The Alphaville Herald

Cory Linden’s Reply To Residents’ Open Letter

by Pixeleen Mistral on 03/05/07 at 10:46 pm

thank you for taking your time to deflect questions – Luth Brodie

SL TownHall Meeting 5/3/07 Transcript ( Un-Edited ) courtesy of JayR Cela

the overbooked townhall sim

[11:58] Zagro Ferraris: turn on the stream there talking
[11:58] Zaphod Kotobide: .. /mode #pooley +mv Cory Linden
[11:58] Brenda Maculate: I did. It craps out.
[11:58] Jeska Linden shouts: Welcome to today’s Town Hall with Cory Linden. Today’s Town Hall is focused on technical issues within Second Life.
[11:58] Notecard Writer: Dale STFU
[11:58] Rob Adelaide: I’d take Kathy Bates over Audrey Hepburn anyday…
[11:58] Rob Adelaide: lol
[11:58] Jeska Linden shouts: We’ll begin in just a few moments, first I wanted to take a minute and explain how this works.
[11:58] dale Cao: there is none
[11:58] Jesse Linden shouts: shush
[11:59] Wrestling Hulka: Heretic! I’ve never met you before
[11:59] Jeska Linden shouts: All questions should be submitted via the Linden Town Hall Questions group – the group has open enrollment, simply join and paste your question into the Group IM. Questions will be answered in the order they appear, duplicate questions and any technical support or individual support questions will be skipped.
[11:59] Jeska Linden shouts: If you’d like to follow along with the Town Hall, please join the Linden Town Hall Closed Captioning Group, where we will be repeating the discussion.
[11:59] Jeska Linden shouts: We will be posting a full transcript to the blog after the event, you may also want to read Cory’s Pre Town Hall blog post here: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/02/cory-linden-town-hall/
[11:59] dale Cao: i can read
[12:00] dale Cao: can’t read
[12:00] Jeska Linden shouts: Also, please hold offers of friendship and IMs to Cory until after the event, as it can be disctracting!
[12:00] Zagro Ferraris: good cus i’m not sure if i got chat logging on :p
[12:00] Brenda Maculate: Ellin, I can’t see!
[12:00] Cory Linden shouts: Good afternoon, everybody… amazing to see so many avatars in one place
[12:01] Davina Glitter shouts: I love you Cory
[12:01] Cory Linden shouts: And I think since I put up the blog post we should go straight into questions
[12:01] Zagro Ferraris shouts: Thank you cory i ben here since 6am :p
[12:01] Melchoir Tokhes: 4 places.
[12:01] Zagro Ferraris shouts: Is there a channel that only going to have what the lindens say ?
[12:01] dale Cao: ican’t read
[12:01] Mecha Dinosaur: It’s over 9000!
[12:01] Sansarya Caligari does not have sufficient privileges to engage in questions in Linden Town Hall Questions…???
[12:01] Cory Linden shouts: I know you will have a lot of them, so we’ll go through as many as we can

[12:02] Zaphod Kotobide: Josh: The town hall questions group
[12:03] Cory Linden shouts: Because until very recently the performance limitations of MySQL 4.*’s multithreading
[12:03] Cory Linden shouts: hasn’t been the high nail on performance
[12:03] Cory Linden shouts: plus we wanted to make sure it was very stable before we switched
[12:03] Cory Linden shouts: the process of upgrading is now ongoing, but will take time with 50+ MySQL instances running
[12:05] Cory Linden shouts: We’re trying to be careful about not using it too aggressively and building metrics to better know when to use it. The building of the metrics is ongoing.
[12:05] Seven Shikami: Is the closed caption echo of the town hall working for anyone else? I’m not getting anything.
[12:05] Ravanne Sullivan: nope
[12:05] Ravanne Sullivan: not working
[12:05] Ravanne Sullivan: par for the course
[12:05] Nel Shan: Uh-uh
[12:06] Kylix Petit: not working here either *sighs*
[12:06] Cory Linden shouts: woah
[12:06] Zagro Ferraris: Is there going to be some kind of monitor for the sandboxes now that live help is gone… There next to usles now for what there intended for.
[12:06] Cory Linden shouts: As we have talked about in thepast, the integration of firefox has taken *way* longer than any of us expected
[12:06] Joshua Nightshade shouts: Can someone repeat questions? The closed captioning group isn’t working for anyone.
[12:07] Cory Linden shouts: we aren’t the only folks who have found this difficult and the good thing about firefox 2.0 is that they are working on making that process easier
[12:07] Cory Linden shouts: we have an external team working on it as well, so our goal is to be doing a more significant release soon. However…
[12:07] Celano Obscure mutters. “So don’t use FF.”
[12:08] Cory Linden shouts: as I pointed out in the blog post, most of our development resources are focused on existing bugs and scaling, so firefox has been a bit starved for resources
[12:08] Jeska Linden shouts: Kage Seraph: Cory, if you were a super hero, which would you want more, the mutant ability to scale things at will or the ability to make them more stable by the power of your mind?
[12:08] Wrestling Hulka: sigh at that question
[12:08] Alayna Hutson: are you kidding me?
[12:09] Cory Linden shouts: scaling versus stability isn’t really a choice… I would want to do both
[12:09] Samantha Poindexter closes her eyes and shakes her head.
