I’m on a Mac, a G% as opposed to an Intel, so there are certain things I can’t do eg iPhone SDK without getting an Intel Mac. Photoshop was the same, pre G4 and Altivec. even if you upgraded the software, you didn’t benefit from speed unless you got the hardware.

But both PS and SL still run on older equipment, just don’t expect all the bells and whistles. I’m happy not having Windlimp lagging everything to death and distorting lighting thank you very much.

LL promotes SL as a lot of things, for a lot of things it cant actually do or handle.

-It isn’t a 3D internet, as the internet is not controlled by one entity. It’d be a true 3d internet if anyone could just download the server software and run their own sims or grids. don’t even start on reverse engineered attempts. They’re nothing more than a proof of concept, much like what SL REALLY is.
-It sucks for education and business collaboration, as what it offers can be mimicked by conferencing software (a bunch of avatars, sitting in a sim, conferring with someone on a video screen, how about just using skype or something else that allows conferencing)
-It sucks for business. Period. There are no real protections on any “products” you make inworld, nor are those products really yours. You also have to rely on the company’s own currency to make money, currency that can change arbitrarily with no checks or balanced.
-It’s only good for advertisement.

It’s basically a proof of concept software that got turned into a golden goose. It was never ready for what it’s doing now. They can spin as much marketing bullshit as they wish, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s run by an incompetent company that fired all their real developers and have people like dave working on it — and the fact it was never intended to do what its doing now.

The best solution would be for someone to rewrite it all and make it better to scale, with security (encryption, anyone?) and other things that they try to claim it can do.

Application sharing would be great too if they want to tout collaboration.

It’s hilarious that you need such powerful set ups to display graphics that look up to date if it were 2001. Yeah tons of objects and user created content doesnt help, but I’ve seen games that are much much more graphic heavy, and with more objects, not even make a 7 series sigh.

Sounds like someone is trying to keep job security by blaming the end user for their faulty code.

Though the 8 series GPUs are certainly popular with gamers the percentage of installed PCs with graphics capabilities at that level is very low. Only dedicated gaming PC will have GPUs of that caliber as the requirements for Vista are far lower and the majority of mainstream PCs are lucky to run the Aero interface smoothly.

At one time Linden Lab was promoting SL as the future ’3d internet”. They certainly can’t achieve that goal by making their platform inaccessible to the majority of computers.

In any event, this has been going on for years. I can’t tell you how many times my card has gone from the recommended list > minimum requirements list > not supported list. Which means at times, I couldn’t have all the candy until I upgraded again.

Nothing new under the sun.

Click this link (the developer mailing list archive) and search for posts by Dave Parks (his later ones are worth reading too to get an idea of his mindset):
https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008-May/date.html

I guess the old article about Dav3 P4rks being hired was pretty much on spot, saying “… a mutant undergrad computer graphics d000d”.

Besides that, I’d tend to agree with the guy about making über-features available to über-hardware only, but with the Linden tendency to break something existing whenever adding something new, it’s no wonder people won’t like that.

And with the Geforce 8xxx cards, as someone on the SL dev list correctly pointed out, the G7 cards over the last year were still the most sensible purchase (sufficiently matured without teething pains) while the G8 had their own range of problems with SL.

People on SLDev who checkout a CVS version of experimental code should not be complaining it doesn’t run on their Trident card.