simulation

I am alone on a small island that is about the size of a roundabout in the middle of a vast ocean. With my ghostly body I look up at the night sky and contemplate what to do next. Maybe I will make the sun rise, build some more land or just read some more of the wiki. I've just installed OpenSimulator (a.k.a. OpenSim), a "3D Application Server". What this means is that it can be used to host "virtual worlds", a bit like SecondLife. In fact you can use the SecondLife Viewer as a client for it. After hearing about at various points for quite a while and finding a really good set of instructions on how to set it up, I couldn't resist having a go, even though creating virtual worlds is a bit of an excursion for me.

The start of the twenty first century has been a time when we are surrounded by vast amounts of computing power that we take for granted. There are obvious computers in our lives, the laptops we use or the desktops we'll find at work, but also the unobvious ones that we use every day like mobile phones, car navigation systems and set top boxes. In the 1960s things were very different, computers usually filled entire rooms, even the calculator was a bit of a cutting edge invention. Despite this the challenge had been set by President John F.