Can you LL monkeys ever get this right?

I'm sorry, but no one forced you to do that, you chose to do it, and you should have known when you did it that SL is an experimental thing that does not guarantee you uptime, or even guarantee it bloody exists next week. It sucks, but it was your call and no one else's to made those investments. You read and accepted the Terms of Service that say



- that, or you chose to accept a TOS without reading it, which is even sillier. You took a risk that realized. It sucks that it did - I am sure everyone agrees with that - but if you invested more than you can lose under a TOS like that - well, someone already mentioned a bridge for sale in England; I have a lot of stuff I'll sell you under this same TOS to which you have invested way too much to back out. Linden Lab has delivered what they have promised - actually they have delivered more, because they have promised you nothing.

Yes hardware breaks, but competant management have tried and tested emergency/disaster plans with which to get back to a situation normal as soon as possible.

One does not need to be Sherlock Holmes make any stunning deductions from that.

As to those that make a real world income from their SL business, they should factor in an amount of downtime into their business plan. The more business savvy probably have done so.

The message displayed as part of my log out last night was pretty scary. I can't remember the exact phrase, but it was near "Second Life is closing due to imminent central storage hardware failure."

If the downtime yesterday was to plug a hole hoping it lasted until after the holidays when proper support was available, they failed. If the raid on the server had already failed and was only running on its redundancy, then this could have been the second failure which no one ever expects If this happened to me and I didn't have hardware on hand to replace whatever failed in the asset server cluster, I don't know what I'd do and I'd pretty much be at the mercy of a vendor. After the hardware does arrive you either need to replicate data from sources still running or break out the recovery backups.

If this were a software failure the software would have had a patch job run on it to kill the affected features and the grid would come back up, with a downtime scheduled for today to put in a real fix.

SL is not a blue-chip stock that guarantees a return on investment. It's a new venture, which means your investment is a gamble.

Whether or not that gamble eventually pays off still remains to be seen. But if you are not comfortable with risk, or can't afford to take financial risks, then SL will definitely be a very uncomfortable place to be. That's not meant as a snark, just a realistic view from someone in the IT industry. Tech companies that promised the moon to their employees and their customers turned belly up and left nothing but ashes in their wake. It's the nature of the business, and anyone who doesn't know and plan for that level of risk is in for a world of hurt.

Hmm how condescending. *allows it to wash over*
My newness is irrelevent to the point that you knew the risks. Sorry but as someone else said earlier, if you couldn't afford to lose it you shouldn't have put it in. Things may have been different "back in the day" but it was ALWAYS an experiment and always carried risk.

ty metawraith.

i seem to be attracting posts from those AFTER the new ToS. oh and for the jackamole who assumed i didnt read the ToS, thats your opinion and you are entitled to it. never ASSume that before i invested i didnt check all the pros and cons. i did. and its preventable crap like this that irk me. if its a hack? well darn wasnt foreseen, yet in LL's own blog posts they admitted to a server problem. so please, to the johnny come latelys? save they type space. you havent been on long enuf, not to say i have, however i would read a bit more before you drown us in your 3weeks experiance.

I am a business owner here in game, I own a sim and about 6 businesses..... yes down time surely will occur, however has nobody noticed in the past 3 months the down time has tripled? No there isn't a way to prep for things you don't know will happen, HOWEVER when you change things up and get as much publicity as they have common sense says you are going to have to expand the servers and data capacity. It isn't like they didn't know what was going on either, they have flat out stated over 2 months ago there was a LARGE number of people joining. The people who are business owners and are the ones worried about LL being down, are the ones who have made Second Life what it is.... Do you think if LL would have stuck with the basic content they had that it would have sky rocketed like this? Nuh uh matter of fact if you people would hush for a minute do some research you will see where the CREATOR of LL says flat out we did his work for him.

On the other hand yes we to need to be prepared as business owners for down time, my main concern is my customers not getting scheduled things when stuff like this happens.....It isn't just about the money it is about LL being down and not allowing a lot of us to do our jobs. If they would act like they cared a bit more and gave us more information I think the business/sim owners would be a lot less upset.

Many of you should google Second Life and read some articles I think that there are many things you would find VERY interesting that come from the CREATOR himself.

