Jennifer Boyle

My own experoence with LL support has been good the last year or so. Do you have an idea about how it was done? I am curious about that.

There used to be a program named Avapet which, I believe, will no longer work, that did that with an avatar on a second account. It could do a lot more besides following at a specified distance. You could give it orders via IM to do a lot of different things, like interact with other avatars and objects, chat, etc. It was fun. I had a dog avatar that I would log on with it so he followed me around. I wish we still had something like that.

A DMCA notice is an allegation. You only have to assert that the IP in question infringes your rights. The requirements regarding what must be included are simple and specific, and you can read them on Web in many places. LL doesn't "want" anything, except a notice that meets the legal requirements, in which case they either take down the content or lose their legal safe harbor. If the owner of the taken-down content files a counter notification saying that it was not infringing, it goes back up, and your next step is to file a lawsuit. Neither LL nor any other ISP is going to try to adjudicate copyright disputes. That would be an absolutely losing endeavor for them, by which they could gain nothing and lose much. The idea of presenting evidence to them is silly. You present your evidence during discovery and in court after you file your lawsuit.

I held off using prim feet for a long time because I couldn't get a satisfactory collor match with my skin. I tried Slink, which uses a gradient-textured tattoo layer to obscure the transition, and they work for me. They are the only ones that have. Now I have one pair of heels and one pair of bare feet that I wear frequently. I have a few others pairs of shoes with prim feet that I wear with pants that hide the transition. Otherwise, I sill wear prim shoes. Eventually I will probably wear only shoes with prim or mesh feet, except when the outfit covers the foot and ankle; with those outfits, i see no reason to. The part I hate about regular avatar feet the most is the ankle deformity.

My current skin is LAQ, which I recommend. YOu also might check Dutch Touch and Redgrave. These places probably have shapes, too, though quality in shapes is more subjective. I strongly recommend buying only modifiable shapes. You may well from time to time decide that something should be a little different. If, for example, you just want your height to be a little different, you probably want to otherwise still look the same. Your shape has much more to do with defining your features than your skin. Browse strawberrysingh.com for ideas, too.

First, let me say that you do a first-class job. You have always been so nice and responsive to me that I actually feel affection for you and think of you as a friend, not just someone who sells stuff that I like. In this customer's eyes, you are what a SL designer and merchant should be. I had a few thoughts that might be worthwhile. I am a pragmatist, and think whatever both makes your customers happy and saves you time is good. You can't help that people who don't know what to do with them are going to buy your products, or that later, when they are more knowledgeable, they may return if they had a good experience. One thought I had is to put a notecard giver script in the box that give a notecard that tells how to open boxes, or, perhaps, clearly-labeled links to answers to common, simple questions. Or you could have a script that opens the box on touch, and a texture on the box or hovertext that says "Click on Me," Something else that might help is to make videos and post them on Youtube. I don't know who else does, but Siddean Munro does that, and video instructions are so much easier to understand and follow that instructions on a notecard. Would media on a prim be useful, e.g., have a Web page or video that tells how to open boxes on on the box? You could also include clearly labeled prims that had links to video instructions on them . OnE could be named "REZ ME FIRST" and could have a video briefly describing the resources available. Would a redelivery terminal help? I know that I have occasionally forgotten to make a copy before having an editing misadventure and was grateful that the seller had a redelivery terminal. If she hadn't, I would have taken her time asking for another copy, and she would have been in the uncomfortable position of having to spend a little more uncompensated time or possibly alienating a customer. You could, at least, just have a canned response for all the problems having to do with customers needing help because they messed something up.

Innula Zenovka wrote: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-3025 Thanks!

Lately, I frequently strike a particular pose for no apparent reason. If I stop all animations, it goes away, but keeps returning. If I could find out what the animatiion was, I think I could figure out what's going on.

Make sure you are not wearing multiple tattoo layers. I usually wear four or five, and whenver I log on wearing them. I have to take all but one off, Then my avatar rezzes. After she does, I can replace them all one by one, This is a known bug. There is a jira about it that I am unable to find right now.

I'll check them out. Thanks.

Tamara Artis wrote: I have it in wine color and I wear no skirt benath lol. Just wanted to say great look and don't mind the occasional AO accidents:) Well, that's certainly a solution for the problem.

Czari Zenovka wrote: ...A merchant with the present permissions system can't make everyone happy, so has to go with the majority. As for backing up, that was something LL changed two years ago.... Yes, exactly. The current permissions system is too limited. A merchant could offer both mod/copy and mod/trans, however. I probably should have been clearer. I was not necessarily talking about backup outside SL. I would be content with being able to keep backups in a prim in world. Even having a backup in inventory would be a major improvement, since it would protect against many hazards, like loss due to sim rollbacks and damage due to mod attempts gone wrong. Parenthetically, inventory loss is not the only hazard. SL glitches can change permissions, too. One of my favorite shoes is no mod/no copy/no trans due to that; its mate retains the correct permissions.

