Socially|Mundane

Mark Kingdon, a.k.a. "M Linden" made another blog post, spun as usually to really be more a detailed press release, but with a better 'feel' of being directed to the users than previous posts.

That's a good thing. I know care must be taken in how things are phrased and which words are used and I'm all okay with that. For those of you whom have followed my rants and raves over the past year, you know I am not afraid at all to be highly critical of Linden Lab — as a whole — and "M Linden" specifically. Hey, he's the guy in charge and just like people blasted President Bush for many things he had no direct hand it, he was the man in charge. So what goes around comes around.

However, I also am quick to praise Linden Lab — and Mark Kingdon when they do things right. Praise I think is far and few between in the SLogosphere and certainly doesn't come often enough.

So Mark, and all Lindens and Linden Research: Kudos to you.

In Marks blog post, early-on he states the following:

Mark Kingdon sez: "…you will see we are intent upon making dramatic improvements to the Second Life platform and experience.  At the same time, the team has been hard at work on stability and scalability.

"Last year, we halved the user hours lost to downtime in the second half of the year.  But, with growth ahead, we have more to do and the team is hard at work on continued platform and network improvements to enable us to break peak concurrency records on a regular basis≥"

I agree with this completely.

The problem with the Second Life population at large is a massive 'entitlement' attitude among the vast majority. Add to that how the 'world revolves around' each of them. They almost never see the forest because all the trees are in the way.

When there are grid issues, viewer bugs, and over all frustrating anything going on, these people are very quick to complain and criticize without realizing a few things: The grid really has gotten better by leaps and bounds; the viewer always is a work-in-progress and difficult to keep synced-up with server-side code; many, many bugs are being tracked down and quashed while at the same time, new features are being added.

The problem, if you can call it that, is that these improvements happen slowly over time. Most people can barely see past their own noses.

To all the detractors of the above statement and whiners about grid or viewer stability and such, I say this:

Where the hell were you when the grey goo attacked? Where were you when concurrency of 10,000 would bring the entire grid to its knees and required the lindens actually kicking everyone off the grid and disabling logins so they could find problems and reboot the whole grid? Where were you when a bug in the server caused the Lindens to turn of scripts grid-wide because of a bug that broke all sales vendors, giving items for free and with full permissions? Where were you when griefers with actually crash the whole grid?

Drop the entitlement attitudes and stop looking a gift-horse in the mouth. Most of you are so godammmed cheap you aren't willing to spend $5 of real money to gain more than L$1000. Instead, you actually spend more real life money in some camping chair or waste time panhandling for L$10 at a time.

I question many decisions that come from the Lab, but most of those questions and gripes have to do with my unknowns with regard to how you will handle something - such as the usability of the XStreet SL web site. and i know you yourselves may not have those answers.

And I still refuse to recognize "S" and "L" generically placed together as any kind of trademark unless there is a specific artistic representation, like the General Motors "GM" logo.

:P

As for all you resident whiners and bitchers: get an effing clue and open your eyes to see the hard work and technical prowess exampled by the people at Linen Lab.

Linden Lab and Mark: thank you for your efforts. Thank you for a great product and for finding a way to remain profitable while still allowing totally free access.

via Official Second Life Blog