New CEO Mark Kingdon alias „M Linden“ – soon new CTO?

Founder Philip Rosedale has announced today that after about one month the search for a new CEO is over – it is going to be Mark Kingdon, in world name M Linden.

He’s going to start May 15th, has a background in arts, business and economics and has been working at bigger companies. His main focus? Better in world stability, user experience and reliability. He’s also got quite much experience in international companies, which might help Lindenlab too, since they have an international audience.

Sounds like very good news to me, seems it’s easier for Lindenlab to find a new CEO than a new CTO, though, but perhaps since this one is settled a new CTO will follow shortly…

A more in depth portrait of Mark Kingdon can be found here.


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Login worries

Some days ago there’s been the news that IBM is going to build their own server farm with the Second Life server side on it.

Well, frankly said, I can understand them. That convoluted mess that Second Life today is is all but a worthwile investment if you’re a company. If you want to have a good experience with it, better stay away from the main grid and build your own farm, your own island.

If you’re thinking about investing in SL, better do it when the grid has more stabilized. At the moment this would just be a great waste of money in my opinion given the bad performance all inhabitants of Second Life have been experiencing since months now.


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How to handle the mob…

Since my last post Second Life hasn’t been really much better. Lindenlab is still good at producing what’s their own speciality – lags over lags over lags and ah bad gaming experience.

Well, to top it even, all logins to Second Life are disabled because the ISP of Lindenlab is having problems with their infrastructure and handling all the traffic, so they tell. Well… might be even right, who knows, stuff like that happens, but good hosting providers have got backup lines just in case for that, redundant connections, they are running if big enough a system called BGP with an autonomous system which even adds more to the reliability of a system.

Well, because Lindenlab quite well knows what they got on their blog when an issue like that opens up again – thousands of angry comments – it became lately their policy to just disable comments for such postings.

On the last case, though, one comment from Second Aimee made it through, before they closed it. She encouraged the people to comment on her blog instead, which the people are now gladly doing.

So this is quite a good chance again to get an unfiltered picture about what are people thinking about Second Life, opinions, which aren’t really showing up on the corporate blog anymore.

One asks for example:

Why is SL always screwed up on Weekends Grrrr

Simple – because weekends mean usage peeks and the most stress for the system, which it is unable to handle.

Another one just finds interesting prim objects in real life:

WHAT IS THAT 1 PRIM OBJECT IN THE CORNER OF MY ROOM AND HOW DO i SCRIPT
IT?? SOMEBODY CALLED IT A TELEVISION ONCE. THINK ILL TURN IT ON..

But most are just plainly annoyed right now and venting off some steam, like:

yeah UP YOURS Linden Labs!!! I have over 200,000 dollars(Lindens)
invested in my freakin inventory alone,and that isnt including what I
spent on my Avi, like are u freaking kiddin me? All I get back is a
bald head, a freakin boot up my ass that wont even come out even if i
click detach and now I cant log in to pull the boot out of my ass and
find my hair??? WHAT did I do to you besides spend real cash for this
crap?? Thanks!!

So… the typical collection of comments on such a matter. New CTO, anyone? /me sighs.

The problem with the mainland

Consider yourself living on a nice, new sim of the mainland. You’re happy with your small parcel, nice seaview, perhaps, good neighbors and then happening this: a new club is opening its gates.

Worse, this club has many camping spots, to fake traffic and also quite some visitors with the result that its eating up all possible traffic alone for the whole sim.

The result? You’re busted. You cannot use your property anymore, because teleporting and even logging into your home becomes a new kind of adventure. "Is the sim already full or is at least one slot left for me to enter?"

So what can you do about it? Of course, you could tell the club owner to leave. "I am soo sorry, but I want to stay here, I like it and beside, I just own 4096 sqms of land and don’t have the money for a private sim." Bummer. So he’s eating up the whole traffic of the sim and making it unusable with just his teeny, weeny piece of it.

The next logical thing for you? To abandon or sell your land – don’t think you can sell it with profit, by the way, good buyers take a look at the sim before buying it – and move to a private living sim.

So what should Lindenlab do about this kind of behaviour? Simple: they should make the tier traffic based in such a case. Why should I for myself finance the sim when some kind of business maker is only paying also a small share, but makes it unusable for the rest of us?