MySQL: what is the problem?
at 11:50 am on Saturday, 19 April 2008
MySQL’s decision to produce proprietary add-ons to its highly successful open source database has been widely misunderstood, and in some cases spun to produce the impression that it is a failure of open source. (more…)
Websites do not need to support Internet Explorer?
As much as I dislike Microsoft Internet Explorer, and as much as I wish that people would make their own lives and those of website developers better by using better web browsers, I have always taken supporting it as a necessary evil. It is bundled with Windows and most people take whatever it suits MS gives them. (more…)
If this is the market working, what is failure?
at 7:54 am on Monday, 31 March 2008
Brain Caplan thinks markets work fine despite having to wait 19 years to be able to a product with a tiny marginal cost of production: i.e. he spent 19 years waiting on the supplier’s whims just to buy allowed to buy some music. (more…)
Limitless stupidity
at 7:38 am on Friday, 28 March 2008
This is old news, but I only just found someone even stupider than the woman who refused to believe that -6 is higher than -8. Even stupider than Jerry Taylor, City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma, who threatened to call the FBI because he could not understand how to configure his computer. The record breaker: another small American city that came close to banning items made using dihydrogen monoxide.
Wired’s open source myth
Wired has an interesting twist on the tired old myth that “open source is developed by volunteers”, that has been. The new twist is that it reverses the usual myth that it is not possible to make money from open source: instead the wrong people will make the money and it will all fall apart. Unsurprisingly this flies in the face of the facts.
Nisha Clare Pietersz
at 10:32 am on Wednesday, 5 March 2008
My second daughter Nisha Clare Pietersz was born day before yesterday.
She has one older sister, Lucy Tarika.
If you know the derivations of the names (or their Latin and Sanskrit roots) you may notice a pattern.
Both mother and baby are well and full of life.
Why tax havens are fraudulent
I usually enjoy reading Economic Logic, but this post defending tax havens seems badly wrong headed to me. It misses the essentially fraudulent character of tax havens. (more…)
Who downloads Linux
at 10:23 am on Monday, 18 February 2008
I noticed that most people downloading Mandriva One using bit torrent were using Windows clients, but almost everyone downloading Arch Linux seems to be using Ktorrent. The latter is to be expected, but the former surprised me. (more…)
Alan Sugar fails to understand education
Alan Sugar has called for “enterprise lessons” in schools. While a capitalist economy may benefit from there being some people like Alan Sugar, I see absolutely no evidence that we need more of them. (more…)
Incompetence from The Economist
at 9:28 am on Wednesday, 6 February 2008
The Economist’s coverage of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has apparently been written by someone who thinks that Yahoo is primarily a search engine. It has been written in complete ignorance of both the competition concerns and the major difficulties of integrating the businesses. (more…)
