Merchants

[Josh Susanto]

>Yes, that's the best news since this whole DD thing was deployed, even if delivered in odd language. 

Better news would be "no deadline", which is what they had before, and which they should still have, because it was considered to be good enough when they still believed DD was going to deploy OK.

(think about it)

[Josh Susanto]

> the state of DD today is much better than folks give it credit. 

I can't say I'm not disappointed with the total impact of DD.

But what's got me all p'd off again isn't the technical failures.

What's got me p'd off is the completely backwards way LL tried to prepare people for the deployment.

They should have warned us that it would probably be full of bugs (which I knew anyway) and told us what we could do to mitigate the impact to our businesses. But they instead acted like we'd be idiots not to join them in expecting a flawless deployment that would instantly solve all the pre-existing problems; they even spent 6 months actively discouraging us from demanding any fixes to the existing system "because DD is just around the corner anyway". 

Moreover, they not only gambled our trust on their own misplaced self-confidence, they also utterly failed to prepare any kind of contingency plan for anything that might have gone wrong. 

I'm pretty sure that ANY software company for which you've worked devotes some amount of budget and planning time to damage control and explores various scenarios for bad deployment outcomes.

I am 100% convinced that LL simply does not do this. 

It makes me think that, maybe if I want LL to start taking their own risks seriously, I should just send the SFPD to look at LL's fire extinguishers (meaning, if they bother to have any, since ... you know... there's no fire, right?).

[Josh Susanto]

>I don't understand what the issue is with upgrading your viewer.. Did you complain when they added mesh and we had to upgrade?

Yes.

But my complaint wasn't the need to upgrade.

My complaint was that only SL's viewer could see mesh at first, and SL's own viewers continue to be almost total crap.

If they want to create new features that require me to use their own viewer, I'd be fine with that in principle, but they should then also provide a viewer that doesn't feel like being forced to make a circle on an etch-a-sketch while standing on one foot, blindfolded. 

[Josh Susanto]

>Now there is absolutely ZERO reason for a merchant to rent land.

Bingo.

And now you know why LL has been gradually making the SLM less and less useful, including with the DD mandatory downgrade, while pretending to try to make it work better.

When the SLM is finally shut down, the problem will have been solved that Xstreet was reducing demand for in-world commercial rentals, and LL can say "but we were just trying to help!".

[Josh Susanto]

>Merchants never really had to rent land for a magic box.

Exactly.

And that was one of the problems that LL will have solved by first making us give up the Magic Boxes and then making at least most of us give the DD as well.

Merchants selling stuff without renting land means less revenue for LL. 

But buying out Xstreet just to shut it down directly would probably have created some legal exposures in terms of antitrust legislation.

Pretending to try to improve the system while actually crippling it makes it look less like monopoly maintenance.

[Sera Lok]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

My complaint was that only SL's viewer could see mesh at first, and SL's own viewers continue to be almost total crap.

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This is what happens when the majority of users give up on LL viewers and refuse to use them, and the majority of LL employees spend so little time doing anything inworld other than going to meetings.  The default viewer suffers.

That said, I've been using the latest LL v3 for a few months now and I am ok with it.  I have heard SO many people say they'll never use a LL viewer again, and many of them aren't even aware there is a V3, so many still refer to V2 (which WAS horrible, imo). 

Now that Firestorm has the FUI, and so few know that this is an LL design, I'm sure they will be getting a lot of the credit from users for LL's UI design, which is amusing.  I'm sure already there have been expressions like "omg you made the viewer so much better we can drag our buttons around LL fails you guys are the best!" when in fact it's LL supplying that design.  But there is good reason for that actually - the Firestorm team actually communicates, provides viewer support, and is open to user feedback, whereas the LL team is dysfunctional in all those aspects.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

The DD car has less than a hundred miles on it. So far it's been driven from factory to truck to the dealer and been test driven for a couple of weeks. Is that conclusive?

Or, how long does it take an employer to realize that the employees just aren't up to the task in general? How many bugs are too many?

Basic requirements here are that it gets from point A to point B reliably (not yet established and last years model has failed), that the gauges tell you what you need to know (reporting inadequate, records don't reconcile, funds are mangled) and that the passengers arrive safely (many of them seem to suffer from air-bag rash, with or without DD).

This the kind of thing you'd consider acceptable in your software company? Hey, it appears that you may have gotten something right! You can stay another year!

[Josh Susanto]

>But I have never rented land in SL for the purpose of finding a home for me Magicbox.

I did at first, but only because I wanted to be able to hold someone responsible for keeping the sim working correctly.

Ironically, that just put my box on the map with others, conspicuously ready to get borked.

I always figured I could get a few people to let me install a really nice plant or rock on their land that would also be a magic box, but they would still have been doing me a favor, so I wouldn't have been in a position to demand consistent service or leaving the prim in-situ or try to get them not to lag the sim with a bunch of other scripts.

But the most important point to understand about magic boxes not requiring land rental is that:

if you just keep an avatar on one of the Linden sims and attach a box to it, the box works JUST FINE. 

Since Malefactor Linden apparently never figured out a way to bork that, it would only have been a matter of time before people other than me bothered to test it out, and the need for DD would have become a lot less clear, while, also, merchants and/or merchant alts might start camping out a lot on Linden land, especially when things like deployments have been announced. 

Thus the urgency to separate merchants from their magic boxes; not regardless of how well the boxes really work, but because of how well they really work.

[Darrius Gothly Member]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

> the state of DD today is much better than folks give it credit. 

I can't say I'm not disappointed with the total impact of DD.

But what's got me all p'd off again isn't the technical failures.

What's got me p'd off is the completely backwards way LL tried to prepare people for the deployment.

They should have warned us that it would probably be full of bugs (which I knew anyway) and told us what we could do to mitigate the impact to our businesses. But they instead acted like we'd be idiots not to join them in expecting a flawless deployment that would instantly solve all the pre-existing problems; they even spent 6 months actively discouraging us from demanding any fixes to the existing system "because DD is just around the corner anyway". 

Moreover, they not only gambled our trust on their own misplaced self-confidence, they also utterly failed to prepare any kind of contingency plan for anything that might have gone wrong. 

I'm pretty sure that ANY software company for which you've worked devotes some amount of budget and planning time to damage control and explores various scenarios for bad deployment outcomes.

I am 100% convinced that LL simply does not do this. 

It makes me think that, maybe if I want LL to start taking their own risks seriously, I should just send the SFPD to look at LL's fire extinguishers (meaning, if they bother to have any, since ... you know... there's no fire, right?).

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No arguments here. And yeah, we would normally take database snapshots right before and at various times during the deployment and fixes. I'm betting there isn't one available .. anywhere.

[Josh Susanto]

>Or, how long does it take an employer to realize that the employees just aren't up to the task in general? How many bugs are too many?

That's really the elephant in the living room, isn't it?

Forget the technical aspects of the problem for a minute.

How many GOOD decisions have you seen LL make in the last 8 months?

And how many of those were not merely improving upon some earlier bad decision?

If people are ultimately being paid just to make bad decisions (and possibly to make even worse decisions first) wouldn't it be more efficient just to pay them to make no decisions at all?

Of course, then, you might also consider not paying them to not make those decisions...