Madelaine McMasters

Ceka Cianci wrote: godwin time!! i give you.. The Honey Badger!! \o/ Pfft! Eagles rock!... ETA: Ceka? Do you get the feeling we're actually giving examples of the superiority of RL over SL? Nature's World, Nature's Imagination?

Perrie Juran wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: You're cuter than I imagined, Perrie! When I was young, I learned how to unzip and eat bananas by watching monkees at the Milwaukee County Zoo. I'm hoping you know how yourself, but if you don't, you won't be the first fella to learn the technique from a gal. Most Earth People I have observed seemed to have taken their lessons fron snakes. I call your snake and raise you a centipede...

Perrie Juran wrote: <threadjack> I know this really has nothing to do with this thread but after reading a comment in another thread I really needed to get this off my chest. Thank you all for your patience. </threadjack> You're cuter than I imagined, Perrie! When I was young, I learned how to unzip and eat bananas by watching monkees at the Milwaukee County Zoo. I'm hoping you know how yourself, but if you don't, you won't be the first fella to learn the technique from a gal.

There are (at least) two different issues at work here. One is the rendering of complex scenes in which the shortcuts of a world like WoW can't be used. Because of the centralized professional design of the WoW world, textures and geometry are heavily optimized and reused. SL is a mess. Maybe sparse voxel octree technology (SVO) helps there, but it seems to have problems with avatar animation and global illumination (I think because that wants to crawl backwards on the octree). There was a thread here a couple years ago about an Australian company that claimed they were gonna take over the world with their SVO technology. I've not heard a word about them since. The other issue is communication and synchronization of the underlying world information, such as texture/geometry handoff as objects move in-world, animation of objects and avatars, collisions (physics) etc. As Perrie linked, there are numerous ways to skin that cat, none of which scale well with world size and population density. I'd have a much better feeling about Hi-Fidelity's ability to solve these problems if their website didn't look like yet another Rosedale love fest. nVIDIA probably has more people working on SVO than Rosedale will ever attract. What's his batting average been since LL? To his credit, he has wrestled a little venture capital out of Google, and apparently LL.

Trinity Yazimoto wrote: valerie Inshan wrote: Had to post this for you Trin! hahahhahhahhaha yes ! Ah que ... Coucou !!!!! i was totally fan lol thanks Val Wait a doggone minute! First you tell Hippie that coucou means hiya, then you rave about two crazy puppets going wild over naughty (yet observant) little things popping up and yelling "hiya!"??? No, no, no! Those li'l things are yelling exactly what the sane among us would expect them to yell... "You're nuts!". Thank you very much for proving that my understanding of your goofy French language is every bit as good as I think it is.

jwenting wrote: oh, but if you don't believe word for word identically what someone else believes you're of course a heretic and must be burned at the stake... Don't you love the way people interpret religious writings to mean they can do nasty things to other people, and forget that little thing about "turn the other cheek" and "an eye for an eye" (which to me means if I hit someone with a stick he gets to hit me right back, and vice versa). In a little less than six years, we'll learn the truth about "an eye for an eye"... http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/What-happened-in-History-on-this-date/m-p/2099255#M117060

valerie Inshan wrote: Hippie Bowman wrote: Coucou tout le monde! Peace! :D:D Coucou Hippie!!! Bonne journée et gros bisous ! Hippie, if I'm not mistaken, Val just called you a nut and told you to take a journey with Bonnie on either 144 biscuits... or an ugly one. Val, I think you need another vacation...

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: General Ripper, Sir, as an officer in Her Majesty's Air Force, it is my clear duty, under the present circumstances, to issue the recall code, upon my own authority, and bring back the Wing. If you'll excuse me, sir. As we take it easy and wait for those particles to do us proud, I'll have a rootbeer, made with rainwater. Help yourself to whatever you'd like, Peter.

