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SA solar star in GermanyKevin Davie, Mail & Guardian: 5 August 2007As a country we do not do too well on the green front. We are generally energy inefficient and wasteful. But we can take a small measure of pride next month when the first solar panels resulting from South African taxpayer-funded research and development come out of a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant costing upwards of R500-million.But South Africans will have to wait before they can use this technology. The panels about to come out of the production process next month are being produced and marketed in Germany.It will be a good two years before the first thin-film solar panels, as they are called, are manufactured in South Africa.The electricity-producing panels are leading edge in terms of both the cost, reckoned to be about a quarter of existing technology, and efficiency. These panels convert considerably more -- in excess of 16% -- of the sun’s rays to electricity than current offerings. As one observer says, “in solar anything above 10% is considered pretty good”.This solar technology, developed over a 13-year period at the Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg) with R13-million in funding from the department of science and technology’s innovation fund, stands to make a significant contribution to easing the country’s energy crisis.Its low cost, says one South African-based energy analyst, means that it can be cost competitive with coal-fired electricity, offering the prospect that this solar power can help the country to embrace clean, renewable energy.The German-based company, Johanna Solar Technology (JST), which secured the first licence to produce these panels, has three South African investors.Richemont/Venfin, Anglo Coal and the state-owned Central Energy Fund (3%) own 24% of JST.JST makes the solar panels under licence from PTIP, a South African company which is listed on the register of South African companies, Cipro, as a subsidiary of the University of Johannesburg. The other shareholder is Professor Vivian Alberts, the chief inventor. The University of Johannesburg did not respond to a verbal and email request for a breakdown on this shareholding.Maclean Sibanda, a senior patent attorney at the innovation fund, a business unit that reports to the department of science and technology, says the innovation fund will get 5% of any revenues earned by PTIP.Sibanda says that the innovation fund’s agreement with PTIP means that the intellectual rights to the invention have to remain in South Africa.The story of Alberts’s invention received a blast of publicity when the breakthrough was first announced a few years back, but for reasons that are unclear, there appears to be a reluctance by some of the parties to take the public into their confidence, so it has not been easy to get information. Some will only talk on an off-the-record basis.Plans for a production facility in South Africa, which will match that set up in Germany, are at an advanced stage and are expected to be finalised within the next two months. The facility will be the same size as the German plant, each year manufacturing panels that can produce 30MW of power. The plant represents an investment of between R500-million and R800-million.The facility will be sited at the coast as the major part of the production is likely to be exported. An apparently high-tech production process, the facility will create a relatively modest 150 direct jobs, but many more downstream as South Africans switch to this clean energy source.The Central Energy Fund will be the main South African investor, taking up between 33% and 49% of the shareholding. The other investors are expected to be one of the two private companies which are invested in JST, Richemont or Anglo Coal. The non-South African investors who are shareholders in JST are expected to hold about 40% of the South African manufacturing operation.The South African plant is also to benefit from any know-how that the German operation has learned from setting up the new plant. JST could also assist, such as in skills training of the South African workers.A site for the plant has been identified, one of the remaining requirements being that an environmental impact assessment (EIA) be completed before the manufacturing plant be built.The German licence restricts the licensor to selling outside of Africa. The South African licensor will have no such restriction. It will target both the continent and the rest of the global market.One source says that, when the technology was first marketed locally to investors, there was a marked lack of interest. “Investors were quite scared,” the source says, explaining that while the technology was proven in pilot studies it still had to be proven in a commercial manufacturing operation.German investors in the meantime learned of the technology and applied for a licence, one of three PTIP is understood to be issuing.The use of solar energy to heat hot water is relatively well known. The technology can also be relatively simple, being no more than passing water over a source that has been heated by the sun. Converting the sun’s rays into electrical power, a process known as solar photo voltaics, or solar PV, is a much more difficult and costly technology. Equipping an average household of five with solar PV can cost in the region of R100 000.Thin-film solar uses a layer of metals less than the thickness of a human hair to convert the energy from the sun into electricity.The technology developed by Alberts is not the only such solution. Fuel giant Shell is developing its own thin-film solar and Google founders, Larry Page and Segrey Brin have invested in another.Called Nanosolar, this is a well-resourced competitor that raised more than $100-million in funding last year.But Alberts’s solution is considered, at least by its supporters, to be the best of the best. It uses more metals, giving it more flexibility, and achieves the highest level of efficiency. It also reportedly offers significant cost advantages over rival technologies.One supporter says the local plant should be aiming to produce four gigawatts of panels rather than 30MW. He says producing at scale will bring costs down.A supplier of solar PV to the South African market grumbles that news of Alberts’s invention a few years back all but killed the domestic market as many people who were considering installing solar PV decided to wait until his solution was available, perhaps at as little as a quarter of the cost.Common business sense says it will be offered more cheaply than rival products, but that it will be some time before the price falls closer to its actual costs.

