Qie Niangao

The next tier level after a full sim(region) of 64k .. is another full region (64k) and $195 p/mo. T But it's not. It's another half-sim, charged at the full-sim rate per square meter (so US$97.50 per half-sim, rather than the US$125.00 of just a single half-sim). See the Knowledge Base article: Any tier beyond the first full region is assigned in half-region increments at a rate of US$97.50 per half region. A higher level appears in your land use fees when you upgrade beyond a full region on the mainland. If you sell the land and move back to a tier of one full region or below, the system automatically tiers you down.

Some of us are optimistic about the "experience tools" project, which seems to be advancing at an unknown, perhaps undetectable pace.

Do you have any scripted objects on the parcel owned by the landowner? (On group-owned land, that would be an object deeded to group.) There's an LSL function that clears ban lists, as used by "security orbs" for example.

The next step after a full Mainland sim is another half-sim, but charged at the full-sim rate per sq.m., so 1.5 sims (98,304 sq.m.) at US$ 292.50.

In fact, the individual region maps are generated in two layers, one with basic terrain and the other with objects. An example of the terrain: Can you guess what the dirty adfarmers have done to that map?

Oh yeah. I guess a Linden Home would be individually owned, so that would work. (Group land takes more work.) In the Linden viewer I'm using currently, it's under: World / My land holdings...

Let us know how it goes. If the Lindens agree with you, then I'll be glad to remove that lettering -- and to AR every heartpox on the Map until they're all gone. I must confess, though, that I'm still pretty astonished that some folks dislike these things so much, but more than that, having dedicated a bunch of my SL history to battling adfarms, I'm just gobsmacked that these are being seen as remotely similar.

Perrie Juran wrote: One issue that has been brought up but I haven't confirmed personally is that those signs are interfering with shadows on the ground for those who enable that function. I don't use shadows myself for lag reasons. Also I don't know much about how they work. For instance, at what height does an object cast a shadow on the ground? I have shadows enabled pretty much always, and as best I can tell, once I render something, it casts shadows, even from thousands of meters up -- and it does not cast shadows until I've rendered it. So, the higher up something is, the less likely it is that one has cammed up and rendered it, so the less likely it will cast shadows. I rarely see the heartpox shadows, for example, nor most of the others (which may be because I generally keep a short draw distance), But this is all anecdotal and unscientific, so an expert may correct this informal impression.

I think we need more information from you about why a notebook computer is even a consideration. If you'll be using SL at home, by all means get a desktop and save yourself hundreds of dollars and years of aggravation. On the other hand, if you really need full-fledged SL on the road, then yeah, you're probably stuck having to pay all the extra money for the much shorter-lived laptop. ("Full-fledged" meaning more than you can get from Lumiya... and even then, there's SLGo, so you might still get by on the road without a notebook -- and one can pay for many months of SLGo with the savings of owning a desktop instead of a notebook.)

Perrie Juran wrote: The Hearts are not the only thing, just the most ubiquitous and obvious. There are still many clubs and store with flat prims with their name on them set at about 300 meters in order to show up on the world map. I didn't realize folks had a problem with such signs. Coincidentally just this past week, I made the prim Map "sign" for Hotel Chelsea in Lanestris. (I'm just a neighbor and sometimes attend live music there.) Here's how it looks on the Map of that sim: I hadn't thought anyone would object -- in fact, I was feeling rather pleased with myself for the effect, at only 13 Land Impact. :smileyembarrassed: I'm not a huge fan of what the "heart pox" does to the map (although I have heard good things about that outfit from their tenants). It honestly never occurred to me to compare it to adfarming, so now I'm all befuddled.

As I understand it, the code to disable installation on certain older OSs was contributed to the official viewer by the Firestorm team, so I'd be pretty surprised if Firestorm continued to install on systems that won't work for the Linden viewer going forward. Still, the advice to use a third-party viewer is good: there will be some TPV supporting any older OS until big parts of the viewer code becomes unsupportable on it.

friend sell 2x crossfire ATI RADEON 4870 x2 gpu (2 x graphic card with dual gpu) I've read that Second Life makes no use of Crossfire (nor SLI). If that's true, then you'd only get about the same SL2 performance as with just one of those two cards, but with twice the heat, fan noise, and electricity use.

