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WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

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Everything posted by WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

  1. I find the use of JIRA to take reports of technical problems to be intimidating, and I don't consider myself to be ignorant of computer technology. It is a channel biased towards the jargon of the computer programmer, using methods intended for professional management of bug reports. All this is necessary, even desirable, within the process of developing software. But for those of us not amongst the cogniscenti, it remains a barrier. What shibboleths do we use to discover if the problems we experience have been reported? How do we classify the thousand un-natural shocks that virtual flesh is heir to? When some problems seem to have JIRA entries referenced by fewer digits than Django Reinhardt needed to play his guitar, how may we be confident that you are listening? We've have had plenty of fine words. When are you going to deliver?
  2. There are a lot of problems across the whole internet with search results being swamped in un-wanted content. Having better filtering can help, but I couldn't say that's what is currently happening is better filtering. Some people have been using SEO tricks on their marketplace and in-world seach for a long time, and it gets tedious which somebody uses the equivalent of "I also sell $_WANTED" in every entry they make. If this is catching out some people who deserve to be embarrassed, I don't care, but this is like fishing with dynamite: noisy, wasteful, and indiscriminate.
  3. So I have to join Facebook, and compromise my privacy? No thanks, guys. Besides, you think I'm going to tell you where Freya and I will be, having fun? There's a beach us Landing Force veterans know, which is a bit tricky to reach by land. A bit of a sun-trap too. I just hope Antoinette can keep her daughter from taking the outboard to pieces. At least the two of 'em could put it back together. Smallwolf might be bringing a girl along this year, somebody he knows from school. I wonder if she realises what she's getting into with this family...
  4. I know that quite a lot of items suitable for general historical situations are tagged "Gorean". John Norman took a lot of historical info and fitted it to his setting, so you have books centred on Vikings and Mongols as a starting model. If you're merchant selling a longship model, it's been worth the "Gorean" tag. But John Norman's fictional world of "Gor" is notorious for the controversial sexual customs built into it. And now we've got Teens on the main grid, the Lindens are nervous. So. painful though it is, I can see merchants taking a hard look at that label. It may be better to drop it for the history-based items, so that all customers can see them, and those wanting items for a Gor-inspired location or AV can find them by looking for real-world labels. What I remember from when I read a few of the books (I was a teen) was that the historical settings used for Gor did overlap in similar ways to the real history. Vikings in Constantinople, for instance, or meeting Arab traders. Even some of the caste-colours he used in Gor are real-world plausible--red for warriors, wasn't it?
  5. I'm not sure of the real-world age limit on buying tobacco--like RL age-of-consent it may not be 18 in other countries than the USA--but there are age limits. So at that level, it isn't crazy. Though virtual items for roleplay--pass me the pipeweed, Mr. Underhill--maybe should be less tightly restricted than reality. Do Linden Lab have something better than the initial automated pass to clear this sort of ambiguity? I don't know.
  6. A couple of days ago, I was thinking that stuff such as the HippoGroups service were on the way out, with the increased number of SL Groups allowed. Now I've realised there's another scenario. It looks as though Hippo Technologies is based in the UK, part of the European Union, which means that it is subject to the Data Protection Acts. Also RIPA and a few other things. So if they leak that random.resident is a member of some gay-friendly group, they're in trouble. At least, I can see a plausible argument for claiming that an SL username is personal data within the meaning of the Act. After all, your name, address, and phone number are classed as personal data under the Act, even though they may be published in that thing called a telephone directory. I am not a lawyer. Don't trust my advice on this. But if you're concerned about the privacy implications of running a group within SL, the alternatives do seem worth a look.
  7. I'm so glad that I have a computer running Linux.
  8. I'll cautiously welcome being able to connect other websites to my Profile. I can see the advantages, and I can also see the security risks. I can set up my web browser to be very restrictive on running scripts and other executables. How do I do the same for an SL Viewer? I do not want to have to open an account with a third party to find out what you are doing. You already have a website. If you want to use Twitter or Facebook as one of several channels of communication, fine. I don't have to. But you're talking as though you'll only listen to foodback via Twitter. This seems particularly dumb.
  9. Ouch! They're taking a huge gamble, aiming for the mobile market. If they can pull that off they're not really competing with SL. But they can't afford to fail.
  10. Is the compression feature for sim crossings and teleports generally enabled? I've had a few seriously slow crossings this week? Teleport to Bay City, folks, don't even try to go through the Ahern infohub cluster.
  11. A Debug setting in the Advanced menu, for Phoenix. Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S for the debug settings window. Set Phoenix40GroupsSupport to True If you have Alts, you only need to set this once.
