Redwood's Blog

13th May 2012

Post

My impressions of the #FirestormViewer

I’ve been having problems with my preferred viewer recently (the mesh version of Singularity, which admittedly is technically a beta, but there’s been no update since October), so I tried the latest Firestorm (version 4.0.1).

The acid test will be when I go dancing, but here’s my impressions from doing my usual weekend shopping around the grid.

• Inventory loaded very quickly - quite noticeable for me, since with over 120K items it takes well over an hour to reload inventory after clearing cache on a V1 viewer. For Firestorm it appeared to take about 20 minutes.
• On the other hand, the inventory search is on all tabs instead of being independent for each tab. I’m finding that this interferes with some of my normal inventory management practices. (And opening a second inventory window is still impossible - it crashed the viewer from insufficient memory.)

• Additionally, after cancelling a search, it takes a relatively long time to rebuild the inventory tree - at least a minute. This is also not good.

• The “Vintage” skin and various options did mean that the interface was sufficiently close to my V1 preferences that I was able to function - I didn’t have to go searching for things buried in the toasts.

• The graphics glitches I’ve been having, which are the primary reason I tried upgrading, are still there. These take the form of several vertices from a random object being scattered several meters away from their correct location (while still connected to the object), making the object appear to have random spikes pointing in weird directions. This may or may not be related to mesh, as I did not see this with the pre-mesh version of Singularity, but the spikes are not limited to meshes - I’ve seen it happen with avatars, terrain, sculpties, and even simple boxes. It’s also not my graphics drivers, as I just updated to the most recent this week.
• The “Automatically accept new inventory” option does not work - I still have to manually accept inventory after paying a vendor.
• When teleporting via SLURL, the Places Profile remains open and has to manually be closed after the teleport, which is annoying.
• Cache management seems to be worse than Singularity - the textures at my home location ought to remain cached (especially with the maximum disk cache), but they were not. Also, texture loading seems to be slower than Singularity in general.
• CPU utilization seems to be lower most of the time, but to spike to much higher levels fairly frequently (occasionally consuming near 100% of all three cores on my machine, which Singularity never did).

Overall, I would put it on a par with Singularity, and much better than the last time I tried Firestorm (which was probably about 6-8 months ago).

I’ll continue to give Firestorm a go, especially since I need to start migrating my Marketplace offerings to Direct Delivery (which no V1-based viewer is currently capable of).

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24th April 2012

Post with 2 notes

*What* sex-selective abortions?

From Huffington Post via @pbtrue1

Spotlighting the issue of sex-selective abortions is an increasingly common tactic that the anti-abortion community has been using lately to turn the “war on women” around on Planned Parenthood, to galvanize social conservatives and to push legislation that would restrict abortion access. “In 2010, more than 9 out of 10 PPFA’s services going specifically to pregnant women were abortion,” National Right to Life president Carol Tobias wrote in a recent opinion column. “Roughly half of those abortions are performed on unborn girls. That’s the real war on women.”

OK, so half of abortions are of girls. And this is somehow indicating sex selection? Half is what you would expect if there is no sex selection occurring. The exact opposite of what NRLC is claiming.

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