Mordos Yering

*shudder*

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"We can no longer live as rats. We know too much." -- Nicodemus
The Secret of Nimh <:3 )~~~~

prinţesă nină

i dont like the name 'second life' because it implies i have no first life. as if my life is so pathetic i need to live a virtual life. i think the name is a far bigger turn-off than many people realise.

Cindy Claveau

I prefer "The Big Fuckup"

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Sometimes, "I hit it with my axe" is the best solution.

Michael Bigwig

Who knows what's going on behind closed doors at LL.

You'd think they would shut down the website for maintenance, and fix the 503 Error, but for some reason they don't make that choice...very odd, and very bad decision making.

Fix it. There is no other way to look at the problem. They CAN fix it.

Hell, I say while you're at it, refurbish the forums with (like stated above) a forum technology similar to SLU...

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~Michael Bigwig
___________________Lead Designer, Glowbox Designs

FlipperPA Peregrine

If you want to be able to use the web site, just visit the URL below:

https://secure-web17.secondlife.com/account/

(you can change the 17 to any lower number as well)

It is a hack, but if you desperately need to do something with your account, it works.

Regards,

-Flip

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Peregrine Salon: Flip & Jenn's thang.

Mordos Yering

Embarassing? Look at dates:

503 and other errors on web site
[#WEB-63] 503 and other errors on web site - Second Life Issues (BETA)

Khamon

I originally opened my account to explore the possibility of using this virtual world environment to support our eLearning students and instructors. It didn't take long to figure out that LL were pushing the pioneering limits of gridded simulator development and would not stop until they had first settled on a viable business model for themselves and, second, set the standards for Internet-based VWs. That order seems to flip every six months or so.

In other words, Linden Lab employ the term "Lab" literally and extremely. It has broken my heart for years to see people sign up, get excited, build an avatar, buy land, join groups, and establish a home in a petri dish that guarantees no stability, none, not even a little. I've been aghast for years that LL have advertised supporting a virtual life when their primary goal has been development and testing.

I can empathize with Cocoanut's feelings of frustration and betrayal. The only solution I can offer is to back up, look over the past few years, and accept that LL are going to forge ahead with their experimentation and laboratory mindset until the bitter end. Honestly, the only way I know to be happy on the Second Life grid is to accept that LL tinker with it as a means to an end, a mere tool being tinkered from the user end by their hacker customers. It's a project with no clear termination date, and no clear funding model, hobbling along on the backs of those of us determined to make it work.

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But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said, before it ends; as works fair and wonderful, while still they endure for eyes to see, are their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken for ever do they pass into song. - Quenta Silmarillion

Please Visit Our Gardens and Our Website

Cindy Claveau

Saturday I had some time & desire to log in and stay for a while for the first time in weeks. I decided I wanted to do a makeover on my avie, so I went to RAC to get some demo skins and hair.

Nothing - and I mean nothing - would rez. The blog was blabbering about rolling restarts and support issues. I never did get to see the demo skins on my av, even after TPing back to my skybox where there's never really much lag to speak of.

Friends list was borked. In four TPs, I had hair and shoes stuck up my ass on half of them. Most of my friends list (when it IS working) is dead these days, anyway.

Within an hour I decided that my day would be better spent offline doing something else. I want to sit here and rant about how fucked the grid continues to be most of the time, and how the caretakers have spent more time worrying about fancy new geegaws rather than sound, fundamental structural improvements (yeh, I know, it works better than it used to, but is it working at an acceptable level even now? NO!).

But truthfully, I wouldn't care so much if I hadn't made so many great friends through SL, and hadn't had such great fun with so many people. I get a little teary-eyed with nostalgia thinking about how great it used to be and knowing that it can never be like that again.

Meh. SL depresses me these days.

/me wanders off

Khamon

Yes Thank Heavens we can grow those friendships using stable platforms such as email, forums, instant messaging and snail mail. We'd be up the proverbial creek if we had to rely on the Second Life project to maintain connections with people.

Beau Perkins

No, I've always hated that name as well.

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Kristian

I like to point out to people who claim SL is a sign I have no life that they are mocking me while sitting in their mom's house smoking dope and watching their neice's cartoons.

Travis Lambert

I realize I'm the odd man out, still being drunk on the Kool-aid & all, but....

If Second Life is that bad, and you look at it as 'part of your life you'll never get back'.... why, why, why, do you continue to stay? For those that left a long time ago - why, why, why do you continue to care?

