A little Spring Cleaning

How about instead of adding features, someone take a few moments to clean up the vestigial tails in the game. For example, from day one I have wondered why we have had a drop down box that has "Wood, Stone, Light, etc." As far as I can tell, light is the only one on this list that has ever been of use. The rest have been most confusing, and after this long I am beginning to think the rest really will never have a purpose. Another example are the pictures in the profile. It seems that their ratios are not the same as each other, or at the very least, are not squares, like imported texture must be.
I suppose many of these things have been there for so long that we tend to just ignore them and skip over them. However, as SecondLife continues to grow, and as we continue to teach new faces how to build it would be nice to not have to answer so many questions with "Well, that really doesn't do anything".
It is a small thing, but something I think would improve the over all consistancy of the game. In the mean time, as always, excellent job and very well done.

Hi, Eve. Material type also affects the way the object acts under physics - whether it bounces or not, etc. I believe that it also affect the sounds that is played when objects or avatavrs collide with the prims.

So a rubber sphere bounces around making squidgy noises, while a stone one, wellllll, doesn't

A little-known trick is that setting a small prim--like a default plywood cube--to Light will not make it get culled from view as near as it "normally" would, when you walk from it. (Full Bright doesn't have the same effect.)

So as Ben mentioned, and Material type is uniquely used in a lot of existing content.

But yes, the ratios in profile pictures are definitely confusing, and part of that confusion stems from how textures are uploaded in "powers of two" (128, 256, 512, etc.). Ever upload a snapshot as texture at a 1024 x 768 resolution? It gets squashed like this.

There are a lot of easy things like this, and they should not be forgotten.

And there are some things which should be simplified. A popular example might be, in the future, having a core set of Appearance sliders that control many of the current sliders, and being able to switch between Basic+Advanced modes.

Eve, these are the kinds of observations I enjoy and I am always naive to them, because that's the way my mind works. Thanks for sharing.

Ack. IMHO, they should cull "light" prims sooner. If you're far enough away you can't see the prim, you shouldn't be seeing the light from it either.