Madelaine McMasters

I'll second your reassurance on wireless. I've been wireless my entire five years in SL. That's never been an issue.

Janelle Darkstone wrote: Is common sense dead? I'm working on it. These things take time.

Dillon Levenque wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: As for hair, in SL I've been wearing the same unisex style for years. It's short enough I don't have to worry about it entering my body and now longer than my RL hair, which is a lot easier to manage when it's boy cut. I won't say I've got either style or sophistication, but my friends, both SL and RL find me reasonably easy to locate in a crowd. Although that was never my goal (I'm a natural introvert) I've seen more than a few people here wonder how to attract attention. It has always seemed logical to me that if I'm attracted to people who are comfortable in their own skins, I should probably be comfortable in mine. For about a year I never saw you in hair different from what you had the first time I met you. I completely identified it with you. Once a long time later you were wearing a similar but different style and I needed you to pose for a snapshot. You had your back to the camera because your identity was supposedly secret. Thing is I really wanted everyone to guess who you were and you had that different hair, it was even a different color. I was trying to figure out a way to ask you to wear the hair you usually wore without making it seem like you always wore the same hair (though of course you did). You asked, "You mean my 'Maddy' hair?". So I guess you identified it with you, too. The current hairdo is terrific, by the way. And if you won't say you've got style and sophistication I'll say it for you :-). You are too kind. Your look is easily identifiable (and pleasing) to me as well, but I wonder if you'd call yourself either stylish or sophisticated. Could we simply claim to be consistent in a meaningful way?

Suella Ember wrote: Janelle Darkstone wrote: If a social world is so in need of having processor-killing trees, why not just turn your computer off and go outside? There's REAL trees outside you know? I've SEEN them! (Who me? Noooooooo. I'm not *that* Suella Ember. I'm a totally different one. Don't know what you're talking about!) :smileytongue: I've seen 'em too. Including this one... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glochidion_ferdinandi Now get out of here and pick some cheese!

Ariel Vuissent wrote: As for skins, there's also nothing about the mechanics of SL skins that's changed, other than the tattoo layers which now allow you to change makeup without altering the rest of your skin. I don't know about the mechanics, as I don't create skins myself, but I do know that if I put on a skin made even back when I joined, in 2010, then put on a skin made this year, I can definitely tell the difference. If I put on a skin made back when SL first started, I can most definitely tell the difference. I see much more detailed shading and really, just general detail in skins made more recently. That's not just from adding tattoo layers and make-up; it's the skin itself, even if the two were made by the very same creator. Some of it's increased skill, but I imagine some of it's just the level of detail people can achieve now that they couldn't achieve then. I change my hair frequently, although recently I'm more into one particular style I just purchased. I identify more with my shape and face, and with my skintone. (I'm quite pale in SL; I'm also quite pale in RL. I've tried on tanned skins, and they just don't feel like "me." I always find it a little bit odd when my friends change their skins completely, as I feel like I have to get used to them all over again!) I agree, however, that people whose avatars display a consistent style make the most "sense" to me. And I greatly appreciate attention to the little details that make a person unique. Avatar skins are comprised of three 512x512 textures. That's it. Nothing has changed about that in at least the five years I've been in SL, with the exception of tattoo layers that allow the separation of makeup from the skin. My old Minnu skin had lovely detail in the face, freckle and non-freckle versions, nice detail on the body and some tasteful eye and lip treatments. I'm sure that skin creators improve their products over time, but there were very good skins available five years ago and nothing has changed that allows one to achieve greater levels of detail now. If there is greater detail now, it's because the creators have been adding things to keep us coming back for updates! My RL skin has vitiligo, so if I want my SL skin to mimic it I'd have to blotch it up myself (and I might someday). Instead, I adorn myself with moles arranged like my favorite constellations. I'm currently wearing Orion, Ursa Major and the Pleiades. I thought I might add the Andromeda galaxy as a port wine stain ;-) I also wear a prim "Anne Francis" mole near my mouth, which is a little spinning nighttime globe of the Earth. I like knowing I can lick the world whenever I wish. I too appreciate attention to the little details, especially when I imagine seven billion people live on them. :-)

