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Shockwave Yareach

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Everything posted by Shockwave Yareach

  1. Gideon: I agree. But in the absence of this, I went ahead and created an account in FB for my AV. Then I attached that to the FB button. If facebook wants to ban it, let them. Just like the revolving doors of SL, I'll create another avatar account with another name in FB. See if you can guess how much information my Avatar accounts will contain.
  2. Mine updated and I was able to TP just fine. You may have just been afoul of the routine grid teleport problems that everyone experiences, regardless of viewer.
  3. Okay everyone. Regarding the "LL is updating me against my will!" That's not true. As Winter pointed out, in Setup there is an "Update Software Automatically" function that is on by default. If you were running 2.4 then the program loaded 2.5 while you weren't looking -- that's all. I myself was a bit surprised to find that I was running 2.5 last night. Launching SL started an install which made no sense to me until I realized the version had changed. But this auto update can be disabled if you want to disable it, so no screaming at the lab for this one. Software that keeps itself up to date is common in the marketplace today. I cannot attest to the stability or the good juju of 2.5 as I was only running it for an hour and not in a shakedown mode, either. I did notice going to edit to change stuff in a prim's inventory was twitchy, but after 10 seconds it resolved itself.
  4. Mike: Yes, it was good news. It was also good news when Wallace did the same thing about 9 months back. And it was good news when Katt did it before him about a year prior. And on and on and on... How many times do we have to hear the same song before we get sick of it?
  5. At one time, you could message someone with a problem and they would get back with you in a matter of minutes. Now, now you have a ticket system that is all but useless. Consider the ghosting or the Can't Login problem. All these take is one person about 60 seconds of typing to resolve. That's it. Need a sim rolled back because (ahem) someone disposed of things they shouldn't have? Tickets are useless because it takes 10 days on average for a ticket to be processed and the rollback can't be done past 2 days. Your communications system is only part of the equation. If you don't improve the customer support at the same time then you may as well not have the communications to start with. I've watched some people quit and abandon sims simply because they couldn't log in and nobody would tap on the keyboard for 60 seconds to fix their problem. So why should they continue to spend a couple of K$ a year for something they don't get to use? I'll be happy to see how this latest push to improve communications goes. But I've heard this song and dance several times already, and the lab continues to ignore what we paying customers want and expect. Of the problems in SL, communications is a big one yes. But so is inability or unwillingness of LL to act on the critique you receive.
  6. As ANZ said, check your firewall program. Especially if you've updated Second Life recently, as most firewalls will see v2.3 and 2.4 as being different programs and if you've not given permission for the new version to access the internet AND act as a server, you won't be able to do anything. Are you running ZoneAlarm by any chance? Open ZA up and look at your Program List, and be sure to put checkmarks beside every version of Second Life (or whatever viewer you are using.)
  7. The difference here, though, is it isn't real. It can't be real. It never will be real. It never has been real. So there is no reason to stick real world laws that are required to maintain a real world society because the real world actions have real world effects. I can invent the most unholy of activities -- something involving child avatars, gay animals, a weed eater, 3 different brands of gasoline and a caffinated squirrel with a match -- and not a single person can, will, or could be harmed by it. I view censorship in SL the same way I do in the movies. Have your ratings system to segment who can and cannot see what, and that's that. But one major difference with movies is that no person being represented has ever existed. So even though there are many activities in SL that aren't "my thing" the act of banning them because "someone else finds them squicky" pushes us straight down the slippery slope to becoming the wonderful community of Second Iran. All you have to do is look at the past couple years and how a simple ban on gambling quickly evolved into bans for all sorts of sundry activities -- even in your own virtual home where you aren't hurting anybody's eyes but your own. When SL was first formed the lab wanted no part of pushing a California-centric code of behavior on everyone else. And growth was phenomenal. Then they began their moral crusades to try and clean up their image, and people began to leave. Nobody has a constitutional right not to be offended. But unlike the real world, nothing in SL can hurt anyone anywhere under any conditions. So while I agree with you on many things, I respectfully disagree that LL needs to do anything more than say what is permissable in public areas and in different ratings of sim. Beyond that, LL should just tell people that if they are doing something that is against the law in their individual states, that's their problem and not LL's. As you pointed out, there are so many jurisdictions that it's impossible to have a onesizefitsall solution. The only solution that works is to say that if you face charges for gerbil molestation (or whatever) in $state, then it is between the user and the authorities in $state. There is no reason to make all of SL follow the strict edicts of the imams of Iran just because the internet goes to Iran.
  8. It's okay Loki -- I imagine these same people who have pixel sex with vampires never stop to wonder if their engaging in Necrophilia is against the law in their state...
