Socially|Mundane

When software developers write their software and it becomes just barely functional, they call it 'alpha' (first letter of the Greek alphabet.) At some point there are enough of the features and there is enough stability where they change the status and refer to it as 'beta' (second letter). However, status never reaches 'gamma' (third letter,) though sometimes, perhaps it should.

When software is right on the very edge of being thought of as completed and "ready for mass consumption" it is then referred to as a "Release Candidate." It is then called RC0 and passed to as many people as possible for testing. If any glitches are found they are fixed and a new iteration is created and distributed. So everyone is on the same version, it is referred to as RC1. When the software is finally ready to go, and they send it off to be duplicated and boxed-up for store shelfs, it is said to be referred to as 'Golden Code'.

In other words, it's now a money-maker. Of course these are generic references to the way computer software code is referred. However, it is pretty rare that a release candidate would go past a third, okay maybe a fourth iteration. You know: RC2 and RC3.

However, the newest Second Life viewer has hit a magic number: 15. Now available is RC14 of the upcoming Second Life viewer version 1.20.

Wow.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not whining. I'm chuckling. I've never personally seen a release candidate go so long. And I am actually anxious to get my hands on it this time (I am not at home as I write this) so I can look at and decide for myself what this new silver interface is really like as I see many detractors and whiners of anything always tend to exaggerate and go a bit overboard in their... well, detracting and whining.

Anyway, I just find it funny that the 1.20 viewer has reached the magic 15th iteration.

Original statement by Ramzi Linden:
We expect this to be the final Release Candidate in the 1.20 viewer series, barring any Showstoppers that you may find. Please of course continue to report any new issues (large or small) in the Issue Tracker, and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to “1.20 Release Candidate”.

Now here's something of note: This will not be a required upgrade. The reason is there is a "known issue" that this version of 1.20 will not run on the Macintosh OS-X prior to Tiger.

Here's the ironic part: a short time ago a poll was taken asking if the Second Life viewer should continue supporting Macintosh OS-X version 10.3.9 affectionately known by it's development code name "Panther". Linden Lab obviously wanted to discontinue support for that version as "Tiger" and "Leopard" have since been released. In truth, I concur (and yes, I do also use and love Macintosh and all Apple products.)

Snuck in at the bottom of this blog post is the answer to that poll and desire:

"It is a Known Issue that this Release Candidate will not run successfully on a Mac PowerPC that has the operating system OS X 10.3.9. It will only run on PPC hardware if you have Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher."

So... watchathink?