Jennifer Boyle

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: ... a service provider is eligible for the limitationon liability only if it does not have actual knowledge of the infringement, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, or upon gainingsuch knowledge or awareness ... Failure to comply substantially with the statutory requirements means that the notification will not be considered in determining the requisite level of knowledge by the service provider. If, upon receiving a proper notification,... In the case I mentioned, the complaint in the DMCA notice was that a resident was using a single word in the name of her SL business that the filer had registered as a trademark. Single words are not subject to copyright; therefore, on its face, the notice was not a proper notice of copyright infringement because it was not possible for the alleged conduct to be copyright infringement. The DMCA does not apply to trademark infringement, so, again, it was not a proper notice. I didn't see the notice, so I don't know, but I'll bet it was carefully worded so as to say nothing that was literally untrue, e.g., claiming to hold exclusive rights to the use of the word in question without saying that that was because it was a registered trademark, not because they held copyright. Or maybe they actually complained of trademark infringement, and LL, for whatever reason (ignorance? laziness? fear?) let them get away with misusing DMCA to abuse its customer. It seems to me that LL should recognize a fiduciary duty to its customers not to act on obviously invalid DMCA notifications. If they are obviously invalid, as in the case I cited, I don't think they are taking much of a chance.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: "... This notice, which must be filed by the copyright holder or an agent working for them,... Exactly, the copyright holder, who may not be the creator.

Deja Letov wrote: ... Don't you have to be the creator to file a DMCA ...? No, but you have to be (to legitimately file) someone whose copyright is being infringed. You could be someone who bought, or was given, limited or full rights. You could have bought all rights from the creator. You could have bought an exclusive license to use something in SL, while the creator retained rights to use it everywhere else, etc.

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: LL are legally obliged to act on a DMCA claim... People keep saying this. If they take down the allegedly infringing content, they have a safe harbor, meaning that they are absolved of liability for whatever infringement occurred. They are perfectly free to refuse to remove it, in which case they can be sued. I know of a case in which LL took down content in response to a DMCA notice that was obviously invalid because the allegation was that a trademark was being infringed, and the DMCA does not cover trademark infringement. IMHO, they should excercise just a little judgment and display a little backbone by refusing to act on DMCA notices when the allegations contained in them, if completely true, would not constitute copyright infringement. If the filer in such a case chooses to sue, it will lose and LL can recover damages from them.

Thanks. You helped my understanding.

I have used the Dataram RAMdisk. It worked perfectly.

Perrie Juran wrote: To answer your question Perrie yes I did take in a few video tutorials after I had downloaded and installed firestorm. I than I too have found that logging in with one sometimes messes up my settings in the other. seems to go both ways for me. i should probably make a back up copy of the settings file so all i'd need to do is drop it in the program files rather than having to re do all my settings whenever this occurs. I use a different settings file for each viewer. You can use the command line settings switch to designate a different one for each ( " --settings firstorm.xml"), so that it's not trouble at all after you configure it the first time.

Alicia Sautereau wrote: ssd will speed up loading textures alot faster, tho the gpu still needs to render it. There is 1 problem with ssd, they degrade when data is written onto the same place unlike normal hdd`s I`m using an old vertex2 ssd as cache/temp data storage for the sake of speed, even tho the odds of it degrading are 10 times faster then when using it for normal things. IF you want to use an ssd, i would strongly recommend using a small 30gig cheap vertex 1/vertex 2 ssd The vertex 3 series are for the sandybridge systems with +P69 controller that can run at the advertised speeds, not to mention that they are abit more expensive to use as a "dump" disc. If it would fail after an year, the costs are neglectable to replace it That is an interesting idea. I think I will try putting the cache on a RAMdrive and seeing if it improves performance before buying another SSD, I tried that in the past, and it didn't help, but that was on a different, slower computer, and there may have been some other bottleneck that kept it from working. With a three year warranty, wearing out an SSD does not seem to be much of a concern to me. If it fails under warranty, I get a free replacement. After three years, technology will probably have advanced enough that I won't mind replacing it, and the replacement will probably be a lot cheaper.

