Server class distinction to be eliminated

That's the problem. I can't swing $300/mo for a sim. It just doesn't make any business sense for me to bother this late into the game.

People aren't spending the money, and it is a tough market to get into right now. Maybe if I had a good $10,000-$25,000 of discretionary money saved up, I might bother, but I don't.

Yeah, probably; I realize where I read it now.

However...

I am at Jack's Office Hour right now (have been) and he didn't show (apparently again for the third week in a row), but while here I noticed the blog said there will be a big meeting at 3PM SLT at the "four corners" venue.

In addition, some of the folks that showed up here noted that there is a large number of people in several of the private Linden sims, and Jack is apparently in SF at the moment. It wouldn't surprise me in the least for them to announce just this kind of change today.

I see where you're coming from Desmond, perhaps we would be lucky enough for Caledon to find a buyer who it did work out finacially feasable. You do what you got to do I guess, LL should be doing changes like this in steps perhaps jsut drop the transfer of grandfathering for now that would weed out some of them over time with less impact, but of course effects the value of those sims, but in anycase sims should be either valued as blank sheets of canvas or artworks containing communities, goodwill and people like Caledon that make it stand apart from any archplegeo island full of 1024's and fake bot customers.

This is the most ridiculous thing I have heard in a long time. At best it is a lease on a part of a piece of hardware (1 full sim = 1/4 server). Stop paying that lease and see how much of a server anyone owns. Try driving up to the co-location facility and say "I am here to take home my 1/4 of a server that my sim lives on, just load her into the truck would ya?". You and I have a very different definition of "buy" if you think anyone has bought hardware.

I think you are very much mistaken. Desmond is leasing hardware to the tune of USD40,000 if your figures are correct. Also I wasn't talking about Desmond's business plan having forecast schedules. You don't seem to know much about investing in a company Isablan. I suggest you go and learn about what happens when people normally invest into a company. LL would have to give a forecast of how they see the business doing over a period of time, any pitfalls they see and any major plans they have. Most likely there would be shares held by the investor and dividends paid out from profits. A lot of people think this applies only the public companies but it applies to investing in a private company also. The only difference is that in a private company shares are not floated on the stock exchange and the company can keep many aspects of how it is doing private, between them and their investors.
If you really think that *real* investors would invest in LL based on the lack of business information available to current sim owners, then we are further apart in our thinking that I realised. If you doubt what I am saying, just go do some reading.

Sim owners are nothing more than service leasors with the ability to sell that lease on to another party. It should be easy to prove me wrong, if I am.

Well, I went to that meeting of Jack's over the blog post. I think he expected some mass torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob over it. Why, I have no clue.

The 10-15 people that showed were all like "yeh.. cool", and moved on to other concerns.

We asked the "will grandfathering transfer be impacted" question 3-4 times before we got back a cryptic answer that was something like "well, we may need to look at that again".

So, yeah, I have a funny feeling that will be up next on the hit parade in a few months.

Ironically a lot of oldbies might be on board with their land barons, on this one.

I can't see, for instance, the thousands upon thousands of residents of D'Alliez, Azure and Dreamland rising up to say: "Yes! Stick us with Class 4's forever, or raise my land baron's tier by several thousand dollars monthly!"

True, there are certainly people on the down side of this, but this issue makes for strong alliances between older land barons and most of their existing residents.

The "office hour" with Jack Linden mentioned at the end of has just ended.

Attendance was not that high and much of the discussion was about things other than the move away from class. A summary:

-- People will not be able to get an upgrade to new hardware by overusing resources. Script limits will help enforce this.

Script limits: three phases ("info, tools, enforcement":
-- provide info on script usage in Q1 2010
-- later in 2010 (perhaps Q2), add tools to viewer to manage script resources
-- by end of 2010, enforce script limits like they do for prims
Both at parcel and region level for info; ultimately would like controls to be at both levels too

LL has talked in the past about letting people "park" an unused sim, turning off a sim if no avatars are there. Purely internal discussion so far.

-- Class 4s to be migrated out over next 2 months
-- No change to billing for anyone as a result of moving away from class
-- No plans to change grandfathered fees
-- "...something to look at. it may make sense that we no longer keep them grandfathered on transfer"
-- A few (very few) new hardware servers have been deployed already
-- Very few people have done the upgrade from class 4 to (non-grandfathered) class 5
-- They are still evaluating how much better the new class of server will be: "not a huge difference but they have more RAM and that does help"
-- New servers will have the same CPU ratios (number of regions per CPU) as currently
-- "no plans to change class 5 pricing"
-- Move to different hardware will be a long and slow process... can't just shelve thousands of servers
-- "there are absolutely definitely no plans to raise prices any time soon."
-- Right now there is no change to what has been announced [about homestead pricing increase in July 2010]
-- Jack would want [LL] to make a clear statement on homestead pricing in January that would apply to the whole year, but can't promise

Yes but will they be raising prices when they move to class 6? Oh wait, he said "There is no class 6", there is no Keyser Soze either and look what happened there!

I had no need to pull out the pitchfork at that office hour, although I agree with Tal in wondering why it was held there for such a non controversial issue.

Well, I don't think they plan to eliminate grandfathered tier rates directly any time soon but, at some point, the rate won't be able to be transferred to a new owner anymore. I don't think that should impact the large land barons much, if at all. I never would have expected grandfathered rates to last this long, to be honest.

Especially after the OpenSpace fiasco. <.<

How often do we NOT react with pitchforks whenever LL does anything?

Any chance somebody asked if they were counting *just* cores or if they were counting threads, too?

/me looks at her server at work, which is running the same type of cpu as a class 6 will. It's got one physical processor and task manager shows 8 (hyperthreaded quad-core)processor graph thingies..

Well, that was said partly tongue-in-cheek. If I had a cheek, that is.

Tongue-in-scale? Er..

So LL has released the specs on Class 6 servers ordered somewhere? Last I heard they were still trialling different brands and specs.
Wonder what class 7's will be

No but somebody (T or FJ Linden? One of the new Initial Lindens..) mentioned they were looking at Nehalem processors for the class 6 hardware.

Well, Jack emphasized that there will no longer be any "class" designation for hardware. Over time, there may be a number of different specific hardware buildouts on servers running at any one time. Getting away from classes means that they can have a more affine upgrade stepping, allowing them to buy the most cost effective equipment they can at any time (i.e., best price/performance profile).

There will likely be what amounts to class 6.0, 6.0a, 6.1, 6.1a, 6.1b, 6.1c, 6.2, ... going forward, all running pretty much at the same time. They will retire the oldest machines as they hit EOL with the newest ones.