VRprofessor

Echo Hermit wrote: You can have the best graphics card in the world, but if your internet service provider lies about the speed, or you find yourself sharing your broadband with a ton of other users, it's not going to make a deal of difference to your framerate. Good point. The last time I did a speed test for my internet the results were very encouraging, I was getting something like 14mbps down, but I have no idea what internet speeds are necessary for good SL performance. And I was trying this at time when folks in my neighborhood are likely to be online. I'll try again in a bit when most in my neighborhood are at work and see if it helps.

Luc Starsider wrote: From what I understand, the 6xx series might not always be the best or fastest solution. I thought it should be pretty good for SL, but I have no idea. For more details and some technical details, have a look in this thread, starting at around post #11: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Normal-Maps-Specularity-Maps-amp-Diffuse-coming-soon/td-p/1638165/page/2 - Luc - Thanks for the link. Not the most encouraging discussion from my point of view, at least what I thought I understood of it.

I keep trying to view the ratings in MP but when I do I see only the most recent two and no obvious way to look at the rest, assuming there are more. If I cannot view the rating I won't leave any so that doesn't enter into my buying.

I finally broke down and spent the $$ to upgrade from a GTX550ti to a GTX660ti. According to the benchmarks provided by nvidia the 660 should give a sizable improvement in performance relative to the 550. But I walked around at NCI Kuula both before and after installing the new card and saw no noticable improvement in the fps rates at the same graphics settings. (I was using SL viewer default "High" settings.) Installed the latest driver from nvidia's website and rebooted my computer. Tweaked a few graphics settings. Any other suggestions I should consider before I find out if I can get my money back? I have an i5-2500k cpu with 8GB RAM. The card is sitting in a PCI 2 slot.

It happened to me a couple of weeks ago. A friend I hadn't seen in a while asked why I had a blank profile!? I have no idea how long it was missing. That profile was short and I sometimes lack patience so I just typed a new profile and as of yesterday it was still there.

Kelli May wrote: The most important question might be "Why are you discussing it here, and not in some kind of cosmological forum?". While there are undoubtedly some intelligent people and original thinkers among SL residents, few of us have the background and training it would take to judge your ideas. In scientific terms, you haven't presented a theory (a peer-reviewed body of thinking backed by reproducible evidence), but a series of linked concepts - a theory only in the looser, philosophical sense. A scientific theory must make predictions which can then be repeatedly tested by experiment. To answer your question: no, I can't disprove it. I have a theory there is a green dragon on Mercury who only exists on Tuesdays and breathes watermelon soda. Can you disprove it? Kelli's dragon example should make it clear why the onus is on the hypothesis proposer to provide supporting evidence for the credibility of their claim and not the rest of the world to disprove the hypothesis no matter how incorrect it can be. Any other approach means that anyone with an imagination can create "theories" that are non-falsifiable and we would be quickly over run with nonsense as truth. I appologize for not noting the name, but I think is was Madeline that provided an extensive physics discussion explaining why senior academics are unlikely to pay any attention to the OPs hypothesis. It is nice that she took to the time to explain. As for why here and not on a cosmology forum? One of the signs of bad science is that it is sold outside of the relevent scientific community. When you have bad science that you cannot or will not put aside (and humans are bad at giving up on an idea once it creeps into their brains) you go outside the scientific community for support. Anyone remember the infinite energy car on the Tonight show (with Johnny Carson)? Cold fusion by -- I forget their names--but they went straight to the media. If the scientific community won't accept your ideas, maybe you can sell them directly to the public.

Nala Spires wrote: sure kids should never be in an adult sim what i never got is why is that linden labs responsibility? i think thats up to the parrents to supervice right their kids ... also give em a break i mean people where getting veryfied as elvis prisley ... and thats kind of a sign that linden labs did not store your information the system was checking if name licence id etc exist to a real person and thats all ... thought thats my assuption really Hmm, is the content on those sims legally prohibited to minors, or is the age restriction simply in the name of good taste. In the U.S. if you sell products or services that are not legally available to minors, you are obligated to verify their eligability for purchase. Whether it is beer at the local pub or porn on the internet the retailer is responsible for age verification. If the product/service may legally be sold to minors, then it falls to the parents to police their children's activities. However, parents cannot be all places at all time and a bit of help is much appreciated--especially in the wilds of the internet where the typical parent lacks the skills to monitor their kids' activities.

