Madelaine McMasters

Jeffrey, you're quite right that everything here is recorded, for all to see. Ultimately, that may become a problem for you. KarenMichelle's response to you was both heartfelt and appropriate. We do operate as a team here, and we welcome new members. We all get joy from helping people, including each other. And all of us enjoy learning. Outside of making mistakes on my own, my friends here in Answers have been the best resource for SL knowledge I have. We'd be happy to have you with us, but your attitude makes that difficult. Although we generally dislike the RIC button, as you elevate the tension here, it will become more attractive. Eventually this will be resolved. Nobody is in a better position than you to determine what that resolution will be.

Hi Dawn, More than ten years ago, Hank Ramos published the scripts for a Touring Balloon in the SL Wiki. If flying in a balloon makes you dizzy, just wait till you dive into the scripts! I think the balloon is pretty close in function to what you want. I imagine there are similar products available in the Marketplace if you don't feel like tackling this challenge. But if you do tackle it, you know where to find us. I've got hypoallergenic glue to re-attach the hair you'll pull out, and the rest of the Answers denizens probably have actual answers. Good luck!

Hi Klariz, KarenMichelle has addressed the most important questions you've asked. I'm just going to jump in with some commentary about the wisdom of Linden Lab selling advertising space on their web properties. In a word, the practice of doing so is... foolish. It dilutes the Second Life brand (not that there's any substance left in it by now) by giving control of the brand image to others. Over the years I've seen banner ads by competing virtual worlds. Can you imagine Microsoft allowing Apple banner ads on their sites? Your confusion over seeing ads for mmook on SL web pages is understandable. LL's allowance of them is not. Good luck.

I don't see a future for group headgear play. That's just too much cognitive dissonance. I feel like a curmudgeon when discussing the future of immersive VR. It's swimming against the mobile tide at a time when "sitting is the new smoking". If you watch teens, though they may be texting like crazy, they're still roaming the streets in packs, just like they did the day the first street was invented. I think the near future holds more promise for technology to invade the real world than for humans to invade virtual worlds.

LeonardoMyst wrote: I think it even stretches to MMOs. My first MMOs were Neocron and Star Wars Galaxies, both of which had player housing, clothing and furniture. Both were also very atmospheric, with you living in areas that were beautifully designed and populated with both players and npcs. Virtual life could never replace real life, but the memories you make in it are just as real. I have several places I am fond of that never existed in physical form. Something I would like to see is a program that instead of uploading an an avatar into a virtual world, you are able to create your own home or decorate a purchased blueprint/template that's stored locally on your computer. When you're logged off, the server only shows the exterior with shut/locked doors and windows. When you log in, it uploads the interior of the home and you can venture out or have visitors enter. And then it would need to be something that's not tied to any one service provider so that each person can have a different server they use. Kinda like internet or cell phones, but connecting virtually instead. And then slowly modify internet pages to be more interactive. Project Gutenberg could be a library, youtube could be a cinema... etc... You're right about the memories we make here being just as real. I've had to bite my tongue several times, as I was on the verge of describing to a RL friend an experience I had in SL. It would be hard to explain how I'd spent an afternoon lounging in an active volcano. It is currently possible to script a home to change its appearance when you log out, so that the doors close and lock and the lights go out. Upon log-in, the house would come to life. That would require a full-perm or self built structure, but it can be done. I have a set of simple firelogs that catch fire when one or two specific avatars are within range. I built those logs on a whim and was surprised by the emotional impact they have. And I think this marks a difference between SL and RL. In RL, much of the world is unintentional. In SL, everything is the result of "intelligent design". ;-).

irihapeti wrote: Coby Foden wrote: One "Log In" button was perfectly enough for me. :smileyhappy: I don't quite understand what has been the "bright" idea with these four separate login buttons. :matte-motes-frown: according to what I read on the blogs LL said in the beta period that this login screen improve their download and immediate retention rate for new accounts by about 4-5% i think that meant there was a improvement in the numbers of new people who actual logged in after downloading bc was more clear to them how to actual log in and go places Can the middle Log-In button can show more than "My Home"? Is that for a list of favorites? If not, it's silly to have a drop down. These alternatives make more sense to me...