  9. If that were true, then every blog hosting company could be shut down because of the words of its members. Or Facebook. or Livejournal. Or Ezboard. or anyplace for that matter. The issue was resolved by creation of the "Safe Harbor Act". In it, ISPs and providers are declared immune to legal prosecution because of the actions of one of the users of the service, much the same way as the telephone company is not liable for someone making obscene phone calls. Strangely, this law becomes null and void if it can be proved that the service provider does regulate content. So a service saying "We are not liable for what you do here" can't be prosecuted whereas a service that says "You may not engage in any of the activities in volumes 3 through 44 of the AUP," can be prosecuted. Which is rather funny -- the services that try to clean up their content open themselves up to legal liability wheras the companies that let the users take consequences for their own actions are not open to that liability. In brief: LL is once again doing things completely backwards.
  10. you can't have a pedo inworld if everyone is an adult. Now can you? You can have a graphic representation of something icky is all -- not an icky itself or involvement of an actual child. Anything goes can work and should be the rule LL follows. A simple "Hey, if you do something that can get you arrested in your $state, then you do so at your own risk -- LL does not regulate user content or behavior beyond the rules of the TOS." So nobody can be a public pervert outside of A and people creating virtual kiddie porn (as stupid a concept as my having pixel sex being virtual beastiality) run the eternal risk of being found out and reported to the authorities by anyone who encounters them. So anyone wishing to continue to do so would have to keep a VERY low profile indeed. Granted having acual kids inworld now makes the danger more grave than before. But LL's saying "If you break the law, it's your butt not ours and anyone can report you" in a place where there are kids makes it even more dangerous for the virtual kiddie porn folks to play here. Thus they'd be even less prone to play here, or keep an even lower profile if they did.
  11. SL will grow only if the new CEO manages to beat into some heads the simple concept that SL can be many things at once. It has some business applications. It has many recreation applications. It can be pure as Disney. It can be vile as Hustler. And the simple truth which M never could grasp is that these things aren't exclusionary -- SL can be all of them ALL at the same time! Just like in the real world, what you find depends on where you go. Go to Zindra, you'll see sex. Go to PG, you'll see... um, teenagers I guess. The point is that it is stupid and unneccesary to throw your current paying customers under the bus while trying to get new customers. For one thing, the new customers know that they'll end up under the bus next. So why should they join? All LL has to do is make the mainland 3 continents each with its own rating. Then leave everyone the h*** alone to enjoy their property (again it is OUR property! LL made it so when they sold it to us years back) the way we want to enjoy it. And just simplify the TOS as follows: PG: No sex or foul language of any kind anywhere, home or not. Violence is permitted only in Combat areas. M: Sex and foul language and violence are permitted, but only in areas not visible/audible from public roads. If it's not readily visible and there are no advertisements for sex or violence visible to the public, it's okay. A: Anything goes anywhere. Verification is required however. See how easy that was? M areas are "Keep it out of public view" while A is "anything goes" and PG becomes "Disney approved". Simple as can be and doesn't stifle anyone's dreams or builds. But as long as the heads of LL continue to think of SL as a single product that can only be a single thing, we are doomed.
  12. Mike: The problem with the gambling ban is that it took a problem and made it worse. It could easily have been changed by creating a seperate money system (the Nednil) which can be bought with Lindens and used for gambling, and the only cashout would be to pay for Tier or Premium. Then the user just pays money to Linden Labs, no different than when I buy lindens on the Lindex. But instead of fixing the leaking dam they just told everyone they could drown and blew the dam up. As for the Adult bit, I was very very incensed that people were being deprived of their private property. And while I can see a need to do that, it's a very great exception to the rules. And even during the illegal (see: Ownership) confiscation, many people would have been fine with it... IF LL HAD DONE IT RIGHT! But instead of making 3 seperately rated continents so people didn't have the problems of seeing something they didn't want to see, they simply moved the adult businesses and left the rest of mainland a mess. Which now creates the next coming disaster when some teen's mommy sees him camming into M parcels and seeing graphic pixel sex. As usual LL took a problem and didn't bother to fix it; they simply rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic. How many times do we have to tolerate such gross incompetence from our landlords? If you bought a car and then the dealer took the paid-for car away and replaced it with a Yugo, you'd sue them. Yet LL thinks it's perfectly in the right to do the same thing. I can understand responding to a legal mess. But I cannot understand responding in such a way that you guarantee another legal mess a year later. If you have to fix something, then fix it right. You don't even have to be a rocket scientist to understand such a basic thing as that. If you have to screw customers because of some problem then you work day and night to make it right to them and do it in such a way you don't have to screw them again. LL constantly screws over its own customers. And in doing so, turns them into exCustomers. And so LL is constantly screwing themselves. If I didn't get so much pleasure from my own community inworld and the building, I'd have been long gone after the whole Voidsim disaster (which cost me my home.) As it is, the numbers of our group inworld are dwindling because people are getting fed up with LL's technical and managerial bumbling. We are currently holding our breath and praying that Rod comprehends how fed up his customers are with the micromanagement and the volumnous tomes of do's and don'ts and LL's apparent hatred for its customers. But after so many years, we expect things to continue to get worse instead of better.
