Virtual World Ups Sales 200 Percent. Virtualization

Virtual World Ups Sales 200 Percent, Cuts Costs with Virtualization, New Database

Selby Evans

Microsoft promotes a product and tells about the the progress of reaction grid.

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ReactionGrid is a virtual world that offers a safe, online environment

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The company founders launched the site using a single server and an open-source database program but quickly realized that they needed more performance and scalability.

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ReactionGrid migrated operations to Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™ technology to take advantage of server virtualization efficiencies, and also adopted Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008. As a result, ReactionGrid can grow faster by deploying virtual machines rather than physical servers, and cut its first-year hardware costs by U.S.$750,000. Because outstanding performance and reliability now provide a compelling user experience, ReactionGrid saw a 200 percent jump in sales.

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000004150

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Virtualization Slows Server Growth

Even though the ReactionGrid site was not publicly announced, virtual-world enthusiasts soon discovered it, and traffic began to grow. As the number of customers grew, ReactionGrid watched its server costs skyrocket. ReactionGrid makes money primarily by selling sim packages—various Web server and storage configurations needed to create and store sims in the ReactionGrid environment. The more customers the site attracted and the more those customers enhanced their sims, the more host servers ReactionGrid needed to purchase and manage.

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Benefits

ReactionGrid is the first OpenSim-based virtual-world company to use Microsoft-based server virtualization to run nearly its entire infrastructure. 

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Virtualization Speeds Business Growth

Although it takes a week or longer to deploy a sim in a physical-server infrastructure, it takes the ReactionGrid staff less than an hour to deploy one on a virtual machine.

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Virtualization Contains Hardware Costs

With the efficiencies provided by Hyper-V, ReactionGrid has been able to dramatically trim its hardware needs. Hyper-V actually changed the company’s business model and gave ReactionGrid much greater flexibility and economies of scale. “Two months after opening ReactionGrid to the public, we went from 200 to over 700 users,”

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Hobo Kit: Table of Contents

Media : If this is social, people are going to like it. Right?

Social is not just a name

By Selby
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I am very much in favor of the social side of Second Life.  I think that is the key feature that Second Life can offer to its residents. Here is what I said last year and reiterated just this month:

S-tech is here. E-tech is last year 

S-tech, the social internet, and the future of virtual worlds 

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So I am concerned to read the comments by Cummere Mayo:

Calling "Social" Team Out-

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Cummere is concerned about privacy.  I am not.  But here is the tricky thing about Social.  Cummere is my friend and colleague.  So what concerns Cummere concerns me. 

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Cummere's comments indicate that a number of people are dissatisfied with the handling of profiles.  Now that means to me that there is something wrong.   Because if you are in the social media business, it is important to keep good relations with  the social groups you depend on.  

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So I won't bother with  a discussion of what the social team is doing wrong.  I am delighted that Second Life has finally recognized its potential as a part of the social internet.  I am glad to see Second life snuggle up with Facebook.  I am happy to see my profile on the internet.  

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But if Linden Lab executes this in a way that makes a lot of residents unhappy, I don't  like it at all.  And I don't see it as a good omen for the future of Second Life as social media

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Making your customers unhappy is not the path to success.           

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Hobo Kit: Table of Contents

SecondLife "LL Confirms Missing MegaPrims" "Problem Corrected"

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Well it seems the suspicion's of other's and myself were correct on the recent missing MegaPrim issue. It was due to some sort of glitch that occurred during the last Server RC roll out's. You will be happy to know the problem was identified, and corrected.

See :  http://status.secondlifegrid.net/2011/02/02/post1209/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SecondLifeGridStatus+%28Second+Life+Grid+Status+Updates%29

JayR Cela :_)

SecondLife's Saving Grace "InWorld Games~Machinima & The New CEO~Rod Linden"

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I have been giving this post considerable thought for the past month or so, finally I feel ready to speak out. Long time resident's of SL can all recall "The Sky is Falling" mantra spouted forth by the "Chicken Little's" scattered amongst our ranks, these years past. Indeed, during M. Linden's disastrous reign, I admit to being one of them.

