Orca Flotta

I did see a marked improvement in both render time and reliability. +1 SSA is the best improvement LL came up with in a long time. Maybe because, unlike most of their other new shinies, SSA is really an improvement.

I wouldn't complain but you are forcing updates on people so this is frustratiing. We? We are just users like you. We didn't do anything. As was repeatedly clarified in various threads and should be clear for everybody, the Lindens don't read or participate in these forums. Back to your problem: it sounds like your Radeon has some difficulty dealing with SL. And MacOS, as everbody knows, isn't the right software for SL in the first place. Same as ATI GPUs aren't the best choice for OpenGL. We don't even know what kind of Mac you're running and how old your system is. Please post your system info so we can help you better (login screen - Help - About [your viewer]). Then just copy/paste the text to the forum. The result should look somehow like this: Singularity Viewer 1.8.3 (4998) Sep 18 2013 09:20:21 (Singularity) Release Notes Grid: Second Life Built with GCC version 40405 CPU: Intel® Core i5 CPU 650 @ 3.20GHz (3193 MHz) Memory: 7917 MB OS Version: Linux 3.8.0-19-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 17 18:16:28 UTC 2013 x86_64 Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 260/PCIe/SSE2 OpenGL Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 313.30 Viewer SSE Version: SSE2 libcurl Version: libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.0g zlib/1.2.6 c-ares/1.7.5 libidn/1.25 J2C Decoder Version: OpenJPEG: 1.5.2 Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.18 Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)

Let's not forget the pic was obviously photoshopped, made a bit harsher, added contrast, desaturated colours ...

Is there an app or website tool that allows a player to set his/her online status externally, without having to log into a SL viewer. Ever wondered what the online status is good for? It's showing your online status! When you're not logged in you're not online. Makes sense, no? What sinister plans do you have to fake your on/offline status?

The eyebrows remind me of my older Belleza skin.

Ah those younglings, eh . . . Yes, terribly stupid. They are young, they make lots of money. they are healthy and they are selfish. So they get out of public health insurance and join some private insurance. Then they get older, marry and have kids and they realize oopsy, their wife and kids aren't included in my health care. Then they lose their jobs and can't pay their high insurance premiums no more. And then they become ill, heart attack or cancer or whatever. Too bad. . . . and you have the temerity to incorrectly attempt to criticise my use of English? Silly girl! Yes, silly me. But I reallly don't have the foggiest where you got that term "germanic" from. When talking about the FRG just german should do the job quite fine ... if you're not on any agenda that is. And with your reputation as a slightly hilarious forum troll I'm not so sure about that agenda part. PS Don't give up your day job to try to become an economist either. Naaaw, why should I? Economy is boring. My field of expertise is Russian history and I'm a trained user support/hardware technician and Unix operator. I also worked as press photographer, windsurf instructor and sailyacht crew. My dayjob since 13 years, as a semi-retired (not officially unemployed but not on pension neither) housewife/ useless person/caretaker, is fullfilling enough. There is nothing in economy for me. :smileyhappy:

Many, many Federal government employees belong to a Federal Employee union. They have outstanding retirement and health benefits. Many either contribute a very small percentage of their relative pay into these 'plans' or don't contribute anything at all--they are funded through taxes. The same applies to city and state government. Needless to say working at any level in government is a pretty good job (except, of course, employees of Detroit.) Oh, poor country. Well, I don't know much about the US but where I come from you pay into social insurance when you have a job, any job. It's the 3 pillars of the social system: health care, unemployment, pension. You work, you pay your due, you benefit. AFAIK you and your employer each pay 50%. There's no way around that system, no cheap way out for neither you nor your employer. I don't need to work for the gov'ment to receive a pension or get my hospital bills paid. And it's a system that won't touch taxes in any way. Nothing outstanding at it, it's just logical and has always been that way. Not even the nazis dared changing anything. That system works great ... or used to work great until legislation turned the American way and allowed to substitute your public insurances with private health insurance.