Reallycuriousgeorge wrote: Hey everybody I’m a student doing a research project on the gender bending experience in online gaming and I would like to ask anyone who is interested some questions on the subject. You don’t have to answer all the questions just the ones you are comfortable with. Questions don't make me uncomfortable, it's my answers that sometimes bother me. My definition of gender bending: players who create a virtual identity of their opposite sex What is the opposite sex of someone born with both sets of gender bits? What is the opposite sex of someone born with one gender's bits but the other gender's self identity? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. It's nice to be appreciated. Thank you in advance. ;-) Questions for people who don’t gender bend Why do you think that people want to play as their opposite gender on an online game? I suppose I'd have to ask them, which would require I know who they are. I don't think I'm terribly good at detecting them. I don't recall asking those who have confided in me, nor those who make it public. When people ask me why I'm kinky, I give them the same blank expression I see in the mirror when I ask myself. How do you think people respond to players who are not the gender they play as? Although this gets discussed frequently in the forum, I've had no direct experience with others "responding" to this issue. I don't know if that's because it's not an issue or because it's not an issue (Yes, that's obtuse, but I can't think of a better way to word it. Okay I can, but sometimes I enjoy being obtuse). How would you respond? That would depend on a lot more than just this particular revelation, so I can't answer. Do you think people who gender bend are forth coming or do they wait to be asked? If I knew one who volunteered the information and one who waited to be asked, how would I answer your question? Also, is waiting to be asked not being forthcoming? Question for everyone. How do you think the playing experiences differ between playing as a male or female avatar? How could this be a question be for everyone? Only those who've played both male and female would be able to answer it. I appreciate your curiosity, George, but this is an interesting subject that might want the finesse one could imagine of The Man with the Yellow Hat. I hope that you'll get enough responses from others to sense a shape to this creature. So far it feels like a shmoo to me.

Rolig Loon wrote: One of the first things to do when you are working on something like this is to step back and take a deep breath. Ask yourself how much detail you really need to provide. Is this an object that many people will zoom in on tightly? Are they likely to spend more than a brief second looking t it? If so, then it's worth spending time and your prim allowance on making it super-realistic. If not, you're putting too much effiort into it and you're creating something that will just add to the rendering load for people who look at it. Personally, I'd suggest applying a tassel texture -- maybe 128 x 256 pixels, graded to 100% alpha -- to a single conical flexi prim. Rolig, you are absolutely right! Here are a pair of prim tassels I made myself, in just a few minutes!!! They are simple alpha textures slapped on cubey prims with rotation scripts. They spin in opposite directions, which keeps anyone from paying attention to the icky alpha texture and displays my extraordinary dancing skill!

Czari Zenovka wrote: Dresden Ceriano wrote: Czari Zenovka wrote: Orca Flotta wrote: These forums do not represent an effective cross section of your target group anyway since you find here mostly tired oldbies who prefer to blabber in forum over logging in. :smileywink: I've been trying to figure out why, for approximately the last 6 months or so, I log into SL and many times am not motivated to do anything so I log back out. You hit the nail on the proverbial head. :matte-motes-wink: No kidding... what's even sadder is when I sometimes log into SL just to sit at my virtual computer desk and do nothing but post to the forum. ...Dres Oh gosh! I do that too! This is really bad. Maybe we need to form a support group. I grew up online in text venues, campus computer terminal IM and bulletin boards at first, then usenet and IRC. Now I find that when I'm in-world, I'm usually balancing on my ottoman, or standing in my fireplace as I chat with others in IM. I sometimes wonder if Philip Rosedale underestimated the power of the written word.

Sephina Frostbite wrote: Btw you are right its amazing what a good hair and shoes will do. About twenty years ago, as a blushing bride and rising young businesswoman, I found a pair of basic but quite high heeled pumps that were suprisingly comfortable and available in a rainbow of colors. Sensing the opportunity to avoid years of trend following, I purchased two dozen pair in various colors. I don't wear them as much as I once did, but they are still the foundation of my modest shoe collection. In SL, I have a favorite pair of prim feet high heeled ankle strap sandals (in various colors) from Kittie's Lair that I've been wearing for years. I have a pair of flats (again in various colors), a cute pair of pumps (strawberry) and some oversized work boots Ceka Cianci gave me for Xmas long ago. I think that's it! I'd wear prim feet pumps, but haven't found a pair that gets the ankle/prim foot joint as seamless as I want. As for hair, in SL I've been wearing the same unisex style for years. It's short enough I don't have to worry about it entering my body and now longer than my RL hair, which is a lot easier to manage when it's boy cut. I won't say I've got either style or sophistication, but my friends, both SL and RL find me reasonably easy to locate in a crowd. Although that was never my goal (I'm a natural introvert) I've seen more than a few people here wonder how to attract attention. It has always seemed logical to me that if I'm attracted to people who are comfortable in their own skins, I should probably be comfortable in mine.