    When Viewer2 prematurely cast it's ugly shadow upon the land, in an insanely mad rush to attract new users. Quite a few old time SecondLifer's cried out, the end was near, and a mass ex-ados to Open Sim grids was inevitable. This may still happen, V2 was a total flop, but quite a bit of progress has been made since it's introduction, by not only the SnowStorm Team, dedicated TPV open source developers are making tremendous contribution's as well.

    We now have a new CEO, Rod Linden. Rod possesses a lengthly and experienced background in the Video Game Industry, most notably EA's The Sim's. I firmly believe this move was a stroke of genius on LL's part, because. One of the most common questions I hear from newcomers to SL is. "I don't get it ?" and "What's the point, what do you do here ?" Well for many of us, SL has been a cutting edge form of modern escapism. A place to express ourselves in a manner not available in our real life scenario's.(Content Creator's, Fashion Designer's, Builder's, Scripter's, and to a somewhat lesser extent the RPG genera.) Not merely a place to play games.

    I believe all things in life never remain the same, no matter how hard mankind try's, change is inevitable. If you have not been following the main SL log in page.

                   Explore Second Life Through Our Destination Guide

                                       http://secondlife.com/destinations/

It is an excellent example of how much time and dedication is still at work in this Virtual World Platform we call SecondLife, and I urge you to do so soon. Some of the builds I have scene recently are truly inspiring. Just about every category imaginable is represented. Machinima ( the art of film making using VW's as the background ) is again vibrant within the SL community, as are RPG sims, Science Fiction, Adventure, Mystery and Puzzles.

    I understand many recent events were set in motion well ahead of Rod's arrival to LL. But the fact that his experience, energy and willingness to immerse himself into "Our World" http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2011/01/20/getting-immersed-in-second-life?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+SecondLife+(Official+Second+Life+Blogs+-+FEATURED)  

bodes well for all of SecondLife.

JayR Cela :_)

Its the Little Things...

by Cummere Mayo

When it comes to love its often the little things that make all the difference in a girl's heart; The kisses, the random hand squeeze, getting the door, the random box of chocolate, the "your beautiful" when her mascara has run in the rain.

When it comes to viewers, that adage "Its the little things that matter most" still holds true. The big things make the viewer usable or not, its the little things that make people fall in love with it or hate it. Lately, TVPs have been much better about that kind of thing and thus have been wining over far more admirers then Linden Lab's official viewer. However, there are signs that might be changing soon.
The latest few rounds of Snowstorm test viewers have had a few neat things that make things so much nicer and have helped finally make the 2.x viewer turn the tide from merely tolerable to almost decent.

First off, some of the movement and animation controls that were scattered across different menus were gathered up into a movement group and moved under the "me" menu. this makes it much easier to find them then hunting through different menus like before.

Next the voice button disappears when you turn voice off now. Another small thing, but it frees up space for other buttons that are perhaps more useful, and to those that are deaf or mute, it means they don't have the voice button sitting there mocking them.

The mini map built into the nearby people subtab. I was skeptical at first how useful it would be, but once I saw it I fell in love with it. To be able to instantly see not just who is near me but where they are near me is wonderful. Furthermore, if you click a name on your nearby list it automatically highlights the dot representing that person. For business owners and role play game masters this tool can be extremely useful for responding to someone that needs help or to knowing where a greifer might be hiding.

Another small but noticeable thing is the stability. The new round of 2.5 and 2.6 viewers are much harder to crash then previous versions. Which means less crashes for everyone, and seriously, aside from griefers who doesn't appreciate less crashes?

And finally, allot of little settings that didn't persist like custom water color changes, and inventory sorting options are now persistant so there are less things you have to reset every time you log in.

The viewer still has a long, long ways to go, but the more of these changes that Snowstorm can continue to push through and the longer they keep up this pace, the more attractive viewer 2.x will be to users. Keep it up Snowstorm!

~CM~

SecondLife "MegaPrim's Revisited" How Useful Will They Be, or Not? "Upcoming 64x64m to Change Everything?"