I think you are right that it takes really good hardware to have the best SL experience. I base this statement purely on my own recent experience. Santa brought me a new computer with a second generation Core i7 CPU, X79 motherboard, 32 GB RAM, GTX 580 graphics card with 3072 MB of DDR5, and an SSD for all programs. The only thing that could be better, but only slightly, is it could have the extreme edition CPU and use SSDs for all storage. SL works dramatically better on it than it did on my old computer. My old computer was pretty good. It had a 3.2 GHz Core 2 Quad, 8 GB RAM, and a GTX 470 graphics card, much more power than needed for almost all everyday computer tasks. I am pretty sure my new computer is overkill, but I have no idea by how much, and I have no idea which parts (except the amount of RAM) are better than they need to be. All I can say is that my old one is not good enough to even approach letting me have as good a SL experience as I do with the new one. And, yes, the reason I wanted the new one was to improve my SL experience.

I'm using Firestorm now. I used Kirsten's Viewer before development stopped. The main reasons for using third party viewers for me is that they usually have additional desirable features that the LL viewer lacks, and the developers seem to be much more open to adding features that users want. An additional reason for my not using the current release of the LL viewer is that I cannot because it always crashes on startup. Users of TPVs are certainly not "bucking the system." TPVs were a predictable and expected outcome when LL made the viewer open source a few years ago.

A few of my favorites were bought in 2007 and 2008. One was given to me in 2007 by the creator, who is no longer in SL, and I have a sentimental attachment to it. I tried the alpha masks that came with some of my newer shoes, and none worked well with shoes they didn't come with. I have neither the talent, skills, time, nor software to make alpha masks myself. I need an in-world tool that lets me make the alpha mask while wearing it. Something like a tool that lets me paint invisibility on my avatar and then save it. I think LL should prohibit sale of items containing invisiprims if the viewer is not going to support them. At least, they could require MP sellers to certify that none of their items on MP contain them, and if they catch one lying, permaban him. I've said in the past that one of the good things about SL is that things don't wear out. I guess obsolescence due to technical progress is the SL equivalent.

Tari Landar wrote: When I need to make more sales, or simply want to, I don't look to others to see what they can do to better aid me. I don't look to others when sales are low, to see what they are doing wrong, that is harming me. No, I look at myself, at what I am doing, at what I can do differently. Even if I am doing everything right (or think I am anyway, lol), there is always something that can be changed. Exactly.

Others have said everything I'm going to say, but I wanted to put my $0.02 in. First, if someone is trying to make a RL living making things in a virtual world that others make for enjoyment and give away, perhaps some reflection on the wisdom of the career choice is in order. If you want better income, innovate instead of whining. Make things that are better than anyone else's. Make your products so good that people are happy to pay your price. It seems to me that if you are representing yourself as a professional, it is reasonable to expect better quality from you than from your amateur competition. And if you aren't professional, why do you think you deserve high prices? You need to keep improving your products to stay ahead of the competition and earn the high prices---just like RL. I don't see how purveyors of high-quality free and low-priced goods can kill the SL economy. Consumers like me, who buy Lindens with real money, are the people who support SL. If someone has a viable (at least breaking even) business, the money to pay from everything, like tier, comes from consumers. If a business fails because we can get the same products for less, we get the same products, and the merchant is no longer removing money from SL. We may bring in less, but the reduction in outflow will probably be greater than the reduction in inflow, so we spend more money with other merchants. We consumers get more stuff, other merchants sell more stuff. The only one worse off is the person who went bust---because he didn't make good enough stuff to stay in business. If I see something I really like, I usually buy it. Most of my purchases are clothing. I have to really like it to pay over L$300, and be absolutely smitten to pay over L$500, but within those limits it doesn't matter that much. Yes, I will buy things that are very low-priced more readily---because if it turns out to be $#!t, I can delete it without losing much. What I think is on of the worst things about SL shopping is the huge amount of mediocre, completely undistinguished stuff that is offered just because someone without outstanding talent or skill decided to start selling clothing. I hate having to sift through all of that stuff. For that reason, I tend to keep returning to favorite stores of whose quality I am confident. I also seldom shop at freebie and dollarbie places; it's just not worth sifting through all the mediocre stuff to find the occasional nice item. I tried to make some estimates of what someone would have to charge to be fairly paid. I would think that 30 USD per hour would be generous compensation, especially since the work can be done from home on one's own schedule. I also would think a skilled creator could make a nice garment in three hours. At L$250/USD, if they were priced at L$100, 225 would need to be sold. That seems like a number that would be easily attainable for a quality item at this price. I really would like for someone who actually knows something about how much time is needed and what sales volumes are likely to comment.

I am really impressed with some mesh clothes, but not with others. I would really like to try mesh hair, so thanks for posting a source. I hope others who know of sources for mesh hair will post

Thanks for the explanations. You'd think they might tell us when they do things like this. Oh, well, I've been needing to clean out my shoe inventory, and I really like mesh shoes.

