Prokofy Neva

I recall much bigger battles in past years between, say, furries and Goreans. I don't see those kind of big battles now but I think it's because the world has gotten larger, more dispersed, etc. I have rentals open to any style and I see furries, Gorean, fairies, norms etc living side by side and the lifestyle itself doesn't cause them friction. What causes problems are other things like encroachment on the view, putting up giant megaprims, etc. However, I personally would never go to Luskwood if I were not a furry. That is, they will have concerts there open to all and you could just fly around and look at the forest, but it's a furry community. It's meant for furries. Same with the Goreans or whatever. They are intended to be a certain culture and style and aren't interested in PC integration.

You have to select the style and model and it will assign you a location. Don't just look at pictures -- fly to the areas where these houses are inworld. I know the "fairy" theme one has a landing at Elderglen with a lot of great magic freebies. Look around -- see if you want this area or not. Zoom out of the map from there -- you will the other areas like the A-frames and such. Go and walk around the areas first to see what you are getting before you pick.

Hello, The first thing you need to do is make a group. These cost $100 to make. Think of your name carefully as you will be stuck with it -- it can't be changed. Look at how group roles work carefully. Then decide whether you want your officers and employees to have all or some or a combination of powers in the group. Be mindful of: o who can get a payout in the group (it's a checkoff box) o who can deed and sell land o who can change other things on the land These are all powers to study. You can pay a whole amount into a deeded cube to distribute equally pay once a week (it would distribute 24 hours later. This is sort of a workaround to make groups pay out. But there are payment devices for sale in gadget shops that can be set up to sell objects and split the pay, or pay as tip jars, etc. You can just decide to "make someone manager," or you can use group tools to give them powers: o can ban people o can put in music o can remove non-group set prims Some businesses have several groups and divide up the land. One area might be tenants with a general group they all can join. Other areas might be vendors or a club. Depends on the thing you're doing/selling. Chose officers/partners very carefully. Do not share things that are possible for one to steal, i.e. land where you both have rights to sell, payment objects that split in half or to everyone in the group regardless of their input. Even your very best friend might turn out to mess you up -- there are many tales of woe like that in SL. On the other hand, with a little planning, a little trust in your fellow human being, you can make fun businesses like clubs or stores or services and multiplying those online to help can compound your profits if you set it up right. Be prepared for a period when you invest at a loss until you figure out how SL works. Never consider land as an investment. Land in SL is a hole in the Internet into which you pour money. Treat land and tier as a fixed cost always. It almost never can be sold for what you paid. View it as an expense.

Customer service will often explain to you that SL was not meant to run on a laptop. Even the most blazing Alienware computer my son had purchased will pop up a message that SL is not known to play with this graph card etc. I think you risk having an SL that will not play at all by buying a laptop to play it. I've found that myself. I wish the Lindens would build a customized laptop of any make or model that was optimized to play SL and sell that as a package with SL already loaded and tweaked, maybe with some content in it as well. I would buy it for sure.

When you re-parcel a sim, this is a surefire way to mess up traffic. It may never update and may stay messed up forever. There is something about this act of chopping up previously known parcels in the system with traffic on them that makes the system "punish" them. Maybe because a trick to game the search used to be to chop up parcels even as small as 16 m2 and put key words into them to try to clog up the search engine and drive people to one area. So the Lindens have fought back on that sort of gaming. You have to file a ticket and show them the size and location of the lots and convince them that it is a normal practice on your sim and not a gaming technique. It's annoying, I know.

Vernor Vinges, Rainbow's End. A favourite of Lindens. Very scary.

