WADE1 Jya

I realized something is very wrong with the employment forum. It can not be called 'employment' legally. Check into it, seriously. I wouldn't want to see you guys get in hot water. I remembered something from back when I had a management position at a company that was not technically offering "employment". What we did was we just gave people opportunity to make money through distribution agreements & arranging contracts with clients. It was a very cool thing for some people. For others it was horrible, they would make very little money, or potentially --- nothing at all. As one of the people working in middle management, I was cautioned at one point not to ever use the terms "employment", "employee", "employer", "hire", or "fire" etc.... anymore as these have very specific legal definitions. Until that point, all managers had been using traditional job terminology. Turns out there had been a major legal issue somewhere costing the company a lot of money over this simple mistake. Employment, by definition means the employee must receive at least minimum wage by law & numerous other parameters of obligation must legally be fulfilled between the two parties. Although many fun opportunities are presented in the 'employment' forum, none I have seen are ever genuine employment. I have not seen an offer of minimum wage, or anything even close to minimum wage. These are not offers of employment. To avoid potential lawsuits against Linden Lab and/or major grief between residents, the forum title "employment" should be changed to something more generalized, or the forum should be restricted somehow to only contain employment offers. Ask your legal people about it.

Oh man this is bad. I did not update or change any listing or change anything with my storefront since this issue began & now more of them are scrambled. So it seems the data corruption is ongoing. It's spreading, just as I first thought it would. Looks like Lindens made one of the worst mistakes possible in data management & also failed to plan any sort of redundency systems. Either that... or they have had the misfortune that someone (probably a LL employee or one of their outsourced coders since it would most likely take an insider to do this) has purposefully inserted some malignant bad code, essentially a virus-like program that is now slowly eating away at the marketplace. RIP marketplace :catindifferent:

Yeah I'm just not drinking free labor koolaid. Little story to share while we wait for Linden reply to the thread: ***redacted i'll save it for later*** :catvery-happy: Would be nice if we heard a roadmap for anything. I wonder not just about Marketplace, but I wonder about the roadmap of Second Life as a product also. Without knowledge of any Linden operations, planning I might do for a future here is rather limited. So where's that roadmap Lindens? ...fixing the data corruption issue, or at least telling us best method to get to work repairing it ourselves would be good for starters. I guess I'm not really going to be holding my breath for any reply.

I'm disgusted too Medhue. Thoroughly. Linden Lab created amazing atmosphere back when I joined in 2006. Since than it's really changed for the worse. Actually, they pushed me to sign an NDA about pathfinding very early on (now I am realizing in hindsight that signing was probably a bit of a mistake), but the big turn off for me was the tone of some of the internal communication (i was supposed to be scrambling to work hard impressing the 'big guys' (yes that's a direct quote)... yet to what benefit??? why??? ), and the treatment of some people's IP who contributed (luckily I chose not to contribute) was awful. Working hard for free to impress 'big guys' who only give fat paychecks to themselves (as you pointed out) I do not see as any route to my success. I see clearly now that we are only regarded as yes as you say... "cogs in the machine". That is why I am now working 50+ hours a week to create my own independent worlds that I have real ownership of. I am loyal to my awesome customers here & will continue to serve them until whenever we see Second Life's final days... if not for them, I would probably fly away.

Faye Feldragonne wrote: ...I think they maniupulate the data for (fill the blanks, because I don't wish to specultate too much).... You bet they do! Sure can't talk about it on here though. There is other issues going on at the lab right now I think too, but it can be hard to guess the inner workings of a company like Linden Lab which is backed by venture capitalists, especially when the company ceases to communicate their direction publicly & begins to do everything possible to undermine transparency. By the way, on a perhaps completely unrelated note I found this site interesting as a window into venture capitalist thinking: Ask the VC