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: IIRC particles targetted at a prim continue on their way to that target, even if the emitter prim changes to another target while they are 'in flight'. That being the case a single emitter can send a stream of particles to each target in turn, cycling through them. Using enough slow particles should mean an apparently-solid line can be drawn to more than one target at a time. Using fewer or faster particles would result in a 'dotted' line, which might be quite aesthetically pleasing. Of course, if I've forgotten how particles behave and in-flight ones turn towards the new target this post is completely wrong! In any case, since particles are client-side artefacts there's no predicting what any particular person will see (YMMV). In my experience, particles, like B-52s commanded by Gen. Jack D. Ripper, can't be recalled once they're set on target. Your idea should work, Peter!

Trinity Yazimoto wrote: Coucou Hippie !!!! dont listen to these pests.... yep coucou is also a bird and also a clock, but we use it daily for saying hiya and its always a nice and kind way to say hello ! Im proud of you Hippie, you are a good student :smileyhappy: for your next lesson : everyone = tout le monde... so you can say coucou tout le monde ! you know, in every classes there are those bad students, indisciplinated that mocks the good students (usually... sometimes the good one is also the most indisciplinated lol... i know what im talking about hehehhehe).... but dont worry, ill give to Maddy and Val more homeworks as punishement...:smileyvery-happy: Pfft! Where I come from, "tout le monde" sounds like what you'd do after eating a bowl of my chili.

valerie Inshan wrote: Good morning Hippie! Big Hump Day hugs to ya! After weeks of terrible heat, it's raining at last, yay!!! How do you like my wellies? Ooooh, perfect! Though I can't see them, I know you're French, so I'll presume your nails are painted to match. I'm half Irish, soo...

Hippie Bowman wrote: Hey everyone! Trinity taught me a new word yesterday. It is coucou and it means hiya. Let me practice! COUCOU EVERYBODY! Peace! Where I come from, it's spelled cuckoo, pronounced "koo koo", and describes most everybody I like.

Nikkesa wrote: ah, sorry; What I want to do is change it so that instead of aligning the vehicles z-axis with the worlds z-axis, I want to be able to align the vehicles z-axis with any vector that I chose. Wondering if this is possible, or if I have to skip the vehicle library all together and make my own version of this... I think you could do this by computing the difference between the vehicle's axis and your desired axis, then using a fraction of that difference vector as VEHICLE_ANGULAR_MOTOR_DIRECTION. That should start the vehicle moving in the direction of your desired axis. The trick will be to stop that motion when the vehicle reaches the target direction. If you start and stop the turn instantaneously, you can use a timer to set the duration of the turn so that you stop on heading. You get a fast start and constant rotation speed by setting a very low (or zero?) VEHICLE_ANGULAR_MOTOR_TIMESCALE and a very long VEHICLE_ANGULAR_MOTOR_DECAY_TIMESCALE. If you divide the difference vector by the desired elapsed time for the turn, and then set a timer for that same time, you should be able to stop the turn just as the vehicle reaches your desired heading. You can probably achieve a quick stop by supplying a motor direction vector of zero with very small (or zero?) VEHICLE_ANGULAR_FRICTION_TIMESCALE. If you want the turn to start and stop smoothly, you could increase the VEHICLE_ANGULAR_MOTOR_TIMESCALE and decrease the VEHICLE_ANGULAR_MOTOR_DECAY_TIMESCALE and play those two parameters against your VEHICLE_ANGULAR_MOTOR_DIRECTION. It should be possible to set the acceleration and deceleration such that one impulse will bring you around to the desired heading without need for a timer event to stop the rotation. If I were going to do this, I'd first get the math working to bring the vehicle around in the proper direction using a small fraction of the difference vector (so you can watch it turn), then play with the timescales to get it to stop correctly. A bit of calculus would probably provide you with the right numbers, but it'll be easier to experiment. Fortunately, once you've found the right timescales, they'll work for any direction change as everything just scales with the difference vector's magnitude. I've probably made this sound easier than it is. Good luck! ;-)

valerie Inshan wrote: Good morning to ya Hippie! LOL, what happened? You fell off the bed today? Hugs and love ya! It's okay Val. He landed on me. If I'm gonna have a monkey on my back, it might as well be Hippie...