Jolene Rae wrote: About 3 or 4 years ago, when I first started SL, I spent a lo t of time and money creating my avatar. Now, people tell me I l ook like a noob. My theory is that the skins and sh apes have improved so much, that even though I got a top notch skin/shape back then, it now looks like a noobie one. I will gladly shell out the Linden to update my skin and shape but here is the problem. I don't want to change my face. I've learned that if one changes the s kins and shape , the face will change. Also, my shape is a custom made Brazillian one (I am a big woman) and I'm very happy with it . How can I magically make m y self look more sophisticated (the opposite of a noob) and keep the details of my avatar ? There is nothing about the mechanics of SL shape that has changed since SL started. There may be trends in avatar shape, but I don't advise following them unless they're heading in a direction that pleases you. I don't gain and loose weight in SL to follow the fashion trends, I just try to maintain a healthy physique. Since you are happy with your shape, keep it. As for skins, there's also nothing about the mechanics of SL skins that's changed, other than the tattoo layers which now allow you to change makeup without altering the rest of your skin. When I first entered SL, I purchased a Minnu (which has changed name) skin that I think would have served me fine right up to today. I currently use a makeup-free base skin (obtained somewhere on the web years ago) that I've modified and upon which I layer makeup to match my mood, just as I do in RL, and with similar infrequency. I'm hardly an expert on sophistication, but I do appreciate avatars decorated with attention to detail that, over time, exhibit a distinctive style. I'm all for experimentation, but throwing on different looks day after day, with no apparent underflying fashion sense, turns me off. Sophistication is not magic, it's the result of thoughtfullness. ETA: For me, hair is central to the look of an avatar. As I approach a group of friends, I recognize them first by their hair. Those friends who switch styles generally do so in a way that makes sense to me, and that contributes to their style. If you know who you are, show it! If you don't, spend some time thinking about it. That effort will serve you well in both SL and RL.

Perrie Juran wrote: We've gone off here on a small threadjack it appears though the it has been related to the OP's comments. We could discuss this for a long time. Yep. I think the primary reasons we constantly have technical complaints are not technical, and we could theorize ad nauseum.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: 5.) Given that SL is meant to be used exclusively on video monitors, a low-dynamic range technology, please explain to me what about HDR would be less useless than teats on a boar hog for SL. Theresa, All HDR is meant to be used with output devices having limited color palettes, like displays (256:1 for 8:8:8 RGB) and printers (typically 50:1 or less for prints). HDR refers to capturing the much higher dynamic range of the original scene. The human eye is good for a dynamic range of somewhere around 10,000:1, as are some digital cameras (like my DSLRs, with 16384:1 or 14-bit dynamic range). The dynamic range of a typical landscape on a sunny day is around 100,000:1. HDR refers to methods of representing a very large input dynamic range (the actual scene) within the confines of a more limited output dynamic range (screen or paper). For sensors with limited dynamic range, this is done by taking multiple exposures with different exposure values. Think of taking three shots of a daytime landscape in rapid succession, one with a short shutter time to capture the bright sky, one with a moderate shutter time to capture the sunlit detail on the ground and a third with a long shutter time to capture detail in the shade., Those three images are then combined into one which is then logarithmically compressed (gamma) into the 8:8:8 RGB of JPEG. For cameras with high dynamic range sensors, it may not be necessary to take multiple exposures. You'd simply apply the appropriate gamma correction to squish the original 42-bit image (14:14:14 RGB) into JPEG. As the apparent brightness of any texture pixel in SL is a product (the multiplication) of its value and the incident light, it is possible to create more than 256 levels of brightness in a scene. In a perfect viewing system, there would be enough dynamic range in the output device to represent all the resulting pixel intensity values. Absent that, HDR could be effected by gamma correcting all pixel intensity calculations BEFORE they are written to the frame buffer. Typical gamma correction happens after that fact, mapping a 256:1 frame buffer dynamic range onto a similar or smaller output device dynamic range (usually one with unpleasant non-linearities). Another way to think of this is that, to maintain full arithmetic fidelity, a system that multiplies two eight bit numbers (pixel value x light value) must maintain 16 bit results right to the bitter end (gamma compression into the output device color space). SL doesn't. So, HDR could be used in SL much as it's used in RL. Video games started using HDR years ago. It taxes the GPU, which must perform either floating point or 16+ bit integer math on all pixels, rather than 8 bit. The results, however, are often worth it. We are all, unfortunately, accustomed to facelights, glowy things and odd windlight settings blowing out the highlights and/or losing the shadows in a scene. With HDR, this would be less problematic. And finally, given that this is SL, you just know someone could find a use for teats on a boar hog. ;-)