Hello, Think of it as a display rack for your store. Most people renting malls ask you to put your wares in a vendor because it saves on prims, especially if you are in a large place with only small stalls or storefronts. Some of them will keep tabs on sales for you by being connected to third-party sites -- that can be useful for monitoring your business. You should start as simply as possible and experiment so you don't frustrate and confuse yourself needlessly -- loading and managing these things can be a bit tricky, but basically they involve just inserting one prim into another while paying attention to the "contents" tab. I have free vendor boxes of different styles available at Memory Bazaar, the Ross infohub, in the marketplace by the stacks of tea crates. But these are sort of simple and old-fashioned. They will do the trick, but you might want to go to SL Marketplace on this site, and study the variety of options of vendors available for sale from different companies. They will have different features, for example, some of them even display a version of the object like a hologram, called "holovendors" (not all malls allow these as they at least temporarily take up prims). There are vendors that have pictures and prices, that display different ways and some even let the shopper type in a key word and it will bring up that object.

I totally agree that the objective should not be to force people to speak English. You don't do that in real-life, why do it in SL? To me, some of the most thrilling moments of SL are when I can travel to another sim, take out a HUD or use the online Google or Babelfish translators (which I find better than HUDS to use personally even though some are the same thing), and paste in some text, and have a conversation. To be able to have a conversation about buying something, getting something custom made, recommendations for places to visit -- that's all great. If you can go forward and even have more of a conversation, it's even more rewarding. Example -- going to the Polish sims and sharing with the Polish people their national tragedy with the plane crash where their leaders were lost, seeing their vigils, memorial services, etc. going to the Egypt sims and hearing people discuss the demonstrations in Tahrir square, Mubarak's fall and so on. going to Brazilian sims and talking with young entrepreneurs about their burgeoning population in SL, what they find interesting The most dramatic moment ever in my Second Life is when a customer rented a store, and then walked toward me in full traditional Japanese costume, and spoke into the chat entirely in Japanese characters, and I took a HUD and translated them, and saw the phrases like, "Do you like my store? What else should I put out? Can I put in an advertisement?" It was just stunning. The drama of encountering a completely different culture, something about which you know little, a people against whom we fought in a war more than 50 years ago, and to be able to share in some basic thing like making a store interesting. This is the beauty and possibility of Second Life. And it begins as cross-cultural communications have always begun, at marketplaces, more than at negotiations tables. So in a sense what I'm saying is it's about being willing to go to them, not having them come to us, and it's about being willing to use a HUD - and that starts with me, and I'm reluctant to use them (especially as often it means customers out of the blue sending me TPs so they can HUD to me in chat). I'd be interested to hear more your thoughts about "So the real goal is..." I have found both Spanish and Portugese customers are so used to having to try to adapt to English that they keep their HUDS on all the time and speak out in two languages all the time.

You will not be able to use the vote in two weeks. It is being removed. Please sign the petition to keep it in: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/slvote/

It's the name of the software company that provides the bug tracker and most importantly, the feature proposal system. The vote is being removed from this, so sign the petition to keep it in http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/slvote/

1) The machinima policy says this applies on private islands, not on the mainland. You forgot to mention that. 2) If you really are taking machinima on public thoroughfares, on the equivalent of public roads, parks, gathering spaces, then...that is the Mainland. And you can film there. 3) In real life, you don't have the right to come into my home and start filming me. You can't even come into my back yard and start filming me. So it's about private property equivalency, not your geeky sense of eminent domain merely because the technology enables you to do something. 4) I'd be happy to put "film as you please, just give the sim builder credit" as a policy, but I have to consider my customers in turn. They are renting land from me on private islands for privacy. Why is your machinima needed to intrude on their privacy? 5) You're not understanding (or not admitting) the real context here. It's not just "art". It's not just "journalism". There are many people who are using machinima as a commercial enterprise. They use it to advance their business. Their business might only be making machinima for other people! They may only want to demand these rights so they have ease of use of tools in business! But it's still for commercial gain. And I fail to see why I would have to pay tier, pay for builds, attract tenants who want privacy, and then have you get to make coin off that. It does seem unfair. And that's what Paparazzi Artful was going around camming everywhere and being able to then help market that business of consulting and making panoramic machinimas. There are thousands of mainland sims and thousands of Linden owned sims on the Mainland -- plus numerous island builds open for exploration that have a policy friendly to machinima -- that that you should not be able to claim that your "creativity" is somehow harmed. It's not. Furthermore, the policy is worded precisely to give some leeway for things like filming a live music conference or a big meeting. And crowd scenes are understood not to be very specific close-ups of avatars. So you're just being finicky when you claim that "you can't tell what that is" when the policy is very clearly written, and very clearly given you as leeway in precisely covering that sort of event. The TOS policy on machinima is not perfect. I've critiqued is extensively as having giveaways and clawbacks and contradictions. But it's good enough. And it leaves discretion to owners, and that has to be respected. There has to be a balance.

