Joining in on the rant (not what you expect)

I gave up using the preview grid after the last few major releases. 1.10, 1.11, and 1.12 have all had huge problems widely reported in the forums and bug-reported in-world that turned out to be things that should have been treated as show-stoppers... and after the update they had to be fixed.

Torley and Milo Linden are both often seen on the preview grid, and listen and respond... they're great people, but you shouldn't have to hunt them down and demo things for them to get Linden Labs to take serious bugs seriously.

Actually, I think it's a good analogy.

What if TV had only been invented a couple of years ago, and was still a brand new, developing technology? ....and there was only one TV channel.... and they were having to invent the way TV channels work pretty much as they went along? Would you cut the TV company some slack in those circumstances?

That is pretty much where SL is now. It's pioneer territory... and we're all pioneers. A rough ride is inevitable. Sure, it blows when it's down... but the way some folks act like a deprived crack addict through an outage only goes to show how powerful - and important - SL is becoming. It'll be back to normal (?) soon... just go do something else for a couple of evenings.

Personally, I'm excited to be part of something that's still evolving.

The first thing I ask when something breaks is "why was someone mucking with it anyway?" ... so many random and seemingly unrelated issues have been complained about in the last several weeks that I certainly had my suspicions, which were confirmed by Joe's blog-post:

"What isn’t obvious from the release notes, however, is the work we have undertaken to make a series of changes to the underlying architecture of the system to support a rapidly growing population in Second Life." -- Joe Linden (blog)

"Seat of the pants" development is a sad condition that results from releasing work-in-progress code. Production is impacted, patches rushed out, in the hurry to fix show stoppers, new things get broken and rolled out.

Tolerable? Intolerable? That's an individual decision each customer has to make on their own for themselves... trying to rally the mob in protest may seem like a grand idea but in many cases will merely increase the pressure to deploy quick fixes rather than digging out and repairing root causes.

I, personally, am tolerant to periods of instability, I have other things I should be doing and will come back when the weather clears, and hopefully after some of the underlying architecture changes are complete, will find SL runs faster, and hopefully, more robustly than before.

Pet Peeve:
There is no value in screaming "JUST FIX IT!". Particularly when "IT" (singular) is SecondLife. What you want fixed is the problemS (plural) with "it".

Individual problems can be fixed... but there are often costs associated with each fix. Better performance likely requires newly designed and immature architecture changes. Better stability means refining /tuning older architecture... and as population increases so does poor responsiveness.

While I think we can all agree that stability is probably the most important thing needing fixing. Once we have that back though everyone will proceed to screaming about poor performance... which means radical changes, which introduce bugs... and the cycle continues.

I'm not apologizing for LL... I'm just saying try looking at the "problem" from their point of view once in a while.

LoL i dont consider myself a crack addict, but i do have a business venture here that needs daily care to be profitable for me and my partner. We have alot of money tied up in our investment here. While i dont mind being part of something thats evolving, i do mind the instability of SL now, where you cant trust your parcel prims to go up in smoke whenever you try to return others prims. That never used to be an issue, now we feel like were walking on eggshells, trying to keep what we have. Its an unsettling feeling to be sure.

As for SL being so new, the LL website states it was founded in 1999, thats 7 years, which is eons in the web & gaming business. I am just not so pleased with the half tested new versions that have come out, i feel with the imput that they get from the previews, which is usually ignored, they could do alot better.

My hunch is that the reason Lindens don't fix all the little bugs before new releases is that they are aware of the scalability and other flaws in the current system. Moving towards a new release with a more stable codebase (a more solid backend) will help prevent the reoccurance of future bugs.

If a house has termites, the first thing you do *isn't* slap a fresh coat of paint on it.

EDIT: Oh, and I understand these bugs are more frustrating for people who have so much real income tied up in SL... But perhaps you just shouldn't have so much income tied up here? Investing your time & money in SL isn't all that different from investing in stocks for a new tech start-up. It's a gamble. Expect to take loss from time to time, or find a safer job/hobby.

The problem with your theory is that some of the bugs they aren't fixing aren't "fresh paint" kinds of fixes, but core issues (albeit minor ones).
Their "New Features" (that are buggy) is the "fresh coat of paint."

