Anaiya Arnold

I called the implementation a fail. You inserted the word "total", changing what I did say into something much more extreme and significantly different to what I've actually said. And you did bother to post, so pretending you actually had a point but could not be bothered to post that, yet could be bothered to post a pointless mini-straw man, is not a convincing act. It's odd a self professed, moderate, middle ground dweller who takes a nuanced view and sees shades of grey rather than black and white, cannot detect a single shade, or an inch of ground, between "fail" and "total fail, including waste and ruin". You certainly have a rather extreme, black and white, middle-groundless interpretation of fail, and one that obviously others do not universally share, because otherwise the word "total" in the phrase "total fail" would be meaningless and redundant, yet you still inserted it into my mouth for no good reason. Please don't insert your stuff in my mouth without asking and receiving permission first, thanks.

I'm not sure how they are different, but they are. For instance the same item I've never sold a single copy of that is persistently on the first page of my store using the "best selling" filter is usually not on the first page when filtered by relevance.

I don't think there is a particular commonly known name for that dress style. You could try cabaret. I tried burlesque and went 15 pages deep on the search results (with the default "relevancy" filter, and the closest I found was this.

On my machine an old Pheonix version works the best of the viewers I have on my machine. It's pre-mesh though. In second place an old V2 viewer (LL), also pre-mesh. In third place, an up to date V3(LL), although I have to have one of the graphics settings turned off or all the prims go pink (Firestorm have already released a fix for what appears to be the same bug). In fourth place a fairly up to date version of Firestorm. I had an older version of Firestorm (had mesh but was several releases out of date) that was stable and reasonably fast on my computer, but unfortunately upgraded to that "pink bug" version, and then got the version with the patch for the pink bug thing. Both these viewers run really, really bad on my machine, to the point of being unusable. I wish I had taken note of what version I had before because it seemed to run just fine on my computer but the last few I've tried have been really awful for me. The version of V3 I had before the one I have now was just as bad as the Firestorm versions that are giving me grief, but I recently updated my V3 and even though it seems to have the "pink bug" it's definately better than the one I had earlier.

Honestly your post is just irrelevant spin in the form of an underhanded ad hominen attack. I have no problems seeing shades of grey, not to mention many other colors. Sure there is complexity in the world, but judging whether or not this implementation is good enough or not, is really rather simple. EDITED TO ADD: What I find interesting about this whole discussion is that because I recognize that for a large number of people, MP actually works ... I am suddenly an "Enabler" and a "Fan Boy" That somehow my refusal to ignore their successes makes me an evil force that must be argued into the dirt and ultimately "vanquished". The emotional fervor and energy being poured into these posts just astounds me. You labled yourself an "Enabler" (capitalized for extra drama). I merely suggested that your behaviour might be enabling. As someone so familiar with shades of grey you should easily appreciate that enabling is not a behaviour itself most usually but rather how someone chooses to react to a behaviour. Where did Fan-boy come from? You certainly have a flare for the dramatic for someone concerned about being a "moderate". What you think I think about you does not reflect reality outside your own head. And if it's not bad enough you want to dictate what is in my head to me, now you are putting words in my and Joshua's mouth? Fail, pass, not good enough, and good enough, none of these things make any reference whatsoever to any volume of liquid or drinking vessels. All this spin, twisting things around, bringing in special measurements, ad hominen attacks, these things are usually not necessary for someone who has reality on their side. If you're frustrated because you find you cannot argue your position realistically, what does this tell you about your position? I often find when I'm in that position, it's because my position is untenable. When I find that to be the case, I choose to respond to that by conceding my position as ultimately not entirely correct, rather than lashing out at others, putting words and thoughts in their head, and characterizing them as extremists, anti-LL, unable to see shades of grey and having nasty thoughts about me being a a fan-boy, evil, and wanting to crush me with arguments. Obviously your mileage does vary. Oh and to top it off, I see that in your view that you expect Ll to respond to criticism like a sulky child, but of course I expect you do not see that as fail either. No business that wants to stay in business behaves by responding to criticism by refusing to fix things because they were criticized. Is that how you behave in your professional life?