Tari Landar wrote: I wouldn't believe any of what you hear, personally, because, well, we all know how that game telephone works.

Tex Monday wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: I haunt the forums, as they're accessible from my mobile devices. I can participate in conversations while sitting on my RL roof, waiting for my arm to regain strength after 10 minutes of brushing on new paint, or while waiting in my friend's little room at the care center for her to awake from a drug induced stupor as she, in turn, waits for a new liver. When I do get in-world, I stand on the ottoman in front of my fireplace and IM friends to distract them from whatever they might be doing so they can shower me with attention. ;-). And burn away their sins in your fireplace https://www.flickr.com/photos/58030004@N06/sets/72157626488154798/with/10175499625/ (Edited to add the entire album, not just my photo) :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: It's a valuable service, don't you think? Who doesn't need room for new ones?

irihapeti, your story made me grin from ear to ear. Richard Dawkins, a proponent of both physical determinism and free will, was once asked if he saw that as an inconsistency in his views? His reply? "I sort of do. Yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable." Faith is like that. My SL skybox (where sinners come to immolate) has a little "monster door" in it. My RL childhood bedroom (just a few steps away from me as I type this) also has one. When I was little, I was told that the bedroom monsters others found so scary were actually quite timid, and that they could only enter my bedroom through that little door (made of cardboard, just over a foot tall). My only communication with the monsters was via exchanges of items through the door. Before going to bed, I'd open it (which revealed nothing but black paper taped to the wall) and leave a piece of candy. In the morning, I'd find a huge dust bunny. Then I'd leave a penny and find the innards of a broken clock. These exchanges went on until I moved away for college and marriage. After my divorce, I moved back in with my parents, just in time to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Ouch. One night, feeling a little nostalgic, I opened the monster door. Nothing. I placed a penny behind the door and went to sleep. It was a silly thing to do, and I forgot about it. A few days later, I opened the door to retrieve the penny. In its place was a little pile of sawdust, American Cherry. Dad's long gone, but in my dining room sits a very heavy table, capable of seating eight. Dad and I started work on it when I was in college, but we got distracted and the slab top gathered dust for years. It's done now, the last thing Dad and I worked on together. It's made entirely of... American Cherry. Faith has its place.

Have you ever wondered why people... Carve pumpkins? Make snowmen? Build sandcastles? The journey is the reward.

Coby Foden wrote: • If the avatar looks and acts like a child, it is child avatar • If the avatar looks and acts like an adult, it is adult avatar Yep. I was going to say that I'm bothered by avatars (whether SL or RL) that look like an adult and act like a child. But I do that, so that's not what I mean. You know what I mean. ;-).

Janelle Darkstone wrote: The picture of the family all wearing headsets and ignoring each other even though they're all within arm's reach? The cat appears to be leaving. He's the only one with any sense. He's actually returning to his room, where he'll log in and have virtual sex with everyone in the family. What's not clear from the picture is whether he's playing human, or they're playing cat.

