SL gets $11 million dollars in funding!

This is awesome news.

I don't understand how anyone could think LL is profitable at this points; those salary number are far too low, as that's a national average. Due to the cost of living in San Francisco, being the high profile tech-Mecca that it is, technical salaries are much, much higher than the national average for those based in San Francisco.

I'd be surprised if LL wasn't taking a loss on the cost of a sim; if you figure the set up time at even just two man hours per sim, you're already at a loss on the cost of hardware. That excludes concierge costs and so forth. This will be made up over time with monthly fees, but definitely not up front.

As Moopf states - having high profile people involved is often more important than the cash itself. The ability to hire will allow a full team to continue focus on bug fixing and scalability, while now allowing the hiring of enough employees to continue feature development at a faster face.

Doc, I'm pretty sure LL has been working on a ground up re-write for some time now, but these things don't happen overnight. That version is what we refer to as 2.0.

Regards,

-Flip

Well, if they spend it on an enormous party and throw all the servers into a swimming pool full of champagne, that wouldn't be good.

Don't do that, please, Lindens.

That was my favorite line.

But it has to be replaced from somewhere, and that is either in the form of 'dwell', or weekly stipends, which are all paid for in the monthly fee - and from new accounts.

Lewis

Isn't that why people relocate or outsource overseas to reduce costs?

There must be other places even in the US that have the necessary facilities to operate SL from.

I see no reason why LL should stay in San Francisco. Shouldn't be too hard to rent a couple of U-Hauls should it?

Lewis

No it doesn't, that's the whole point of a sink.

Pretty much what I'm worried about Flip - a ground up rewrite by a team that allocates development priorities on what individuals feel like working on at the time does not bode well. That's why I stipulated 'by an independent third-party developer'.
On the evidence of the current state of affairs the work needs farming out to an outfit that has a more realistic, less idealistic, approach to project management.
SL development desperately needs to move into the real world - something that's unlikely to happen in LL as far as I can see.

Yesterday was the first day i saw that we was more than 6.000 loged on at same time...

I sometimes wonder how MANY that are paying or still in SL compared with the 168.191 ones mentioned at the startpage...

BUT as i like this place I of course hope that the millions will be a good injection for us all)

wooooo hooooo! Nice to know my little spot on the grid will be around for the next while.

this is great news. That cnet article didn't mention that Benchmark also participated in the round. actual press release here

But isn't there more than one sim per server?

That's over L$3billion!

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Your not serious, are you?!!! For starters:

(1) Its Philip's company, and he's a San Fran boy.
(2) San Francisco is at the very heart of tech innovation in America; you may have heard of this place called "Silicon Valley".
(3) There are more residents from the Bay Area than anywhere else, excluding LL employees.
(4) All core (development, database, network, sysadmin) LL employees are there
(5) Many people have a lot of problems with outsourcing overseas. Beyond the fact that it eliminates many good jobs in Second Life's country of origin, I've never seen it work well. I've seen companies crumble due to that big pacific ocean because their dev teams were in India with project management in the USA. Unless you're actually suggesting Philip & co move over there?

Regards,

-Flip

You see, I disagree with this. SL has grown since day one under the current method. Time is SL is a weird thing; SL time is like ten times RL time. A relationship lasting a year in SL is like ten years in RL. This effect of "time stretching" seems to also infuse us with unrealistic goals. I hate to keep referring back to this thread, but it really does show just how many amazing things have happened in the past two years:

/108/52/86249/1.html

I don't think a traditional company could have pulled off what LL has. What they're trying to do requires a completely different kind of thinking. Have you ever seen the development schedule of a "realistic, less idealistic" company? Several I've worked at (for example, a bank) talked in terms of years and decades for rolling out single features. They move incredibly slowly. Linden Lab saw two roads diverge in a wood; they took neither. They hacked their own way through the shrubbery!

