ANDREW LINDEN IS BACK!

[Lucia Nightfire]

Well, his new name is now Leviathan Linden, but still...

This news alone makes me optimistic, a feeling I haven't had about this platform in many years.

Thanks for coming back!

I can't wait to see what cool things you bring us once again.

😻

Edited January 25, 2022 by Lucia Nightfire

[Marigold Devin]

1 minute ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Well, his new name is now Leviathan Linden, but still...

This news alone makes me optimisitic, a feeling I haven't had about this platform in many years.

Thanks for coming back.

I want Oskar back. I know what you mean about the optimism. 

(Welcome back Andrew/Leviathan)

Edited January 25, 2022 by Marigold Devin

[Lewis Luminos]

Wow! Welcome back Leviathan! This is good news indeed. 

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

[bigmoe Whitfield]

now where is torley.

[Persephone Emerald]

1 minute ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

now where is torley.

I want Torely back too. ❤️

[Lewis Luminos]

And Oz.

[Maitimo]

Welcome back Andrew/Leviathan (someone get him to post here so we can tag him properly)

[Silent Mistwalker]

@Andrew Linden 

 

Might work.

[Maitimo]

Oh I tried leviathan and it didn't work, but that might.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

10 minutes ago, Maitimo said:

Oh I tried leviathan and it didn't work, but that might.

Yeah looks like the database for names has not synced to the SL database for names so it's not populated it yet to the forum software.

[Charlotte Bartlett]

Now just for Spike Linden and Babbage Linden (and Torley!) to come back! 
Full House

Welcome back Andrew!

Edited January 26, 2022 by Charlotte Bartlett

[Garnet Psaltery]

Welcome back, Andrew.

Come back, Harry.  There aren't enough Tiny Lindens here.  

[Alwin Alcott]

I can't get around the thinking about the current team, what did happen that they need the oldies back ... in business often a sign something very serious is going on.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Alwin Alcott said:

I can't get around the thinking about the current team, what did happen that they need the oldies back ... in business often a sign something very serious is going on.

Old code needs new blood but new blood doesn't know if they can monkey with the code without killing the grid. Solution? Bring in the people who wrote the code.

Maybe, just maybe, it means some of the ongoing bugs will finally get some attention.

[Drayke Newall]

18 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

I can't wait to see what cool things you bring us once again.

 

Hopefully an update to the physics engine he implement to something more modern.

Edited January 26, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Silent Mistwalker]

20 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

Hopefully an update to the physics engine he implement to something more modern.

That's what I was trying to say but without getting anyone's hopes up too high.

32 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Old code needs new blood but new blood doesn't know if they can monkey with the code without killing the grid. Solution? Bring in the people who wrote the code.

Maybe, just maybe, it means some of the ongoing bugs will finally get some attention.

 

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Old code needs new blood but new blood doesn't know if they can monkey with the code without killing the grid. Solution? Bring in the people who wrote the code.

so the current team has not enough capabilities to handle their job? .. thats quite a shock to be honest.

[Silent Mistwalker]

3 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

so the current team has not enough capabilities to handle their job? .. thats quite a shock to be honest.

That's not what I said. I said they are simply being cautious, so they don't bring down the wrath of thousands of residents on their heads. That does not imply they are incompetent. Even competent people need help at times.

[ChinRey]

21 hours ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

Now just for Spike Linden and Babbage Linden (and Torley!) to come back! 
Full House

I'm not completely with you there. Not that I disagree with any of the names but the list is way too short. Add Cory, Eric, Ryan, Avi and Michael... Now we're talking!

I wouldn't actually be too surprised if Torley and/or Ryan Linden returned to LL. Not much chance of any of the others though.

[Charlotte Bartlett]

Just now, ChinRey said:

I'm not completely with you there. Not that I disagree with any of the names but the list is way too short. Add Cory, Eric, Ryan, Avi and Michael... Now we're talking!

I wouldn't actually be too surprised if Torley and/or Ryan Linden returned to LL. Not much chance of any of the others though.

hah, true true I think the list in reality should be quite long!