LOL That is actually pretty ridiculous since the word (if you can even call it a word) as applied here is a Linden-engineered expression supposedly meaning anything 1960's (but specifically not psychedelic things?)....... yet in reality the word has no definition! According to google, madstyle is nothing but a jumble of random things: How does Google define "madstyle"? I see nothing linking it to the 1960s there. Since it means NOTHING how can it possibly be misused? I'm not going to, but I could say my kittens are madstyle & label them as such. Why not? But I guess Lindens would pitch a fit about it. Unless.... maybe... kittens... are... madstyle? :matte-motes-shocked: Who knows? Considering threads from this forum about 'madstyle' spam are now number 2 in google search results, who's guilty of 'madstyle' spam? By Lindens encouraging merchants to aggressively use this 'madstyle' keyword, people looking in google search for madstyle will get spammed with SL stuff, instead of the search results they hope for. Number one for madstyle is True Jackson. Are Lindens trying SEO trick in attempt to capture demographic of True Jackson?

My prediction of the roadmap is they will do none of those great features Sassy suggests. They will launch direct delivery (which yes nobody asked for). It will turn out to be very broken & far less reliable than magic box ever was. The entire roadmap will be based around the concept that countless hours of SL merchant's free labor can always fix even the most sloppy implementation... so like whatever man Slowly more & more listings will get scrambled by data corruption, but its okay because merchants doing the work of deleting everything and redoing everything over & over again fixes that. Who cares that reviews & relevancy data built up over years is lost forever in the process, its fun to see if the item ever sells again when its sent to the bottom of the pile. Every 3 to 6 months hereafter, Lindens will isolate whatever function of marketplace is working best and redesign it completely, breaking it in the process. Sometimes, just for a change of pace they will instead add another feature nobody asked for, like why not redo all our storefronts in flash animation so things take even longer to load. Eventually this roadmap will lead to a dramatic decline in anybody shopping there. Most merchants will also give up completely retooling everything constantly to achieve less and less sales. Then Lindens will announce that since nobody much is using marketplace anymore, they are shutting it down because this is what residents want. That's my best guess at the roadmap, what do you think they will do next?

its not different fonts. SL has no font support. they are just typing special unicode characters. all fonts use unicode & potentially depending on the codepage support of the font have tens of thousands of special characters! the easiest way to access these is google 'unicode' there are page tables on the net with all possibly available symbols. these links may be to your liking: http://panmental.de/symbols/info.htm http://www.mandaliet.com/cursive.php

I am so disappointed in Linden Lab over their latest conglomeration of amateurish screwups, exploitive manipulations & mostly the coldhearted apathy they now present towards the community of SL that I really want to type a page or two mentioning a lot of things they would call 'ToS violations' and ban me for. ...but I will take the high ground & refrain. Really in my personal situation, it doesn't matter anymore as I've already taken action to minimize my risk exposure to them. Diversifying and expanding my reach over the last year and a half to make sure nothing Lindens do here can ever mess me up again, but I hate seeing what they are doing to people who are highly dependent on them acting as a sensible business partner.

I guess nobody is getting stuff fixed. Mine sure isn't fixed either Kampu. I do think its only going to get worse from here, and Lindens know it, which is why they are so quiet about it. Why oh why did Lindens have to buy & then destroy Xstreet? It was such a nice place. They should have just let it be. I feel it was somehow like the beating heart of SL, with the cool forums, friendly staff, & everything there worked perfectly :heart: Then Lindens came along and ripped that heart out & ever since all facets of SL have been in steepening decline.

Doh :matte-motes-mad: I missed you did say that! I haven't used the uploader very much. Wow that's a very pretty window BTW, much better than I imagined from the preview. Nice work! If that's not just a faulty count & there really is that much extra tris being generated by the uploader, that's rather atrocious! I think back when I made my birds the count matched up, but I'm used to building for mobile devices which are very restrictive. It's probably something picky to do with the way triangle stripping is done in the uploader, that could be made much more friendly. Probably could have been fixed if the mesh team hadn't been given such tight deadlines, but since Lindens seem far too unfocused/incapable/unwilling to ever get SL onto mobile devices it probably doesn't really matter if all UGC here is unnaturally heavy. Desktops can just grind along rendering tens of thousands of unneeded hidden tris artifacts & the few people that stick around SL for more than a few minutes don't seem to mind being tied to a desk slugging along at < 15 FPS. As far as i know, the Lindens which brought us mesh were let go the moment they completed the project, that's just how things work at the lab now. Hired and fired on a per job basis, so I'd expect no bug fixes to this uploader ever. Rumor has it that the majority of the remaining Lindens are busy making premium 'games', or working on other new products which have nothing to do with SL.

