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The occasional personal note

Study: P2P effect on legal music sales

This is has been sitting around in the draft bin for too long: Study: P2P effect on legal music sales “not statistically distinguishable from zero”
“A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.”

Great news. Music sales go up and down because demand goes up and down, quality goes up and down, the economy and affordability and attractiveness of music varies.

Take that, Voldemort!

Does anyone else think that “Bifidus Regularis™!” sounds like a spell Harry Potter should have been casting?

Bifidus Regularis is a trademark of Dannon for their Activia line of yogurts

The BFC Computing Weblog : FCC Comissioner Michael Copps – My Hero

Blogging at the newly-renamed BFC Computing Weblog, Bill McGonigle writes: FCC Comissioner Michael Copps – My Hero: “Quoting FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, from an e-Week article:

“Can we finally agree that something drastic needs to be done? We can start by facing up to our problem and doing our level best to diagnose its causes. We need to know why so many Americans do not have broadband, and why those who do, or think they do, are paying twice as much for connections one-twentieth as fast those enjoyed by customers in some other countries…”

Wow! An FCC Commisioner with a clue! Is that allowed? The US is backsliding into being a third-world country by so many measures. Enriching “The Telephone Company” and “The Cable Company” should not be one them. Broadband should be the dialtone of the 21st century. Rural Electrification was a boon to the country. Rural Broadbandification should be, too.

Seat Belts

New Hampshire’s legislature is considering a mandatory seat belt law as New Hampshire is Last in the Nation on this requirement. In this morning’s Concord Monitor, Eric Moskowitz points out that “Belts may save more than lives: Insurance costs could drop.” Yeah. maybe, but there are better reasons. Garrett Fitzgerald links to a post by Jim Macdonald:

“Do you know how we can tell the difference between people who were wearing their seatbelts and those who weren’t, at the scene of an automobile accident? The ones who were wearing their seatbelts are standing around saying “This really sucks,” and the ones who weren’t are kinda just lying there.”

Don’t be found lying about. Wear your seat belt. Whether required by law or not.

Garrett Fitzgerald: Mas FoxPro

Garrett Fitzgerald blogs Mas FoxPro: “In view of Microsoft’s decision to abandon future development of Visual FoxPro, there is a movement afoot to ask MS to open-source the product, so the community can take it forward. If you’d like to see this happen, one thing you can do is sign the petition that PortalFox is running.”

It’s an admirable notion, but just because Microsoft doesn’t want to continue development, doesn’t mean they are willing to turn their tools over to a potential competitor. That would be altruistic.

There’s no doubt the software contains all sorts of embarrassing comments, perhaps undocumented calls to APIs Microsoft doesn’t want others to know about or use and probably some ugly work-arounds. It would be very educational to read the source and understand some of the obscure behaviors of FoxPro: where the phantom record really hides, how “Workarea Zero” works and why Error 14 reports Error while reporting Error 14, but I’m afraid the final journey of Visual FoxPro code will resemble the final scene in Indiana Jones, with the crate of source code wheeled back into the misty distances…

UPDATE… ComputerWorld covers the petition with an article that covers the history of FoxPro better than any other I’ve ever read in the trade press. This is the best press FoxPro has gotten since PC Magazine gave it the Editor’s Choice award, and that was some time ago.

Life After VFP

Robert Jennings posts Yet “Another Life After VFP Thread.” For those not following VFP closely, MS recently announced a confirmation of earlier news that there were no plans for a VFP version 10, and that the VFP scripts in the project known as Sedna would be released under some sort of public license. Poor communications lead to media and Slashdot reports that VFP was to be Open Sourced, sadly not the case.

Robert does a good job of outlining the huge cost in moving a vertical-niche application into another development environment, language and runtime. Most sophisticated specialty applications have person-years of investment built into them, knowledge not easily extracted, transferred or translated to any new environment. Regardless of whether that new environment is Dot Net, Dabo, LAMP, Python or Visual Fred, there will be a huge cost and risk with any enterprise making this switch.

