Theresa Tennyson

Here's my thinking about buying computing equipment for the best value. Let's say you're looking at three computers - Computer A costs $300; it's the cheapest one you can get and is just barely adequate for what you need it to do. Computer B costs $600; it's a middle-of-the-road computer that will do what you need well and has the potential to do more, but isn't the top of the performance charts. Computer C costs $1200; it's top-end and has the best-performing parts available when you buy it. Realistically it has performance that you don't need but you're considering it for the future and for maximum service life. With Computer A, you may find that in 2 years it's obsolete and you need something new already. Cost per year: $150 With Computer B, lets say that it becomes obsolete in five years. Cost per year: $120. With Computer C, in five years it still has the ability to do what you need. But it's very possible that in the interim new features and architecture came out that weren't on the radar when it was built but by year eight are basically required, and this computer just can't deliver them because it wasn't made to. The extra years of performance you were trying to get aren't available, and you need to replace it in year 8. Cost per year: $150. The trick is trying to find the level of performance that will give you the most "bang for the buck."

What I'd recommend is that you take a limited number high-quality products and then get them placed at places like FabFree Station, Free Dove and other places that have a reputation for good freebies from quality merchants. Include information in your store and then sell the rest of your products at prices that will allow you to make some money but are substantially lower than the big names already out there. If you have in-world presence you also should participate in hunts, and try to interest bloggers in what you have to offer. If you "sell" everything for free you don't have a store, you have a charity. Charities are wonderful things but that doesn't sound like what you want your store to be.

Sergio Upshaw wrote: I agree over anything, rules ...procedure ...all...but An Avatar with empty profile, no pay info used, sell items full perms... is so easy understand not is the creator ... most for who like us is not a newbiee Right now the item copybotted buyed can be easly replaced by legal tool allowe to duplicate full perms items, and also if i won the DCMA this item will be all over inworld with different creators... and i cant at this point search all over sl to found it...right? so 1 day of delay can destroy the business of the entire community of sl builder My suggest is linden lab have to put a rule over marketplace, as i cant buy mainland if not premium, the rule must be also i cant sell stuffs on marketplace if not premium... This can be the real solution... You seem to have the opinion that if SL residents have the choice between getting something for free which most will quickly figure out is an illegal copy and a legitimate item which they have to pay a small fee for they'll automatically choose the free item. History suggests that this is not the case. Copybotters have been in SL for years and some of the most frequently copybotted merchants are still some of the most successful ones. Your legitimate house is both very reasonably priced and much better looking than the (alleged) copy. Most of the SL public who'd be willing to pay for an item in the first place would realize that. It's also entirely possible that this merchant wasn't the original copybotter - they don't seem very bright and may have gotten full-perm copybotted items and not realized what they were.

Sorry, any "land" you own in SL will have some sort of recurring fee. Actually in RL the same thing happens; the fees are called property taxes.

The thing that jumps out at me is that your Nvidia drivers are ancient - I checked and your card should be able to use the current Nvidia driver which is 310.70. Yours look to be 186.34 which were from 2009. The first thing I'd do is go to the Nvidia web site and get the current driver.

If you're a premium member and don't own any other land, owning this piece of land will require you to pay an extra $75 US dollars per month on top of your regular membership. As it happens, this piece of land is a very inefficient size for the fee schedule. If it was only a little smaller (9578 square meters) you'd only have to pay an extra $40 a month for it if you created a group to buy it (groups get a 10% bonus on the amount of land they can own per fee tier.) On the other hand, if you really want this land the $75 extra you'll pay will allow you to own almost double that amount of land before you get pushed up into the next tier bracket.

There was only one mandatory update to the SL viewer recently and that was a couple of months ago. It's possible something in your configuration files got corrupted when it tried to install and the system isn't recognizing your installation properly. I'm not familiar enough about Macs to tell you where to look for the configuration but someone here probably is. As far as the graphics problems, do you by any chance have a Mac laptop that has automatic graphics switching between integrated graphics for low-power applications and a separate Nvidia or ATI/AMD graphics chip for graphics-intensive programs? There have been problems with SL thinking this type of computer only has the integrated graphics so the graphics won't run using the good graphics chip, which would result in low-quality graphics. Again, I need to defer to Mac experts for a work-around if this is the case.

