Autor: Bartholomew Gallacher

Feeddemon now free as in free beer

I rarely comment on other software than Second Life here at all, this here is one of the rare cases.

Feeddemon, argueable the best RSS aggregator for Windows out there, is now free as in free beer. The company that bought it from Nick Bradbury a while ago, Newsgator, is now giving the fully enabled version away for free since the beginning of January. Before that you had to buy this version for 25 US$, which was also quite a good price if you take a look at the features and sheer speed this beast offers to you. You want a feature? Bet that in 99.9% of the cases Feeddemon has it and much, much more!

If you are really a news junkie, then this is the only program you’ll ever need! The same goes now for NetNewsWire, the standard RSS aggregator for Mac OS X, backed up by the same company.

The problem with the mainland

Consider yourself living on a nice, new sim of the mainland. You’re happy with your small parcel, nice seaview, perhaps, good neighbors and then happening this: a new club is opening its gates.

Worse, this club has many camping spots, to fake traffic and also quite some visitors with the result that its eating up all possible traffic alone for the whole sim.

The result? You’re busted. You cannot use your property anymore, because teleporting and even logging into your home becomes a new kind of adventure. "Is the sim already full or is at least one slot left for me to enter?"

So what can you do about it? Of course, you could tell the club owner to leave. "I am soo sorry, but I want to stay here, I like it and beside, I just own 4096 sqms of land and don’t have the money for a private sim." Bummer. So he’s eating up the whole traffic of the sim and making it unusable with just his teeny, weeny piece of it.

The next logical thing for you? To abandon or sell your land – don’t think you can sell it with profit, by the way, good buyers take a look at the sim before buying it – and move to a private living sim.

So what should Lindenlab do about this kind of behaviour? Simple: they should make the tier traffic based in such a case. Why should I for myself finance the sim when some kind of business maker is only paying also a small share, but makes it unusable for the rest of us?

I’m back – well, sorta…

Since I’ve been away for a while from my time, now the time has come to write some new stuff. I just haven’t been much in a writing mood, that’s all, but still many times in Second Life.

Well, what’s the matter, then?

  • Teleports are still as unreliable as ever.
  • The usual avatar still has only the possibility to be member in 25 groups maximum. Way too low… there’s been some effort around to persuade Lindenlab to raise this number, but if it is going to be succesful? We’re going to see.
  • Virtual banks are no longer allowed in Second Life. A good move, especially after the bad example of Ginko Financial.
  • I still don’t see the open sourcing of the official server code, since this is the biggest source for revenue they have. It’s that simple.
  • I still wonder what’s the next big thing is going to be. Now that Havok4 is being tested and WindLight is still in the Beta viewers only, SL leaves much room for improvements.
  • There’s been no really important open source viewer or fork of it, now one year after the opening of the source code. Why not? Because the server is still closed source.

Cory Linden takes his hat

The pilot is leaving.

Cory Ondrejka aka Cory Linden, one of the longest running employees of Lindenlab and its chief technician (CTO) is leaving. Why? The reasons remain mysterious. Some speculate that he had different visions for the future of SL than Philip Rosedale has. What does this mean for LL? Well, many think that the company is in for a tough ride now and it’s going to be very hard to fill the gap Cory Ondrejka leaves, since he’s one of the few people who can still understand the big picture as it seems. So – we’re going to see.