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Phil Deakins

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Posts posted by Phil Deakins

  1. It sounded to me like you want to hear what RL things peoiple have been up to, but others read it as SL things. So, just in case it's RL things - or even both - here are a couple of RL things that I've "been up to" lately.

    To fill some time, I've been doing jigsaws lately. I got a few from charity shops and I also found a second-hand bookstall that also sells jigsaws. They buy them back when I've done them and I get more. So each jigsaw provides many hours of enjoyment for me and costs extremely little.

    A friend recently encouraged me to start oil painting again. It's decades since I last did it and I thought about it. Today I bought the equipment I need and what I hope will be sufficient colours of paint, but I'll probably need to add to them.

    On reflection, your statement, " It may be enjoyable for me, even though I cannot be in-world for quite a long time" does sound like you're interested to hear SL things that people have been up to, but I'll still post this - in case interrested anyway.


  2. Qie Niangao wrote:


    As she deleted items that were in boxes (a good portion were no copy) it didn't go to her trash so there was no way to catch the mistake. 

    But deleted boxes
    do
    go to Trash. If one deletes a bunch of them all at the same time, they all go to trash in one coalesced object, named for one of them, and shown with a kind of "pile of blocks" icon--same as how bunches of returned items end up in Lost & Found.

    I always thought that rezzed items disappear completely if deleted but they don't. Has there been a change, or is it just something that I never knew?

  3. Sorry to pur cold water on your cruise meet but I have a MUCH better idea! Organise a bring-your-own-sandwiches SuperMeet in Bradford, Yorkshire, England. It's approximately mid-way between the far east and the far west, so everyone can come, and it has the distinct advantage that I'd only have a short walk to get to it. What do you think?

  4. I just wrote a post that contained the name Dr. Who, but with the first of those 2 words written in full (Doctor). The system refused to post it, saying that the message contains those words, which are not allowed in this community. Why?

     

    ETA (tests):

    Doctor  Who (2 spaces)

    Doctor White (a different name)

  5. Quite a long time ago, one of the British TV companies showed a specially-made 30 minute Dr. Who episode in 3-D and without the need for viewers to wear any sort of glasses. It worked! It really did. And it still worked when watching a VHS recording of it. I have no idea how it was done but it did have a major drawback. The 3-D effect only worked when the camera was moving. For instance, I remember a bit where Dr. Who was talking with someone on a street corner and the camera was moving round and round them as they talked. That bit was what made me notice that the camera needed to be moving.

  6. Polarised glasses, with the polarisation of each eye turned 90 degrees to the other, have been the standard 3-D method in cinemas for many years. I don't know when coloured glasses were last used - probably in the 50s or 60s. Since the method is used in cinemas, I don't see why they can't be used with monitors. Monitors use pixels which cinema screens don't, but the pixels are so small that I'm sure the polarised method can be used.

     

    Interesting thing to do:-

    Get a pair of cheap polarised sunglasses. Pop the polarised plastic eyepieces out of them. Get some clear cellophane, such as the clear cellophane outer wrapping of a cigarette packet. Crumple it a lot. Put it between the 2 eyepieces and look at it through the front eyepiece. Now rotate one of the eyepieces slowly while still looking through eyepiece 1, crumpled cellophane, eyepiece 2. You'll like it.

    Better still, get a small sheet of clear glass or plastic and some cellophane sticky tape (it must be cellophane (cellulose)). Stick some short lengths of the tape flat on the glass, at various angles, so that there are many overlaps. Put one of the eyepieces behind it and look through the other eyepiece in front of it. Then rotate one of eyepieces slowly. You'll like it even more - and you'll be amazed.

  7. The way I see it is similar to Sky TV. The 'Murdoch factor' (the dislike of Murdoch) is great enough to prevent some people from signing up with Sky. Some other people sign up with Sky in spite of their dislike of Murdoch, because of the personal benefits. And other people don't dislike him.

    There are things in SL that would outweigh the dislike of company and keep some people in. RL profits, for instance, but mainly people (users). Many people would stay in SL because of the socialising they have in it, in spite of their dislike of the company that runs the system.