Just a thought,
anyone in the game 2-3 months may not have the same frustration as one who has been in game much longer.

wanna bet?


im sorry i fail to see how adding more features addresses the "unexpected features" that have been a long standing issue. some of the complaints are in regards to the "unexpected features" that were supposedly tweaked, yet they continue to be an issue.
im sorry, but again i refer to my posthoddy work= shoddy performance= pink slip.

past behavior shows they don't care to hear anything anyone says, they want help with beta testing, people give it to them and they don't give a shit. your point is? (aside from dead)




can you possibly brown nose anymore? nice to see who is underneath the desk sucking the lindens off!

/thread

lets say sony has a defect rate of 10%, only a handfull of customers are out of Tv enjoyment on a temp basis, if they have to recall something it still only effects a small handfull of ppl becuase that tiny falure rate exceeded set standards

worst case scerino is fisher price, little billy chokes on a play-skool toy becuse parent wasnt watching littly billy shove crap in his mouth ... thats another thread but the scare factor enters in there .... it still might take them months to issue a recall, its not really their fault and still only a small handfull of ppl are effected

it doesnt screw over everyone who ever bought a sony TV all at the same time ..
and it doesnt mean anyone that owns a play-skool toy will see their child die instantly becuase of a design flaw in the new product

SL on the other hand ... if it messes up it kinda screws 600+ accounts instantly, regardless of status

other online platforms (ie AOL) have lost alot of money becuase of issues like this

and if you have never seen my AOL vs SL thing ..

SL is like AOL circa 1990 you put up with the crap becuase you have no "real" choice, yes theres other platforms ... the basic idea of a SL like world dates back well before computers had the power to even do simple math, but its just a matter of time, and if "they" are better, ill be there . But to date SL is the most advanced (too bad its stuck in 2001, but its better than 1995 vrml like AW or 1998 sudo 3d like there)



sry but thank you aug of 2006 ... fact is theres a LONG list of simple stupid bugs being ignored, some of these have persisted since before i joined ... SOME of these bugs have persisted long before my roomie joined in 2004, its like being told

"well this house has a cracked foundation, bad plumbing and the roof leaks, but check it out we gave it a fresh coat of paint"

same stupid crap is still in there, the lindens have hit a platue long ago of pushing forward hardly ever fixing old bugs and making new ones, theres been many many times that patches have gone totally rotten, in 1.11 i got a linden quote of "this is a nightmare patch", well so was 1.9, 1.7, early 1.6, early 1.5 and it just goes on and on ... after 3 years of day in and day out working with the system one would expect they know what is going on inside of it ... im sorry linden labs, even if you somehow did get your ass in gear i have lost most of my faith in you to provide a system thats not bug ridden, crappy,intensive, and more restrictive than before the internet existed

im just here for the ride, soon as the next train arrives ba bye, unfortunetly after almost 2 years of bitching about the same crap im about to jump (btw just for fun during this week of "just barley alive to avoid refunds" i managed to learn some vrml, hell i can biuld and script with it to my hearts content and with the propper viewer it looks better too)

"There" is like AOL circa 1990, perhaps. SL is the best and most fully featured system, not the lowest-common-denominator cheesy junk that you get because you don't know better like AOL has always been.

If SL was like AOL, I wouldn't care enough to bitch about it... except when one of the inlaws asked me to help them fix their AOL...

I'm in full agreement. My original post used the quote from another post to debate the "TV" point and replace it with an analogy to the banking system (see below)



Considering that people spend real money here, this sort of downtime (14+ hours when it was said to have been 5), I think a better analogy would be the entire banking system going down. Sorry, ATMs are out of service. Sorry, you can't get change for your store. Sorry, you can't access your savings, checking, money market, etc. (Yes, it's an extreme example, but it's closer to reality for some, than a television going wonky).

We are living in a house while it's being renovated.

Modernizing and growing an old architecture can be
a very destructive and annoying process. There WILL
be dust, noise, and unexpected periods without water or
power. (and several other analogies)

I put up with it because I'm sure when the major aspects
of renovation are complete, we'll have a more stable,
robust, faster and better SecondLife.

If you can't put up with it... get the hell out.
Go check into a hotel for a while and come back later.

--
Follow the rats, if you think this boat is sinking.

...and one fixes AOL by uninstalling it. And sometimes that's not even enough.



I lived in this house while it underwent remodeling (including two of the three bathrooms being useless and the third didn't have a bath or shower). That was less annoying than SL's bugs.
Oh, and "this house" is a 130 year old stone farm house that had two other renovations prior to my parents owning it, one of which was nearly completely torn down in the process of what we had done (that room had three walls and a floor--the roof was of inferior construction and the fireplace was shoddy and not to fire or building code).