  13. I'll let you know where I will not be having fun -- in your Facebook page. I'm in Second Life, not in Fakebook. If you want me to share my Spring Break with you here in the forums or even Flikr, I'll be happy to. But I'm not going to have one thing to do with Facebook. If I wanted to play in Facebook, I would have no use for Second Life. Then again, at least Facebook hasn't sold me property, given me a reciept, and then said I don't really own it. Hmm. Maybe I should reconsider where I'm spending my time and my money...
  14. IMVU reports record growth and record profits. They now have more customers than SL by a wide margin. Movie studios report record ticket sales and profits. Blizzard made a billion dollars in sales last year. In times of crisis, entertainment sees growth as people use it to escape their troubles momentarily. Every entertainment venue in the country has seen growth the past few years... except SL. So either the rest of the world is wrong (but still profitable by some magic trick), or SL is wrong. The fact is that LL has mismanaged and ruined SL so much the past couple of years that they have missed the gravy train that all the other entertainment companies managed to catch. The failure of SL is totally LL's fault. From tech problems that haven't been fixed in 8 years to customer support manuals flown in from North Korea -- the ruin of SL begins and ends at LL's jackbooted feet.
  15. Not to mention: * saying we own our purchases in SL, then announcing we don't. You suckers... * selling broken voidsims and announcing major price increases. * blaming users for the broken voidsims while all the while continuing to sell a known faulty product. * forcing people off their land and into ghettos because someone thinks SL will grow if we can just hide all these icky customers who pay money here... * trying to hammer SL into business tool. The old adage about polishing poop is apt here. * micromanaging what kinds of fun we are permitted in "Our World". * not fixing things that take 60 seconds and leaving people to spend weeks unable to even login. Only in Lindenworld do they think people will continue to pay 1000s of dollars a month and not be allowed to even login. * banned gambling. * utterly destroyed Search, starting the meltdown of inworld businesses. * bought out Xstreetsl because LL despises successful SL players. * Setup the marketplace to put even more damage to inworld businesses. * gives free homes in direct competition with their biggest customers. SL's biggest fault is LL itself. When SL was formed, it was a place where LL didn't want to act like a government. Now LL is so mad with power that they cannot stand to see a happy customer doing what they want to do anymore. LL has painted the customers as the enemy. And it's a very dangerous path when you think poorly of your customers - the ones who pay your salary. And until LL wakes up and gives the customers what LL said they would get, and stops treating us like poo-shoveling peasants, their fortunes will continue to circle that black hole in the center of that porceline supernova they created for themselves. And in case any cheerleaders want to blame it all on the economy again -- IMVU reports record growth and epic profits. There. See, not the economy's fault -- that could have been an SL headline had SL been run by competent leaders.
  16. *Aside* PocketMetaverse has just updated. Check your phone for the new version.
  17. It's called Sparkle. I have both it and PocketMetaverse on my iPhone (although I prefer the PocketMetaverse). They give me text ability, IM and PaythroughIM abilities. That's it. If these few functions is all it takes to make a VW, then two pickles and a bun are all you need for a supersized combo at Burger King.
  18. While the iphone 4 has a puny GPU, the whole machine doesn't have the computing power needed to run an actual client. Consider how much code is in a regular PC client and how much ram it takes up. How are you going to cram all that into an iphone? While it's concievable one could tilt the device to turn and walk, everything else in the UI is going to be horrorshow on such a tiny screen. "Oh, well they just need to optimise the code" you say? If that were true, then what does the fact that they don't do it on the client say about their skillset? And if they can't on a pc client, how do you think they'll be able to do it while simultaneously losing the drive for caching, running on a tiny fraction of screen space than before and making it readable and usuable with a fraction of available ram, CPU and GPU power? Not everything on the planet can or should be mobile. If VC want to mutually massage each other with the buzzword d'jour, that's fine. But if they are too incompetent to make money with a VW on a PC, then sticking it all on a iPhone isn't going to magically open the cash font to them. Even if you could run SL on a wristwatch the faults in SL are mostly managerial rather than technical. The incompetent management will still hold SL back whether you run the client on a superPC, cell phone, pocket calculator, or toilet paper dispenser.