    The "wonderment" fades for eveyone over time. Much of the "goodness", which I interpret as enjoyment, need never fade, regardless of LL.


  8. jwenting wrote:


    Phil Deakins wrote:

    There's another possible reason for sub-dividing land into unuseable chunks and then abandoning it - to discourage anyone from buying it, so that LL doesn't get tier on it.

    In two steps, I went from a whole mainland sim down to a quarter sim plus the 10% group bonus. I abandoned the land I got rid of so that LL would earn less tier. If I'd sold it, LL would actually gain tier, so I abandoned it. I hadn't thought of also cutting it up into unuseable chunks to discourage people from buying it or I might have done it. Yes, I do dislike LL the company that much.

    typical hater response. If you hate LL so much
    you want to "punish" them in such a way, why do you keep your premium account, why indeed to you stay in SL at all and don't vote with your feet by leaving us all in peace and taking your business elsewhere?

    You're just as much a griefer as those kids launching lag attacks to crash sims.

     

    I don't hate anybody or anything. Whatever gave you that extreme idea? I dislike LL a helluva lot though. That's the company, not each individual employee.

    You ask why I don't just leave SL. Simple. It's because I've been making a load of RL money from it for years. However, I did decide to leave SL at least 2½ years ago and one of the two big reasons was my great dislike of LL. That was when I started to let the store run down so that, when it was no longer financially wothwhile, I would close up and leave. I'm still waiting for it to no longer be financially worthwhile. As I said, the store made me a load of RL money every month so it's taking a long time to run down.

    Apart from that, disliking LL a helluva lot is no reason for anyone to stop enjoying SL itself.


  9. valerie Inshan wrote:

    Homesteads have never supported 40 people. 20 is the official maximum, though I've been able to host prrivate parties with up to 25 without crashing (in very rare occasions).

    That's interesting. With other sim types, the maximum number of avatars is programmatically controlled. I.e. if a mainland sim already has 40 avatars in it, and you try to TP there, you get the message that the sim is full and the TP attempt fails. I assume that attempts to go to a private sim are exactly the same but the max varies according the owner's setting.

    So you are saying that LL didn't put that control into Homestead sims? I can't really believe that they didn't, because at least twice as many Homestead sims are hosted by a single computer (4 sims per core, I think, or maybe more) and, if a few started to accept more than the 20 maximum, all the other Homesteads in the same computer would really suffer.


  10. Blaze Nielsen wrote:

    Peggy I would like to point out to you that Photoshop originally was a Mac only program. In 1987 Thomas Knoll developed the first iteration of Photoshop on his Macintosh Plus and in 1988 Adobe purchased the license to distribute it,  Photoshop 1.0 was released for Macintosh exclusively in 1990. And only later adapted for PCs. I still have a copy of Photoshop 1.0 from that era. I could debate the Mac vs. PC pros and cons for content creators all day. I'm not here for that. I'm simply asking Linden Lab to dedicate resources to make our OS compatible with SL.
    The OS chosen by more professional content creators than any other. In the past and the present.
     

    When used in an SL forum, the phrase "content creators" means people who make the content for SL, and nothing else.

    The word "professional" means a person who does something for a living. In this case, it means a person who creates SL content for a living.

    There are very few "professional content creators" - very few indeed. Single figures maybe or possibly double figures, but very few. Of those few, I would place a lot of money on PCs being by far the majority machine. And this is the reason why PCs are the most popular amongst them. People don't join SL to become professional content creators. They join because SL might be an interesting passtime. So the quality of the computer for creating content never comes into it, and the people who join are general people who use the computers that general people use. I.e. the percentages of people who use Macs and PCs in the world is reflected in the percentages of Mac an PC users in SL. Therefore, the great majority of SL users have PCs.

    Some people then find that they can make things. Very very few of those end up creating content for a living. They won't change their computers for it because what they have already is extremely suitable for the job. For instance, would changing from a PC to a Mac aid with scripting?, with creating animations?, with building prim objects?, with creating sculptmaps?, with creating meshes? No it won't. So why would anybody change?

