I use Latex and OpenOffice, so the $100 number was not personally relevant. On the other hand, paying $40/PC (that I actually wanted Windows on) per year in return for free upgrades and Microsoft no longer adding features of dubious value seems like it would be a good deal from my perspective.
I have blogged about this: I would be a much happier (occasional) customer of Microsoft's if they would support one version of Windows and Office at a reasonable yearly subscription price.
This would remove the drive for forced upgrades through new features that I don't care about. I would consider $40/year for Windows and $100/year for office to be reasonable. Buying a new computer would get you a 1 year subscription.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's business model requires constant growth (I was once a house guest for a weekend in a friend's home when another house guest was a Microsoft exec and his family. He said that Microsoft had to "grow a new Disney" in size every year for their business model to work). I don't think that $40/year from every legal Windows user would satisfy Microsoft's appetite.
On the other hand, look at Apple: I occasionally use OS X (Linux is my main development and writing platform) and I don't mind paying for a $130 OS X upgrade every 18 months or so - one reason is that OS X upgrades actually run faster -- great for older Macs.
Microsoft needs to get off of the forced upgrade path.
Sorry that this is off topic, but does anyone know the fate of Flickr and del.icio.us? Because Flickr has paying customers, I assume that Flickr is safe, but I have come to rely on del.icio.us while Yahoo's competing my web seems poor in comparison.
Train people in sanitation, promote education, teach job skills, etc.
Who says that the conflict between these two is a "zero sum game"?
I give to 3 charities every month, 2 of which help people in the third world. Who is to say how I allocate the money that I can spare each month? (Answer: me!)
If some people and organizations want to contribute to longer term solutions, good for them!
If this program really gets started, I was hoping to buy one for $300 in order to have a novelty for myself, and to provide 2 for kids in the third world.
A little off subject, but I was writing yesterday (http://mark-watson.blogspot.com/) about what is commonly referred to as the new world order. I expect individuals and corporations (who act out of profit motive) will probably do the most for helping out people in the third world who need help.
... but I have not used them yet. My plans are to use EC2 for occasional machine learning or neural network training runs instead of tying up my own computers. I wrote about this on my AI blog (http://artificial-intelligence-theory.blogspot.co m/2006/08/using-amazons-cloud-service-for.html) a while back.
In general, I think that it makes sense to "outsource" basic infrastructure. I used to run my own servers, but after figuring the costs for electricity, bandwidth, and hardware costs, I switched to leasing two managed virtual servers - paying for the CPU, memory, and bandwidth resources that I need. I view Amazon's EC2 service the same way: when I need a lot of CPU time over a short time interval, simply buy it.
Some dissatisfaction with Ruby
on
The Ruby Way
·
· Score: 1
From my blog today:
I use Ruby a lot for small database tasks (love ActiveRecord!) and for using Rails for some web applications (not with scaffolding, mostly generating controllers and writing my own code).
That said, for a lot of what I do, Ruby is much more than an order of magnitude slower that compiled Common Lisp. I find myself still using Ruby and Java when appropriate, but for most tasks, I am going back to using Common Lisp. Better language, and the learning curve is not so bad (I have been using Lisp for over 25 years, and I am already up to a 'moderate' level of competence:-)
I used to be very much into J2EE (even wrote a book on it), and it is great to see the platform evolve as the Java language evolves.
That said, I have "moved down the food chain", starting to favor just running Tomcat+custom tag libs+JSPs+persitence. I used to mostly use Hibernate, then simplified to using Prevaler. In the last year or two, I have favored Rails for small quick web apps.
J2EE is great for large scale projects, but for most web apps and portals there are easier to use solutions. I have even gone back to using Common Lisp for web apps and web services in the last year (that is "moving back up the food chain":-)
First, congratulations on MySQL's market capitalization! My question is:
I have been working part time for about 6 years on software for text/data mining and general semantic information extraction. Almost all of my development is in Common Lisp, but I have ported little bits to Java and released that under the GPL in the past. I view this as a small, niche market, not like MySQL. What do you think that chances are for making money on GPLing a niche product?
MySQL is very widely used so if you capture commercial use icensing costs for a small percent of users, you do very well. For my software, with luck perhaps a few hundred companies a year might start adopting my product. Does it seem like wishful thinking for me to use a GPL based business model like MySQL's?
I want my customers to have my source code for a lot of reasons, but I would also like to capture revenue. I might just end up going to market as a proprietary product that incidently includes source code, with licensing that prohibits redistribution to non-customers.
