Businesses

Converting an Open Source Project into a Business? 38

Posted by Cliff from the from-hobby-to-budding-career dept.
Yaztromo asks: "I'm about to try to make the jump and move my jSyncManager Project from being a time-consuming hobby into a full-time business. I'm hoping to follow the model of other successful Open Source businesses by selling integration, development services and support contracts. Has anyone in the Slashdot community attempted to move their Free/Open Source projects from hobby to business? What were the special challenges or obstacles faced?"

Ten Years of BeOS 264

Posted by michael from the be-all-that-you-can-be dept.
Tracker writes "BeOS was released to developers officially for the first time ten years ago. OSNews has a charming write-up about the BeOS, some interesting historical events since 1994, and a few anecdotes as well. Today, BeOS still lives on with projects like the freeware BeOS Max (built upon BeOS 5 PE), the open source re-implementation from scratch OpenBeOS and YellowTAB's commercial Zeta OS (based on unreleased and updated code of what would have been 'BeOS 6' if Be wasn't purchased by Palm in 2001)."

Virtual Real Estate Boom Draws Real Dollars 285

Posted by CmdrTaco from the virtual-taxman-still-evil dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to a USAToday story, Second Life from Linden Labs is seeing a boom in virtual land trading. The article quotes a player as saying: 'My vision is to buy real estate in Second Life with one or two other investors and make it available to new players as a business', and it seems that 'Large swathes of undeveloped online property, some bearing an uncanny resemblance to a palm-studded West Coast beachfront idyll, are selling for up to $550 an acre.' Second Life uses OpenGL and Ogg-Vorbis running on a Linux grid." S!: We've previously covered Second Life on several occasions over at Slashdot Games.

Making Operating Systems Faster 667

Posted by michael from the pinstriping-adds-extra-torque dept.
mbrowling writes "In an article over at kernelthread.com Amit Singh discusses 'Ten Things Apple Did To Make Mac OS X Faster'. The theme seems to be that since you won't run into 'earth-shattering algorithmic breakthroughs' in every OS releases, what're you gonna do to bump your performance numbers higher? Although the example used is OS X, the article points out that Windows uses the same approach."
The Almighty Buck

Leveraging Linux when Hardware is a Commodity? 69

Posted by Cliff from the it-all-boils-down-to-added-value dept.
AKInnovation asks: "My company produces peripheral hardware used in commercial applications, such as retail POS. In our market, amongst other such hardware manufacturers, we are the only ones to offer Linux software solutions (drivers). This distinction has recently won us several large accounts. When the hardware becomes a commodity, and you must compete on the software side to keep the money coming in, how can releasing your code as Open Source be rationalized to management?"
Communications

Generating Revenue with On-Line Ads? 64

Posted by Cliff from the maintaining-product-visibility-on-the-internet dept.
ratajik asks: "In my continuing quest to generate revenue from my open source project, I've been attempting to use on-line ads. What are other Slashdot users' experiences with on-line ads? Which are the best methods (presentation, click-through, purchase, etc.), and which are the best companies that you've deal with?"
GUI

Dealing with the Unix Copy and Paste Paradigm? 1125

Posted by Cliff from the it-works-well-enough-once-you-learn-how-to-use-it dept.
MolecularBear asks: "I grew up on Windows machines, using the ol' ctrl-c to copy and ctrl-v to paste. For the past few years I've been a hardcore Linux user, running it almost exclusively at home and at work. As I am sure you are all aware, highlighting text in Linux automatically performs a copy while the middle mouse button performs a paste. The Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v standard works in many applications, but not all. Lately I have begun to find the automatic highlight-copy to be annoying. As in, I'll highlight text to copy it, then realize I want to highlight a block of text for the purpose of deleting it. Of course, the second highlighting overwrites the first highlighting. I am curious about how other people accomplish their copy/paste needs. Any special setups, applications, or words of wisdom?"
Graphics

Modern Video Cards with Open Specs? 63

Posted by Cliff from the an-extinct-hardware-species? dept.
JessLeah asks: "I've been having trouble finding decent, 3D-accelerated drivers for video cards (of late-90s/early-2000s vintage) under Linux. I'd just get a newer card, but it seems like the situation for newer cards is even worse. The market at present seems to be little more than an nVidia/ATI duopoly, and neither nVidia nor ATI have open specifications available for their chipsets. As a result, both of them presently have binary-only, x86-only, Linux-only XFree86 drivers as their sole alternative to Windows. Are there any modern chipsets (with a reasonable cost) that actually have open specifications available online -- or, at a minimum, open-source drivers that can actually compile on things other than Linux/x86" What was the last video card with open specifications that you can remember?
Security

