Prokofy Neva

That "Land-Cutting Prohibition" is really a thing of joy and beauty to behold. Note how carefully it is crafted. Remember that it took four long years of groups of us lobbying Jack Linden and Philip Linden and others to stop this horrid practice of "ad-farming," where people would deceptively sell land like this, and hold back a square or a "donut hole" or a piece under water which they would then put for sale for some outrageous price, like $10,000 for a 96m piece, and put some ugly thing on it to force you to "buy back the view". The Lindens should have dealt with this swifty and thoroughly to keep Mainland value but instead, they let it fester, for two reasons: 1) it fulfilled their ideological bias toward extremes of expression -- despite the fact violated their TOS 2C clause about "affecting the enjoyment of Second Life of others," a kind of "Do Unto Others" clause; 2) it drove buyers to private islands which they could sell for more. Really, letting the ad farms and the Bush guy and Mr. Lee's Hong Kong and all those other culprits of yester year to fester and ruin beautiful waterfronts and meadows and mountains was a crime. But nothing would get the Lindens moving on this. I'm not quite sure what finally turned the table for them. Maybe it was a slow-down in purchase of brand-new sims, where people stopped believing they would remain pristine for long. Maybe it was a slow-down in the sale of premium accounts which are used for mainland primarily. I remember spending many hours in Linden office hours on this subject and also having protests with signs that we wore in the welcome areas. It was so hard! There's also a rule that you can't have advertising on too many parcels on one sim -- there were a number of culprits on that score too. It doesn't happen as much now but abuse reports do not equal instant response always which is why it's good to have a group do it. To me, the biggest problem on the Mainland now is that people buy land, put up a big piece of plywood or a half-finished or ugly build, then go away for ever -- or maybe a year -- or maybe only six months, but long enough to ruin the view for miles around. Sometimes if you keep checking and find these people finally gone from the people's list, their land can be formally abandoned and cleared. But not always as they might buy a year membership or leave a credit card to debit and don't care. I wish sometimes that there was a rule that if you have not logged in for 90 days, or make it a year if you must, everything on your land auto-deletes. Of course, many would howl given the precious attitude there is to "content" on both the users and the Lindens' side. Yet staring at plywood boxes for months on end from people impervious to IMs who never log on is a huge annoyance and destroys property values. Somehow, I think progress could be made on this issue.

They aren't bots, they are people who are quick on the draw -- I think they keep refreshing the land for sale pages -- if you set your land to less than .5/meter. They show up and buy it, sometimes stopping to look around to see what it is worth. I haven't seen a bot in ages.

Why are you paying $300 a month and not $195, which you can pay for a full-prim sim if you get a grand-fathered sim on the secondary market, or pay the "pay-down" fee to get that tier. Many have done it. There are grandfathered homesteads for $95, too. $300 is more like a parking-lot fee, not monthly rent, at least in New York City. I think it's helpful not to perceive sims in Second Life as land. They are more like boats, the definition of which is "a hole in the water into which you pour money". Land is not an "investment" for a business, but a sunk cost of doing business. Rarely can you re-sell it for what you paid, and even renting is increasingly difficult. If you are an end-user, you should look at it as an entertainment cost. If you spent $10 a day on movies or lattes or magazines in real life, or $300 a month, let's say, you wouldn't find it so terrible, but you might decide to cut down on those lattes or lunches or magazines because it adds up. It's better to rent than buy in SL for this reason, so that you can leave any time, hopefully with a refund, or when your rent expires, so as to avoid this recurring cost. The Lindens look at sims as a frame for content, which they find more important, develop for, and hope to have serve as their revenue-maker some day, as sims are expensive and also unreliable as people keep finding them too expensive and dump them, hence the reduction of sims. But the Lindens can't justify reducing the cost of these sims because anyone finds them expensive, because they cost money to run -- they rent them from server farms and those server farms have electricity, cooling, staff etc expenses. The Internet is not free; the liberation of content has covered up that harsh reality. Perhaps the Lindens or somebody might figure out how to get the price of these things down, but I find in RL jobs working for web sites that people pay that much for Amazon servers for their web sites. There's a reason why you can't equate the "land" of SL to the real land of real life that might have a mortgage you could pay off, and then after that pay substantially less in taxes or upkeep: servers have recurring costs. The Lindens don't have their server farm bill stop because you've owned your sim for a year; their server farm's electric and water bills and payroll don't come to a natural end just because you paid tier for a year.