Perrie Juran wrote: Personally I find all of this stuff fascinating. Me too, and not just the technical stuff. I liked Philip Rosedale's original vision for SL, in which creation was easy. Now it's becoming the bastion of specialists, just as it is in RL. Virtual reality is giving way to augmented reality. We SL diehards are a tiny lot, apparently not representative of the general population that Rosedale might have thought he was targeting. Years from now will we look back and see that SL was ahead of its time? Out of touch with reality? Owner of a sturdy niche? Will we all run off to mobile/social before eventually coming back to the granddaughter of SL? Slightly off-topic... I just finished building props for a community theater play. My work was seen by more people than have seen anything I've built in SL, and has generated more notoriety. This was quite unexpected and suggests that RL is a more worthy SL competitor than I'd thought ;-)

Marigold Devin wrote: I thought you sounded assertive rather than snarky... but I might just need to top up my sugar levels ... but a little bit of snark seems appropriate under the circumstances. Oh goody. You top up your sugar, I'll top up my vinegar. ;-)

Sephina Frostbite wrote: Tex Monday wrote: IMHO, it is fraud...you paid for something and he never delivered. Since you've tried to contact him and he's never responded, he's a scumbag. I don't know if you have any kind of recourse through LL...I was checking around and didn't see anything. A question is besides you and your friend, has anyone else had this problem? Does his shop have a group? Maybe question people there??? My suggestion is to see if you can file a case with LL (although, it may not be the way to do things), to get your money back or your custom work delivered. If he's posted for options on the forum, I think you've more than welcome to confront him here. Either you'll guilt him into satisfying you as a customer (with the custom work..get your minds out of the gutter) or he'll just stop posting because you've called him out. Either way, good luck. It's totally unfair that there are scumbags like this inworld who don't even have the common desency to do a service they're being paid for. (Ohhh..there goes that mind in the gutter thing again) Thanks for the advice. I know there is most likely nothing that can be done concerning LL. I am just concerned of all those victims including close acquaintances of mine. Makes me ill to think about the thousands of linden he is getting. Sadly he has ruined me from ever getting custom work done. I thought about calling him out of the forums in a nice way on his posting but then I dont want to be banned or get backlash from people. TOS doesn't allow calling out people by name, but I don't think it forbids asking a question like "I purchased something from you two months ago and you have yet to deliver. Would it be too much to ask for you to satisfy your obligations to existing customers before taking on new ones?" in his thread asking for new customers. You might want to use a little less snark than I did, but I think this approach gets the point across without violating TOS.

Good morning, Hippie!