kiramanell wrote: Backwards compatibility -- often lobsidedly thrown in our faces here as something holding the company back -- is, in the rest of the world, the corner stone to staying in business. That's simply not true. Read "The Innovators Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen for a compelling treatise on the perils in your belief. Look at Microsoft, and the history of Windows. With maybe a few small exceptions, a program written for XP, back in the day, will, to date, still run on Windows 8.1 just fine. In fact, if Microsoft had broken with backwards compatibility after XP, Windows would be dead as a doornail by now. Others have offered ample examples of retirement of products and technologies by Microsoft. I'll argue that their failure to change more radically over the years has placed them at a competitive disadvantage. How well has their insistence on retaining desktop compatibility in the mobile environment worked for them? The same could be said for a company like Intel. Why do you think they're still on the x86 architecture!? The cost of retaining X86 compatibility is low, the benefits are high. The inverse applies for LL and SL. To stay with the XP analogy, there's technically no valid reason the New World couldn't come with a 'SL 1.0 Compatibility Mode' too. You'd need to have demonstrated significant technical expertise for anyone to take your assessment seriously. There are numerous technical reasons (scalability and portability are two) to abandon large portions of SL's design. Especially since the code for it is, naturally, already there. The recipe for New Coke is already there, why not reuse it? Not doing so is simply a choice. Yes, and as explained elsewhere, a good one. And, much like there's no such thing as being 'a little pregnant,' likewise there's no such thing as 'a little backwards compatible.' Either you are, in full, or you are simply not. Expressing this degree of certainty over clearly unsupportable claims makes you a flashing target for ridicule. Backwards compatibility has always been, and will always be, something that is done by degree. My new cordless electric drill is backwards compatible with all of my previous drill bits, and none of my previous batteries. Like I've argued before, half a home = no home: if only half the structure can be ported, I will effectively not have ported the home at all. This statement is both wrong and of questionable bearing on the topic at hand. But I'll endeavor to draw a parallel that's both right and relevant. My RL home is a mix of the original farm cottage (now my family room) and two major rebuilds over the last hundred years. The current house is five times the size of the original. Oher than the beautiful fieldstone basement walls of the original cottage (which is the only part of the basement that ever leaks), there's not a day I don't wish the remainder was gone. The stud and rafter spacing is erratic, the lumber is not of standard dimension, nothing is square, nothing is straight. The proportions of the room are for a time when men were as short as women are today. I fit, but my neighborhood handyman has to watch his head (and his coat pockets, but that's another story). The millwork placed in the home by my Father (with my help!) during the last addition has been the subject of serious admiration for nearly 40 years. My colorful vocabulary is largely the result of Dad's regrets over trying to retain compatibility with anything in the old cottage (made by strangers) and, to a lesser extent, the first addition (made by Dad and his grandfather). The worlds largest tech company, Apple, is infamous for dropping compatibilty (MacDraw, AppleWorks, Final Cut). They're also famous for keeping it (68L->PPC->Intel). Compatibility is a double edged sword. The smart know how to wield it. I think the problem here is that, understandably, you are thinking like an SL customer. Linden Lab, on the other hand and equally understandably, is thinking like a business. Five years ago, two design teams sat down to figure out what to do next. One team, a handful, decided to craft from scratch an engaging sandbox virtual world that could run across desktop, console and mobile platforms. The other team, 300 strong, decided to leverage a great deal of legacy programming and infrastructure to improve upon an already successful sandbox virtual world. Five years later, the little team has grown to 40, has 40 million paying customers, and has been purchased for US$2.5 Billion. That's $62.5 million per team member. Welcome to Minecraft. That team of 300? It's now a team of 200 and has less revenue today than when it embarked on its bold journey of compatibility. I haven't looked lately, but a few years ago I found that this team had attracted total venture capital in the vicinity of $75 million. Welcome to SL. Today, two design teams are sitting down to figure out what to do next.

Mornin', Hippie! The local garden center set out their last few saplings for free last night. I'll bury 'em and see what happens next spring... Happy Thursday, Kids!!!

Gavin Hird wrote: The impression SL2 or whatever it is called has been made through the multiple "chats with", transcripts and direct postings made by LL on blogs and web sites since the information was first slipped. If you go back in this thread you will see I have corrected people many times saying it is an entirely new product, and have been flamed for it multiple times. What you call it (new version, vs new product) has multiple implications for the legalese too, such as the TOS, but I will not go into that here as it will just lead to another lenghty TOS discussion. Okay, just to make sure I'm understanding you. You are accusing others of being close to dishonest, not LL. But that brings me another confusion. How would LL legalese, such as the TOS, be affected by what other people call the new world?