  19. I personally believe that everyone should have to pay something. Either you pay 3$ a month for a basic account or 7$ for a premium account. That premium account allows you to call a DialALinden any time of the day or night and fix a problem, then and there. Too many people have quit because nobody in Battery Park could be bothered to type on a keyboard for 60 seconds and fix something simple. If they fix their hostile attitude toward customers and stop ruining SL for us, then they can charge that amount. No other VW is free, so why is this? If you aren't getting 3$ of pleasure out of SL then you should find something else to do. I understand that LL was trying to turn SL into a new 3d web browser -- that mushroom dream is dead and gone. So too is the need to let people come in for free to boost the user numbers. What we have is what we have -- we need to start with repairing what's broken and then we'll worry about buying out IBM in some future date. At the same time though, they cannot charge a groat more for anything at this moment, because people are so torqued off at LL right now. Nobody is going to accept paying more for nothing, or at times, worse than nothing. So if LL fixes its customer support and gets off its customer-hostile high horse, they can charge something from everybody who is here. But not until they right the ship first.
  20. Rene Personally I detest shopping inworld. When I need something, I need it then and there. I don't have 3 hours to piddlepot around the grid, arguing with Search and crossing my fingers that I might (MIGHT) find something that'll do what I need. Instead I just punch in a search term into the Marketplace (which actually works) and look through the listings. Tada, I get what I need, then and there. I don't dispute that the marketplace has killed off inworld stores, and that's a pity because although I do prefer the website, for browsing around when you are bored, you cannot beat a store inworld. And who knows, you may find something you didn't know to search for that you really want. So both systems need to be in place for an ideal experience. A good solution would be limiting the marketplace to 12 items PLUS the number of items you can put out on land you own. That way anyone can break into business even if they don't have a nickle. Likewise, people like me who are just playing have to limit how many things we put out. And someone who owns an inworld store on 1024m of land can have 234 prims -- thus they can have 1/5 of that primcount added to the marketplace for a total of 58 items on the web. Own 1/2 a sim? That's 6565 items you can sell on the marketplace. Own no land at all? Basic 12 spots is all you get. Today, the marketplace makes owning land a sucker bet. Why buy land when the website costs nothing but a commission? This kills off browsing and wandering. So simply tie the max number of items you can have for sale on the website to the amount of land you own, and both systems will flourish hand in hand. And make it so anyone can have 12 items on the marketplace and you'll still be nourishing the innovators and newcomers.
  21. as per the gridsurvey, abandoned is 7.7% of the mainland and Linden-owned is 40.9%. This means 48.6% of the mainland is not making them any income. I have no doubt LL is keeping the stuff on the sim intact. Anything they can do to maintain the illusion that they haven't driven their money-maker right over a cliff. Before people abandon land they should wipe it clean. And the more LL plays these silly games, the more distrust they will generate and the less anyone will believe anything they say, write, or put into a contract. Sadly, it is distrust that LL has itself created with this adversarial relationship with customers that has caused this mess. LL could have just left people alone to enjoy their purchases and their land. But noooooo...
  22. You can make these numbers up, and we wouldn't have any way to confirm it. You have a history of hiding bad news. You have a history of removing access to data. Looking at previous data, SL has never had a bad day in its entire history. Yet there have been multiple major layoffs and concurrency has continued to drop. LL has zero trust left with its user base. So no, I cannot believe a word of it. Not when LL can make up numbers, hide whatever it wants whenever it wants, and has no legal requirement to tell us the truth. You cannot expect anyone who has been inworld to believe that land is fine, sales are fine, and the population is fine. Mainland is 50% owned by Lindens and the price for land is no longer in the toilet; it's in the sewer. Numbers and sales are down across the entire virtual world. And here you are telling me that everything is roses and cream? Preach it to the choir because your church is emptying.
  23. On the plus side though, the targeted adverts they are going to start sticking on our profiles are much more easily blocked in a webpage than they are in an inworld profile. What you do with your servers, LL, is out of my hands. What I do with my computer, LL, is out of your hands. I would like to see you move away from this adversarial relationship with your customers which you've had for the past couple of years. But since you won't bother giving your paying customers an option to not be involved with a group they aren't paying to be a part of, and would like to avoid, I don't see any deviation from your Adversarial approach to customer service. And yet you wonder why numbers are falling?
  24. you know, something occurs to me. Sure, these connections to Facebook are so facebook can learn more about "us" and target ads that will be put on our profiles. But what exactly does anyone on Facebook think we are going to buy off of the web that has anything at all to do with Second Life? A graphics program, maybe. But think about it; what can anyone target their ads to us in SL? What products would a vendor say "you know, if I can just get this ad in front of all those Second Life players, I'll make a million." I don't think we need to worry about the targeted ads so much. And besides, running Adblock or dropping a certain URL for the facebook adservers into your HOSTS file eliminates them entirely. Oh, btw LL -- thanks for moving the targetted ads to web profiles instead of the inworld profiles. It will be much easier to block the adverts you send in the future on a website than it will be to block them from an inworld profile page. So thank you for that little gem.
  25. Good for you. So shall I Until LL has to pull the plug because they chased all the money-carrying chicken littles out, that is.
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