There has been a lot of discussion about the pricing of Radio Userland ever since it was announced that a small charge will be made for it once it's out of beta [Radio UserLand]. In August - when I had a lot of time on my hands and exam marking was an incentive for displacement activites - I had the bones of an idea* which is archived on eGroups here. Dave responded

That's very good Duncan! Almost, but I don't want to charge for Radio UserLand, and I don't want to limit people in their ability to program, quite the opposite.

Personally, I have no problem with Userland charging (a modest amount) for RU but I can see why others that may have predicated a business strategy on a free version of RU may be upset at the announcement that it won't be free. Of course, I think it would be great to have a free (cut-down) version of RU as this removes one of the major barriers to widespread adoption. I hope Userland and the RU community can come to some amicable arrangement regarding the free vs not-free version(s).

* Note: the current version of RU has wildly exceeded my expectations for 'programmability' so the ideas presented in August have largely been overtaken by developments.

Incidentally, Jim also believed it would be free

For some reason I thought it was going to be free. So did Duncan.

Jim's link to my page that states Dave had made assurances that it would be free was written a week or so after the assurance had been given.

Just to get this on record: I will be forever thankful to Dave and the rest of the team at Userland for creating that coolest of apps - Radio Userland. I have had the privilege of seeing it develop and, of course, benefitting from the free beta versions. It has been primarily responsible for bringing back music into my daily regime. I will happily pay a moderate price for it when the time comes. Just as I wouldn't expect my other indispensible apps - BBEdit, Conversant, SoundJam, Anarchie, Frontier, Eudora, etc. - to be free, I don't expect RU to be either. I'm looking forward to having time to explore the full potential of RU.

Many thanks Userland.

Jeremy takes a Look At The Community:

Things are going remarkably well around here... if this keeps up, this community will be one for the record books and endless scholarly dissertations. Here's to another year like it!

I couldn't agree more with your sentiments Jeremy. I've thoroughly enjoyed the last year being a small part of the community. Why it works so well I don't rightly know, but work it does. And Susan Kitchens' AIDS Day: Remembering Jeffry Michael is an immensely moving example of the special people that form the community. Al Hawkin deserves a special mention too:

I always appreciate a visit to Al [View From the Heart] Hawkins' weblog. It grounds me to reality and reminds me how fortunate I am.

And in February on [Friday] Crusoe's Companion Website! I put down some further thoughts about community involvement:

We aren't isolated individuals since we read (some of) each others weblogs and, like now, we participate in a 'collective consciousness' where we react to what others say. We may rarely post follow-up messages but no doubt we ponder on what has been said -- whether we agree or disagree is unimportant.

Its's been a fascinating year and just the precursor for more to come. And that's why I think reports like BBC News | SCI/TECH | The revolution will be postponed are missing the point entirely because they ain't considering the two-way web.

via SiT - The Instructional Use of Learning Objects -- Online Version

This is the online version of The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, a new book that tries to go beyond the technological hype and connect learning objects to instruction and learning. You can read the full text of the book here for free. The chapters presented here are © their respective authors and are licensed under the Open Publication License v2.0, meaning that you are free to copy and redistribute them in any electronic or non-commercial print form.

Regular readers may know that I'm fond of the odd acronym or two ;-)

I was at the annual Strathclyde University Academic Selectors meeting earlier today. One of the projects discussed was the initiative by the West of Scotland universities to encourage pupils from schools in disadvantaged areas to apply to university. For example, less than 18% of pupils from Glasgow city schools go on to higher education. In some areas of the west of Scotland the application rate is less than 4%.

The acronym for the initiative is GOALS - which IIRC stands for Greater Opportunities for Access to Learning in Scotland.

I joked with the GOALS coordinator from the University of Strathclyde at the end of the meeting and suggested that if the University set up it's own initiative it could be known as Greater Access to Lifelong Learning at the University of Strathclyde - GALLUS. In case there are some non-Glaswegians reading here's the definition of gallus from Eejit's Glasgow Patter:

Gallus: In Glasgow this is a general term of approval for anything considered excellent: 'Gallus waistcoat, wee man!' When applied to people it's more about attitude and includes elements of toughness, cheek, self-assurance and boldness: He jist stoats right inty the place as gallus as anything. Ye'd never get me gaun oot wi wan a these wee guys that think they're gallus'

Seems like the perfect acronym to me ;-)

Sharky Extreme - PC - Hardware - Itanium Technology Guide

The Itanium is a new processor family and architecture, designed by Intel and Hewlett Packard, with the future of high-end server and workstation computing in mind. The Itanium is big, expensive, complex, and will come with massive internal resources. The Itanium is cutting-edge processor design. The Itanium will use an entirely new form of instruction set called EPIC, which has the potential of bringing unseen levels of parallelism inside a processor. Today, we are going to look at the technical side of the EPIC architecture and the Itanium processor.

Interestingly, I set my students an Itanium practical [52.225 | CAD Practical - Merced] almost three years ago. Needless to say those students have since graduated so many of the links on the submissions page are now broken. However, a number of students sent me their web pages and I have recorded them for prosperity at Index of /~duncan/cdrom/archives/ay1997/teaching/cad/practicals/ia64

I wonder if my old students will recall their practical work now that Itanium has become a reality?

Joel on Software: Up the tata without a tutu

Until yesterday, the FogBUGZ license said that you couldn't reverse engineer the program, attempt to look at the source code, or modify it in any way. Various honest people have asked how much we charge for a source license, so that they could customize a few things.

