Jenni Darkwatch

True, and I do know a few men that have very feminine voices and speech patterns too. Usually obvious when they get called Ma'am on the phone. Totally off-topic, but that is indeed why I always laugh about "voice verified". Short of taking a DNA test + MRI or CT it's absolutely impossible to tell gender. Regardless of that, for most people speech patterns plus "sound" (pitch, modulation etc.) is approximately "gender appropriate".

Woman into man works quite nicely actually... the problem there is rather the different speech patterns and choice of words.

Considering that LL operates worldwide, they're basically violating law all the time, just in different places. I don't know how it is in the US, but in some countries any such restrictions posted or even written in contract are automatically null and void precisely because contracts and end user licenses cannot override law.

Simple answer to that often-repeated question: Do what you want, let others do what they want, don't hang out with people you don't like. Simple, really. I hate voice in local: Screaming kids, someone's blaring TV, iBlubb, whatever... don't want to hear it. In IM I'm ok with it, since I only use it with people I know RL anyway. As far as RL info... I don't mind sharing, with the exception of any personally identifiable information. A few people have it, most will never in a million years get it.

Needs to be deeded to the land group, i.e. group A. Giving members of group B access to it depends on the objects capabilities then - stuff like that can be done with "child objects" set to (but not deeded) a different group, e.g. group B.

There's the Starlight skin, that does add some functionality to the official viewer: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_Skins/Starlight Chat... well, not much you can do there aside from waiting for the CHUI project to make it past QA to live. Probably sometime 2014 ;p

IIRC there's no easy way anymore to know how many prims you have on your land, just what kind of land impact they have. You can easily have 20000 prims on a regular sim, as long as your land impact stays at or below 15000

Actually, you pay tier for square meters, not for prims: https://secondlife.com/my/account/landfees.php?lang=en-US Or if you go estate, you pay per estate/homestead.

Not all of those constants return sensible values for avatars: PRIM_EQUIVALENCE, SERVER_COST, STREAMING_COST and CHARACTER_TIME have no meaningful results when used on avatars. SCRIPT_TIME works, but has one major flaw: When someone enters a region, their script time will be very high while their scripts get transferred into the simulators' engine. Depending on some factors it can easily take a minute or more for script time to settle down. About the best thing you can probably do is gather some statistics at your desired target region and then set your own limits. One possible approach: Check what idle time your region has, then divide that by the number of avis you'd like to support on the region.

It's not directly possible. LSL scripts cannot query the joystick. There's a workaround of sorts: Since you can use it to control your avi movements that's covered. Map the joystick buttons to mouse buttons and keyboard shortcuts. If I recall correctly Logitech stuff ships with tools to do button mappings accordingly.

Perrie Juran wrote: Jenni Darkwatch wrote: First off, that value means zilch for servers. It's entirely a client-side indicator of how much impact ones avi has on people seeing that avi................................... But this now does prompt a question. Will this change when they switch over to Server Side Avatar Baking? My brain says it shouldn't, but it is still a question. I know the point of that is to improve Avatar rezzing for everyone. My understanding is that the baked skin is stored as part of an outfit, which should mean it's rendered once and done with. Practically speaking, server-side baking should only happen once anyway, when the avi is first "set up", and after that only if relevant parts of the avatar change. Therefore the cost should only be incurred once when equipping an outfit for the first time or altering an outfit. I used a lot of "should" there - I'm not in the know, just reading the occasional tech blurbs from Lindens which make me believe the explanation should be more or less correct.

Generally don't accept anything offered without solicitation. Or accept and trash it. If it's from friends, ask what it is. No object can permanently harm your avi, but objects can do some fairly nasty things. The more common mischief is to just spawn replications of itself or to flat out offer itself to others in the vicinity.

First off, that value means zilch for servers. It's entirely a client-side indicator of how much impact ones avi has on people seeing that avi. Ever wonder why FPS drops precariously for some people in busy venues and not at all for some other people in the same venue? Computers aren't equal in performance. Consequently, the meaning of this value is subject to PC performance. For me it's a measure of who to (perma-) mute first when a venue seems to lag Either that or turn off shadows+lighting... usually, muting people is preferable for me, it helps me reach my goal of having the entire planet muted for some reason or another.

Not enough info... what "Linux" are you using? Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora, SuSE...? What version...? If I had to take a wild guess it's *buntu 12.10 - in that case, the viewer doesn't work and there's no fix pending that I am aware of. You can get it to work poorly by going into the folder where you installed SL, then into the "lib" folder and opening a terminal window there. Then you'll issue these commands: ln -s libfontconfig.so.1.4.4 libfontconfig.so.1ln -s libfontconfig.so.1.4.4 libfontconfig.so

Like everything, whether mesh is good or bad for performance depends entirely on the skill of the creator. Much of the bad rep of mesh is, IMO, due to the often horrendously done worn mesh - rigged or otherwise. It's IMO always been the bane and lure of SL That everyone can create things means that there's a lot of very, very bad stuff in SL. Jewelry made out of hundreds of prims, with 1024x1024 textures on miniscule surfaces and so on. That's just one example. LI is the (crude) indicator of efficiency. It doesn't take into account sim-wide efficiency management. If every mesh on the sim has a different texture, the sim will be hell for visitors because the textures alone will load forever. The same goes for re-using mesh (or sculpts). Re-use as much as you can and you can get away with very detailed builds while still giving visitors a pleasant experience. Here's an easy set of example to try: Rez a sim full of large sculpted trees - max out the LI of the sim, but only use ONE tree sculpt. It's going load extremely fast, but even modern computers will struggle rendering that with any decent FPS. Load time = low, render efficiency = lousy. Now go ahead and create a mesh tree, but replace all LODs below the highest one with distance impostors (simple 4-surface tree surfaces). Plaster the sim full of those. Load time = low, render efficiency = great. Last test, go ahead and use a different texture on every mesh tree. The sim will load forever, while still keeping FPS fairly high. Mesh gives creators unprecedented control over the user experience. Whether creators can utilize that is a matter of skill and the willingness to acquire those skill. That's nothing new in SL. What is new is that building now largely happens outside of SL rather than in-world. That's my biggest gripe with mesh

