Interesting:My name is Simone Brunozzi, a 30 year old guy from Italy.
What’s interesting about me? Well, I’m a brand new Technology Evangelist for Amazon Web Services in Europe!
I’m going to tell you how I landed the job of my dreams, and I suggest that you pay attention because it’s a story you don’t hear every day.
Whatever happened to Second Life? Well, somebody's still using it, apparently:to create a geo-coded map within Second Life that enables you to explore a scaled 3D version of Birmingham, UK in-world, access geo-tagged BBC and CNN World News, and more.
(Via New World Notes.)
This is getting interesting. After appointing a top Googler as its "digital president", EMI Music has now nabbed Cory Ondrejka, most recently at Linden Lab, and the main technical brains behind Second Life:Two weeks ago, I joined EMI Music as SVP of Digital Strategy.
Why EMI? By hiring Douglas Merrill, EMI has demonstrated a commitment to capitalize on all the technology available to make the music experience better for artists and fans. At Linden, the most important changes I drove were blends of technology and licensing, so when Douglas asked me to join him at EMI, I jumped at the chance. Music touches everyone in the world and is uniquely part of our lives -- how could I not take this challenge?
Two people who really get the digital world at the top of EMI Music: surely *something* good must come of that?
I wonder whether in retrospect Linden Lab's decision to open up the code of Second Life will turn out to be as momentous as when Netscape gave its Navigator code to the new Mozilla project? Interestingly, Linden Lab specifically invoked that precedent when it made the announcement:
In 1993, NCSA released their liberally licensed, but proprietary, Mosaic 2.0 browser with support for inline images arguably heralding the start of the web as we know it today. In an act of either acceptance of the inevitable or simple desperation, Netscape Communications released the bulk of the Netscape Communicator code base to form the foundation of projects as Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird.
We are not desperate, and we welcome the inevitable with open arms.
Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2.
A year later, it's a good moment to review where we are, and here are two useful contributions, one from Wagner James Au, the other from LWN's Jonathan Corbet. Things seem to be moving on, and it will be interesting to watch how this area develops.
It's been an open secret for some time that IBM has been creating intranet-based virtual worlds, but this seems to be the first official news about it:IBM said on Wednesday it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own computer servers.
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IBM employees will be able to move freely between the public areas of Second Life and private areas which are hosted behind IBM's corporate firewall.
This will enable the company to have sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information without having the data pass through the servers of privately held Linden Lab.
Wow:
Linden Lab Chief Executive Philip Rosedale said on Friday the company he founded has begun a search for a new CEO with more operational and management expertise.
Rosedale will become chairman of the Linden Lab board when his successor is found, replacing Mitch Kapor, who will remain a board member and the company’s largest investor. Rosedale said he will also keep a full-time role at the company working on product development and strategy.
“This is my life’s work,” he told Reuters in an interview. “I’m not going anywhere, and I’m still full-time on this, probably for the rest of my life.”
Second Life’s growth has slowed after a period of rapid expansion. Rosedale’s replacement will face the difficult task of regaining that momentum, working within Linden Lab’s idiosyncratic corporate culture and winning over Second Life’s impassioned users.
Presumably it's the slower growth that has encouraged Rosedale to make this move in the hope that fresh blood can get things moving again.
Now Linux users can enjoy the same capabilities as Windows and Mac users to explore, create and socialize!
The beta includes several features we’ve added in recent months, such as:
* 3D voice support
* Media playback - play back any in-world media supported by GStreamer
* Lots and lots of bug fixes, polish, and performance improvements
What's particularly interesting is the view in the comments attached to this post that the GNU/Linux is already more stable than that for Windows.
It was sad news that Cory Ondrejka was parting company with Second Life, but it looks like there's a silver lining:I think it would be fun to make a semi-regular part of this site different moments from my memories of the first 7 years of Second Life.