How does de-rendering work on Firestorm and other non-SL viewers? Does it go by object name or UUID or what? If the object name changes, does the item remain de-rendered? Does changing an object's name change its UUID?

I thought the gifts were pretty high quality for this sort of event, they are keepers. I just went to the household stores, they were all good. The build by the Moles is really nice too and it's not laggy.

Hi, I'm glad you like Flamingo Court! If you pick up a card of listings in the SL Public Land Preserve, you will find some areas where you can "camp" i.e. just as you say, a trailer, a chair, a few things for 40-50 prims. (Sign is at the gas station). But a lot of them are in woods by rivers and sea and not near roads. In Hector there is one pull-off we have (where the food truck is) where a rental box could be put up,. but that's not so far from where you are now in Juanita. And Columbia has a few 512s for rent cheaply ($150) although that's more than what you need. Maybe I should add a trailer park there. I may do that! I think most landlords don't have the incentive to have parking or camping this small because people don't make use of it. I have fiddled with this formula myself now for two years and I think I have a fair mix. But it's hard to have the luxury to keep roadside spots open for occasional travelers. You might have to spend more, there are some hotels and camps along the Hetero roads but you may have to pay a bit more, $50 is hard to find.

@ChinRey but didn't LL solve this by slowing down scripts all together? Which then creates "the sensation of lag" for some. Plus doors close slowly, etc. I never rent to clubs because it's too much work and trouble. I used to have a club and rentals on the same sim. Bad idea, and not just for lag. Griefers bother the apart-dwellers, etc. If the theory is that people meet in the club and retire to their apartments, they don't. They want to keep them very separate, I've found.

I think the short answer is that you cannot do this in apartment buildings. It's just too hard. You can set security orbs to distances like 5 or 10, but that can ding people in the next apartment sometimes. I've never seen any "ban by volume" devices, I don't think this is a question of "many". That is, I'm aware of maybe 2 or 3 brands of skyboxes that have security for the periphery of the build only, but they aren't apartment buildings. I think you should have a group role where everyone gets eject/ban powers and they can solve it that way. If you live in a stacked-up situation not on a dedicated parcel (where you pay more) this is what you have to expect. In 12 years of running 3-4 apartment buildings I have had more problems from people installing their own security and blasting everyone away than I have had from any griefers, which aren't that frequent. I only had one custom-built tower where the security was built into the elevator and doors which worked ok but people got annoyed when they tried to invite friends over. And if an intruder wants to cam and sit through the wall, he can. Another thing I've done is put dedicated lots next to the building, small ones, for small skyboxes. Each floor gets a teleporter to a skybox at spaced levels so that setting security isn't an issue even at 20-30 meters.

I totally agree. If you have a payment information on file and are a member in good standing this should be much faster. The issue is that not everyone has first bought Lindens, then tries to convert them back -- that's not very economical. The system is designed for people *earning* Lindens from businesses, then converting them. So the Lindens are constantly on the alert for fraud and money-laundering so they take that long. I think 3 days would be more reasonable.

@Chic Aeon Sounds to me as if there is now LOD inflation. Those cards used to tell you to set them at 4. Now it says 7? @Whirly Fizzle I don't want a nag message telling me to adjust settings. There's already a lot I can't see, even with a regular "good" computer "meeting specs" from Best Buy (which is what LL has to produce for, not hand-built jobs from New Egg that their own devs make). And I'm used to that. My day is filled with unexpected glaring blobs, grey people, etc. It's up to me to adjust -- or not. I always have the feeling that mesh is an alien creature in our world, it's not meant to be here and has been artificially granted like beech roses on to the shore. Does it work better in Sansara? Maybe that's the idea.

