“From the server's point of view it looks and acts exactly like a normal client logging in to the grid, going through all the same steps, it just sends less data… Basically they look and act just like a normal client with a lot of options turned off or turned down.” “The client is a small command-line program written in C# that has all the code needed to ‘speak Second Life’, so to speak,” libsecondlife member Eddy Stryker explained, when he showed me the technology last week. The libsecondlife team had figured out a way to log automated avatars into the world, using their scaled down version of the client. While the group has been operating for months, in the last week or two they introduced an in-world demonstration of their client that very quickly became the buzz of the community. The ultimate goal are limitless versions of the client, operating on thousands of independent servers insuring Second Life’s spread through the entire Net. But if I recall right, Lars Ulrich never tried to crush Fanning with a giant boulder.įirst, the cool hack from idealistic coders: it begins with libsecondlife, a group of Residents attempting (with Linden Lab’s explicit blessing) to reverse engineer an open source, modified BSD-licensed version of the Second Life client. This time, the part of Shawn Fanning is played in part by a tiny pink cat, while everyone else in the world gets to be Metallica. Welcome to the Napster era of Second Life. Right on schedule, the peer-to-peer, open source movement that consumed the Internet of the late 90s arrived to Second Life’s community in recent weeks, beginning with the idealism of talented hackers creating cool applications- which quickly careened into widespread protest, accusations of IP theft, and economic chaos. (And like the original boom, usually ending up with lightly-trafficked sites of ambivalent success.) Which, much like Netscape’s initial public offering in 1995, led to the mini-dot com boom we’re awash in now, with massive brick-and-mortar corporations throwing money at the world with a kind of frantic urgency. Throughout 2004, SL was an obscure medium for gamers, techies, and assorted early adopters- not unlike the Net’s Usenet groups of the 80s and early 90s- then somewhere in mid-2005, began attracting substantial interest from real world businesses and the mainstream media. If the earliest days of Second Life resemble the first century of American history ( and they do) then the most recent years of the world seem to be replicating the last couple decades of the Internet in miniature form.
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