That's a lousy example. You can make commercial use of MySQL under the GPL. Commercial licenses are offered as an alternative to the GPL. The reason you'd buy a commercial license is if you want to modify MySQL without the obligation to release your modifications under the GPL.
Also, the people who run MySQL AB are the ones who developed the MySQL database. They're not running a company to get rich off someone else's code.
As for people who've contributed code, documentation or tools for MySQL, they are getting paid. They're getting a free database. If you consider the cost of purchasing some comparable alternatives, they're getting paid very well.
I took a look at Boingo's sites in Massachusetts. They're great if you spend a lot of time in Boston-area hotels, but otherwise forget about it. At this point, the target audience seems to be travelers, not cafe-frequenting locals.
I don't know that my favorite local coffeehouses are going to spring for wireless anytime soon. I might spend more time at them if they had wireless, but I don't know that I'd drink that much more coffee. It's not a matter of being cheap so much as a matter of how much caffeine I can have in an afternoon before my hands start shaking. And plenty of other people are cheap. So, even if they had access to free bandwidth, there's not much of a case for encouraging wireless users to fill up their tables (unless those tables are empty to begin with, which is rare these days with so many people out of work).
It actually looks like a pretty good system, as these things go.
I particularly like the idea of paying for pages, rather than for time. If I go on vacation or just take a break from Slashdot, I'm not wasting a portion of a subscription. That's very good. Not putting an expiration date on the 1000 page views is even better. I wish my cell phone company would sell pre-paid minutes that way, instead of having them expire after 90 days.
Deciding where to spend your 1000 page views is also pretty cool. I hope that it's eventually possible to add options like "show ads if I'm refreshing a page" or "show ads on the lameness filter page" so that people who want to conserve their page views for "new" pages can do that.
I also like being able to put only a small amount of money ($5) down. I paid $30 for a Salon subscription, but probably won't renew. I paid $5 for LiveJournal with almost no hesitation because $5 is a very small amount. Deciding to spend $20 would take much longer than deciding to spend $5.
Overall, it looks cool. I hope it works out for everyone.
If one had an old PDA lying around, this might be fun to try.
But the form factor of the PDA seems less than ideal for biking. Bike computers are generally a lot smaller than a Palm and the Bikini approach in particular looks unwieldy. Besides, if I'm going to mount something that big onto my bike, it had better have a GPS receiver built in.
Actually, at 43 pages, Apocalypse 4 (printer-friendly version printed to PDF via Adobe PDFWriter) is a longer PDF than the entire Perl Review magazine. I found it (and its predecessors) too long to read on my screen comfortably.
The old-school once-a-month publishing format has some good points and I think that it can co-exist with the newfangled publish-every-day format.
O'Reilly Network is good for reading over coffee in the morning. I can log on every day and find an interesting article to read.
But I can print out The Perl Review and stick it in my bag to read while I'm commuting. Doing that with O'Reilly Network content is harder because I'd have to go through the various sites (OnJava, BSDDevCenter, etc.), select the articles I wanted to read, select the printer-friendly versions and print them. But with The Perl Review, 30 seconds of work gets me a pile of reading for the subway.
So I think that there are niches for both frequently-updated web sites and monthly magazines. There's also a big difference in the kind of content you want for each type of site. On a site that I visit daily, I'm going to want short articles (which O'Reilly provides) and in a monthly magazine I want more in-depth stuff. The Perl Review's biggest article is a 21-pager from Simon Cozens on working with the Perl source code. That sort of feature is way too big for an O'Reilly-like site.
Actually, no. If O'Reilly sent me unsolicited commercial e-mail advertising their latest titles, I'd be very sad as I wrote them a letter explaining why I wouldn't be purchasing any more of their books.
The problem with spam is that it's unsolicited, whether it's useful or not. If you think that people want more e-mail from you, there are plenty of ways to enable them to request it.
Porting Windows games, good as they may be, won't create a market for gaming on Linux. I think that a successful Linux gaming company would have to take its cue from the console game companies.
People choose a Nintendo system as their gaming platform because you can play Nintendo games on it and you can't do that anywhere else. If the only games Nintendo put out were ports of last year's Playstation games, there'd be no incentive to buy a Nintendo console.
Similarly, if a company wants people to buy Linux games instead of Windows games, then it really needs to "sell" Linux (even to people who already use it but don't see it as a gaming platform). What Linux really needs is the next Mario or Sonic - something that you can play on a Linux box that's so much fun that Windows gamers start repartitioning their systems just to try it out. Without that, Linux gaming won't go anywhere.