That sounds like a reasonable complaint. Even I find my gatchas are drowning out my "regular" products, such as they are. And when I go to find some item that I want to be a sturdy, copyable household item and I find a slew of overpriced gachas clogging search, it's annoying. So it needs to be a filter.

Some of the most talented and original mesh makers use these templates and prefabs because they are stretched so thin. They could make the same thing themselves but re-texturing is easier. I find this more and more. I don't care, I buy it anyway, but I credit the template maker first in my blog.

This is simply 100% false. I don't know how people end up saying things like this. I think it comes from theory, without any practice. I deal with hundreds, thousands of mesh items -- I put furniture in hundreds of rentals, I buy all kinds of gachas, hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of items. They do not rez one atop another. Believe me, hope beats eternal and I try and try with this and just often forget, so hard does the old prim habit die. And baboom, they go disappear, I get error messages it doesn't work -- just had this last night with three different creators' items I was putting out, over and over again. Nearly ever single piece of mesh has this problem. Very few don't. When they don't, it's maybe the floor of the house that doesn't have the problem -- but putting things on book cases by the same author will have this problem. I can easily demonstrate to you a hundred different creators with this problem. It's a theory only, what you're saying. The reality is, it just doesn't work 90% of the time with a huge variety of items.

Of course I know you can edit mesh because I work with it every day. But there are real limits, the most obvious being that you can't increase the size without adding sometimes huge amounts of land impact. Seldom do things look good when you recolour them. Scripts often don't work right in mesh. It's not as adaptable to editing as prims. The worse thing about mesh is that you cannot put one mesh on another mesh, and this drives you crazy. Instead of just bouncing, what it does is give a confusing error message, "The owner of this land does not allow..." although that is irrelevant and then the item disappears, not even to lost and found, but into the ether, until you relog. SO ANNOYING. The workaround is to put down a prim board and rez out all the mesh on to the board, then cam it into place. But this is ridiculous. They should fix this.

H Here's a nice new home by DaD called River House which I put overlooking the sea at the Ravenglass sim. $165 a week/225 prims for your use, management house prims don't count. More prims available. Pets, skyboxes welcome. 4 wks 10% discount Self-service - self-join group, hop right in and start decorating. Refund any time for small cancellation fee. TELEPORT TO RIVER HOUSE IN RAVENGLASS Look around at the other houses on Ravenglass -- $165 and $265, all great houses nestled in the woods.

These wonderful motel court cabins made by Post are exactly like the kind your Mom and Dad used to take you to in the 1960s -- that is, if you are now in your 60s yourself like me, and you remember this! But even if you don't, you can enjoy the retro ambiance of an era that had one foot in the 1950s with the ashtrays and cat clocks and credenzas and one foot in the 1960s when rock 'n roll and weird New Age stuff began to surface in the gift shops. TELEPORT TO FLAMINGO MOTEL COURT CABINS You can use the furnishings already installed - management prims don't count -- or ask to remove and place your own. $50 a week, 75 prims for your use, more available. Pets welcome, skyboxes too if you want a tiny one 500 m or higher. This is a great area with plenty of parking for your RVs or horse, and 3 sims to explore. You can swim in the big hotel pools or go in the sauna at the Flamingo Court Lounge. TELEPORT TO FLAMINGO MOTEL COURT CABINS

I've never heard of anyone leaving SL because they...couldn't mod their mesh outfit or head. Mesh outfits and even bodies are cheap enough to people buy tons of them and change them constantly. Sure they end up fiddling and complaining about it a lot, but that's part of SL. If they had a choice between returning to the early days of SL when they could make a prairie skirt like Home Ec in 1974 on their system avatar template, or have beautiful mesh things, they will take mesh. Being able to edit your prairie skirt doesn't mean anything when it is surpassed hundreds of leagues by mesh.