I think it's fixed now.

Tamara Artis wrote: Why do you break words in two lines? It was an accident. The new post window timed out before I finished the post and wouldn't let me post, so I pasted into Word and back into a new forum messgae window. It happed by accident somwhere in the copying-pasting. I'll try to fix it.

First, don't you think someone would need to know something about your knowledge, skills, abilities, limits, and likes and dislikes to give you a specific suggestion. A good place to look is in the help wanted classified ads in world and here.

I have been thinking about the permission system. I think it is deficient in certain areas. Tomorrow, I will have been in SL six years; other aspects of SL have improved enormously, but I don't think the permissions system has changed significantly during that whole time. First, what would an ideal permission system do? It would protect everyone's rights, infringe no one's rights, and not provide technical means to prevent people from exercising all of their rights. The current system does not meet this standard. Second, there are fundamental differences between SL and RL in terms of what IP rights mean. Because everything in SL is IP everything is subject to copyright law, under which both creators and consumers have certain rights. In RL most tangible objects are not protected by copyright, but may be protected by patents. Third, the entity that has rights and obligations under IP law is the human owner of the SL account or, perhaps, her RL employer if the SL account is used to carry out duties as an employee. The only way to enforce IP rights is through the RL legal system, and it can only target RL people and other legal entities. Fourth, the permissions system is not the same as a licensing system. A license is a contract between seller and buyer that sets out what the buyer can and cannot do with her purchase. It cannot say just anything, and there are certain rights buyers have under the law even if the license denies them. One is the right of first sale, which is the right to sell the copy or copies that they purchased. Another, in the case of software, which all SL creations are, is the right to make a backup copy. It goes without saying that buyers have an unrestricted right to modify anything they own. The current system does a pretty good job of protecting creators' rights, as far as I can tell, although, as I see things from a consumer's point of view, I could be overlooking something. What it does not do is give creators tools that allow them to protect their rights without depriving buyers of theirs. It is too simple and limited, and, obviously, was not designed to make it possible to place limitations that correspond to actual rights as closely as possible. Creators' legitimate need is prevent more than one copy for every copy sold being in use at the same time, and it is limited to that. Consumers' legitimate need is to be able to use, backup, sell, give away, and modify their property as they see fit. It seems to me that a few simple changes would go a long way toward making the limitations imposed by permissions closely correspond to actual rights. One is to change "no transfer" to "delete copies when transferred." The expected behavior would be that all copies that had been made by the transferor, wherever located, would disappear forever when one was transferred. This is quite similar to most RL software licenses that I am familiar with, which prohibit using more than one copy per license simultaneously, and require that no copies be retained if ownership is transferred. This alone would work for items that are ordinarily worn, such as clothing and body parts, since one can't really use multiple copies at the same time. For items that are ordinarily rezzed in world, something more is needed, since it can be useful to rez multiple copies. One way to deal with this would be to have a "copies to rez" property that would be incremented every time the buyer bought another copy of the same item and decremented each time a copy was rezzed. Obviously, since everyone has a right to modify her own property, it should not be possible to sell no-modify items. Scripts are a special case, since they are made no-modify to prevent people from copying them as text. A good way to deal with that would be to have a "no display" property for them. That would have the side benefit of eliminating the confusion that occurs when no-modify scripts are included in items that are otherwise modifiable. Most of the above discussion implicitly addresses transfers between users. There are a couple of other aspects that are significant. One is that sometimes sellers defraud buyers by lying about permissions, a situation in which buyers have no effective recourse. That would become impossible. Another is that it would be possible to freely transfer things among alts. That should be possible because it's necessarily the account owner who paid for and received the license, not the account. Since the original buyer clearly has the right to transfer her property to another person's account, it seems to me that she must have a right to transfer it to another of her accounts. I'm sure there'll be objections to these ideas. One will be that if we can sell and give away our stuff, creators will go out of business. There are still plenty of people creating RL content profitably, even though we can sell it freely. "But RL stuff wears out and SL stuff doesn't." That's right, but SL stuff becomes obsolete. Skin makers get better, so the skin that looked good six years ago doesn't now. Lights and shadows, which look so good that I almost always have them on, rendered a whole lot of shoes that relied on invisiprims to hide feet obsolete (for people who are unwilling to invest considerable time in making alpha masks, anyhow). Sculpties made a lot of old prim stuff obsolete, The increase in prim size limits made a lot of old structures obsolete. Scripters have become more skilled, and LSL has become more powerful. And now we have mesh, which will eventually render a huge amount of content obsolete. I sometimes just delete things I paid money for years ago because, by today's standards, they are of such poor quality that it's not worth the trouble to store them in a prim. In addition, many of us enjoy shopping in SL and aren't going to stop just because there are more yard sales offering stuff the sellers don't want because it is old; we don't want it either. Creators who keep innovating and improving, as they should if they expect to thrive, won't go out of business. Creators who just want to keep selling the same old s__t year after year need to go out of business. There will probably be an objection that making everything modifiable will allow people to break things and that they'll be asking creators for free replacements. That doesn't seem to be a problem in RL and it shouldn't be in SL. It probably would be a good idea to have one of those popups that keeps appearing till one checks the box that warns people to make a backup every time they buy something. There could even be a Backup system folder into which a copy would automatically go. I probably overlooked something. I hope that this stimulates discussion of what the best and fairest permission system would be.