Unlike the Open Source world, when a vendor choses to discontinue a product, developers have little choice but to move along. While many folks point out the upside that the product will likely run for years to come, and a lack of Microsoft official support doesn’t instantly obsolete a product (DOS apps can still be found, after all), there is an immediate slowdown in the custom software market, and a longer-term turning away from the product by customers. Large-scale vertical products have to be operating with 5- and 10-year plans for reinvestment and changes in direction, to ensure they can fund “The Next Big Thing” while continuing to deliver good value to their customers today and tomorrow.

This is not a death knell for the product. The writing has been on the wall for years. But developers with large applications have to be looking around for a new platform.

FoxPro developers always viewed themselves with a bit of “Battlestar Galactica” mythology: a rag-tag crew of self-taught developers from the PC Revolution, they survived the dBASE wars and the implosion of Ashton-Tate. Working under a cruel master who never promoted their product, they persevered. MS’ internal team developing VFP did amazing things on a shoestring budget, introducing a fairly smooth transition from procedural to object-oriented, from developer-guided to event-driven interfaces, from characters to pixels, from local ISAM to RDBMS. The VFP IDE was a remarkable environment in which to develop rich-client, component-based, web-driven or even server-based applications. I will miss it, and look forward to becoming as skilled at my next platform.

Blog, the first five years…

… ended yesterday, and today I start the sixth year of blogging. The first year was blogging on the Perl-based TWiki software, 2003 through 2006 on Radio Userland. This year, I’m using WordPress, on a self-hosting Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP platform. Wonder what I’ll be running in another five years? It’s been a blast, and I hope it continues to be. Primarily, my blog is my voice online: notes of places I’ve found and want to share (or publicly bookmark so I can find them again), news to pass on, or events on which I comment. Thanks for reading.

Hosstraders no more

Color horse logo of HosstradersSad news from the organizers of the spring and fall Hosstraders ham radio festival: they have chosen to end the event. No more Hosstraders. I very much enjoyed the last four or five I attended. The GNHLUG has manned a booth there for quite some time, and it was a great opportunity to do some outreach to like-minded technically adept folks. We gave away a lot of Linux distributions, sold off personal surplus equipment and picked up lots of neat gadgets. I’ll miss Hosstraders. USD 1.3 million was raised for Shriner’s Children Burn Centers. GNHLUG leader maddog expresses his appreciation here.

Five Things You Might Not Have Known About Me

Andrew Ross MacNeill tagged me with the “Five Things” chain letter, also tagging Craig Bailey, Eric Den Doop, Kok Kiet (John Jones), Richard Base (FoxPro: Catalyst). In turn ARM was tagged by Rick Schummer, who was tagged by Alex Feldstein and Rick also nabbed Kevin Ragsdale, Kevin Cully, Mike Feltman, Randy Jean. Alex had tagged Rick along with Garrett Fitzgerald, Rick Borup, Doug Hennig, Craig Berntson. Alex, in turn was selected by Claudio Lassala. Claudio was tagged by Markus who was tagged by Rick who… well, you get the idea. Someone was bored over the holidays, probably someone who wasn’t incensed over Microsoft giving away Acer laptops for Christmas, and decided to double the volume of the internet with self-indulgent blogging bit. Folks, who cares?

I’ve followed the links back 27 times and still haven’t come across the first couple of A-List bloggers I’d seen playing this game only a few weeks ago, so my back-of-the-envelope math tells me that there’s no one left who has a blog, so I’m tempted to declare the game over. Well done.

But just in case there’s bad juju with breaking the chain, has anyone heard from Calvin Hsia, Christof Wollenhaupt, Paul McNett, Andy Kramek and John “Gonzo” Koziol? No? Tag, boys, you’re it!

For those into this six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game, there’s a list of blogs at Fox Wiki Blog Watch and, yes, a self-referential aggregator of the resulting feeds at Planet Fox.

  1. I was saved from near-certain death aboard a submarine by a quick-thinking shipmate… and his clipboard. Really.
  2. I sat next to Senator George McGovern at a political rally.
  3. I earned three varsity letters in swimming. Butterfly was my specialty, though I wasn’t very good.
  4. I’m Union and I Vote: UAW Local 1981, the National Writer’s Union, AFL-CIO.
  5. I lived in a travel trailer over summer of 1980 in Orlando, Florida and the winter of 1981 in West Milton, New York, yards from the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory. Might explain a lot, eh?

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.