Massively^™

When I see the terms "quantum shift" or "quantum leap", I immediately think "the smallest possible discrete motion that can exist" -- basically because that's what we were taught in high-school all those decades ago.

Cisco is announcing a "quantum shift in networking", with a short machinima video (it's only around 9 or 10 seconds long, and contains no romance, explosions or Linkin Park), and an launch event in Second Life.

Cisco's Quantum flow processor is (we believe) a 40-core beast that can handle 160 threads and 49 billion transactions per second. While that's a very impressive workload specification, we don't believe the processor actually uses any quantum computing technology -- which makes the whole "quantum shift in networking" seem like dubious marketing on two fronts.

Nevertheless, there will be a launch event for the processor in Second Life on Cisco Systems' island on Tuesday, 4 March at 9 AM SLT (US Pacific).

Two hospitals opened up in Second Life today. Except only one actually did any opening. IBM's Virtual Health Center actually isn't open to the public. Rumors of its opening seem to be greatly exaggerated, and are largely confined to the press-release and coverage by folks who didn't actually try to visit it. We've asked IBM what's up with that, and we're waiting for an answer - so we can't even show you a picture of the place.

So, the more interesting hospital (ie: the one we could actually look at) comes to us courtesy of Cisco, Palomar Pomerado Health, and metaverse developers Millions-of-us. The design of the hospital is exceptionally modern, and the Second Life version of the hospital is - essentially - a model of the physical campus that will be built (by the year 2011) in San Diego, California, all packed with top-of-the-line, medical-grade Cisco technology.

Palomar West hospital has its own Second Life account registration portal, and a video tour. On the whole, the campus is very pretty. It's as 21st century as you could hope to see, without flying cars.

If you happen to live in San Diego, California in 2011 and have a medical emergency, your hospital stay will be a lot better thanks to Cisco. As part of their Connected Life series of projects, they are building a Connected Health hospital campus, dubbed Palomar West. If you can't wait three years to see the finished building, they've built a simulation in Second Life.

In the virtual prototype, you can walk the grounds as a patient, check out all the cool health gadgets, and learn more about the program. This corporate machinima is top-notch, with high-quality shots, editing, and voiceover. I can't wait to see the build!