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Written by Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.” andy Pausch set the tone early on yesterday at his farewell lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you,” said Dr. Pausch, a 46-year-old computer science professor who has incurable pancreatic cancer. It’s not that he’s in denial about the fact that he only has months to live, he told the 400 listeners packed into McConomy Auditorium on the campus, and the hundreds more listening to a live Web cast. It’s more that “I am in phenomenally good health right now; it’s the greatest cognitive dissonance you will ever see — the fact is, I’m in better shape than most of you,” he said. And then, to the appreciative laughs and applause of his audience, Dr. Pausch dropped to the stage floor and did a set of pushups. “So anyone who wants to cry or pity me can come down here and do a few of those, and then you may pity me,” he said. “What we’re not going to talk about today,” he continued, “is cancer, because I’ve spent a lot of time talking about that … and we’re not going to talk about things that are even more important, like my wife and [three preschool] kids, because I’m good, but I’m not good enough to talk about that without tearing up.” What he was there to discuss was how to fulfill your childhood dreams, and the lessons he had learned on his life’s journey. When he was a boy, Dr. Pausch said, he had a concrete set of dreams: He wanted to experience the weightlessness of zero gravity; he wanted to play football in the NFL; he wanted to write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia (”You can tell the nerds early on,” he joked); he wanted to be Captain Kirk from “Star Trek”; and he wanted to work for the Disney Co. In the end, he got to tackle all of them, he said — even if his football accomplishments fell somewhere short of the NFL. In his 10 years at Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Pausch helped found the Entertainment Technology Center, which one video game executive yesterday called the premier institution in the world for training students in video game and other interactive technology. He also established an annual virtual reality contest that has become a campuswide sensation, and helped start the Alice program, an animation-based curriculum for teaching high school and college students how to have fun while learning computer programming. It was the virtual reality work, in which participants wear a headset that puts them in an artificial digital environment, that earned him and his Carnegie Mellon students a chance to go on the U.S. Air Force plane known as the “vomit comet,” which creates moments of weightlessness, and which the students promised to model with VR technology. And even though his football career ended in high school, he said, he probably learned more from that experience than all the other childhood goals he did achieve. Among other things, he learned the value of the coach yelling at him for his mistakes, because an assistant coach told him after one particularly brutal practice: “When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.” While he didn’t get to be Captain Kirk, actor William Shatner, who played Kirk, did visit him at Carnegie Mellon in recent years. “It’s cool to meet your boyhood idol,” Dr. Pausch said. “It’s even cooler when he comes to you to see what you’re doing in your lab.” And he got the chance to write the World Book’s article on virtual reality. Known for his flamboyance and showmanship as a teacher and mentor, Dr. Pausch talked Disney officials into letting him work on sabbatical at the company, helping design such virtual reality rides as the Magic Carpet and Pirates of the Caribbean. More recently, he got the chance to intern with Electronic Arts, the video game company, and that relationship prompted the firm to give Carnegie Mellon the right to use its famous Sims animated characters as part of the Alice curriculum. Near the end of his talk yesterday, Dr. Pausch surprised his wife, Jai, with a cake for her birthday on Monday, and persuaded the audience to sing for her. She managed to choke back her tears long enough to blow out the single candle on top. To honor his life and career, Electronic Arts announced it was setting up a scholarship fund for deserving female computer science majors at Carnegie Mellon. And the school itself said it would put his name on the footbridge that will connect the new Gates Computer Sciences Building and the Purnell Center for the Arts, symbolizing the way he linked those disciplines. Dr. Pausch’s ordeal began a year ago, when he began to feel bloated and his bowel movements changed, he said in an e-mail interview. When doctors did a CT scan to see if he had gallstones, they spotted a tumor. “I got the news from my GP,” he wrote, “who said ‘There’s a mass on your pancreas, and it’s not fair.’ “As I later told him, it’s unfortunate, and it’s unlucky, but it’s not unfair. As I always tell my 5-year-old, it’s not ‘unfair’ when you don’t get what you want. We all run the risk of getting hit by the cancer dart.” In a Web-based diary he kept of his treatment, Dr. Pausch concentrated on trying to improve his survival odds. He knew it would be an uphill battle. Despite improvements in treatment, the overall five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is just 5 percent. Even the one-year rate is only 26 percent. The first step was surgery, which took place exactly one year ago today at UPMC Shadyside. Surgeons took out his gall bladder, a third of his pancreas, part of his stomach and several feet of small intestine. As he recovered, Dr. Pausch discovered that M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston was carrying out an experimental, highly toxic radiation and chemotherapy regimen for pancreatic cancer that might increase his five-year survival odds to almost 45 percent. The treatments began in November and didn’t end until the following May. The low point, he wrote, was on Christmas Day of last year: “My wife and children were in Norfolk, and I was in Houston getting poison put in my veins. I was never depressed, but that was the day I was really squeezing the lemons hard to get lemonade.” But later, less than a week after finishing chemotherapy and radiation, Dr. Pausch was playing flag football with his recreational league team again. “First play of the game, I caught a 25-yard pass over the middle,” he said in his diary. “Granted, I was sucking wind the whole game, but damn it’s good to be back on the field.” In mid-summer, after tests initially showed he was clear of cancer, he added two rounds of treatment with an experimental cancer vaccine at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. And then, just as he was finally feeling healthy again late last month, Dr. Pausch sent out this message to his diary readers: “A recent CT scan showed that there are 10 tumors in my liver, and my spleen is also peppered with small tumors. The doctors say that it is one of the most aggressive recurrences they have ever seen.” He and Jai moved their family to Chesapeake, Va., so she would be near her relatives. They made initial plans for hospice care, and Dr. Pausch began palliative chemotherapy to give him some extra time. “I find that I am completely positive,” he wrote. “The only times I cry are when I think about the kids — and it’s not so much the ‘Gee, I’ll miss seeing their first bicycle ride’ type of stuff as it is a sense of unfulfilled duty — that I will not be there to help raise them, and that I have left a very heavy burden for my wife.” He is concentrating now on creating videos for his children. With his oldest son, 5-year-old Dylan, Dr. Pausch went on a recent trip to Disney World and to swim with dolphins, thinking Dylan may be the only child who will have strong direct memories of him. His wife and children, he said, “mean everything to me. They give a purpose to life and a depth of joy that no job [and I’ve had some of the most awesome jobs in the world] can begin to provide. “I hope my wife is able to remarry down the line. And I hope they will remember me as a man who loved them, and did everything he could for them.” If you liked this post, buy me a beer (Source: the Mail online | Men's health)

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(InfoWorld) - David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of one of the hottest technologies amongst software developers these days: the Ruby on Rails Web framework. Hailing from Denmark, Hansson is a partner at 37signals, a Chicago firm that develops tools for communications and collaboration. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Hansson during the RailsConf 2007 event in Portland, Ore., last week, where Hansson expressed pride in how the community has latched onto Ruby on Rails. Development of Ruby on Rails 2.0, featuring REST (Representational State Transfer) is in progress. Hansson stressed Rails's emphasis on convention over configuration, suggested Microsoft is having battles internally regarding open source, and expressed doubts about whether Microsoft can win converts its new Silverlight technology. InfoWorld: When did you develop Ruby on Rails and why? Hansson: I started developing Ruby on Rails actually as part of the first Ruby project I did, which was Basecamp. The summer of 2003 was when I originally got into Ruby, and I had been doing PHP and some Java for about four or five years ahead of