Gavin Hird wrote: MB Robonaught wrote: Has anyone considered that the reason Linden Labs won't be allowing inventory transfers is from incompatible technologies between the current SL and the upcoming SL2 and not some grand conspiracy to destroy inventories? Yes, and I am perferctly happy with that. What I find close to dishonest is when they call it a new version, when in fact it is an etirely new product where the only thing you can move is your account and LL holding. A new version implies backward compatibility (as is customary for all new versions of software) or at a minimum conversion routines for old data/content. Ebbe's announcment of the new world is quoted below. Where in it does he call it a new version? And you see that in the second paragraph, he's up front about about the expected incompatibilities. Can you provide an example of where LL has made the statement you've indicted? ---- Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king. This is a significant focus for Linden Lab, and we are actively hiring to help with this ambitious effort. We believe that there is a massive opportunity ahead to carry on the spirit of Second Life while leveraging the significant technological advancements that have occurred since its creation, as well as our unparalleled experience as the provider of the most successful user-created virtual world ever. The next generation virtual world will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don’t want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start. That doesn’t mean you necessarily won’t be able to bring parts of your Second Life over, just that our priority in building the next generation platform is to create an incredible experience and enable stunningly high-quality creativity, rather than ensuring that everything could work seamlessly with everything created over Second Life’s 11 year history. Does this mean we’re giving up on Second Life? Absolutely not. It is thanks to the Second Life community that our virtual world today is without question the best there is, and after 11 years we certainly have no intention of abandoning our users nor the virtual world they continually fill with their astounding creativity. Second Life has many years ahead of it, and in addition to improvements and new developments specifically for Second Life, we think that much of the work we do for the next generation project will also be beneficial for Second Life. It’s still very early days for this new project, and as we forge ahead in creating the next generation virtual world, we’ll share as much as we can. If we had one message to share with Second Life users about this new project at this point, it would be: don’t panic, get excited! Again, Second Life isn’t going away, nor are we ceasing our work to improve it. But, we’re also working on something that we think will truly fulfill the promise of virtual worlds that few people understand as well as Second Life users." ----

And there's still some life left in good ol' prims... http://ayumicassini.blogspot.com/2009/07/ultimate-guide-to-prim-twisting.html

Welcome (almost) to Second Life, raihaneh! Even though you think your graphics drivers are up-to-date, they may not be. Here's a link to AMD's driver update page... http://support.amd.com/en-us/download Your graphics card is on the low end of what's capable of running SL, but it does meet the minimum system requirements, so you should be able to log in once your driver issues are resolved. If your drivers truly are up-to-date, or you bring them up-to-date and you're still unable to log-in, return to your question and edit it (via "Options") over there on the right to give us an update and some more information, such as the OS you're running, CPU, etc. Good luck!

Hi callen, That's not much to go on, but it does sound a li'l like a graphics throttling problem that happens if your card is being overworked and the cooling system isn't up to snuff. Under such conditions, after launching SL, temperatures start to rise and the operating system will throttle back the graphics system clock to maintain a safe temperature. Eventually, the system is thottled so severely that the viewer crashes. So, make sure your cooling system isn't clogged with dust bunnies, and try dialing back your graphics settings to put less of a load on the hardware. If everything is clean and dialing back the graphics delays or eliminates the crashing, you might try a laptop cooler (if you've got a laptop) or repositioning your desktop computer to achieve better airflow. Good luck!

