The big news today in Second Life (SL) is that it now supports voice. I downloaded the new client to my fastest desktop and tried to attend a voice meeting about technology for developers. I gave up after five minutes, because the voice stream I heard was too distorted to follow. I also noticed that my avatar had taken on distinctly feminine characteristics; I didn't know why. I teleport I also noticed that my avatar had taken on distinctly feminine characteristics; I didn’t know why. I teleported to someplace quiet and tried to edit my avatar’s appearance, but I couldn’t: that function seems to be broken in the new client.Fortunately, I still had last week’s SL client software installed on my laptop. I logged off of SL on the desktop, and when I logged into SL on the notebook, my avatar’s appearance was normal (if you can call a Harajuku male avatar normal), and I was able to edit its appearance without a problem.There’s a balance to be found in software between features and reliability and stability. SL has chosen features, and pretty much forgotten the balance. There is a new client to download roughly once a week, sometimes to add features, but often to fix bugs. Worse, the server grid goes down frequently: if I were doing business on SL and paying for service, I’d be seriously annoyed. Actually, a lot of SL users are seriously annoyed: read the blog comments, for example the reactions to the voice announcement at the bottom of this page. At a gathering I attended a few weeks ago, someone joked that it would be great if SL could get to one nine reliability. It was funny mostly because it’s so true.Supposedly, the Windlight atmospheric rendering enhancements, which came and went in a matter of days last month, will be reintroduced “soon.” What was it I was just saying about features versus reliability?Think “Where have all the flowers gone?” What’s the song’s refrain? “When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?” Software Development