that. But I was getting fed up and tired with those environments and wanted to give something new a chance, so I stumbled over Ruby and started playing around with it. And within about a week of playing around with it, I knew there was no way I could go back to either PHP or Java or anything else I'd been doing before. InfoWorld: Why is that? Hansson: Ruby just felt like such a great fit for my mind. So many things that I was frustrated about in previous environments I'd worked with just seemed to be solved incredibly beautifully in Ruby. And that was really one of the first things that I noticed that I intensely liked about Ruby, it was the aesthetics of the language. Ruby code is just inherently beautiful. Sure, you can write ugly code, but you can write incredibly beautiful code too. InfoWorld: How did Rails come about? Hansson: It started out not wanting to be Rails. It started out just me wanting to implement Basecamp, this Web application for 37signals. And I started working on that, and Ruby at that time had some Web frameworks, but [they] weren't necessarily what I directly liked. I came into Ruby with a lot of preconceptions of what Web applications should be like and how they should be developed from all the work I'd been doing in PHP and Java. And I wanted to bring some of those ideas in. So I started working on a little bit to talk to the database, a little bit to run some templating language to get something in HTML displayed. And all of those small pieces started just getting built up more and more. And a few months into it, I realized that I now had a fairly sizable chunk of tooling that I'd built just for myself just to implement Basecamp in Ruby. Maybe I could actually share that. So around December 2003, I kind of got into the mode that, hey, I want to release this. I want to wrap this stuff up, these tools I'm doing, put it into a box and let others enjoy themselves with it. Because I was thinking, Ruby is kind of a hidden gem right now. And it's really a shame. There are so many Web developments out right now that are, in my mind, stuck in PHP or Java, which is what I was thinking about at the time. And if I could have so much fun as I was having with Ruby right now, it'd be a travesty if I just kept all that to myself. So around December of 2003, I made the decision to really make a framework out of it, but it wasn't until six months later that Rails was actually released for the first time. We released it I think June 24 of 2004, the release of Rails 0.5.  InfoWorld: This is another weekend Ruby Conference.  Why are developers so excited about Ruby and Ruby on Rails? You kind of elaborated on that a bit before. Hansson: Sure. I think a lot of developers are excited about Ruby on Rails because it allows them to focus and think about something as simple as the joy of programming. That's not just a side effect of working on real enterprise production systems, it's at the forefront of development [of] Ruby on Rails.  We really want developers to be happy about the programs they're working on, the tools that they're working with, and the environment they're living in as programmers. And I think that [we are] explicitly choosing to make that the center of development of how we go about developing Rails, making sure that the aesthetics are just right. It's not the traditional computer science attributes we're trying to optimize for like memory usage or performance. We naturally care about those things because if it's not fast enough, it's not going to make us happy. But primarily, we care about getting beautiful code and getting a development environment where people are just happy about their work. And there are plenty of things in most traditional development environment that make people miserable. We tried to find those pain spots and remove them. InfoWorld: Could you just name a couple of them? Hansson: One of the things, for example, is how you configure your applications. A lot of environments, especially before Rails came around, had a notion that you basically started with a blank sheet of paper every single time. Everything had to be configured from scratch. How do I talk to the database? How do I map these fields between objects and records and rows and so on and so forth? You had to configure that explicitly every time, even though you might be doing the same thing over and over and over again. Like Groundhog Day, everything just started over and over and over again. So with Rails, we decided it's not going to be Groundhog Day. We're going to make some decisions and we're going to make them once. And once we've made those decisions, we're going to turn them into conventions, and we're going to teach you those conventions. And once you've learned them, it's done. Like