If you want to try to comprehend the global issues around Second Life and Linden Labs, check out this fantastic blog entry. It’s one person’s opinion and analysis, but it jives with what I’m reading on the blogs and hearing in-world.
Of particular interest to me are the comments on “sculpties” (hate that term), or sculpted prims, and scalability. I’ve been saying since the moment I saw the announcement on sculpted prims that a whole new class of “knowledge worker” had been created to join the scripters, animators and builders. Gynneth essentially says the same thing, but explains the ramifications better than me.
On scability, it’s abundantly clear that SL’s growth has outpaced its capacity. The “game” wasn’t designed for the problems that it is experiencing. Again, Gwyn’s got better insights than I do.
A very good post, one that everyone should read. I’m still quite torn on her perspective on the Project Open Letter, though. It’s one thing to be a Luddite, but another altogether to demand a baseline stability to the grid.
Filed under: opinion, Second Life
I’ll be a signatory of the Open Letter project the day there is a similar thing for Windows
Windows users have been using an inferior product with huge stability issues every day since 1985… and well… they’re still using it.
Microsoft also has half a million bugs on their internal bug tracking system. Sure, they’re doing something about it — slowly and patiently. Just like Linden Lab is doing with Second Life. After all, LL fixed about 10,000 bugs in 2006 or so; I have no idea how many were officially fixed in this first semester of 2007. They’re note exactly crossing their arms and expecting everything to collapse. In fact, most of us have noticed that since SL 1.15 was released a week ago, SL “suddenly” stabilised in the past 2 years. No patches were released. No downtime was necessary. It just “suddenly” started to work well again. Well, yes, their engineering and operations team have been very busy under the hood… and not idling away forgetting about their users. They just don’t work with the quickness that the users demand these days, ie. “instantaneous”.
But compare what Windows Vista has brought the Microsoft user community since the days of Windows 2.0… I’m pretty sure everybody agrees that it’s quite better than what you had in the past
– Gwyn (obviously, a Mac user… I gave up on Microsoft in 2000)