WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

That little-and-often release strategy does make me wonder sometimes. There have been times when bad mistakes have slipped past the QA system, leading to a rollback to a previous version of the server software. I do get a feeling that they're pushing their luck. It doesn't have to be incompetence on the part of the programmers or the QA team, just management-sourced optimism about the timing.

I haven't seen a rights grab this extreme since the last century. It seemed, for a while, that every company on the net was trying to cover themselves over the grey areas of how IP law interacted with the workings of the internet. Just displaying an image on a web page involved making a copy. My own guess was that the lawyers responsible were ignorant of thew technology. And some things are still technically and legally difficult. How do you safely remove every copy of a piece of data, text or image, when you have back-ups? What I understood was the purpose of the most recent TOS change was to cover all the different Linden Labs products. It's as if they cannot cope with Second Life and Versu using user-created content in different ways, and keeping distinct the different content. I get an impression of ill-informed lawyers and mismanagement of data resources.

They have the old-style two-part account name (NOT Display Name) with the second part being "Linden", which they use when in-world on official business. The LDPW Moles are contractor with permissions for building and maintenance, and have no authority to ban anyone, but if you were hassling them you can expect their Abuse Reports to be taken seriously. It's worthy of an Abuse Report to pretend to be a Linden, either by some misleading display name or by sending an IM. It of possible that an employee might be using a private account, and has sent you an IM, but you can not know such an IM comes from a genuine Linden. Send in an Abuse Report. Make an Abuse Report from within the Viewer (I think it's on the "Help" menu in all viewers. Cut and paste the IM into the report box. Be very polite Expect to hear nothing about the results. They will tell you nothing. You won't even be able to reliably confirm that an account has been removed from the game. You won't know if your report was trivial, badly written, or otherwise unclear. I reckon that a weakness in the system.

I've tested sim-crossing with vehicles, and things are currently working well. Network quality can affect this, both at Second Life and across the wider internet, but I was getting good results at a time when the local-to-me internet can be quite busy. The ancient bug involving sim boundaries and full parcels is still there. And camera position interacts with the short distance at which ban-lines can be seen to make life difficult. But, like the NSA, I rather expect such hassles to be with us always. (I am inverstigating the possibility of usind a skywriting aircraft in Second Life to pass on sekrit messages.)

There are settings you can adjust under Preferences (use "Ctrl-P" to get that) in various sub-sections. One of these is the Download Speed. Use Ctrl-Shift-1 to bring up the Statistics window. This does give the current download speed, but what you need to check is the number for lost packets. This should be zero, though I would not worry about a few. If you are getting lost packets when the current download speed is high, you need to reduce the setting in Preferences. Linden Labs had bad network problems over the weekend, and they may have to do some more work to clear up problems. Check Preferences -> Graphics and try reducing the setting a step. That can help a lot. It is possible that the Draw Distance is set higher than it needs to be, which means a lot of extra textures need to be downloaded.

The Lindens aren't even back at work yet, after the weekend, and oh boy, are they in for a shock! There are server deploys timetabled for Wednesday and Thursday, plus work on Vivox (the voice service). We don't know any details, maybe final decisions are due to be taken this morning. Up until the networking problems, I wasn't seeing anything going wrong. Since then... Well, I think the fix is the computing equivalent of one of those undersized spare wheels some cars have. Temporary use only.

Is there any info anywhere on what the new access controls will do when a Viewer makes them available to us. I'm not sure what the point is of putting the code in the servers without there being any viewer which can use them. If seems an odd way to test things. Things such as vehicle crossing have, for me, been so bad over the last couple of weeks that I am at a loss to see how anyone could know anything new is wrong.

I've seen the same error message in other circumstances, over the weekend. It may be a sign of a connection problem. It may be a viewer bug. You should certainly tell us which Viewer software you are using. As for your specific circumstances, check the land settings are the same for the two parcels.

