451

The 404 1,080: Where we paint the sixteenth chapel (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Ray Bradbury may soon be honored online with "451" error code for Internet censorship.

- Time Warner Cable grabs patent to prevent DVRs from skipping commercials.

- Twitter to grant Web sites extra characters with "expansive tweets."

- Select audiences at Disney-Pixar's "Brave" will be treated to Dolby's new Atmos sound system.… Read more

Ray Bradbury, author of 'Fahrenheit 451', dies at 91

Science fiction literature pioneer Ray Bradbury, whose works included "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles," died overnight. He was 91.

His passing was confirmed by io9 through his family and biographer, as well as by USA Today through his daughter.

CNET contacted the Bradbury family for confirmation. We'll update the story when we get a response.

Bradbury wrote one of the quintessential dystopian novels with "Fahrenheit 451," practically required reading for many high-school students. He also authored the script for the 1956 film "Moby Dick" and wrote scripts for the classic … Read more

Tweak central

Built-in administrative tools let you configure and even customize how Windows works. You can change everything from start-up to display and folder options, but the controls aren't all in one place. They generally require a bit of knowledge and experience to get the most out of them without making things worse, all the more so when the Windows Registry is involved. GIGATweaker from 7room C0DE is a powerful tool for optimizing Windows that not only collects Windows' built-in functions in one console-style interface, but also offers clear explanations of what each change does as well as its implications for … Read more

Forrester misunderstands its 'intellectual property'

The conventional wisdom is that scarcity makes a product worth buying.

Whether in software development or software analysis, the thinking goes that making your products freely available extinguishes the desire to buy it.

It's a great thought. Unfortunately, it's not true--at least, not to the extent that its proponents would like.

Take Forrester. The venerable analyst firm has decided to stop letting analysts maintain personal blogs and instead to aggregate their blogs on Forrester.com. The content will still be free and viewable by anyone.

In and of itself, this isn't particularly controversial. However, the aggregation will … Read more

Open-source VC investments: Time for payback

Venture capitalists have poured $3.2 billion into open-source companies since 1997, according to a new report from The 451 Group. It's about time we started delivering a return on that investment.

In some ways, of course, this $3.2 billion investment has already been repaid several times over. The Linux Foundation, for example, estimates that that the Linux kernel is worth $10.8 billion in free research and development, and a compelling argument has been made that open-source vendors have already saved customers $60 billion in license fees they'd normally be paying.

Indeed, if you expand beyond … Read more

Open source zigs in a zagging VC market

Over the past year, the open-source business community has collectively donned a hair shirt over stumbles in venture funding, especially when venture funding in open-source companies took an apparent 12 percent slide in the third quarter of 2008.

However, while the second half of 2008 saw declines in open source-related venture funding, overall, funding levels were 35.5 percent higher than in 2007, according to The 451 Group.

This is pretty amazing, when you consider that overall U.S. venture capital investments plummeted 8 percent over 2007 funding levels, as TechCrunch reports.

And if you treat Washington state as a … Read more

Proprietary buys of open-source firms to flourish?

The 451 Group's Matt Aslett believes that a perfect storm is brewing for serious mergers and acquisitions around open source in 2009. Having a (literally) vested interest in the matter, I'd like to see his prophecy come true.

Aslett provides a long list of reasons to suppose that 2009 is the year of the open-source buyout, among them:

Proprietary vendors see open source as a means of entering adjacent markets. Proprietary vendors see open source as a means of expanding reach and a potential source of upsell opportunities.

I've written on this second reason before, arguing that … Read more

Links of the day, January 6, 2009

Commuting down to the valley from SF is such a time-suck that I ran out of time and energy to get in any quality blog time. Fortunately, others wrote things for you to enjoy.

The Register: A crack in the madness of clouds --My latest Cloud-oriented piece for El Reg in which I use the terms "cloud-droplets" and "data-as-an-answer." I am sorry for both.

WSJ: Premium Tuna Sells for $104,400 in Auction --Did you know that Japan had strategic tuna reserves?

NY Times: Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power --R is like Erlang for … Read more

Yet another overblown open source debate

Matt Aslett of The 451 Group and I met in London this morning, and discussed a range of issues. One thing that came up, which Aslett discusses on his blog, was the furor over CPAL, AGPL, and other open-source licensing designed for the Internet. I heavily contributed to that furor but, looking back, it would seem that the concerns were almost completely overblown.

Mea culpa.

A year and a half later, very few open-source projects use the CPAL license, which introduced a specific form of graphical attribution for open-source projects. There was sound around it, and there was fury, but … Read more