Re:blogging and the death of the commons
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 2
I've seen very few weblogs that really do a good job of fostering discussion. They don't work well for that purpose because it's very hard to develop an identity on a site that's all about another person (as compared to developing an identity on Slashdot or Plastic or a Usenet newsgroup).
What I have found that my weblog (which doesn't provide any space for comments or discussion) is good for is giving people a chance to see what I'm up to. I think mine is mostly read by my girlfriend and some local friends, and the occasional far-away acquaintance. I sometimes visit the weblog/LiveJournal of someone I don't see often just to get a quick dose of their sense of humor or something. There are also strangers who do interesting work or have interesting hobbies and I'll sometimes read their weblogs even though I'd have little to discuss with them. But I definitely have much more 2-way communication with strangers whose writing I read in non-weblog forums than with the strangers whose weblogs I read regularly.
XML is used to represent data, while UML is used to represent systems.
XML is typically used in the implementation of a system, while UML is used to communicate the design of the system (during the design and implementation processes as well as afterwards).
It's also slightly misleading to call UML a "language" because it consists primarily of visual diagrams drawn according to several standards for notation.
You're right. RMS' examples will probably work very well if you happen to be RMS and people accept that you're the sort of person who'll turn the file format used for the office football pool into a political issue.
I'm not RMS. The rules in my work environment are not the same as the rules in his work environment. I don't have the credibility that comes from 20 years spent working on free software. If I start rambling about secret proprietary formats, people will wonder what my problem is. So, assuming that I support the political point RMS is making, how do I advance that point in a way that doesn't damage my personal interactions with the people who send me e-mail?
I don't think that calling Word "a secret proprietary format" (true as it may be) will make much sense to the average Windows user.
A more general issue is that all of the examples provided are political in nature.
Could one accomplish something similar with a message like "I'm sorry but I'm unable to read documents in Microsoft Word format because I use Linux. Please send your document in a format that I can read, such as ASCII Text or PDF."
Educating people about the political issues surrounding proprietary document formats isn't always appropriate in a business situation. If I need to ask a customer to use a format other than Word, I also need to be able to do it in a non-alienating way. I think that Stallman offers some good suggestions, but the specific examples he provides wouldn't work well in some social contexts.
I didn't see an X10 link or any other advertising link on the page I got when I followed the hyperlink from Slashdot article. I looked at a few other Yahoo! News pages and didn't see anything like what this story describes. Perhaps it was an error?
The announcement doesn't indicate what, if any, connectivity options they intend to use by default for the Tivo2. USB ports are great and everything, but if it still requires a modem line to get guide data and uses the USB network adapter for its "extended services"... Yuck.
According to the web page for the new AT&T Broadband co-branded Tivo [tivo.com] the new Tivo units do require a phone line for the guide data. The site very halfheartedly recommends a wireless modem adapter if you can't put your Tivo near a phone jack. I'm a little surprised because AT&T Broadband is a cable modem provider and I'd be more inclined to buy a Tivo through them if I could use it with the cable modem service that I already buy from them.
At least one of the other major new music services (Real Networks' RealOne Music) uses files that stop working when you unsubscribe from their $9.95/month service. Napster's web site doesn't clearly explain whether or not one can continue using.NAP files after cancelling one's Napster membership. Does anyone have any information on whether or not they're planning to follow in Real's footsteps on that issue?
Bandwidth's not the most important thing in a geek-friendly apartment by a long shot. In many American cities, you can get a cable modem connection for $40-$50 a month, which is plenty of bandwidth. Having the apartment wired with cat5 is a plus, but it's not hard to do yourself and wireless 802.11b also works pretty well.
What you really need in a geek's apartment is lots of power. Well-placed outlets in every room are key, as is not having to worry about blowing a fuse if you have a whole bunch of equipment running at the same time. Pretty much anything else you can set up yourself if you need to, but if the wiring is lousy and the landlord's not interested in improving it then you're probably screwed.
What's the point of the project? Are they porting specific tools that aren't already available with Cygwin, or are they reinventing the wheel? If I've got Cygwin running on my Win2K box, what extra benefits do I get from using Debian?
The elderly and infirm tend to use wheelchairs to get around. It's possible that this would be a good wheelchair substitute (although you've got to be standing upright to use it, so it's not for everyone) but it doesn't seem to have any significant advantages over a motorized wheelchair.
