Author Archives: Ron Bieber

Joel On Software: The Economics of Open Source

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Earlier this week I wrote about a podcasted lecture by Clayton Christensen called Capturing The Upside, in which he explained in understandable terms the concepts of commoditization and decommoditization.

Well, I’ve hit Chapter 40 of the Joel On Software book and lo and behold, another lesson on these concepts appears. Joel Spolsky does a really good job of explaining these concepts and applying them to Open Source in his article Strategy Letter V – The Economics of Open Source.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m getting a ton of value out of this book. I highly recommend it. This has been one of those books that have been very hard to set down once I pick them up.

You can buy Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity by clicking on its title, or going directly to Amazon.

Stealing Your Neighbors Wi-Fi

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I found Jonna pointed me to an article on CNN in which readers react to an article published previously about “stealing Wi-Fi”.

I tend to agree with the people who say that it is your responsibility as someone who owns a router to secure it. You can’t complain about people around your neighborhood stealing bandwidth from you if your going to leave the router wide open, discoverable, and unencrypted.

It’s time we all start taking a little personal responsibility rather than expecting the government to punish people for our laziness, don’t you think?

Guitarist : Dave Paris

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I was listening to The Distorted View podcast earlier today (a quite disturbing episode, I might add) when he started doing listener mail. During this segment one of the mail messages he received was why he didn’t play Joe Satriani during this segment anymore, to which his reply was “… because I don’t want to get sued”. In the background, I heard some really great sounding guitar music.

He then mentioned that he was using music from a guy named Dave Paris. I went to his site and started listening to his music this evening. The guy is pretty damn good.

There is one problem. There are some goofy URL’s here, so you will not be able to listen to these unless you fix the URL once you click on his links on the music page. Change the %5C characters in the URL right after the ‘tunes’ directory to a forward slash (‘/’) and the files download fine. For example,:

http://www.daveparis.com/tunes%5CWise%20Mans%20House.mp3

becomes

http://www.daveparis.com/tunes/Wise%20Mans%20House.mp3

The two songs I’m digging the most right now are Wise Mans House and Greater than Angels, two ‘shredder’ type songs.

Check them out and tell me what you think. Incidentally, he is also looking for musicians to make real recordings of these songs. He is calling the songs in their current state “Prototype Demo Tunes/Future Hits“.

28th Anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley

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I’ve always thought that people make too much of a big deal about Elvis Presley, but the fact of the matter is, he had a hand in changing music as we know it as much as any of the music icons. Today marks the 28th anniversary of his death. I can remember how much everyone around me was affected by this event, even though by the time it happened, even as a nine year old I could see it coming — it was just a matter of when.

Anyway, while the idea and idol worship around Elvis has always annoyed me, there aren’t many non-gospel Elvis songs that I would actually turn off if they were on the radio. The music was cool for its time and is, in a sense, timeless.

As I sat thinking about how revered he has always been and how much it has always bothered me how much of a big deal people have made of his death, I realized that when you really think about it he was the Kurt Cobain of his time — which when put in that perspective you can kind of understand all of the hype. Every generation has one of these musical heroes that brought them together, and then died due to some sort of act that — ultimately — they did to themselves.

When it comes right down to it, Elvis has and always will be the universal music icon and hero. I guess I’ll just have to accept that.

Wikipedia has a full history of Elvis, his career, and his demise.

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