17 February, 2011

fun, fun, fun, in the sun, sun, sun

This from one of my groups:
LL is goign to be [switching] the blogs, forums, KB, and resident answers to the same system Best Buy got in trouble for using to track customers social media ussage. Additionally they are putting mandatory widgets on every post/coment you make. To try and get LL to make these opt in only please comment and watch https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-3667.
Okay, let me break all this down. Best Buy has a reputation for being a big box store with poorly-trained clerks and owners that have no clue what they're doing. Part of this, of course, is due to their buy-out of Geek Squad (owned by a group of geeks who genuinely cared about computer repair) and subsequent replacement of all staff with clerks who, in some cases, didn't even own computers in the first place. But that was just strike one.

Strike two happened back in 2009 when they used the same (or at least a very similar) system to try to pervert purely social media streams into 24/7 advertising for themselves that would raise sales.

Short version: they failed. Slightly less short version: they failed because people didn't like ads where they didn't want them (aka, chatting with their friends on Facebook or Twitter), and resented Best Buy's assertion that they "understood social media" while at the same time responding to precisely none of the pleas for help they received from customers who used social media and were complaining about Best Buy's abysmal service. As a subsequent result, those customers moved away from Best Buy to other (online as well as offline) retailers. Best Buy sales suffered tremendously as a result (though they've picked up by 61% in the last quarter of 2010. Of course, at least part of those profits were a result of corporate share buybacks...).

Same system, different company, and there is more than a little sharp taste of irony here, because when comparing Best Buy's languid, disparate customer service with Linden Labs' customer service, Best Buy actually looks like a customer that really, really listens...so having the same system pop up that failed with Best Buy as the Lindens' Next Big Thing?

Well, one, it should surprise none of us, and two, I think it ties very much into the previous JIRA I've been mentioning (now closed), with admittedly, about as much success in getting the Lindens to actually change their minds.

[02:20 AM] Turley Hallenbook is thinking, my Doctor is always asking me, if I am hearing any voices, now I'll have something different to tell him :)
[02:20 AM] Alexx McLaglen: lol
[02:22 AM] Turley Hallenbook: wonders if there is anyone brave enough to assist in if they can hear them too?
[02:22 AM] Turley Hallenbook: Or perhaps it is just me, myself and I
[02:22 AM] Alexx McLaglen: try to tp me, if you want, Ms H
[02:27 AM] Precipitate Flood: A tp? http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pacific%20Dreamz%20Lagoons/36/174/23 - it may get you away from the voices, if nothing else.
[02:28 AM] Garnet Psaltery: Good morning. What is the SLURL for, please?
[02:29 AM] Turley Hallenbook: oh, no, I believe it ate, Miss Alexx!!!
[02:29 AM] Turley Hallenbook: no here she comes :)
[02:29 AM] Precipitate Flood: Turley was complaining about hearing voices - a change of scene may help, or so I thought
[02:30 AM] Garnet Psaltery: Ah, how considerate of you :o)
[02:41 AM] Turley Hallenbook: oh my
[02:41 AM] Turley Hallenbook: it is so very loud now
[02:41 AM] Turley Hallenbook: and I have a witness ;)
[02:42 AM] Turley Hallenbook: But I don't know what happened to Miss Alexx


There is a haunt on the loose in one of the Caledon sims.

[02:47 AM] Turley Hallenbook: There is someone here with me, thank goodness
[02:48 AM] Turley Hallenbook: but can't find the location exactly the voice is, have narrowed it down to Miss Ouna's house
[02:49 AM] Turley Hallenbook: they hear it also
[02:49 AM] Emilly Orr: It might be that her parcel is set to play sounds beyond her parcel.
[02:50 AM] Turley Hallenbook: no matter, this sounds like a Ghost or Demon or maybe the Devil
[02:50 AM] Emilly Orr: Still could be sounds playing beyond her parcel.
[02:50 AM] Emilly Orr: Unless her parcel's haunted...
[02:51 AM] Turley Hallenbook: I believe it is, Miss Emilly
[02:51 AM] Turley Hallenbook: Has to be
[02:51 AM] Emilly Orr: That's not good.
[02:52 AM] Turley Hallenbook: someone should tell her and help her
[02:52 AM] Turley Hallenbook: I hope she hasn't been living with this, in fear of telling anyone


One does ponder the effectiveness of pixelated demons, or at least, when that one is me. This, plus reports of the ghost ship last summer...could be Caledon needs its own version of the Ghostbusters.