[12:09] Jeska Linden shouts: Rob Adelaide: What impact will the impending voice system have on the main grid as we know it now?
[12:09] Ravanne Sullivan shouts: How about relevant questions and someone fix the CC group?!?
[12:09] Notecard Writer: Yes
[12:09] Cory Linden shouts: Since voice is using external servers for mixing and sends a very small stream to each client, the impact of on teh grid
[12:09] Veeyawn Spoonhammer: cc group is working for me
[12:10] Zagro Ferraris shouts: i just got bumped out of the CC group
[12:10] Imogen Saltair: not me
[12:10] Zagro Ferraris shouts: i cant get back in
[12:10] Cory Linden shouts: as a whole will be minimal from a scaling standpoint. From a use/business/community standpoint, the impact will be incredible…
[12:10] Cory Linden shouts: we’ve been doing all our linden meetings in the voice client for a month+ and it is amazing how well it works…
[12:10] Wrestling Hulka: Jamie – that’s answered in the blog I believe.
[12:10] Mecha Dinosaur: haha voice is a joke
[12:11] Cory Linden shouts: in fact it has had a measurable impact on development, too, since multiple groups are doing their morning standup mtgs in the voice client as well.
[12:11] Jeska Linden shouts: Sweet Valentine: Can we please have a way to back up our own inventorys things we buildto help with inventory load and losses? im not asking for backing up copy items just teh items we make ourselves and also what is being done about inventory losses there was a patch posted that they said was fixing this but people are still losing items daily ?
[12:11] Cory Linden shouts: Agree that backing up items you have full perms on is a good idea. We really feel it is important to build that system in a way…
[12:12] Cory Linden shouts: that scales and is robust enough to use more broadly. SL has suffered from rapidly deployed systems that we then have
[12:12] Nyx Divine: yeah Sweet would hate to lose all those freebies she sells
[12:12] Cory Linden shouts: to rely on for years and years –XML-RPC for example — so this isn’t a quick fix. Would like to work on it in Q3, however.
[12:12] Jeska Linden shouts: Katie Welles: As you’re working to fix “Search” — can you do something about “abuse of key words?”
[12:13] Celano Obscure: Well great. Nearly of my most valuable items, the costly ones I treasure most, are NOT full perm. So that helps me how?
[12:13] moo Money: clear your cache and restart
[12:13] Cory Linden shouts: We are starting on a major reworking of search in SL. We’ve talked in the past about how search in sl is a different problem than on the web…
[12:13] moo Money: it seriously helps
[12:13] Celano Obscure: I mean, I really couldn’t care less about the junk I made. It’s just’s that. Junk. I could make it again in five seconds.
[12:14] Samantha Poindexter: Celano: read the blog. Supposedly that’s one of the things they’re trying to work out. The questioner confined this to full-perm, not Cory.
[12:14] Cory Linden shouts: but we think we have a good approach that will be more resilient to simple spam-based attacks. More details as the design is refined.
[12:14] Jeska Linden shouts: Digital Digital: I would like to know whyat are we supposed to do when we lose such an expensive item in second life for example I bought a slingo machine for 16KL and it’s gone, I have tried everything also reported it many times and never get a responce back in e-mail or anything.
[12:14] Celano Obscure: I don’t have anything lost right now. I just have a few expensive avs I’d hate to see disappear forever the way some folks have.
[12:14] Alayna Hutson: heh, try calling the tech support… I still haven’t got a response months later
[12:15] Khamon Fate shouts: You’re going to have to shout if you’re talking to us Heretic.
[12:15] moo Money: jesus christ, you guys are freaking out more than I did and I lost my entire inventory
[12:15] moo Money: *which I got back
[12:15] Nyx Divine: wonderful Moo!
[12:15] Samantha Poindexter: Ooh, you did, Moo? Yay!
[12:15] Wrestling Hulka: solution: Be a blog writer for SLI
[12:15] Zagro Ferraris: i keep loosing bit’s of my inventory aswell
[12:15] Zagro Ferraris: so far nothing to inportent
[12:15] Zagro Ferraris: i try to keep my inportent stuff moving around so it stays fresh
[12:16] Cory Linden shouts: As is spelled out in the terms of service, you do create content at your own risk in SL. We are making every effort to reduce that loss and I am sorry that it has occurred…
[12:16] moo Money: oh don’t even pull that
[12:16] moo Money: let the man speak
[12:16] Zagro Ferraris: we need a BANK style invenotry system where you can store longterm unused items in it
[12:16] Cory Linden shouts: and numerous recent releases are directly addressing underlying stresses and scaling issues in inventory and assets.
[12:16] Phoenix Psaltery: SHHH!
[12:16] Alayna Hutson: Next time, hope that your credit card information gets lost and you don’t have to pay for your premium account anymore…
[12:16] Jeska Linden shouts: Kylix Petit: Where does stability and performance fall in the priorites for LL development…. There is a problem literally every other day and it seems like there is VERY much room for improvement in this regard.
[12:16] Alayna Hutson: oh wait, nvm, won’t ever happen.
[12:17] Cory Linden shouts: As I spoke about in the blog post, 69% of the development staff at LL are currently on scaling and stability…
[12:17] Nyx Divine: 69% even?
