Croquet 2 Play

Hi All,

For the time being, I’m disabling comments here while I try to get to the bottom of what appears to be malicious tampering with the site. During this time, you may notice some entries that are blank, but I hope to have the database restored soon.

Thanks for stopping by.

Reviewing Intel CTO Justin Rattner’s recent “The Rise of the 3D Internet” presentation, caused me to wonder if there’s any research on Croquet or even general p2p hardware utilization/performance for virtual worlds. Feel free to reply offline.

In announcing that update 8 for Croquet Collaborative is now available, Howard Sterns says

In Croquet today, as with all software, things will go wrong. We would like there to never be errors, and we will hunt down every one we encounter. But that will take a while, and what work of man can ever be said to be perfect?

Designed To Fail

As Dave Winer also recently pointed out about Wordpress, the acknowledgement that software by it’s nature is a bit funky is a good and necessary thing. Pushing that understanding down into the code, ultimately all the way through to the hardware and up through the scripting environment and user-interface will help create an efficient meshverse.

Julian Lombardi has some key insights - thanks!

The implications of Laurence’s work are that Croquet worlds can now be made to mirror aspects of Second Life worlds - and vice versa. This also means that there’s now a way by which actions taken within metaverses such as Croquet can be logged to text files. That particular capability would be of great importance to educators, researchers, and marketers who are interested in understanding what kinds of things have taken place in Croquet environments.

Metaverse Interoperability

3D Printing and the Emergence of Industrial Rhythmeering

The “Cheap Revolutionaries” cover story on the current Forbes magazine is a must read. Here are two gems:

Why buy computers when you can use Amazon’s instead?
Rent-a-Disk - Forbes.com

Cirpack, a unit of Thomson in France, generates $30 million a year selling Linux-based switches. Starting with a single four-processor IBM Linux server that costs only $10,000, Cirpack adds its own software and charges up to $2 million for a switch that can handle 250,000 phone calls simultaneously. (Traditional switches with equivalent power cost $10 million and take up 500 square meters of floor space.) Carriers in Europe are using Cirpack’s cheap switches to offer “triple play” service–phone, Internet and TV–for $40 a month.
Open Source Networking

A friend of mine in Second Life confided that she felt physical comfort when her avatar was held in the arms of her digital lover.

Recursive Instruments

I previously linked to an Amazon store in Second Life, but didn’t mention that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is an investor. Jeff’s not the only one who sees a big future in Second Life:

Mitch Kapor: “Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet.”

Scripting News: 8/21/2006

Kapor, chairman of the board of Second Life’s producer Linden Labs, made the above statement in his keynote at the recent Second Life Community Convention.

I am pretty sure that I’m not crazy, but I just might be an emissary from the future. … Don’t forget that web pages were the crazy and futuristic new thing just 10 or 12 years ago.
Amazon Web Services Blog: Life2Life - ECS-Powered Amazon Store Within Second Life

My thoughts exactly!

… a little reading between the lines and dot-connecting seems to support the idea that a peer-to-peer platform like Croquet will be an extremely valuable tool in the global economy …

Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. … The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.

…

There are entire realms that Second Life users are creating from scratch.

…

Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie,” or simply whim.
Wired 14.07: People Power