Hmmm. Why does the license say you can't change the source code? I couldn't think of a single reason. In fact I thought of a lot of counter-reasons, and immediately changed the license agreement. So now you're going to have to sit through one of those old-fuddy-duddy stories from my past...

Joel's stories are far from fuddy-duddy. Well worth keeping tabs on Joel on Software.

Bryan Bell's Simple Navigation tip is very similar to the way I have set up my own template which 'includes' the Navigation page and my personal Bookmarks page.

Adam Curry's Weblog - Mail Pages

I get mail, lots and lots of mail. Instead of just forwarding all the good bits to friends I also want some of them available to everyone.

That's what the Mail Pages are for, so if you never want email posted publicly, Do Not send it to adam@curry.com

If the e-mails are all going to be as hilarious as these then I'm going to 'eavesdrop' on a regular basis ;-)

ZDNet: eWEEK: Linux looms large at IBM

While the Armonk, N.Y., company's initial goal was to enable Linux on the mainframe, it is now working to effectively cluster large-scale Linux configurations. The result should mean more scalable and reliable server and mainframe applications for such things as e-mail, Web hosting and enterprise resource planning.

I know quite a few of my students dip into this weblog. I also know that some of them are serious game afficiandos but I doubt that they come anyway near to the guy that's auctioning The Ultimate Video Game Library! on eBay. Bids closed at $70,000 which didn't even meet the reserve price!! via [hbwt]

BBC News | UK | Spy plans 'threat to human rights'

Civil liberties campaigners have warned the government that granting police and secret services greater snooping powers would be a breach of human rights.

It has been reported that British intelligence services and the police are seeking powers to log all telephone calls, e-mails and internet traffic in the UK.

This would be an unbelievable development and a massive intrusion on privacy. Would the government countenance the mandatory 'steaming open of envelopes' and recording of all postal correspondence? Can you imagine the uproar that that would cause?

Perhaps the most incredulous aspect of this whole idea is that the blithering idiot - the deputy director general of NCIS, Roger Gaspar - who is responsible for the proposal estimates that a database to store all the information would cost about £3m to set up and £9m a year to run!! Unbelievable!!!

Regular readers may recall my mentioning Buchanan International. Looks like they have this sort of technology already and the people:

FT.com | People | Special

"How do we write a program that detects anything bad that's going on on the internet?" asked Stephen Whitelaw, former Glasgow University lecturer and chief executive of Buchanan International, a security software company based outside Glasgow.

...

These intellectual feats breed eccentrics. One Actis employee, Roy MacNaughton, a 21-year-old drop-out from Glasgow University and a gifted astrophysicist who was also a concert grade pianist at the age of 12, guards the database.

A second, a ruthless tracker of criminals known only as Stew, is unkempt, sleeps in the office overnight and pads about barefoot. "We found Stew in the PC section of a bookshop in Glasgow - the best place to find his sort," says Whitelaw. "The last thing I want is disciplined minds."

Good to know all this data is in safe hands then!! By my reckoning they'll get £1m each to set it up and £3m each per annum to not spend on socks and toiletries. BTW, if you're reading this Stephen, Roy and Stew it's nothing personal OK ;-)

Update: Out of curiosity I visited the Buchanan International website. [health warning: do not visit if you are susceptible to epilepsy - really]:

Coming soon...
In precisely 11 days, 18 hours, 6 minutes and 20 seconds we launch our exciting new website.
Until then you can view our existing temporary site by clicking here.

In a cunning ploy to throw off potential hackers and other ne'er-do-wells, the self-proclaimed monitors of the 'Dark Side of the Internet' have cleverly placed their welcome text and the 'here' link on a nice blue background thus rendering the link almost invisible. An even more cunning stunt was to make sure that that link to the existing temporary link [currently] throws up a 404 Not Found

Obviously these subtle ploys are to demonstrate to the politicians and security services that Buchanan International is at the forefront of website protection measures (specifically sprinkling \s into URLs), dark-force counter-measures, and anti-snooping techniques. After all, if visitors don't have an epileptic seizure and then actually manage to find the link they'll just get a 404 Not Found. Brilliant! Way to go BI!!

Perhaps In precisely 11 days, 17 hours, 37 minutes and 37 seconds [at the time of writing] they'll launch their exciting new website by just fixing the link ;-)

Finally, for the terminally curious the Buchanan International Newspage announces:

buchanan and system lookout map the dark side of the web

Earlier this evening the family got together at my brother's to celebrate his birthday. Happy Birthday Richard

Talking of birthdays - EditThisPage.com celebrates it's first one tomorrow.

The Mops Page

Mops is Michael Hore's robust and powerful public-domain development system for the Macintosh. With Forth and Smalltalk parentage, Mops has extensive OOP capabilities including multiple inheritance, and a class library supporting the Macintosh interface.

Speaking of Forth reminds of my time at Dragon Data as the lead software designer for the Dragon Data Ltd DRAGON 32 / 64. The M6809 implementation of Forth ruuning on the Dragon was a nice development environment. I still have a soft spot for the Motorola 6809E - a lovely 8-bit architecture and probably the only processor with a SEX instruction ;-). One of these days I will need to write up my experiences whilst at Dragon. In the meantime any reader with way too much time on their hands can check out Google Search: Dragon 32 Smeed.

Coincidentally, a Google search with the words Smeed and Dragon will find a mention of my cousin Michelle who is heavily involved in Dragon Boat racing. Michelle helped with the staging of the first World Championships held outside of the Far East.

But the best known member of my immediate family is my uncle - Vic Smeed a famous model designer and author.