Related: de
sign,
emu,
host,
info,
physical,
terminal,
type, VPN
Virtual
sources are
information such as
ideas,
plans, de
sign,
intellect,
software,
video,
audio,
genetics, etc. which must be
stored and ex
pressed by
physical
space,
time,
mass and
energy.
De
sign is im
portant, but it is
just one half of the
sources required for
production.
De
sign can be thought of as the
VIRTUAL
Sources of
Production.
Virtual
sources are in
finite in theoretic potential and include
things such as
ideas,
plans, mechanical de
sign,
genetics,
text,
audio,
video,
software. I am not tal
king about any
particular
copy of any of these
things, but the *pattern* of those
things. What I
mean by 'pattern' here is the
information describing any
single
instance of those
things, but NOT any
particular
instance.
Physical
Sources are the other half of every
thing. To "
instantiate" any
Virtual
Source requires the
Physical
Sources of
Space,
Time,
Mass and
Energy.
The
genetics of an apple are "
instantiated" by the
organism itself as a seed and then tree
uses land,
time,
soil,
water,
sun, and other
rotting
organisms to
grow.
The mechanical de
sign of a CEB machine is not
worth any
thing until someone
creates an
instance of it u
sing land,
time, machines, steel, plastic, grease, electricity, fuel, etc.
Because of their inescapable
connection to
physical
sources,
virtual
things can never
actually be copied for zero
cost. Even a
cross the
internet there are
costs for both the
server and the client such as: bandwidth, s
lightly higher electricity to
run the NIC, more
CPU time to
run the
kernel module that
controls the NIC, the
usermode applications that
serve and receive the
data, RAM dedicated to that
process and
Hard Drive
space
needed to
store the
new copy. There is also the '
cost' of the
exclusivity of those
physical re
sources to that
data and
activity during those
time slices. This may seem an un
realistic academic exercise, but it
really isn't if we
scale the problem toward the upper
extreme.
Imagine these
costs for
YouTube.com,
Video.Google.com, etc. when they are
servicing millions of customers. It is a very big deal indeed and requires huge rooms with
expensive
cooling equipment
(I once read the cooling is commonly more expensive than the electricity for the computers).
VirtualCultures.TypePad.com
VirtualCitizenship.org continues where
Ryzom.org left off.
Solipsis.NetOfPeers.net >>Solipsis is a pure peer-to-peer system for a massively shared virtual world. There are no central servers at all: it only relies on end-users' machines.
VirtualSquare.org >>Virtual Square is a new perspective on the virtuality. There are several kind of virtual entities today: virtual machines, virtual networks, virtual users, virtual servers, etc.