The Germanic unions do little to protect their workers from their employers; they operate to protect a closed shop, rather like the Guilds you mention. They are failing, of course, as the rapid reduction in the reduction in the unionised proportion of the workforce demonstrates - it was down to less than 20% by 2010. Not completely true. Unions are there in the fisrt place to negotiate fair wages and protection for their members. Once the tarif contract is done everybody in the business will gain from it, not only the members. In that regard they are completely different from medieval guilds since their power is much bigger, it even reaches into the legislative. Most of the labour related and social laws you find in germany where created for big parts due to strong unions. The unions are acting as lobbyists same as their counterparts from the corporate world and have influence on a country's politics. The reason for shrinking membership has rather to do with fashion and mindset of the younglings these days. My grandpa, my dad ... and to some extent even me were always proud of our working class status. But nowadays they all seem to be afraid to be recognized as workers, everybody wants to be something better, everybody wanna be a popstar. So becoming member of a union would be like a stigma for them. Also as the working force shrinks, and we already have all the fancy contracts and laws in place, many people think it's not necessary anymore to engage in the struggle. Once I get my unemployment benefits why should I be member of any union? And that's the sad state of mind of major proportions of the general population. That is the sad truth. One more word about your false (imho) use of the term germanic. Germanic is a genealogy term (in which most of us whities fit more or less) and has nothing to do with the political construct of Germany.

Hm, I'm not an expert on ATI graphics (heck, I'm no expert on anything really) but I heard the last couple of ATI drivers are kinda incompatible with SL. Maybe just try to install an older driver and try again. And/or install a third party viewer (Firestorm, Singularity ...) and see if they'll treat you better than LL's own krappola viewer. Further, why did you go premium? The benefits are small and it only makes sense if you're planning on owning lots of land. I went 4 years in game on a basic account until I finally got the stupid idea that I need a home of sorts. I'm still not spending much time there anyway and have just tiered down and will probably go back to basic acc in the forseeable future.

Unionism is a rational response to feudalism; the USA was never a feudal society, so unions were an irrelevant aberration in the developing country Unions are a rational response/counterweight to industrialism ... not feudalism. Unions were not formed in medieval times but around the turn of the last century. And the USA had theri industral revolution as well as any other country. And now that we have less and less "real" workers in the coalmines and heavy industry they spread out, of course. In germany we have unions for every kind of business, from gastronomy, education, public works, banks and insurances, farming, retail and wholesale, just about any kind of business that needs employees. They were and still are important as a controlling factor on employer/employee relations. A buffer zone if you so will. I'm just disappointed that I won't be around to see the rise of collaborative anarchy, or as the Eastern Bloc call it, crime. Huh? What eastern bloc? Haven't you watched any news the least 30 years? There is no eastern bloc anymore since kinda around 1989 or so. Which is kinda shame .... but oh my, so be it. Further, anarchy is a threat (and therefor crimatized) by any organised society. There are/were only a handful of selected people on this planet I'd share a true anarchist system with. Namely Mahatma Gandhi, Nestor Makhno, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez ... maybe Mother Theresa (if she promises to behave). These are good, uncompromised people with a free mind. But that's it. For the masses anarchy would end up in a giant bloodbath and is not recommended. Apply sparcely.

I work ~70 hours a week, every week, and for over 25 years. I work to pay taxes to pay union federal workers retirement plans... and now Obamacare. Oh that's stupid. If your contract says you gotta work 70 hours/wk than your union obviously has some bad negotiators. You pay taxes for retirement pans? You obviously live in the wrong country. Obamacare? What has that to do with anything? I know, I know the USA is kinda struggling to grasp the concept of social insurances but I can tell you right now that Obamacare might be a step in the right direction but is still the wrong concept.