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: So, you are 16 and you were lying about being her sister... It would have been much simpler and less deceitful to just come out in the OP and state you had a new job in RL and were leaving for a while, instead of all of this trickery and wallowing in the well wishes and "we hope you are OKs." Lying, deceit, trickery and wallowing? That's an impressive display of hyperbole, Drake. Leave some for the youngsters.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: ETA: It's interesting to watch the borked avatar baking process. You can see the rebaking progress through various stages of the progressive texture download. Just moments after the final, full resolution textures bake, it all starts over again. That's a hell of a lot of work being done by the entire SL system to effect what is truly (again unless I'm missing something) a simple set of pixmap operations. I hope server side baking works. I don't believe anyone at LL knows why viewer side baking does not. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SUN-57 Go to the bottom of that JIRA. Problem found, problem fixed in beta. Doesn't requre server-side baking. The problem described in that JIRA isn't the one I've been seeing for the last year or two. Last night I watched the top of my avi rebake for the duration of my hour or so in-world. It was not a matter of not baking at all, I watched the entire progressive download and bake sequence repeat endlessly. I also witnessed the de-texturing of things that went out of view. If I spin around, I can catch the viewer repainting stuff that was fully rezzed a moment earlier. This has been described as an interest list issue. And I routinely find myself having to cam around a place to force everything to rez. It would be ironic if client side baking was fixed for good on the day before that entire code path is retired, only to be replaced with server side baking that has its own issues. ;-)

Perrie Juran wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Server side baking really feels to me like a "We don't know how the current scheme works, so we can't fix it. Let's replace it and hope something completely different works better." I can only hope they have better luck than with their various forum system replacements over the years ;-) Actually it makes sense. They are moving a computationally expensive function from 1000's of computers that they have no control over all the variables to the Servers where they can control and optimize the computations and hopefully supply the necessary resources. Merging avatar texture layers should (if I'm missing something, somebody let me know!) be pretty easy . It's just a bunch of pixmap operations done on on a sorted collection of textures. The CPU and network overhead for sending all those textures to the viewer seems to me to be in the same ballpark, if not greater, than processing the pixmaps locally. This would always have been true... unless those textures were distributed across a network of asset servers, and aggregating them in one place for baking was difficult. This was the theory I esposed earlier to explain client side baking. If there never was a good reason to push baking to the client, that would suggest some degree of incompetence during the early days of SL's design. I can only imagine why certain decisions were made more than a decade ago, but I'm going to hold onto my theory. I believe it was too difficult for the original SL asset servers to deliver all the required textures to a single CPU in the server farm for baking. Since all the mechanisms for delivering assets to the viewers had to exist and work well for SL to operate at all, they chose to delegate final assembly of the avatar texture to the one place they knew they'd have all the assets... the viewer. Now that SL occupies an ever decreasing physical footprint (declining concurrency/regions divided by increasing server packing density equals much smaller physical footprint) and networking speeds have increased (10G between servers these days?) the equation now favors baking the textures in the server. I haven't heard any talk about SL server locations in ages, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are all now in the same building, rather than split between Austin and SF Bay (as I once heard they were). It would be ironic if the reason SL performance finally improves is because it's shrinking. I'm just making all this stuff up, but it sounds good to me! ETA: It's interesting to watch the borked avatar baking process. You can see the rebaking progress through various stages of the progressive texture download. Just moments after the final, full resolution textures bake, it all starts over again. That's a hell of a lot of work being done by the entire SL system to effect what is truly (again unless I'm missing something) a simple set of pixmap operations. I hope server side baking works. I don't believe anyone at LL knows why viewer side baking does not.

Perrie Juran wrote: It's easy to lose patience. Especially when a problem seems to go on endlessly. But I do try to approach everything with patience, especially SL. If you don't it can drive you crazy. Some things are inexcuseable as far as I'm concerned. That my dinner above (Troobles) didn't perform out of the box as advertised I find inexcusable. But when it comes to the platform as a whole, that glitches happen, I may not like them, but I am a lot more patient and understanding. I was in-world for an hour or so last night. For the duration of that time, my avi rebaked itself every minute or two, as did many of the objects in my house. This has happened in both Firestorm and V3, for both me and Snugs, on both MacOS and WinXP and across several machines over the years. That such a basic function could be borked for so long suggests to me that LL does not fully understand SL. But I don't think that surprises us, does it? And that's the complacency I'm speaking about. We can still file JIRAs and comment in the forums, but we've lowered our expectations, haven't we? Server side baking really feels to me like a "We don't know how the current scheme works, so we can't fix it. Let's replace it and hope something completely different works better." I can only hope they have better luck than with their various forum system replacements over the years ;-) As for the Troobles, I'm also very fond of setting on fire those things which peeve me.

