Prokofy Neva

In a world where you can cut and paste chat from a group that clearly shows a spammer, it's hardly some "he said she said" vague accusation. And the landlord is sometimes renting land *that is used for the yardsale or store doing the spamming*. So they definitely need to GET THE MESSAGE that their profit-making for themselves selfishly, at the expense of the rest of us who are in groups or run groups, is *just not on*.

I totally disagree with every aspect of this post. I've never known LL to deal with spammers in groups, there are too many of them. I find it a HIGHLY EFFECTIVE way to deal with problematic spammers with some history on them (i.e. not a day-old account) to go to the owners of other groups and tell them that their member is misbehaving. Funny how spammers don't go into certain groups where they can't or don't want to (like a rentals group) but invade open merchants' groups. Unless other merchants feel the hot breath of pressure on this -- they make money from people who harm others' business and chase away their customers -- little progress will be made. There are several merchants' groups I have stayed in because either I paid for them or I value their messages that are constantly invaded by people selling cheap mesh heads and sales or other items like skins that even seem to be scams, and often the owner of the group simply isn't online to expel them. Yes, the group tools enable you to expel and ban people like that, but they can make alts or move on to another one of the jillion groups in SL. So sometimes the ONLY way to address this is with naming and shaming and community pressure. If the abuse system worked better and there were real sanctions for this, it might be different but the reality is, in an open group where you have turned on chat, saying that someone's chat is then objectionable falls into the grey area for LL as to "resident-to-resident disputes". Don't like chat and spam in your group? Turn it off. And moderate it. Some of the best merchant groups are those that have 24/7 moderators who don't just eject spammers efficiently, they provide news and answer questions. Even the poorest merchant can find a friend to help run their group in this way, or a long-time trusted customer. It's not "a problem of a third party". It's a problem of merchants *too negligent and indifferent to manage their groups*. It's especially outrageous when *we have paid for your group* to allow that to happen. Take responsibility for running your business which involves deterring and removing spammers not shifting the burden to Linden Lab or issuing punitive pronouncements against those of us who have a VERY effective method to get rid of them: making other group owners OWN them.

I'd absolutely oppose this. There is absolutely no reason for it, and it would be an unnecessary and negative intrusion into the economy. For those that that want to have the equivalent of state-owned housing or "assisted living," there are Linden Homes. There ALREADY IS an interface where you can click "rent this home" on secondlife.com which is "buying" a Linden Home and parcel. There is no risk in this as there is in renting from a third-party. I use "buying" in quotations merely because nothing in Second Life is ever really "bought" or "owned" -- as the TOS explains, you are buying a user license. You're making an assumption that if Linden Lab got into the rental business inworld -- which they've never shown an appetite for, thank God -- they'd set it up so that all renters got refunds. But judging how they collect tier -- not on a pro-rated basis for your usage over time, but ONLY for your HIGHEST usage that month -- I don't think you could expect them to have refunds, so be careful what you wish for. If you put rentals in the land menu, you'd also wipe out the businesses of numerous companies that provide rental boxes of various types and features -- while some monopolists might survive others wouldn't. And why kill resident business because of the unhappy experience of a few. The reality is, if you right-click on a prim and send money to that prim, it's your own fault if you have not examined that prim thoroughly at first to see if it will refund your money. Many rental agencies do not refund money because the costs of running rental businesses are high and the margins slim. I'm one of the few companies that DOES offer refunds and I can attest to it. It's also a system that is abused, as people hop around renting and refunding. You can put in a cancellation fee to discourage that, but often you find people whining and special-pleading as to why that should be returned. In my view, the chief problem with managing fraud or unethical behaviour in Second Life is the inability to call such behaviour out on the forums by naming names. In real life, only a free press and an open and independent judiciary system can deter crime. But there's a reason for that: it's anonymous people denouncing other anonymous people and we don't know the agenda or the facts of the story. Only LL knows, but only if they spend staff time investigating and that's simply not the best use of their time. Instead of devising global ways to ruin the economy, given more power to the state, and not prevent the problem you imagine (because some people, especially on private islands, will simply go on using private rental scripts and insist on their use), you should think about how to make consumer protection groups or blogs and perform the hard work that goes into them.