By Avatar JayR Cela

    The past few days, I have noticed an increased interest on the SL Forums dealing with the MegaPrim and upcoming increase size limit allowed by the Lab that will enable resident's to create and build with there own large prims, to a maximum 64x64m  (meter) size. Currently we are limited to 10x10m official maximum, unless you are using MegaPrim's.

    There have also been reports of seemingly, and randomly selected sized existing MegaPrim's, suddenly vanishing from existing builds. After some poking around various SL related Blogs, and reading independent Forums. As far as I can tell, this was a glitch of sort's that occurred during a recent Server RC roll out. There have also been report's of the aforementioned Mega's, missing from people inventory's as well. Apparently they are no longer in LL's main Data Base. Whether this is actually true or false, I am at this time unsure. I have several current builds composed of mostly Mega's, and they seem unaffected.

    So what to do? I am currently not really ready to give any advice, other than this. Soon we will be able to create our own prims up to 64x64m in various shapes and sizes, while not having to worry about them snapping back to 10x10m if you inadvertently attempt to resize them. This is the current result while building with Mega's now. So what's all the fuss about ?

    Does this mean MegaPrims will no longer be useful ? I don't think it is a matter of usefulness or not. Of course they will still have a niche place in very large custom builds, that the 64m standard will be unable to fulfill. What I do see as a potential disaster, is if the Lab decides to suddenly pull the plug. ( fix the bug that allowed Mega's in the first place ) You don't think that could happen ? Well looking back over the past five and a half years I have been using SL. I have to say "Don't Count On It" LL has proven itself time and time again to be extremely unpredictable. Saying one thing, and doing another, and in some extreme case's, exactly the opposite.

JayR Cela :_)

P.S. BTW I stumbled upon this MegaPrim Web site while preparing this post
http://megaprim.sl/

Calling "Social" Team Out.

by Cummere Mayo

[Additional notes edit: I debated long and hard about cross posting this here, but in the end, I decided I should.]

Anyone following web profiles knows about the battle for privacy being waged by users agaisnt the Social project team at Linden Lab. Its being played out in forums, in chat rooms, in Blogs, on twitter, and in the jira; one of the most voted jiras being web-3494 written by yours truley.

In that jira several major issues about privacy and preferences are raised and and argued for by nearly all the comenters, leading to some "concessions" and promises. Promises that have yet to materialize. I'm going to blast through these in rapid succession.

Promise 1:
Said by Yoz on 1/20/11:

"As you may have noticed, the Real Life section has been removed from publicly-visible web profiles for the moment, so as to bring the new web profiles in line with the old ones. We don't know if or when they'll be back, but we would like to offer residents more control over the visibility of individual profile sections in the future; if this comes about (the likelihood and timing is not certain) then the Real Life section would be part of that."

The facts:
For a short time real life tab did indeed seem to be hidden but across the board the last couple of days everyone has been seeing this tab again. heres the thing, we don't see it on our OWN profiles, we see it on others. (For independant confirmation visit the Linden Lab blog here and read recent comments.) This is a depressing and outright inexcusable breach of privacy.

Promise 2:
Said by Yoz on 1/20/11:

"But, this is a good time to remind everyone: if you're sharing information in your profile and you have "Show me in Search" ticked (which also currently enables public web profiles), then it is at the very least visible to millions of Second Life residents and the Search system. Profile information is also explicitly excluded from the Privacy Policy (see section 6)."

The facts:
Turning off "Show me in Search" does NOT disable the web profiles for either the old or the new style. In v1 it removes you from the internet and in world search engines only. In v2 for both the world.secondlife.com and the my.secondlife.com it removes you from the inworld search engine, but still keeps you in the web search engine. For both it also only requires a password to see your profile details but still shows at minimum your name, photo, and a join here link to those not logged in. This is INEXCUSEABLE.

Promise 3:
Said by Fredrik on 1/25/11:
"We just deployed a new version that removes the Share This widget for profiles that have the "Show me in search" option checked.

We are working on a complete overhaul of the privacy settings that will allow users to have more control over their privacy.

Until then please do come with ideas and constructive feedback."

The facts: Neither checking nor unchecking this seems to have any effect at all on the Share This widget. It still shows up on everyone's profile once you log in. Again inexcuseable.

