Josh Susanto

>LINDEN LAB SPEAKS ! And please note that while it says "The Commerce Team" at the bottom, it does not say "CommerceTeam Linden"... anymore. (edit) " We will not be requiring Merchants to migrate to Direct Delivery before August 1, 2012, and will give at least a 4 week notice for any shutdown dates." Wow. Finally something in an adult voice. What do you suppose just happened?

>This is what I've been talking about with Magic Boxes being broken. Repeating this more often doesn't make it less untrue. >and there is no way a magic box is reliable. Did you try attaching it to your avatar while on Linden land? How do I know that you didn't? >I really think that Magic Boxes have problems handling a large number of items. No. The Marketplace, itself, has problems handling a large number of items. This is only made worse by sims where box rental being advertised being deliberately borked in order to create support for DD, as was done just about the same time that DD was first announced. Should it happen again, there are ways around it, though, which don't require us to give up other utlities that the box continues to offer. > I don't know how many items you have in your store or how many magic boxes you have those items in but it makes a difference. A magic box containing over 700 items will flawlessly deliver any number of things to my alt as quickly as my alt can order them, provided that the box believes it is rezzed on Linden land. Please try it yourself and get back to me when you actually have some idea what you're talking about on this point. > I broke my daily sales record three times in a single month I'm ahead of that so far myself... and without DD. >sales (and probably in world) are going to be far below normal. Nope. Not in my case. My sales have been way up since the Lindens have been too busy covering their butts in various ways to create additional problems for me or for my boxes.

>The problems are never going to get fixed. I'm way past expecting them to fix anything, at least without some kind of very unpleasant staff turnover first (don't hold your breath). I'm devoting most of my rhetoric at this point just to the idea that they should try to slow down on finding new ways to break things that at least still work a little bit. Mostly, I think the impending magic box shutoff is pure evil, no matter how you slice it.

Please see the article in question. The suggestions are not about how to make a project succeed, but about how to make a project fail. I've been using the term "negative" here to mean something that should make it less likely rather than more likely that the stated purpose of the project will be met. In context, this means "negative" is a Marketplace less useful to merchants and customers and "positive" means a Marketplace more useful to merchants and customers. Whether LL, or, rather, everyone in LL sees the positive and the negative in this way is one of the points I'm trying to address with the analysis. I have not flipped the terms partly to avoid greater confusion, and partly out of respect to any Linden who actually wants to provide better service to merchants and customers. As to the question of statistical confidence, I'm not claiming a very high degree of conclusiveness; I'm just trying to dispel the notion that the data is in any way more supportive of the idea that the Lindens simply don't know what they're doing or that they're somehow actually trying to make these kinds of decisions in a way that produces a favorable result for merchants. The claim that there is probably a malefactor, by any degree of conficence, only needs to be stronger than the claim that there probably isn't a malefactor in order to be a point worth making. If it's wrong to use numbers to support the malefactor hypothesis, it can only be more wrong to continue to ignore the numbers as a way of trying to support a counterhypothesis of no malefactor; a counterhypothesis which meets with a lower burden of evidence only for social reasons, and not for scientific ones. But let's put some of my more charitable understatements aside for a moment... Not having all the hard facts myself, I think there are merchants on this forum who are still inclined to disagree with me about the probable motives of the least benevolent Linden, and who would yet concede that it looks like LL followed all 10 steps to making a project fail (please think about this for a few seconds). Assuming that the Lindens literally have no idea how to manage a project like the replacement of Xstreet with anything comparable (or better), we should see behavior equivalent of tossing 10 coins in the hope of getting 10 heads, and yet somehow getting 10 tails. This is an outcome we should see on one project out of about every 2 to the power of 10, or 1 in 1024. If all 10 steps were followed, this puts Linden about 511 projects ahead of schedule in terms of producing such an unlikely result. Even if we could believe this kind of bad luck to be possible once, how are we to reconcile it in combination with the additional displays of what I guess we are to assume is other astronomically bad luck in terms of the selection of code deployment dates, somewhat expounded upon here: http://tribes.tribe.net/secondlifemarketplaceproductsearch/thread/9354a5f2-05b0-4fbe-b898-5a8dea6fd770 ? An additional point that bears making here is that the list of 10 items is not a list of 10 things that must be done in order to make a project fail. It is a list of 10 things ANY of which can cause a project to fail. For a project to succeed in spite of one, or even more than one of these suggestions being complied-with in principle, is certainly not impossible. But it's exactly the kind of gamble that hiring people with any training or experience at all is intended to completely avoid; it's the whole reason why we don't just toss coins to make project design decisions. For a team to produce a predominance of such bad decisions that exceeds what we should project from a random process (3 to 7 at a confidence interval exceeding 51%) indicates a team of people about whom the kindest thing we can say is that to use them to make decisions might be no worse than simply flipping a coin. So, assuming your own intuitions are correct, that this team is performing at the chance level (despite their good intentions), wouldn't it be cheaper for LL just to hire one person to flip a coin for a few minutes whenever a decision needs to be made about the direction of the Marketplace? That we are led to believe by LL, itself, that chance operations are not driving decisions regarding the marketplace should less encourage us to think that they all want the Marketplace to offer improving service to merchants and customers than it should encourage us to think just the opposite. So, while I'm stretching the meaning of the available data, those who make claims opposite to mine are trying to stretch the meaning of data that doesn't even exist. Who is more wrong?

