[sldev] 1.23.4 released in a hurry ? NO.

[Thomas Grimshaw]

Kent,

Whilst I appreciate that you guys are proud of what you have 
accomplished, it's really not fair of you to make claims such as "the 
best viewer we've ever shipped" and then be offended when your own users 
disagree. There's new media bugs in 1.23 which cause the UI to turn 
black when quicktime is used, editing prims is a nightmare now due to 
changes to the sub unit mapping,  the terrain and water flicker at 
altitude is unbearable.. As for crashes, my 1.23 viewer has frozen 
several times today and did not trigger the crash logger.

I have a lot of respect for what you guys do, but please, just listen to 
our feedback and stop blowing your own trumpet.

~Tom


Kent Quirk (Q Linden) wrote:
> Ouch.
>
> Ya know, I'm trying really hard to be polite and rational and explain  
> the reasons behind what we do. I tried to show that we actually have a  
> professional development organization with a process. We've documented  
> what we fixed and what we changed.
>
> Perhaps you forget that we serve about a million customers a month.  
> Almost a million of them are not you.
>
>  From all the tracking data we have, I can objectively see that over  
> hundreds of thousands of sessions, this is the most stable viewer  
> we've ever shipped. I hope that over the next several weeks, we'll  
> even see a small uptick in new users and retained users who find the  
> viewer easier to use and more understandable because of the changes  
> we've made.
>
> I will admit that your personal experience may in fact be worse. And  
> if that's the case, I'm sorry.
>
> Sadly, we can't code Second Life individually for each user. For what  
> it's worth, I'm actually working toward the goal of making it possible  
> for you to customize your experience much more than you do today.  
> It'll take a while to get there, though. In the mean time, we'll  
> continue to try to incrementally make the best viewer we can for the  
> greatest number of people.
>
> I'd appreciate it if in the future you'd keep the name calling off  
> this list.
>
> 	Q
>
> On Jun 17, 2009, at 2:51 PM, Boy Lane wrote:
>
>   
>> That's absolutely the most ever single bullsh*t posting I've read on  
>> this
>> mailing list. 1.23.4 is the worst viewer ever, it did not fix most of
>> existing bugs but introduced tons of new ones. LL did not respond to  
>> most of
>> important user concerns but ignored them, as in the past. And you  
>> guys are
>> proud to follow your new release policy by pushing unfinished  
>> software out
>> to users for nothing but political reasons. Shame on you Linden Lab!
>>
>> Boy Lane
>>
>>
>>
>>     
>>> Message: 7
>>> Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:35:48 -0400
>>> From: "Kent Quirk (Q Linden)" <q at lindenlab.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [sldev] 1.23.4 released in a hurry ? NO.
>>> To: Latif Khalifa <latifer at streamgrid.net>
>>> Cc: sldev <sldev at lists.secondlife.com>
>>> Message-ID: <A0AC2AD0-18A8-4C57-9693-23627BD9E759 at lindenlab.com>
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>>>       
>>     
>>> I absolutely claim that 1.23 is not only of releasable quality, but
>>> the best viewer we've ever shipped. It met its design goals on RC1.
>>> The bugs that were found and fixed in the next 3 RCs were minimal. On
>>> a global statistics level, the crash rates are lower than they've  
>>> ever
>>> been, even when you include crashes caused by specific video cards.
>>>
>>> There are some individuals who are upset about some of the design
>>> decisions, like the redesign of pie menus. That's not a quality  
>>> issue.
>>> There are other individuals who are upset about some of the technical
>>> decisions, such as the imposition of rendering limits where we never
>>> had them before. That's not a quality issue either. And there are
>>> people who don't like the new Adult-Only stuff. That's also not a
>>> quality issue.
>>>
>>> The definition of quality is meeting the specification. We executed  
>>> on
>>> this viewer better than we've ever done it before, and I'm pretty
>>> proud of our team for doing it.
>>>
>>> By the way, contrary to the implication in the subject line, we
>>> released 1.23.4 almost exactly according to the schedule I announced
>>> internally in February. The internal decision to ship was based on
>>> quality. As every professional software organization does, for every
>>> open issue we balance the risk of shipping a product with that issue
>>> against the risk of trying to fix it. When all the risks of shipping
>>> are lower than the risks of fixing, we ship it. Which is what we did
>>> with RC4.
>>>
>>> Q
>>>       
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