Friday, June 18, 2004

Boingo beta? Boingo and the Mac. I'm not at all sure that there's a business model in Wi-Fi connections other than offering them as part of something else, but if anyone is going to make this work it's probably going to be Sky Dayton and his team at Boingo. I haven't used Boingo, in part because it's been a Windows-only service, and I've bugged Sky every time I've seen him for a Mac version. It's coming -- a beta Boingo for the Mac has been sent to a few folks, which means the real thing is coming soon. Still not sure about the business model, but I'm glad to see the Mac support.[Dan Gillmor's eJournal] I, too, have been banging on Boingo to produce a Mac client. See, if the WiFi connection you want to make requires Boingo, you can't get it with the Mac. Now, I don't think it should take a special client to grab a WiFi connection, but apparently some folks think that way. Must be what Dan means by "a business model." Pretty silly, seems to me, but there it is. 6:52:46 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

It's all relative. . . isn't it? From TechDirt: Steve Jobs Is Overpaid While Larry Ellison Is Underpaid. Nothing seems to get people riled up in the tech world like executive compensation arguments. Everyone likes to argue over who's overpaid and who's underpaid. Luckily, we no longer need to argue over it (yes, I know you will anyway) because the San Francisco Business Times has put their crack research team to the task, where they discovered: celebrity CEOs Terry Semel and Larry Ellison were underpaid, while Steve Jobs was overpaid. . . . Meanwhile, the worst on the list was Michael Cannon, CEO of Solectron, who brought home $18 million while his company lost $3.5 million.  [Techdirt] Cannon of Solectron was followed on this listing by, um, Craig Conway of PeopleSoft. Who, by the way, topped the AFL-CIO's list of overpaid IT execs. 6:32:07 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Of software myths For those of us who work closely with software developers, it pays to understand what they're up against. Which is why I read Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man Month some time back. I have the 20th anniversary edition, which includes some commentary by Brooks about what's changed, what's still valid, what he might've said differently. Over at the O'Reilly site, there's some commentary by Ed Willis, an admittedly youthful developer, entitled The Mythical Man Month Revisited. And there's the requisite Slashdot commentary. 10:35:10 AM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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