But we move on.

Share in the dinosaur love. Even if you don't like the Nostalgia Critic, or worse, don't know who he is, it is a hysterical joy to watch him dissect The Lost World: Jurassic Park. There's even a brief segment on how to properly do a Jeff Goldblum impersonation!

Lastly...with much trepidation, and not a little sick dread, I have downloaded the Phoenix viewer (build 1.5.2.908, to be precise). Two women I trust have either told me it's reliable, or demonstrated proof that it's reliable, and I am having an insane amount of difficulty dealing with Imprudence at this time.

Case in point: every single time over the past eight weeks I have logged in to SL, this is what happens:

1. Log in.
2. Notice "Loading", sigh, clear cache, and log out.
3. Log in and clear cache and log out again.
4. Log in, take a teleport, and crash.
5. Curse Imprudence, log in, clear cache, log out.
6. Log in again and wait half an hour for my inventory to load.

This was bad enough when I was just a sales clerk, but now that I'm an estate manager it's an incredible time sink, and it's beyond frustrating that it happens every. single. damned. time.

It is far from a secret that I feel as if the people behind Phoenix, and Emerald behind them, did the grid a great disservice and injustice. I do not trust them. I do not trust their viewers, I do not trust the people coding their viewers, I do not trust that the Lindens worked with some of them earlier and then turned on them for what may have been entirely separate issues. I do not trust anyone involved with either project.

And it doesn't help that I feel as if I'm jumping into the shark tank after having slashed open veins in my thighs with broken glass, but...I also feel I have zero alternatives. I won't use viewer 2 unless it's that or leave SL...and at that point, I will likely leave SL...but also, Imprudence has completely lost all effectiveness (in my opinion).

So...bring on the sharks. We'll see how it goes.

11 comments:

Lalo Telling said...

I'm not having a lick of trouble with Imprudence, Miss Em... outside of parcel audio not working, but that's easily circumvented by way of a stream URL input to Winamp, and was a "known issue" on release, anyway.

Might I inquire after which version of Imprudence, and which OS you're running it on?

Oh, and I just happened to think: my Inventory is still, after three-plus years, below 5,000. I daresay yours tops that by a fair bit...

Emilly Orr said...

The parcel audio never bothered me, but on my six-year-old Windows XP machine, and the latest experimental version of Imprudence, not being able to teleport without crashing, or log in without seeing "Loading..." or not fully being hooked to the server (when I log in and have no notices and no messages)...something else needed to be done.

Of course, I have over 74,000 items in inventory, and why yes, I DO need to cut that back, I just keep getting bogged down in both how and in getting time to do so!

Sphynx Soleil said...

Mr Telling,

Imprudence - Nov 13th experimental - has some *serious* crash issues with loading textures. I've run into this probably 5-10x a day when I'm actively building. Basically, when it's trying to load a texture long enough, and the texture hasn't loaded already, it gives me >BEWM< crash to desktop.

Yes, I should probably save the logs, but when I'm building, and get crashus interruptus looking through textures, my first thought is ARGHLEMMEBACKINDAMMIT. :)

My machine is - at this point - near top of the line still. It was top of the line when I got it about 1.5 years ago. In my case I *know* it's not the machine, it's the viewer. Miss Orr has it worse because her machine is old and (I swear!) possessed. :)

Emilly Orr said...

Sphynx is right, Mr. Telling--she, her husband, and friends have all told me on frequent occasion that something just doesn't DO that...but it will, on my machine.

