Updates, Updates, Updates.

As a few people within the virtual world of Second Life know, I've been busy in the real world dealing with real land - running roads into otherwise accessible property, planting trees and so on, dealing with the mess of the legalities and procedures of real land. One thing I have learned is that real estate in Second Life is much more easier to contend with.

The other thing I have learned, having been logging in less, is that I don't want to have to download a full client every time I want to log in - and that seems to be par for my log ins these days. Sure, it may be relatively fast but come on... - Second Life, as a virtual world, has reached a point where downloading an entire client to log in is not only a pain, it's... avoidable.

Consider patches. I'm not saying that downloading patches is a silver bullet, but it would probably help a lot with server loading as well as the annoyance I feel when I encounter the 'download new client' dialog when I'm logging in. It annoys me enough to write about it, so I wonder how even more casual users than I feel about it. I imagine it's less than pleasant.

As a software developer with a reasonable amount of experience, I think it's time for the update process to grow up. As a user, I think it's time for Linden Lab to recognize that the issue itself is something that might actually keep people from popping into Second Life. I mean - every time I turn around, I'm piping 30 megs of data down through about 10 servers.

Big picture: Figure 40,000 people download the update. 40,000 x 30 = 120,000 megabytes of transfer. For... how many changes in the code? Is it worth it?

Just because we have big pipes doesn't mean we should be downloading the code that didn't change every update...