[12:17] Mecha Dinosaur: I’d perfer over 9000
[12:17] Cory Linden shouts: and that percentage is rising over the next few weeks. It is the highest priority and the focus of the majority of our design, coding, and QA work.
[12:17] Cory Linden shouts: We are also working on the next gen architecture to allow far more scaling thean the current design.
[12:17] Jeska Linden shouts: Vienna James: I am concerned about releases that have blatant issues, why are they being missed in Beta?
[12:18] Mecha Dinosaur: Because hardly anyone uses Beta.. because the beta sims are so slow…
[12:18] Cory Linden shouts: Many problems only appear when we hit high load. Part of the solution to this is better synthetic testing, but the beta grid exists for people to expose problems…
[12:18] Nyx Divine: yup need more BETA testers
[12:18] Zagro Ferraris: Vienna Go to beta and help us find them … beta so barron of folks
[12:18] Cory Linden shouts: You can all help by exploring the beta grid and posting bugs and repro cases to the public jira.
[12:18] Zagro Ferraris: nyx come join me in beta
[12:18] Jeska Linden shouts: Lewis Nerd: When can we expect to see “Traffic” removed? It serves no purpose, is entirely inaccurate and gamed, and most likely adds to many other problems we have
[12:19] Mecha Dinosaur: That would require the beta not be lagtastic
[12:19] Nyx Divine:
[12:19] Alayna Hutson: amen to that question
[12:19] Cory Linden shouts: Removing the current traffic metric is part of the new search project, so the goal is to pull it as soon as possible.
[12:19] Imogen Saltair shouts: Hear Hear!!!!
[12:19] Zagro Ferraris: Mecha ever go in beta any time other than a main grid down for maintenince
[12:19] Nite Zelmanov: Yay for question!
[12:19] Zagro Ferraris: i go in all the time becos its faster
[12:19] Nite Zelmanov: Yay for answer!
[12:19] Wrestling Hulka: Lewis stole my first born
[12:19] Jeska Linden shouts: Spank Lovell: I’d like to ask what Quality control measures LL has in place to police the testing and release of both client updates and patches the the SL client and backend systems. It seems to me that each release introduces issues or breaks previously stable features?
[12:20] Alayna Hutson: another amen, especially breaking stable stuff!
[12:20] Cory Linden shouts: As I mentioned, the challenge with a system as complex as SL is testing w/o full load. As we continue to builkd out the dev team…
[12:20] Mecha Dinosaur: Yes I have gone to beta to test out things.. and it’s lagtastic.. sim crossings usually result in a crash.. and I won’t even talk about how unstable the voice client is.
[12:20] Cory Linden shouts: We will be working on better synthetic tests and benchmarks. In addition, nearly all new/refactored code is being …
[12:21] Cory Linden shouts: written with unit tests, whcih help. But the best way for you all to help make SL better is to use the beta grid and report repro cases when you find them.
[12:21] Flight Band: All Go
[12:21] Jeska Linden shouts: Cedric Boyd: Since i’m not getting any answer from the support concerning this question: when will the map be updated again? The last map from the sim i live on was up2date about four weeks ago. Live Help didn’t answer to my question and the support still not too .
[12:21] Starr Sonic: For those who know peeps who can’t get into the sim.. this is streaming live on www.slcn.tv
[12:21] Mecha Dinosaur: The voice beta client crashed 48 out of 50 times for me. .most amuzing.
[12:21] Fart Binder shouts: Unit Tests is not testing!
[12:21] Alayna Hutson: if LL wants more people to go to the grid, they better start providing incentives
[12:21] Rob Adelaide: oh, hi Starr
[12:22] Patchouli Woollahra shouts: it is so!
[12:22] Rob Adelaide: p
[12:22] Rob Adelaide: sup
[12:22] Alayna Hutson: *beta grid
[12:22] Patchouli Woollahra shouts: Qualitative testing is testing!
[12:22] Starr Sonic: Hey Rb
[12:22] Fart Binder shouts: There can be still bugs if you don’t use human testing with protocolls and stuff!
[12:22] Nyx Divine: alayna, having a viable game is incentive enuf for me
[12:22] Cory Linden shouts: We know about the bug and it is actively being worked on. We will try to provide more details after the meeting.
[12:22] Patchouli Woollahra shouts: Hence the invite to beta grid
[12:22] Veeyawn Spoonhammer: Alayna, you need an incentive to help make the end product better?
[12:22] Fart Binder shouts: Every bigger company, and yours is big enough, has an own testing appartment!
[12:22] Alayna Hutson: doesn’t matter… no one is going to the beta gird and incentives will help pull people in to help where needed.
[12:22] Zagro Ferraris: i gave up on the questions group
[12:23] Jeska Linden shouts: Sascha Vandyke: Can’t the patches be tested on a beta grid, because they always render the whole sim unstable?
[12:23] Nyx Divine: a beta grid? WTF is that? hehe
[12:23] Cory Linden shouts: Patches are tested on the beta grid, but often times bugs do not appear until full load testing.