The "it depends" answer is pretty much spot on. Mesh can have more detail than normal builds but it gets adversely affected by size in many cases. If you plan on building large structures like houses you may sometimes get ridiculously high LI if you build it in one piece, but significantly lower LI if you build high-vertex details in smaller pieces and only low-poly parts in large single sets. This is because of LOD switching. Mesh penalizes high detail builds if they're visible far away. The bigger something is, the further it can be seen, and the further away LOD switching happens. Taking the house example, you could go ahead and build the basic box with very few details out of one mesh. Then add windowsills, frames and such as individual mesh parts. Because they switch LODs faster and are smaller, they'll be lower LI than if you integrate them into the house mesh. Another "trick" that helps is to build the insides of buildings as a separate mesh with no lower LOD. Effectively it means that the inside disappears if people are too far away. Depending on windows and whatnot this may or may not be feasible, but it does certainly help with LI and also with viewer framerate. The beauty of mesh is that it allows more freedom. The bane of mesh is that it requires a lot more skill and knowledge.

Schau am besten mal bei deutschen Sims vorbei... die VHS oder die diversen German Newbie Centers duerften da sicher gute Anlaufpunkte sein.

With laptops, heat is often an issue. Does the laptop get very hot when running SL?

The gender pronoun issue has been a subject of debate especially in circles where gender is more fluid. Apologies for the excursion, it's just for the benefit of people who might be unfamiliar with the concept of gender fluidity. Most of us know women who are extremely feminine, women who are stereotypical averages and women who don't act like women at all, instead acting more or less masculine. Of course the opposite is true too: Effeminate men, stereotypical average guys and the hyper-masculine extremes. Interestingly, a subset of the people who defy their "expected" gender roles (effeminate men, masculine women) would prefer to be addressed in a gender neutral way. They're neither transsexuals nor crossdressers. They just don't agree with gender stereotypes. In those circles, the pronoun debate has been quite spirited, breeding all kinds of neologisms. None of those caught on in mainstream language use. So, back to the original question/debate. On one side there are people who adamantly insist on their definition of a "pure" and "proper" language where "they" is plural. That dictionaries and other sources list a singular "they" is irrelevant, because dictionaries are not part of the official grammar of any language. I do not know if English has any normative bodies for language, but some other languages definitely do: French and German for example. On the other side are people who realize that language is not at all static. It evolves constantly and quickly. An easy example is the word "gay" which until decades ago was synonymous with "merry" but now has a totally different meaning. Word use and meaning changes over time. Then there's people who get offended if one doesn't use the "proper" pronoun. No need to elaborate that I guess All this does IMO muddle the waters to the point where all one can do as writer or speaker is to do whatever feels right and muddle through. Me, I'd LOVE to use "it", but that's likely the route that seems to offend a lot of people. If I am completely unsure of someones gender - or do not want to reveal someones gender - I go out of my way to use gender neutral language. It's possible without falling back to "s/he" or "they". It is just very, very hard and takes a lot of effort.

Jein. Es gibt viewer die das sogenannte LookAt beacon anzeigen koennen, das ist theoretisch da wo der mauszeiger ist. Ein paar klitzekleine Probleme gibt's da aber schon: * Das dingen kann jeder abstellen, dann sieht man eben nix. * Das teil zeigt unter anderem nicht an wo die flycam ist. Wer also wie ich z.B. flycam benutzt wird ergo nicht angezeigt. * Dieses LookAt beacon ist auch im normalen betrieb eher unzuverlaessig. Dass die maus auf einem haengt heisst noch lange nicht dass der/diejenige einen angafft.

Small correction, you get a discount as soon as you pay for more than 65k sqm. Not sure what that discount is these days though.

Opinions on "best" viewer are a dime a dozen. Your best bet is to just try them out yourself: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory There are a few viewers which are not listed in the TPV such as Cool VL Viewer. While most of them comply to the Third Party Viewer rules, I'd stay away from them unless you know it's a legitimate viewer. When trying out different viewers it's also a good idea to wipe the cache and settings when switching. Or if you know what you're doing, move the cache to a separate directory for each viewer. Newer viewers do that anyay on their own.

I don't do much in SL in winter (too much RL work), but I tried it this past weekend. You can indeed sail through, _if_ your boat is phantom and _if_ you can reset the camera after passing through. flying through with the LL freebie airplane for example completely hosed the camera view with no way to reset it that I could see/find.

Pretty old, but I guess a lot of people still fall for it. In SL like in RL: Don't accept stuff from strangers - even if it's from friends, don't accept unsolicited/unexpected objects. Or accept+immediately delete. That pretty much prevents such griefing.

Sorry, no good news... even the latest dev viewer from Nov 15 still doesn't have the trivial libfontconfig fix, let alone the PCRE fix. It doesn't look like any fix is forthcoming anytime soon.