AnthonyJoanne

I'm going to be quite blunt: I've seen reviews of products on the MP where people complained that the item didn't fit their particular mesh body. For products which don't list that mesh body and never have. I've seen reviews of products on the MP where people have complained that it didn't fit, for products with a free demo clearly referenced in the MP listing. I have helped people in SL who were having trouble with something who admitted that they hadn't read the instructions. I've met people who are proud that they are too lazy to RTFM. SL users contain a high percentage of the lazy or stupid. Creators can't be expected to spoon feed these people indefinitely. I've dealt with hundreds of creators in my time in SL ... and a few of them sucked. The majority, however, were helpful and courteous. I've also dealt with busy bodies like the people who think they get to set up the SLBB and get to be the 'product police' and they ALL sucked. LL has mechanisms in place for creators who misrepresent (incorrect listings, false advertising, etc). I have no idea if LL are actually any good at dealing with that stuff, but the fact remains the mechanisms are there. I certainly hope they pay attention when we flag MP listings ... I'd hate to think I've been wasting my time reporting keyword spam for no reason. :p At the end of the day, if the SLBB approached me the only result would be a quick trip to the bit bucket for them and all their communications.

I think you missed my point. I'm well aware of what the migration can and can't achieve in and of itself. BUT ... all of that is completely irrelevant if it has no positive (or negative) impact on the users. Whether it's going to prove to be a good thing for LL remains to be seen. I've seen far too many people who should know better fail to understand the realities of the cloud. I had a former colleague who was convinced that you could treat the cloud as if it were local to all geographic locations.

Let's leave the potential ramifications of not owning your own infrastructure aside and consider the migration from the perspective of the users. Also - I'm not calling it an uplift because I've seen a number of projects (elsewhere, I'm not talking SL) where migration to the cloud was demonstrably a significant downgrade. LL has moved SL to the cloud. Who cares? That might seem an odd thing to say, but bear with me for a moment. From the user perspective SL running on the cloud or on LL hardware is pretty much irrelevant if we don't see any benefit (or penalty) from the move. How you define benefit is somewhat variable from person to person but I think we would all agree that the following would be (almost universally) seen as benefits: Reduced costs of operation which LL then passes on to the users of SL (e.g. cheaper land, lower cost for premium, cheaper $L, etc) Performance improvements e.g. Less lag, faster/smoother region crossings, faster avatar loading, faster texture loading, more reliable teleports, etc Better MP (faster operation, better search, etc) Elimination of bugs I'm sure there are plenty of others, but the above list gives you an idea what people would generally view as 'benefits' and I'm not going to bother thinking up a huge list. Obviously penalties would be things like increases costs to the users, performance loss, etc. Parenthetically ... I'm well aware that performance is also heavily influenced by the client, and the hardware upon which the client is running (which the cloud migration has no impact on). Don't waste my time and yours pointing that out because it is not relevant. Equally I'm well aware that infrastructure migration can't have any impact on most bugs directly. Again it's not relevant. The reason these things are irrelevant is the actual point of this entire post: For the user, the migration to the cloud means exactly nothing until it makes our SL better in some way. Permit me to illustrate with an analogy: You buy your bread from a local bakery. It is grade A bread which costs you 1 money unit per loaf. The owner of the bakery changes to a different flour which is cheaper. The taste of the bread remains the same, the quality of the bread remains the same, the price per loaf remains 1 money unit and the savings go into the pocket of the owner as increased profit. The change of flour therefore has zero impact on you as a customer. Someone is bound to point out that the migration to the cloud makes operations more scalable. The idea being that LL can spin up new servers quickly. But that's a benefit for LL ... and until that flows on as a benefit to the users of SL, it remains irrelevant. Another argument might be that the new infrastructure will make it easier for LL to improve things in the future. Again, that's irrelevant until things improve. Now it's demonstrable that the migration has had a negative impact on the users ... LL were assigning resources to the migration process rather than assigning them to other projects which would improve our SL, but that is an inevitable consequence of such a project and is unavoidable, so I'm not going to kick them over that. So it boils down to this: If the benefits of migrating to the cloud are only benefits to LL, and they don't flow on to us as users in some tangible way ... then the cloud migration is irrelevant to us.