leon Bowler wrote: I did publish it and asked others to read, at the time I was developing ultra sonic body scanners(that I have patents for) I was even offered a meeting with Steven Hawkins that I turned down as I don;t see how you can have any meaningful chat with him as it all has to be prerecorded as all his replies are(bet you didn't know that), so I felt I was being setup from the start, seems some don't want this idea out. Okay, you published and no one paid any attention. Time to move on or get more training in physics so you can try to work out why no one is paying you any attention. Again, you need to provide the reason for folks to take you hypothesis seriously, to show how it provides a better explanation of the facts than the big bang. It is not the job of others to disprove that which they do no believe.

leon Bowler wrote: I think the main reason the theory was not excepted as it gives no role to god, whereas the big bang does and if you look at the direction it is going they will soon declare that god started the big bang, I can only guess as senior academics would not even listen, or read any papers. Huh? You need to go get some more scientific background. Science is the study of the natural world...God is part of the supernatural--there is no place for God in science. You will never see scientific texts declaring God to be the source cause of the big bang.

Those proposing a change to the current knowledge base are obligated to prove that their hypothesis has merit, not require that others disprove it. YOU are obligated to show work demonstrating that your hypothesis does a better job of explaining the observable facts than the big bang. So, in 20 years have you ever demonstrated that your proposal has scientific merit, that it is more than idle musing? Have you published or presented your hypothesis to an appropriate professional audience?

Mandji Koba wrote: <snip>At all, in general, I agree that I should put my main at sleep for some time, pack up her stuff as you said, downgrade to Basic then send her away for some holidays. And indeed, the same human operator being behind both accounts, I believe Mandji should also take a break. <snip> I would suggest keeping some written records of full account name, password, security question and such if you have not already done so. I have non-SL accounts dating back over a decade that I can no longer access because I did not write things down. I was sure that I would/could never, ever forget the log in information because of number of times I logged in while I was active. I was wrong and those accounts are effectively gone.

I don't have your specific problem, but most people are simply ignorant of the size of the video games industry. I was (only a little) surprised to learn that some games bring in more revenue than all but the biggest movies. Facebook + Zynga along with Apple + apps have done a lot to legitimize and normalize the micro-transaction market. A market worth billions of dollars for intangible goods.

MoiselleErin Teardrop wrote: <snip> When this year is gone, I wonder what people are going to say? "Oh no, I never said the word was gonna end" <snip> The typical response is to move the date following some sort of appology for a misunderstanding or miscalculation of some key piece of information. But this time, we are assured, they got it right and the date of doom is.....

Good Question. What graphics quality setting are you using? Did it work before and start crashing lately or have you never been able to get on? (I've had an unusal amount of crashing in the last two days. I've seen at least one other thread, but many respondants are reporting no problems. Go figure.) Have you made any changes to your system lately? Especially software.

Camilattice wrote: Welllll, there's Muddy's (music Cafe) Recently renamed to Tide's on the Pier (if memory serves).

With low expectations I think you'll be fine until you can save up for a discrete graphics card. Once you have the GPU you'll never be satisfied going back to on-board graphics. I started a thread asking about GT 640 cards...given the discussion I've decided that for a few dollars more I am now looking at the GTX 550ti. The 550 is a pretty good GPU and runs about $130ish these days. Because it is last year's model it will hopefully start dropping in price pretty soon. Keep your eye open for sales while saving up.

What does your gf want to do while in SL? Shopping and chatting are going to be OKish even on a relatively weak laptop. Just go with low settings and stay out of highly populated areas Clubbing is going to need more graphics power, but I do have a student who goes clubbing with an i5 based laptop and no GPU. I don't know what sort of frame rates she gets, but she's never seen better and is satisfied. I, on the other hand, switch between desktop and laptop. Because of what my home desktop can do my i7 CPU with 550m GPU laptop often seems disappointing. If I had never run SL on my desktop I would be pretty happy with my laptop. So her expectations are going to play a major part in all of this. If she is expecting high frame rates @ high quality graphics settings while out clubbing she is going to be horribly disappointed. If she is expecting modest frame rates at low/moderate graphics settings while shopping or chatting with friends, she'll be happy. For the other part, multi-tasking, the i5 is going to be plenty strong for most users. A typical college student's needs (facebook, word processor, etc) are well met by the i3 line of processors, so the i5 should be more than enough for all of her non-SL needs.

Will it run SL? It should. It isn't going to run ultra high settings. Probably best to stick with medium settings where you should get okay fps in moderately busy areas. Or start with low settings and tweak up in areas that matter to you. For example if you are primarily in clubs you don't need 128m draw distance, but you might want good resolution on other avis.