Weird! Sorry I don't know what the *beep* is going on there but notice your window is 14413 tris? Maybe you might have secret reason for that :matte-motes-wink: and if so say no more... but it probably can be reduced hugely. From the look of the geometry involved you could probably execute the same exact look with a few hundred tris... I'm thinking either your curve at the top is oversmoothed (easy way to accidentally use up many tris) or you must have a whole lot of hidden triangles (probably degenerate triangles) somewhere on the model that could probably be safely deleted.

I do wonder what's in it for them. When we see Lindens being let go as soon as they complete jobs, there might actually be a huge motivation there not to complete things & to work as slowly as possible. It's a common motivational problem in negative corporate working environments. I am a little scared that over the years the lab has turned into one of those places, full of frightened temp workers. Truth is we don't know their motivations & it doesn't necessarily align with ours whatsoever. I always keep that in mind. For all we know they don't even want an economy, aiming more for a giant ball of free content, free labor. Anyone making significant money in SL might be seen as an imbalance in their system to be rapidly smoothed out & eliminated. Not to say that I necessarily believe this, but who knows??? They sure don't communicate much so we can only theorize.

Kampu Oyen wrote: Maybe LL could resolve the discrepancy just by buying out all the TPV's and gradually destroying their utility. This is probably how they would do it. Classic Linden style haha :catvery-happy: thanks for kind discussion people. last time i put that opinion out there some people really flipped out on me :matte-motes-bashful: sure we'd have some issues still, but closesource combined with aggressive prosecution/litigation of offenders would weed out all but the most persistent hardcore criminals, we wouldn't have so much crime of opportunity where it is done simply because it is easy. Linden Lab just hiring on the best of TPVs and then close sourcing it is probably way to go. If they do plan on ever scaling Second Life up significantly (these days I kind of doubt it), it would be smart to tighten this up so there is only their inhouse viewers available... as SL would be targeted for many other crimes than just content theft (stealing credit card info, identity theft, malware, keyloggers, etc). I think loose viewers are a crime enabler. Just as Macs start to get hacked now once they are now popular & commonplace, & we see PlayStation network got hacked, a big part of the 'safety' of SL is just that it is too small; not on the radar of organized crime.

You can always just go to the beta grid. Just switch on the login screen from 'Agni' to 'Aditi'. If you've never gone there before it is good to know that you will see a nice L$ balance there everytime you login, but its never real L$ on the beta grid so spend away.... uploads there are always free! yay :catvery-happy:

oh wow i'm so sorry to hear that happened to you. yikes.... i just knew DD would be a total disaster! try searching google cache to see if you can recover your images, google remembers all if you know where to look. also if you look on merchant's name you see on your store & go to their store, maybe your images are there. just a guess... hopefully LL hires (or rehires) some real brains quick to fix all these insane issues before it all amounts to rearranging deck chairs. after reading your comment, wow.... just wow... only way i am abandoning my magic box now is if Lindens pry it out of my cold dead hands.

I haven't used mesh very much in SL, but I am using "convex hull" meshes in the design projects I am now busy with outside of SL. Convex hull should in no way be equivelent to 'phantom' :catsurprised: Outside of SL, convex hull is a physics simplification of the mesh to a closed 255 tris shape which can then interact physically with other mesh objects. It only works for shapes 255 tris or less.... SO that might be your problem. It is a gross simplification too, gross (not as in disgusting :catvery-happy:) as in reduced bigtime. So a wall or a floor might collapse into a funny geometry you wouldn't expect. It will create an invisible geometry for physics which you can not see, and that shape may or may not align with the rendered shape you can see, which is the other possible problem. To correct this issue, make a reduced version of your mesh for physics (in SL I know you can asign a different mesh for physics during upload), or try just reducing the tris of your mesh if that works easier for you. Definitely make sure you optimize your mesh to get rid of stray points & bad seams which could be heavily distorting your physics geometry. For the environments I'm in, that is how it works anyway. Of course, Lindens might have twisted the original meaning of 'convex hull' to signify something else entirely in SL, or you might be encountering an SL-specific bug. Hope that info helps, or if not that someone more actively working away in SL comes along to explain any further particulars