I don't know where you got this assumption that employeers are not unfair when it comes to pay in the USA? Me? You obviously got me wrong. Employers are usually the most unfair. And we'd still be working our asses of for no pay if it wasn't for the unions.

would work the same we do now. How? Our bosses would've never agreed to your contract if not by force thru strikes and laws. Oh wait, maybe in your case it's different: you're not by any chance USAmerican, are you? Well then, sorry, you don't qualify for this thread. would earn more doing so. Oh yes. And that's why our average wages are as low as in the 50s since all the young people don't grasp the idea of solidarity and only think for themself while watching the world around them crumble. Why would your boss pay you more if he doesn't have to? would have more time to spend on things we like because we'd spend less time waiting needlessly for unionised bureaucrats who're once again on strike or in interminable union meetings. Every big organisation needs bureaucrats, they keep the whole thing working. Any of your big bucks corporations employs bureaucrats as well. And most ppl working for unions are low level local representatives. They often do it in their spare time. ... in fact the only people worse off would be union execs who'd not have the posh lifestyle of the rich and famous they now live from the union fees paid by their members. Execs always get more money. So what? At least their wages are open and transparent since they are working based on the same tarif contract like everybody else. Let's never forget how it all got started during the industrial revolution. Nowaydays we are softies and spoiled brats but remember how our grandfathers and their dads fought hard for a minimum of worker's rights and fair payment, for vacations, for equality, for education, for insurance, for just about anything. Again, US is a bit different since contrary to Europe, the workers failed over there. Back to the topic of this thread: You can't strike in SL. Period! LL are not our employers, they don't pay us. Everybody working in SL is a freelancer and so doesn't have any legal protection or anything. LL is a fascist/feudal system, strikes are pointless here. The only thing you can do is boycot LL by stop paying for their services and by not logging on anymore. But as we all know LL are kinda brickheaded and won't even notice any action from the user's side.

Without unions most of us ... would work 16 hours/day 7 days/week couldn't afford the computers to type out spoiled selfish anti-socialist unsolidaric slogans wouldn't even be educated enough to think of those stupid anti-unionist conclusions

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-8350G.89653.0.html The AMD Radeon HD 8350G is a processor graphics card in the AMD Richland APUs (A4-5150M). It offers only 128 VLIW4 shader cores (8650G: 384). The 8350G has no dedicated graphics memory, but shares the main memory with the CPU cores. The integrated UVD3 video decoder allows the full decoding of Multi-View Codec (MVC), MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX, xVid), MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and Adobe Flash HD videos. According to the clock rates of 514 - 720 MHz (Turbo), the performance should be only a few percent above a Radeon HD 7420G. Thus, the Radeon HD 8350G performs similar to a dedicated Radeon HD 7450M. Modern and demanding games (2013) should be only playable in very low settings and resolutions. Without fast dual-channel memory the performance drops even more. The shaders of the chip can also be used for general computing. The APU is manufactured in 32nm and rated at a TDP of 35 watts. This allows the chip to be used in notebooks from 13 to 14 inches or bigger. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+8350G As you can see it's not a very promising chip to play games on. Actually the worst. So here's the golden protip when you buy your next lappy: do reasearch first, buy computer later.

/me knocks on Scot's head, hears a lovely clean ringing PING sound. Nods satisfied and buggers off. :smileyhappy:

I play other games just fine on my rig SL is nothing like. Any. Other. Game! But, granted, your rig should play SL nice up to very nice. And I'm experiencing the same right now. Since like 2 weeks FPS went way down and I suffer high packet loss. Might be my ISP (last mile is in process of upgrading) or SL (which is an eternal construction site) or my GPU is giving in. :smileyindifferent:

What? Ditto. I'm a Linuxer as well but not since long, and I did never, not even once, use the Terminal yet. I hope I can avoid that in the future as well. My knowledge of Linux is super limited but after a little help from friends I was able to get SL running. It would surely be helpful if the OP could tell us which Linux they are using. But from the answers I couldn't make anything neither. OP asked for help on newbie level and got exactly what they wanted to avoid: totally freakish technobabble. I could tell them how I installed Singularity 64-bit on my Mint 15 Cinnamon 64-bit system. That might be totally different on Slack, Arch, Fedora or any other more expert linux.