Also all completely irrelevant because this is a debate not about splitting hairs of meaning and analyzing "what looks best" as an abstraction cherry-picking VHS or Philips. It's a discussion about whether mesh looks better and sells more, or old sculpty and prims of your generation look better. And the answer is: mesh looks better and sells more, the end. Arguing about this with silly RL examples about TV picture quality is silly when you have only to look at the stream of things sold on the MP. Again, this is just a bad case of forums contrarianism among people who don't want to change or accept either mass taste or the capitalist market and the free flow of goods and services. They want some socialist god to intervene and make it possible for them to live their old prim life again.

In fact, true. Mesh looks better. and mesh is selling boatloads and boatloads -- in gachas, at events, off the MP. Watch what floats by in the ticker of what people actually buy on the MP. I watch this all the time. And it lets me know that people aren't buying old ugly prim craftsmanship but the best mesh. You may confuse mass taste with better higher taste but then that sells less because it's not part of a cultural stance, not necessarily because it "looks the best". If most people find a lamp "looks the best" and buy it for that reason and it sells the most, that's the lamp that looks the best. Some arch hipster might say a twisted collection of tin cans looks aesthetically better even if it sells two copies but that's not looking the best. The Honda Civic looks the best, and most people buy what looks best to them. In some abstract way they may concede that the "Maserati looks better" but this is an edge case. What this discussion is about is what looks better -- mesh or old school prim and sculpty. And the reality is, like it or not, mesh looks better and sells more. You can try to split hairs and edge case and say whatabout this or whatabout that but the reality is -- mesh looks best and sells more, the end.

Chin, you haven't disproven my blanket statement because you've shown a tree that in fact isn't proven to be a better seller than the better-made ones, so I don't know what your point is. You seem to be confusing selling MORE with selling AT ALL or being "somewhat popular". Believe me, the mesh trees sell way, way more than the planar ones. Just look around the world. I see this everywhere not only among my tenants but among my neighbours. You also seem to have a deep aversion to capitalism, as so many techies do on SL, although they themselves benefit from it. You've fetched a 19th-century example (!) about food poisoning (!) which doesn't relate to SL at all. And I mean, it's totally irrelevant. I don't know how this framed in your mind. Did some tree poke your avatar eye? As for "considering all the alternatives," I think most people buying in micro-payment markets aren't doing this kind of deliberation they might do in real life. I certainly don't. Perhaps for some very expensive skin or mesh head or something but most people buying a lamp pick the one that looks best. There are holdouts that still quaintly decorate from the Linden Library. I actually have oldbie tenants who do this, God bless 'em. Most people buy the mesh that looks better, Chen. You know this, but for some reason you're feeling contrarian.

I disagree that the maker whose tree you are showing "never really made it". And you're selecting two trees out of the many made by multiple top-selling merchants and not showing the best sellers. In fact, the people who make the best-looking stuff sell the most.

No there aren't any Catholic masses, nor should there be. I discussed this issue once at length with my own parish priest, I explained Second Life to him. In order to be official and actual, the Mass and the Sacrament of the Eucharist or communion have to be non-mediated, i.e. they have to be direct and not simulated in virtuality. Same with the Sacrament of Reconciliation or confession, it must be in real-life, not online. The Episcopalians may be less strict about such things.