It sounds like you've been using graphics settings that are lower than your card is capable of. The upgrade automatically reset a lot of people's settings to what's considered optimum for their cards, which in your case probably involved turning "Lighting and Shadows" on. This setting looks beautiful when the surroundings are set up taking it into account but in some cases it can make things look too bright if there are a lot of strong light sources like a lot of places put up to look better with older graphics settings. For instance, facelights can be obnoxiously bright with it turned on. Go to "Preferences" - "Graphics", click the "Advanced" button if you haven't already and then turn off "Lighting and Shadows." That should change things back to what you're used to. To get rid of "windlight", also turn off "Atmospheric Shaders."

Wrath Warcliffe wrote: I have my shoe base on, i have 2 pairs of shoes, both have a shoe base, if i take my shoes off, the "halo" goes away, with or without my shoe base on.This happens with both pairs of shoes which leades me to believe its my shoes. These are all shoes from before the mesh based clothing came out. Those shoes have ridiculously large invisiprims - an old way of hiding avatar body parts - for what they are. If they're modifiable you can shrink the invisiprims; if they aren't and it bothers you, there are a number of stores you can get almost identical shoes very inexpensively that won't have that problem.

You've got "Lighting and Shadows" turned on, which is the reason you can't see invisiprims - "Lighing and Shadows" changed the way the rendering system works and they intentionally stopped invisiprims from working how they used to. The jagged edges are because you're not getting any anti-aliasing. "Lighting and Shadows" uses a different system of anti-aliasing that might not be supported with Intel graphics. I'm surprised you're getting usable frame rates with a Celeron and Intel graphics with those settings. Try turning "Lighting and Shadows" off, then go to "Hardware Settings" and setting your anti-aliasing to "2x".

All avatars are basically the same from a performance standpoint - it's all a matter of what's attached to them. If the avatar of an account created in 2003 and one created five minutes ago are wearing the same items and clothing they'll perform exactly the same when they enter a sim. Older avatars tend to have larger inventories and may still wear older attachments that are less efficient but there's nothing fundamentally different in the avatar itself. This rumor is downright bizarre.

It will help us a lot if you edit your original post and describe your laptop's configuration and exactly where it's falling short of the requirements. Thanks!

Go into "Preferences" - "Graphics/Advanced" - "Hardware" and turn off "Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects." That's a setting that traditionally causes problems with older ATI video.

Sounds like you're trying to use "edit" to adjust pathfinding attributes. Pathfinding is complicated and has a separate menu under "Build" - "Pathfinding" - "Linksets." You'll want to study up on Pathfinding if you want to get serious about it. I don't remember if Linden Homes have floor prims or not - if they do you'll probably want to put down separate transparent prims on your floor and set them to "Walkable." Your dog should get around just fine outside of your house though. Servers are set up so that pathfinding characters will work reasonably on bare land by default.

Reem Lorefield wrote: Why do contributors to these forums slice sentences from posts and comment only on those sentences and ignore the rest. One sentence or even a paragraph may not reflect the meaning of the post in general. I do not say rules do not exist ...that is really silly... I still say that most people entering photo contests in SL do so for the fun.....and they assume that the photograph should be taken by the equipment contained in the Second Life viewer. Use your technical process skills and expensive software and equipment to produce creative imagery.... but use it please for personal albums and advertising products if you are unfortunate enough to have to make money in SL. What about GIMP, which is free?

Personally when I search for something I always start off on "Everything" just because that's what it defaults to. If I'm looking for a place I'll use the "Places" button which has the icon of a landmark. Have you found anyone else who assumes all places would be under "Destinations"?

Ricky40 wrote: I have been noticing recently when I look at the map that there are sims missing from right down the middle of the old main continent? Is this true or just a glitch, and if it is true, what on earth happened? That's a glitch with the map that turns up from time to time. Those regions are still there, but the map server hasn't updated the "tiles" (thumbnail pictures of the region) for some reason so they're not available. When this happens the "missing" regions form stripes like you're seeing.