Qie Niangao wrote: Long ago I read about LL's use of MySQL and the limitations that's placed on growth of the grid. The argument was that Oracle would have been too expensive. I don't doubt that. I dunno. That MySQL choice looks pretty smart now, in the time of NoSQL. (I'd have supported the MySQL choice back when it was made, too, and have serious doubts that it ever got in the way of growth. It's hard to imagine anymore, but back in the day there were religious wars over relational DBs, and tracts written that in hindsight seem pinhead angel choreography.) I may be misremembering the name of the DB, but the discussion was definitely about the difficulty of scaling up SL. But this kind of thing happens all the time. You usually can't start out where you want to end up. You have limited resources and must make do with what you have. You can hope that the business will grow to the point you can make major improvements and grow the business even more, but that might not happen. I joined SL in early 2008, while the hype was peaking. Upon entering, I wondered how a world with such a steep learning curve could be as successful as the hand wavers claimed, but I was happy as a clam. I had no other video game or virtual world experience, and I found SL to be alluring in the same way I'm drawn to factories and workshops where things can be made. In the five years since then, I believe the SL experience has, from the perspective of Philip's "virtual tinker toy" idea, gone backwards. I can no longer compete with the creations of SL's most sophisticated builders unless I invest in the steep learning curves of external tools like Blender. Whether this is blessing or curse I can't say. Mesh might be a step in the right direction as we head into the world of at-home 3D printing. It might also further bifurcate the SL population into builders and buyers. Even that might be a good thing. Rosedale's original vision of SL as a place to create may have been suited for a population too small to support a business the size we once imagined. Mobile is overturning lots of apple carts. Whether we are where we are as the result of error or inevitibility I also can't say. It's difficult to tease it all apart. The complacency I feel results from the realization that we are not where I'd hoped we would be, and we are not likely to get there. So I'll make the best of what we have as long as we have it.

Rolig? Do you have that in plaid flannel? ;-)

I left SL several years ago, setting my avi adrift on a burning raft and closing my account. I enjoyed the catharsis of incinerating that life. Alas, I was back five weeks later because I'd not arranged a suitable replacement activity. The next time will be different, I'm already working on replacements. I understand the difficulty of doing this. I'm also sure it can be done and that once done, the regret will be manageable. I'm happy for the new people who will get to know you. We here will smile over the memories of the time you spent with us. I hope your resolve is as sound as your reasoning, and refer you back to my goodbye picture, asking only that you... ...keep your eyes on the road ahead.

Perrie Juran wrote: As to the who and why of the original architecture of SL we'd have to ask the original architects. You can dig through old Forums and Wiki's and JIRA's and glean some answers. Some of it comes down to it was the best available at the time. One thing they could not see sometimes was the long term affects. But moving forward to today two things have to be dealt with which is what makes some of the fixes harder than they may appear on the surface. First is Domino effect. Change one thing and suddenly a hundred others topple. The second is scalability. Some of the original architecture hasn't scaled well. But what is interesting is that 'experts' outside of SL haven't been able to improve on it very much despite having better programs and more powerful systems than the original architects of SL had. The systems that do work better would require SL to dump everything and start all over from the ground up. ETA: If saying this makes me an apologist, so be it. I look at it more simply as an acknowledgement of some of the challenges and barriers to building a Virtual World. It is not my intent to say that LL couldn't do a better job. I think that they could. But we still need to understand it's not always as simple as pushing a button and poof, everything works perfectly. I don't think you are being an apologist, though maybe the rants of technologists new to LL's predicament shouldn't bug you so much. I'm seeing some head butting here by people who might be largely in agreement. There really is no excuse for new residents not being able to see themselves fully rezzed under the simpliest of circumstances, which is roughly the complaint I see being lodged here, and which I've experienced myself for years across numerous computers both Wintel and Mac. I think LL got caught in their current position because of some very large "errors" made long ago. Perhaps the biggest error was made my Philip Rosedale himself, who thought SL would be more widely attractive than it's turned out to be. But that's an error many people made, including all those companies that piled into SL to advertise. They were able to get out. LL can't. Long ago I read about LL's use of MySQL and the limitations that's placed on growth of the grid. The argument was that Oracle would have been too expensive. I don't doubt that. There might have been the hope that revenue would grow to the point that a more robust solution could be implemented, but that revenue never came. Unless the average resident is spending more money each year (I'm not), revenue has been in decline for at least two years. If expenses haven't been declining faster, something's gonna snap. Now everybody is running to mobile/social, where MySpace and Zynga are proof that mistakes are not unique to LL. If there's one thing that worries me, it's the movement LL is making in that direction. And while we do need to understand that it's not always as simple as pushing a button and poof, everything works, we must also understand customer expectations are customer expectations, even if they seem unfair. If you can't meet them, is that necessarily the customer's fault? Somewhere else in this thread you wondered if the OP would complain to his computer manufacturer for selling him a computer that didn't play SL well. So long as the manufacturer accurately describes the computer being sold, I think responsiblity for selecting the right one falls to the purchaser. And further, if it's difficult to ascertain what kind of computer is necessary to run SL well, wouldn't that be LL's fault? When I purchase gas for my car, I don't expect the clerk at the station to know what octane fuel my car needs. I expect to find that requirement in the owner's manual. If it's not there, and my car sounds like a diesel on 87 octane, I'm gonna get mad at Ford, not BP. If it is there, and I've just filled up with 87, then my blonde is showing.

