Rolig Loon

I'm always a bit unsure about how "active users" are defined. As long as everyone is using the same yardstick, that's a handy benchmark statistic to have. When it's not clear how many bots and alt armies are included in the "active" population, though, it's difficult to make meaningful comparisons.

It's impossible to tell from your description. The GTX 960 card is not a super card for SL, but it should work quite well for you. The problem could be the card itself, as you suggest, but you could be having connection issues or could simply be setting your preferences too aggressively. As you troubleshoot, try: 1. Using the current version of the standard SL viewer. 2. Restarting both your router and your modem. 3. Avoiding a wifi Internet connection. 4. Logging in to a quiet region while you do your testing (Furball and Smith are good places to try). 5. Setting your draw distance to 128m or lower, and your Max # of non-imposter avatars no higher than 10. 6. Being sure that you are actually using the NVidia card and not the Intel graphics chip on your motherboard (check the NVidia Control Panel to be sure).

I truly enjoyed reading this article. There have been so many uniformed pieces written over the years by amateur writers who spend a weekend romping through SL that I greet each new one skeptically. This article was refreshingly different, well-researched, thoughtful, and ... yes, honest.

Theory? I have only seen one person being derogatory here ......

Relax. As Adam said, rather politely, this is a discussion. When there's no single answer, a thread can wander into side issues and sometimes reveal mistaken interpretations or outdated assumptions, but that's a good reason to keep talking. People have differing opinions and experiences to share, so there's a bit of give and take. If it had gotten out of hand, with name-calling and flaming, the moderators would have stopped it ages ago.

Fortunately, one only laughs silently. JESTS

It's your personal responsibility to fill out your tax forms properly. If you export enough money from SL to trigger the government's mandatory requirement, Linden Lab will send you a copy of what they send the IRS (Form 1099 something?)

Me too, although the first I was aware of was Eisenhower. I remember hearing political jingles for Ike on the radio before the elections in 1952. My parents were reluctant Republicans, but they preferred him to Stevenson.

Nah, one lie is enough. FAKER

Really? I guess hiccups tell TRUTH.

Lindens have better ways to spend their time than by wandering through the records, looking for people with lots of alts. Although they do say that they discourage anyone having an "army of alts," it's rare to find anyone beyond newbie age who doesn't have at least one -- often many more. I have only four, myself, but it's not uncommon to have a small squadron, if not an army, for perfectly legitimate reasons. I use mine for various building tasks or for load testing. A photographer might want a well-controlled, properly-dressed crowd scene. Linden Lab does take notice if you get into trouble, however. Once you have been suspended for something, they will watch to see that you don't get around the sanction by logging in as another alt. If you get on the bad side of the Governance Team, that's when they pay attention to alts.