    Exactly the same applies to all the content creators who don't do it for a living (who aren'ty professional content creators).

    So you see, the great majority of content creators don't use Macs at all. Like you, I can't provide actual statistics, but I don't need to. Given the percentage shares of Macs and PCs in the world, it's just common sense.

     

  11. Just to make it perfectly clear:- kbps is nothing to do with memory useage (or memory leaks). It mean kilobits per second, and is the speed of downloading data. I.e. it is bandwidth (someone mentioned it twice already).

    As the speed (kbps) increases, the computer has more work to do, and it can appear to become slower, although it's probably working faster than when the speed was lower. It seems like it would account for your fps getting lower, but computers continually communicate with the source (constant handshaking) and your computer keeps telling the souce (SL) to send the next lot of data.

    Since your fps decreases (that's a figure produced by SL according to the data it is actually sending you), SL is sending less and less screen-updating data, so the question is, where is the ever-increasing data coming from? Perhaps it is data concerning the mass of avatars in the places you frequent.

    Those are my thoughts, anyway. It's nothing to do with memory leaks. That is unless your memory useage also increases, of course.


  12. Dillon Levenque wrote:

    Um...I understand Electronics, Jeanne, but thanks for the attempted clarification.

    Don't know why you felt compelled to offer it: my comment was that the images on vacuum tube tv's couldn't compare with the ones we see today. The common understanding of the phrase 'can't compare' or 'couldn't compare' is 'nowhere near as good'.

    When I read your 'vacuum tube' post, I thought you meant the CRT tube. The Jeanne wrote as though you meant valves (also called tubes), so I assumed that's what you meant. It turned out that you really did mean the CRT tube after all :)

    But I don't agree with you about today's TV images being better that the images on CRT TVs. Today's TVs have much poorer images, imo. HD is a step towards CRT quality but it doesn't reach it.

    Having said that, we in the UK used a different CRT system to the U.S., which I've always understood produced better picture quality, so maybe current TVs do have better picture quality that the old U.S. system.

    When I got a 42" plasma TV, I was very disappointed with the picture as compared to the 32" CRT that I'd replaced. The immediate change made it very noticeable. But we get used to picture qualities and, soon enough, the picture was fine for me. Later I got a 50" plasma as well but it's no better than the 42". I'm told that LED screens are the best quality, and they may be. Whether or not they reach the quality of CRT screens, I don't know, but I'm certain they don't surpass it. I see them all in shops and I haven't yet noticed one that equals a CRT screen.

    What is better is the large screen sizes that we can have without losing picture quality. We'd hate to watch large screens if they used the old lines method.

  13. I wouldn't worry about standing out. I'm a star - always have been, and always will. I'm world famous in my street and I wouldn't have it any other way. People try to get close to me, just so they can tell their friends that they know me, and I let them. But I draw the line at blowing my own trumpet, so  you won't find me doing that.

  14. Unless the poseballs come with that option, they can't be made to do without a viewer doing it for you. That's assuming that the poseballs aren't rezzed by an object, such as a bed. If they are rezzed by an object, the object may have the option to adjust and save their positions.


  15. Knowl Paine wrote:

    [...] I just have a problem with selecting complimentary colors. 

    I think you mean colours that go well together. Complimentary colours are very easy. Take a colour, subtract it from white, and what you are left with is the complimentary colour of the colour you started with. Or, to put it another way, a colour's complimanetary colour is the one that, when added to the original colour, makes white. Simple example: the complimentray colour of red is cyan.

    The true primary colours are red, green and blue. Those are the primary colours in light, not pigment. Mixed together they make white light. Take red away from white and you are left with a mixture of green and blue, which is cyan.

    But colours are not usually primary ones and a simple way to determine a colour's complimentary colour is to stare at the colour for 30 seconds or so, and then suddenly look at a white surface - a sheet of white paper, for instance. You'll see the colour's complimentary colour on the white surface, in the shape of the colour you stared at.

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