Sometimes, that's the only way to do it as a startup to make something like SL happen. Would you prefer they took the Microsoft method and took 7 years to develop Windows Vista, creating delay after delay, remove all interesting features, so they're basically re-releasing Windows XP at this point? And that with thousands upon thousands of developers!

We're still waiting for Duke Nukem Forever as well. Read up on that link to understand what REAL ineptitude is.

Regards,

-Flip

Only for "void sims".

But don't forget, they get US$195/month rent on the server. That's a good deal more than typical colo rates... $2340/year for an island sim. For a fully populated "First Land" sim they get over $15000/year.

The "sale price" or "auction price" of a sim is only a small part of their income. They could sell all the land at "first land" prices ($224/sim) and still get a gross profit on the box.

The big question is what's their net profit/loss per sim... what's the overhead (power, bandwidth, rent, salaries), and how much does that change per sim (for example, adding a sim doesn't increase bandwidth costs much, if at all, because that's more a function of concurrently online users).

Yes Flip - but...

There's a time for LL style development, and there's a time for a more structured and organised method.
Getting something off the ground quickly may be served by the current method. However, I think that at this stage, if SL is going to go mainstream, it needs a degree of stability and reliability that just isn't there.

Mass market users won't put up with a half baked product (sorry, but that is how SL strikes a lot of new users...).
Neither will they put up with something that requires something much better than a 'consumer' PC.

The days when SL could rely on a userbase of ubergeeks with state-of-the-art computers are past. What's needed now is something that works consistently, something where every minor improvement doesn't break a couple of genuinly useful features.

It needs something built from the ground up by a professional team with a clear set of targets and a realistic development timeframe.

In short - SL needs to grow up. And I suspect (hope) that the new investors will demand that for their $11 million.

My, what a tactful way to describe the 'activities' in Second Life! *giggle*

Let's hope they use the funding to hire more programmers, and good ones, to squash all the bugs and fix the performance issues.

No Argent - most Sims are two per cpu, some even 4...

Can't give you the url because of the idiot way the search system displays them - but, go to Wiki and search on CPU...

I'll second this. I'm frustrated and ticked off by turns, but I'm also awed and amazed. I know that what they're doing is a bigger project than almost anything I've worked on, and the bigger projects I have been involved with have been glacial.

LSL sucks in many ways, yes, but all software sucks and given the environment it's running in it's a miracle.

Prims could be so much better with only a few changes, and the prim allocation policy is crazy (a twisted truncated torus makes the physics engine cry, but it costs the same as a simple cube!), and physics is years late for an upgrade, but to someone who's done real-time control it's a miracle it all works as well as it does.

Odd. In a recent thread on void sims they said that only the void sims are running 4 to a server and Linden Labs is renting them to island owners at a 4:1 rate because of that.

Possibly they meant 4 times as many sims per server?

Reference

That means they're getting $5000 up front and almost $10,000 per year per server.

Actually there is some advantage to saying that they are not profitable and do not know when they will be - it certainly scares off would be competitors.

$11Million........
PIE for EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!!!
i now return you to your regularly scheduled gripefest!

I think you guys are confusing CPU cores and server - a single new server has 4 cores I believe, hence can run 4 "full" sims. For void sims they stack them higher than that, but still not very high, the sim software seems to like burning cycles even when nobody is around to enjoy them.

Agree. And tbh, I think it's resident behavior that is partly (mostly?) why these investors are interested. I'm often amazed at what "computer illiterate" business-noobs come up with when presented with a problem. When the slate is clean, there's no bias to solve a problem a particular way.

You are incorrect here, but its a common misconception; paid sims (non-void), as I understand it, are ALWAYS one per CPU. Some servers have more than one CPU per server, and thus, multiple sims on a single server, but each gets their own CPU. And, benchmarks have shown these servers to perform BETTER than the single servers used in the past, and save rackspace in the colo facility (which I have seen in person, and is VERY impressive).

Regards,

-Flip