Right, for newly abandoned land after a few days. There are probably still some parcels with the old settings for abandoned land (lacking auto-return and maybe even allowing public build), and LL will fix them with a support ticket. And I think freshly abandoned land spends a few days in a kind of limbo where objects on it are not returned, just in case the previous owner will decide they didn't really want to abandon the land after all. (The logic there has changed over time, so I'm not 100% sure of its current behaviour.) But yeah, I do think it gets set to no-build immediately, which won't stop all attacks, but is better than nothing. (Just in passing: This last griefer attack was vaguely useful in that it revealed beyond any doubt that the cluster of avatars at the Bitcoin scammer's parcel in Miramare are in fact bots, as they always seemed.)

Why a tenant will want to do that? We can think of some reasons, I suppose, but whatever the reasons, they raise a different "why" question, too: Why do Mainland landlords rent land instead of tier? Of course they do so because that's where the demand is, so the question is really "Why do tenants want to rent land instead of tier?" Now, I know there are outfits that rent tier (or at least there were; I imagine some must still exist although the one who really introduced the practice has been out of the business for several years now). I get it that there's some economic incentive -- the cost of land parcels themselves -- that a Mainland landlord provides as a service to tenants. There's also the considerable complexity of land ownership in SL that tenants don't need to figure out. And some may be attracted to landlord-developed property (although, in fact, the vast majority of Mainland rentals are for bare land, and it takes quite special "development" to make land more valuable as a rental). But we know such land-renting advantages, such as they are, simply aren't enough to pull in as tenants folks willing to pay a substantial premium to own land themselves -- all the quarter-sim tier-payers, for example. For those specific people -- the ones who own middling amounts of Mainland -- what's the reason they want to pay tier to LL rather than paying substantially less to a private company for tier only? Is it irrational fear of losing the land if the company goes bust? (I say "irrational" because group-owned land can exist for months or even years after tier contributions have dropped to zero.) Or is the barrier the complexity of group-owned land, above and beyond individual land ownership? Or something else?

(Some third-party viewers are able to block media URLs, stemming from a notorious SL alt-identifying scam that an ex-con was running for a while. Google "RedZone Second Life" if you have a few hours with absolutely nothing to do. If that's the kind of "block" meant here, I'm not sure why it wouldn't work -- and it might be worth investigating if it doesn't.)

You mean rent it for L$1000 per week? If so, yeah, that's close to the going prices for Mainland sky-only rentals. In fact, you can probably get it a bit cheaper than L$1 / prim / week if the ground below is junky enough. If you mean buying a Mainland 4096 for L$1000, I'm not sure that was ever commonly possible. At the very bottom of the land market really poor land sold below L$0.5 / sq.m. but if you ever found a square 4096 at sale for less than L$0.25 / sq.m., it must have been extraordinarily good timing. In general, both rents and purchase prices have gone up slightly over the past year, but barely noticeably compared to historic prices.

You're talking about Mainland here, because that's where the tier-free Premium "bonus" 512 applies. The way it works is that, once you abandon the Linden Home parcel, that bonus 512 is over and above whatever you pay tier for, so if you do go with the 2048 tier level, you can actually own 2048 + 512 = 2560 sq.m. of Mainland. (If you group-deed it, you get another 10% bonus, but that starts to get complicated. There are advantages, however, to group-owned land, once you're ready to take that step.) Now, if you really want to own just 2048 sq.m., that's tricky: there's no tier level corresponding to 1536 (to make 2048 when your free 512 is added). You can either pay the 2048 tier level and leave that bonus 512 unused, or you can mint a Premium alt, combine its bonus 512 with yours, plus one 1024 tier, to total 2048. If you do the math, those premium bonus 512s are in fact the cheapest way to own Mainland -- just keep adding them together -- if they're annual-plan memberships and if you offset the membership fee by the value of the weekly stipend. So as crazy as it sounds, the bonus 512s from four annual premium accounts is the cheapest way, net of stipend, to get that 2048.

Thanks, Innula, for posting about that explanation. It's interesting and informative and some very welcome transparency.

Commerce Linden is the recipient of payments to Marketplace merchants, but I believe that's also the account that gets payments by Marketplace merchants for things like enhanced listings. Once arranged, those would be recurring payments. Search doesn't find the OP as a merchant (but: alts, so who knows?). In any case, I would think the Description field of the Transaction History would shed some light. (I doubt it has anything to do with the L$299 purchase.)

