bucky Barkley

Am helping a friend upgrade from a very sluggish ATI based laptop (Packard Bell TJ 75). We are researching decent NVidia-based laptops - middle price range. What would you recommend for SL? Should be able to easily do shadows and most photo effects...

Yep, great feedback Void, thanks! I do know that today's monster becomes a mere garden lizard in a couple of years

Yep, there is a level of planning for the future in it - today's overkill becomes a nice sweet spot in a year. I know I may start doing machinima as well.

[I'd posted this over at Kirsten's Viewer, but I want to reach a wider audience before I go order] Hello, I am seeking to replace a 2006 Intel iMac. Obviously almost any desktop I buy these days is going to be an improvement. I am thinking of: http://www.velocitymicro.com/wizard.php?iid=18 Although I would love to max out a new iMac, I am thinking that Windows 7, 64bit, is the way to go. Some of the hardware specifics are: 1200 Watt Velocity Micro® Power Supply - Nvidia® SLI™ Certified (+$110.00) EVGA X58 FTW3 motherboard with USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s Intel® Core™ i7 processor i7-960, quad 3.20GHz cores, 8MB Cache 6GB DDR3-1600MHz Triple Channel Premium Memory with Heat Spreader (3x2048) (+$35.00) 1536MB EVGA™ NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 580 GDDR5, PCI-E 2.0, SLI ready (+$450.00) Genuine Microsoft® Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit w/ SP1 (+$80.00) Specific questions: what to avoid? what to zero in on? I know the machine will be decent for machinima, but the primary goal is to get the best photography features from SL.

[sorry if this is a repost - this part of the web site seemed to swallow the first one] I want a machine, Windows or Mac, that can handle all SL graphics features on maximum, with a great frame rate... What would you recommend? I want to be able to take photos with depth of field, shadows, and blur. My 2006 iMac wont do these ... [ An Update -- thanks for the nod towards BOXX -- I am a diehard Mac fan, but am unsure as to whether a high end iMac is going to handle every graphics feature turned on -- the next step up from that is to go Mac Pro... on the other hand.. for that money I can really max out a Windows machine and know that there is a large pool of people in the same boat -- it is safe to say I am targeting 2000-3500 for this, if need be.. I want rapid fire snapshots to disk at high res w/shadows, depth of field, etc.. everything turned on. Working with my 2006 iMac is like having a photographic arm tied behind my back.. I know what is possible ( Hello there, Zonja C!), but I cant do it on my machine. ]

[sorry if this is a repost - this part of the web site seemed to swallow the first one] Which of the current crop of MacBook Pro or iMac machines will allow me to take full advantage of all available photo effects? I want to be able to take photos with depth of field, shadows, and blur. My 2006 iMac wont do these ... thanks! [ Just to be clear - yes, I know where the system requirements are. I am coming up on 5 years in SL.... my SPECIFIC question is really aimed at those who are currently taking advantage of ALL available effects on an iMac or MacBook Pro. I want to hear about their experiences.]

@ RR - Hiya Kim....although I would not use the web viewer as my default viewer, it would really be a big help to those of us in the Federal sector to have a web viewer that can run on IE6 and that is not seen as a threat by our security processes. The feds are still running IE6? Yikes. That's not good. It is true that MS is supporting it till 2014 (reluctantly).

@Enid - @ Kim Linden ....we are testing a number of approaches to bring new users closer to the richness of our virtual world.... Is this a way of saying: "We don't want our current users and paying customers to have a FAST, EASY and FUN time anymore, so we are offering you this in hopes that the older SLers will leave and or not pay us anymore becuase they complain to much mmmm, that's not quite it. Sure, Kim should have said "we are testing ways to bring everyone into SL, no matter their platform". That would have been more inclusive. She's still new... What's really going on is that LL is trying to deliver on a long sought out goal, and that is to present the experience in a browser. Although I was able to get in and look around, I dont agree with the approach that they took (Java, Flash, and JavaScript....) What they are trying to avoid is having to make the user install anything. Amazingly, even in 2010, many users balk at the idea of installing a plugin, let alone downloading and installing a standalone client. I maintain that using Unity would give them a far more flexible means of attaining their goals, and it would run fine on a wide range of end user machines. The downside is that it is a plugin, but the install of it could be made straightforward. I'm not sold on rendering things in the cloud - it means that somehow, the host for all that processing has to get paid (versus doing all of the rendering locally via a capable plugin, such as Unity). You don't get to completely reuse rendering for 40 people in a club - they are all standing in different positions with different view angles. That's a lot of distributed processing to do. What happens when you have a concurrency of 50,000 users? Seriously, where is all of the money going to come from to do all that rendering and maintain the fat data pipes to stream it all? It's a lot more data-heavy than the current LLSD stream... In the end, it doesn't matter what LL does. All of the puzzle pieces are there for the community to take things forward. If LL wants to continue to pursue the walled garden approach, that is their perogative. I think what we can do is watch with interest, note the things which do and dont work, and strive together in the realm of OpenSim to surpass the Virtual Worlds training wheels experience we have had here. There really is a parallel to what AOL was doing in the 90's with their approach (aside from aol.com), and what LL is currently doing with theirs. If you know your online history, take a couple of steps back and think about how certain things repeat themselves. There is a pretty predictable sequence of events to come.

