Gavin Hird

The question is not how the public in general reacts to it, the question is how corporate Amazon views it in terms of potential media and market valuation backlash. Seriously, I don't think the public would be particularly comfortable with this issue. The fact is more that SL is completely obscured from 99.9999% of the population so nobody knows.

Naw, you only need to make them aware of the child avatar ***** and they could close shop immediately. It is a very slippery slope to support these billionaires by handing them your business.

The performance on the MBP 13" should be identical to the mini as the motherboard and M1 is the same, with the exception it has a Retina display, and if you set the viewer to Retina display support (they call it HiDPI in the graphics setting), it will have to render 4X the amount compared to rendering with default viewer resolution. That will effectively more than halve your frame rate, but that might be acceptable depending of your location and how much content in view.

Here is an excerpt of a longer message I sent to the TVP developer mailing list yesterday: An update after testing viewers on an Apple Silicon M1 Mac mini today, and the good thing is they all (SecondLife, Kokua, Cool VL, my own) runs, and seem to run reasonably well under Rosetta 2 emulation. Performance is significantly better than on a Mac mini 2018 with the Intel 630 integrated graphics. Probably around a 3X performance increase. For a viewer window of 1680x1080 running on a 27” non-Retina display, with graphics settings at high, objects at the fist High step (not fully turned up), ALM on and Shadows for both Sun/Moon/Projectors, no refelections, RendervolLODfactor of 4 and draw distance of 128; on my Linden home location it runs at about 10-20 FPS depending on how much is in view.

The throttle also has to do with not feeding too much data to the viewer as there are limitations to how much new and updated content it can process between rendering each frame. If you feed it too fast, it will just be discarded and can be seen as cliches or tearing in frames, or cause the viewer to request the content to be reloaded.

You completely forget this is the mode a lot of high end games on iOS operate. No, it does not peg the CPU 100% - in case it does the machine is very weak or the viewer code is hozed. On my Macs - even if the GPU might be hovering at close to 100% utilization, the CPU runs pretty cool mainly utilizing one core only. The same will be the case on iOS, while Metal will offload even more to the GPU.

You'd run them in connected mode with a console keyboard plugged in for the iPhones. The recent iPads would be useful as they are, but obviously powered if running anything but shorter sessions. With no OpenGL you'd also have to completely redo all UI, which would be most efficient both memory wise and cooling speed wise to do in native iOS frameworks. These are also optimized the heck out of on Apple processors and GPUs. Most scenes will run comfortably in 2 GB application memory and far less GPU memory.

Numbers given as estimates by Oz in a TPV meeting. Ask them in the next for an update. It was up for discussion when the Linux client was put on the back burner. Usage for Linux was said to be less than 1% of the user base.

According to LL 15% of SL users are on macOS, and closer to 25% of the content creators are. So dropping the macOS viewer will impact their financial performance. What you tend to forget is that a Metal renderer will potentially broaden the market to the 1 billion iOS users. Not to be underestimated. Today's iOS HW is in many ways more capable than the desktops that ran SL only am few years back.

Completely rewriting the renderer for Metal in 15 months is probably not doable both because there are significant dependencies between all LL content and OpenGL 2.1 currently used by all viewers. The other issue is that the Lab has had an open position for a rendering engineer for a very long time without being able to find anyone. The individuals out there who are capable of lifting the current OpenGL 2.1 code in to Metal are few and far between. Probably very expensive to hire too. Of course, succeeding to write a Metal renderer makes the road to an iOS version of the viewer very short. So hopefully...!

Most of the viewers work on Catalina (beta versions). The challenge is the macOS version following Catalina where, reading the tea-leaves from WWDC 2019, OpenGL will not only be deprecated but also completely unsupported.

There is no bluff. OpenGL on all Apple platforms are depreciated for Metal 2 which yields 2-10x draw calls over OpenGL on the same hardware. While I not necessarily think this is a good move by Apple, it is what will happen, and OpenGL should be gone in macOS 10.16 which can be expected in 2020 if they are on the same yearly release schedule as they have been. All new non iOS hardware introduced even this year have HW support for OpenGL still.

The viewers are not built with OpenGL ES, which is what moltengl supports.

@NiranV Dean why don't you stick to commenting on your own viewer. NOBODY is interested in your anti Mac spew!

I suggest you open the Console app, find the System Reports on the left sidebar and look for memory_resource.diag reports for Firestorm in addition to .hang reports. Also in the User Reports section you should find Firestorm .crash reports. Although these reports probably is beyond your skills to analyze, you could share them with FS developers to identify the cause of the crash. Edit: If there is a GPU crash there should be a separate crash report file for that too in there.