I'd like people here to consider what the 10-part list can tell us mathematically about what is probably really happening inside LL. The Polyanna Pangloss model of behavior analysis I have seen mostly applied on this forum is essentially as follows: Negative behavior: probably unintentional Positibe behavior: probably intentional As what is observable has often tended to put me in a position to disagree with people here about what meanings to assign to Linden behavior, it's somewhat understandable that most of you likely imagine I'm using this kind of an unber-cynical model, which would easily explain why we tend to disagree: Positive behavior: probably unintentional Negative behavior: probably intentional So please let me clarify what model I'm actually using. It's essentially the same model used by practically every person who does professional modeling of behavior with statistics. Random behavior: probably unintentional Nonrandom behavior: probably intentional So how does this relate to the 10-part list? It relates in terms of understanding whether or not LL's compliance or noncompliance with the essence of some number of the suggestions on the list is better understood as random or nonrandom; that is: probably intentional or probably unintentional. Assuming LL would toss a coin on each of the 10 items to decide whether or not to comply with it in essence, the outcome we would expect would be 5 positive complies with a standard deviation of 2.5 more complies or 2.5 fewer complies. If they would comply in essence with anywhere within 3 to 7 of the suggestions, we could characterize that as indistinguishable from random. It would still mean that they don't know how to make good decisions, but it would not give us any reason to prefer to think that either positive or negative outcomes are being deliberately produced. That's the easy part to understand. The next point I'm going to make is a little bit more abstract, but I think anyone who has read this far can probably grasp it without too much extra effort. The important point is: Either a compliance score of 2 or 8 would have equal statistical implications in terms of intentionality, as would 1 compared to 9 or 0 compared to 10. In other words: One set of numbers suggests intentional positive outcomes and the other set of numbers suggests intentional negative outcomes, but the degree of intentionality statistically implied is equal. This is important to understand because, if LL complied with only 2 of the suggestions, I think most of you people would be quick to want to forgive them these 2 and credit them with at least doing 8 other things correctly. That is: you would assume positive intention and dismiss as silly the idea that they'd merely got 8 things right by accident. But if they complied with 8 of the suggestions, how many of you would be equally eager to assume negative intention? What we all know I should expect from you people in such a scenario is exactly what I'm seeing now: people continuing to stumble all over themselves to come up with some remaining way to believe "they obviously didn't really mean to do that". Please consider again, carefully what I have said about the significance of with how many items on the list LL has complied in principle, and tell me how I might be wrong. That done, please tell me: With how many of the items do you perceive LL to have complied in principle? If the number is 8 or more, then, from the simple standpoint of behavior analysis, we should say that it is likelier than not that at least one person at LL in charge of one of the decisions has decided with the intention to produce a negative outcome such as is described in the article. This is not a very diplomatic way to look at the Lindens, I know. But seeing how much all of you have accomplished with your diplomacy, don't you think it's time that you started to put diplomatic decisions aside long enough to first make objective behavioral assessments?

