Opening the grid...? How feasible is it and how would it work...

Standalone is one thing.

Start adding more people and items and it will jump up.

Especially if you add in scripts.

It is easy to add additional islands...the instructions are there, they need a bit of searching for.

The intreguing aspect for me is machinima without OP's builds(or lag) in my field of view.

As stated it IS VERY ussefull for debugging sculpties, animations, etc prior to a 'real' upload.

Some tech issues like bandwith and grid to grid TP will be part of the past in 5/10 years. Technology evolves really fast, is not that weird to think the future internet as a 3D enviroment, what sounds weird is people running their own sims at home. Today people uses hosts to put their websites, so I can imagine us using hosts to set up our own grids. The problem of storage and bandwith are already solved there.

If SL grid becomes a standard maybe there will be host SL compatible so you can rent it and set up your own grid. Just like now you have different type of hosts, for example html/ftp only or html/ftp/php/mysql...what about html/ftp/php/mysql/SL? .

And what about regulation? Who will control all this? Well, actually internet is free, but there's an entity called icann (Internet corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) that solves issues like ip range, domain names, standard characters, lengths etc.

Maybe that would be the LL assignment in the future. Time will say....

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PS: About ICANN: http://www.icann.org/about/

Well connectivity will still be TCP/IP so presumably the existing ip ranges etc etc will continue to be in effect as we all will connect through it in some way or another. Unless of course we can suddenly come up with a new protocol and get it internationally adopted...

If it has been proven that you can tp from the main grid into an open sim (as ruth) then we are really not very far away from this type of service evolving. After all you can send emails and ims when you are not actually on the grid - you can buy stuff on the shopping sites and these get sent to you in world - maybe carrying your assets from main grid server to personal grid is not nearly as hard as we think...

Added: Meanwhile, as the grid is down maybe now is a good time to install my own

I have a 2-region standalone island where we've built stuff. I even look almost the same there as I do in SL. It's a free download from OpenLife or others. There are glitches, not surprisingly, and you can't transfer stuff from SL. I did my av there by copying all the slider setting values down on paper from SL and re-entering them on the standalone. Also I can download my own Photoshop textures to it and other members of my RL household can use the place too.

BUT.... there's no easy way to connect it to the net and it certainly can't be connected to SL. We also failed to create access via an internal network

But as a standalone sim or sims, it's good, if rather lonely. It's not a substitute for SL, my first loyalty will always be to LL, but it's an interesting diversion and gives an interesting insight into how to run a sim for those of us who don't own one in SL.

I wouldn't be surprised if LL one day offer their own standalones, with all latest features and full inventory transfer from SL, at a relatively low price, and with possible connection to the grid but with L$ transactions disabled for security reasons. I remember mentioning this idea a long time ago, before any standalones were available - I even had a name for the concept: "First Life Plus".

Or how about

"Second Second Life"

?

Ah yes the old writing things down on bits of paper to transfer from one machine to another... glory days indeed. I remember peeling an acetate record off the cover of C&VG magazine to load a crummy demo into my ZX Spectrum many years ago... And there was one month they expected you to manually type in pages and pages and pages of hex to get one level of something I forget now what...

Back on-topic

Many people have touted SL as the future of the internet and communication and all the rest of it - but the reality is this would never happen unless the grid is distributed all over the world... some good servers... some bad servers... doesn't matter really

Maybe the Linden $ will become the benchmark currency for virtual world transactions, much like the USD is today - oh no hold on I mean the Molvonian Peso - but if you are big enough to run a meatyserver farm - hell why not create your own economy and start trading you Stork(tm) $ against Lindens and so on...

Cue a landrush for virtual dictatorships

I may be wrong, but I think people use web hosts because the ISPs charge an wing and a tenticle for static IP. Good engineering would have everyone with several hundred static IP addresses for their own use(probably not enough) So people could be (as they should be) hosting from their home what websites they want to build and offer. THAT kind of network expansion is like how the telephone networks arose. Each new node added increased the value of the whole net.
I expect (hope) for such a future as that. So people sould be able to host their sim from home. Artificially scarse bandwidth does not cut it. Demand INFINITE bandwidth ASAP or don't complain about limping along like a trogladite.

Why would you need a static IP? The only thing that needs to be static are the name servers for a domain, the web server's IP can be dynamic (up to a reasonable point) for what most average people need.

People use hosting for convenience (no maintenance, no keeping up with exploits, no setting things up, no worrying about keeping backups, etc), availability (can't reboot, people are using the server; can't run SL, site performance would suffer; etc) and bandwidth (most people either have bandwidth or transfer capped, or both) and latency issues. It has little to do with static vs dynamic IPs.

In SL's case there's redundancy as well (if a sim fails to come back up on the host it's assigned to, it'll come up on another server).

Just because you can run a server hidden away in a closet somewhere that only you use doesn't mean that much. To use your telephone analogy: you're using two cans and a string and you think you're better equipped than a telephone company. A home "server" and professional hosting just don't compare.
IPv4 can't support that in any realistic way and IPv6 is still a long way off.

Unfortunately we're stuck in the real world where materials used to carry signals have a physically finite bandwidth with further limits imposed by the technology used to send signals across them and be able to decode them on the other end reliably.

roger on the static IP, I love IP updating continuously (it's sooo reliable).
Yep don't you just love caps? I do they're so yummy.
WOW, never thought of keeping a backup, maybe next time i will.
IPv4? Well blow me down, really? I thought it could handle umpteen gazzillion addresses.

I do think 1000's of connections routed out to all my neighbors and their neighbors etc etc etc is a hell of a lot more reliable than some pissy telco