Hmm... thanks for the feedback. I don't think I'll contact them about it then. Sure don't want the issue spreading to more items! I had heard that had been happening too... LOL dog's breakfast aptly describes this mess :matte-motes-sick: I know I can't touch it either or the problem spreads. It's like an infection. Did you only have your top selling items affected? That's the really curious part of it... but that could be unlucky coincidence maybe only happen that way to my store :catsad: I hate it most not because of the obvious (lost income) but I hate it most because no customers will ever think it was Lindens who messed it all up. It is my store. Now my store looks stupid & that just reflects poorly on me. Clean up your mess Lindens... you're making us all look bad :catmad:

Wow this bug has been going on a long time & Lindens still have not quashed it :catindifferent: Has anyone seen their scrambled listings (wrong pic, wrong merchant name, or wrong product name) fixed yet? If so, was this solved after specifically contacting Lindens for individual help? Wondering if it is a waste of my time to fill out JIRA with all the info about it or go explain it in a support case for my bugged listings? I know its affecting so many merchants and Lindens already aware of it so thinking my additional requests would possibly be quite redundant. Thanks :cathappy:

Just wanted to drop my word in this thread. Although there is some amazing alternative viewers out there, unfortunately they are a gaping wide security flaw. I would love to see Linden Lab closesource it and ban them all. Prosecute any and all attempts with the felony of 'unauthorized network access'. It would be well worth the temporary bleed off of disgruntled residents leaving to greatly enhance the security of Second Life... security which at present is essentially nonexistent. I know I'll probably get flamed by all the hardcore fans of alt viewers for this comment... but whatever :matte-motes-impatient: (Don't worry, Lindens will never ban them anyway, because they love the concept of getting people to work for free.... and by now they are probably totally dependent on the huge pool of free labor endlessly supplied by the alternative viewer teams.)

Marketplace is more busted now then its ever been before, truly this must be huge embarrassment for Linden Lab. At least the CEO tweeted that it was "unacceptable" ----- but since then no action. The only new development is Lindens seem completely incapable of repairs or moving forward! Maybe they just need to hire more brainpower? Smart people tend to cost more money so that might be part of the issue if they are trying to use only the cheapest labor the overall capabilities of the team will suffer. Whatever.... I think Lindens painted themselves into a corner.... I have no faith anymore that they will ever move marketplace forward in functionality & only expect performance to deteriorate at an ever quickening pace.

Observe as a chaos spreads over this world. Look, even now, the great ones, they stumble over the plane. Their all-mighty ham-hands rain disaster upon all. The gods are on the move.

Yes, I create AI privately (non-military use only) beyond LSL and SL environment. SL is just my playground :cattongue: My newest work will be launching on other platforms this year. Once again can't really say more at this time :matte-motes-zipped: Code is language and language is more or less limited depending on the way it is constructed and the richness of its vocabulary. For example, 1984's Newspeak (fictional) is much more limited than English, because it was constructed from English and purposefully limited for narrow application.

I just don't want to lobotomize all my animals and put cookie cutter LindenBrains™ in there. All things using pathfinding system will have the exact same behaviors. Nice but homogenous. If I want to play with a blackboxed generic AI system I can do that outside of SL. Can't say much more about it as I'm under LL NDA. Anyway, for me, it is boring as my interest is in the actual development of the AI and writing my own algorithms. My passion is to develop my own systems from scratch & I will continue to do so.

This "madstyle" debacle is just mad embarrassing I think. They should have taken the resources used to plan this "marketing opportunity" and use instead for fixing marketplace so it is actually functional for shoppers, not a scrambled mess that is scaring customers away - unless that is the plan to break marketplace so bad for excuse to close it down - in which case I say carry on, Lindens, you're doing a great job.