[12:24] Jeska Linden shouts: Duckling Kwak: Is the explosive land expansion a factor impacting grid performance? If yes, has LL evaluated other alternatives to managing the rising cost of land? The increased land has had a modest impact on land prices. If it’s costing SL more in performance, it’s not a worthwhile tradeoff.
[12:24] Cory Linden shouts: Not really. There are a couple of load points related to sim count, but one of them was removed last week and the other is being designed away.
[12:25] Jeska Linden shouts: Nite Zelmanov: Does the new search functionality being worked on include the discontinuation of traffic based rankings to illiminate the camping/bot impact of people gaming that system?
[12:25] Cory Linden shouts: Traffic was our first attempt to create relevance ranking and it clearly is imperfect at the best of times….
[12:25] Nite Zelmanov shouts: Jeska, he already answered that questions!
[12:25] Nite Zelmanov shouts: FFS
[12:26] Callipygian Christensen: :etgirl- we sent one successfully today to a group of over 2000..it might just have been a miracle though
[12:26] Cory Linden shouts: we’re pretty confident that we can generate better relevance ranking using other approaches.
[12:26] Ravanne Sullivan shouts: Please, no redundant questiions!
[12:26] Nite Zelmanov: Thanks Cory, sorry for the DUP, you alreadyu answered that
[12:26] Joshua Nightshade shouts: nite: No he didn’t. Simply deleting traffic won’t get rid of camping. They game it for popular places.
[12:26] Heretic Linden shouts: Please direct your questions to the group Linden Town Hall Questions.
[12:26] Jeska Linden shouts: Rita Cummings: Is there any project about improving Sound in Sl? Your sound component seems to capable of much more then what the current functions allow as to do. Will you expose more functionality in the near future?
[12:27] Ravanne Sullivan shouts: The questions grop as well as the CC group are not working!
[12:27] Cory Linden shouts: Voice is going to generate a lot of new music and audio options.
[12:27] Cory Linden shouts: and our effort is there more than other audio features.
[12:27] Celano Obscure: Indeed. The CC group hasn’t popped up for me yet.
[12:28] Cory Linden shouts: but sound bugs are going into public jira nad the studio focusedon bugs will look at them.
[12:28] Wrestling Hulka: CC group is not in use because this is a non-voice town hall.
[12:28] Wrestling Hulka: thought that was obvious :X
[12:28] Jeska Linden shouts: Chaos Mohr: What is being done to address land database issues which result in things such as parcels being paid for and not transferring, parcels being sold to multiple people etc? This seems to be a major technical issue which keeps cropping up and hasn’t been fixed yet.
[12:28] Celano Obscure: Yeah, but not everyone can cram in this sim. There might be peopple on the outside who’d like to know what’s going on.
[12:28] Heretic Linden shouts: A copy of this Town Hall transcript will be posted on the blog.
[12:28] Wrestling Hulka: ^ what he said
[12:29] Cory Linden shouts: These are likely symtpoms of the broader stresses on the central db and transactions..
[12:29] Ravanne Sullivan: CC group was supposed to mirror chat
[12:29] Cory Linden shouts: as I mentioned int he blog post, we are attacking these problems in two ways, to first identity weak spots in the current system and to build a better transaction system as well.
[12:29] Jeska Linden shouts: Robaato Yoshikawa: do MySQL instances are load balanced, or the architecture is based on only assigning different server to residents, if the answer is no, have LL looked at tools like Sequoia: http://sequoia.continuent.org/HomePage
[12:30] Cory Linden shouts: Right now the different residents go to different servers. Ops will get the sequoia pointer, but more broadly we want to go a more scalable architecture long term. More details on that very soon.
[12:31] Jeska Linden shouts: Magi Merlin: What focus are you putting into improving pre-release testing in order to reduce our pain?
[12:31] Nite Zelmanov shouts: Jeska FFS
[12:31] Ravanne Sullivan shouts: ASked and answered already!
[12:31] Cory Linden shouts: We’ve hit this one a few times. It is the majority of our design work, we post all potential code to Beta grid, and we hope that more of you hit the beta grid to test it.
[12:32] Alayna Hutson: come on, question asked, question answered, repeats = wasted time
[12:32] Jeska Linden shouts: Sharrah Brendel: What about the loss of live help..it has been inpossible to contact a live person in SL for over two weeks. I have left 5 tickets and never heard a word…Where have all the Lindens gone?
[12:32] Simon Pulford shouts: working at stability issues
[12:33] Gwynnie Boffin shouts: that’s all in the blog, too
[12:33] Cory Linden shouts: There’s an extensive blog post about that, will post into chat in a moment.
[12:33] Allana Dion shouts: We can’t Heretic, it’s broken, all we get is an error message when we try to ask a question
[12:33] Jeska Linden shouts: Keiki Lemieux: I often have upset customers who have lost animations or other no copy items when trying to transfer them from their inventory to a HUD. Other customers have lost their HUD altoghether. Since yesterday’s update, I’ve had 3 customers contact me with inventory loss issues. Two questions, 1) Is there a particular resource that I can point someone to who is experiencing inventory loss issues, like a page in the wiki? and 2) If you are noticing inventory loss after users attempt to move items in a particular way, can you provide a list of suggestions that I can pass on to my customers to avoid inventory loss?
