Washington Post story talks of LifeMinders, Inc., an online company that asks people to reveal all kinds of personal details about themselves — and has gotten millions to do so by helping to organize their lives in return.

Happy Halloween! Oh, alright, it probably will have already been
Halloween
by the time you get this, but you’re still hip-deep in candy. Isn’t
Halloween great? You run around the neighborhood dressed like a maniac,
and you grab candy from willing donors. It’s fantastic. They want to
give
you candy, you want to take candy. You want to hoard, they want to let
you
do it. If you don’t hoard the candy, you’re thought of as
strange. What a great business model!

Open Source is like Halloween for geeks. The only strange dynamic is
that
the kids grabbing the candy and the adults distributing the candy are
the
same group of people, and you’re expected to let anyone eat from your
bottomless pillowcase of candy. No problem, right? It’s wonderful! It’s
fantastic! It’s giving! It’s freedom!

Until you realize that sometime, somewhere, someone’s got to pay for
the
candy. Oh, we’ve advanced beyond the concept of spending cash for a bag
of
‘fun size’ Snickers bars. It’s all about time and interest. Time
actually
isn’t the hard part. Sure, a lot of developers are super-busy, but
you’ll
find that getting a program written takes more than just time. It’s got
to
be interesting.

That’s right, it’s got to be interesting. Want to know why there’s no
fantastic small-business financial management tools for Linux? Because
small-business financial management software is only slightly more
interesting than watching a full evening of ‘The Brady Brides’
reruns. It’s boring! It’s stupid! It’s painful! They need something
more
to get them involved. Here’s some tips to getting your application
written.

On Halloween, the silliest thing you could do is to be one of those
people
that just leaves a basket full of candy on the doorstep with a little
sign
that says ‘please take one.’ Are you mad? The first kid that comes to
that
door is gonna bolt up there, dump the basket into his or her bag, turn
around and say, ‘It’s empty!’ Duh. Want kids to share? Supervise. What
does this mean? Get involved. Help them. Make them feel wanted and stay
onboard so you can get what you really want.

Want them to come to your house again and again and again? Be the guy
who
gives out entire candy bars. Oh, yes. They will flock to your house.
They
will come by your house many times, sometimes in different costumes. I
know this because I did this when I was a kid. Always keep a spare mask
around. Anyway. The kids need something to come back for. Give them a
huge
Snickers bar. I’m not saying the ‘King Size,’ but certainly bigger than
the standard Halloween ‘Fun Size.’ Get the big candy bars. What does
this
mean? Support them! It’s not enough just to be around. You’ve got to
give
them the good stuff. Definitely time, maybe some money. Maybe some
equipment. Anything you can spare, but make sure you’re giving the best
you can.

See use Perl announcement for specs, description, download mirrors.

Four keys on the latest Apple Pro keyboards won’t work properly with Macs shipped prior to July 19; Apple is offering refunds or order cancellations. Details at MacCentral Online.

The Duke of URL reviews Gentus v3, the latest Abit repackaging of Red Hat Rawhide with additional Abit features. Covered are pros and cons of Gentus, what is new in v3, installation, and how Abit has address the GPL problems with earlier releases.

IBM DeveloperWorks has a very detailed article on the changes in the forthcoming 2.4 Linux Kernel.

It was announced today that an “easy” installer for PHP v4 on Windows has been released. This allows people to setup a PHP/Apache server on a Windows-based workstation more easily, allowing them to develop and test solutions at their desks.

Slashdot reports that the European Union is objecting to the recent AOL and Time-Warner merge. The EU says that the result is too powerful, and could harm consumers.

Austin360.com reports on Amazon.com’s recent privacy policy change, as well as past privacy issues Amazon has faced.

Qbizm technologies, Inc. is happy to announce a HyperQbs alpha developer portal for free downloads and alpha testing of the new Java2EE and XML based HyperQbs technology.
HyperQbs defines the “write once, view anywhere” architecture solving the technology gap, which forces developers to rewrite their internet application each time a new display enters the market (different HTML browsers, WAP, PDAs, multimedia, PDF, e-mail clients, messaging — even microwave ovens, cars and other new devices yet to come).

“Java brought the market the ‘write once, run anywhere’ concept. The marriage of HyperQbs and Java makes a true revolution in internet software engineering resulting in ‘write once, run and view anywhere’. This not only simplifies the life of internet application developers and operators, but also delivers freedom, cuts down the costs and speeds up development and deployment in internet applications dramatically” said Peter K. Ulrich, CEO of Qbizm technologies, Inc.

“If you are a Java developer who is tired of the hassles associated with today’s approach to ‘website’ or better to say ‘internet application’ development. Also if you are fed up with the chewing-gum-glue-it-together approach resulting in spaghetti code and HTML mixtures rather than serious software engineering, then the HyperQbs innovative component-ware technology is right for you.” said Rene Michalek, Chief developer at Qbizm technologies, Inc.

HyperQbs technology is a successor of Servlets and JSP allowing complete separation of the work between programmers and web designers, enables team work, prototyping and incremental application life-cycle development of sophisticated internet applications with reusable plug-in components, called Qbs [read: Cubes].

Qbizm technologies, Inc. is in preparation to release the whole HyperQbs technology to open-source in the near future.

Let the Qbs roll . . .

Issued by the Press office of Qbizm technologies, Inc. at Saturday, 2 September 2000

For more information refer to:
Qbizm technologies, Inc.
Kralovopolska 139, BRNO
Czech Republic
+420 602 711 890
press@qbizm.com
www.qbizm.com
www.hyperqbs.org
–pulrich