Hippie Bowman wrote: Good morning everyone! Monday Monday Monday! Have a great day! Peace! Good morning, Kids! Gotta make sure I'm in shape to tackle this lovely Monday...

Mom and I are off to the Wisconsin State Fair. While we're way, would you dry off this li'l guy for me? He got a li'l stinky playing with dead fish on the beach and the neighbor kid gave him a bath...

arabellajones wrote: I don't think anyone has to pay to post here. I wonder how many accounts are opened, every week, to spam these forums. LL do seem to have a policy of pointing with glee at the lifetime total, everyone who even opened an account, and saying little or nothing about how many stick around. I was going to say "think of the children", but LL doesn't let in children. Teenagers, not children. But it's enough to scare the lawyers about what might happen if they didn't make a prompt deletion. It's necessary, but there are better jobs which need doing over the weekend. Yep, kinda takes the bloom off Rodvik's vaunted "We're attracting 400K new signups/month!", doesn't it?

Ceka Cianci wrote: i think they are going to try to make this record a hard one to beat in the future.. You're tempting fate, Ceka. You bring corn on a stick. I'm gonna bring a tent, a sleeping bag, a Weber Baby Q, a cooler full of rootbeer, and a big sack of grillable veggies to hang in the tree so the bears don't get 'em.

Perrie Juran wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Perrie Juran wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Ceka Cianci wrote: didn't they start putting more sims on each server a few years back.. didn't it used to be like 4 full prim sims per server and like 8 homesteads? then getting those number 5 servers or maybe it was the higher ones.. and now it's like 8 and 16? i thought i remembered that going up per server at some point.. If so, this bolsters the argument that LL's infrastructure costs are declining. This is why I think it's wrong to focus on infrastructure when discussing LLs costs. Unfortunately, there is no Moore's law for business competence. So what if they can host more SIMs per Server? Overall, hardware has gotten cheaper and better for all of us. But that is a Capital Expenditure. My current Desktop with a 3G processor and 4MB of Ram with way superior graphics processing cost less then my first Desktop did with a 500mhz processor and 256MB of Ram. But my operational expenses have not gone down. In fact my operational expenses (cost of living) continue to rise. Tell me, why hasn't the cost of Cable TV gone down? Why does it continue to rise? My 26 inch flat screen TV I just got (my capital expense) cost a hell of a lot less than the equivalent thing did five years ago. But my net cost of watching the thing has gone up. on a side note i tried finding some graphs that tracked the trends in server costs over the years but my google-fu failed me. but even knowing this, we still would not know what percent of LL's net expenses that represents. Well, this is the argument I've been making. We can't compare LL to something like GoDaddy or Bluehost, which does increase what you get every year for the same price, or lower the price every year, or do both. Cable TV prices are what they are because of a mix of monopoly pricing power and content licensing costs. The underlying infrastructure costs are declining, which is why Google is causing so much grief for cable operators in Kansas City. They can march in with a completely different cost structure and raise hell by disrupting the cable business model. I've said elsewhere that I think LL's infrastructure costs are small and declining. Our money is going elsewhere. Building your infrastructure is a Capital Expense. Maintaining you infrastructure is an Operating Expense. So one thing to note here is that Linden Lab continues to do both. They have been investing in improvements however questionable the value of those improvements may be (Pathfinding, CHUI, etc). And this still does not take into account their daily operational expenses. My guess is that SL is a very profitable endeavor. What I don't think is that it is so profitable that they could make some of the price cuts (50%) I've been seeing suggested. I don't think LL is building any infrastructure, they're maintaining it as it shrinks. That distinction is different than the accounting distinction between capital expenses for server replacements and operating expenses. We don't even know if LL buys or leases their server capacity. And I continue to think that we should stop discussing infrastructure. It's a small and declining part of their costs as concurrency falls and infrastructure follows Moore's law (or Amazon's EC2 law, or whatever applies). SL may be a very profitable endeavor, but it's not something anybody believes can grow. If they did, they'd be investing in it. LL hasn't attracted any venture capital in years. Lithium, the purveyors of our lovely forum platform has, I think, got more venture capital than LL.