I have noticed this problem with several different pairs of prim shoes that do not have alpha layers or mesh. If Lights and Shadows are turned on in the graphics preferences. They look strange. I have fully updated 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate and a GTX 580 with the latest drivers. The same thing happens with Firestorm Release version and LL Viewer 3.2.5 beta. I can't run the official release viewer because it crashes on startup. If anyone has a suggestion about how to fix this without doing without Lights and Shadows, of about what the cause is, I would appreciate your posting it, With Lights and Shadows off: With Lights and Shadows on:

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: It's a problem that will always be here. I personally don't understand why a 32x32 texture costs as much to upload as a 1024x1024 one. if a 1024 costs 100 times more, a lot of people will think twice if they really need it. That's a great idea. I think it needs a jira. It definitely should cost more to uplead bigger textures. People do respond to incentives.

hibit Spad wrote: SL currently does not work with dial up. and people on low end broadband have problems. If SL were to double the graphics quality tomorrow many people would find SL unusable because of the bandwidth requirements. What I don't understand is why the server can't know how fast the connection is and send lower-quality graphic information to clients that are on slow connections, and better quality to clients on fast connections. Couldn't it periodically check how long it took the client to respond? The client could be written to give the highest priority to responding such a request from the server, so that it could reflect the time it took for the round trip more or less accurately. It could do something like truncating the lowest n bits of colors, lowering the resolution of textures, etc. I have an 18 Mbps connection, and I regularly download files from fast sites at over 6 Mbps, yet the highest bandwidth I have seen in the Statistics Bar is 1.6 Mbps, and that was for a few seconds once. I'm not really qualified to have an opinion, but my conclusion is that much lag is due to LL's servers or their connection to the Internet backbone being slow.

Veritas Kennedy wrote: P.S. Just found out there is a Viewer 3! Is it worth moving from viewer 1 to it? IMO, absolutely. One of the biggest improvements for me that ever happened in SL was the outfits that can contain links to inventory items that were introduced with Viewer 2. Another thing I really like is mesh clothing, some of which is so much better than prim/system clothing,

Jessika Rang wrote: I live on the mainland so I get lots of random visitors and I kind of like that random interaction.... Me, too! I have had a lot of enjoyable visits with people who just wandered in, and some became friends. I leave my house open on purpose, so people can wander in.

Why are weekly restarts a problem for you?

I am often multitasking when I am logged on and, therefore, don't respond promptly to IMs.

I have only been here five years come January 13, so I am a newcomer. Nevertheless, I remember some of those things, particularly the demise of casinos. Characteristically, LL didn't announce the change with sufficient lead time for residents to adjust, but just abruptly changed the rules. And I sure remember The Edge.

Thanks Ceera, Peggy, and Chelsea. Considering that most sims are empty or virtually empty most of the time, it seems strange that the load one puts on a core can have a big effect on others on the same server. Are we describing underpowered servers? I have read a lot of discussions similar to this one, and it's usually said that SL graphics are much harder to handle than a usual game's graphics because everything is dynamic. When I look around the sim I live in, I can see that most of the content has not changed in months. Couldn't there be some way for the server to know that? At least, it could know what objects are locked and how long they've been locked and know they are unchanged for some period of time, couldn't it? Also, if viewer is smart at all about what it saves in cache, now that the cache is really big, most of what I see should be in it. Why can't it load that content really fast first, and then check for changed content? Another thing that has long puzzled me is that SL can't seem to just let it's graphics degrade and run when not enough graphic power is available. I have two computers, but only one monitor, so I use Remote Desktop Connection a lot. SL graphics initialization fails when I try to run it using RDC, presumably because the best color available is 32 bit, Why can't it just go ahead and run the same, except for being less pretty. I understand that it uses the GPU to do things that other parts depend on, but it doesn't seem that having a poorer quality connection from the GPU to the monitor should affect that.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: ... If LL had changed the avatar and prims early on then maybe it would only have been a minor set back with a relatively few textures and objects being destroyed with the change..........but after a couple years it was too late.... Can you help me understand why it would not be possible to have two, or more, classes of avatars that are constructed according to different sets of rules? If that were done, newer, and better, ways of making avatars could be introduced without breaking anything, couldn't they? It seems to me that server and viewer code could be written to recognize more than one type and handle each appropriately, but I am not knowledgable about such things.