I'm an avid purchaser and admirer of mesh. But I also have many old prim "heirlooms" that are very beautiful and still compete with mesh. I also don't mind occasionally buying cheaper prim items for specific reasons, i.e. I often find that the most convincing specialized role-lay or "job" or "experience" type of object is prim, not mesh. Mesh makers often seem to go for appearance rather than functionality. I'd totally oppose any move to impose "100% mesh" on SL because that would mean in this legacy SL that is SL 1.0 if you will (or 2.0 but not Project Sansar), we can't build things ourselves. And that would be awful if such creator-fascism was imposed on us, when there is no need for it. Mesh has to be made outside of the world by only skilled artists, but prim things can be made by anybody, including me, who flunked art class in high school, and I value that. Mesh is not all that. For one, it is wildly different in quality. There is really crappy mesh just as there are prim things and really good mesh. I don't know the factors that go into this wide gulf in quality but THAT it exists is visible to the naked eye. Some people combine mesh and prim and/or sculpty and it usually looks worse. The dirty little secret of mesh more and more is that it is high-prim, i.e. actually high "land impact" which is the new measurement. It used to be that mesh was de facto considered very low impact, i.e. 1 or 2 or 4 for furniture. It's creeping up more and more to 10, 11, 18 and I don't know why but that's interesting and sometimes annoying because objects don't always advertise with their LI. There are two major drawbacks to mesh: 1) it's impossible to place one mesh item on another. This is a HUGE HUGE annoyance because instead of just admitting that and announcing that, LL puts in their software a message that says "The owner of this land does not allow you" -- as if the issue was groups and membership and not something technical about mesh. Obviously I'm the owner of my own land, and my tenants are members of the land group, but we can't place mesh because mesh is a ****. The only way to place most mesh items is to rez them out on a prim board, then cam in and winch them into place -- a time-consuming annoyance. It discourage decorators for sure, you have to be very determined. 2) If you expand mesh, it can suddenly wallop your land impact or "prims". Even a small amount. And if you combine mesh with some other thing, notably prims, especially twisted prims, you may blow all the prims off your sim by accident. Very vicious,with no warning. Some merchants do put warnings but it's never enough because there has never been an official company police statement about this. I love discovering old prim "antiques" such as those the Moles make (their 99 prim picnic is a wonder!) or old pre-mesh craftsmen like Baron Grayson or Desmond Shang -- few recall that he was once a furniture maker before going into the community management business. There's another problem with mesh and I'm not sure why it exists -- few mesh creators allow their objects to be "give all" or put dispensed objects in them (they often just don't put them on mod so you can't do it either). There's a drive to do more of the prop-hand placement through AvSitter, but there may be other technical issues, I don't know. That's why I still prefer the old-school creators like KitchenKorner or Kitty who have prims and sculpties made into realistic food that dispenses that you can hold in your hand and consume. But then, I am a Sim at heart, as in Sims Online.

I saw this yellow sign with lights today that said "Keep Calm and Reset Scripts". I think it was made by The Loft. But now I can't find where I saw it, and it's not in the Loft's store or on the MP. Anybody?

Here's some reasonably-priced waterfront! $300/300 Teleport to Aztecha $150/125 Teleport to Coney Island  $900/700 Teleport to Sutherland Dam Basin $800/600 Teleport to Ravenglass $700/500 Teleport to Ravenglass 

The marvel isn't that SL goes down with a critical problem like this blocking the service for most people. The marvel is that they fix it within about 45 minutes. You youngsters don't remember the early days of SL when we had 2 straight days without log-ins, and the Lindens even issued us all a token cash compensation for our loss. Linden engineers often talk about how they'd have to swap out the engine while the plane is 30,000 up in the air flying and that's why they had to start over with Project Sansar. But existing SL works pretty good and in fact if you read the fascinating "Technical" section of the Linden blog provides a lot of interesting problems and challenges which ultimately everyone will need to learn how to fix when the whole world is virtualized in the Internet of Things and we will all need Second Life or something like it to manage those Things.