Ceka Cianci wrote: really what i think it is.. people have always paid it and when enough leave that it starts to hit them hard enough..they will lower them.. that or shut it down.. but since people are still paying and still showing up.. there is no need to lower them..or shut it down.. the going price is what people will pay... not what they want to pay.. LL will get as much as they can..until enough start saying..this is too much..to where they feel the pinch.. for all we know..they could drop back down to 10 to 12k login's and still have enough to keep going.. if they played it smart..they didn't let the growth go to their heads and make them too big for their britches like smart business people do.. people keep saying they are terrible at business..but really..they are still in business after 10 years selling virtual property..that's pretty freakin smart if you ask me hehehehe Smart is relative. The Angry Birds guys were pretty smart too! It's all conjecture on our part, but I wonder if we aren't funding LL's attempt to escape SL with those other apps they're working on. I don't think they'll be successful, as the mobile market is too fickle. LL's recent return to reduced academic pricing might be an attempt to measure the price elasticity of the market (I learned that in Econ 101!). My ex-hubby is a marketing VP for a big bank. During our ten years together, we'd often discuss sales, marketing, econ and the like. A company with a varied product portfolio can experiment with pricing on individual products to gauge elasticity (the effect of price on demand) without endangering the company. It's more difficult when you are powered by a single rubber band.

Qwalyphi Korpov wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Qwalyphi Korpov wrote: Phil Deakins wrote: I beg to differ with you Qie, which is something I rarely do. I don't think it would be difficult at all for some people think that the offer is for multiple quarters. Not permanently, but more than one quarter. I do think it's misleading. It would have been very easy to change the word "per" to something that's actually true. At the very least, the way they've done it can be misleading. It's possible for a reader to think it might be for more than one quarter. They are clearly told that the 50% off is a limited time discount. So after seeing the bubble they would have to wonder what number of quarters is covered by this limited time. They would have to read futher to determine the number of quarters. They would find out quickly that the number is one. Anyone thinking it will be 12 quarters or 3 quarters or whatever is guessing wrong. There is no suggestion in the 'ad" that there is any specific duration until you read the actual duration. While some people may insist that the term 'per' always means more than one that isn't in the definitions I've seen. In examples given you will see things such as "The cloth was x dollars per yard." In which case the cost of a single yard of cloth is x. There is no requirement to buy multiple yards of cloth by the way. Even though it is priced per yard. That doesn't imply that only multiple yard purchases are available. If I pay $11.25 for one quarter and then downgrade to basic what rate did am I pay per quarter? It turns out that the discounted quarterly rate is a good deal for almost anyone who wants to begin a premium membership. Of course the secret to the best deal is knowing when your going to leave. Here's a little spread sheet showing the running cost of premium membeships month by month. For the first 18 months going quarterly starting with the discount is often the best deal. I don't go into all permutations but then who knows when they're going to leave in advance. I generally interpret "limited time offer" to mean that the offer will be available for a limited time, not that the offer's advantage persists for a limited time. On the same page as that offer, I find the following grammar errors... "Linden Homes are ready-to-move-in homes that belong to a themed community and available only to Premium Members." " Join friends in an fun jungle..." I'd say that LL's wording of the offer is consistent with other evidence of their competence. I hope we're not splitting hairs cuz mine is tiny and short. It's true that two things are for a limited time. The duration of the offer and the duration of the discount. I'm thinking 'Limited Time Discount' refers to the duration of the discount. But perhaps I'm being too generous to the LL. Because it's a 'Discount offer' there could be confusion regarding what the as yet unstated duration is and what it applies to. All is revealed in the 'TERMS & CONDITIONS FOR 50% DISCOUNT' which is immediately below the listing of periodic rates. So while it may be slightly confusing to some and slightly misleading to others I'm still in the group that feels it's definitely not very misleading. I'm sure that the phrase 'very misleading' varies in meaning for people so I'll give an example of what I call moderately misleading. My cable company runs ads that offer high speed internet for $10 per month. Then they flash the T&C on the screen for maybe 1 second that is unreadable even if you pause your DVR and move up close. So I know there are details that I don't have yet. I also know I won't be getting high speed internet forever for $10 per month. It's moderately misleading because the ad itself didn't tell me the duration was limited.. except in the unreadable T&C. I have to chase down the details on some website or call the sales staff and get the hard sell. After being in the thread awhile I now know that what I consider slightly misleading is what some other people call very misleading. It's just a personal threshold thing. So while to me it's very misleading to call the LL offer very misleading I understand that that also is just a personal threshold thing. I don't think the offer was "very misleading'. That sorta suggests an intent. Would it be too cynical of me to believe that, if LL had malicious intent, their incompetence would limit the threat? ;-)