By any reasonable measure this implementation fails because it's not good enough. It's really that simple, no matter how much spin you add to the mix. There are numerous clues to this in your own posting. You asserted that it's not a fail if we don't measure it against the only reasonable standard, and had to restrict your measurement to a comparison of LL to LL in order to justify a claim that it's not a fail. You would not need to qualify your measurement standards to such a specifically narrow scope of comparison if this implementation were good enough to be deemed not a fail in the grander sense. Being unprofessional is always a fail for a business. That's common sense. You've admitted that this implementation lacked a level of professionalism. That's a fail, even if people are panicking, even if there is misinformation around, even if LL are too sulky to talk to us unless we coat sugar everything and essentially baby-talk to them. Not a single thing you've said changes the essential fact that being unprofessional is an instance of fail for a business, and that you yourself assert a lack of professionalism here. Being balanced is not about putting a spin on things, it's not about creating a reality distortion field or sugar coating things in case someone unprofessionally sulks even more than they already are, nor telling porkies to stop panicking. Unrealistic assessments are not a fix for misinformation. Here's the bottom line, either it's not good enough and so by definition a fail, or it's good enough and a pass. There's no middle ground. It's either good enough (aka a pass) or a fail (aka not good enough to merit a pass). That's what fail means Darrius. Not good enough to pass. It does not mean "total waste and ruin" anymore than vegetable means specifically carrots. Sure a total waste and ruin can be a result of a fail, but not all fails produce total waste and ruin and it's just silly word game to invent new meanings for words that have simple and unambiguous meanings, just so you can assert unrealistic assessments as an unbiased middle ground. You'd not need to indulge in such creative spin efforts if in fact this was not a fail after all. Fail means not good enough. Is it your position that this implementation is good enough? Whatever internal borkage is going on, it's not going to be fixed while LL are able to dellude themselves into thinking that this is good enough. Of course they can only convince themselves of that if they decide that people who call it a fail and say it's not good enough are malcontents while those who claim it's not a fail are "middle ground voices of reason". You can call for understanding all you like, LL is a black box so we can only guess not understand, but if your own guess is correct, then enablement for the borker is whatever allows them to convince their bosses that although not perfect, things are good enough, that those who say otherwise are malcontents, and that while middle grounded voices of reason might see minor problems in the details, they concede it's not a fail.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Perhaps you are content wailing on LL because they are not up to professional standards, and I will allow that I'm disappointed in their level of professionalism in that respect too. But I am not willing to declare it a failure simply because it didn't come out of the box with zero failures. What I'm seeing is progress toward that goal, but at the present time it is also am unattainable goal. Sure, like you I want them to operate with the same level of attention to detail that I demand of myself and demanded of my teams when I was in that world. But that leap is far too high for them to scale in one shot. And as I've learned over years of being a parent and a manager, setting impossible goals is the surest way to cause total failure. I'd rather set a series of reasonable goals and then introduce the next one as soon as the previous one is completed than demand they "go away" until perfection is attained. Characterizing honest and well merited criticism as wailing on LL does not change the fact that unless you employ very special standards, it's a fail. They are business, so a pass mark necessary requires that the standard "professional" is met. A non-pass is a fail. This is not about coming out of the box with everything perfect either, and it's disengenuous and peevish to even try that on. The fact remains this is not up to professional standards, but it's also not someone's hobby, school product, or a pre-production demo and it has gone "live" to customers. That's not a pass Darrius. It's not that there were more than zero problems out of the box, it's that, as you admit, the level of professionalism is just not there, and this is a business we are talking about. It's far from reasonable or fair to pretend that the issue is about me wanting to "wail" on LL or me wanting to call things a failure if they do not" come out of the box with zero failures". This is not about one failure, or two failures, or three failures, or four. Do you consider a lack of professionalism to be the pass standard for a business? And as to setting goals, you're not setting anything that I know of. What you are doing, if anything at all, is a sending a message to LL that their performance is good enough, while a realization that it just is not is likely to be a pre-requisite to real and stable improvement. You're not goal setting, but you might be enabling.

Darrius Gothly wrote: No, the current state of affairs is not acceptable in the grander "compared to others" sense. But nor is it a 100% failure either. As with most things, the truth lay somewhere in the middle. I think this is the core of the difference of view. What is happening is not good enough, and that's a fail by realistic measures. I don't think you are applying realistic measures but are employing "special case" measures. So that "as a professional...." is redundant where you said it earlier and could be dropped from the sentence, because it had nothing to do with how you measured performance. What you really by was "compared to LL's previous performance". But Secondlife is a business. Previous performance is not a realistic measure for a business. The proper measure is the "grander "compared to others" " where "others" is all those things competing against Secondlife for peoples' entertainment time and dollars. It's a business, not a high school project where the teacher sometimes gives out "highly commended prizes" to truely terrible work that happens to be "quite good for that particular student".

Darrius Gothly wrote: Today they did announce they will be extending the deadlines. To wit: "Also know that we will be extending migration dates. Please stay tuned for more details." Yes, that's the best news since this whole DD thing was deployed, even if delivered in odd language.