Thanks. Invisiprims are obsolete because they don't work when people view them with lights and shadows enabled in their viewers, as I almost always do. Now, to hide body parts properly you need alpha masks. You wear them like clothing. Think of them as another clothing layer that is solely used to determine what body parts will be invisible. They are usually included with mesh clothing and with some prim shoes, although some of those don't work well for everyone. There are also free, generic ones available. Sometimes one intended for use with one pair of shoes will work with another. They are easy but time-consuming to make. You can make them using a free program that you can download. I start with clothing templates when making them and wear a tattoo layer made of clothing templates. That really helps you know where on the template a point on your skin is. Firestorms temporary texture upload is a real boon when making them; you could also use the beta grid. To wear more than one invisiprim, alpha mask, or anything else, choose add instead of wear on the menu for the second and subsequent ones.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: Then again, if you've got a setup that prevents me from opening up and using the thin I bought while still in your shop, you've lost some of my respect, and maybe the next impulse buy. If I have to go home or to some poor victim's land (OPer) to open it up, that gives me just enough time to rethink clicking on that item over there to the left that looked interesting... Yep. I just don't understand why so many shops have building turned off. They could take care of any concerns about littering by autoreturning objects after 10 minutes.

Yesterday, I put together an outfit that included a mesh skirt and mesh coat from the same designer, who makes really nice clothing. I knew I might have problems, but thought I might not because, coming from the same shop, they might have been designed to work together. First, I donned the size small ones, my usual size. (My shape is a standard size small.) That coat definitely didn't work, I tried the medium, and it looked great. I was so proud of my outfit. I wondered if we would ever be able to have nice 3D clothing that we could layer. I had a couple of thoughts. I'll describe my idea for a workaround first, so people will read it before they get tired of reading my drivel and quit. Could mesh clothing creators offer. as a bonus for people who buy two products that, like these, could be worn together a single mesh item that included both that would look just like they two separate should look together? Is it hard to make such a mesh object when you already have the two parts? As I continued to think about this, I wondered why we can't eventually have a complete solution (that would solve some other problems, too). This is involved and hard to express clearly. The shape and position of everything in SL is actually just a lot of numbers stored digitally that represent coordinates of points in space. Therefore the system (potentially) knows if two objects occupy the same space, i.e., overlap. Why can't there be a number stored in the objects properties that represents it's susceptibility to deformation by other objects; the lower the number, the easier it is for objects that it collides with to deform/move it, and the higher it is, the easier it is for it to deform other objects that it touches. In this example, the number would be higher for the skirt than the coat, so the coat would move instead of being penetrated by the skirt. Another way to do this would be to use a similar system, but instaed of deforming one object, not render the parts that penetrated the other. I realize that something like this would require massive, complex computation, perhaps more than is feasible with today's hardware. Is that the only reason we don't have something like it, or are there other reasons that are not apparent to a non-programmer? If that's the only reason, then we should be able to have it in the future as hardware rapidly becomes more powerful.

A discarded shopping bag.

I think it will always be much as it is now---a lot of people want cheap and don't care (or know how bad) they look, and others really care about their appearance and the quality of their clothing, just like in RL. So there will probably always be people churning out undistinguished clothes in mass quantities and others making unique designs.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: ... . And ran into a whole army of those "free for people under 30 days" offers... ... Which reminds me of something I've wondered about for years---why are there age limits on so many of the offers of free samples. It seems to me that their purpose is to acquaint people with a creator's products, so that they will like them and buy more. Why don't they want to acquaint old avatars who are not familiar with them with them for the same reason? If anything, I think old ones are more likely to spend money on more if they like them.

What size? How many prims? What maturity rating?

Thanks for the useful information, Dora.

Two questions. The only clothing-related thing I make is alpha masks because a lot of the ones that come with clothes do not work very well. Should I be saving the textures for them as 24-bit instead of 32-bit? What is the advantage? As far as I can see, the two shirts in your photos look the same, so it appears that using the alpha channel did not do anything desirable. Why would one be used in such an instance? Thanks!