Condi Rice's best friend was in charge of the 9/11 commission. From what I have read he forbade certain lines of inquiry. This is why so many family members of 9/11 victims are so critical of the commission's report.
Hopefully it was obvious, but I am trying to mock the (Karl) Rovian technique of branding anyone who wants to discuss the invasion of Iraq as "cut and run" people.
To me, it seems inconceivable that very wealthy republicans would conspire to do such a thing - I can not even relate to that much greed.
And greed is what this is about: the super rich and multi-national corporations save so much money with Bush tax cuts - that is their motivation.
I call Bush's fiscal policies "cut and run economics" - give tax cuts to the super rich, run up the deficits, and run away like cowards letting future generations suffer (I am a grandpa of two young kids - this is something I really care about).
First off,I have a really short NDA/agreement that basically says that we will trust each other, make reasonable efforts to protect each other's IP, etc. I offer customers a 12.5% discount if they just go with my agreement.
For other customers, I remove any contract clauses that don't seem right to me.
One thing that "raises a red flag" about potential customers is if they just send me signed contracts for my signature without bothering to email me a copy of the agreement first to read over. This rarely happens, but when it does,it bugs me.
And the winner is: Writely!
I wrote about Writely a few days ago (and generally liked it). I wrote my own online word processor last year (KBdocs.com for my own use, then opened up free registration - got 1000+ uesers. My system was a 3 evening hack - generally OK, but not feature rich.
Google Calendars has a huge advantage because of the GMail integration. Writely.com's advantage will likely be a good integration with blogspot, etc.
Speed is good but ubiquity would be better
on
802.11n Delayed to 2008
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I live in the mountains and I get my broadband from a small local provider who has a few inexpensive transmitters around town. A good solution for a small town.
I would really like to see universal coverage, and low bandwidth by throttling socket connections to keep people from abusing the system would be OK. There would still be a huge market for high speed wireless, cable, and fiber, but a backgound universal lower level of service system would be a good infrastructure investment.
Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to happen in the USA given our current political climate that subsidizes corporations and for political reasons needs to inhibit growth and prosperity of the middle class and small local businesses(just pointing out that the middle class is the largest threat to the republican dream of a 1000 year reich: permanent control).
Well, be careful of Other People's Documents (OPDs)!
I always turn off any live macro support in OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word, and hope that is good enough security. I also tend to open Word.doc files I receive from other people in OpenOffice.org.
A little off topic, but I have been blogging about this lately: whether I am writing up short project documents or working on a for-fun book project (Ruby AI Programming), I find that just using Latex is much more productive for me. One reason is just seeing raw text (with a little markup) seems less distracting. Also, I find Latex easier to automate for stuff like running external commands and including the output, auto-insert of external files using custom listing styles for programs and for program output, etc. This is great when writing about programming - tweak the code examples, and the next time you run Latex on the main document, the new code versions and new output are included. Sweet. The "overhead" for writing is reduced, giving me more time to post on Slashdot:-)
I still can't help feeling that at least outside the USA, the future will be Linux - China, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and other places with low costs of living and an educated population are going to power the world's economy, and I don't see the rest of the world paying the Microsoft tax.
That said, Windows, Linux, and OS X are all good platforms for open source applications: for work I 'live' using open source applications that really run great on all three OS platforms: Emacs, Eclipse, Ruby, LaTex, OpenOffice.org, and others...
Commercial products that I rely on also run well on all three OS platforms: IntelliJ, LispWorks, and Franz Lisp.
The only commercial application that I love to use that is single platform is OmniGraffle (OS X).
I actually have a psmall oint here: as Linux gets better (and Ubuntu is approaching OS X in usability for my work, and is roughly on par with Windows), people like myself will likely use Linux and non-programers OS X or Windows.
Anyway, I checked out Apple's new OS site FTFA, and it looks useful. Some enthusiasts will likely get Apple's open source OS core up and running with X Windows, etc., and make a free distribution, but I am not sure what the point is.
I have blogged several times in the last 2 years about how much fun the iTunes music store is: spend some time, listen to free clips, and buy a track or two.
The problem, which Cory points out, is that when you de-DRM songs by burning an audio CD, and re-import as MP3, you have to manually re-enter meta data. I don't mind the slightdrop in quality doing this round-trip, but the meta data manual entering is a nuisance.
