Geek Meet - 16th June

Just an excuse to post some piccies - they've been scarce in recent days. This is the first of the weekly Geek Meets I've been able to make, arranged by 57 Miles of metaversed fame (well maybe not fame yet, but he's getting there!). 57 had arranged for representatives of 3 of the major technology companies in SL to come and talk to the group. So we had folks from IBM, Intel and Sun giving us a 5-10 minute chat, each followed by a Q&A. Doubtless some keen soul will post the transcripts, but I will limit myself to impressions.

The mighty epredator potato (God I'm embarrassed typing that name) of IBM is a long-standing evangelist for virtual worlds and gave us some useful insights into the whole shebang. He's been inworld a long time - and it shows. The presentations from Intel and Sun were interesting too in their different ways. For me, it seemed that Core, the guy from Intel, did not really have the full lowdown on SL - or maybe I don't - but I didn't feel his description of server virtualisation would advance SL's availability, stablity or scalability (OK, maybe scalability). Whereas, Klaatu from Sun - though he made some interesting interjections about load balancing - seemed to be there mainly to promote network.com, "CPU power on demand." Although greater brains than mine may find good uses for this facility in SL, I did not feel that the examples given would actually work. For example, "rendering of sculptured prims" was mentioned - yet this happens client-side, and would not benefit from a slow link to remote CPUs.

Damn! I meant to keep this brief! Anyway - here's some piccies. First up, some shady-looking characters! epredator, me, tara5 and Poinky.

And here's some other bods, followed by snaps of our 3 presenters: Epredator, Core and Klaatu.


The pink-faced fellow is VeeJay Burns of Mindblizzard. I think I prefer his non-photorealist face!

This was a well-attended meeting with the sim full. Get there early if you want to attend the next one!