TwoIron wrote: So again, what is uneducated here? So you vetarans of this service expect new players to come here and read up on all the various issues such as broken http textures or whatever else? Here is how clueless you are. You are addressing a veteran of the IT industry. Been in it since the beginning, in the Seattle area. In fact, I worked at DECwest engineering where the prism project was born. Prism is essentially the guts of Windows NT that Dave Cutler took with Microsoft with him, and cause a lawsuit to have to be settled between Microsoft and DEC. In fact I was on the internet with a high powered Unix workstation and DEC OSF/1 in 1993, back when this kind of software was nothing more then a chat room. Uneducated? I have a friend in RL who is on here. She is upper middle class well educated and runs her own business. Do you have any idea how steep the learning curve is for someone like her? I'm on skype with her trying to explain the subtley of conflicting alpha layers and the like. So yeah - when new players like us are climbing this huge learning curve, and we can't get our avi's to rez in our free apartments with nothing but a bare floor...and we just dropped 17USD on new stuff for our avatars, us uneducated masses have a problem with that. But by all means keep trying to make yourself feel superior...it looks so good on you! I understand the frustration, and so I don't mind hearing the rant. I also imagine the frustration inside LL as 14 year old kids create iOS/Android games that net a million dollars while they struggle to keep SL afloat with little hope of growing that side of the business (look at SL concurrent logins vs. mobile/social market growth). SL is a mess. I don't know if that could have been avoided. It is unlike any other online "world" by necessity, as it depends on the users for content creation. I think LL finds itself stuck between a rock and a hard place as it tries to stretch the original architecture of SL to accommodate the increasing expectations of a world accustomed to the more refined performance of systems with vastly different goals, and therefore architectures. How much easier would it be if SL's 200 terabytes of user generated content were really just 200 megabytes of cleverly designed textures and carefully reused polygons that produced a cohesive look across the continents and if creation was something that could only be done off-world. I'm not (I hope) an LL apologist. I think they've screwed up plenty. But those errors were not solely at the technological level. I think LL (and many of us, including me) vastly overestimated the attractiveness of this kind of virtual experience to the world at large. SL will never produce the sort of slick overall experience of something like WoW (though I've never seen it, I've heard it described) which was carefully designed by a team of designers with a common goal. And you won't score any points with me using Windows as a gold standard for software excellence. I'm a Mac user, I find Windows (which I used every day since it was born) to be more than enough abomination to last me a lifetime! And don't get me started on Mac OS either. And really don't get me started on anything I wrote during the first decade of my engineering career. I don't want to think about the dumb blonde that did that stuff, even if it still works. But as I said before, I'm surrounded by software driven things that work remarkably well, and SL is not one of them. So, marvel at the stupid problems that persist in SL years after they were first reported... but also marvel that it's still here. You are ranting to a group of people, including me, who find this place irresistible. I don't think we are at all superior, we're just marvelously nuts.