I have no personal experience but Belkin is generally regarded as crappola. :matte-motes-nerdy:

tl;dr

That stiffing up and sliding sounds like a lag problem as it so often happens in places with many people. Please check your connection with ctrl-shift-1. FPS good? Packet loss? Latency? And pls also send your system info so the more technicallly ppl here can advice you better. You don't even need to be logged in world to get the data. From your login screen just click Help --> About 'your viewer' and copypaste the content of that window. It should look somehow like this: Singularity Viewer 1.8.3 (4998) Sep 18 2013 09:20:21 (Singularity) Release Notes Grid: Second Life Built with GCC version 40405 CPU: Intel® Core i5 CPU 650 @ 3.20GHz (1197 MHz) Memory: 7917 MB OS Version: Linux 3.8.0-19-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 17 18:16:28 UTC 2013 x86_64 Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 260/PCIe/SSE2 OpenGL Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 313.30 Viewer SSE Version: SSE2 libcurl Version: libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.0g zlib/1.2.6 c-ares/1.7.5 libidn/1.25 J2C Decoder Version: OpenJPEG: 1.5.2 Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.18 Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)

I'm very surprised that we didn't have thread on the America's Cup while it was still being contested so I thought I'd start one now. I guess I mentioned it before: most sailors are far too busy to participate in this lame-o landlubbers forum, most aren't even writing in the SL Sailing community's own forums. Even the SL Boatporn Tumblr is only used by a handful of contributors. That doesn't mean the AC went unnoticed. Orca, Noodle and Jane are the 3 best-known sailbloggers and they wrote about the AC once in a while. And corry Kamachi of WildWind Yachts even made an AC72 for use in SL. But, as it so happens, the America's Cup was never of great appeal for the masses of sailors. Not even the few interested in racing didn't think much of it. There are many many regattas on this planet who deliver bettter sport, better boats, more skillfull sailing. We care about those. And after the the cheap drama of the soap opera that was the AC 2013 it sunk even lower on the scale. "Hey, you own a car, dontcha? So you must be a big fan of Formula 1/Nascar! Not?"

Have you any other applications running at the same time? Torrents can really bog you down. Maybe a nosey neighbor riding piggyback on your unsecure connection? Have you contacted your ISP about these spikes? Maybe you're on a congested DSLam. Have you tried changing to another sim? Some sims are lagging badly due to heavy script and texture load. But calling 5 fps bad? You're so lucky, I've experienced far worse. Everything above 20 fps is like SL heaven for me ... and I'm a biker and race sailor, go figure.

LOL, jibber-jabber for some, important info for others. It didn't need as hard look to find out this: With a 17.3 screen this is a behemoth of a laptop, huuuuge and heavy. So it's really not that mobile anymore but a desktop replacement computer. I wouldn't take it on travels. The Intel integrated HD chip is ok-ish for a multimedia pc but won't hardly cut it for SL use. Let's not forget SL is the hardest application to run for any machine. You won't get much joy from it. The vendor Best Buy is of questionable reputation, so I hear. I'm not an American but I guess in your counttry it's known as a box-pusher who tries to look cheap - but really isn't. In this price range you should well be able to find more a suiting pc. If you're set deadbang on a laptop have a look at what other sellers have on offer. I hear Newegg is good and won't try to sell you chit. Look for a laptop with a real dedicated GPU from Nvidia's GTX series. Look for MSI GE or GT series laptops. They offer a better resolution 1080x1920 on a matte display (less reflections) and have better graphic chips built in. Also they are decently cooled so your poor lappy won't be fried in a long SL session. It will stil be a compromise for SL usage but better than most other laptops.

... and, as always, the obvious hints from Obvious Orca: - the fuzzy screen indicates your poor gpu is totally overworked and stressed out - place your lappy on a cooling stand with fans - every 3 mth open it up and give it a good clean - never operate a laptop on your lap, neither in bed or anywhere where it doesn't get enough circulating air supply - maybe slide down the graphics a bit - turn down the DD - check temperatures - avoid crowded places like shopping malls and clubs