Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.
TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.
Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.
I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels
A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.
Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!
More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.
When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.
Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?
It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.
When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.
Comments
So we've relaunched FSDaily.com
So we've relaunched FSDaily.com. Free Software Daily is a digg style news hub based on pligg. In our upcoming queue, we can boast more free software news articles than any other site. And it's up to you the readers to decide which ones are important enough to reach the homepage. If you haven't looked already, go and check it out and let us know how you feel about it...
Subscribed by rss
It's a nice site, I subscribed to it by rss. So I'll see it every time I check my google reader. :)
I've subscribed!
I'm subscribed to a number of RSS feeds already (among them Slashdot, Groklaw NewsPicks, and TechDirt), so not all the news are new to me by the time they appear on FSDaily. Nevertheless, sometimes I do find news that I haven't seen anywhere else.
And besides, it's great to have a news hub with "free" in the title, and not "open". ;-)
subscribed but then unsubscribed
i subscribed to it in my rss reader ("tiny tiny rss" or tt-rss), but after a week or so i unsubscribed.
why? too much noise. i don't know if anybody has found a good way to integrate rss with reader submitted/voted news sites (digg, etc). i don't want to wade through all the lowly rated stories in my rss reader, but only the highly rated ones. or at least i want to know which stories are which. but stories appear in the rss feed shortly after they are added (or at least that is how they appeared in my rss reader), which is too early in the voting process to make a "good" or "bad" determination. so i end up wading through tens of stories per day without the benefit of the community voting process.
maybe an updated-daily rss feed of the top rated stories from the previous day? that would give the stories some time to amass votes and earn a (initial) good/bad score.
because of the dynamics of a user voted news site, i don't know how to best combine an rss feed (static) with fsd (dynamic), but that what i saw with tt-rss and fsd didn't work for me.
I'm not really a newsie...
I'm not really a newsie most of the time, but this will definitely carry a lot of the news that I am interested in. I just put it in my top-level bookmarks.
Matthew Flaschen
I like the new FSDaily (never used the old one). Now, how about adding it to the link list below your own blogs (along with Delicious, Digg, etc.)?...
Looking into it
We're looking into it Matt. Thanks.