[12:33] Zagro Ferraris: ok i’ve tried asking this in questions 12 times and keep getting error’s
[12:34] Zagro Ferraris: Are we going to have some kind of help with greefing in the public sandboxes since thers no more live help. and when do we see the first sculpties in beta.
[12:34] Cory Linden shouts: There are inventory related bugs on the public jira, also we have been putting a lot of code into QA to address some of thos eproblems. For more details, see blog post on transactions.
[12:35] Jeska Linden shouts: tx Oh: q1) i still can’t modify scripts in group deeded object but i alowed to edit them. q2) if i change objects inventory, it takes a lot of time to get it updated. q3) the read from notecards is very slow. WHY?
[12:35] Torley Linden shouts: Public JIRA Issue Tracker – http://jira.secondlife.com
[12:35] Heretic Linden shouts: Please confine your comments to Linden Town Hall Discussion.
[12:35] Cory Linden shouts: On specific bugs, please make they are in the public jira issue tracker, please add specific repro cases if you have them, and the studio focused on current bugs will be able to hit them.
[12:36] Texas Timtam: (Live coverage of this town meeting at http://slcn.tv)
[12:36] Jeska Linden shouts: Nel Shan: How do the Lindens feel about the Open Letter Project, and what it implies about the state of Linden/resident communications?
[12:37] Cory Linden shouts: I can’t speak for all Lindens, but as I mentioned in the blog post, I thought that it did a good job of coalescing issues into one thread.
[12:37] Ravanne Sullivan: from this meeting it seems they feel it is like a two by four between the eyes
[12:37] Jeska Linden shouts: Synack Fitzgerald: has LL considered migrating to a database that scales better that mysql and pays more attention to data integrity (postgresql is free, but oracle or db2 would be viable options as well)?
[12:37] Cory Linden shouts: We don’t want to work on a model where we attempt to scale a central db. Instead, the effort is to build out a more scalable architecture.
[12:37] Zi Ree: why.. noscript ..no work ..in noscript area?
[12:38] Cory Linden shouts: And MySQL master->slave->slave setusp we use are quite reliable.
[12:38] Heretic Linden shouts: Please direct all questions to the group Linden Town Hall Questions.
[12:38] tx Oh shouts: decentralisation is the way to go
[12:39] Jeska Linden shouts: Kymber Schnook: The blog indicates that LL will provide an exporter for Maya for the creation of sculpted prims. The range of pricing for different versions of Maya runs from $2,000 to $7,000 USD. Will you make available a more affordable means of export at the time of introduction of the sculpted prim?
[12:39] Nite Zelmanov shouts: There there a linden clever enough to boot the spammy objects? Thanks!
[12:39] Heretic Linden shouts: Please direct your comments to the group Linden Town Hall Discussion.
[12:39] Wrestling Hulka: There is a free personal usage Maya client I believe ^^
[12:40] Cory Linden shouts: I agree that only being able to export from Maya is suboptimal. We expect other exporters to be written and someone could take the open source client and build an editor there as well.
[12:40] Jeska Linden shouts: Cay Trudeau: Do you think arranging physichal server on other continents, like Europe for instance, would ease up on the server load, ease the connections and allow better performance for European residents? Would that also lift the load from sending texture data across the wire?
[12:40] Cory Linden shouts: We absolutely want to deploy servers overseas. We have an architectural quirk in how we talk to the dbs — a layer of single threaded dataservers –
[12:41] Heretic Linden shouts: Please keep in mind that a transcript of this Town Hall will be available.
[12:41] Cory Linden shouts: that would suffer in situations with greater ping latency, so we need to fix that problem first, whcih is being worked on.
[12:41] Cory Linden shouts: once that is fixed, we will begin international deployments. This is critical since over 65% of our use is from outside the US.
[12:42] Jeska Linden shouts: Daisy Beauchamp: regarding 1.15 and graphic cards in laptops not working: 1. Why is it inconsistent? Why can I login and stay logged in for hours after 5-10 attempts? 2. Will SL ever support other graphic cards, or should I consider selling my Island and counting my losses? 3. Is it possible to use an older version of SL if you have issues?
[12:42] Wrestling Hulka: Solution: Servers in Space
[12:42] Cory Linden shouts: Laptop drivers are still an issue for all highperformance 3D applications. Over time, they are improving, but not as quickly as any of us would like.
[12:43] Mo Rocco: Why have I not gotten any response in my request to increase my Lindex Limits?
[12:43] Cory Linden shouts: We are discussing how to drive the client onto both higher and lower end cards, but right now more development is on system wide scaling.
[12:43] Veeyawn Spoonhammer: Nice work SLCN.tv, good coverage
[12:43] Jeska Linden shouts: Doc Nielsen: What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. Are you going to do this – yes or no?
[12:44] Cory Linden shouts: As I previously mentioned — and was in the blog post — 69% of development is currently on bugs and scaling. That number will increase this month as we continue to hire.
[12:44] Marilyn Murphy is gonna have docs baby
[12:45] Cory Linden shouts: Also, this is a good time to remind folks, we are hiring developers aggressively, including offices in Seattle, Boston, and all over the Bay Area.
[12:45] Zi Ree: me ..no can move ..there
[12:45] Ruud Lathrop shouts: But not in Europe
[12:45] Cory Linden shouts: Plus, we will always look at smart folks anywhere in the world since SL is working quite well for distributed software development. Oh, Brighton, too!