Case in point: I use Chrome because it's more stable than Firefox on my machine. I don't like it as much as I like Firefox, but it crashes less. And by 'crashes less' I mean it only crashes three to seven times EVERY SINGLE DAY, as opposed to Firefox crashing twenty to fifty times EVERY SINGLE DAY.

So far, in my day-plus of using Phoenix, it is remarkably resilient and stable--UNTIL my full inventory loads in. Then it crashes. I restart, go back in, and it laboriously pulls in my inventory--and crashes. At least I know it's the inventory doing it, and not just random hiccups, as in Imprudence's case.

So, tomorrow, I start flinging EVERYTHING barring textures and palm trees into boxes. I will do my best to keep SOME hint of organization, but I have to get SERIOUSLY under 50K at least. No more excuses.

Edward Pearse said...

I think I started using Emerald not long before it blew up and was delighted with the features and it's lack of crashiness compared to the official viewer. I moved on to Phoenix as soon as it was released and have updated each time a new version was released.

Some of the features from Phoenix, like the "Worn" tab, have now been incorporated into the official viewer - which of course is translated back to Phoenix. So I now have the Worn tab as well as the Worn folder in inventory.

It still crashes but I find that's more sim related than anything else. Yesterday I survived 3 hours of Grand Tour Ball in my Seraph Club, while also DJing, only to crash twice within 10 minutes when I moved onto the next locale.

Anonymous said...

Imprudence hasn't been working for me either; it just hangs on login. I forget which version, and can't say I care enough to check...

I may already have asked this, but have you tried Cool VL Viewer? It's been my client of choice for ages... looks like the pre-2007 viewer, and has just about all the new stuff under the hood. (Tattoo/alpha layers, worn items tab, multiple attachments to one point, symbolic links in inventory, radar... about the only thing it doesn't support is Emerald-style breast physics.)

Anonymous said...

...right, you've used it. Sorry about that! I had a feeling I was forgetting, and sure enough I was...

Emilly Orr said...

Hee!

Miss Poindexter, indeed I have used Cool VL. And, while I think it's a good, stable viewer in many ways--and I have international friends for whom it, and the Cool SL viewer before it, are the only viewers for SL that work at all for them...there are things I just can't cope with in it.

Emilly Orr said...

Edward,

I admit to feeling slight twitches that I am missing bits of the Grand Tour, but every time I get one of them, I think things through. Right now I:

* am managing eight sims, so that takes up most of my time;

* have killed all music and media access due to the RedZone idiocy, so there's now little use in going to musical venues unless I really care to reinstall WinAmp, which I don't have on my computer at present;

* am not speaking to much of Caledon at present, so really, social interaction is low on my list.

How'ver, on the off chance I do want to go to the Seraph Club in future--and it IS still on my list of things I want to do--I should install WinAmp at some point.

Aunt Foggy said...

I am with you on the viewer pain :)
And am running Phoenix for the same reasons and with the same trepidation. I would also add that the last couple of weeks, and this last week even more so have been gruesome on the grid - and not in a viewer related way. Large group chats have just gone tits up. Not just the usual infuriating lag and mixed up messages, but now flat broken. Not opening, not posting at all, and pretty much useless most of the time for things like...communicating.
Asset servers were also having serious issues (again, as usual) as well. Rolling restarts, sim crashes...yeah. I hope that whatever is going on is being actively fixed. Oh, and world peace would be cool too. Yeah.

Emilly Orr said...

Lady Fogwoman,

I know part of my problem is simply excess inventory (which also strains the asset server). But the rest of it--yeah, it's gone beyond any viewer issue, the grid entirely is just flaky beyond all reason. Group chat is mostly worthless; asset servers are hiccuping; in-world search has gone beyond the laughably broken it was before, teleporting seems to be iffy...Plus, it seems every couple of days there's a rolling restart on one of the main four server programs, so...? I'd love to know what's going on, sure, but...like that's going to happen.

hide away, they say, 'cos we don't want your broken parts

Yeah, so...remember that thing I was recovering from? You know, last year ? Yeah. I did it again. So this is Em Faw Down Go Boom part ...