Once upon a time, Around August of 2001, back when Second Life was called Linden World, there was no scripting language in SL. Primitar was about to replace the spaceships and floating eyeballs that were the original avatars and James was doing the first major UI revamp so that we could add to the world without shooting. The entire team had been debating how to add behavior into the system for months, with Philip arguing that we should just use physics. Philip had some really good points, because if we were able to use Havok for all of our behaviors, residents would be able to gauge the complexity of an object by just looking at it -- like mechanical systems in the real world -- and we wouldn't have to divert scarce resources into a project that could take significant time and effort. Mitch was also an advocate of visual complexity representing behavioral complexity, and I think there was something to that idea.
Now read on...
The statement, issued on behalf of Rosedale, read: "I can confirm that Cory Ondrejka, CTO, will be leaving Linden Lab at the end of this year, in order to pursue new professional challenges outside the company. I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank Cory for his tremendous contribution to the company and to Second Life, in terms of its original vision and ongoing progress.
Eeek: this is not good. I interviewed Cory earlier this year, and found him both an extremely pleasant chap and very switched-on. Obviously, I don't know the background to this latest news, but it bodes ill to lose your CTO in this way....
I won't bother demolishing this sad little piece on why software patents are so delicious and yummy, because Mike Masnick has already done that with his customary flair.
But I would like to pick on something purports to be an argument in the former:
One needs to understand that there is fundamentally no difference between software and hardware; each is frequently expressed in terms of the other, interchangeably describing the same thing. For example, many microprocessors are conceptualized as software through the use of hardware description languages (HDL) such as Bluespec System Verilog and VHDL. The resulting HDL software code is downloaded to special microprocessors known as FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), which can mimic a prospective chip's design and functions for testing. Eventually, the HDL code may be physically etched into silicon. Voilà! The software becomes hardware.
Well, that's jolly interesting, isn't it? Because it means that such hardware is in fact simply an instantiation of algorithms - hard-wired, to be sure, but no different from chiselling those algorithms in granite, say. And as even the most hardened patent fan concedes, pure knowledge such as mathematics is not patentable.
So the logical conclusion of this is not that software is patentable, but that such hardware *shouldn't* be. I'd go further: I suspect that anything formed by instantiating digial information in an analogue form - but which is not essentially analogue - should not be patentable. The only things that might be patentable are purely analogue objects - what most people would recognise as patentable things.
There is an added benefit to taking this approach, since it is also solves all those conundrums about whether virtual objects - in Second Life, for example - should be patentable. Clearly, they should not, because they are simply representations of digital entities. But if you wanted to make an analogue version - and not just a hard-wiring - you could reasonable seek a patent if it fulfilled the usual conditions.
I haven't been using Second Life much recently, but I wasn't sure why. Now I know. I've just tried the WindLight First Look Viewer, and its atmospheric effects - sunsets, clouds, water etc. - really transform the Second Life experience.
The problem before, I now see, was that Second Life was just too lacking in visual richness. With the WindLight First Look Viewer, Second Life is closer to real life in the sense that you can now just be, and watch the world go by. Time to give Second Life a second chance, perhaps.
Here are two online journals that may be of interest. Both, happily, are open access, so you can root around to your heart's content.
The first is the inaugural issue of the International Journal of the Commons. I have to declare a very tangential interest here in that they asked me to review a submitted paper: obviously my well-intentioned comments were devastating, since it's not included in the present issue...
The other journal is Innovations from MIT Press. This has an interesting mix of articles, including one by Cory Ondrejka on Second Life, and others on the Science Commons and Open-Sourcing Social Solutions.
I was lucky enough to interview Irving Wladawsky-Berger for the Guardian shortly before he retired from IBM. One of the most intriguing hints of things to come concerned virtual worlds:Does IBM have its own internal virtual world system - an intraworld running on its intranet?
We plan to build them; exactly how is all under discussion. We very much feel that many of our clients will want intraworlds in the same way they have intranets.
Then you want to make the navigation between the intraworlds and public worlds as seamless as possible.
Some of the "how" regarding interoperability is being addressed with this interesting collaboration between IBM and Linden Lab:IBM and Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life (www.secondlife.com), today announced the intent to develop new technologies and methodologies based on open standards that will help advance the future of 3D virtual worlds.
