keeping simple

Category: software business

  • Free software and newspapers

    Folks who decry the idea of subscriber fees argue that paywalls won’t work, and that those who advocate for them, don’t understand the Internet. The opposite is true. These folks don’t understand the first thing about actual journalism. It costs money to cover a metro region, or a nation, or the world comprehensively, to place…

  • Manufacturing and devices

    The answer is obvious but few people stop for a second to wonder about this. After all, it is not like Apple has control over all aluminum in the world. Apple were just the first to see the potential of such bodies and began to increase their orders. In just a few years Apple became…

  • Richard Stallman speaks

    A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice. If it is tea I really like, I like it without milk and sugar. With milk and sugar, any kind of tea is fine. I always bring tea bags with me, so if we use my tea bags, I will certainly like that tea…

  • Sinking in too many layers

    Facebook engineers and analysts tap the company’s Hadoop clusters via a SQL-like query language known as Hive. [..] Separate from its Hadoop work, Facebook built Cassandra, a distributed database also based on a piece of Google’s backend. Google uses a proprietary distributed database known as BigTable that runs atop the Google File System (GFS) system,…

  • Computer architecture, power, and PHP

    The Tile-Gx chips have 64-bit processing on their cores, and include floating point math instructions that allow a floating point operating to be done in five cycles instead of hundreds of cycles when done in software. This is, believe it or not, important for PHP support, Ihab Bishara, director of cloud computing applications at Tilera,…

  • VCs bailing on signed term sheets

    Via Trevor Loy (not a bailer) this story We’ve heard three stories in which lead investors bailed on rounds after term sheets were signed.   The first upset came last week from a WeWork Labs company. The startup’s lead investor pulled out of a $500,000 round. Another entrepreneur raised between $3 and $4 million and thought he was…

  • Apple’s Patents possibly covering android

    Apple’s initial legal victory over rival HTC in a patent infringement suit could pave the way for Apple to collect high royalties from devices running Google Android, according to one analysis. Mike Abramsky with RBC Capital Markets believes that Apple has the upper hand over HTC, which is a smaller handset maker with a limited…

  • Information technology for medical care

    Really interesting article in The Atlantic about efforts to reform the medical information system. One general observation is that the potential of information systems to permit flexible corporate/government operation are often defeated by corporate culture So representatives of Athenahealth approached the major health insurance companies and proposed a new payment model: Instead of paying for…

  • The internet as we know it

    Comcast demanded a “recurring fee” from Level 3 “to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’scustomers who request such content,” Thomas Stortz, the chief legal officer for Level 3, said in a statement Monday afternoon, seemingly alluding to the Netflix service. The action “threatens the open Internet,” Mr. Stortz added. Comcast did not…

  • Free and Open Source Licenses

    Interesting discussion here. But many FOSS-based transactions are not commercial in the foregoing sense. Instead, software subject to a FOSS license may come into a product without the producer knowing that this has happened or, in any realistic way, assenting to the terms. Also, the software often comes from a non-commercial party. An engineer downloads software from an…