This shouldn't be an issue we as residents fight about we should be putting our heads together so we can ask the appropriate questions. While reading all the posts on this thread there are many issues we can ALL agree one =) Just my two cents!

....Do you realize how much it costs to run 3000 CPUs? Do you know how much that cost to buy those CPUs? ....

Well, let's see...
4 sims to a server, island setup is around 4*1200 = $4800
(when we go to the new pricing, it's $6700 per.)

That ought to cover initial cost.

Then there's the 4*$200 a month tier = $800 * 12 months + setup =

$14,400 a year per server.

Gosh, no wonder they are not making any money.

As of this month, there are 3121 private islands which comes to
$44,942,400 annual income for the islands alone.

Perhaps they are down because of a floating point overflow in the accounting software.
--

ty Stacy that is exactly what i have been trying to say. maybe they will hear it from you better.

I'd actually rather LL keep SL offline all day to fix everythings that's wrong than too periodically take SL offline and fix a specific problem.I believe that as long as they're only fixing peices of SL we're are going to still have grid crashes,lag,etc. I am more than willing to take a few days break or however long they need just to come back to a stable lag free SL.

Like --- cars never break down, PS2s last forever, no other online game networks ever crash, the milk is never 'off' when it's delivered?

I do a bit of online share trading (only small - scale, mind you) and the site which gives real-time prices has problems just as much as SL. - and all that site has to do is display numbers on a screen!!!

LOL now that's a friendly welcome to us newbies there.

Maggie, picking on the new kids isn't going to get SL running now is it?

My EXPERIENCE Ok is limited in SL but is extensive in Network Support, so excuse ie if I act like i actually have a clue!

ANY new business venture is risky. The failure rate of even a conventional business, like opening a restaurant, is quite high. So not only is LL a risk factor in and of itself, but opening your OWN small business is an additional risk. The combination of the two pushes the risk factor through the roof.

Never invest more than you're willing to lose, because chances are that you will indeed lose.

Maggie... you are only 7 months old. Many would still consider you a noob. You (and several others loudly complaining) being jaded comes from your own unreasonable expectations.

Yes, Second Life is over three years old. But do you see ANYBODY remotely attempting the same thing that is being done here? I think that still qualifies everything as experimental.

There is risk in spending money here, as there is in spending money on anything that isn't tangible. I've spent several hundred dollars here, yet I'm not freaking out. Your in-world possessions will still be there when the world comes back up. Being unavailable now doesn't mean they will be gone forever. Being down now doesn't invalidate the money you spent on them or the time you enjoyed them while you were able.

With great potential of hundreds of thousands of new residents comes great risk. If you are willing to invest money in this environment, you have to be prepared for some pitfalls. Nothing is guaranteed.

You aren't jaded. You are whining because you got caught unprepared. Your risk was realized. It happens. Life isn't perfect. Lindens aren't perfect. If you are as attached to this world as you claim to be, suck it up with the rest of us. If you still consider the potential windfall to be worth it, suck it up with the rest of us. If you can't handle it, cut your losses and head to more stable pastures.

Thank you for the Kudos, Gypsy.

I think some of what people are feeling is just that for the most part we create this world ourselves and yet when things go wrong we are unable to touch what we have created to rectify it or repair it ourselves. Its some psychological thing that drives me batshit personally. I love the concept of SL, though and always will.

As for conspiracy theories and assumptions: these are necessary and inevitable, and if properly expressed can be the key to potential solutions.

Now, lets all have a joint. *sparks up*.

Does it count if it came back up for 5 mins every 12 hours for a 3 day time period? Cuz I kinda remember that a few months ago

Can I interest anyone in an Apple Lisa? Maybe some beta video tapes? Heck, even VHS tapes.

The last few decades are strewn with the bodies of dead technologies that burst into brief existence, then died. Anyone who bought a Lisa was left with a very expensive doorstop; and my storage closet is filled with VHS tapes that I can't even play anymore because it's not worth buying a new VHS tape player when the old one broke.

The high tech merry-go-round bears quite a bit of resemblace to a roulette wheel.

Last year I wrote a post speaking about marketing of SL to the world. I was excited about what SL was and is and continues to grow to be. However, looking back I was wrong.