[12:45] Simon Pulford: any possiblity of hiring devels from south america?
[12:45] Jeska Linden shouts: Sam Stork: Will there ever be a good IDE? Two seperate clients for example, which would make things a lot easier for everyone?
[12:45] Ruud Lathrop shouts: Yeah
[12:46] Heretic Linden shouts: Please confine your comments to the group Linden Town Hall Discussion.
[12:47] Jeska Linden shouts: Thorian Pennell: I would like to know if it’ll be possible for group owners to limit chat ability of members?
[12:47] Alayna Hutson: Next time Heretic says that, I’m getting 100 000 linden dollars
[12:47] Cory Linden shouts: Voice chat within groups is on the roadmap, so yes.
[12:47] Jeska Linden shouts: Sascha Vandyke: If there’s a database issue and deployment problem, why don’t you put a time limit on free accounts?
[12:47] Notecard Writer: Damn god question
[12:47] Alayna Hutson: oooh good idea
[12:47] CickMy Lunt: makes sense to me
[12:48] Phoenix Psaltery: Must say I agree
[12:48] Astarte Artaud: Well nice to see the townhall has just disappeared from us at Brampton
[12:48] Nyx Divine: here here
[12:48] tx Oh shouts: no voice chat on linux scheduled
[12:48] Mildred Mapp: sure
[12:48] Samantha Poindexter: …not to me. Not at all.
[12:48] Melchoir Tokhes shouts: How about that IDE question?
[12:48] Alayna Hutson: It would probably put the citizen count down closer to 2 million so they won’t do it.
[12:48] Cory Linden shouts: We actually had time limits long, long, long, LONG ago. The problem is that people take a while to learn to use SL, plus great events or builds often bring folks back in weeks/months/years down the road.
[12:49] Alayna Hutson: too bad for them. database issues are more important than someone having to make a new account to revisit SL.
[12:49] Cory Linden shouts: It would be bad for all of our businesses to lose that ability for casual users to come back in. Plus, as we have discussed, free accounts are less of the load than you might expect.
[12:49] Notecard Writer: Oh PLEASE
[12:49] Lexa Pro: can someone who can get into the questions group pass this one on, credited to Lexa Pro? “The recent Group IM bugs and resultant chat flooding highlighted an issue that several residents I’ve spoken with and I would like to see resolved. Is any thought being given to allowing users to toggle Group IMs on/off on a per-group basis, giving us the freedom to avoid the noisier group chats while still being able to keep tabs on groups that interest us?”
[12:49] Jeska Linden shouts: Alexandra Rucker: When will groups truly be fixed? I had to relog 3 times to see the town hall QUESTIONS group, and people still can’t see what’s being pasted to the captions group?
[12:49] Luth Brodie: oh come on not the “businesses” card
[12:50] Cory Linden shouts: That is a known bug in the public jira that is being worked on.
[12:50] Veeyawn Spoonhammer: cc group works here
[12:50] Jeska Linden shouts: Arguss Sleeper: Is it possible to have a “real time” sim status map so that when there is a rolling restart or issuses concerning the ability t0 use the full grid a person would know in advance where not to tp to?
[12:50] Lexa Pro: ok, folks, i think we got it. =) thanks greho, melchoir. =)
[12:51] Cory Linden shouts: We currently have an internal tool that does that. We eventually want to be expose portions of that functionality via webservices.
[12:51] Jeska Linden shouts: PetGirl Bergman: when wil large groups be able to send outnotices again – mine are over 1000 and have stopped working?
[12:51] Melchoir Tokhes: Dammit, Lexa, that one didn’t go in. Got an error.
[12:51] Lexa Pro: melchoir: i saw it.
[12:51] Melchoir Tokhes: :p I didn’t
[12:52] Lexa Pro: and phoenix just got it through again, that i could see anyway.
[12:52] Lexa Pro: so let’s stop torturing them a sec. =)
[12:52] Flight Band: All Go
[12:52] Greho Otaared: It seems sometimes, the group throws an error, but catches the message
[12:52] Jeska Linden shouts: Katrina Bekkers: since the Open Letter indeed HAD a follow-up from LL, is this *the* way to contact them from now on? since the undercutting of other venues to contact them (and no, a comments-disabled blog and an unresponsive support/tracker don’t count), you’re endorsing resorting to 2000+ residents signed petitions to make issues heard now?
[12:52] Cory Linden shouts: What Torley said…
[12:52] Phoenix Psaltery: Interesting – I didnt see mine go through
[12:52] Melchoir Tokhes: It’s a question I’d really like to have an answer to.
[12:52] Kooky Jetaime: ((What did torley say??))
[12:53] Cory Linden shouts: In this case, since scaling and stability are the primary internal focus right now this was an excelletn opportunity for a conversation.
[12:53] Notecard Writer tears his hair out
[12:53] Harleen Gretzky: [12:52] Torley Linden: For many of these bugs, you can look them up on the Issue Tracker (Public JIRA) – Group Notices failing – https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-37
[12:53] Alayna Hutson pats notecard on the back and gives him some glue for his hair
[12:53] Cory Linden shouts: As the commuynity team has been bloggin about, there are various methods for contacting us and talking to Lindens, including office hours, etc.