Can't imagine why you'd want one
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
It's heavier, cheaper and slower than a bicycle, not to mention 10 times more expensive. Why bother?
Seriously. Besides, if you're living in a major American city then "working at McDonald's to get by" probably isn't a realistic option because a minimum-wage job won't cover rent.
Which is not to say that open-source coding is a bad idea. Especially when the pickings are slim and it could take months to find a new job, working on your skills while you job-hunt is a good idea. If I get laid off, I'll use some of my free time to pursue Java certification. Working on an open source project might be another option, as would volunteering to do some free/cheap tech work for a local non-profit.
But having a real impact on an open-source project would seem to require more of a commitment than a few weeks of downtime while between jobs. Realistically, the only projects that do well are the ones where people invest serious effort on a long-term basis.
It would be pretty trivial for an ISP to count a user's HTTP requests (excluding images and whatever) and bill a penny apiece for them. What would be non-trivial is distributing that money to the thousands of web sites the users visited. There's no incentive for an ISP to participate in that system unless it gets a cut of the money, because it'll have to shoulder the expense of billing, logging, and paying for all of these microtransactions.
The other issue with this system is that it assigns an identical value to all web pages, which is incorrect. A standard rate for all web pages eliminates the incentive to produce quality content. If I can make advertising money off mediocre content and subscription money off great content, I've got an incentive to produce great content. If there's a standard price that's independent of quality, why bother? Price controls are a useless measure for such a varied commodity.
Finally, there would be privacy issues. Do you really want your ISP keeping strict accounts of how many pages you download from who?
My experience in college and in the workplace is that I wouldn't be able to get everything done on a Linux desktop.
One of the biggest issues is file format compatibility. Even if one's own office uses Unix or Linux exclusively, one still receives documents from the outside world, and they're often going to be in MS Office formats. StarOffice is cool, but it's not 100% ready to fill that need.
Another big issue is hardware compatibility. Nearly every new consumer device that comes out provides Windows drivers (except for those aimed specifically at the Mac market). Linux/BSD drivers are still hit-or-miss. A lot of college students inherit printers and other peripherals when they go off to school, and an operating system that doesn't have enough hardware support is going to cause major headaches. This is less of an issue in an office environment because all the new hardware is bought by the business, not by individuals.
On the other hand, a good argument for Linux on campus is that the network is much less likely to get bogged down by students playing big multiplayer games online.
Slashdot Mirror
Is someone going to patent IsToo?
That's a lousy example. You can make commercial use of MySQL under the GPL. Commercial licenses are offered as an alternative to the GPL. The reason you'd buy a commercial license is if you want to modify MySQL without the obligation to release your modifications under the GPL.
Also, the people who run MySQL AB are the ones who developed the MySQL database. They're not running a company to get rich off someone else's code.
As for people who've contributed code, documentation or tools for MySQL, they are getting paid. They're getting a free database. If you consider the cost of purchasing some comparable alternatives, they're getting paid very well.
You know that your code is well-commented when the moderators give it a +5 Informative.
I took a look at Boingo's sites in Massachusetts. They're great if you spend a lot of time in Boston-area hotels, but otherwise forget about it. At this point, the target audience seems to be travelers, not cafe-frequenting locals.
I don't know that my favorite local coffeehouses are going to spring for wireless anytime soon. I might spend more time at them if they had wireless, but I don't know that I'd drink that much more coffee. It's not a matter of being cheap so much as a matter of how much caffeine I can have in an afternoon before my hands start shaking. And plenty of other people are cheap. So, even if they had access to free bandwidth, there's not much of a case for encouraging wireless users to fill up their tables (unless those tables are empty to begin with, which is rare these days with so many people out of work).
It actually looks like a pretty good system, as these things go.
I particularly like the idea of paying for pages, rather than for time. If I go on vacation or just take a break from Slashdot, I'm not wasting a portion of a subscription. That's very good. Not putting an expiration date on the 1000 page views is even better. I wish my cell phone company would sell pre-paid minutes that way, instead of having them expire after 90 days.
Deciding where to spend your 1000 page views is also pretty cool. I hope that it's eventually possible to add options like "show ads if I'm refreshing a page" or "show ads on the lameness filter page" so that people who want to conserve their page views for "new" pages can do that.