According to the Grid Status page, nothing has happened since the Main Channel rollout on Tuesday. According to the Twitter feed, SLGridStatus, the RC rollout took place as planned. The link given in that tweet iis to the Main Channel rollout status message. Compare Twitter:SLGridStatus and the Grid Status web page Has the rollout taken place? Please, extract digit

I'm reading your description as not being able to start the program, rather than a login problem. The Firestorm people have a good set of Clean Install instructions, which tells you which bits are chat-logs and stuff which you might want to save. There are a few differences to folder-names. Clean Install is worth a try, just to be sure. The cureent version of Firestorm is different enough to be worth trying. If it's a graphics driver problem, Cool VL Viewer is worth a look, because there is still a maintained version based on an earlier iteration of the graphics code.

Was that an answer to a rhetorical question? Moving house to get a better internet connection so as to connect to SL is such a wonderful solution. I shall try your remedy forthwith.

I'll try and give a little more detail. 9 9 ms 10 ms 10 ms xe-0-2-1.cr1.ams5.nl.above.net [64.125.22.61] Trans jump 10 * * 89 ms xe-0-2-0.cr2.lga5.us.above.net [64.125.27.185] Each numbered line is the details for the link leading to a particular computer on the internet, usually a specialised router. Computer 0 is the one running the tracert or traceroute program The next three numbers on the line is the time, in milliseconds, to get a reply from that computer. In line 10 you see asterisks, meaning that there was no reply. This is a low priority test, so the asterisks might mean the router is ignoring the specific test signals Next comes the domain name. These particular ones are complicated, but the last four elements tell you something about where the routers are. "ams5" is somewhere near Amsterdam, "nl" is the ISO code for the Netherlands, and "above.net" is the operating company. And the appearance of "us" tells you that line 10 is the transatlantic link. "lga" and "ams" happen to be standard codes for particular airports and it suggests the routers are somewhere near those airports Now, the difference between 10 ms and 89 ms is pretty good for a transatlantic link. It's the dropped packets that are the warning sign.

And I am seeing an OK transatlantic connectionm but serious problems building up nearer DFW Some of the lost packets I've had reported on my internet connection would be old enough to vote by now. Why is it that I lose more packets talking to SL than I do to the whole rest of the planet? I had a better connection than this in the days of dial-up modems. I do tests. I have a good connection. But every time I contact support they tell me it's my fault. I'm not the one changing the [redacted[ software every [redacted[ week. If this is customer service in modern corporate America, no wonder there are death threats.

I'm hearing a rumour in-world about a change to the age-limits. But whether that gossip is based on somebody reading the TOS, I'm not sure. It ties in with US Federal Law on internet access, and if the rumour were true, they'd have to be ignoring that law.

Different legal systems, but I've been a customer of companies which went bankrupt, and there's sod-all chance of getting your money back when that happens. Somebody such as Anshe Chung has enough money tied up to make it worth checking with a lawyer. I do see the figures for the number of regions, and SL isn't going to vanish all that soon. They need to stop the shrinkage, and I don't expect a price cut. Perhaps they should stop pulling stunts like this, where they can't even provide the simplest indication that they see us as anything more than money-trees. It's a fair question: why should we pay them for anything when they treat us like this?

Oh dear, I feel an outbreak of pedantry coming on. I have seen distortions with Shape Slider changes on skin and system clothes for ages. Even since I made myself a few t-shirts... The UV mapping is not changing. The UV map is a set of data which links mesh vertices to specific points on a texture map. When a slider changes the shape, the mesh vertice moves. Which means the texture pixels move to track it. You can see some ugly vertical movements along the center line of the chest, even for a male AV. And that's just where you put a t-shirt logo. It's nearly a decade since I started using Poser and the underlying tech is just the same. The problems are the same. But the figure meshes (and there are a lot of them) have huge numbers of polygons, and that makes it possible to minimise the distortions.

