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Three Great Reasons Why Even Lonely Developers Need Source Control | Web Builder Zone
“Sometimes, when you’re a lone developer on a project you skip some of the important facets of developing as a group. Like iteration planning, bug tracking, and source control. Well, I’m here to tell you that having source control is the most important part of your application (that’s not written by you, that is). Here are three great reasons why you should never develop without it, in desc order of importance.”
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open…: Russia to create “National OS” Based on GNU/Linux?
“Although the proposal is still in its early stages, the attractiveness of the proprosal to a government keen to assert its independence at all levels is obvious. It will be interesting to see how this develops.”
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Love: massively multiplayer world created by lone developer – Boing Boing
Story is almost a year old, but very interesting.
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Eskil Steenberg interviewed about his one-man MMO project “Love” – Massively
“Have you ever wondered what it would take for a single person to create an MMO? Is a task this monumental even possible? Apparently it is, given what we’ve seen and read of Love, an MMO being developed by a single man — Eskil Steenberg.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
I’m sure IBM Global Business Services Russia stands ready to sign a contract to help them in their project.
Times change, and business changes with them. I remember stories from the 1980s of IBM Customer Engineers being based in Vienna, and providing service behind the “Iron Curtain” by special negotiation between the relevant governments. I also remember restrictions on which countries you could overnight in, when travelling on IBM business; I think it was somewhere around Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, or Finland; but don’t quote me.
On the other topic, the thing about ‘licences’ reflects a divergence between the view of the salesman selling ‘boxed’ consumer software, and the realities of life on the wide open spaces of the public Internet. I guess it’s most sharply seen in the proposition that you can go into BestBuy (or any number of competitors) and pick up a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista for just a fistful of dollars, and then you take it home, plug it in, and find that three million of them have apparently contracted a ‘worm’ and are busily trying to spread it more widely.
I’m not sure what the ‘worm’ is trying to do; but it certainly makes all the affected computers different from each other, and takes them a step away from being controlled by their nominal owner. And really, I don’t think the problem is Microsoft-specific; I think any popular software on a public network will suffer the same type of problem eventually; it’s just that this Microsoft product has the largest quantity ‘out there’ at the moment.
How much of the $220 they get at ‘retail’ for each copy will Microsoft have to spend on remediation, in terms of employing software developers to find and fix whatever is going on, and in terms of distributing a resolution ? And what happens further down the pricing curve ? I’m fairly sure Lenovo won’t be paying anything like $220 per copy.
Do you get to a point where the service cost to keep the thing under control rises above the revenue from the customer ? And if so, what does a business then do ?