Ceka Cianci wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Ceka Cianci wrote: didn't they start putting more sims on each server a few years back.. didn't it used to be like 4 full prim sims per server and like 8 homesteads? then getting those number 5 servers or maybe it was the higher ones.. and now it's like 8 and 16? i thought i remembered that going up per server at some point.. If so, this bolsters the argument that LL's infrastructure costs are declining. This is why I think it's wrong to focus on infrastructure when discussing LLs costs. Unfortunately, there is no Moore's law for business competence. i wasn't commenting on cost..i was commenting on them needing more servrs or not..me thinking not.. they mentioned more sims are added so more servers were needed..i wasn't arguing anything other than.. can't they put more sims in servers now? when a sim doesn't get paid for..it gets pulled offline..it doesn't sit out there like mainland does.. so it's not constantly adding new sims even when old sim owners leave.. they go offline..then someone comes along and gets that old spot.. there is not as many sims as there used to be..so they more than likely have more than enough servers.. Yes, I know you were just making an observation. I'm the one arguing that LL's server costs are probably declining and not a huge factor in determining SL prices.

Hippie Bowman wrote: Good morning all! HAppy Friday! Peace! Okay, okay, I'm getting up!!!...

valerie Inshan wrote: Good morning and hugs to you Hippie and Maddy! Friday at last and it's finally gonna rain tonight, YAY! /me is ready! Such a cute li'l princess. ;-)

Perrie Juran wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Ceka Cianci wrote: didn't they start putting more sims on each server a few years back.. didn't it used to be like 4 full prim sims per server and like 8 homesteads? then getting those number 5 servers or maybe it was the higher ones.. and now it's like 8 and 16? i thought i remembered that going up per server at some point.. If so, this bolsters the argument that LL's infrastructure costs are declining. This is why I think it's wrong to focus on infrastructure when discussing LLs costs. Unfortunately, there is no Moore's law for business competence. So what if they can host more SIMs per Server? Overall, hardware has gotten cheaper and better for all of us. But that is a Capital Expenditure. My current Desktop with a 3G processor and 4MB of Ram with way superior graphics processing cost less then my first Desktop did with a 500mhz processor and 256MB of Ram. But my operational expenses have not gone down. In fact my operational expenses (cost of living) continue to rise. Tell me, why hasn't the cost of Cable TV gone down? Why does it continue to rise? My 26 inch flat screen TV I just got (my capital expense) cost a hell of a lot less than the equivalent thing did five years ago. But my net cost of watching the thing has gone up. on a side note i tried finding some graphs that tracked the trends in server costs over the years but my google-fu failed me. but even knowing this, we still would not know what percent of LL's net expenses that represents. Well, this is the argument I've been making. We can't compare LL to something like GoDaddy or Bluehost, which does increase what you get every year for the same price, or lower the price every year, or do both. Cable TV prices are what they are because of a mix of monopoly pricing power and content licensing costs. The underlying infrastructure costs are declining, which is why Google is causing so much grief for cable operators in Kansas City. They can march in with a completely different cost structure and raise hell by disrupting the cable business model. I've said elsewhere that I think LL's infrastructure costs are small and declining. Our money is going elsewhere.