>I am getting sales on things that have never ever sold on SLM. After I converted them to DD. Someone else might be able to assign a specific meaning to that, but I can't. If you have a theory as "paranoid" as I might be expected to offer, though, I'll naturally be eager to read it.

>people are trying to start a rumor that SLM is being shut down. It's not a rumor. It's a behavioral projection based on the established trends.

>So do you really think LL would be that stupid to wipe 25% of listings?? They have already said that they will. They just haven't been explicit about it.

>Here is a novel thought: >What if the MP is not critical to the growth of SL at all? For one, it drives in-world participation down and erodes tier payment from merchants and creators. Yeah, that's way novel. I wonder why no one ever mentioned that before.

>So, now, why the heck does LL write in their own blog that no copy does not work? It's so that you'll get disgusted with the marketplace and move all your business back to the grid and pay more for land. You can pretty much just cut and paste that last sentence any time you need an explanation for anything that happens around here, henceforth.

>That is a diabolically genius plan... So that can't be it. It only requires 1 genius. The other people could all be idiots. Really, it's time that they all realized they're being played for idiots anyway.

Things just get curiouser and curiouser, don't they?

>the JIRA is the way that info is communicated to CTL and the Devs. The JIRA is just a way to make the rest of you people feel like you're "doing something about it". I'm actually doing something about it. If I weren't, someone in SF wouldn't be scrambling to shut off the 2 numbers that were posted for me here. How many of the other borked listing have been shut off so quickly like that?

The picture for the Women's Medieval thing is mine, but it's a picture for the Illegible Epitaph 2 item. I believe these are not items Items 1436951 and 1436952 (which would make sense) but items Items 1436951 and 1455293. Considering the two consecutive items are not the ones in which a picture has been shifted, this seems to me like it must be a reasonably sophisticated borking algorithm. No? Otherwise, why should I be seeing one of my own pictures shifted AND numerically consecutive borked listings, but not have the 2 things map?

Screw it, I'll just try this first...

And you'll also note that the 2 that don't show are the ones you listed. Someone's desperately scrambling to keep me from getting my fingers into this.

Yep, this one at least. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/illegible-epitaph-2-seamless-sculpted-column-prim/1455293 I see three in total. The other two go to the default page for some reason, but, yeah, that's one. Now this officially my problem. If you think I haven't been holding anything back, I think you might end up pretty surprised by the end of this process.

>I see two of the listings in your store that are borked. And they are both in the 14xxxxx series. That's new. And interesting.

Maybe I'd finally shut up at some if I didn't keep reading these things. Too bad LL won't accomodate, huh.

A whole thread just vanished from this forum without ANY explanation. Do you suppose it could be some kind of bug?

>Ok, I just read that DD does not support no copy items. Is this right? If it is, that's fricken ridiculous. How the heck does LL release DD when it doesn't support no copy, and then say they will add it later? Now you're getting the picture. Did you also notice that the thread where I most recently explained why this stuff happens has totally disappeared without any explanation? OTOH, don't worry. I'm sure they'll start figuring out how to add that feature some time around 2 June.

What is that in actual calendar dates?

>So the range is somewhere between 1398435 and 1463572. What does that mean in terms of actual calendar dates?

seriously? how many people saw that thread? no warning, no email, no notice of any kind, and the comments are gone from here, too since the comments here were specifically about (the correlation), i can only assume that's the same reason they erased the other whole thread they better hope i don't post it elsewhere as i did with the 13 september thing, huh. of course, if it were to simply reappear, i might not have to do that...

It might be easier to finish sorting this out if whole threads wouldn't disappear when we start to get close.