In all three cases we were told these three changes were already implemented and deployed. So my question to Social team is this: Do you really think we are that stupid that we cannot tell what our own profiles are doing? Did you really think before you fed us these lines? What exactly did you gain by lying to us?

I'm calling you out on this Social. Step up to the plate and implement these changes and apologize for the lies.

update 2/3/11:
Ive been told that the real life tab change was backed out as part of a process toward a more robust and grandular preferences system coming soon. I am taking a wait and see attitude on that one.

~CM~
Crossposted

SecondLife "LL About to Dump QuickTime?" "HTML5 Gains Preference"

By Avatar JayR Cela

     I just came from Merov Lindens weekly meeting, a number of issue's were discussed, one of them being the current state of the included Media WebKit currently packaged with the SL V2. Seems that there are some unexpected difficulties the viewer is having dealing with the QuickTime format. Especially on Linux Box's and even Mac OS-X in some cases. And the Lab is working on rolling out a replacement soon.

     I am not sure how many of you out there are aware of the fact that Cory Ondrejka
  ( formely Corey Linden ) was recently hired by FaceBook as lead game designer for that platform
http://gigaom.com/2011/01/27/facebook-hired-ondrejka-to-help-web-games-evolve/ 
He is pushing all game Dev's on this platform to move current and future development to the HTML5 format.

    Lets face it QuickTime is as old as dirt, in the modern world, and should be dumped in SL as a streaming media format. The question is when, and why not just use Flash? Good Question the recent Flash 10.x is very promising. But seriously folk's the future is in HTML5 development.
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2011/02/html5-video-faq-answers-to-the-most-common-questions.html

    I am very glad to see the Lab looking seriously at this.

JayR Cela :_)

"Breaking News" "IANA assigns final IPv4 InterNet Address Blocks Today"

By Avatar JayR Cela

     Hmm, I just picked this up from a friend in the SL   AWG. I'll just post the link.
http://gogonet.gogo6.com/profiles/blogs/its-final-ipv4-is-depleted-at

JayR Cela :_)

Phoenix FireStorm Preview Release "My First Impression's" "Yay !! I Got MY Screen Back" "A Brief Review"

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Let me start off by saying, I absolutely love it ! Goofy bugs included. Some of them are downright hysterical. One of the most comical was using the Character Tests option ( now located under the Develop Menu ) in order to rezz my Cloud Avatar. The female version rendered me as if I was Dorthy from The Wizard of Oz Movie, ( no pun intended LOL ) and was easy enough to correct. But hey, we were forewarned repeatedly, to expect some weirdness.

   What is the most striking aspect of FireStorm's  redesigned User Interface, is that it is a work of art, compared to LL's official V2. No longer do I have to deal with that wretched,
 ill designed and ludicrous Side Bar, or the poorly conceived, implemented and over sized Camera Control. The Menu Bar has been trimmed down and is actually usable, without eating up valuable screen real estate.

     I have lost count of the number of meetings I have attended and been told or heard. Removal of the Side Bar is not an option, its an integral part of the UI. The Camera Control can not be resized it's hard coded into the UI. We can't change the Menu Bar its an intergal part of the User Interface. And so on and so on. One excuse after another, has been used to force upon us, The Customer, something that a large portion of the long time existing loyal SecondLifer's have repeatedly expressed to the Lab. We the Customer do not want this cruel joke and poor excuse of a Virtual World Client. The UI stinks and eats up to much valuable screen space. There was one meeting I recall where t I heard one LL employee tell those in attendance, to buy a bigger monitor. This sort of brazen arrogance, and seemingly total lack of concern about the existing Customer base, really rubbed me the wrong way, and quite frankly Pissed Me Off ! to say the least.

    In a three short month's time frame the Phoenix FireStorm Team has accomplished what we have been told over and over again was not doable, or not an option !  In other words, Get Used To It ! Plain and Simple, Because ! Well because what ? Because the Lab is ______________ ( you fill in the blank ) and post a comment please, that should prove rather interesting :_)

If you like the current official V2 UI, that is your prerogative, and no longer my problem !

                             Yay ! I got My Screen Back


JayR Cela :_)