It seems some of these "snippets" could be pretty complicated, such as the conversation between an NPC and a player. I don't think they're going to all fit neatly into one script with branching, no matter how you do the branching. So if you're going to need multiple scripts anyway, I'm not sure grouping a few snippets per script is a big win over having a separate script per snippet. So if you do have one script per snippet, because there could be multiple players on the sim at the same time, it seems pretty clear that it's better to put the scripts in something permanently rezzed on the sim, rather than in player HUDs, as long as the snippets aren't trying to do anything that needs the kind of permissions one gets for free by virtue of being attached. (Or, even if they do, perhaps the attached HUD could just perform those particular functions in response to commands issued by the snippet scripts running out in the sim.) The thing is, the scripts don't necessarily need to be in those task objects; they could all be in one "server" that has a controller script with a single listener that dispatches link messages to the snippet scripts (so they don't each need individual listeners). In fact, it may be worth keeping those snippet scripts asleep when not in use; see llSetScriptState() for how that controller could activate them individually as needed. (Note that this is all based on wild guesses about this particular application. A different set of wild guesses might recommend writing your own "language" for these snippets for your LSL script to interpret and execute, where you control which snippet you run according to how you index into a table list or notecard -- but that would only make sense if the snippets can be expressed in just a few primitive operations.)

Min Barzane wrote: I am not any different from movie company,or game company! My intelectual property is MYNE! You steal from me ,you get cought,you pay for damage done! End of story! If it's so valuable then don't leave it out in places where it can get stolen, like Second Life. Hire goons like the MPAA does to pay-off ISPs and legislators, if you like that model so much. Or face the facts: your precious stuff is just not worth that level of effort and expense. Instead, there's the DMCA. LL took measures to improve DMCA effectiveness, notably the requirement for RL identity to upload Mesh (and then made the "model = instance" mistake, to reduce the bookkeeping necessary to track guilt). And I'm serious about OnLive and SLGo: It's not practical as a complete replacement of all SL viewers right now, but a relatively modest shift in economics could change that. Then there's nothing delivered to the user's machine that could be ripped (not from SL, that is; games still using client-side rendering would still be easy prey, as evidenced by all the blatant game rips on sites like TurboSquid). Incidentally, for those watching Rosedale's High Fidelity, that architecture depends on a similar shift in network economics as does OnLive, but for the opposite purpose: to distribute processing among participants rather than to centralize rendering. Philip got his start at Real Networks, and even SL shows he's apt to bet on bandwidth too cheap to meter.

On SunKissed right now I get "Unable to create item that has caused problems on this region" no matter what I try to rez from Inventory. You're right, it lets one build, but won't let me wear anything from inventory, although it will allow me to wear prims built on site, and drop objects that are worn. I think this one will behave better after a restart.

Min Barzane wrote: Prims are mesh! Avatars are mesh! From day 1 od SL! Cube is always a cube,no mater how much you strch,twist and retexture it!ITS A CUBE! You missed the point btw! You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you? On the off chance you take the time to figure it out, the castration of SL's Mesh representation isn't the first time the Lindens have reduced SL functionality in a misguided attempt to placate IP-paranoid creators. For example, watch what happens to the contents when you paint a no-transfer texture on the face of any object. That's how the no-transfer permission on the texture is viral to the object. Now ponder the real effect of that design decision: there is no practical market for textures except full-perm, and no practical way to sell full-perm textures without an End User License Agreement. The point? Be careful what you wish for, lest the result even further diminish the world. And just in passing: There is a way to defeat copybotting, and that's by dumping the viewer altogether and doing all rendering server-side, like OnLive's SLGo. Not very practical, and once end-users rented the rendering service and the bandwidth there'd be little left to pay for user-generated content. but that content would be ever so safe.

Min Barzane wrote: Question was and still is "WILL LL EVER DO ANYTHNG TO STOP COPYBOTERS/CONTENT THEFT? WHAT DO YOU THINK? " They already did: they crippled Mesh. Unlike every other object type, Mesh has no layer of abstraction between the model and the instance. The result is that every other object type can be changed into any other object type without losing the identity of the object. With Mesh, you're stuck: it is always Mesh; even worse, it must remain always the same model. This was done to placate creators crazy about protecting their precious intellectual property. The result is the increasingly static, "behold the pretty pixels" Second Life. Happy now?

Madelaine McMasters wrote: Science (nature) may be cooler because it's not limited by our imaginations. Science and nature are two very different things. Science certainly is limited by our imaginations. Sure, sometimes nature is unexpected, but ultimately we only look for it under the streetlamp where the lighting is better. (One might say that nature is limited by god's imagination -- which would say more about god than nature.)