@Sassy Romano ummm...like keeping low amounts on your inworld account and constantly cashing out? Or using multiple accounts to attach to vendors, redundancy is always a good thing to have in any event. These are simple things anyone can do without fussing about complicated passwords or 2FA. Again, 2FA is merely the latest geek ritual that is supposed to keep us safe in a world in which all digital things are inherently vulnerable and unsafe. It's wise in fact to be very skeptical of these rituals. Remember when the geeks told us that https was going to be the be-all and end-all for security and the job was not only to convince skeptics that included even big companies to change to https but to defeat CISPA, the legislation that would have helped crack down on piracy and copyright violations, because OMGODZORS it was going to "break" https (which was not sufficiently proven). BTW CISPA had many checks and balances on it and was never the horror claimed by Google-paid YouTubester hysterics. So...what happened? Https wasn't enough, now we need 2FA? Oh? You see why I am always and everywhere skeptical. Before that it was these gyrations with putting in your pasword a5uMberO aNd O33 cApitalZ and sp377ingS remember? 2FA in the current setting is not a simple as "adding an alarm clock" and you know that. Are you suggesting LL mail out little necklaces with bar codes to every user? Are you suggesting the hash mark on the computer is sufficient? Let's not obfuscate and pretend that rituals prevent theft. The single greatest way that people in SL can eliminate misuse or theft of their accounts is by never giving out their passport. As a rentals landlord, I see people constantly give out passwords to their friends and partners sometimes merely because they are too lazy to figure out how to give them build perms using the existing tools on the viewer, and other times because they simply aren't logging in and want a partner to pay their rent, for example. This is a terrible practice because if those relationships go sour, the first thing that can happen is an abuse of the availability of the password to steal, deface, grief, etc. LL constantly warns against this but it's a huge problem. It would make sense to use campaigns, social media, awareness efforts to stop that practice than adding 2FA quite frankly. Hacks do not happen due to lack of 2FA; they happen because of either dirt-simple passwords or this partner access problem. I'd urge you to google news stories about the Apple/FBI affair which explain it has nothing to do with the issues you are claiming and in fact it wasn't about hacking encrypted communications but gaining access to the firmware that shuts down repeat guesses on passwords so that the FBI could try the repeat guesses. In the end they hired an Israeli company that simply hacked the firmware and Apple could only fume despite doing start turns as the paragon of user concern. In reality, Apple's sales keep tumbling. How many sales did they lose BECAUSE they defied the FBI over terrorism? And how much was their self-serving campaign about trying to boost sales? BTW, Apple had no problem cooperating with the government of China to provide access in order to keep their market there. Again, always unimpressed with this world...

Oh, thanks for providing at least one explanation for why this might be happening -- people using savings or revenue to buy the new sims, although I wouldn't have thought that likely, given the still-high costs compared to what inworld revenues can be. But it's possible. There are other reasons but I dare not discuss them.

There isn't a rule from Linden Lab about how high a skybox should go. They would find it impossible to enforce that and it wouldn't make sense. There are terms of service rules that apply to the Mainland in general as they do anywhere in SL. I used to have a rule of 250 meters in my rentals. As the viewers got better and people began to see more in SL, I changed this to 500 meters to keep domes and platforms out of the view which is annoying. 500 seems reasonable. You have up to 4096 after which teleports won't work. I'm grateful that you are even asking this question. I'm always amazed that some people buy prime beautiful sandy beaches in SL, which gorgeous Linden landscaping, trees, even nice builds all around and a pretty road, and then stick up a huge brightly coloured glowing dome just a few dozen meters above ground so that it hovers over the whole sim and ruins the view on the 4 adjacent sims for everybody. It's an astounding act of selfishness. There is absolutely no need for this whatsoever. If you are living a sequestered life inside a dome (and I see people recreate beaches and water inside such domes which makes no sense whatsoever if outside is even prettier) then why can't you put that dome 500 meters or even higher. It gives you more privacy and stops wrecking the view.