  12. That graph shows the Average times for region crossing. Which can be not very useful: most people have more than the average number of legs, after all. It's not going to be a Normal Distribution, because that would have a possibility of negative-time region crossing, but it still matters how broad that distribution is. I know enough about stats to know what the median and mode are, as well as the mean that most people think of an an average. One possibility is that the really slow region cossings have been greatly reduced (which is a good thing) without seriously changing the experience of most residents. The mode, essentially the peak of the distribution, might have changed very little, despite a big drop in the mean. I don't think the median on this is all that useful. If you put all the figures for a sample in order, low to high, the median is the one in the middle. This is the average which is defined by half the sample being below-average. Again, it might not have changed much. Wild guess, but a Poisson Distribution might suit the data. There's some far more complicated stats that could be done, since the minimum value is not going to be zero, but this has to be done by somebody who knows more than how to feed the data into a stats package to get pretty pictures.
  13. I wouldn't rule out that this is part of an overall fix. But yeah...
  14. I see we're getting all the same old arguments, in huge quantities. And that doesn't really surprise me. I do think there's been some reactions to the criticisms of the plan, but Linden Labs always seems to give the impression that they have had a bright idea, they are going to implement, and they're not listening to the people who ultimately pay them.
  15. is enough to get a person telling Linden Jokes! How many lindens does it take to change a light bulb? "Our teams are working on it, in the meantime, here is Torely with ten super fun things to do in the dark" Q. How do you recognise an Italian Linden? A. They sing for hours about what they plan to do, and then pull out at... Oh, wait a minute, that won't work.
  16. Now you tell us! If you really didn't know that before you made the original announcement, somebody blundered.
  17. I'm afraid that all this business does is conjure up images of Jack Linden sitting at his desk, fingers in his ears, singing "la-la-la! Can't hear you!" Even if I thought the Viewer 2 UI was usable (lousy colour scheme: it isn't usable), I wouldn't risk the hassles I've had from previous beta releases, messing with the viewer preferences when they're uninstalled.
  18. With an element of weary cynicism, I murmur, "I think you have to pay lawyers."
  19. I had the same problem after I tried the Mesh beta. Uninstalling a beta shouldn't mess with the settings for the stable version of the same program. Some of the problems I had might be down to the developers for TPVs not bothering to store their settings in a different place to the Linden Lab programs. That doesn't absolve the Linden Lab developers from messing up their own software settings.
  20. OK, your work is an improvement on what Linden Lab did. For instance, your use of orange is a help. But it's still essentially grey on dark grey. Can you really say that Viewer 2 has the flexibility of colouring that was available from the Linden Lab viewer of a year ago? I used to be able to pick a skin which suited my vision, and wasn't too far from the operating system choices I find comfortable. And, sorry, you're not Linden Lab. To get this involves modified XML files which are made for specific viewer versions. If you were hit by a truck, it would be dead with the next viewer upgrade. Heck, it wouldn't need that: I know how much a non-fatal accident can mess up access to the net. It was a couple of weeks before I could think well enough to work with a computer. It looks as though Linden Lab don't care. And so the solution you offer is very limited Yes, I'll give it a try, but I am not optimistic. Thanks for trying.
  21. And I was at the Phoenix Office Hour, where the planned mover to the Viewer 2 codebase was outlined. Biased audience there, but the general opinion was that the UI sucks. I've tried it--wanted to see what meshes were like--and the colour scheme gives me eye strain. Everything else I use on my computer is fine. Either it uses the Windows settings, or has a useful range of choices. The Viewer 2 UI is broken at such an fundamental level of UI design that I am beginning to wonder if it can ever be fixed.
  22. Looking at my own experience, a mesh should be easier to make and texture than a sculpt. But the way I make a sculpt involves the creation of a mesh in an external program. If you have that mesh, you can export it as a sculpt texture now, and upload to SL. If all goes as planned, you can take the identical external-mesh and textures, export using COLLADA, and load/display in SL as an SL-mesh. So, even if SL drops support for sculpts (which would be insane), loading the model as a mesh should be easy. Meshes aren't going to make past creations useless.
  23. The Dashboard thing seems to be a way of taking advantage of the ability of Viewer 2 to act as a web browser. I wouldn't call myself paranoid, but I'm uneasy about that. I use a web browser that I can set up to meet my needs for usability and security, and when the Dashboard is a starting point for real-money transactions I'm reluctant to start using something different. It doesn't help that I'd far rather use a TPV with a different UI. How much should I trust TPV developers? How much checking of code really gets done? I can get around most of this by choosing the option to use an external browser: if you want us to use the Dashboard while in-game, please look closely at how it works with that option.
  24. I can see this working if things are well-explained. I could go and do a bit of shopping and join a few groups which get offered to me when I TP into a store--the sort of groups I might sign up to for a week or two. My general experience is that Linden Lab don't do a good job of explaining things. There's been quite a few problems I've noticed where better explanations for new SL users might have paid off better than what was actually done.
  25. OK, I am seeing improvements from HTTP Textures. Viewer 2 isn't worth the eyestrain from that colour scheme. How come other people can change it, but Linden Lab can't? Crossing region boundaries has been hell today, even walking.
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