I'm down with the fact that Linden makes stupid decisions, and Second Life is often unstable. But this has been the status quo for years. Its not like we just rolled over this morning & realized how SL is teh suck. Its hard for anyone to be here for a year plus, and renew their premium account not realizing exactly what they're getting themselves into.

I enjoy SL, warts and all. Absolutely, Linden could be doing a better job, and there are an infinite amount of things I could criticize. When another competitor comes along and shows how they can do it better, I'll vote with my time & money - and move to the new platform. For right now though - no competitor has proven they can do it better than LL.

Are my pom-pons enough, or do I need to go put a skirt on?

Cocoanut Koala

On Friday night, we received one of those inworld blue box messages, saying, "Do not rez no-copy objects, as some regions are having difficulty, until we give the all-clear."

Well, I was on for hours after that, and they never did give any all-clear. Course, they could have after I went to bed, which is a pretty ridiculous way of doing things.

Saturday, I was trying to help a customer with his teleporters, and we couldn't get things to rez and show up. I remembered the message from the night before, and advised him not to rez any no-copy stuff, either.

So - you know - seems to me this should have been on the blog (or the message of the day, but that seems less appropriate), stating BOTH the problem AND the resolution (or the fact that there hasn't been one yet).

So, I'm left with - it is still risky to try to rez no-copy items (and may be in perpetuity! haha).

-----

1. So, do you think they will fix this 503?

I read the idiot JIRA on it someone posted above, which contained in one of the comments (from September) one of the maddening phrases which personify all the reasons why I hate JIRA:

"You haven't provided enough information to fix this." (Or something along those lines.) Gigs Taggart, maybe, said it. (Don't hold me to that, and I'm not going to check it now.)

I have to remind myself: JIRA is for the Lindens to get any additional information that will help - from their extremely technically knowledgeable customer base - and not really for getting the customers to actually FIX it for them. Despite comments like this.

That is, if and when they bother to look at JIRA.

And that is, if that's true anyhow. Sometimes I think they WON'T bother to fix a lot of this stuff, until one of their customers discovers the fix for them.

2. Another question:

For the past several days, I've gotten this extremely disconcerting message sometimes, when going from one sim to another (including my shop sim and my home sim once): "You are now in a sim that is on a different version from the one you were in before."

What on earth is that about? Does it have something to do with the Mono whatever?

(And the first time it happened, the entire sim - which was one next door to my shop - disappeared and turned into ocean after I finally got out of it.)

3. And a question about map updates: When I was in my home Sim, I happened to look at the map and saw that it was showing a house on my property that I haven't had their for at least two, if not three, months!

What's up with that?

coco

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Mordos Yering

pix or it didn't happen.

Cocoanut Koala

I'm teasing about the "three years of my life I will never get back," Travis.

Well, I'm teasing about the part about WANTING them back, anyway.

I've been happy having SL as my entertainment for three years. But this 503 error is REALLY getting in the way, and it seems incomprehensible to me that this is something they can't fix, or couldn't have fixed sooner than this! Or - worse - don't really plan TO fix!

coco

Jessica Robertson

I guess I look at SL as a Virtual World in perpetual Beta testing.

Granted, if I owned land, I would be really pissed.

Jessica

Beebo Brink

I've been known to roll my eyes more than once where LL is concerned, but overall my level of enjoyment in SL is very high. I supect that having a good computer which runs SL as smoothly as the platform will allow contributes to my satisfaction.

Although I am much more social in SL than I ever anticipated, my core attraction is to the metaverse building aspect, so I'm far less bothered by malfunctions that affect socializing. My SL business is a hobby, not a necessary income generating activity, so I can shrug off malfunctions and policies that undercut my sales. And I work in the technoloy field, so I have a fairly high frustration threshold because I tend to react with "Shit, I'm so glad it's not my server."

I can't even get highly indigant about things breaking with updates, again because I'm sooo used to that in my field. Skills I learned 5 years ago, and everything I built with those skills, are outdated now and being replaced with a new tech platform. I've been through two complete revolutions of my skill set and it's never going to stop.

This commentary is not meant to invalidate other people's frustrations or disillusionment, just to explain why I don't share it.

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Travis Lambert

hehe okay, that's fair And I completely agree that the 503 is incredibly irritating if you regularly browse the SL Forums. Because it affects the account page as well - I have no doubt in my mind that they're actively attempting to fix it. The problem may just be a lot more elusive than we realize.

