Future of Self-Hosted Sims?

Just thinking about this in light of Snowcrash and all, what's the possibility, in the future, of people hosting sims off their own machines? I know the bandwidth and whatever network-related support issues within the software might not be up to snuff (yet), but the concept of a sim hosted on someone's home machine appearing on the grid when they have it on, such as alluded to in Snowcrash, seems like a really nice step toward a real global SL. Much like anyone can run a webserver at home now, giving us the WWW.

Thoughts?

Pym

Activeworlds and their derivatives have the ability to remotely host worlds (equivalent of a SIM) and link into the Universe (Grid)

Hopefully it wont be too long before SL offers that possibility. Either on a fixed fee per month/quarter/year or even on a basis of hours connected to the Grid.

As an aside, I wonder how often the SIM server s/w is updated?

Apparently every time a new build is released since the grid needs to be shutdown, servers updated, and restarted! <eyeroll> There's talk of a "rolling upgrade" but for SL not to be designed like that initially is just pathetic.

Having to redownload the entire client (yes, bloatware, unchanged TGA textures and all) is pathetic too. SL can't even remember cached building/UI sounds from the previous session and must mindlessly (and needessly) redownload them.

SL is so wasteful it's, yep, you guessed it: pathetic.

Not neccesarily, it depends on what changes are made to the software in both the client and the sims, If only the sims are affected then a rolling update already occurs, this is when 1-4 regions are taken offline at a time and then updated, restarted and bought back online usually takes less than 5 mins per cluster, If a client only update is needed, then its usually released with no sim downtime, but in most cases the update is both client and sim side with code changing on both, and as the new client needs the new sim software they have to close the grid and update all, and although building a patcher would be nice it would only half the download at most, and then they would have to make sure they included all the files in the patcher

LL could still do rolling updates for new client-server builds by simply sending messages to everyone in a certain cluster that the sim they're is going down and they need to relog (and, hence, upgrade their client). Better yet, like Active Worlds, have SL automatically detect client updates and appropriately prompt the user that an update is needed--all within the application--then quit, download, patch, and load SL seamlessly (and hopefully that sim cluster is updated within that time).

As far as the patcher having to include all the necessary files, duh--that's just basic common sense. As for how much the download file size would be, the most relevant file that would most likely be updated, secondlife.exe, zipped is 4.25MB vs. ~20MB for everything--more than half!

Active Worlds has been doing it this way for years (since at least 1997). Why does SL lag so far behind in this respect?