"a hard drive doesn't take this long to replace"

I doubt I'm going to change any minds here, but I just want to say a few things about the way some people acted in the past few days.

A common thread I've heard was "a hard drive crash doesn't take this long to fix", among other similar sentiments, such as suggesting that LL wasn't prepared for failures. As far as I can tell, the direct implication is that LL is filled with a bunch of total incompetents who can't handle running SL.

Now we find out that, all along, it wasn't the hard drive failure that caused the problem, it was a bug that was simply triggered by the hard drive failure. Sure enough, a hard drive failure didn't cause such long downtime, did it? It seemed to me that there were two alternate conclusions that could be drawn from the long downtime: either LL is filled with incompetents, or they were facing a much more difficult problem than we thought and doing their best to solve it.

Why did everyone jump to the negative conclusion, rather than the positive? LL seems to be filled with conscientious people, and it looked like they were doing their best to solve the problem. It was a far more difficult problem to solve (a race condition, one of the most difficult bugs to find or prevent), and they still solved it fairly quickly. There's no way any of us could have known the true situation from out here, so we weren't in a position to judge.

In closing, I think some people owe an apology to the employees of LL.

Quite simply because any system that I am responsible for has never seen huge patches of downtime. It's not bad luck if a system goes down, it's poor admin.

Azelda

It's because the forums are filled with people who like to guess.

People are used to finished products. No matter how buggy they are, they are already finished. SL is a project that is contantly in development. No matter how much effort they allocate to bugfixing, it will always be buggy.
The fact that it runs over UDP doesn't help much either. Heck, the fact that it runs over a world-wide network in the first place

Just a quick note:

Most modern multiplayer games run UDP - its faster and "slimmer" than an equivalent TCP system would be, in terms of network traffic. And when you're streaming content and rendering in real-time, speed and efficiency are paramount.

Sadly, the only perfect computer systems are the ones that have never been turned on.


Its just a fact of life when working with things this complicated. People complain about LL - but how about Microsoft? LL: 30 employees. MS: 25,000 employees in Seattle alone. Yet with all their money and staff and expertise, MS has bugs and security holes and driver issues all the time! LL is not unique or "inferior" in any way, despite what the whiners would like to believe.

A great thing about SL is that it frees people from the bonds of social conformity and allows them to experience many new and different things. But the downside is that some of our "social conformities" (like basic respect for life, property, politeness, etc) are GOOD to have! Free us from our evolved instincts to survive as a group/pack-animal, and the ugly side of human nature is not far below the surface with many people.

Enough Soap-Boxing, time for me to head back to the POINT of this website: My SL!

Take care,
--Noel "HB" Wade
(Tread Whiplash)

Yeah, Tread, I think you've hit on something.

I guess lots of net-experienced people are familiar with what can happen when you combine a geek with anonymity: suddenly they think they know everything, and that it's their job to tell everyone else what they should be doing. What they don't realize is that they are, in fact, talking down to real people, not just to the other similarly-minded people on the discussion board who will agree with them and help them rant.

With so few employees in LL, 30, the hurtful comments expressed on the board are bound to directly insult a small group of people. Something said as a general somewhat-blunted jibe ("a hard drive doesn't take this long to replace" could easily become a direct stab at the system admins, of which there probably aren't many.

People shouldn't be willing to say anything nasty toward LL in the forums that they wouldn't be willing to call and tell them, or even walk up and tell them to their faces. I stand by what I said: many people owe LL an apology.



As far as Eggy Lipman's "finished product" argument goes, this definitely has some merit. I guess the best thing I can suggest is that if people don't like what they see here, they should simply leave. If they feel they deserve a refund, they should ask for it. Still, indirect personal attacks aren't warranted... remember, LL employees are real people with a real sense of self-respect that can be trampled.

Yeah Tread, I know about UDP versus TCP, in college they made us implement TCP over it, and it wasnt a pleasant experience... especially because I didnt know much about C programming back then and got nasty errors that took me ages to debug.

It doesn't matter... tread is right. UDP has its uses, and SL is definitely one of them. SL over TCP would be ridiculously inefficient.