Mermaids see Second Life from a different perspective than land-dwellers. It's, well, .... wet, for one thing. And I suppose you might consider it boring, except for occasional incredible treasure discoveries and the time we spend frolicking in grottoes here and there. The sea floor is fairly barren, which is why I personally prefer exploring rivers and lakes. They have more twists, turns, and hiding places, and they are much more dynamic than the open ocean. To give you a feel for what mermaids see, I thought I'd include some underwater shots that I took on today's trip down the great channel from Fourze to Piranhaconda Bay. Here's what the bay at Fourze looks like to most land-dwellers. It has an outstanding lighthouse, a stretch of sandy beach, and some rocky places near the mouth of the channel, to the right in this photo. This a very popular place for boaters and houseboat owners. Although the channel looks like a river, it's not one. Like each of the other two passages from the great inland Belliserian Sea, it is open to the ocean on both ends. Here's a mermaid's view of the lighthouse, looking through the rippling surface of the water. If you're not accustomed to this perspective, I guess it takes a little getting used to.Try squinting a little, maybe. The channel is wide as far as the high bridge at Castlewellan Overlook -- high enough, in fact, that even a very tall-masted ship can pass under it, provided that its keel doesn't scrape the channel bottom. From here, the channel is straight and almost featureless along its bottom, all the way south to Proctor. Instead of staying in the channel itself, therefore, I decided to explore side channels in Spring Creek, where they are narrower and more irregular. Spring Creek also has many small islands that are fun to visit. Some, like this one, are rocky. Others, however, have nice grassy areas where you can spread out a picnic or just lie on your back and watch the clouds. This area is a very lovely one to explore on horseback, I'm told, although I would naturally have a hard time handling a horse myself. From a mermaid's perspective, these bridges are meant for swimming under, not riding over. They often have treacherous eddies that can force you against the support columns and give you a nasty bruise. This one isn't bad, even though the flow speeds up a bit between the bridge supports and that large rock on the left. You can see how rough the channel bed is, though. It's those places where we sometimes get unpredictable turbulence. Several small streams like this, all quite worth exploring, empty into Spring Creek and then into the main channel. I made my way up two or three of them before going back to the main channel and heading south. At the southern end of the Spring Creek region, the main channel turns abruptly westward rather than cutting into Proctor. Here, the bottom is sandy and smooth, almost like the shallow ocean. The banks are still rocky at first, but before long the channel widens dramatically and is flanked by beaches and sand bars. This is the Pugwash region, still unsettled today but likely to be opened for a new rush of Bellisserian pioneers before long. Some people are already cruising here in power boats. I couldn't resist playing a favorite game with this one, a game that most mermaids learn once they are strong enough to catch up to a fast-moving boat. The propeller creates an eddy wake that can pull you along very rapidly and with almost no effort. You just have to be careful not to get too close to the propeller and not to get tossed into some obstacle. I stuck close to this one all the way to Piranhaconda Bay, where he started weaving to shake me loose and then roared off toward the Kuga lighthouse. I guess boaters can be annoyed by the drag of a mermaid in the wake, but it does give them something to talk about later. So, there's the trip for today. You'll probably want to do it yourself on top of the water, but I thought it would be fun to show you what I see.

The Answers area is where we try to answer resident questions about how SL works (or occasionally, why it doesn't). We have no special insight into policy questions. This is a resident to resident forum. Lindens rarely come here and never answer policy questions. If you have a suggestion for a feature upgrade, submit a Support Case.

with innocuous little lasting SCARS.

You'll get no argument from me. Again, though, my point was not about technology at all (or only marginally about it). It was about the distance between creators and consumers, and it's hardly an original thought. Commentators point out that since the draft was discontinued, Americans have been further and further out of touch with the military. Agricultural observers lament that there are fewer family farms every year, and that the average grocery shopper has little feel for where food comes from. When communities lose touch with each other, they lose a sense of shared destiny and they feel fewer incentives to share experiences. Creators/innovators depend on an appreciative consuming public as more than just a market, and the general public needs creators for more than a new toaster or another sofa-sized painting. The communities enrich and inspire each other. When "we" become "they", everyone loses something.

Let our virtues invigorate necking. OHBOY

Exactly. I wouldn't use llSetTextureAnim for an application like this that is not animating anything. Just use llOffsetTexture and be done with it. The only mild complication is that your texture doesn't have nice, clean boundaries between frames, so I would suggest doing a little cleanup with Photoshop first.

Not if girls hesitate, though. PAUSE

Yes, but there are an amazing number of people willing to scale that bar, and not all of them are formally educated. I am continually amazed by what I see "makers" do. Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. That's why I said that on the whole I am optimistic. I know many of those people in SL, just as I know many in RL. Perhaps I should have inverted the order of those two concerns in the sentence you just quoted. The reason that the increasing bar for entry concerns me is because I see a greater separation between creators and consumers in everyday life than I did a half-century ago. You and I became engineers and scientists in part because we saw people around us tinkering with things as we were growing up. We had a sense that building stuff is "normal". It's what people like us do, and what we can do, even if it's hard. I raise a flag of caution when I realize that my granddaughters won't think of sewing as a "normal" thing to do because they don't know anyone who even owns a sewing machine, much less uses it. I remember reading Grapes of Wrath and being impressed that the Joad family, on their way to California, could rebuild their car's transmission on the side of the road. That was my parents' generation, when real people did things like that. I know that those people are around today -- I spent my career among them and I do creative things in SL now -- but they aren't right next door where they can inspire kids like you and me to leap the high bar and do difficult, creative things ourselves.