I also like being able to put only a small amount of money ($5) down. I paid $30 for a Salon subscription, but probably won't renew. I paid $5 for LiveJournal with almost no hesitation because $5 is a very small amount. Deciding to spend $20 would take much longer than deciding to spend $5.
Overall, it looks cool. I hope it works out for everyone.
If one had an old PDA lying around, this might be fun to try.
But the form factor of the PDA seems less than ideal for biking. Bike computers are generally a lot smaller than a Palm and the Bikini approach in particular looks unwieldy. Besides, if I'm going to mount something that big onto my bike, it had better have a GPS receiver built in.
Actually, at 43 pages, Apocalypse 4 (printer-friendly version printed to PDF via Adobe PDFWriter) is a longer PDF than the entire Perl Review magazine. I found it (and its predecessors) too long to read on my screen comfortably.
The old-school once-a-month publishing format has some good points and I think that it can co-exist with the newfangled publish-every-day format.
O'Reilly Network is good for reading over coffee in the morning. I can log on every day and find an interesting article to read.
But I can print out The Perl Review and stick it in my bag to read while I'm commuting. Doing that with O'Reilly Network content is harder because I'd have to go through the various sites (OnJava, BSDDevCenter, etc.), select the articles I wanted to read, select the printer-friendly versions and print them. But with The Perl Review, 30 seconds of work gets me a pile of reading for the subway.
So I think that there are niches for both frequently-updated web sites and monthly magazines. There's also a big difference in the kind of content you want for each type of site. On a site that I visit daily, I'm going to want short articles (which O'Reilly provides) and in a monthly magazine I want more in-depth stuff. The Perl Review's biggest article is a 21-pager from Simon Cozens on working with the Perl source code. That sort of feature is way too big for an O'Reilly-like site.
If you want a magazine like that, then start one and ask people to write for it. Publishing on the web is pretty cheap these days.
Actually, no. If O'Reilly sent me unsolicited commercial e-mail advertising their latest titles, I'd be very sad as I wrote them a letter explaining why I wouldn't be purchasing any more of their books.
The problem with spam is that it's unsolicited, whether it's useful or not. If you think that people want more e-mail from you, there are plenty of ways to enable them to request it.
Porting Windows games, good as they may be, won't create a market for gaming on Linux. I think that a successful Linux gaming company would have to take its cue from the console game companies.
People choose a Nintendo system as their gaming platform because you can play Nintendo games on it and you can't do that anywhere else. If the only games Nintendo put out were ports of last year's Playstation games, there'd be no incentive to buy a Nintendo console.
Similarly, if a company wants people to buy Linux games instead of Windows games, then it really needs to "sell" Linux (even to people who already use it but don't see it as a gaming platform). What Linux really needs is the next Mario or Sonic - something that you can play on a Linux box that's so much fun that Windows gamers start repartitioning their systems just to try it out. Without that, Linux gaming won't go anywhere.
I've seen very few weblogs that really do a good job of fostering discussion. They don't work well for that purpose because it's very hard to develop an identity on a site that's all about another person (as compared to developing an identity on Slashdot or Plastic or a Usenet newsgroup).
What I have found that my weblog (which doesn't provide any space for comments or discussion) is good for is giving people a chance to see what I'm up to. I think mine is mostly read by my girlfriend and some local friends, and the occasional far-away acquaintance. I sometimes visit the weblog/LiveJournal of someone I don't see often just to get a quick dose of their sense of humor or something. There are also strangers who do interesting work or have interesting hobbies and I'll sometimes read their weblogs even though I'd have little to discuss with them. But I definitely have much more 2-way communication with strangers whose writing I read in non-weblog forums than with the strangers whose weblogs I read regularly.
XML is used to represent data, while UML is used to represent systems.
XML is typically used in the implementation of a system, while UML is used to communicate the design of the system (during the design and implementation processes as well as afterwards).
It's also slightly misleading to call UML a "language" because it consists primarily of visual diagrams drawn according to several standards for notation.
You're right. RMS' examples will probably work very well if you happen to be RMS and people accept that you're the sort of person who'll turn the file format used for the office football pool into a political issue.
I'm not RMS. The rules in my work environment are not the same as the rules in his work environment. I don't have the credibility that comes from 20 years spent working on free software. If I start rambling about secret proprietary formats, people will wonder what my problem is. So, assuming that I support the political point RMS is making, how do I advance that point in a way that doesn't damage my personal interactions with the people who send me e-mail?
I don't think that calling Word "a secret proprietary format" (true as it may be) will make much sense to the average Windows user.