SL never needed to market in the first place. The PR was outstanding and led to this
immense growth...in fact it led to too much growth too fast! Now we have alts running around that some keep active and some do not. All of these alts being created are given a set amount of items coming into the world as we all were. These items for the most part are pretty lame and do nothing to help keep a new user to stay and the users that are alts never touch them because they know how important it is to have a good skin, hair, clothes..yatta yatta...all this boils down to too much for the asset servers will bound to create growing pains along the way.

Now leading to the news that the Manufacture's server specialists are on their way with new hardware or to replace broken sections of the server...this comes with a hefty bill.
Someone mentioned earlier that LL still has not made a profit. This may be true but they are not really asking for a profit either. Who ever thought that there could be a multi user world that you didnt have to pay for? When did bandwidth become free? All of the issues that have been brought to LL's attention can be solved by implenting the payment verification. Almost all of them can and should! Brilliant minds are behind the creation of this world there is no denying that. But I have to wonder if there are brilliant business minds behind this world as well. If you look at ANY other platform of the same nature...the people have to pay to access it. We would not have the griefers we have, we would not have the unneeded alts due to the griefers getting banned only to come back in with an alt...we would not have the asset problems because there would be less on the asset servers to handle...But would it make the spending take a hit? I personally do not believe it would. At any given time I have never seen SL have more than 19K people in world at the same time. Corporate dollars are only going to become a fad in here if these problems are not addressed and it is not as if LL is seeing as much of that Corporate dollar as the private developement companies are.

I know and see where LL is coming from in not wanting to implement that payment info on file...but it needs to be. Lets get the politics of protecting investments out of the way and create a platform that will work. Like it or not...these Corporations are going to start to have doubt in SL and its stability. For the Lindens...this is only making it harder on them since they are the names and faces of LL...they are not gods and they can not fix things and the point of a finger. Holding their own as they may be...I am wondering when they are going to rear up and demand the relief they could get by SIMPLY re-implementing the CC verification!

p.s. it would also help get the minors off the adult grid!
Good Luck LL...some problems are just out of your control...others...welllll you could solve them yourselves.

Those of us that have been in SL for more than a year know that issues arrise...we all need to be patient but on the other hand this also needs to become a win/win situation for everyone involved. Again GL

I am screaming into a black hole here, but what the heck does it matter how long someone has been in SL? They cannot express their opinion? Agree with someone earlier who said, picking on the newbs does nothing - including help your business when SL is back up

This is what my mind thinks, <not me i dont get along with my mind>

1. for all we know some one from inside LL could have sabotaged the whole network
2. what makes you think that the backup servers are going to be able to handle the same ammount of pressure as the regular servers

i think i will probobaly agree with my mind this time XD.

Yep, a customer. Ie. Not on the payroll. Not paid to fix LL's stuff.

Hi Lydia! *waves*

Yes I'm bored and added no useful content to this discussion. Sorry. Do I get bonus points at least for not whining?

Good day all, hopefully it'll all be over in a couple of hours

i think that was black wendsday?


oh and to reply to the other post: apparently many missed the point of what i was saying, and it made me move off topic. not gonna happen again. i have never said i was knwo all see all. i even admitted to my own newness, however those of you who are delighting in baiting me? need to read Stacy's post again. because thats what ive been tryin to say.

this lastest downtime, has been a long time coming and is just one more in a series of other downtimes that have been happening with more frequency, and even was predicted by LL themselves. this was a preventable outtage.

i should have stated since LL is based in SanFran, and they were hit by some bad storms when the grid went down? i thought it was power related. shrugged my shoulders and got some much needed sleep. i wake up and its turns out it was a server issue? quite possibly an overload? which could have been prevented? forgive me for being angry at losing money in a situation that is and could have been stopped a while back. so stacy forgive me for using Your post as a jumpin point, but i agree with you, this is one time too many in a series of preventable problems.

You're off. The 4 islands per PC I think only attains to Void sims (the huge water ones on the main grid that are almost ALWAYS PG). The rest are 1:1 with DP to use another incase of problems. When you pay the initial start up costs that is basicly to put a server on the grid for your island. Those are definatly 1:1.

Hey Maggie - no worries. If I were in your shoes, I have no doubt I would feel similarly. Hang in there!