Pussycat Catnap

Also make sure technology doesn't change what boards can connect to what. If you want to upgrade your graphics card 3 years from now, start by traveling forward in time 3 years to buy a motherboard that will fit whatever cards are being sold then. Seems every few years they change all the possible kinds of boards inside of PCs, making it impossible to upgrade something like a graphics card unless you get a new motherboard that it can plug into, which then has a different kind of memory slot, and new cables, and a different back shape so it won't fit older cases, and needs more power... and new hard drives... - Or just budget the whole thing with that in mind and a realization that new parts won't fit a few years down the road, so buy at a price that lets you replace the whole thing 3-5 years down the road.

I linked to an SL blog article in another post. Not to anything commercial. I linked to something on a subject others have linked to: the debate on premium versus estate. A pure analysis article with nothing commercial at all. Here, I had linked to an SL group. But if they're defining SL blog articles on what LLs is up to as not allowed, then I can't see any link as legit anymore... So I pulled my entire post, which talked about a couple of faith groups in SL that are very active. Some warped mind might percieve discussion what faith groups exist in SL as advertising...

16 wrote: you do a good job to explain that I read your blog post about proportions. the one with the blocks and the other one with the pic of the Male Action library guy and how you remade him to be proper proportion my light when bing! when I read that. up til then I was pretty dumb about what you meant before that when you was chat about it. like i just thought you was try turn us all into midgets (: Well as long as you finally listen to one of us... There's a persistent crowd out there that tries to claim the proportion argument is about some weird desire to make everyone be a child AV. Its championed by some people who are very far from any form of rational thinking. But it gets picked up and repeated by a lot more people who otherwise might be normal enough in thinking. But the crux of it is really all about giving people access to less laggy and better looking avatars, more space, more prims, better UI control, and better graphics on less resources. - So it gets mighty frustrating when people resist it so strongly. Proportion, scale, camera settings, use of convex hull and mesh builds, tight script control, modest but carefully chosen windlight, and tweaking settings to get more out of less - its about all of these things combined.

Syo Emerald wrote: Czari Zenovka wrote: Syo Emerald wrote: The really sad thing is (when it comes to furries and being naked) that most nude beaches are human-only. I'm not even sure if I can visit them as an elf.... Waidaminut!!!!!!! Nude beaches ie. "clothing optional" won't allow furries or elves??? /face palms Nude beaches belong to a typical group of places which decorate their entrance with signs like "Human avatars only", but without any real obivous reason, like roleplaysims would have. Yep. I find this very annoying. I've had my phases in SL where I've wanted to be a 'naturist' avatar. But as I wander between neko and furry... the furry nudist hangouts tend to not like having a hybrid around, and even less so a human (so forget bringing some friends), and the human places tend to only want humans around. I've also tried going on human alts, and found that one or two will say hi, but most leave a buffer of space around a non-white avatar...

Czari Zenovka wrote: The class that I took that talked about scripts and lag was taught by a scripter/coder who sells scripts in SL so she appeared to know what she was talking about. The class went into quite a bit of detail ie. it wasn't about number of scripts but the memory, etc. I was glad I took that class because I had fallen for the "It's all the prim skirts and hair that is causing lag" argument. The reason the 'hair' argument comes up is because of scripted hair. Not just hair by itself. In other words, the same argument you used to fall for is the one you are now on. Which is correct. - The hair issue was that people would run around with a 256 prim hair, with each prim having its own script in it. And 64 * 256 means that hair would take up at least 16mbs... - Again, not about number of scripts, but about total memory. Especially as these scripts were rarely, if not never, in a paused state. They were usually constantly running. Now take that same person, and have them in a dress of 30 prims, each with a 64 script, for another 1.9mbs. And then some shoes with a color and size hud... for maybe another 3 to 8mbs... and its pretty horrid. Now put that person in a club with 2 others like her... And you've got sim shutdown. Especially if the club is also adding in "splodders", contest boards, tip jars, dance poles, a welcome board, boards for people who are on or offline, notecard givers, a DJing / stream server, and a convoluted danceball system (rather than something simple like Intan...). - All of which will still be less than a single one of those scripted avatars, though not exactly good club design anyway... All of this talk of Arc etc, has me wondering how mesh outfits measure up on this new system. I know they are less resource hogging than sculpty, and less than some kinds of prims (like a torrus). But no idea how they'd measure on this new scale. Amethyst Jetaime wrote: I'm betting all the pretty avatars that LL uses on the web site and in ads are way in the red too. So on one hand LL encourages high costs, but then turns around and gives tools without explaining its proper use to well that cause lag police wars. Ironic. I doubt that actually. Looking at what they're wearing, I suspect they're not as bad as folks on older items. While Mesh is easier on the servers and clients than older stuff - scripts are scripts... but content providers in SL are a lot more script conscious than they used to be; so newer goods tend to be less lag-inducing. Especially when from more informed and connected builders. There are some major brands run by pure idiots... but they're more an exception than a rule.