@Tarina - They are working on the web viewer because eventually they will NOT have a seperate viewer. State your sources.

Wallace Linden says: The test won't be available to everyone, based on a number of variables, including bandwidth, system setup details, and other factors. I don't think cookies or repeated logins will make a difference. I don't have more information that that at the moment, though. If you dont have the system requirements available to you, that makes you look bad. If you know the system requirements, and aren't telling us, that makes you look bad too. Dont people bring predictable events up such as this in internal meetings beforehand?

@ CW - Does it take any extra effort to look at the unique user name of a user when they're wearing a group tag above it? Why would display names be any different? Do group tags get echo'ed in open chat? Do group tags get echo'ed in group chat? Do group tags get echo'ed in IMs? Do group tags get logged in files? Do they appear in the dashboard in the SL site? Do your homework and let us know what you find.

@Lee Ponzu SL is still part of the real world. If someone tries to take your DBA, then take them to court in the real world. No, not good enough. LL has all of the control here to do the right thing, which is to prevent ones name from being abused unless they explicitly opt-in. In the case you propose above, if someone has to waste their RL time, money, and effort dragging some griefer to court, guess how they will try to make up for it? They will sue LL for leaving open such a big gateway to abuse. It doesn't have to be this way, but LL seems to want to refuse to do the right thing.

@Ajax - In all fairness, lots people in RL have the same name i.e. John Smith. I have used viewer 2.3. You can't hide behind a display name, your unique name is still very obvious This is about the context of SL though. It is about LL changing the rules of the identity game mid-stream, and being blatantly deaf to the legitimate concerns voiced by many long and short term users. And it also goes beyond "Display". It has to do with what it is logged, and it has to do with people's reputations. The right thing to do is simple, allow your name to be used as a display name by others on an opt-IN basis only. If LL comes back and says "oh, we haven't done that work!", then withdraw Display Names until it has been done. There is a bit of a precendent here as well. You only allow friends to map you on an opt-IN basis, because it gets into privacy issues. Your own username is personal to you in the same sort of way. It should be *up to you* to grant access to it. Some will be happy to, and many wont. Without LL providing a control for this, they are putting themselves into a "we know what's best for you" position. And that will backfire on them.

@CW - If people want to steal someone's identity by the current definition, they can already do that with group titles, hence if there hasn't been mass identity confusion over group title abuse heretofore, it's implausible (to me) that display names will be a problem. Group titles dont appear in logs. There is much more to Display Names than just "Display".

One more item about "Display" Names --- "Log" Names... How are the log files named when you chat with someone? By user or display name, or both? What is displayed on *every* line of chat that is logged? user or display name, or both? See, the problems that people have mentioned go beyond display. If the username is not used as the name of a log file, it's not good enough. If the username is not showing up for everything that is logged for what they said, it's not good enough. If it is too easy for someone to lift quotes from log files that *only* show display names, it's not good enough. Think beyond display. Display is transient. The potential damage done by log files that hang around and give an inaccurate picture of what has transpired is something to be concerned about. If 2.3 addresses all of these issues, cool. My hunch is that it doesn't. And if the Lindens say "oh, just file an AR in case you have a problem with someone abusing your name", I would say to them: you've cut your support staff and your hours -- do you really want to deal with a stream of ARs? shouldn't you be addressing the problem, instead of the symptom? the documentation trail of people's concerns is a mile long on this one - do you really want to end up in legal trouble by not doing the right thing? There is a very predictable series of events here...