*likes*

@Whirly In fact the very newest viewer offered as the official viewer, and its update that happened just yesterday I think, are still stable for me since the Windows 8.1 update and changing a few of the settings like draw distance. Yes there are still occasional hard crashes in very laggy overfilled sims but mainly it works. TBH, the Oculus Rift viewer worked better, and allowed more visibility, but it didn't have "notifications" as a "thing". I find I can't live without "Notifications" now which really improves work flow. @Qie thanks for that, although I'm not sure I'm more enlightened. I wonder if you could think about the issue of visibility and draw distances and clarity of the scene and how it loads and what might be different in this (what people say is outdated) Oculus Rift viewer. Or maybe the issue is if you are already WEARING the Oculus Rift thing, that does all the stuff you need to do, and the SL world-scene is just an add-on and it doesn't matter how flat or whatever it is. Which reminds me of the origins of Second Life -- it was made merely as an add-on, a landscape, to be used with the Rig that Philip was designing then which was a Virtual Reality goggles thing. SL was merely appended to that, not visa versa. Funny how it turned out. But it is useful to remember that Second Life is not Virtual Reality; it is a Virtual World and they are different with different social and technical problems. The reason I use Opera is simple: Firefox is a piece of garbage. I like the feel of Firefox but it just crashes constantly and hangs and just loses your browser history which I rely on for work constantly having to gather news and snippets to translate. Firefox has one really keen advantage in that you can right-side-up the images that Google Docs won't let you right-side within its own program. That's really funny, that you have to use Firefox to do a thing Google wouldn't do (I figure it's not an issue of couldn't). This is really important if you are trying to work with archives or whatever and you have lots of stacks of images running through those Xerox machines you can tie to email -- because wrong-side documents happen constantly and then you can't read them properly. This is an admittedly esoteric problem but it's why I liked Firefox. Opera is made by a Norwegian company. Then I finally had one day too many of having all my windows close and all my data lose and I junked it and may never go back unless this new cashier thing the Lindens are sending a notice about relies on having to go to Firefox, because Opera, when I go to their test site says something a bit iffy like "Good enough" or "so-so" which may not work with SL. I hate Chrome for so many reasons and don't want to give custom to Google that I went to Opera which a lot of Russians use for its ability to EASILY have circumvention of sites blocked by the censor opened up. But all this brings me to a completely different issue back in SL -- whether I use Firefox or Opera (haven't tested with Crome) this odd thing keeps happening in SL and has happened now for I would say 9 or more months. While you're flying along, or sometimes just zooming around trying to do things from one sim, these browser windows just open up on you all of a sudden. Inword, a little browser window opens up and briefly retards your progress then closes. I don't get why that is happening or what it is. The view into the next sim? or? The window is small and black. It looks kind of like the CMD prompt window but it's inworld and just opens up. I thought at first it was related to media on a prim being somewhere, say, in a roadside ad. But that is definitely not it as I see it on sims where there isn't any media on a prim doing that, which in any event creates a window that looks different. Do you know what this is?

The moderators on the forums are not considered "the police," they are considered the corporate moderators that any of these services have. While Linden Lab has a Governance Team or G-team that is supposed to deal with "griefing" or harassment or violation of the rules, it is very uneven from the users' perspective. They are there to handle the major challenges but the day-to-day problems have to be handled by customers themselves using the available tools. I think most people who spend any significant time inworld turn to their landlord or community organizer or venue host first and foremost, not Linden Lab. So if they are at a concert and a griefer starts particle blasting, they ask the owner of that sim or the host of the concert to handle it. Or if they are in rentals such as in my case right this minute as we deal with a griefing situation in Sutherland (come inworld and see), they ask me to try to ban and block and return obscene content that bothers people and interferes with their enjoyment of SL. The problem is that I can only police my own land, not Linden water or Linden land, which is a commons, much less other people's land -- and that's as it should be. The difficulty comes in with people not only on different time zones, but never logging in. In real life, real neighbours are on the same time zone and if a vandal comes they can band together in real time. On SL, they can't because they are all spread out in time zones even if proximate inworld plus they may never log on. The "no-shows" without autoreturn on their land are the biggest problem of the Mainland. So then we have to file abuse reports to the Lab and they may or may not respond, depending on how busy they are, how many tickets they have, how serious it is, etc. Eventually they will likely address something like giant grief objects throughout a set of sims when they get multiple reports. For some years, the Lab had a Police Blotter which was a great thing. You could follow it in real time, and even subscribe to its feed. It let you know where the more "crime-ridden" areas were so you could stay away from them, i.e. certain sandboxes. But the Lindens ended up taking this away, I guess because it seemed like a negative review of their product. They do not want to be in the Governance business really, they want land owners to control their own sims. By and large this is what happens, but due to exploits in the software it's not always perfect. The worse problem is on the Mainland which is geographically contiguous and a combination of owners so it's uneven. There are groups that role-play police but most people who are actually in the rentals or venue management businesses have no use for these people. They are wannabees more interested in strutting around shooting off guns and playing cops and robbers which only attracts more violence. These types because especially pernicious when they themselves turn into the griefers and extortionists, even seeking a protection racket and payments. Fortunately, the Lab deals with this kind of entity fairly swiftly after abuse reports. But there are some RP types that have long runs doing this "vigilantism" that in some cases can be as bad as the griefers because they keep files that violate privacy or use spy equipment or get into firefights in which civilians are caught in the cross fire. The real life police have little to do with SL these days. For a time when SL was very visible and growing rapidly, before they had put into place a lot of the more sophisticated procedures and rules they have now, there were real-life police in Germany that probed, say, child pornography. But that had more to do with the fact that they already had some offenders in their sights, and then on top of that saw them use SL, and then came into SL. The FBI have been in SL as far as I know like other agencies such as the Army and Navy but as a presence experimenting with the software or running a PR campaign or a training simulation, not to police the world which they have no relationship to or in fact jurisdiction over immediately, as first it is a private company's venue, like a circus, and they run the circus for the people who pay the tickets. The cops are only called if it really reaches the point of a huge brawl. But that's hard to do because of the checks on the system. For example, if you had fascists and extreme rightists attacking Jews, you could ban them from the sim. Or by the same token, if you had prejudice against Muslims you could ban them and eject those people causing trouble. Ultimately they could be banned from the service all together as in any social media or world. I do have to say that I think you need to do more homework and Google around and see what is already written on the subject of griefing, police, and vigilantes in Second Life. Study the history of "Woodbury University" for example.