It's not just an ocassional glitch. Items that have no-copy perms for the seller cannot even be sold using DD, with magic boxes they could. Magic box delivered one of each no-copy item sold, but DD delivers however many it delivers. Hanging transactions are an additional problem. There is no ANS with DD and many merchants rely on ANS. There's the uni-code issue which we did not have with magic boxes. There is also the issue that for many people it really does not work and they literally cannot upload items to sell using the merchant outbox thingie. You can suggest that because the engine starts, a car works, but if it has no steering wheel, no tires, and the brakes do not function, others may deem your defination of "works" as being far from meaningful.

I'm sorry Darrius, but you do not get an abusive spouse to change by endorsing face slaps in place of a punch in the head, nor do you cure heroine addiction by spending only your own pay packet on drugs, instead of spending your own then robbing your neighbours and spending their's too. Somethings happen in steps, but some allowances are simply enablement and send a clear message to the problem party that it's ok to slide like this. It's not ok to slide like this, even if they slid worse in the past.

This production was over a year in development. You surely didn't think you'd seen it all yet over the last few days? I'm on the edge of my seat until the finale. Anything could happen and it's not over until the fat lady is sold and delivered to the wrong customer, with the merchant left unpaid.

For the sake of the continued existence of SL, LL need to lift their standards to that expected by the wider market they hope to capture, not merely make those users who have not been driven to quit already say "well it's not as bad as last time".

Darrius Gothly wrote: DD will fix those problems. As soon as it gets through its own peculiar set of startup issues, it won't develop the same ills as Magic Boxes .. and then we'll see why they switched over. So we've always been told. Of course I expected there might be different problems with similar symptoms. I expected there might even be some merchants insisting they were the same problems, while Commerce Team told them it was definately a different problem, that happened to have the same symptoms. That's not how it happened though.

Wow, you sure know how to spin aggravating factors as mitigating factors. Yes, it's slow for everyone, which is worse not better. You ignore the limited time only, (get it now or miss out subtext implied) bear. The group who would rush to keep banging away under lag conditions, given a three month deadline for under 10 linden items and a 5 month deadline for all stock, is no bigger than the group who will wait till the last moment whenever that is. The larger group in the middle will avoid doing it in these conditions if there is no rush. Online marketplaces are an established genre. It's all fairly proceedual and it's not a mitigating factor if the whole time LL has babbled about DD they had an underlying problem from "new", for such a proceedual system, and despite the working example of XStreet as a head start. So far as complexity and uniqueness goes, approximately the next step down into standardization of software is the one-size-fits-all kind that works out of the box. It's an online marketplace, not the ground-control system for NASAs next generation of inter-planetary space exploration.

Darrius Gothly wrote: I can pretty well guarantee that LL is taking this serious though, but from what I can tell, they're up to their necks in trying to make the Marketplace work faster ... so customers aren't scared away from making any purchase at all. A task that would probably be rapidly completed by removing the stupid bear from the marketplace front page and replacing it with a message that informs shoppers the bear will be released and available for a month starting from X date, and advising merchants that the there is a new (extended) phase-in/phase-out period of X time, and recommending that due to processing delays, merchants not hurry to switch over. That problem fixed, then they could address themselves to fixing the bugs before DD is compulsory, rather than spending between now and then trying to undo the performance damage they pretty much single handedly caused by doing everything in their power to manufacture as much urgency and rush on the part of merchants, and as much extra shopping activity (aka free-bear hunting) as they could, even though anyone with any sense in their head would not need to have been warned about this outcome. I'm an IT lay-person, but I could predict that unless they were willing to bring extra resources on board to cope, that marketplace performance would take a hit when DD rolled out, assuming no one offered a "limited time only" free bear, or informed people that for some products they had roughly a month to transition and roughly two months to get all stock swapped over. I'd never have calculated assuming those two later conditions because no one could reasonably predict such utterly unreasonable behaviour.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Granted, it's just a theory ... but dang this tinfoil hat looks so GOOD on me! LOL I put out tin foil hats for everyone that needs one in this trying time. Emergency Tin Foil Hats

Oh FFS! Thank you Gavin, for completing in your free time, what the Commerce Team are paid to do. In addition to solving the mystery, your discovery provides a workaround, which is a very good thing since an actual fix means waiting around until the Commerce Team find they can be bothered, and assumes they will not just file it in the "too much like actual work" basket, and henceforth instruct us, in some obscure post buried on the forums in a thread posted quietly at no-am in the the morning, to not use those characters, while still allowing the item/product title field to carry on accepting them. Naturally it will be our fault if we do not find the obscure post buried somewhere on the forum at no-am.

I don't buy your "explanation", but I've heard the sounds.

