10:00 AM *YAWN*

Well, I got the movie thing taken care of. Didn't do much else, including the things I had planned. Doesn't bother me much, though; I relaxed, and that's a good thing. I'll worry about Mandrake later.

This week promises to be long and dull; my main task for the week is documenting and completing my beer truck book. I hate documentation with a passion; Keri's the tech writer, not me. But it has to be done. Unfortunately.

Spent a bit of time talking with a few online-people (different from Real Life people, doncha know) about X-Men and the "political message;" namely, a U.S. Senator demanding that all mutants be registered because they might be dangerous. "These so-called children are in classrooms with your kids, and we don't know what they might be able to do." Many, many people in the online community are equating this with the persecution of "outcasts" in American schools, where children are singled out for "antisocial" behavior, and in some cases suspended or even expelled for the crime of not fitting in with the other kids. They're the dangerous ones, after all. It's never the captain of the football team or the head cheerleader who brings the rifle to school. All the arguments that happened post-Columbine are back, because people are watching X-Men and saying "this could never happen" - only to have their children say "Uh, Mom? Where have you been?"

Good question...

10:00 AM Wednesday. Hmmm. Oh, yes, I remember yesterday now. Rather dull, actually, lots of typing, documentation, and so on, very little interesting work to do.

I did discover that I'm missing a cable for the DLT tape library; that could get expensive, somewhere on the order of $80 or so, if I can't find one for it. Annoying, if nothing else.

7:00 PM At that point, I was interrupted, and never got back to it. The editor remained open, haunting me... I just didn't have the time. Oh well.

This afternoon I went ahead and installed Mandrake again on my laptop; shrank its share of the disk and reinstalled a fairly low-level desktop OS. Using Enlightenment as the window manager, StarOffice until there's something better, and a few of the basic necessities; web browser, Xemacs, a few other toys and games.

It works correctly, and the install was almost dull; the only tricky part was the installation of the network card; for some reason the installer detected and activated it, but refused to actually install it. A few moments' work after reboot solved that, and now I once again have both fully-capable OS's on my laptop.

Anything else of interest? Hrmm... uh, well, not really. Still working on documentation and so on. I did discover that due to a visit from "The Boss" planned for Friday, I have to clean my work area tomorrow. This really should be done only by a team of trained professionals, with the proper safety gear and heavy equipment, but I'll have to make do somehow. The trials and tribulations of being a professional systems administrator...

10:30 AM First up, I'm going to Pull a Tom and change over DNS and mail starting in a few hours. So email may be funky, and some burps as things propogate. My iTOOL/Zanova/Onvia/Whoever the hell they are this week account will be updated with the rest, so HOPEFULLY you'll see this site regardless of what you hit, but I can't guarantee that. We'll find out.

Incidently, I am also using Central Info - their price is right (free!) and they seem to be well organized. Later on, I want to host it myself, but that's just because I'm a control freak. And that will have to wait for DSL and mulitple IPs, anyway.

What else am I doing? Hmmm...

Oh yeah. Working. Amazing thing about that... <G>

Got into an argument about the GPL and Richard Stallman and GNU and all those other popular buzzwords... since I came through that with only minor burns, I figured I'd go for another set...

The main argument that RMS and the GNU crowd like to use is that Software Should Be Free. They push the GPL license because it makes the software free; you essentially no longer control it. Anyone can take it and make what they wish out of it. That's great in some ways, but... what about the developers? Don't they have any rights? If I spend months and years working on a program, you're damn right I expect to be paid for it; why on earth would I give it away? Well, the License Nazis chant, you see, Free Software is always better. And since it's better, more people use it. And some of them will pay for it out of the goodness of their hearts.

I see. So basically, if I understand this argument correctly, you believe that if software is released as Open Source, it will become better than any other "Closed Source" program. Assuming that to be true - and I can think of cases where it's not, but let's assume - where do you make a living from? This sounds a lot like the old "we lose money on every sale, but we hope to make it up in volume" argument. In fact, even the advocates were unable to find a single company doing this profitably - their few examples, like RedHat, don't make a profit, they sell shares to raise more money to spend. VA Linux? They don't make money from Open Source, they make money by selling hardware. Andover/SlashDot/etc? They don't make money off open source, either; they're subsidized by VA Linux, who, again, sell hardware.

I fail to see where there's money to be made. Money gets passed from pile to pile, down the ladder... but in the end, the money coming in at the top has nothing to do with Open Source. It's a subsidy, a charity. Eventually, the well will run dry... and then what? Hollow silence answers...

So, anyway. If someone wants to explain where the money comes in (and no, don't bother pointing me to The Cathedral and the Bazaar or any of that; I've read them, thank you. Nice stories.) please do. Oh, and another thing - the "you can charge for tech support" argument don't fly, either. Treating technical support as a revenue stream is a self-defeating proposition.

Later all...