I decided in my mind that SL is Beta software a long time ago - and I set my expectations appropriately. It certainly makes that Kool-aid go down really, really smooth

Cindy Claveau

SL is a fucking lie. That's why. It's just shiny enough and fun enough to hook people (like me), immerse us in the social communities (which would be there with or without the virtual grid) and then fail to deliver on performance.

I keep hearing from people who have high end systems that they don't have the same problems I do. But really - if that's how it is, name me 3 other 'games' on the market right now, released in the LAST 2 YEARS, that don't run acceptably on my old P4 2.4 Ghz/NVIDIA 6800? I had to tweak settings on Oblivion a little, yes. But it runs great, and that's a very graphics-heavy game. I get a little lag in town in Pirates of the Burning Sea and I have to adjust my settings a little in big group fights in COH, but NOTHING else I use right now demands the things of my system that SL does.

For what? Windlight? I can see better clouds in LOTRO. Flex prims and voice? Hahahaha.

For the investment required in processor power, I just don't think SL delivers. If all I want is to interact with friends, I have plenty of other venues where that's possible on a machine equal to or less than mine.

So why do I stay? You tell me. I'm asking myself that question more and more, and every answer I get back from myself is that there's no answer. My saturation point on the fucked-upedness of SL has hit the top. Throw in the lost relationships and broken hearts, and it's just another icon on my desktop I'm not using any more.

I say again: "Meh".

Wildefire Walcott

Totally disagree. The first time I ever heard there was a virtual environment called "Second Life" I instantly knew what it meant. Just from the name I assumed it probably wasn't a traditional game but a 3D space where you could do things that you couldn't in your real life. I even assumed there would be some form of player housing just from the name.

It would be a huge mistake to change it.

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Beebo Brink

SL isn't a game.

And no, I'm not spouting off some vapid marketing meme, I'm talking about the underlying architecture. A game delivers a large packge of pre-designed content that you can store locally on your computer. SL doesn't do that, it can't do that, and still be a blank metaverse landscape that allows residents to create content.

The performance demands on bandwidth and computer resources are completely different and the comparison you made is invalid. SL doesn't require a high-end system, but you can't get by with a low-end system either because of the incredibly demanding graphics traffic across the internet. Nothing else even approaches that aspect of SL.

You can't tell me this is news to you, considering how long you've been here. Why the indignation over a basic fact of what LL is offering?

prinţesă nină

i am seriously thinking of selling all my land and cashing out.
i am sure i will still log in every now and then, but its hard to justify the huge tier i pay considering how miserably sl runs for me.

Wildefire Walcott

Rumors of their death have been greatly exaggerated. The official forums are certainly not the drama factory they were in the days of yore, but it's just plain inaccurate to say the forums are irrelevant. They're the first place many new residents go for help, and while there aren't a lot of oldbies there anymore, there are plenty of knowledgeable folks there sharing useful information.

They are the best source for scripting/building/texturing information outside of the wikis, and they are more active than any of the 3rd-party forums are today, even if most activity there now happens under a single forum: Resident Answers.

Hell, they're not even moderated anymore, now that Strife's moved on.

It's a shame that the forum performance has been so bad, that the version of vBulletin they're using is so out-of-date, and that bbcode appears to be permanently disabled. Very few of the Big Names of 2003-2005 are there anymore, but the SL Forums still have their celebrities and villains, and the forums still have a place in the community.

prinţesă nină

sl is a game, despite what ll wish to claim.

Cindy Claveau

I am very well aware of all that (I wouldn't call my system "low end", it should be sufficient to run 90%+ of the programs I buy). But the sad fact is, their experiment in alternate architecture has needed major rethinking ever since Phillip's brainfart bumped concurrent usage from 5,000 to over 50,000 without ANY accompanying preparations for the onrush. It's not just the missing textures and shoes up my ass and failed TPs. It's also the legions of clueless twits who have invaded the grid to get rich quick, steal content, spam open groups or exploit the innocent. All that lays at the feet of Philip, IMO.

And that's really the whole thing - I'm sure there's a way to design a grid system similar to SL's that actually works. This 6-year old rough draft/beta test is now running on bandaids and bailing wire, mostly thanks to lack of foresight by the caretakers.

I'm having a bad day, for one. And realizing what I once had in SL but have lost (not all due to LL's flatulent engineering paradigm) is depressing for me.

I thought this was a rant thread?