These are the ones I interacted with most and have fond memories on their contributions directly.
Spike - when I accidentally rezzed a self replicating thing on my region back in the early years.  Much laughter and him patiently dealing the carnage I created.   Just that in world support and interaction made SL a fun new frontier in those early days.
Babbage - for the contributions outside of SL too and a conference back in the day in virtual worlds and hearing his passion over the meta verse.
Torley - well we all know what an amazing contribution he made and his artistic talent.  I will always think Torley when I see a Watermelon!

[Coffee Pancake]

SL's devs aren't lost and confused,  the people who manage the devs have different priorities than the rest of us. 

Code is code, old code .. new code .. it's still code. It doesn't go bad.

Nothing happens to SL code wise with out it being justified, costed, scheduled, focus grouped, aligned with business priorities & growth prospects, and signed off on. The devs just do what they're told.

It really is that simple.

 

SL's lack of platform advancement isn't a developer issue, it's a management issue.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/25/2022 at 4:24 PM, Lucia Nightfire said:

Well, his new name is now Leviathan Linden, but still...

This news alone makes me optimistic, a feeling I haven't had about this platform in many years.

Thanks for coming back!

I can't wait to see what cool things you bring us once again.

😻

So I think generally this is a good thing, because the more old Lindens at the helm who know where all the sim bodies are buried, the better. And even though they covered the tracks likely when they moved to the cloud, still, Andrew will know where the duct tape is loose. I used to have conversations with Andrew, back when that was possible with the Lindens and there were less of us, and he would criticize my forums posts and I would tell him he had spent too much time with the logical positivists (Hamlet nee Linden suffered from that problem as well.)

Andrew used to say that he was inclined to think new membership should be throttled before performance was better, and he wasn't wrong about that, although it flew in the face of corporate wisdom at a time when they were saying "millions" had signed up. Where are they now? Likely he wouldn't say that *now* with 30,000 concurrency and many days with no log-ins as things are too broken. Or would he? 

Here's the exact statement from the old forums (and see the full transcript here).

Andrew Linden, 4/25/05: "The LL model of the SL population and how it would grow was always much simpler. From the start the theory was that SL would become an increasingly interesting place as its population grew. In the beginning would be the "early adopters" who were excited about virtual reality in general. Eventually some artists and programmers would find the feature set complete enough to express their creativity and these "content creators" would build stuff. As the content became more interesting some casual explorers would find the content compelling and would buy some of it -- "consumers". A population of consumers would provide a market for those content creators that wanted to make real money -- ta-da, a market is born that only gets more interesting as it grows.

Every person on Earth has some threshold of features/content at which point they will find SL useful and/or interesting enough to login. As SL grows more and more people will fall into the subset whose threshold has been passed. The grand plan is to push the feature set of SL and allow the population to expand until nearly everyone's threshold has been passed.

It was always the intention to start SL small and let it grow. SL 1.0 was not launched ready for 1 million residents, and it is still not ready for that many. SL is growing at a very healthy rate. In fact, LL's main challenge is to develop the platform fast enough that SL's architecture can handle the next season's population. At the moment don't see many reasons to speed up the growth rate -- if SL were to "tip" and suddenly become the next big thing such that hoards of people were joining up, then LL would be forced to throttle new accounts until SL's fundamental system was more ready.

I don't think the Lindens have diverged from this concept of "a virtual world society" AKA user base in all these years, but I think it's fundamentally flawed as a recipe for an open society -- it's a closed society like the Middle Ages.

It creates strata or classes of society that then come into conflict:

o Early Adapters or techs and graphic designers who are hard core, usually at the extreme end of the Open Source movement and wonky enough to have read "Snowcrash" in 2003  -- this is the oldbie base and the first iteration of the FIC and those who continue to attend office hours and have the Lindens' ear as they are from their same cohort -- technologists. So these are "the monks and scribes" or "the Church" in their ideology although their actions are more like the Crusaders.

o "Artists and Programmers" -- still a skilled class, but not as inclined to worship Stallman or Snowden. The content creators were the hope of M Linden, who thought that the killer app was "each other," not due to the high value of socializing, which is a mixed bag in a virtual world with anonymous alts and the ability to always make more, but the content that would be a draw to a larger audience. So these are like "the Medici Family's hires, the Michaelangelos.