It's axiomatic that as technology develops we see society react to that development and eventually reform around it. I use society in the broad sense ... including government, the people, organisations ... the whole enchilada as it were. Historically there has been a percentage of society which has resisted technology for a variety of reasons. The Industrial Revolution had examples of workers committing sabotage for instance. The machine age, therefore, must be view not only from the perspective of the technology, but from the perspective of society. Or to put it another way - the technology is not the only change which needs to be viewed as part of the age ... the shift in society as a result of that technology is just as significant. A lot of people believe that we are deep into the information age, or that we're actually moving into a new age. This is, I believe, quite wrong as it fails to address the fact that society has not absorbed and adjusted to the changes of the digital age in any meaningful way. There's no question that we are in the information age, but at the moment we're still in the early stages ... as can be seen by the fact that the legal systems around the world are not even remotely suited to addressing the issues which the information age has brought to society. Nor have we (as a society) developed the mechanisms which are necessary to function in the information age. It would be easy for me to use a contemporary example, given what's been going on in the world recently ... but I'll try for something a little less controversial: The shape of the Earth. If you fire up your browser of choice and go to youtube you will find a quite amazing number of videos proclaiming that they prove that the earth is flat. Now I'm not going to bother going into these proofs, suffice to say that there are also a number of videos debunking everything claimed by the flat-earthers. It's quite interesting viewing, but it can also leave you with an unsettling feeling that humanity is getting dumber at an accelerating rate. Let's not discuss the Reverse-Flynn effect as that would derail the topic btw. I suggest, therefore, that one of the mechanisms necessary for society to embrace the information age is the automatic tendency to verify information before accepting it as fact. Unfortunately, in the past few years, we've seen that far too large a percentage of the human race is either unwilling, or incapable of doing so. I offer, as proof of my contention, another example. Again it would be easy to use a contemporary example, but I'm trying to avoid having this thread get drowned in political rhetoric, so I'll go with something a bit older: Lysenkoism. For those of you who don't know here's the lede from the wikipedia article And here are the effects (same source) What you may not know is that in 2016 a paper was published in which details current attempts to defend and resurrect Lysenkoism. For those who don't want to read the paper, I'll summarise that we're seeing an attempt to rewrite history and science for political purposes. The only way to address this is for the people who are being presented this disinformation to examine it and compare it to opposing information. Unfortunately ... right now, we're seeing moves to eliminate inconvenient facts through deplatforming and (let's be honest) duplicitous 'fact checking'. Unproven (and unprovable) claims abound on the 'net ... and pointing out the flaws in those claims gets one a quick trip to the digital gulag. (Speaking of which ... did you know that in 2018 Students at Goldsmiths University in London described Gulags as places of compassionate rehabilitation? How's THAT for disinformation.) To support my contention that we have a history of rejecting information based on what we know to be true (which may well be wrong) I offer the story of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. These two researchers received the Nobel Prize in 2005 for research they carried out in the 1980s. You can look them up, but the short version is that Marshall and Warren were the researchers who showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) plays a major role in causing many peptic ulcers. To give you some more information ... the first paper wherein they presented their research was rejected in 1983 by the Gastroenterological Society of Australia. At the time decades of medical doctrine held that ulcers were caused primarily by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid. Now we know that medical doctrine was wrong. The reality is that, if the Information Age is to be a positive for humanity, then two things are necessary. Society will need to be based on critical thinking ... the ability and willingness to examine information presented to you to ascertain if it's consistent and provable. The second thing is the freedom for information to propagate without interference. And this brings me back to youtube and the flat earth theory, to illustrate the point. The people who are making the flat earth videos are going against conventional knowledge. But so were Marshall and Warren. So it's necessary that they (anyone who is opposing conventional knowledge) be permitted to do so ... because they may just be right. However it's equally important that people who have evidence that disproves any incorrect information out there be able to present their information so as to correct the record. Then it's up to the people who are being offered those opposing informations to think about it critically and decide for themselves. Until we achieve that, then society will not have adjusted to the information age. Whether or not we will is still up for debate.

Ah - I follow. I was actually chatting with a friend in-world about this a bit earlier, and he made the point that he never pays any attention to the forums other than the technical ones ... scripting, that sort of thing. It makes sense.

That's easy to explain. My blocklist is currently 3 pages. It's made up of the following groups: Racists and Bigots. Anyone who claims that any group is inherently X because of the color of their skin. Where X could be anything from 'criminal' to 'privileged'. I spent years discussing this bigotry with it's proponents on reddit, and not one of them ever acknowledged the countless ways their bias has been debunked or argued in good faith (see the next section). I gave up reddit as a result, and I have no desire to read the same hatred here. People who do not discuss in good faith. If someone has displayed a frequent tendency to mislead or misrepresent as a means of defending their position, then what they have to say isn't worth reading. This includes people who use all the fallacies (both formal and informal) ... I've no interest in bad faith arguments. Hypocrites. An excellent example is this: If someone is defending an action taken by one group, but condemning the same action taken by another group ... they are hypocrites and frankly I've had enough of their bias too. Now let me point out that (a) I don't block someone based on one post ... they need to be consistent in their asshattery and (b) unlike many I'm aware that there are such things a context and nuance and I take that into consideration before I decide someone needs to spend the rest of their existence in my bitbucket. And yes, that's a very solipsist point of view ... but it amuses me. And just to clarify - it's not always politics, philosophy or the like that gets a person ignored. There's one person on my ignore list that I never saw express a political opinion ... but they absolutely met the criteria for failing to argue in good faith. YMMV ... but, while this may sound elitist, I have spent more than enough of my time dealing with people who are full of hatred and/or full of manure and I no longer intend to waste my time in doing so.

Well that's pretty definitive. Thanks :)

I tend to agree with you that it's unlikely that it's a mesh body ... the background of the picture behind the 'model' being different to the background behind the bike made me suspect so. But as Lillith mentioned - there are niche bodies (for example 9s) which have exaggerated features and it seemed to me that body could fall in that category so it was worth a post.

Prefix: 1. I'm not sure if this is the correct forum for this post. If it's not, it's not for a lack of trying to figure where it should go. 2. I'm linking to an MP listing. The MP listing contains semi nudity and reference to things which might offend. If you think you might be distressed by a reference to non-consensual sex just don't click on the link. Ok - with that out of the way onto the meat of the post. A couple of weeks ago I noticed an MP listing. In it is what appears to be a mesh body (possibly with an attached head) but I cannot identify it. I reached out to the owner of the shop but haven't had a response, so now I'm throwing it open to the public to see if anyone can identify the body, or perhaps who knows that it's not a mesh body at all. Here's the MP listing in question. Thanks in Advance. Tawny