I started a thread asking about the nvidia based 640 GPU relative to the 520 I am using now. The 520 is a definite upgrade to what you have, but it is still slow. But, using an inferior CPU, I see the 520 taking a lot of load off the CPU and where you are waiting about 5 minutes I am waiting about 2. One of the posters also reminded me that GPUs need power and you need an adequate power supply. The 520 should run on a 300w power supply, but the 640 needs a minimum of 350w. I'll be okay because I happen to have a used (but working) 400w power supply I can stick in the computer. But if I were buying a power supply to support the GPU I would notice that the 550-600w power supplies are only a few bucks more than a 400w (especially if you watch the sales) and that the price point of the GTX 550ti cards is only $10 -$20 higher than the 640. (The 550ti is what I have at home and if I weren't always looking for an excuse to buy new tech I'd be happy with it.)

In general it is best if you can tell folks about your system--you'll likely get more helpful answers that way. The numbering on video cards isn't particularly obvious so unless you are a bit of a hardware geek you may not be able to tell if your card meets minimum specs. Not only may Windows have gotten the wrong driver for you, there are a few reported cases where the newest driver for a card doesn't seem to work with SL and you have to roll back to the second newest driver. The more we know, the more helpful we can be.

The last time I did a fresh install of the SL viewer--a week or so ago--it defaulted to "high" settings even though the computer I installed on had no chance of running on high. If you still want to try the SL viewer and can access the preferences menu on the log in screen set your graphics to "low" and see if that helps.

My laptop is a different brand, but if I right click the link for SL I get an option to set whether it runs with the graphics card or othe built in graphics.

Nope, that page doesn't tell us about the computer. I will hazzard a guess that it is a second generation i3 based laptop using the built in graphics. (But actual system specs would be best.) I haven't tried one of these yet, but I am guessing that you aren't going to get really great performance. If you are in a relatively empty area and can tolerate low frame rates--for example if you are building--you might be able to move to medium graphics settings.

For your passion I don't think you absolutely need money, but it is nice to have some available. My son funds his Steam account with transfers from my paypal---he hands me cash and I type in the necessary passwords. It is his money to spend as he wishes so I have no problems with this arrangement. In SL I would probably prefer cash for credit card charge, but in either case it is a way for my child to get money into a virtual economy while I can assure myself there are still a few $$ left for college. Practice. I want to emphasize practice. I have tried a couple of the beginner building projects and am happy I did. I now recognize that while fun, I do not have the patience to develop real, serious building skills. I have put in about 10 hours and my building skills are politely described as "basic." SL skill development is going to progress more slowly than skill development in video games, or even school, but if you practice, you will get better. What I love about building with prims is that the building materials are free--you can make all the prims you want and delete any failed efforts. This gives you a lot of room for trial and error. I don't remember seeing the Ivory Tower of Prims (I think is the name--search Ivory Tower) on the list of locations for you to check out--do add it to your list. If you find a mentor make sure to express appropriate appreciation. The responses to your plea show that there are lots of SL folks who enjoy helping. Some of that joy is from seeing folks develop and some is from simple awknowledgement that they were part of your development. Saying "thanks" as payment is a screaming bargain.

"Obviously, you will all bring up arguments surrounding causation vs. correlation, anecdotes to contrary and attacks on the messenger's hardware and system configuration too. I don't care to start a flame war. Not my intent." Well, I suppose I could bring up causation v correlation, that is in my job description, but from an information gathering point of view I would be delighted with reasonably good descriptions of peoples' experiences in this case. First, I don't think anyone is going to give me the $80k or so it would take to set up a lab and hire a bunch of undergrads for the summer to run systematic benchmarks on dozen or so computers using a couple of dozen different video cards. Even using only a couple of PC platforms the cost of video cards and undergrads would be prohibitive. That leaves us with anecdotal reports and tech savy folks to critique those reports. Anecdote #1 should bring forth lots of criticism, especially in the form of alternative causality. Additional anecdotes could simply be agreeable for reasons of confirmation bias, or they could be all comers telling their story. In the first case we get bad conclusions, but in the second we can start to eliminate some of the possible alternative causes suggested. With enough independent anecdotes we can narrow the conclusions fairly nicely. As much fun as the benchmarking would be, I wouldn't bother to do it for reasons other than fun. Mostly because I have read enough of these threads now to conclude that those folks with technical backgrounds have largely vetted the anecdotes and come to the conclusion that nvidia based cards work better for SL than amd/ati cards. Given that there are still reports of the opposite experience it suggests that there are still some details that are not fully explained, but I think those buying a GPU to support SL for the first time are relatively safe looking at nvidia based cards.