None of this is true. SL has never been the egalitarian society imagined by its creators and early adaptors because their imagination was always constrained by their own circles and class of people -- they mean "anyone" who has technical skills of either coding or art or building who can make things that can be sold. It's great that any clumsy oaf such as myself who can barely put two prims together can in theory "make and sell things" but I have sold very, very few copies of my "atomic table" or "Nautilus But Nice Lamp" even mercifully put on mod. It was ALWAYS and EVERYWHERE the case that the people with SKILLS who were the BEST at making sold the most and got in the public eye. Sure, those who endlessly fiddled with traffic gimmicks and complained about how traffic wasn't working in their favour *cough* might make sales, but usually the best filtered to the top. In the early days, it was harder for newer people to get to market because oldbies blocked them and tried to sabotage their democratic access to telehub markets run by oligarchs by agitating to do away with them entirely. But with the advent of hundreds of islands and p2p, a store could be anywhere and then even only be on the MP or only be shown at temporary merchants' events or live inside a gatcha machine. All of this is good because skill and quality have been rewarded in a free market. Those of us who can't build an realize our artistic leanings through decorating. I do think a world where you can't edit or build even a little table or step will be just a circus where you are a gawker. I like having the ability to build at least some things even if I suck at building. And so do most people. So it's important, but it's wrong to claim there was this perfect world before. I was there, and I early caught on to the fact that certain favourites prevailed and got a boost and not always with talent if they knew the devs. But today, there is less of that because the world is bigger AND because blogging, merchant events and gacha machines have loosened the grip the early makers had on the market.

Well, these are all welcome things, and put in with lightning speed, as these things go. I look forward to seeing it. Since backspace wasn't what I used, it may not matter. The item count I suppose is helpful, and I'm assuming it tells you that it will do that before it does that. Not being able to purge trash from Recent sounds like the most important and relevant thing. However, IF there is a bug somewhere that is randomly putting folders into trash against your will -- and I believe there is, and I think there are sufficient numbers of field reports of this now -- then this isn't addressed. This is because engineers "couldn't find it" or "couldn't replicate it". So these other things are the remedies for when this thing happens which you didn't think you did does happen. There already was a "do you really want to do this" message with Trash, which I would argue is not relevant because you don't realize there's a problem and bat away such a message. I would have been happier with an addition of a message that pops up if you are deleting a folder *with objects in it*. That was the issue for me, and others. So if a folder gets pushed into trash, it says "Warning: Folder named [X] with [Y] items has been put in trash. Do you want to retrieve it?"

I've had perhaps 3 incidents over 12 years where my inventory wouldn't load the same way twice and the Lindens said there was a "corrupt objects" and removed it. They would never tell me what this thing was and I didn't see anything missing per se. Once I had some griefer rapidly send junk into my account. There didn't seem to be a way to stop it. Even logging off. So literally thousands of grief boxes were sent into the account. The Lindens actually took over my account and made a special script to strip this junk out of my account. I remember I mailed them a box of cookies for this. I don't really accept this premise that "once something is broken it doesn't work right again". I could accept this with, say, a real-life car that has actual wear and tear on its parts, and which is weakened structurally somehow. But pixelated things? Electronic things on line? That can't be. They are lines of numbers -- code -- and are regenerated. I don't see how this could function in the way you claim. Removing a corrupt object or a bunch of spam should restore the avatar to pristine condition. It's not like it has "dents" on it. There might be a function of either age of an account (although again, I don't see how something can really "age" in SL unless of course certain objects or scripts become incompatible with the latest software -- that's always possible but I haven't really ever seen that. Sometimes you rez stuff from inventory and it goes poof and disappears forever, perhaps for that reason. The other issue -- and most likely of all it seems -- is the sheer number of objects. I had close to 100,000 objects, 97,000 something to be more precise. I then dropped down to like 82,000. So many the job of loading those objects puts strain on something somewhere. The larger issue for me is that I can't see any reason why I should create a new account, without any name recognition or friends or anything, which then becomes a nuisance. Even if I give it permissions, it's just annoying struggling daily with things like teleporters or objects that don't copy for another avatar. I already have this to some small degree with alts and helpers. Why induce it on a grand scale with my main account? Identity must count for something. The Lindens should just decide -- 75,000 is the limit. Or 50,000 is the limit. Or whatever their limit is. After that, you're on your own. And of course as I've been saying, they need to develop a back-up system.