Don't waste your time filing tickets to the Lindens, it is not their problem. They do not handle consumer complaints about products you purchase from other residents. Deal with the owner himself *edited for potential harassment* But give him a reasonable amount of time to fix the problem.

I appreciate your need to dig at "payments" as if you imagine the only reason people ever do anything is if they are greedy money-grubbers in a land business, blah blah. But a) if you are in the Mainland rentals business in Second Life, you are not a greedy money grubber but a hippie socialist who has to have their head examined b) in fact it's ok to have people do things because they're motivated by at least reimbursement of costs if not profit. I view the profit motive as not at all an evil thing but a good thing, so we may differ there, but I also think even good-will donation types in SL like to get costs covered to keep their good will from getting frayed. So if you can tell people that they make more sales if they put out language ads or language help cards, that may be motivation for them when their default is to say "make them use English" -- and then if they do follow up, they might make the world a better place. I think self-interest coupled with reasonable betterment proposals that anyone can feel comfortable with are all that has ever made the world a better place. Idealistic notions devised from superstructures on high and imposed on people or socially engineered to trick them to do something beneficial are not workable and destructive.

Excellent idea I hadn't thought of. I have links to the language sims inworld, but that should be supplemented with the web link.

Thanks that's a good start. I didn't have that link, although I do have all those kiosks in world -- they don't seem "short" -- but I'm going to compare the two and see if the one on the website is better or easier to copy and use that.

I didn't follow all the Wasted drama, it was clearly some kind of special interest aggressively at work. I don't ask Linden Lab to do a darn thing about this. They've already done a number of things in fact -- they have kiosks in major foreign languages; they have a robust volunteer translating program; they've encouraged some large language communities. I don't ask anything more. If anything, I try to take what they've done and optimize it, make sure that it is visible, etc. I think residents have to take care of this themselves and not ask the company to do anything that isn't really in its interests. It just closed a bunch of offices overseas, in part for austerity measures, in part because it didn't bring the profits they sought given the costs. So it's up to users to encourage this on their own. It cannot be an imposition on the platform. I'm not for politically-correct multi-lingual signs being forced on a populace that uses English as a working language. I'm for trying to build in some easements and comfort ramps for people so that they don't find SL such an obstacle.

There doesn't seem to be any notifications system when content posted is removed for any reason or no reason. I think it's a basic of any such community system that if your content is removed, that you receive a notification that the content is removed, and an excerpt from the relevant law invoked, i.e. the TOS or CS standard alleged to have been violated.

Yes, there are loads of lengthy multilingual cards around. But what I'm saying are quick quickstarts. Even one guide that has 10 major languages on it, like a foreign exchange kiosk does in real life. I agree about unpaid work. As a real-life translator who makes a living in part from translating, I don't accept this casually, and I might even see if I can find funds to pay for a master quickstart card. I guess what I'd find interesting is to see what is the 6 things you'd reduce down to a notecard about SL that you'd want anyone person to know so that they don't get frustrated? Like "the search box is in the upper right corner, type in words of interest to you to find places, events, and people".