Why is it that you don't handle EU and European Economic Area citizens through your UK Tilia subsidiary when the GDPR regulation states you must do so? GDPR is a regulation meaning no implementation is required in national law for a regulation, as it is of direct application. The legal rules it creates are, depending on its subjects, directly applicable to any entity on the territory of the European Union and European Economic Area. Any citizen will be able to refer to the GDPR provisions after May 25th 2018, and its provisions will be directly enforceable by any court. This implies that any EU and European Economic Area citizen who is a customer of Linden Labs and its subsidiaries have the right to take the Tilia UK subsidiary to court in Europe for failure to implement the GDRP. The same right can be extended to general consumer protection, banking and financials sector regulations and tax regulations. While you have a US requirement to do IRS reporting on US citizens and US registered businesses, there is absolutely no point in reporting transactions for non US citizens or companies to the IRS where in many cases these might risk IRS tax withholding. This can completely be avoided - at least for European Union and European Economic Area entities by establishing a relation between these and your UK subsidiary, and not your US registered company as you have set forth in this communication. Then the UK subsidiary would have to do their tax reporting in accordance with EU regulations to the member state for the entity in question (person or business). The "disadvantage" perhaps from your perspective is that the UK company would have to be in full compliance with all EU regulations. The upside is that you will avoid the often significant noise your terms creates with European Union and European Economic Area customers, and consumers in particular. Being in compliance would easier persuade these you are a company that can be trusted with their business.

It is hard to say exactly how Brexit will pan out in this respect, but many companies will have to register subsidiaries inside the EU to ensure they can make business with the EU market, which without the UK is 455 million (now 511 million with the UK). Europe overall is about 758 million. Having said that, UK legislation is more or less harmonized with the rest of the EU on the issues discussed, and will continue to be so unless the UK parliament change them to something else post Brexit.

The problem presented for you in regards to EU citizens is that you have established a subsidiary; Tilia Branch UK Ltd, which is established inside the European Union / European Economic Area, and therefore make you 100% required to comply with EU legislation when it comes to privacy, consumer legislation, the GDPR directive and conflict resolution. As a matter of fact, since you have this subsidiary inside the EU, you HAVE to handle your European Union / European Economic Area customers through this company, in the same manner as i.e. Apple, Microsoft, PayPal HAVE to handle their customer relationships through their European subsidiaries and not the US mother company. So for European Union / European Economic Area customers you have to present terms of service, requirements for identification, handling of privacy and conflict resolution according to EU law. These will necessarily be different, in the same manner as we see it for the aforementioned companies, from what is presented to the US citizens. I am of the opinion the terms, as currently presented, does not meet the minimum requirements for a B2C contract based on EU law. It is in your interest to make them meet these requirements, or the minimum requirements will be applied by the courts in Europe and you will lose in conflicts. In a conflict with a European Union / European Economic Area citizen or company, it is the Tilia Branch UK Ltd company that will be taken to court, and EU law will be applied. Granted some of the entities who will deal with Tilia will be businesses and for them you can present a completely different set of terms and contracts, but the majority of Secondlife customers are consumers (the definition also exist in EU law). You also have to follow EU tax legislation for these customers, and there is no reason why you should report European Union / European Economic Area customers being private or businesses to the IRS. It shall be reported to the EU member states in question from your Tilia Branch UK Ltd company.

Exactly. Or they could share the username and the hashed password (which cannot be decrypted).

Asking non US citizens to resolve Disputes in the US is the same as telling them they cannot resolve disputes at all, as it is not practical or economical. For EU citizens, their UK subsidiary will be the contract party (as long as they are in the EU and Brexit has not been resolved), and obviously disputes will have to be done in a EU court.

I could not see a single line about GDPR Compliance in the terms and privacy policies for this Tilia company? Since we are asked to provide government issued identification if non US citizens, the company we give it to must be in GDPR compliance when handling EU citizens of which there are quite a few of in Secondlife.

OpenGL will most likely be gone in 10.16 if you read between the lines of the OpenGL to Metal conversion session of WWDC 2019. I also found the viewer is running fine in the macOS 10.15 beta, but the HIToolbox is still present in it, and Apple said very explicitly in last years WWDC that HIToolbox will be gone for good in 10.15. It is still early days, so we shall see...

LOL I have not been in the market for a rendering engineer, preferably with Metal experience. Linden Lab has!

Mavericks is 10.9 and there was no Metal till 10.11. 10.11 is when the crashes started, and this is when the NSOpenGLProfileVersionLegacystarted to be enforced strict. So what you reported for Mavericks is pretty much irrelevant. ;-)

The NVIDIA driver does not support Metal, which is the reason why users will see a significant reduction in system frame rates over using the Apple driver on macOS 10.11 and 10.12. More importantly, the NVIDIA driver does not impose the restrictions of the Apple NSOpenGLProfileVersionLegacy where before Metal it was possible to call the OpenGL functions supported by the hardware directly, whereas after Metal in macOS 10.11 you can't do that any more with the Apple driver. This is why the code started to fail in 10.11.