[12:53] Kooky Jetaime: (Thanks Harleen))
[12:53] Notecard Writer: thanks Alayna
[12:53] Imogen Saltair: so the answwer to us not being able to talk to you is ‘we are on it’ whatever it is
[12:53] Heretic Linden shouts: Please chat in Linden Town Hall Discussion.
[12:54] Jeska Linden shouts: tx Oh: over 90% open bug reports are unassigned. why?
[12:54] Samantha Poindexter: Yay! Alayna wins L$100,000!
[12:54] Alayna Hutson: score!! pay up, Heretic
[12:54] Alayna Hutson holds her hands out
[12:54] moo Money rolls her eyes at Alayna
[12:55] Cory Linden shouts: Torley is on this, so we are trying to provide better feedback on when bugs are being worked on. Not all will show the specific Linden who is on it, but we will indicate thos we are on.
[12:55] Phoenix Psaltery: Can we please keep unneccesary chatter to a minimum?
[12:55] Jeska Linden shouts: Nel Shan: One of the major issues that comes up with inventory loss is the fact that there is no way to verify the loss. This leads to the impression that the Lindens believe that anyone complaining about inventory loss is trying to scam Linden Labs. As well as trying to reduce inventory loss, will there be a way of verifying it introduced?
[12:55] Torley Linden shouts: Re: bug status, you can read the Issue Tracker instructions – https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Issue_tracker
[12:55] Torley Linden shouts: See the procedure and the bottom section about “WorkingOnIt Linden”
[12:55] Cory Linden shouts: That’s a very good idea and I will pass it along to the people focused on the issues.
[12:55] Jeska Linden shouts: BlckCobra Shikami: Are our bug reports and crash dumps taken serious and analysed or do you just wait 2 month and send an eMail (like today) asking wether the bug still matter? Does it make sense for us to send bug reports and crash dumps or do we betetr save our time on that?
[12:56] Cory Linden shouts: Please start focusing that energy on the public jira. That is the best vector for demonstrating repeatable bugs and getting the data to the people working on the problems.
[12:57] Jeska Linden shouts: tha Poindexter: Have you considered holding events in the beta grid for better testing? For instance, would it help if these Town Hall meetings were held on that grid?
[12:57] Zi Ree: pile-ons
[12:57] Alayna Hutson: oooh, good idea
[12:57] Samantha Poindexter: “tha Poindexter”?
[12:57] Buckaroo Mu: DAMN GOOD IDEA!
[12:57] Ravanne Sullivan giggles
[12:57] Cory Linden shouts: We have in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Town halls there is a good suggestion.
[12:57] Jeska Linden shouts: ascha Vandyke: After the update my island is unstable and support can’t find the issue. Will there be better debug tools coming to fix it?
[12:58] Celano Obscure: No sorry. Too much of a bother. Best leave the crash-logger intact for now.
[12:58] Phoenix Psaltery grin… that’s what we call you, Sam… “Teh Poindexter.”
[12:58] Greho Otaared: (Sorry.. can someone tell my if my question is showing in the group?)
[12:58] Samantha Poindexter giggles.
[12:58] Cory Linden shouts: In the long run, we want to expose as many of the management and support tools we have for land to the residents so that you can provide better data back to us…
[12:58] Cory Linden shouts: but that is going to take time.
[12:59] Jeska Linden shouts: GreeterDan Godel: people are here expecting answers to their big questions. But it is clear that a lot of people’s big concerns don’t have immediate answers. Should people accept SL as it is and hope for slow change? Or is there reason to expect fundamental changes to the biggest problems any time soon?
[13:00] Cory Linden shouts: The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between. We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement. At the same time, we are…
[13:00] Cory Linden shouts: building the foundations for the next gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale.
[13:01] Cory Linden shouts: We also expect that some changes that might seem incremental, such as voice, will actually be transformative in terms of the avaialble design space for residents.
[13:01] Geor Mizser: People need to realize that for the most part, this is the initial 3D/Virtual “world” available on this scale and they should accept that there are going to be problems along the way.
[13:01] Jeska Linden shouts: Melchoir Tokhes: What’s the story with the Friends list and the online status indication? Can we expect to see (please) a way where we can check the online status and update the client side on a per-person basis?
[13:02] Torley Linden shouts: Friends list not working on the Issue Tracker – https://jira.lindenlab.com/browse/SL-40433
[13:02] Celano Obscure: Except for all those people who won’t use voice….
[13:02] Cory Linden shouts: My blog post went into some detail on this. In addition there are details on the public jira. Plus, we are continuing to roll out fixes to thsi system.
[13:03] Luth Brodie: and those who will discriminate against those of us who wont use voice
[13:03] Wigge Whitfield shouts: : As I have posted on the forum, PLEASE Address the Group IM issue, allowing group owners to DISABLE Group IMs or allowing users to choose not to receive them.. As we speak my group was being spammed, and due too the current bugs I couldnt chat in the group myself to address them, costing me ove 25 members.. PLEASE Address this problem for us business owners!
