Remembrance of Sims Past

There's a fascinating post over on 3pointD.com, which exhumes some screenshots of sims as they were three years ago, and contrasts them with their present form. It's impressive to see how far Second Life has come in that time - and exciting to consider how far it might go in the next three years.

But seeing these old sims made me wonder whether we are in danger of losing our virtual past, since these screenshots are the exception, rather than the rule. When the history of virtual worlds comes to be written, vital data about how things looked in those days - nowadays, too - will have gone for ever.

Clearly, what we need is a kind of Internet Archive for virtual worlds that preserves not just the screenshots, but maybe the actual data files for "historic" and representative sims - a Virtual World Archive. Brewster Kahle, are you listening?

Second Life's Second Innards

Talking of guts, here's a piece about Second Life's intestines. I've written about this in various places, but there are more details here:

Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said.