This also annoying when loading songs on my Linux laptop and desktop PC: when I rip my store bought music CDs, the meta data is there - but not for the iTunes exported audio CDs.
Seriously, India has been investing heavily in education for decades, and they are justifiably reaping some well deserved benefits from that policy. Overall, I had a very positive feeling about India and the people there.
Actually, I find the Eclipse RDT and RadRails plugins to be very good (I work in this environment 8 to 15 hours a week).
I had another more radical thought yesterday: just for fun, I installed the latest stable build of Squeak Smalltalk - years ago, I had done some natural language processing work with Squeak and I wanted to look at a newer version. Any, the idea: Smalltalk and Ruby are similar enough, that for non-GUI applications it would not be so hard to write a translater from Smalltalk to Ruby for deploying small utility applications.
The performance of Ruby is not so great (I just had to switch part of my current project from Ruby to Common Lisp for performance), but it would be neat to be able to use a Smalltalk enviroment, and "compile to Ruby". Anyway, this is an idea that probably lacks merrit because professional versions of Smalltalk like VisualWorks have very good deployment tools (small size, low memory requirements) and even with the free Squeak system, with some effort you can build smaller "headless" applications.
Back to Ruby: I find Ruby installation to be easy, and the rubygems system is great. The Ruby community is friendly and helpfull.
Two childhood friends both struck it big (20+M and 300+M) starting software companies, so the American dream does happen.
However, the statistics are against you if your goal is to become very rich - but it is the possibilty that motivates people.
Here in the USA, we have an interesting cultural/political phenomenon: many lower middle class people strongly support the republican party whose policies are very biased towrads helping the very rich. I think that part of this phenomenon occurs because people dream of having a great idea and striking it rich.
I think that having one's own business is a good idea (http://mark-watson.blogspot.com/2006/04/owning-yo ur-own-business.html) but only if you do it for the right reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Latex and OpenOffice, so the $100 number was not personally relevant. On the other hand, paying $40/PC (that I actually wanted Windows on) per year in return for free upgrades and Microsoft no longer adding features of dubious value seems like it would be a good deal from my perspective.
I have blogged about this: I would be a much happier (occasional) customer of Microsoft's if they would support one version of Windows and Office at a reasonable yearly subscription price.
This would remove the drive for forced upgrades through new features that I don't care about. I would consider $40/year for Windows and $100/year for office to be reasonable. Buying a new computer would get you a 1 year subscription.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's business model requires constant growth (I was once a house guest for a weekend in a friend's home when another house guest was a Microsoft exec and his family. He said that Microsoft had to "grow a new Disney" in size every year for their business model to work). I don't think that $40/year from every legal Windows user would satisfy Microsoft's appetite.
On the other hand, look at Apple: I occasionally use OS X (Linux is my main development and writing platform) and I don't mind paying for a $130 OS X upgrade every 18 months or so - one reason is that OS X upgrades actually run faster -- great for older Macs.
Microsoft needs to get off of the forced upgrade path.
Sorry that this is off topic, but does anyone know the fate of Flickr and del.icio.us? Because Flickr has paying customers, I assume that Flickr is safe, but I have come to rely on del.icio.us while Yahoo's competing my web seems poor in comparison.
There are two problems here. One short term:
Provide safe drinking water and food
One longer term:
Train people in sanitation, promote education, teach job skills, etc.
Who says that the conflict between these two is a "zero sum game"?
I give to 3 charities every month, 2 of which help people in the third world. Who is to say how I allocate the money that I can spare each month? (Answer: me!)
If some people and organizations want to contribute to longer term solutions, good for them!
If this program really gets started, I was hoping to buy one for $300 in order to have a novelty for myself, and to provide 2 for kids in the third world.
A little off subject, but I was writing yesterday (http://mark-watson.blogspot.com/) about what is commonly referred to as the new world order. I expect individuals and corporations (who act out of profit motive) will probably do the most for helping out people in the third world who need help.
In general, I think that it makes sense to "outsource" basic infrastructure. I used to run my own servers, but after figuring the costs for electricity, bandwidth, and hardware costs, I switched to leasing two managed virtual servers - paying for the CPU, memory, and bandwidth resources that I need. I view Amazon's EC2 service the same way: when I need a lot of CPU time over a short time interval, simply buy it.
From my blog today:
:-)
I use Ruby a lot for small database tasks (love ActiveRecord!) and for using Rails for some web applications (not with scaffolding, mostly generating controllers and writing my own code).