With any luck they will discontinue this feature. Popular though it may be, it has harmed mainland and estate land quite a bit. LLs gets good buck out of it from people who would have gone estate rental going premium instead. But only up to a point - as they then lose each time a sim gets cancelled. Premiums are more profitable though. http://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/mainland-versus-estate-which-is-the-better-bang-for-your-buck-to-linden-lab/ ***************** "If all mainlanders owned only 512m of land… paying 6/month. Then 49.2 of them would be one estate account, but they’d only burn up 38% of a sim – all remaining land on that sim would be added bonus." "If we assume the average mainlander owns 2048+base 512 (probably they own less, but some own vastly more…) for $15/month – and if we assume every one of them paid annually (the lowest rate – $6/month)… 295/21 = 14.05 mainlanders to pay the same in per month as one estate holder, burning up 28774m (44% of a sim). All mainlanders after this are added bonus." ***************** - But they need to get people out of the linden homes and onto mainland, or mainland collapses. We already see a massive amount of vacancy on mainland - and that makes SL look empty, which causes people to lose interest. Linden homes are 'on direct' more profitable than even mainland - they fill up better. Packing a lot of people into a lesser amount of resources. But they consist of less vested users - users who, lacking community around them, will not become as inspired to build up, expand out, and attract more people in. Its a harder argument to make though - because it requires looking at psychological factors. Knowing at what point vacant mainland becomes a danger is not something you can pull up a chart of numbers to find the answer to. If you are premium... and cannot find a linden home, just go find 560m of mainland somewhere and buy it for your own private group of you and one alt. Or buy 512 in your name. You will have more control over it anyway.

EDIT: Apparantly we're no longer allowed to link to anything or mention anything that might be promoting anyone...

Jonathan Sivocci wrote: I do however think Lindenlab need to make the viewer easier to understand for new residents. I'm sure they have something in the pipeline altho when they will do it and how many bad updates later i have no clue, Lets just hope that LL keeps investing in new technology maybe a 3d viewer. I suspect the real reason we see 10,000 signups a day (give or take) and only a few dozen make it inworld, is spam bots. Running a forum for my company has shown me that if I make it look like a place people come to and communicate, give it good SEO for that, and then fail to lock it down against automated registrations, I can get about 10,000 to 20,000 new accounts added to my system -PER DAY- for a board with a legitimate userbase no greater than about 5000 to 10000. Something I was able to see quickly because my company knows who its real customers are, and the profile of likely new customers, pretty darn well. And because while I'm not a computer person, I see patterns easier than details - I can find the forest given one tree, and never quite realize I'm looking at a tree, and the pattern for us was obvious. What I want to know is how many of the new accounts SL sees daily ever even bother to log in inworld... Most of the spambots we got were sleepers. Made to hide in the database to triggered at later points when spam was sent out by their owners. They're made with automated registration systems that in the present day can even outguess many of those "type the letters in this picture" systems (I'm guessing the same way a scanner manages to understand the letters on the page you put on the screen to be scanned in: OCR). - They'll run a few hundred thousand attempts per day against an SEO attractive system, hoping to get as many through as possible. Then they just seem to send out commands to a number of them every now and then to spam up info on forums, mailers, private messages, and so on - to put up things that will make their clients look to be related to the victim's system when searched for on google... Spam isn't there to get you to buy some 'personal enlargement device' anymore... but to fool google and bing so people can rate higher without having to pay an adwords campaign... Short version: I don't think people are trying SL and giving up. I suspect that most real people who actually make accounts, actually try it, and actually stay. But that most accounts are not real.