More security chimeras and ritualistic approaches to life on the Internet. Recently when the Russian opposition was hacked because some of them failed to have 2FA, they were berated for this as it's fashionable to blame the victim but Pavel Durov, the developer of Telegram actually said that while it's nice to have 2FA, the real problem is the FSB (the KGB's successors) and what he himself does is not only use 2FA, but even uses a sim card in his mobile phone that is not manufactured in Russia, because of the problem of the FSB making duplicate sim cards or getting mobile operators to cooperate with them in making sim cards or spoofing authorization SMS in order to get into a device. In fact the people hacked were not hacked because of a break of encryption and not even really 2FA missing but because the cell phone company in Russia by law has to do what they are told, unlike Apple which defies the FBI. So they shut off the SMS notifications to the opposition guy's phone while they sent an authorization code they themselves used to hack his messages, then turned the SMS back on. The reality is, if you don't want your money stolen from hacking in SL you have to use a variety of safeguards and back-ups and limits and not rely only on rituals like complicated passwords or 2FA if it is installed.

Oh, that's very interesting. Thanks for picking that out. Interestingly, nothing has gone wrong with my machine by that forced update that Windows bought even if these "dodgy Taiwenese computer makers" (!) Theresa is fretting about had it locked. Go know. It seems to me the long hang on log-out is not gone yet. But I need to try the other main release candidate, plus observe the log-out closely and get back to you.

Could you explain in layman terms what CEF is or what the features/aspects are that would be introduced in a later iteration of Oculus Rift? I'm puzzled why, in the Oculus Rift version of the viewer, something related to seeing images better/faster/easier wouldn't be part of it. If that's what it is.

@Theresa Tennyson your snarky remarks are exactly why few people brave the Technical forums to actually try to get to the bottom of problems with the Second Life software. There's no curiosity or scientific approach or willingness to gather data impartially, as you would expect with people who are *scientists* i.e. computer programming is a science, correct? Or is it only a trade like car repairman? I think really the latter. Instead of the scientific and impartial approach, we get this snarky, nasty, snarling invective -- the user is always wrong, worse, he's bought some completely Neanderthal computer or he's in the Dark Ages because...he has the basic computer you could buy NEW LAST YEAR from Best Buy and not-Windows-10 which geeks themselves warn strenuously against (!). I was thinking this computer was 3 years old -- it feels like and it gets a real workout every day -- but my son reminded me that it is actually less than 2 years old. And that's just it -- running Second Life is a proposition where the makers tell you that you must buy a new computer or at least a $400 graphics card that you must install yourself or pay $100 to install. Imagine, the crime of irrelevance and backwardness *gasp*, not to have gone from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 - and this from Linux box users or Mac users who hate Windows. The reason these Taiwanese (what, I'm supposed to buy Lenovo?!) lock up the driver is so that the machine continues to play as they constructed it instead of falling to the mercy of every geek who images inserting alien graphic cards into situations where they burn up the mother board or cause other problems. And that's fine, I don't have a problem with that, as I've had SL burn out my motherboard from an alien graphics card and I've also had another time when ultimately it just didn't work and caused other problems. Yes, everything under the sun that wonky nerds do not need who are in the masses in the norms population -- YouTube, Netflix, WoW, Facebook, Slack, etc. Most people don't need to build Unity worlds on weekends or during their 1/5 free time from their Google or IBM job.

