As the real-estate market continues to cool, a growing number of brokers are doing what was until recently unthinkable. They are giving most of their commissions to buyers.

I may have a similar arrangement, but it has more to do with giving a friend experience than as an enticement. Although read enough of the Big Picture, and it definitely feels like it is worth waiting a couple of months. (Or longer...)

RealEstateJournal | Real-Estate Brokers Step Up Rebates to Home Buyers

Cedric's definition of mainstream includes being appealing to Visual Basic and PHP programmers. That seems to be the backdrop of his first two points, that Ruby and Rails are too hard for these folks. I can see some of these points - folks in our reading group have been somewhat mind bent by some of the Ruby concepts, and they are Java/C# folks, which would put them higher on the food chain than VB and PHP programmers. I think that some of this is just unfamiliarity as opposed to difficulty, but there's not doubt that there is a learning curve there.

Ted Leung on the air : What does it mean for Ruby on Rails to become mainstream?

SQL Server Everywhere is an "embeddded" database, used to store data on small devices, such as mobile phones, rather than require users to connect to a server to access information. Flessner said Microsoft had already developed the embedded database for internal use but will now release it as a commercial product.

Other companies, such as Oracle, IBM and Sybase, already offer embedded databases. In addition, there are several open-source options such as Sleepycat, which was recently purchased by Oracle.

Microsoft readies embedded database | CNET News.com

Cybernet Technology News offers a quick fix that can help with Firefox's annoying memory leakage. This fix will bump memory usage down to under 10MB every time you minimize Firefox (Windows OS, only). When minimized, it writes Firefox to the hard drive and fetches it from there when you maximize.

Simple Fix for Plugging Firefox Memory Leaks :: Street Tech :: hardware beyond the hype

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

Transient Systems (transient.net) was started 10 years ago (registered May 3, 1996). But it is the master of nothing.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Joseph Scott does some testing to remind us that while database abstraction layers are nice, there is a performance price to be paid — sometimes an expensive one.

The Price of PHP Database Abstraction | Gadgetopia

Microsoft has developed a fascinating style of using language--Microspeak, let's call it--with a refinement, a subtlety, a fine polish all its own. To understand certain announcements and news releases issuing from Redmond, Wash., requires rhetorical analysis and possibly a glossary. The exercise can be worth the effort, though, because after all, Microsoft is Microsoft. These days, if you don't savvy Microspeak, you're going to be left behind.

A Bug by Any Other Name by James Gleick

For those predominantly commercial source (IBM prefers "private" source) vendors, which have made amends with open source and cherry-picked among products to "open," the continued preservation of their commercial code is now suspect. The escalating JBoss-Red Hat stack strikes at the heart of the data center software infrastructure business. This expanded Red Hat stack is both wide and deep. If end users determine that scale, reliability and manageability of this stack meets their needs, this puts significant downward price pressure on the other infrastructure vendors as they sell a solution, or one-throat-to-choke, value.

Indeed, there are two major trends in open source, as evidenced by last week's LinuxWorld show: open source is moving downstream from Linux into virtualization in a big way, and simultaneously open source is moving up the stack abstraction to SOA. In the meantime, open source is hollowing out the middleware components beyond runtime to groupware, portal, directory, and transactional messaging. Tools is a done deal.

� Red Hat-JBoss points up seismic shift to an open source stack model | Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect | ZDNet.com

RedHat just took aim and shot its partner IBM in the foot. Or maybe IBM shot itself in the foot. While the deal makes little difference to IBM Systems and Technology group (hardware, servers and storage), for Software Group the deal serves to increase pressure on IBM margins.
...
I suspect in the long run that Oracle could still end up as JBoss steward, by acquiring Red Hat. Charles Phillips has plenty more deals in his sights.

The acquisition announcement is net positive for Novell SuSE "in light of its relationship with IBM. We might also now expect to see IBM reaching out to the Debian community. If you want to divide and rule, you need options to balance against each other. Red Hat is now a more troublesome partner than it was. We now have a new top reason why IBM could support Debian.

The deal shines a clear focus on the Linux market. Can IBM really afford not to be in control of its own distribution for the long term? Sure Linux can be swapped out but ISV relationships and hardened environments at customer shops can't. Let's not forget that IBM already paid Novell $50m to strengthen the relationship.

James Governor's MonkChips: Some thoughts on Red Hat's JBoss acquisition

PRICING: We will shortly be adding an additional page to go into detail about our pricing structure.

In a nutshell though, it`s like this:

Uploads: Entirely free

Downloads: Totally free from your own account, $20 for 1000Mb worth of files when downloading from other accounts

Bandwidth: No limits

Public Storage: Unlimited space, totally FREE for the lifetime of your account with us!

Private Storage: Storage for files marked `Private` will be charged at $20 per Gb after the first 12 months of storage.

Hope this is clear. To confirm, that`s unlimited storage space, totally free, for the life of the account and free downloading whenever you need your files.

Yet Another Online Storage Pricing Model (and associated startup)

Swapzies