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IBM and Linden Lab plan to work together on issues concerning the integration of virtual worlds with the current Web; driving security-rich transactions of virtual goods and services; working with the industry to enable interoperability between various virtual worlds; and building more stability and high quality of service into virtual world platforms. These are expected to be key characteristics facing organizations which want to take advantage of virtual worlds for commerce, collaboration, education and other business applications.
What's striking about this announcement - still rather lacking in details, but clearly very good news for Linden Lab - is the emphasis on openness:Open source development of interoperable formats and protocols. Open standards in this area are expected to allow virtual worlds to connect together so that users can cross from one world to another, just like they can go from one web page to another on the Internet today.
No surprise there, really - open standards are the only way to build resilient, heterogeneous systems. And if you're contemplating linking together myriad, disparate virtual worlds, it had better be resilient in the extreme. (Via Clickable Culture.)
This was bound to happen:Eerily ergonomic, infinitely adjustable, incredibly expensive, the Aeron chair is a fetish item in the computer industry, so it's not surprising that Residents have made virtual versions of them in Second Life since the very beginning. All that's changed, however, because Herman Miller, the company behind the Aeron, has just set up their own official store in SL, and is giving away chairs made with their official imprimatur. For a limited time, Residents with knock-off Aerons can bring them to the Herman Miller outlet in Avalon and exchange them for an officially branded SL version, for free.
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And with that announcement, the first public salvo has been fired: a real world corporation is loudly and actively asserting its real world intellectual property rights against Resident-made objects which allegedly infringes them. Many wondered when this moment would come, and though DMCA notices have been quietly filed by companies through Linden Lab, this is the first move I'm aware of that's being done in conjunction with an official move into Second Life, and a marketing offer.
Things are moving on with the open source virtual world based on Second Life, it seems:
Eager programmers had already begun open source work on the viewer in April of 2006, ahead of Linden’s move to formally put the viewer into the open source domain in January of this year. Now, as Linden Lab prepares to take the Second Life server code open source, the company is once again finding its timeline challenged by an open source community that doesn’t want to wait.
About 300 servers have installed Frisby’s open source Second Life server code, called OpenSim. DeepGrid, a network Frisby manages, has 20 OpenSim regions running on a near continual basis. While there’s no centralized inventory server, meaning that an avatar on DeepGrid can’t take objects from one region into another, users can cross region boundaries seamlessly, experiencing no disruption as their client connects to servers on opposite sides of the world. Another similar network, called OSGrid, connects ten regions.
One of the first detailed looks at what promises to be an important entrant in the virtual world space.
For anyone who is sceptical about the possibilities of Second Life - and virtual worlds in general - point them at this rather impressive video. It is a recreation, in 3D, of Van Gogh's Starry Night, which grows before our eyes. Interesting to note, too, that if copyright lasted for ever (even minus a day), this kind of creative re-use would never be possible.
And talking of 0.01 code and self-deprecation:I have released AjaxLife’s (very ugly and hackish) code under the revised BSD license. :D
You can find it at http://code.google.com/p/ajaxlife/. As it says, the code is messy. But eh.
That’s what you get when you throw something together over the weekend in a language you don’t know. And for added fun, part of the code was lost at some point (file corruption) and had to be recovered by decompiling. So, as I said. Ugly code. :p
Well done Linus, er, Katharine.
Here's a classic story.
Hacker gets tired of missing functionality; hacker thinks "it can't be that hard"; hacker takes a bit of open source code as a starting point, knocks up something over the weekend; next day, the revolution begins - in this case, being able to access Second Life from a browser (that is, without needing the stonking SL client or upmarket video cards).
But where things get even more interesting is that the hacker in this case is just 15 - and female. Katharine Berry's blog posting on her AjaxLife hack is here, and there's already an interview with her. Let's hope she isn't too put off by the media circus that is sure to descend on her (not me) to carry on honing the code.
Happy hacking.
