Heh heh heh...

'The End of Free' is a Weblog covering the change of commercial sites on the web from free, to fee. (In other words, no more free beer, but free speech hopefully has a future.)

'The End of Free' has some pretty good links. For example, this link to an article on 'How to Avoid the Top 5 Subscription Marketing Mistakes' where ContentBiz asked veteran copywriter Don Hauptman to review a variety of typical subscription sites, and share tips that could help everyone sell more. (Piro should read that one. Not that I think he is doing anything wrong, but every little bit helps.)

Still I have to wonder if the 'End of Free' really means the end of most commercial sites altogether. Not because they must switch to a fee, but because there are so many high-quality free alternatives (subsidized by the content creators themselves, often as a hobby) that people will not pay fees. In other words there is little or no market on the Internet for commercial content period!

I don't know if this is a 'tragedy of the commons', or more an emergent quality of low-cost content delivery. But I am guessing there isn't much room out there for fee-based content. For proof of my thesis I point to 'The End of Free' itself, which is 'free' (as in beer and speech)...

Attention Larry Niven fans; there has been a Puppeteer sighting in Indiana.

KBillar is pretty damn cool, that's what it is. (Warning, Linux/KDE only.) From the website: KBillar is a billiard game where everything is user definable: the table, borders, ball properties, gravity, etc. The user can choose to play billiard on different surfaces like a sphere, a cylinder, a torus, or in any map which can be expressed as z(x,y) !

Botan is an Open Source C++ library with gobs of different cryptographic algorithms and a nice filter-based interface. Crypto types supported includes many different block and stream ciphers, public key algorithms, hash functions, and message authentication codes.

Best part? It runs on various Unices (including Mac OS/X) and Windows. So if you are writing cross-platform code that needs crypto, Botan might be right up your alley.

One of the biggest complaints about the new version of Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2K3) is the fact they removed 'Assault' mode from the game when they added the 'Bombing Run' style gameplay. (The other big complaint is that the new sniper rifles give your position away, but how you feel about that depends on whether you like to snipe or not.)

Now UT is just about the only game I spend any time with and I usually play 'classic' UT because I prefer to play Assault maps. The combination of a first person shooter (FPS) with game-based tactics and some strategic thinking is what makes the game fun for me. UT2K3 has amazing graphics and interesting game play, no doubt about it, but even Bombing Run isn't as much fun as good old Assault.

Luckily the RoAR team agrees. They have been working on a major Mod for UT2K3 to support Assault-style play and are nearing completion. Soon I may find myself retiring classic UT while I move on to playing Assault on UT2K3.

(Submitted to the /. front page)

Intel chief Andy Grove says Moore's Law has reached its limit. Pointing to current leaks in modern chips, he says -- "Current is becoming a major factor and a limiter on how complex we can build chips," said Grove. He said the company' engineers "just can't get rid of" power leakage. -- But, of course, this only applies to semiconductor chips, there is no gaurentee that some other technology will not take over and continue the march of smaller, cheaper and faster processors. I remember people saying stuff like this years ago before MOSFET.

(Whoops, had to edit it. I mistyped Andy Grove as Andy Moore. Now I hope it doesn't make the front page.)

Update: Well, it did get accepted, error and all. And, of course, someone caught it, leading to my posting a mea culpa that got modded up as 'funny'. Heh...

Ever wonder whatever happened to that annoying sock puppet when pets.com went under? Well, wonder no more; my favorite computer discounter, Computer Geeks, has him
for only $9.95!

Yet another casualty of the dotcom crash...

I certainly hope this doesn't start a trend. It certainly seems unlikely to have the intended results...

C# Help is a website devoted to C# and .Net with a ton of source code and how-to articles. If you are working with C# (MS or Mono), this site is worth a look.

Austrailian judge rules that defamation happens where you read it, not where you publish it. The potential consequences for the Internet are staggering. Besides, now some Quebecer (uh Quebecenite, er, whatever) is probably going to sue me in French.

Now there are Canadians wanting the USA to invade them! I say sure, so long as we don't have to take Quebec in the bargain...

AJ's Internet Cafe is a complete Internet Cafe system intended for use with LTSP thin clients. What this means is that you can turn any coffee shop into an Internet Cafe by adding a Net connection, a decent server and a bunch of suplus computers you can pick up for next-to-nothing.

Pretty cool!

This is an excellent example of the kind of thing a programmer like myself will spend a lot of time on, as a thought experiment, and then never get around to actually doing. Only, in this case, someone did!

MetaL or 'Meta-Language' is an XML-based programming language intended to be translated (via XSLT) into any of several other programming languages. They have done quite a bit of work on this product, even to the point of developing a standard object persistance storage format. All in all it is a pretty impressive effort.

However when you look at the non-trivial example code you see the downside of their particular approach: The MetaL class is substantially larger and more difficult to understand than the generated PHP or Java code. Meaning that you should probably develop in one of those languages in the first place, unless language portability was one of the design goals of your program.

I have been playing with my own version of the same basic idea for some time (as described at the beginning of the post) and I am convinced that the proper way to do this is to use a declarative language for the top level. But that turns into a chicken and egg problem because it requires a very large standard class library in each target language. However you need to define the class library in terms of the meta-language syntax in the first place...

Still, I persist in thinking about it. Perhaps someday (RSN) I will get around to creating something more than a lot of notes on yellow pads...

This is so unutterably sad that I am turning off comments...