That said, for a lot of what I do, Ruby is much more than an order of magnitude slower that compiled Common Lisp. I find myself still using Ruby and Java when appropriate, but for most tasks, I am going back to using Common Lisp. Better language, and the learning curve is not so bad (I have been using Lisp for over 25 years, and I am already up to a 'moderate' level of competence
I used to be very much into J2EE (even wrote a book on it), and it is great to see the platform evolve as the Java language evolves.
:-)
That said, I have "moved down the food chain", starting to favor just running Tomcat+custom tag libs+JSPs+persitence. I used to mostly use Hibernate, then simplified to using Prevaler. In the last year or two, I have favored Rails for small quick web apps.
J2EE is great for large scale projects, but for most web apps and portals there are easier to use solutions. I have even gone back to using Common Lisp for web apps and web services in the last year (that is "moving back up the food chain"
Hello Mårten,
First, congratulations on MySQL's market capitalization! My question is:
I have been working part time for about 6 years on software for text/data mining and general semantic information extraction. Almost all of my development is in Common Lisp, but I have ported little bits to Java and released that under the GPL in the past. I view this as a small, niche market, not like MySQL. What do you think that chances are for making money on GPLing a niche product?
MySQL is very widely used so if you capture commercial use icensing costs for a small percent of users, you do very well. For my software, with luck perhaps a few hundred companies a year might start adopting my product. Does it seem like wishful thinking for me to use a GPL based business model like MySQL's?
I want my customers to have my source code for a lot of reasons, but I would also like to capture revenue. I might just end up going to market as a proprietary product that incidently includes source code, with licensing that prohibits redistribution to non-customers.
Thanks for your help,
Mark
Condi Rice's best friend was in charge of the 9/11 commission. From what I have read he forbade certain lines of inquiry. This is why so many family members of 9/11 victims are so critical of the commission's report.
I have, in agregate, spent about 3 1/2 years in the last 20 years working on using NLP for semantic information extraction.
Possible? Yes, given very narrow domains of discourse and lots of work.
Hopefully it was obvious, but I am trying to mock the (Karl) Rovian technique of branding anyone who wants to discuss the invasion of Iraq as "cut and run" people.
Sad, but I think that it will happen again.
To me, it seems inconceivable that very wealthy republicans would conspire to do such a thing - I can not even relate to that much greed.
And greed is what this is about: the super rich and multi-national corporations save so much money with Bush tax cuts - that is their motivation.
I call Bush's fiscal policies "cut and run economics" - give tax cuts to the super rich, run up the deficits, and run away like cowards letting future generations suffer (I am a grandpa of two young kids - this is something I really care about).
Snivelling cut and run fiscal cowards.
First off,I have a really short NDA/agreement that basically says that we will trust each other, make reasonable efforts to protect each other's IP, etc. I offer customers a 12.5% discount if they just go with my agreement.
For other customers, I remove any contract clauses that don't seem right to me.
One thing that "raises a red flag" about potential customers is if they just send me signed contracts for my signature without bothering to email me a copy of the agreement first to read over. This rarely happens, but when it does,it bugs me.
And the winner is: Writely!
I wrote about Writely a few days ago (and generally liked it). I wrote my own online word processor last year (KBdocs.com for my own use, then opened up free registration - got 1000+ uesers. My system was a 3 evening hack - generally OK, but not feature rich.
Google Calendars has a huge advantage because of the GMail integration. Writely.com's advantage will likely be a good integration with blogspot, etc.
I live in the mountains and I get my broadband from a small local provider who has a few inexpensive transmitters around town. A good solution for a small town.
I would really like to see universal coverage, and low bandwidth by throttling socket connections to keep people from abusing the system would be OK. There would still be a huge market for high speed wireless, cable, and fiber, but a backgound universal lower level of service system would be a good infrastructure investment.
Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to happen in the USA given our current political climate that subsidizes corporations and for political reasons needs to inhibit growth and prosperity of the middle class and small local businesses(just pointing out that the middle class is the largest threat to the republican dream of a 1000 year reich: permanent control).
Too late - I am already spoiled by Latex.
I tried to get the publisher of my last book to accept Latex, but they said no.
Well, be careful of Other People's Documents (OPDs)!
.doc files I receive from other people in OpenOffice.org.