Hrm. I had a kitchen re-done recently. And even though I don't cook, and it was far more annoying than SL's bugs... (dry wall got into everything). Perception, by definition I guess, is relative.

And neither you nor I are trying to grow our places to accomodate 10x their current occupancy, (which is already 10x what it was 2-3 years ago).

Don't get me wrong, there are things that annoy me, most recently focus issues with getting the chat input window to open particularly, but I'm having no trouble building or scripting, which is my primary activity in SL.

The MOST annoying thing I encountered in SL lately (not including yesterday's grid attack) ... was mouse-drag problems. Objects would be dropped, selecting was erratic, draging rotation rings would fail... it was infuriating! Turned out not to be LL's fault... it was merely my mouse button wearing out.

I don't remember any dry wall issues, but then the amount of work being done WITH dry wall was small and several layers of plastic between me and it.



Very true.



Hehe.
I was actually no effected by the grid attack at all, at least other than scripts being turned off. I must have been on the other side of the grid from it.

Seems to me that what we need here is NOT SL 1.37.92.whatever. It's SL 2.0. Lindens, give us a semi-stable current version for however long is required to rewrite the core software, add the features, and TEST, TEST, TEST, BEFORE release.

THAT's the thing that really gripes me about SL. It's a wonderful simulation with great features, but the software can NOT POSSIBLY be tested properly in the short time between "updates". It's just not possible.

2.0 is dream and we might not see it for awhile..........They need a large jump in platform client before we can even believe its possible.

That is exactly my point, Usagi-san. LL spends all its resources (time and money) on these too-rapid minor-feature updates, and NO resources on real upgrades - like rewriting the core code to eliminate the major problems, such as 1) extremely long rez times; 2) downtime every time they put out a new "update"; 3) inability to copy to inventory; etc.

Kelly Linden submitted an excellent post which seems to respond to your observation Mariko:

#23

So what? The point is that a crappy product is defective. The delivery mode is irrelevant.


Right! A customer who complains is called a "problem customer", and unless you're a REAL BIG customer, american buinesses actually WANT you to go away. it's easier then fixing their shoddy products.

Unless the company is run by a computer, an individual makes every mistake in a company.

If a company WERE run by a computer, it would make no mistakes at all for a very long time, then one day the whole place would suddenly blow up and burn down.

Winzip
Google Earth
Winamp
Adsubtract
Taskinfo
Windows calculator

...assuming "perfect" means "does a damn good job and without bugs which crash it".

All software can have features added, which by definition, improves it. Since the new version is improved, the previous version must not have been "perfect". But so what? That says nothing about the quality of the software.

...and it happens more in american corporations than in countries where the the managers aren't greedy, evil or stupid, and the employees care more about the quality of their work than they do about office politics, padding their expense accounts, wandering around gossiping, stealing office supplies, celebrating the secretary's birthday party, and hanging around in front of the building smoking cigarettes.

It's a piss-poor statement about a product when all that its apologists can say is "Okay, it may be shitty right NOW, but at least it hasn't killed anybody yet".

The Japs are laughing at us because their managers fix problems and ours fix blame. The Germans are laughing at us -- and rightly so -- because their industries make quality products, and ours make quantity excuses.

--D

I think you forgot to correct one of your "speling misteak"s.

It's true.

If the words "exponential growth" have any meaning, and I think that's possible, perhaps there will be an open-sourcing of SL by that time. I realize the complexity of such an undertaking would be daunting and that LL can't do it unless they can make money off it (survival ain't free) but it would tap the very technically advanced skills of the user base in a productive way.

Roll your mind ten years into the future and imagine - you plug your keychain thingbob into the network and that was you bringing your own sim online - integrated with the google map of your home and the video feed from your camera - home honey I'm high!!!

--www.virtualheresy.com

Let's see.. your "Software packages" are:
a utility
a content server
a viewer
a browser plug-in module
another utility
and a teeny tiny fraction of an OS distribution

It's easy to have comprehensive testing when you're providing a relatively simple "tool".



"Quantity excuses" eh? Well, when the complainers provide "quantity" instead of "Quality" feedback... why should they (or you) expect anything better in return?

Care to mention any popular ground-breaking, multi-platform, 3d MMO's (that allow customers to design and create uniquely new content) that were stable, bugless and well performing upon release?

No... I didn't think so.

Did google earth ever work right?!