In the beginning, there was software. And it wasn’t good. The users kept calling with reports of bugs in the software. There were so many of these reports, that the developers decided to make a program to track the bugs. This helped to make sure that every bug would be fixed.
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Archive for January, 2002Ximian changes open-source license - The Linux company makes a philosophical shift in a key open-source software project that now will be governed by a less restrictive license. [CNet] Mono has movied to a license adopted from XFree86, which allows use in commercial software. The primary reason for the shift is that Intel and HP have software to contribute and would not contribute it unless the license was changed. I think this is a good change, because Mono will be able to benefit from cooperative development like that. Joel Spolsky has written another article about not rewriting your code. He harps on this a lot, but makes good points. This particular article provides an excellent, concrete example of why rewriting can be a bad idea… Last night, I rediscovered PythonCard. I had read about it a few weeks back, and was not particularly interested. But, I just saw that there is a PythonCard-based program called textRouter, which is designed to be a simple weblog posting program. textRouter itself looks interesting (particularly since Drupal supports the Blogger API). A couple weeks back, everyone was writing breathlessly about compressing random data. (Not gonna happen…) Today, they’re writing about free energy… News Media Scammed by ‘Free Energy’ Hoax - n/a [Slashdot] One interesting side bit: Slashdot managed to get themselves mentioned in CNN for exposing the hoax. “No sperm necessary Lesbian couples ‘could have own baby’ “ - n/a [Daypop] POE News has an account of the discovery of some evil spyware. The program, called VX2, appears to track all web activity, including form submissions. It’s hard to imagine scarier spyware… Apparently, this came with AudioGalaxy but is no longer included. Be careful when you install “free” software, because it may come with something like VX2. O’Reilly has an interview with the head of the Internet Wayback Machine (which can be found at archive.org. They’ve got a 100TB database that serves up 200 requests using a network of cheap PCs with IDE hard drives. They’re planning to release P2, their Perl-based parallel data searching software. Two shocking bits of business news today: Amazon.com posted a $5 million net profit, on an impressive $1.1 billion in sales, and 105 year-old KMart went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Maybe I don’t understand the issues enough, but KMart’s market cap is currently $450 million. They have $17 billion in assets and $11 billion in liabilities. Doesn’t that mean that they company should be worth $6 billion? Sounds like a buying opportunity, particularly if they’re going to come out of the bankruptcy. After a couple of days blogging hiatus (visiting with my parents), I return to find this: Enron accused of new shredding - n/a [CNN Top News]. Yes, indeedy… these people are still shredding documents. It’s bad enough to run a multibillion dollar con, but to actually continue to do things the same way after you’ve been caught takes some gall. |
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