Hi, no it didn't force a driver update, it's still that same one from Intel 4000, I checked with their driver update thing. I didn't realize Occulus was outdated, I would have thought it was the ne plus ultra of viewers as the Lindens are so preoccupied with the subject of VR now. Yes, no doubt Occulus will be updated as you say and these issues related to how textures are handled or whatever it is will cause crashes again. Perhaps by then I will be able to buy a new computer/add a new graphics card/whatever as I have had to do in the past. But PS -- why do the Lindens have this new change anyway? What does it accomplish? What is its purpose? Does it work as advertised? Second Life 3.7.18 (295296) Oct 8 2014 19:25:50 (Second Life Project OculusRift) Release Notes You are at 204.0, 71.6, 53.1 in Sutherland located at sim10162.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.49.28:13003) SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sutherland/204/72/53 (global coordinates 262,092.0, 254,280.0, 53.1) Second Life RC BlueSteel 16.04.21.314319 Retrieving... CPU: Intel® Core i5-3230M CPU @ 2.60GHz (2594.09 MHz) Memory: 8073 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-bit (Build 9600) Graphics Card Vendor: Intel Graphics Card: Intel® HD Graphics 4000 Windows Graphics Driver Version: 10.18.0010.4276 OpenGL Version: 4.0.0 - Build 10.18.10.4276 libcurl Version: libcurl/7.37.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1h zlib/1.2.8 J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.0 Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.31 Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded) Voice Server Version: Not Connected Built with MSVC version 1600 Packets Lost: 199/33,949 (0.6%)

@Theresa Tennyson I don't drive and don't own a car. You do realize how silly this sounds, right? Telling people their machines that play everything under the sun and are perfectly normal are "dodgy". With Windows, I never upgrade automatically to the next level, ever. Every single Windows update is always derided by legions of geeks as horrible so I don't do it unless absolutely required. And evidently it was because once I had a *fact-based* suggestion to try 8.1 as *a solution to SL problems* I had no problem with trying it, crossing my fingers it wouldn't bring back the paste bug which is the bane of my life on Windows. But I like Windows so much more than Mac that it's not even a contest. It's like Stockholm hostage syndrome or something, people are so geared to thinking that everything else must be wrong except the latest patch, and the job of forums-dwellers is to "set everybody straight" on how their machine is wrong, that they just forget to be *scientifically curious* about the LL software itself. I would hardly say a video card is "orphaned" by a maker -- it is still listed as working and -- guess what, it still works on everything else! And guess what more! It's BACK to working with Oculus Rift viewer. Who knew, go know.

@arton Rotaru It's not about "declaring LL evil," that's silly. It's about making Lindens and their fanboyz feel greater responsibility for customer care, customer information, and their software misadventures instead of defauling to a blame-the-customer's-machine excuse every time. And it's about documenting relentlessly my own crashing here so that people can see at the end of the day *it's not about my machine*. What's hilarious is that my "game" is now working. First, I forced the update to Windows 8.1 as was advised above, you never know. This took hours because it is very hard to get Windows 7 and 8 out of their loops to do anything but it was finally achieved. This may or may not be key, I have no idea. Frankly, I'm finding it hard to believe that an upgrade to Windows 8.1 made graphics issues in SL subside but it may be an overall memory leak issue or who knows. What's relevant here is that it took quite awhile to ferret out of the forums gurus that helpful suggestion -- because of the hatred and animosity towards "Windoze" that so many geeks in SL feel. It's subjective and not relevant to the rest of us. Next, I simply went back to the Linden Oculus Rift viewer. Perhaps it has more attention to graphics things. Perhaps more work went into it because of all the focus on VRs now. Who knows. It crashed before; now it doesn't. I even left "Advanced Lighting" on as it was not crashing WITH it on, so why tempt fate. Now turning around, zooming, photographing, TPing is not causing crashes. Who knows why? And yet on the regular current LL viewer, there are still crashes. I have no idea what is different between the two. So I will stick with Oculus Rift viewer because IT WORKS although sadly "notifications" isn't part of its repertoire which I liked. Singularity also continues to work without crashes. @Theresa Tennyson If it wasn't updated since 2015, and that helps it to work, GOOD! I don't need my little avatar fingers to bend with skeletal underpinnings, I don't need shadows by my little avatar feet, I just need the basics to wait on my customers and pursue my little projects, you know? I'm not running NASA here, just trying to get a piece of software to run like all the other pieces do on my machine without this much fuss. @Whirly Fizzle Note that I was already told to look at crash logs and did. There are numerous warnings that in fact I've seen before that don't stop it from running. They may or may not be relevant. I've sent crash logs before to the Lindens and can send them yet again because, yes, I know where to find them and zip them but I've never really seen them take an interest in them. I can send them again. I'm banned from the JIRA so I won't be posting there, and even if I weren't, I wouldn't, it's useless especially nowadays. @Theresa Tennyson Didn't you notice that I wrote *those old wives' tales* about all that RenderVolume gunk? That should let you know that I fully realize they are irrelevant and in fact part of the silly know-it-all lore that even some merchants and creators impose on you STILL in notecards, even though they are incorrect and don't work. They revert to the original settings on all my reinstallations anyway so they aren't relevant to this discussion. My OS and drivers are not "dodgy," my good woman. They are normal, American, Best- Buy drivers and OS that millions of Americans -- and foreigners too -- are happy to have because everything but SL works on them, you know? I realize Windows-hate is high among the Linux and Mac set over-represented in Sl, but for the norms like me, this is irrelevant. As it happened, upgrading to Windows 8.1, which was easy enough, MAY have fixed things.