10s of millions of people worldwide play online 3D video games. That defeats several of the concerns in the original post. Issues 1 through 4 are completely moot points when you realize just how common MMOs are. Issue #5 however, wipes out almost possible advantage SL could have by being in the company of other 3D virtual worlds that have succeeded in becomming mainstream... Many people think #4 is the issue... but the privacy concerns behind it are also upheld in many MMOs - without any harm. Companies like [comp] that have tried to force the [soc net] model of no-privacy have been forced, successfully, to back off by user revolts ([MMO]'s users went so far as to post pictures of the children of [comp] employees at their schools... to drive home the point of why privacy is needed - causing [comp] to back off overnight). - And despite this, people flocked to [MMO], even moreso after [comp] backed off. Meanwhile [soc net]'s assault on privacy has attracted negative attention on all fronts, to the point of legislative action in some countries and threats of such even in the [big nation] Corpratocracy. A small handful of... and I hate to use the word because its major fan uses it so wrongly so often... technocommunists in the [tech place] are waging an immoral war on privacy... It is -NOT- the public that wishes to end privacy... Far from it... Almost every move these evil actors make is met with great resistance by those hooked on their platforms... Its only a matter of time before all of this blows up on them. The journalist's real problem is that he neither understands the virtual world idea that LLs put forth, nor the one that actually came about in the world, driven not by LLs, but by thousands of different MMOs defining what a virtual world would be after LLs dropped the ball. - People have moved on. Both from the journalist's stone aged ideas... and from LLs. The MMOs have it, they have proven that people want 3D worlds on a 2D screen, and that most people have a computer that can do it. We're now just stuck waiting until the idea of user-created content swings back into popularity. [soc net], evil though it may be - has proven that user created content is exactly what most people want. All it takes is for a group with the managerial skills of the average MMO company to realize that the future lies in user content like [soc net], but served up with the same 3D and privacy their own MMO products currently offer. SecondLife, and LLs, act as an obstactle. Making the MMOs think the idea can't work - because they mistake issue #5 for issues 1 through 4.

The fact that she didn't say what the club made as a result of her help, but only mentioned her own tips - lend credence to my claim. So if the club did make profit from the dancer's efforts... and the dancer was not a predator... such should have been what his/her post was about... But instead, the post was very self focused.

Heart Brimmer wrote: Pussycat Catnap wrote: Its generally unwise to hire dancers in a club, and even less wise to visit a place with them. They are nothing but primma-donnas that go AFK on daceballs / dancepoles and then demand to be paid by -BOTH- the venue and the visitors and expect to be treated above the visitors and above the DJ, host, and owner. Worthless predators, the lot of them. And giving one the power to boot people out of your venue... really foolish. I was a dancer for the first 2 years in SL and believe me, I did NOT go AFK, did NOT use pre-made gestures and was definitely NOT a prima donna. I worked hard every shift I had and the tips showed that. The least amount of L's I made during a 2 hours shift was 5000L and the most I've made was close to 15,000L. So please do NOT lump all dancers into one category. Edited to fix a typo. How many of those clubs you worked in made profit as a result of your efforts? That was your only job, did you manage it, or just vampire leech off of them? Your tips only show you as a predator, unless your club made more. I hope I am wrong, and your club did earn from a result of your efforts. But it is not the trendline I am used to observing.

If firestorm isn't working for you - chances are you've got a setting off somewhere, or corrupted somehow. I suggest a clean wipe of ALL SL files - both cache and settings and the application. Then install again. Do this for each viewer you try until you find a stable one. Try Firestorm again first, if you like its style. Otherwise, try the official viewer.

Reikokimyo wrote: I find building your own save a lot of money over time, as you can use the same mouse, keyboard and monitor. It can also spread out cost as well as you dont need to always buy everything at once. Its possible to slowly upgrade your computer over time as your budget allows. It can, but if you're not expert, it can cost you massive amounts. I recommend not building one's own machine unless one is a tech geek who -ALSO- gets it with what you will use it for, or has such a person do it. - And mind you that many tech geeks have particular understandings of the world that are very narrow. So if you're not the tech geek building it for yourself, if you're having one build it for you - you might not get what you really needed. Off the shelf machines can suffer from being built for general audiences - but this can be a good thing if you're a general user.

