Updated my “about” page
I updated my “about” page last night. It’s still pretty rough, but it gives you a little more about my background in both blogging and tech. I hadn’t realized that I’ve been blogging since 1998 until I started researching last night. That’s only 1 year less than Dave Winer. Although my inspiration, John Halcyons Prehensile Tales, started up in 1996 so I guess he’s been blogging longer than Winer or anyone else.
Well I’m safe for now
Spider-Spud has showed up to save me from Darth Tater.
So now I guess I’m collecting Mr. Potato Head movie tie-ins?
What are the costs of Open Source development?
There has been a lot of discussion centered around Open Source projects on the Microsoft platform. Some of the discussion has been about the lack of support, or interest, in OSS from Microsoft itself. Sure, you’ll see some Microsoft employees contribute to OSS, or even writing OSS. And there is CodePlex, which is Microsofts OSS portal to the world. But, in general, there is no official Microsoft support for OSS projects on it’s platform. This is in stark contrast compared to the support that Sun has shown for JBoss, Hibernate, Spring, and other OSS projects on the Java platform. Apple has built it’s OS X platform almost entirely around OSS projects.
But what kind of support should Microsoft provide? Microsoft doesn’t really consume any OSS in any of it’s products so there’s no impetus to contribute back into any source code tree. Give money to OSS developers? Well, that’s nice. But what are the costs associated with open source development?
Microsoft has (finally) provided free, slimmed down, versions of it’s primary development tool. But most of the developers producing OSS already own Visual Studio in some form or another.
Hosting costs? Codeplex, Google Code, and SourceForge all offer project hosting for OSS projects which includes web site hosting (Linux based of course. Maybe Microsoft OSS developers will want to use a Windows-based host for their site). So bandwidth costs are taken care of.
Subsidized developers? While it’s nice that developers want to get paid for working on code they love. If they are looking for a way to provide for themselves and their family, perhaps they shouldn’t quit their day job? Money for divorce lawyers after they spend all their free time coding instead of with their family? Well… not much we can do about that.
So what exactly are the big costs associated with Open Source Development? I’d like to hear from all side, Windows and other open source developers.
Welcome to Assembly Hell What A Difference A Revision Makes – IConfigMapPath Is Inaccessible Due To Its Protection Level
What A Difference A Revision Makes – IConfigMapPath Is Inaccessible Due To Its Protection Level
: “”
Did anyone really believe Microsoft when they said that .NET would mean the end of DLL Hell?
Programming lately is just so depressing.
Who needs a physical machine?
Jeff Atwood spent some time cleaning spyware off of his system.
I think the real questions here is: Why are we still running operating systems that have direct access to the hardware through the HAL?
Why aren’t all operating system run in a hardware VM sandbox with the ability to snapshot the state of the machine at any given point and roll back to any given point?
Why do video games and programs need to “install” at all? Why don’t they all come with tiny virtual machines and have all the dependencies included? Sure the latest and greatest from ID or Valve is running highly-optimized low-level graphic routines, but do all games need that? Wouldn’t the games that do benefit from being on a console or having just enough OS to get the game running rather than dealing with the overhead of the OS?
Valves hardware survey
Great detailed survey by Valve software of their users hardware configurations.
The most interesting stats to me were the version of Windows the users are running and the amount of system ram.
Windows version:
Windows XP 526,199 92.38 %
Windows Vista 33,724 5.92 %
Windows 2000 4,920 0.86 %
Windows 2003 64 bit 4,217 0.74 %
Other 561 0.10 %
System Ram:
256 Mb to 511 Mb 125,716 22.07 %
512 Mb to 999 Mb 265,401 46.59 %
The 92% Windows XP user base doesn’t surprise me given the reviews I’ve seen of Vista from some of the Alpha geeks I read. I can’t imagine what the Vista experience is like for everyday users who don’t want to tweak everything.
The fact that around 70% of the gamers surveyed have a gig of RAM or less less than 1GB of RAM is surprising. But when you browse the local Best Buy/CompUSA/Circuit City/Dell store you find that the default RAM offering is 1GB on most systems. You have to specify more if you want more. I’m betting the default was lower a year or two ago.
But both of these factors have to be taken into consideration if you are writing software for Jane and Joe users. They most likely aren’t going to be running a great big whiz-bang rig like yours.
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Herding Code Podcast
- Herding Code 133: Derick Bailey on Backbone.js 2/3/2012
- Herding Code 132: Phil Haack, Keith Dahlby and Paul Betts on Git for Windows developers 1/20/2012
- Herding Code 131: Chris Williams and Matthew Podwysocki on the Javascript community 1/4/2012
- Herding Code 130: Dave Weaver on Loggr – a realtime analytics service built with MVC, MongoDB and SignalR 1/2/2012
- Herding Code 129: Rob Reynolds on Chocolatey and the Chuck Norris Frameworks 12/13/2011