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Ceka Cianci wrote: Actually Siddhartha Gautama was not religious,his way of teaching was agnostic. He didn't teach about gods..He didn't teach belief or disbelief of them..He sought out the cure for human suffering. He taught that knowledge and meditation was the key to enlightenment to atain Nirvana. (Bleh, kept hitting enter and triggerin mah post!!) hehehe Buddhism is a religion - it just doesn't have a personalized deity, which is no requirement for a religion. This is my point - there are many, many more ways of religious thinking than the traditional Abrahamic way that many in Western society assume. I think of some of the athiests in these forums as "Sunday-school athiests" because the God they don't beileve in is the God of Western Sunday-school and they aren't familiar with other concepts. Personally, I'm comfortable using the word God but I use it to refer to that which is infinite, eternal and representing the organizational structure of the universe. I don't think of it as being separate from the "natural" world and I don't see it as having an overall intellect or decision-making process that our monkey brains could recognize as such. A student of religion would say that I'm a panthiest, where God is the whole of existence and the objects of we think of as the natural world are aspects of it. I also don't believe in the supernatural - however, that doesn't mean I don't disbelieve in things like ghosts or mystical experiences because aspects of them are common enough in societies that there may be a common source we can't comprehend - however, if there are such things they'd be part and parcel of the "natural" world along with everything else. . I don't use the word God (unless I define it to my liking) because I stop a little earlier in your sentence than you do... I don't think of it as being separate from the "natural" world and I don't see it as having an overall intellect or decision-making process. To me, everything just is. Just what it all is I don't, and may never, know. That's okay. There may be an organizing intelligence that's unrecognizable to us. If so, I don't know what value there is in presuming that's the case... or not. We'll find out when we find out, if we find out. As for ghosts, mystical experiences, miracles and UFOs, it's all about likelyhood. And here I'll defer to Richard Feynman for an explanation... Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said “I don’t think there are flying saucers”. So my antagonist said, “Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it’s impossible?” “No”, I said, “I can’t prove it’s impossible. It’s just very unlikely”. At that he said, “You are very unscientific. If you can’t prove it impossible then how can you say that it’s unlikely?” But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all.

Perrie Juran wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: When I don heels that change my foot shape, my elevation increases. I imagine this mechanism could be coopted for other uses. Pick the appropriate foot shaper for the desired elevation and attach it. The foot shape really only defines the shape of the foot and raising the slider to 100 is how you shape a foot for high heels. The effect on height is really about equivelant to standing on your tip toes. It does not elevate you from the ground. Platform shoes really are an illusion. You hide the foot with an alpha and to have the soul of the shoe on the ground you raise it up higher on the Ava. If you take just the shoe off your toes are still on the ground. Okay then, if that hack won't lift the avatar more than a smidge, and the only way to lift an avatar is to build an animation with a z-offset for the hips, then I'm going to guess that attachments that can adjust the z-offset do so by loading one of many animations that are stored in the thing. If you want to cover a range of 0 to 1m elevation in 0.1m steps, you'll need eleven animations, all identical except for the z-offset.

Ceka, I think I've linked this before, and if I did, it was probably in a discussion where you were present. You're one of the people that comes to mind when my mind goes wandering in search of beautiful vistas. I recall you talking about riding your horse through the country side. Here's Denis Dutton's marvelous theory of beauty... A minute into his talk (1:10 in the video) Denis introduced Van Gogh's "Starry Night", which brings me back to this...

Good morning, Hippie. I got up before dawn this morning, and caught the setting eclipsed moon and rising sun simultaneously! The trees are turning. Here's a leaf for you... Happy Wednesday, Kids!!!

Ceka Cianci wrote: Actually Siddhartha Gautama was not religious,his way of teaching was agnostic. He didn't teach about gods..He didn't teach belief or disbelief of them..He sought out the cure for human suffering. He taught that knowledge and meditation was the key to enlightenment to atain Nirvana. (Bleh, kept hitting enter and triggerin mah post!!) hehehe When I was a kid, we got new hardwood flooring in our house. Dad laid most of it, but some monks helped. They all worked in silence. Mom would deliver coffee and snacks, and sometimes ask Dad "where are you", to which he'd respond "Saipan" or "Mars" or "on the head of a pin". I asked him about that. "I'm traveling in my head, my hands don't need me." I talked to the monks. They were doing the same thing. And I realized I did it when swinging or flying a kite. I'd block out everything and go traveling. I loved sitting on my kite up in the clouds, having picnics with the birds. I think we were one cloud over from Nirvana. ;-).

Hi Wing, Some old AOs won't work in no-script areas, and others won't start up in no-script areas. Make sure you attach and reset your AO in an area that allows scripts. Good luck!