Metalcoldreaper wrote: I took this to apparently the "2nd in command" of the club and he told me as i said before that it was a business. Now to refer to something as a business you MUST, Buy, Sell, Or trade. (its a dictionary term.) And i have asked other club owners, and they do not refer to people within their establishments as "Guests" but Paytrons. This is a misunderstanding on a very deep level... Relying on a 'dictionary' as authoritative of reality is... unwise... Reality goes way beyond books and terminology guides.

Blaz Neuman wrote: A dancer in a club suddently decided my av was out of the rules (no animals, when my usual av is a man with a wolf's head and tail, not even a real furry)... I answered her "I'm just a man with a wolf mask on... do you ban masks?" She then switched to "your tail is causing lag" I answered "ok I give up, I'm leaving" and said in the local chat "Ok folks I have to go, appears that I can't have a tail " She ejected me before I had the time to tp. Its generally unwise to hire dancers in a club, and even less wise to visit a place with them. They are nothing but primma-donnas that go AFK on daceballs / dancepoles and then demand to be paid by -BOTH- the venue and the visitors and expect to be treated above the visitors and above the DJ, host, and owner. Worthless predators, the lot of them. And giving one the power to boot people out of your venue... really foolish.

[censored] - All about the scam of modeling in SL. This advert is even more obvious with its note about lighting. Any serious SL screenshotter knows to use custom windlight settings to create the perfect mood for any shot. "Forcing midday" is horrid advice for showing off product. It just washes out contrast... - That shows they don't want actual models and promotional images. They just want fools to buy their stuff. Which as the poster two posts above me claims, isn't even their stuff... (have not verified this myself).

I have one of these static people sitting on the corner outside of one of my lots. Never thought to consider that it might be a begger bot. I'll have to see if I can do something to clean it out. They bots engaged in fraud, using excessive resources to do so, spamming people, and potentially related to the wave of phishing attacks we've been seeing. AR the heck out of them, and if they're not violating the TOS yet, we might be able to convince the lindens to change the TOS and knock them out.

Yeah - mesh skirts are one of the things that has been the biggest improvement for mesh. No more leg popping. But it does mean you need to design for it. The flowing aspect of long flexis are gone - but those always looked horried anyway due to leg popping. Mesh hair - this really depends on styles. Many of the makers are making styles that should flow, as mesh, which doesn't. In time mesh hair is going to be ideal for me - its ideal for hair that is more static, like African hair naturally is. Though I lose out on the flowing that long dreads have. For medium and short styles of African hair it would be ideal. One recent set of dreads I bought was a mix of flexi and mesh. Of course this means dealing with the pop-through that flexi has... I'm not into tramp-wear anymore, so the styles often seen in mesh clothing work well for me much of the time. But I have seen some pretty racey stuff in mesh (there are already people making pants and skirts so low that your frontal goods are on display, just as is often seen in bodypaint clothes, and I've seen plenty of mesh shirts with a boob or two popping out), just as I have seen attempts to make body-paint that was not sluttish. However with old clothes being painted on - when it goes all the way down your butt-crack... or perfectly flush with the bosom in a skin tight manner... its painted on, bodypaint not clothing, and the person basically looks nude... Even if the outfit has a normal cut. Most of the mesh I see just looks more like things I would find in a local department store. Some of the styles dated, thanks to SL being "older folks" more often. But not always.

It just seems to me like you're getting wrongly flagged. I can't see anything wrong. My guesses were all "if they made a bad decision, maybe it was this." It does take time for profiles to change. It's not automatic / instant. So you might have changed "the right thing" only to still have to wait a week or more for it to show up... You could try just hiding ALL of your groups and picks for a week or two, and seeing if anything happens. Also, if in the past you ever had some adult stuff in there - maybe they just never changed you... I don't know... If all else fails, put in a support ticket over it.

