Yesterday was a busy day online.

Busy at times offline as well. Got some gardening done, chopped up an old rose bush, put together a cat gym for The Last Cat Standing...

It also had me thinking about a lot of things.

Take a deep breath, light a candle, watch the flame, and clear my mind.

All the worlds and all the voices can wait as I find my center again.

In a long rant, Veyron posts up a laundry list of issues with (two letter acronym) and (another two letter acronym).

It's well-worth reading.

Especially if your last name is Linden, because I have the feeling that you're going to be hearing this kind of thing more and more, but not expressed so clearly and elegantly.

This is what has me concerned:

Take the current Class 5 sim servers. They started appearing in October 2006. With 4GB of RAM and a Xeon 5148. That should have obviously made the sims faster, right? Nope, it allowed them to pile more sims onto a single server. That’s what’s really going on. Servers are now twice as fast, but not Second Life servers, and even if they were, it wouldn’t matter, because they would simply pile more sims into a single system. In fact, I would suspect that they are already doing this, which leads me to the next bad thing that’s going to happen… over-commit.

Maybe I'm misreading it, but Mitch Kapor's comment on Friday about Linden Lab's primary source of revenue/line of business being hosting means that renting out space on the big iron in the datacenters that brings in the dough.

Simple, eh?

We've seen a retirement program for the Class 4's, but how exactly was this done? Was this done by stuffing more of those sims off to exting Class 5's... upgrading that Class 4 iron... putting new iron in the racks to move the 4's up to...

I should hold my nose and dive into the mailing lists... forums... jira... sailing down the rabbit hole, never quite sure what mad tea party I'll find there.

Perhaps it's reversed? We're all in the Wonderland of the virtual world, but now and then you've got to five up the rabbit hole and wander the fearsome and frightening real world aspects... the guts of the operation... the connections... the sewers... the pipes...

And the people tasked to tending them. The planners spilling coffee on the blueprints, wearing hard hats while wearing suits...

Still, I wonder. How will an eventual Class 6 rollout take place? Similar upgrade path for the 5's as took place from 4 to 5? Or will that be something Grid hosting partners will offer in various packages, secure VPNs in place to allow the links to the (two letter acronym) official grid. Or will you just roll your own, hand off the keys to LL, etc?

*sigh* Ignorance was bliss.

Kinda miss that time, but eventually the lost souls hiding in little digital dolls have to get off the shelf, cut their strings, and grow up to face the day.