I couldn't accept that as a premise whatsoever. I wouldn't be in business in Second Life today if I didn't offer my ads and cards in foreign languages. I routinely offer foreign-language ads or help cards when I can find them because otherwise, there's a simple math: I wouldn't have customers. Second Life contains a population of over 60 percent non-U.S. (not sure what the latest figures are as the statistics page was removed, but it's a lot). There are numerous people who log on regularly and shop who not only don't have English as a first language, they simply don't know English, period. Philip Linden said once "I made SL for everybody".

Lindens do have the power to rename groups. They do it all the time if a group is abuse-reported for obscenity or something else that's objectionable (for example, the use of a real-world law enforcement agency's name to mislead people into thinking they are that agency; the misuse of an avatar or business name as a form of griefing). I think for them, it's as easy as renaming a Word document in their system. However, imagine the flood of requests if they made that function readily available even just through a ticket system. Everyone who has ever messed up in a name or rethought a name would bombard them. So you try asking them in a ticket filed with support and they might go for it, but I'm thinking they won't, and you will have to make a new one. BTW, I've never seen them fetch expired groups back, either but you could try.

It's about the handover of the agent between sims at sim crossings or even just near sim crossing or due to lag. There's nothing you can do about it except open up the map and try to teleport back to where you were or relog.

One of the obstacles in SL not just to friendship but any interaction at all is the question of foreign languages in a setting dominated by English. All kinds of ingenious workarounds have been created, mainly with various HUDS, available for sale or for free, that pick up languages and translate them with Google (which isn't perfect, but often surprisingly good for basic conversations). As I speak a foreign language (Russian) and can understand a bit of another (French) and have tried to learn "landlord Spanish" to some extent, I've studied this problem a bit. I also work on this project "International Bazaar" where I make available as many real-life country sim landmarks available and try to have the foreign language kiosks from the Lindens available, the HUDs, etc. There was the opening of a Japanese railroad in Burns the other night and a friend gave me an even better HUD than I'd been using which I can send anyone inworld if you want to ping me, it was adequate -- but of course the biggest challenge for HUDs is that you have to go teleport in person, i.e. as far as I know there isn't an "IM HUD" that converts IMs on the spot. Last night despite struggling for 2 days with a guy who had Portugese as his native language I lost him because of those bugabears of SL that cause so much misunderstanding -- autoreturn, outdated notecards from 4 years ago that are still passed around even if no longer relevant (wouldn't it be great if SL had "global recall" for outdated notecards or "global override" for outdated notecards). There is a translation project putting the entire viewer into foreign languages as I know, not all are covered yet. But I wonder if anybody has made like a "quickstart" with like 5-10 basic things about SL that every newbie needs to know in all languages. I have a few of the languages.

I have that title, too, and I have no idea how I got it, it seems subjectively applied, even by code (which is full of such subjectivities). I will go read up on the badges.

I've had this repeatedly happen on the regular SL viewers and the only solution I've found is to turn off the virus-catcher on the computer, and if you don't have a separate AVG type program running, indeed, looking at the Windows firewall function and try turning that off. Yes, that's annoying, because it raises concerns about catching viruses. However, I do have to say that in 6 years of running Second Life, I've never seen that Second Life *itself* as a program ever exposed me to viruses. I'm not saying that's possible, but it really does seem unlikely, as the makers of SL aren't going to casually allow their viewer to become a distributor of malware. I think they're pretty scrupulous about that thing and I'm not even sure of the mechanics of how that would work. So yes, it does mean turning off your anti-virus programs at least temporarily. One way you can tell that it's not some other factor, i.e. failure to have the latest Quicktime, failure to deed media properly on group land, etc. is if you can see the movie playing inside your "about land" media tab but can't see it in the TV device.

The 'ranks' may be there, but I certainly won't judge someone because of their 'rank' and I hope others work on the same logic too. If we all just ignored them they wouldn't even be an issue, so I've decided that's exactly what I'm going to do So...I guess that's why you've already reached the rank of advisor, then?