It *doesn't matter* if the driver is out of date because *Second Life worked last week and many weeks before that and doens't know*. Sure, some little thing they changed in their latest patches tipped it over the edge but it shouldn't do that without notices on their website that their system requirements have changed. And we never, ever get that. I've been buying computers for 12 years and struggling with making SL work with my phone company, and it's never ever LL, it's always the customer and their computer that's to blame, no matter what phone service or computer brand you use. Funny, that. And here's the problem, for people like me who don't build their computers from scratch using parts from New Egg. My Acer computer purchased from Best Buy DOES NOT LET YOU UPDATE THE DRIVER AUTOMATICALLY. (It also doesn't let you update to Windows 8.1 without endless loops either.) It's a customized Intell HD 4000 card that you can't use pages like that to update. Believe me, I'm not stupid and I've already been to them multiple times before because derp, the first thing you do try is to try to update drivers. If you go to the device driver pages on your own system, it says the driver doesn't need updating. If you go to the Intel page, it says "you have a customized driver that cannot be updated from this page". It simply won't let you download it and do it automatically. If you hunt around you discover sure, you can uninstall the customized driver, and download the generic updated driver, but it gives you all kinds of warning signs that your computer may not work, it may so change things that other functions are destroyed. And sorry, I can't do that as I need this computer for work, and I don't have 2 or 3 others on workbenches to tinker with as geeks do. When I try using the Oculus Rift viewer, it has a message saying "you may have to update your driver" and takes you to a page -- it's all these same pages I've already discovered, and you've already linked to (some of them) which ultimately tell you DON'T RISK DOING THIS. So it's the sort of thing I'd have to take it to a repair shop and struggle with trying different things and run up a bill of hundreds of dollars -- in which case you begin to say, oh, why don't I just get a new computer -- and this is how the industry keeps you impoverished. Meanwhile, why doesn't Singularity crash, could you remain curious about that and realize *this is about Linden Lab's software, not my machine." It's simply this: Singularity automatically does something to lower your graphics demand first, informs you of that, and then logs you on and then you don't crash. Now, derp, I already dumb down all my settings -- that's the first step always done with crashing problems. I take off advanced lighting, shaders, draw distaince, etc. -- I truly don't mind if I'm in a diminished SL that doesn't enable glimpses of 512 meters and perfectly rendering avatars who aren't jelly babies. So I don't know what *other thing* Singularity is "undoing" or "dumbing down" that makes it "just work" but it does. I look at my settings in preferences and I just can't see what they've done because I've done that myself. So there's something invisible or something I'm not getting. PS As people sometimes don't believe you or think you're incompetent downloading and viewing driver helpers, here's the message attached. If you go to your computer manufacturer page, in my case Acer, if your computer is out of warranty already (mine is) you can get nowhere -- if you call their generic CS number you will be told that you can't do that and aren't meant to do that. Anothe option is a paid online Acer troubleshooting site but the meter is running. Rolling back driver versions on the device driver page is normally a solution for a fear like this. But when you have to UNINSTALL and then install SOMETHING ELSE I'm not sure device rollback will work. Then systemrestore might work. But not sure and it seems it carries a certain risk. 

