Perhaps one of the most salient ways to describe the world of modern technology is how unceremoniously we toss the old, out of date, or just tired technologies. In the case of second life, I recall…in 2005-2006 hearing lots of things about this new virtual world where we would soon live in some William Gibson inspired ‘plugged in’ world… How times change things… I ran across this article the other day, and it amazed me, mostly in that I haven’t given second life any conscious thought in several years. Upon a small amount of reflection, I seem to have presumed that it was already gone…
In a more melancholy manner, finding out that Usenet is functionally obsolete (and gone) saddened me, in that I spend many amused hours in the 90’s reading any variety of flame wars in the ALT category… Usenet was possibly the great-grandfather of such commonly used tools as Bittorrent, and even a sort of social media for those first generation online end users…
The failure of second life
http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/05/22/the_failure_of_second_life
In July of 2005, when I created my account, Second Life was the cool new thing. Moving between regions was kinda wonky, loading textures and objects was slow, and it was pretty ugly when compared to other games of the time; but it was generally assumed that these were teething issues, which would be quickly sorted out as new versions of the software were released.
At the time, I used an Athlon XP 2500+ processor, a not enormously distinctioned graphics card, 768 megabytes of ram, and phat 2 megabit/512 kilobit DSL.
Today I have an Intel Core i7 940, an eight-threaded processor that can access 6 gigabytes of ram, and Radeon HD4860 video card with a further 512 megabytes of ram, and I have symmetrical 25 megabit fiber internet. The processor’s an easy six times faster, there’s eight times as much memory, the internet pipe is 12 times wider, and the video card is, well, it’s real quick.
Moving between regions is still kinda wonky, loading textures and objects is slow, and it’s still pretty ugly… when compared to games made in 2005. Second Life has gained features, many of them, but it has improved not at all. Its problems are profound and architectural, and won’t be solved by any minor patch, but rather, a complete redesign. Something that won’t happen, as even in its broken, half-assed state, it still makes rather a lot of money from furries, (like Zarla) and it takes quite the brave company indeed to break a profitable product to instead create something that may make no money at all.
Usenet: Long Dead & Buried but Not Yet replaced
http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/06/01/usenet-officially-dead-buried
If you’ve been online for long enough, you probably have used and even grew to love the wealth of discussion forums — called ‘newsgroups’ — that Usenet offered us.
Of course, in the last decade of Usenet’s life, it became increasingly emaciated and diseases, robbing many of us of those fond memories. Legitimate users flocked to newer mediums and all that was left was the infectious spam.
But before that, and before the rise of the browser forum, heck, before even the popularity of eGroups.com (which we’ve known for ten years now as Yahoo! Groups), Usenet newsgroups were home to the Internet’s most vibrant discussions.
We’ve all called Usenet dead many times over the last decade, but it wasn’t until May, 2010 that we could truly say that the death certificate had been signed and the corpse buried.
Duke University was the place where Usenet began over 30 years ago, created by graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979, forming one of the “earliest pieces of Internet history” as Duke puts it.
On the 20th of May 2010 they pulled the plug on their Usenet server, something that one can only imagine was a far cry from the gargantuan machine that connected the world well before the Internet was a household utility.
With the birthplace of Usenet having taken their server down, one could finally say that Usenet is truly, not just figuratively, dead.