It might come back. Try resetting the scripts in it, resynching and refreshing your inventory page on the marketplace, and going to X-street to see if your box shows there. You could also burn a bear. I don't think any of these things actually help but my disappearing marketplace inventory stuff always tends to come back automatically after a while, so the point is to fill in your time and reduce the sense of impotency while you wait.

Mickey Vandeverre wrote: maybe, maybe not. but they have already said more or less that they are not refunding on the "being delivered" phase - just a heads up on that. here it is https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4441 anyway, that's how they handled customer support on that - sent us to a cell in the basement and washed their hands of it. In this case customers apparently are being charged though so I'm wondering how exactly one distinguishes this from criminal theft. Is Commerce team hoping to do a lag rather than just create the stuff?

Darrius Gothly wrote: Frankly it would be a bad investment in hardware to load up on extra computing power just for this initial rush. It would just be wasted processing capability in a few weeks. And it's not like they're starving for computers these days, what with all the Sims going offline. So, as a geek, I can understand why they're not doing the "logical" thing and dumping a bunch of iron on the speed problems. A little patience and this too shall pass. The logical thing would be to encourage a slower take up to reduce the spike, encouraging people to wait, pointing out likely delays in processing time for the first week, and giving ample "'phase in time". The Commerce Team gave out bears roasting marshmellows over our burning magic boxes and have enhanced the sense of urgency to transitioning by putting us all on a sharp countdown for magic box extinction.

I've never uploaded mesh, but I can click the button on a listing to mark it as partially or fully mesh. I did take the test thing. Have you done that? If not, maybe take that and then see if it works for you.

Czari Zenovka wrote: Anaiya Arnold wrote: Czari Zenovka wrote: As someone who has an older computer (and if I could have upgraded mine I would have LONG ago - technology marching on and all) and literally cannot run any of the viewers that work with DD, this effectively puts me out of business in 2 months if LL's deadline stays fixed. I have a small shop and not that many items, but I had a steady stream of purchases on pretty much a daily basis from them. 99% of my sales came from the MP. I can't believe I am the only merchant in SL who is in a similar situation. No, you're not alone. I always said I would keep a premium account so long as the cost per value remained static, but this really rips the value of out of the SL experience for me. Thank you for your response and understanding, Anaiya. My MP sales are what allowed me to participate in other aspects of SL without having to put any RL funds into it. Once other merchants who are not yet aware of this proposed change hear of it or worse, stop getting MP sales and investigate what happened, perhaps LL will reconsider this phasing out time frame. I know exactly how you feel as I also rely on the marketplace to suppliment my in-world income so I can continue to live on my land and spend a few lindens. I really hope you are right about the bolded bit Czari. I had a feeling a viewer upgrade would be necessary, but I honestly believed they'd give us time so that there'd be several viewer releases that work with the outbox to choose from (and hopefully one available that was stable on our computers for most of us) and for those of us that this was not going to work for to have time to make other arrangements without the stress of feeling rushed by a time-countdown. The short "phase out" time table is a real kicker. I completely agree with Mickey that an extremely short phase out time seems to defeat the purpose and meaning of "phase out". I hope as many people as possible can work around this if LL do not decide to be reasonable about this abrupt "phase out". I think the unexpectedness is contributing to how I feel about it. After the time length it took for DD to arrive, I just honestly never even considered they'd rush us so rudely despite the potential for so many technical issues and hardware limitations to get in the way on our end. But you're also right that this is going to come as a big surprise for a lot of merchants I think. At least we know about it I guess.

Waiting an hour for textures to not rezz. Avatar constantly fuzzy. Can barely move. Computer runs much hotter. Screen periodically goes entirely black for 5-10 seconds at a time for a period of several minutes, frames per minute low and everything looks choppy. Can barely move. Problems putting things on, taking them off and sometimes right clicking in world causes the application to crash. LL's viewer is worse, (all the above problems, plus) it keeps dumping my graphics preferences every so many log ins so everything is pink when I log in. Search is a no-go, taking several attempts to get it to load if it loads at all, minutes to load when it does load, and then typing anything in it takes about 20 seconds per character. Also, on this viewer my prims often move seconds later than I do. I had an earlier version of firestorm (had mesh, but it was a few months old, worked fine, wishing I had noted the version before upgrading) and upgraded to the "pink everything" version, and it's been blah since then. I upgraded to the version with the fix for the "pink everything" problem and although everything is not pink anymore, it's beastly slow and highly unstable on my computer. I checked out that SSE2 thing or whatever it's called and apparently my computer has it. I've not bothered with support groups because I am happy using Pheonix and a version of LL's viewer2 that I settled on as stable for my computer. DD is the fly in my ointment and the quick phase of magic boxes just makes me feel like it's all too hard, there is another battle around every corner and right at this moment, I honestly do not know if I can be bothered anymore.