Nalates, I appreciate you want to help, but I did update graphics drivers. They don't need updating. They aren't even listed on the list and maybe they don't meet the requirements but *only last week* Second Life worked. It's only problem for weeks on end was being unable to log off easily. But crashing was never an issue. And I said which versions of the viewers I was using - the current one, then a series of others. I think you didn't read through my post. Now it is crashing. So you have to be curious *about the software itself* and what it is doing, and not just keep endlessly trying to do even more nerdy and wonky things to look at the user's computer. For example gathering system performance requirements is a wonky chore which even requires joining some MSFT group for Windows. I can't do this now and I see now reason why I should. Again, if Second Life worked last week, and the weeks and months before, on this very same computer, then when all of a sudden it doesn't, you simply have to become curious about the software's own issues. Those files have been sent to Lindens in the past and a DXDIAG has been sent to them now in a ticket which of course I have put in. In my experience with the last 3 tickets with different issues (like the curious one where you can't log off, and finally after endless X-ing of the window you get the "end process" message and the "Windows is searching for a solution..."), I get meaningless answers like "do a clean install" or "clear cash". Or I get "Work in Progress" lasting 7 days until I give up and close the ticket. I pointed out on another thread that the "can't log off" issue could be a stuck crash log reporter and its forcing itself on you- so I actually had a Linden walk me through the steps to *turning that puppy off*. Can you imagine? And so many of you said "that's not the issue". And it worked for awhile, then stopped on the next patch. Let me add a few more things done: 1) there's a new patch -- that was forced - I took it in order to log in --- the crashing is now far worse. I'm not trying the release candidate. 2) somebody said oh, move your cache up to 1000 or 1500 and your bandwidth accordingly. I did that. That may be bad for the machine, who knows, that may crash it worse. Put it back down as it didn't stop crashing and crashing was worse. 3) I definitely don't like third-party viewers but just to test the very issue you mentioned I downloaded Singularity, which is among the least offensive although the RLV is not something I support at all, and no, it doesn't crash at all. I don't like this viewer because it's just inconvenient not to have everything as you are used to, but say, it doesn't crash, HOW ABOUT THAT. Could it be NOT my computer but LL's software? 4) No, of course Opera, my viewer of choice for the Internet, is closed. 5) To satisfy your request, I'll give you the "about SL". But again, I'll urge you not to fuss about graphic cards that don't seem on spec or things like packet loss because *it worked last week*. Second Life 4.0.4 (314579) Apr 26 2016 17:54:49 (Second Life Release) Release Notes You are at 123.4, 166.7, 26.9 in Uber located at sim10044.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.48.54:13015) SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Uber/123/167/27 (global coordinates 277,115.0, 280,743.0, 26.9) Second Life Server 16.03.31.313341 Retrieving... CPU: Intel® Core i5-3230M CPU @ 2.60GHz (2594.11 MHz) Memory: 8073 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows 8 64-bit (Build 9200) Graphics Card Vendor: Intel Graphics Card: Intel® HD Graphics 4000 Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.17.0010.2867 OpenGL Version: 4.0.0 - Build 9.17.10.2867 libcurl Version: libcurl/7.47.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1h zlib/1.2.8 J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.2 Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.31 LLCEFLib/CEF Version: 1.5.3-(CEF-WIN-3.2526.1347-32) Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.6.0017.22050 Built with MSVC version 1800 Packets Lost: 154/47,820 (0.3%)

Yes, uninstalled the latest viewer that others say has problems. Yes, put in another SL viewer, the "quick graphics" version. Since THAT could be a mess, too may try uninstalling that and going to Bento next (?!) Yes, absolutely clean install, everything removed. Yes, drivers are up to date. Yes, cleared cache. Yes, unchecked "Advanced Lighting" -- I saw this caused stalls and crashes before. Yes, unchecked even "Atmospheric Shaders," and yes, not the first time I have had to live in soup in SL. Yes, deleted that "settings" file and forced it to regenerate, the old trick that used to work and doesn't any more. Yes, unchecked HTML textures -- that was a reason for crashing last year -- now unchecking it might be the source of problems, who knows. No, I don't do third-party viewers. Update: So before I get to Bento (sigh) I am trying "Maintenance Viewer" since "Quick Graphics" along with "Release Candidate" they have up now is crashing me. Further Update: I tried deleting a purchased scripted item that was giving a lot of strange errors, maybe that's causing the crashing, deleted and cleared trash. Still crashing. It seems to me that most often when I crash, my avatar is trying to turn around, whirling around or turning sharper seems to be causing the crashes. Still Further Update: Did some of these suggestions: https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Using-Second-Life-with-a-firewall/ta-p/1304539 o Disabled McAfee completely (can't get rid of it entirely, it's welded into the Acer computer) but since I prefer AVG I disabled it o Added Second Life to the white list on the Windows Firewall, which is managed by AVG anyway and that never caused problems before with SL but just in case EVEN MORE: So sure, I have done all those old wives' tales like RenderVolumeLODFactor at 4 and MeshMaxConcurrentRequests at 100 but those higher settings may be making the graphics card spit up, who knows. If I manage to stay on for more than 10 minutes, there is the chronic flashing texture problem with elongated mesh tails flashing out, etc. etc. and purple triangles. Yes, girls, I've cleared cache and yes, guys, I've done a clean restall. Also moved up and down cache and bandwidth and tried different things... Could it be the software? Heaven forfend...

Every year on Hitler's birthday (April 20) and Lenin's birthday (April 22) there is a surge of griefing all over. Yes, they were banned for cause I assure you.

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