[13:03] Jeska Linden shouts: Salazar Jack: What will have to happen to eliminate region crossing rubberbanding, for everything from simply walking across a region boundary to traveling between region in vehicles. Is there a way to make that seamless and unnoticeable?
[13:03] Cory Linden shouts: As many of you know, the region crossing process involves packaging up the objects, scripts, script state and movin ghtem between physical machines…
[13:04] Nyna Slate: and thats a question going on since 2003
[13:04] Cory Linden shouts: there are still some approaches available to us to mask that latency and I feel that we will be able to improve that a lot.
[13:04] Cory Linden shouts: However, the resources to address that are currently on broader scaling/stability issues.
[13:04] Jeska Linden shouts: Michael Dale: Regarding teleporting, it is our only real method of travel within SL. It’s constant breakdowns hinder everyone’s ability to perform basic and routine functions within SL. When will this issue be addressed and corrected?
[13:05] Cory Linden shouts: We are currently working on better metrics for detecting teleport issues and stomping out the bugs in the system.
[13:05] Jeska Linden shouts: Phoenix Psaltery: How does LL plan to deal with urgent scaling issues through 3Q2007 as the concurrent logins continue to grow?
[13:05] Wigge Whitfield shouts: JESKA LINDEN: : As I have posted on the forum, PLEASE Address the Group IM issue, allowing group owners to DISABLE Group IMs or allowing users to choose not to receive them.. As we speak my group was being spammed, and due too the current bugs I couldnt chat in the group myself to address them, costing me ove 25 members.. PLEASE Address this problem for us business owners!
[13:06] Samantha Poindexter: …how ironic. Wigge’s spamming chat to complain about spam in the groups.
[13:06] Cory Linden shouts: As the blog post talks about, most of the development effort is on those issues, plus the next gen architecture will enable us to achieve far larger scale than we can today.
[13:06] Cory Linden shouts: OK, last question…
[13:06] Jeska Linden shouts: Radslns Hutchence: As residents, invested in making SL work, what can we do, in addition to being patient, to help with any of these initiatives?
[13:07] Alayna Hutson: absolutely nothing because the lindens don’t listen to us
[13:07] Cory Linden shouts: Patience obviously helps, but more than that, please help the community build the pieces it needs to make SL a better place…
[13:07] Captain Noarlunga: wtg
[13:07] Phoenix Psaltery rolls his eyes
[13:07] Alayna Hutson: whoops, did I say that out loud?
[13:07] Ken Serapis: Hello Scarlet! Remember me from the ITE?
[13:08] Cory Linden shouts: If you are a programmer, contribute to the open source project or come work for us…
[13:08] Scarlett Qi: Hi Ken
[13:08] Zi Ree: import me
[13:08] Cory Linden shouts: If you have bugs and can repro them, add data into thepublic jira…
[13:08] Captain Noarlunga: jira….lol
[13:08] Cory Linden shouts: Help with the wiki and documentation…
[13:08] Celano Obscure: See now, it’s much better to keep the harsher mocking to IM.;)
[13:08] Ken Serapis: cory, What happened to the Help request?
[13:09] Kooky Jetaime: ((Ken, read da blog))
[13:09] Captain Noarlunga: need a damned degree to enter JIRA
[13:09] Cory Linden shouts: Spend time helping out in the welcome areas and help island…
[13:09] Ken Serapis: Fine.. haha
[13:09] Notecard Writer: And Info Island!
[13:09] Salazar Jack: Thanks for the dialogue.
[13:09] Captain Noarlunga: lol
[13:09] Celano Obscure: Don’t feel bad Captain. I know people with degrees who think Jira’s obtuse.
[13:09] Greho Otaared grins
[13:09] Daedalus Young: lol
[13:10] Cory Linden shouts: Thank you all very much for all the great questions.
[13:10] Captain Noarlunga: so…bottom line…….it screwed up and it aint gonna work
[13:10] Kooky Jetaime: ((I’ve had problems with Jira but oh well.. Guess theres no point in bug repping anymore.. and if thats the case, why not remove that button??))
[13:10] Ken Serapis: haha
[13:10] Melchoir Tokhes shouts: No no, thank you for all the great answer.s
[13:10] tessa Amos shouts: thanks Lindens
[13:10] moo Money: Thank you for taking out the time to address us, guys
[13:10] Cory Linden shouts: I will be making blog posts about known issues more regularly as we move forward as well.
[13:10] Jeska Linden shouts: Thanks for coming to the Town Hall everyone. Please note the transcript from the Town Hall will be posted in the Blog.
[13:10] Notecard Writer: Thanks Cory & the Lindens…
[13:10] Jeska Linden shouts: That’s at blog.secondlife.com
[13:10] Steve Mahfouz shouts: Thanks Lindens for your time
[13:11] Kooky Jetaime: ((Can we have open comments?? it seems everything is closed comments anymore))
[13:11] Mildred Mapp: lol
[13:11] Mo Rocco shouts: Could I get an answer to my question now Lindens? About why no one has contacted me about my Lindex Limits request?
[13:11] Captain Noarlunga: lol
[13:11] Cory Linden shouts: And as we will be talking in more detail about the next gen architecture, search, etc, soon.
[13:11] Cory Linden shouts: Thanks, everyone.
[13:11] Luth Brodie: yes thank you for taking your time to deflect questions