A more general issue is that all of the examples provided are political in nature.
Could one accomplish something similar with a message like "I'm sorry but I'm unable to read documents in Microsoft Word format because I use Linux. Please send your document in a format that I can read, such as ASCII Text or PDF."
Educating people about the political issues surrounding proprietary document formats isn't always appropriate in a business situation. If I need to ask a customer to use a format other than Word, I also need to be able to do it in a non-alienating way. I think that Stallman offers some good suggestions, but the specific examples he provides wouldn't work well in some social contexts.
I didn't see an X10 link or any other advertising link on the page I got when I followed the hyperlink from Slashdot article. I looked at a few other Yahoo! News pages and didn't see anything like what this story describes. Perhaps it was an error?
At least one of the other major new music services (Real Networks' RealOne Music) uses files that stop working when you unsubscribe from their $9.95/month service. Napster's web site doesn't clearly explain whether or not one can continue using .NAP files after cancelling one's Napster membership. Does anyone have any information on whether or not they're planning to follow in Real's footsteps on that issue?
Bandwidth's not the most important thing in a geek-friendly apartment by a long shot. In many American cities, you can get a cable modem connection for $40-$50 a month, which is plenty of bandwidth. Having the apartment wired with cat5 is a plus, but it's not hard to do yourself and wireless 802.11b also works pretty well.
What you really need in a geek's apartment is lots of power. Well-placed outlets in every room are key, as is not having to worry about blowing a fuse if you have a whole bunch of equipment running at the same time. Pretty much anything else you can set up yourself if you need to, but if the wiring is lousy and the landlord's not interested in improving it then you're probably screwed.
What's the point of the project? Are they porting specific tools that aren't already available with Cygwin, or are they reinventing the wheel? If I've got Cygwin running on my Win2K box, what extra benefits do I get from using Debian?
The elderly and infirm tend to use wheelchairs to get around. It's possible that this would be a good wheelchair substitute (although you've got to be standing upright to use it, so it's not for everyone) but it doesn't seem to have any significant advantages over a motorized wheelchair.
It's heavier, cheaper and slower than a bicycle, not to mention 10 times more expensive. Why bother?
Seriously. Besides, if you're living in a major American city then "working at McDonald's to get by" probably isn't a realistic option because a minimum-wage job won't cover rent.
Which is not to say that open-source coding is a bad idea. Especially when the pickings are slim and it could take months to find a new job, working on your skills while you job-hunt is a good idea. If I get laid off, I'll use some of my free time to pursue Java certification. Working on an open source project might be another option, as would volunteering to do some free/cheap tech work for a local non-profit.
But having a real impact on an open-source project would seem to require more of a commitment than a few weeks of downtime while between jobs. Realistically, the only projects that do well are the ones where people invest serious effort on a long-term basis.
It would be pretty trivial for an ISP to count a user's HTTP requests (excluding images and whatever) and bill a penny apiece for them. What would be non-trivial is distributing that money to the thousands of web sites the users visited. There's no incentive for an ISP to participate in that system unless it gets a cut of the money, because it'll have to shoulder the expense of billing, logging, and paying for all of these microtransactions.
The other issue with this system is that it assigns an identical value to all web pages, which is incorrect. A standard rate for all web pages eliminates the incentive to produce quality content. If I can make advertising money off mediocre content and subscription money off great content, I've got an incentive to produce great content. If there's a standard price that's independent of quality, why bother? Price controls are a useless measure for such a varied commodity.
Finally, there would be privacy issues. Do you really want your ISP keeping strict accounts of how many pages you download from who?
My experience in college and in the workplace is that I wouldn't be able to get everything done on a Linux desktop.
One of the biggest issues is file format compatibility. Even if one's own office uses Unix or Linux exclusively, one still receives documents from the outside world, and they're often going to be in MS Office formats. StarOffice is cool, but it's not 100% ready to fill that need.
Another big issue is hardware compatibility. Nearly every new consumer device that comes out provides Windows drivers (except for those aimed specifically at the Mac market). Linux/BSD drivers are still hit-or-miss. A lot of college students inherit printers and other peripherals when they go off to school, and an operating system that doesn't have enough hardware support is going to cause major headaches. This is less of an issue in an office environment because all the new hardware is bought by the business, not by individuals.
On the other hand, a good argument for Linux on campus is that the network is much less likely to get bogged down by students playing big multiplayer games online.