Administering a PC in a Vacation Rental Home? 97

Posted by Cliff from the ammenities-and-security-nightmares dept.
mrn121 asks: "Some relatives of mine are preparing their beach house for rental, and they have asked me to assist in setting up some of the on-site technology. One of my ideas was to add a computer with high-speed internet access to the house, but security issues may be overwhelming. I have administered campus computing labs in the past, so I am familiar with locking systems down, but I am curious about what level of security readers might suggest, and how to go about achieving an appropriate balance between security and usability for such an application. On one hand, I don't want renters to clutter the computer with software and useless bookmarks, but on the other hand, I don't want the system to be utterly useless. One major difference between this computer and a lab computer is that I will not have access to the machine for the entire summer, while the house is being rented."
Spam

Overcoming MAPS Reverse-Lookup Oppression? 97

Posted by Cliff from the all-servers-do-not-have-proper-reverse-lookups dept.
ArghBlarg asks: "Imagine the following scenario: you're the volunteer admin for a small, non-profit site for a few local artists and musicians. You run your web site and SMTP server out of your laundry room, via cable broadband. The broadband provider doesn't mind, as you only get a few hits a day; you keep your system secure and were only rooted once, over 4 years ago (hey, it happens). Your site has never, ever (to your knowledge) relayed spam. On the whole you've been an exemplary netizen. One day, some email you send bounces because your ISP's entire netblock has been placed on the MAPS DUL. True, your server's IP isn't technically static (though it hasn't changed in 12 months); because your domain is embedded within the broadband provider's larger IP block, reverse lookups don't give your domain name, rather that of the provider (with a huge number prefixed as the hostname). Hence you're considered a rogue SMTP node and blocked by MAPS. I've emailed MAPS but they won't agree to whitelist me. I have a proper MX record for my SMTP server, under my domain name. What can I do? Is there any way to make my legitimate domain take precedence in reverse-lookups, so I don't show up as being part of a spam-friendly network?"
Businesses

Becoming a CLEC? 42

Posted by Cliff from the dial-up-ISPs-gone-DSL dept.
eric76 asks: "It finally happened. DSL has come to the town where I work in Texas. While most would see that as a plus, the problem is that I work for a small ISP offering dialup and fixed wireless. The $26.95 / month DSL could drive us out of business. So I'm looking at what it takes to become a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier). That is, we'd become a local telephone company purchasing telephone service, particularly DSL, at wholesale from the ILEC (SBC) and reselling it at retail prices. Has anyone else gone through this? What did it cost? How long did it take? Is there a minimum size to make it worthwhile?"
Movies

Lord of the Rings Home Marathons? 120

Posted by Cliff from the movie-watching-of-epic-proportions dept.
Pepebuho asks: "Given that LOTR 3 is out, how many of you have staged Home LOTR Marathons? How long did they take? Was it fun or did everybody fell asleep by the middle of the Return of the King?"
Games

Playing Games While Not Ruining Your Relationship? 1054

Posted by Cliff from the razor-sharp-balancing-acts dept.
Silicon Mike asks: "A nice sized group of us here at work recently picked up City of Heroes, and started playing together. While all of us were gamers to some extent, now we're all pretty addicted and want to play together online all the time. The problem some of us are running into is that our significant others aren't too happy with us gaming all the time. Other then the two obvious solutions (quit playing or dump the significant other) I'm wondering how other people have deal with it? I tried installing Zoo Tycoon on my other computer and saying 'Look honey, cute bears' but she just didn't bite."
Displays

Homemade Heads Up Display For Bicycling? 27

Posted by Cliff from the right-in-front-of-your-eyes dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "I am a geek that bicycles in an urban center. After seeing this commercial product, I was interested in the possibility of building a homebrew HUD for a bicycle helmet. I searched the usual places and couldn't find much so I thought I'd ask the readers of Slashdot. A HUD that displays speed, distance, and cadence seems very feasible as many bike computers collect that data. A great longshot would be a range-finder that told you the distance to the object you were turned toward, but I'm not crossing my fingers for that. So what components would be needed to make such a cool device?"
Data Storage

Windows Alternatives to NTFS? 140

Posted by Cliff from the seeking-more-filesystem-drivers dept.
Maidjeurtam asks: "I'm a multi-OS user. Although Linux is what I use the most these days (I run it on my primary P4 box and on my iBook), I also run Mac OS X and a Windows XP on other machines. Of course, those boxes are networked, but sometimes, I just prefer to plug one machine's hard disk into another. I often work with big DV files (> 4GiB) and it looks like I have no other choice than having a different filesystem on each of my boxes. Granted, Linux can read NTFS (Macs can too) and even write to NTFS partitions thanks to tools like Captive, but I don't like the idea of running Windows code on my Linux box. In fact, I don't want my data stored on a proprietary, closed filesystem. I've googled a bit and it seems there's no modern (free-as-in-speech) filesystem I can install on Windows. I'd love to have ReiserFS running on my XP box, for example. Am I condemned to stay with NTFS, or do you guys know of a Windows-compatible, open filesystem that I can use?"

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