If you're wearing traditional-style shoes where the wearable object is just a shoe that's worn on your avatar's foot after it's been shaped by the "shoe" clothing item your ankles are probably going to look a little unfortunate if you're wearing heels. It's a limitation of the avatar mesh. Shoes that include feet usually look better in the ankle area but they have their own shortcomings.

You don't actually pay for land itself, you pay for the ABILITY TO OWN land. The $15 is for the ability to own land up to the amount you had previously. To reduce your costs, you have to go into your account and change your tier level to the lowest that will support the amount of land you still have; it doesn't change automatically after you abandon land.

The only thing your HD4000 chip is really useful for is streaming video, which isn't a big advantage in SL. It's poor at 3D calculation so SL is using almost entirely the GTX285. It also sounds like you have an old video card in a new motherboard - hardware and software usually work together most reliably when they're all about the same age. The "notches" under "Preferences" are far too coarse for fine adjustment of video settings - click on the "Advanced" button and use the individual settings. In particular, turn down your draw distance and don't have the viewer calculate shadows when you're in an area with a lot of avatars.

It's called Unicode - it's a series of special characters meant for languages that use different alphabets. You can call them up from within the Viewer. I'm not exactly sure. But I should warn you that there are a lot of people who DESPISE the practice of using fancy fonts to make your display name look exotic because it makes them very difficult to read. If you want to be approached with respect you might want to hold off.

VRimmersion wrote: Hi, Im doing a research paper on brands in Second Life. It would be greatly appreciated and a massive help if you could answer a few questions for me. 1. Is it possible to create a successful brand in Second Life today? 2. What do you think makes a brand successful in a virtual world? 3. Have you ever visited islands in Second Life created by brands such as IBM, American Apparel or Coca-Cola? 4. Can you describe your experience in these brand environments? 5. Do you think your experience of a brand in Second LIfe effects your opinion of that brand in real life? Thank you!! 1. It's entirely possible to create a successful Second Life brand within Second Life. However, there is little connection between RL brands and SL brands because the requirements and values are fundamentally different. Mercedes-Benz' ability to make real-life automobiles doesn't translate to an ability to make Second Life vehicles. You wouldn't think someone having the ability to create a digital mesh or sculpted prims and write a script could be able to manufacture a RL automobile, why would the reverse be true?. 2. A brand can be successful in the virtual world if it answers the wants and needs of the users of that virtual world within that virtual world. 3. I briefly visited the ghost of the American Apparel store. 4. It was an slightly interesting reminder of what happens when people with a RL skillset try to operate in a virtual world without having the required skillset for a completely different environment - i.e. a vision of hubris and failure. 5. Only if the SL presence could have a connection to the RL product. For instance, if a studio making a computer-animated movie created a walkable SL area that featured things from the movie I might be more interested in the movie if I enjoyed the area. Most RL organizations lack the focus on SL that would allow them to compete with creators who are immersed in SL on a daily basis though.

They can be fun to play with if you know what you're gettiing into. Saw them at both LAQ and Redgrave a while ago but they didn't say anything at first - their handler may have been away. Didn't mention being bumped even after I deliberately walked smack into one at full speed. The handler came back in a bit later so my alt got the full spiel. Alts don't have the resources of mains but she decided to help the bot out a LITTLE - she gave her a tampon. Never hurts to be prepared, right? One thing you can do quickly to help make their job a little harder is to post on their feed and tell everyone they're a beggarbot.

Also, if you have more than about 10,000 items in any one folder your viewer may have trouble loading all that information from the server so it will look like you're missing inventory items. They'll still be on the servers but you won't be able to use or interact with them temporarily because your viewer doesn't know they're there. Your viewer downloads the contents of one folder at a time so that many items would download properly if they were split between two or more folders.

Go to "Preferences" - "Graphics/Advanced" - "Hardware" and see if texture compression is turned on. If it is, it will cause that effect in your viewer but the texture itself should look fine if texture compression is turned off.