The design challenge here is how to relate the rotary motion of the wheel to the reciprocal motion of the camshaft. Unlike in RL, where the camshaft's forward thrust drives the wheel, you'll have to translate the smooth rotation of the wheel into the pulsing movement of the shaft -- whose velocity changes as the sine of the rotational angle of the wheel. My mind isn't up to the mathematics on a Saturday morning, but I would be inclined to model the problem in a set of integral steps -- a loop -- in which you calculate the position and rotation of the camshaft with every 10 or 20 degree rotation of the wheel and then apply it new values of PRIM_POS_LOCAL and PRIM_ROT_LOCAL with llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast. Edit: What Prof said ^^

That's a legitimate worry. Originality is always at a premium. It's easier to modify -- or copy outright -- an idea that someone else came up with than it is to create something totally new. Fortunately, there's always a need for both the original creators and the cookie cutters. The original designers set the pace and help define "quality" and the others meet demand. My real concern, therefore isn't about SL or society in RL becoming less innovative but about the fact that so much creation is invisible to the general public. We lose something as children grow up not knowing that milk comes from dairy farms and never seeing people sewing the clothes that they wear. I feel more than nostalgia when I contemplate worlds in which creation isn't seen as a daily experience.

Yes, and there are always some new innovators driving the next wave of development. My previous comments not withstanding, I continue to be optimistic that SL is reinventing itself at a healthy rate, both from within -- Lindens and moles -- and by the addition of new creative talent. I count myself as one of the "oldbie" generation of creators who have tried to keep up with the pace of change, and I know many others like me. My nostalgic musings about the simpler days of home seamstresses and backyard mechanics shouldn't be interpreted as a sign that I am discouraged by the general shift toward consumerism. The more people there are who cannot make things themselves, the more society depends on those who can create things -- artists, engineers, designers, farmers. My only cry of alarm is that the bar for entry into that cadre of creators keeps getting higher, and the community of creators is less visible than it was in the past.

Read up on the diffusion of innovations.

Gee, I forgot the season. GIMME

I think that's a fair overview. I have always known more creators than I suspect most people do, but that's because I was drawn to building things and then, rather quickly, to scripting them. If I were starting in SL today, I would probably not feel the same pull. The prolific builders and clothing designers today are semi-pro 3D modelers who have honed their skills outside of SL. They do their serious design work off-line and import the finished products later, so they don't offer the same "Here, let me show you" sort of casual mentoring that was common a decade ago. Scripters are a slightly different breed, because we have always done our work out of view. Even when we script things in world, it doesn't look as if we are working until something suddenly moves or changes appearance. Still, scripting itself has become more arcane with the introduction of Experiences, animesh, pathfinding, and a tripling (quadrupling?) of the number of native functions in the LSL toolbox. I think it's harder for a newbie scripter today than it was back in the day. At the risk of overreaching, this shift from being a population of creators to one of consumers seems to have paralleled RL. Over my lifetime,I have watched cars become complicated enough that a neighborhood kid can't easily tinker with his hotrod in the driveway the way he could in the 1950s. A budding mechanic needs computer diagnostics and special tools to do things that his father and grandfather did with a screwdriver and a socket wrench. We don't sew at home any more -- it's hard to find a fabric store even -- and even cooking has been outsourced to fast food restaurants and frozen pizza. We have learned to expect other people to make things for us, and there are fewer "other people" in small shops and garages. Given that trend in RL, I don't find it surprising that SL residents -- especially the younger ones -- are consumers rather than creators. Now that I've written this, I really feel like a codger.