:-)
I always turn off any live macro support in OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word, and hope that is good enough security. I also tend to open Word
A little off topic, but I have been blogging about this lately: whether I am writing up short project documents or working on a for-fun book project (Ruby AI Programming), I find that just using Latex is much more productive for me. One reason is just seeing raw text (with a little markup) seems less distracting. Also, I find Latex easier to automate for stuff like running external commands and including the output, auto-insert of external files using custom listing styles for programs and for program output, etc. This is great when writing about programming - tweak the code examples, and the next time you run Latex on the main document, the new code versions and new output are included. Sweet. The "overhead" for writing is reduced, giving me more time to post on Slashdot
I wanted to add the word "small" in front of "point', and missed :-)
I still can't help feeling that at least outside the USA, the future will be Linux - China, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and other places with low costs of living and an educated population are going to power the world's economy, and I don't see the rest of the world paying the Microsoft tax.
That said, Windows, Linux, and OS X are all good platforms for open source applications: for work I 'live' using open source applications that really run great on all three OS platforms: Emacs, Eclipse, Ruby, LaTex, OpenOffice.org, and others...
Commercial products that I rely on also run well on all three OS platforms: IntelliJ, LispWorks, and Franz Lisp.
The only commercial application that I love to use that is single platform is OmniGraffle (OS X).
I actually have a psmall oint here: as Linux gets better (and Ubuntu is approaching OS X in usability for my work, and is roughly on par with Windows), people like myself will likely use Linux and non-programers OS X or Windows.
Anyway, I checked out Apple's new OS site FTFA, and it looks useful. Some enthusiasts will likely get Apple's open source OS core up and running with X Windows, etc., and make a free distribution, but I am not sure what the point is.
I have blogged several times in the last 2 years about how much fun the iTunes music store is: spend some time, listen to free clips, and buy a track or two.
The problem, which Cory points out, is that when you de-DRM songs by burning an audio CD, and re-import as MP3, you have to manually re-enter meta data. I don't mind the slightdrop in quality doing this round-trip, but the meta data manual entering is a nuisance.
This also annoying when loading songs on my Linux laptop and desktop PC: when I rip my store bought music CDs, the meta data is there - but not for the iTunes exported audio CDs.
The "cornucopia complex" strikes again. BTW, I believe that I coined the phrase "cornucopia complex": the fear of too much good stuff :-)
NetFlix provides great service and a wide selection. Also, I feel envy at the quality of their web app - really well done.
On my web blog, I frequently whine about products that I don't like and praise stuff that I think is great - NetFlix gets the latter treatment.
Wow Tim, that was quite a little rant. Have you ever been to India? (If not, I have some travel photos at http://flickr.com/photos/mark_watson/sets/1622965/ - enjoy :-)
Seriously, India has been investing heavily in education for decades, and they are justifiably reaping some well deserved benefits from that policy. Overall, I had a very positive feeling about India and the people there.
BTW, I set up a Ruby news scraper for my own use, but then made it public:
http://rubyplanet.net/
This site was a one night hack, including getting a domain name and deployment, but it does let me see what is happening in the Ruby community.
Actually, I find the Eclipse RDT and RadRails plugins to be very good (I work in this environment 8 to 15 hours a week).
I had another more radical thought yesterday: just for fun, I installed the latest stable build of Squeak Smalltalk - years ago, I had done some natural language processing work with Squeak and I wanted to look at a newer version. Any, the idea: Smalltalk and Ruby are similar enough, that for non-GUI applications it would not be so hard to write a translater from Smalltalk to Ruby for deploying small utility applications.
The performance of Ruby is not so great (I just had to switch part of my current project from Ruby to Common Lisp for performance), but it would be neat to be able to use a Smalltalk enviroment, and "compile to Ruby". Anyway, this is an idea that probably lacks merrit because professional versions of Smalltalk like VisualWorks have very good deployment tools (small size, low memory requirements) and even with the free Squeak system, with some effort you can build smaller "headless" applications.
Back to Ruby: I find Ruby installation to be easy, and the rubygems system is great. The Ruby community is friendly and helpfull.
Two childhood friends both struck it big (20+M and 300+M) starting software companies, so the American dream does happen.
o ur-own-business.html) but only if you do it for the right reasons.
However, the statistics are against you if your goal is to become very rich - but it is the possibilty that motivates people.
Here in the USA, we have an interesting cultural/political phenomenon: many lower middle class people strongly support the republican party whose policies are very biased towrads helping the very rich. I think that part of this phenomenon occurs because people dream of having a great idea and striking it rich.
I think that having one's own business is a good idea (http://mark-watson.blogspot.com/2006/04/owning-y