I've seen some pathfinding and it looks great. There's some linked in the thread that says "pathfinding" in its subject line... The problem is that LLs is sometimes adding features no one has requested and ignoring the ones people ask for. And this may be one of them. - But if it were to work fully at some point, it would be ideal for roleplay regions. However it has a major failing in that there is still no good way to animate the objects that are moving on a path... So you can have vehicles driving around, or boxes on a conveyor belt - but forget about doing a herd of bison or a village of santa's elves...

Melita Magic wrote: There are multiple violations of the Machinima policy on youtube for just one instance. I highly doubt permission was granted by avatars who do not even seem to be aware they are being filmed, but whose avatar names are clearly visible. Also I know not all machinima artists ask permission. I had a bunch show up at my park once while I was trying to decorate it. I was told to get out of the way. I didn't say anything, but it was annoying. I was fairly certain it was against the TOS for machinima. Turns out, it was. If the land description/covenant does not mention or forbids machinima, prior land owner consent must be gotten. How many people are aware of that? You should have just done some selective banning. Not all of them, but like every third one - so that they'd be in a state of jumbled mess over it. If people tell you to get out of the way on your own land... they kinda need a hard boot to the butt...

Syo Emerald wrote: I think someone can have a kind of common sense when it comes to the internet and online worlds, because there is not such varity as their might be cultures. So anybody with a normal brain can come to the point where its easy to follow the TOS, because most of it is easy to understand. And yet everytime we have one of these discussions - nobody agrees with anyone on what is right and proper... - There is no such thing as common sense. Only cultural sense.

Melita Magic wrote: In the U.S. there are 'opt in' laws. I'm not completely certain, so an expert may feel free to correct me. But, aside from past customers, who still have a right to 'opt out' - businesses may not spam or send ads through mail or email in hopes of snaring customers. I know - direct ad marketing makes it confusing. You want to look up the 'Can Spam' act. Funny name, but its an anti-spam law. The short of it is not marketing until they opt-in, and you have to provide certain things on every mailer: A RL physical address For email, a link that is functional that will unsubscribe people or let them opt-out of that ad campaign (if they want to still get mailers you have for other product lines for example). A RL phone number. - This applies to all online advertising. I am not sure about the rules for physical advertising, they might also be opt-in now. I have noticed in the last decade that most stores now ask people aggressively if they want to be on their mailing list, and my guess is this might be why. But keep in mind that those lists at your local dept store - those are both physical and email. Anytime you get mail that is not from an opt-in, they're in violation of that law... which has stiff penalties. But also again be aware that many people sign forms to join such lists without paying attention... BUT that 'unsub me' link is required to be functional by law. The mailing service my company uses does not even let us handle this part - none of our mailers will be sent out by their service unless we include a code snippet in the mailer. That snippet adds in their own bit of code which puts in the unsub link and the address info: both of which we have to keep up to date in our account with them. - If someone does the unsub, the service rips them out of our lists, not us. Spam is still common, but all the people doing it are in violation of US federal law. - If you've paid attention to spam over time since 1996 when commerce was allowed on the internet, its changed a lot. Legit companies used to spam. Content of old spam was a mix of hacking attempts, SEO cracking, and advertising. Advertising is now gone from spam. What you get -looks like- an ad, but its really designed to hack something, create false SEO data so the real client can move up in google and bing without paying for it, or to create illegit clicks and impressions for people who get paid whenever someone clicks something. Real advertisers, working with real legit registered businesses, won't touch spamming with a 10-foot pole - it puts them at too much risk of bad publicity and litigation. Just because SL is "inside a video game" does not mean it is outside the laws of the US... so SL spammers could be sued if someone were willing to push that case forward...

GothGirl Demonia wrote: I have read the TOS a few times don't really care about the TOS much I just use common sense, and not do illegal things, or well at least you know COYA when you have to actually do something. Common sense is useless. There are rules, this is not an anarchy. So whether or not you like the rules or agree with them - you have to follow them. Even when it flies in the face of so-called "common sense" (which is nothing but another word for cultural bias).

Phoenix is also very old and outdated - and in 2 months when they change to the new graphic system, won't even be able to render anything but a gray mess. Now is an ideal time to move on up to the official viewer, or Firestorm, or something.