F452 - Slashdot User

Tiny URL Developer Basking in Website's Success-> 0

Submitted by

F452

on Tuesday July 08 2008, @07:56PM

F452 writes "The Minneapolis StarTribune has a piece about the guy behind TinyURL. Mostly a fluff piece, but interesting. From the article:

"The website he created in 2002, TinyURL.com, gets an impressive 1 billion hits a month, but Blaine Web developer Kevin Gilbertson would rather talk about riding his unicycle. [...] The site makes URLs tiny at a rate of about 1 billion per month. Which is where the $1 million comes in. Gilbertson could make about that much if he chose to attach a pop-up advertisement on each URL. But he won't, on principle. [...] Kevin spends as many as 14 hours per day on the computer — on days he doesn't unicycle."
"
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Java Artificial Intelligence Sample Code Liberated 0

Submitted by

F452

on Friday September 14 2007, @05:56PM

F452 writes "An objection I've had to many programming books and web sites is that they don't make sample code available under a free software license. This is within the rights of the author, of course, but it seems counter to the spirit of teaching and sharing knowledge to restrict the use of example code.

I was happy to exchange words recently with an author who was open and responsive to making the sample artificial intelligence code from his book available under a free license. With Saturday being Software Freedom Day, it seemed like a good time to write about our email conversation and point you to the freed code. Topics include: Control Systems, Scripted Behavior, Discrete Searching, Searching State Space, Genetic Algorithms, Thinking Logically, and Supervised and Unsupervised Neural Networks."

Free software is a weak mode of production?

Submitted by

F452

on Tuesday October 17 2006, @10:26PM

F452 writes "From Free Software Magazine, are we entering the age of a glorious coder's paradise, or will the bourgeoisie co-opt the digital factors of production? Is free software actually a weak mode of production?

'The success of GNU/Linux and other free software projects is annoying. Free and open source development doesn't fit neatly in the box of standard business practices and is therefore a problem. We really need to break free of those hippies at the Free Software Foundation and let the grown-ups manage things from here on out. Not to mention that the peer-based production model doesn't really work that great anyway.

Or at least, that's what I inferred from...'"