o "Consumers" -- also known by technologists as "Problem in Chair, Not in Computer" -- the rubes who are supposed to come in, buy the popcorn, gawk at the circus acts and just accept what is told them about the technology. It's not like more than 100,000 people "jailbreak" their iphones, etc. Of course these "casual explorers" aren't so casual, and spend more money -- and more time -- than any of these other groups, especially as time logged in while your nose is in Blender doesn't count, especially if you throw up a vendor and never even do customer service. The better ones of course hire CSRs. So these are "the peasants."

o "Every Person On Earth" -- well, I have had customers from Uzbekistan, where they could only buy at first an Internet package that consisted only of a bundle of Facebook, VKontakte, and then they could pick a few other things. The Lindens say they have had log-ins from Iran. I have yet to meet a Turkmen but their threshold is just: Internet, period, and then they might pick Second Life if they can use their computer at work. 

Andrew did concede that "Every Person On Earth" has a subset only for SL who "find it interesting" -- or about whom one could say "have a computer connection and graphics card that can handle SL". And it's helpful to remember that there was *no Facebook* at the time SL launched. I can remember distinctly being at a TV job where the boss told us there was a thing called "The Facebook" but that you had to have a college email to join. And I didn't, having graduated long before the Internet was born, and never going back to try to get one, of the kind many people use for life. Then you had to be invited by someone, and I was finally invited by a college friend who *had* retrieved his email. SL didn't work that way, anyone could join from anywhere if they had a payment form. When the Lindens decreed that there could be basic accounts with no payment on file, that's when the population grew.

Today, the Lindens' problem isn't so much "How can we handle a million coming in the door" when concurrency used to be much higher, but "how can we keep the boutique users we have already."

So I think Andrew's shock and alarm at certain things that are allowed to pass now, or that have become the norm, might be a good impetus toward change, provided he has that shock and no one keeps him from having it.

@Lucia you should read that old town hall transcript linked above and say "Oh, wow, they never did that thing." Or "Oh, wow, they did all those things in 10 years." Or whatever.

Edited January 27, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL's devs aren't lost and confused,  the people who manage the devs have different priorities than the rest of us. 

Code is code, old code .. new code .. it's still code. It doesn't go bad.

Nothing happens to SL code wise with out it being justified, costed, scheduled, focus grouped, aligned with business priorities & growth prospects, and signed off on. The devs just do what they're told.

It really is that simple.

 

SL's lack of platform advancement isn't a developer issue, it's a management issue.

I think you need to read more of SL history and you won't keep saying that sort of thing. The Lindens by their admission used to have The Big List of Things to Do. They would work on it on an "I feel like doing that one, I don't feel like doing the other one" basis. Then at the end of every cycle, there would be a bunch of things that no one thought was "fun" to do, so they cut them off the list. Did they reinstate them on the next month's list? Not always.

Then they changed to teams working independently and then adding to branches of code. They didn't have Slack in those days so who knows how they managed the coagulation of these different silos. Of course they had the Agile software cult and the scrum and the story and all the rest of that ideology. When everything is a fake user story told by devs then nothing is a user reality. Do they still have Agile? It's much more criticized now than it was.

It's BOTH developers and their ideologies, which can be extreme, and managers, who can't manage them or are one of them as the Benevolent Dictator in a software cult.

Your notion of this task list of being justified, costed, scheduled, focus grouped, aligned with business priorities & growth prospects, and signed off on isn't backed up by actual testimony or documentation from inside the lab, and is like that cartoon with the tree cut off and the swing on the ground.

Early Lindens did what they thought was worth doing and whatever their cohorts in their town halls or office meetings put in front of them -- and likely there are still parts of the spaghetti code from that era. Oz has been gone for nearly a year, and the new guy is just getting started. 

 

[Ceka Cianci]

On 1/25/2022 at 5:05 PM, Persephone Emerald said:

I want Torely back too. ❤️

Me three!! \o/