Continuing his light-hearted and insightful series of essays, Joel reveals the deep dark secrets of software pricing, and why none of them work. Halfway through the essay: “That was the easy part. The hard part is that everything I just told you is sort of wrong.” Three-quarters of the way: “There’s no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I’ll tell you why.” He does warn you, along the way, that you will end up learning nothing, but I think he undersells himself. Pricing is a fine art of balancing contradictory and opposing motivations, with insufficient information, and never knowing if you guessed right. Good reading!
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New study predicts growth of Linux market
Linux Looms Larger Than Thought. “The overall Linux market is far larger than previous estimates show, a new study says. In an analysis of the Linux market released late Tuesday, market research firm IDC estimated that the Linux market — including servers, PCs and packaged software — is expected to register a 26% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over five years, reaching a whopping $35.7 billion by 2008.” Source: OSNews
Happy Birthday, Bill of Rights!
The United States Bill of Rights celebrates its birthday today.
If it’s the second Tuesday, it must be time for Microsoft patches!
“Microsoft issues five bulletins on Windows flaws. Microsoft today released five Security Bulletins warning of several vulnerabilities that put computers running Windows at risk of attack. None are rated “critical,” Microsoft’s highest severity rating.” Source: Computerworld News
The bulletins, MS04-41, MS04-42, MS04-43, MS04-44, MS04-45 are somehow listed as “important” rather than “critical despite the fact that the compromises can “allow remote code execution,” “elevation of privileges” and denial of service. I’d hate to see what “really, really important” meant!
Also note that Microsoft “re-released” MS04-28, version 2, where a problem in GDI+ and JPEG processing can affect nearly every recent application, including Visual FoxPro 8.0. Shouldn’t a three-month lag between release and update qualify the sequel of the original security announcement for its own number? Not in Microsoft twisted logic, apparently. Make sure your systems are patched up to date!
It’s the 51st week of the year.
A Spoke in the Wheel
Steve Sawyer, the man when it comes to VFP RI, and an insightful developer, is off on his next career, but we can still catch a little wisdom from his blog, such as A Spoke in the Wheel: “The most carefully formulated business processes can be short-circuited, sidetracked, derailed or otherwise thwarted by the very people responsible for implementing or following the process.” Source: Steve’s Transitions Journal
FireFox downloaded 10 million times
CNET News.com reports Firefox surpasses 10 million download mark. “The open-source challenger to heavyweight Internet Explorer breaks the 10 million mark in a little more than a month since its release.”
See the announcement at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Brian Livingston also published a “Secrets of FireFox 1.0” article in his Windows Secrets newsletter with some great tips.
Copying lots of stuff from there to here
On a weekly basis, I back up a bunch of stuff from the file server by burning CDs on one of the local workstations. Some of the stuff doesn’t change a lot. Copying gigabytes, even over a high-speed network, takes time. Since I’m copying files from a Linux server, I found a quick solution that works regardless of the destination: Linux, Mac or Windows. The Mac is busy making its own backups Sunday morning, so I thought I’d find a way to do it on Windows. Using CygWin, the UNIX simulator and bash shell, I could use the rsync command to copy only the files that had changed, reducing a long copy to a few minutes.
rsync -vr tedroche@the.server.ip.address:/the/source/directory /cygdrive/c/destination
With ‘v’ for verbose and ‘r’ for recursive, copying all the subdirectories. Piece of cake. Doesn’t interoperability rock? Working well with others is A Good Thing.
Too controversial?
Linked from Garrett Fitzgerald’s Blog: Too controversial. As Tom Smith says… Perfect.
Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular
Why Nerds Are Unpopular. “If you’re too cool for school, you’re probably not very smart. Some of us would rather build rockets than friendships.” By Paul Graham from Wired magazine. Wired News
Paul is doing a great job of syndicating essays from his latest book, “Hackers and Painters.”
Schneier on safe computing
News.Com: Who says safe computing must…
News.Com: Who says safe computing must remain a pipe dream? Bruce Schneier: “Two years ago, I published a list of PC security recommendations. The idea was to give home users concrete actions they could take to improve security. This is an update of that list: a dozen things you can do to improve your security.” Link via Tomalak’s Realm