All this could be a poor connection, rather than a fault at SL. It's sometimes hard to tell. And the pattern of internet traffic generated by SL can be different enough to make tests misleading. The usual advice from LL support is to reboot your computer and router, but doing that disconnects you if you're using Live Chat, which can be frustrating. It can be a long time to reconnect. So try that before you try LL Support,

That's a long-winded way of being sure. I was just watching how a Le Tigre region wasn't behaving like a Magnum region when I entered. Since we are going to be running SSA I do wonder what the point is of running new code in a non-SSA release channel is. What will the testing reveal this week reveal?

No specific knowledge here, but there's a chain of controls that affect sound in Windows. Start with the Windows-level controls for the mic. Check the input volume is not too high. Then you have the Preferences sub-window for Sound, with another input level control. Using headphones, there shouldn't be any sound for the microphone to pick up, but it's possible that speakers are running at the same time, and you're not noticing. Check SL Viewer first, make sure it's pointing at the right output, then the same for Windows.I know I have to check where the sound is coming through the USB headset I use, the switchover isn't 100% reliable. Windows sound is one of those things where it pays off to check the obvious.

It might be a good idea to do the restart, because of memory leaks and stuff, but the Status message is looking confused, for "do they know what they are do9ng?" values of confused. To be honest, it looks a little as though somebody saw the lack of announcement, and put out the initial Status message thinking it had been forgotten. I was told that rollouts started at the stated time. when, a few months back, I asked about the apparent delayed timing of the rollouts starting message (start about 5am, announcement at about 7am), and then the Cancel message came at about 8.30am. So I infer that somebody was on watch in the middle of the night, who can post Status messages, but nobody with the authority is told anything at 5am, the 7am messages are almost automatic, and at around 8.30am some poor sod had a nasty shock. It does make me wonder if there is any formal message passing which gives the routine Status sequence any useful meaning? It almost looks as if the support team are as much in the dark as the customers.

1: I am getting a good connection speed to sites on the European side of the Atlantic, though ping times are erratic. 2: connecting to sites based in New York give significantly worse connection speed, about 2/3 of the previous level, with a more-or-less usual increase in ping time due to the extra distance. 3: Connections to Second Life, and to Live Chat support, are dropping faster than a whore's drawers. It looks like an Internet problem somewhere in the USA, so I am not going to blame you too much, but I don't think it gets you off the hook for the consistently bad sim crossing I have seen for the last couple of weeks.

Every weekend is the same, a bunch of spam in the forums, advertising opportunities for real sex, usually in India. It is so obvious that one has to wonder whether any moderation takes place over the weekend. And it's likely another new account, which will never again be used, yet will be counted in that ever-increasing publicity figure.

If this bear has to choose between eating a marmalade sandwich and reading the JIRA, the sandwich wins. And I am going to get fat. We've had a week of terrible sim crossing, with vehicles losing track of camera position and sit position. The rubber-banding is sometimes crazy. If you go along the chain of water regions passing through Moose, expect some north-to-south passages to be impossible, and I have tried several different vehicles. And the JIRA, I have become convinced, is useless. I can't talk the talk, and when every fault I submit gets classed as "expected behaviour", I become liable to use bad language. I'm no Malcolm Tucker (and I consider his vocabulary terribly limited, even when the flexibility of his favourite work is taken into account. If you were running a brewery, the beer would be typical of the Anchor Brewery in the early Sixties. Things are looking that bad.

This issue made it into Status at 12.55pm PDT on Sunday. Second Life uses a third-party service to handle voice chat, and they seem to be waiting for a response from them. I'm on Premium, and in my experience the Support Ticket System isn't of very much use.

I've seen very variable effects from large crowds. Yes, I'd expect a sim that was so full to be very laggy. But I went to the Raglan Shire Wootstock Festival and that was packed out, but not laggy. And I know a few clubs which lag horribly with far fewer AVs present. I reckon that whatever is behind the lag situations, the Tinies have figured out a fix.