we're no longer going to talk about what the primary key field in database tables are going to be called. They're going to be called ID, that's it. Now, [it's] done. Let's move on to the next decision. And like that we progressed through a ton of standard configuration points and literally removed them. We replaced them with conventions that said if you're just doing what most developers are doing the same [way] most of the time, you're going to get it for free. So they're going to be called ID. You don't care about that anyway. You shouldn't be caring about what the primary key fields are called, and if you can lift yourself above that and not care about it, you can get all this configuration stuff for free. So I think that's probably the biggest contribution we've made to thinking about frameworks. How can we get less configuration? How can we replace it with conventions instead?  And how can we get a lot of productivity out of that? InfoWorld: How does Ruby on Rails compare to Java framework like Spring? Hansson: I think one of the big differentiators is definitely that notion of convention over configuration. Java frameworks in particular have been peculiarly fond of XML for wiring pretty much everything together, and in some sense, it sounds great. You get ultimate flexibility, you get the opportunity to wire everything together exactly like you want it, but most people don't really care. That amount of flexibility is not worth the tradeoff.  And I think that's the fallacy of a lot of frameworks, especially in Java, they thought flexibility was free. Flexibility is not free. It's overrated. And if you trade that flexibility in for some constraints, you get a lot of complexity removed from the equation, you get a lot of productivity back from all the stuff you don't have to do. So that's one of the reasons that Rails is different from something like Spring or Struts and so on.  Another thing is just the aspects of something like Ruby. The Ruby programming language is just an amazing programming language to be able to work with, and we choose to employ it across the stack. So everything is written in Ruby. We write the views in Ruby, we write the models in Ruby, we write the controllers in Ruby. We try to keep everything as Ruby as we can instead of mixing something up with XML this or configuration files that. InfoWorld: Could you name a couple of the major Web applications or Web sites that have been developed with Ruby on Rails? Hansson: Sure. So my own company, 37signals, has been kind of the poster child for some time, it's the original, the first Rails applications. We have something called Basecamp, a project collaboration tool. We have something called Highrise, just managing context online. But there's a ton of other companies out there too. I especially like 43things.com, which is like a social networking site about the goals you want to achieve in life. There's shopify.com, which is a really cool e-commerce marketplace where you can create a beautiful-looking shop in very little effort at all and start selling merchandise for very little up-front cost.  InfoWorld:  Are you following any of the Ruby and Ruby on Rails tools that are being released, such as Ruby In Steel from SapphireSteel, CodeGear's upcoming Ruby offering, and the FiveRuns's Management Suite for Rails? Hansson: I am. And I'm very pleased to see all that work going on. One of the things that I've wanted from day one for Ruby on Rails was to create an economic ecosystem around it because I think that's one of the factors that make sure that something like a framework like Rails will stick around. When people start depending on this for their jobs, when people start depending on this for their paycheck, it'll ensure a long life for the framework. And that happened early on with consultants who shifted to making Ruby on Rails projects instead of whatever they were using before, and now it's happening in second tier. People were building up businesses around selling tools to Rails developers, and I think that's just -- it's such an important point in the evolution of the ecosystem and a great milestone for Ruby on Rails. InfoWorld: What do you think of Sun Microsystems' recently announced JavaFX Script for content creation? Is the world ready for yet another scripting language? Hansson: I think there's always room for new ideas, but I don't think that the whole fuss that's currently going on about RIA, rich Internet applications, is justified. I think we've been through this cycle so many times before that it in some ways amazes me how history seems to be ignored. We went through this with Java applets, they were going to rule the Web. Everything was going to be in a Java applet. HTML and CSS is history. And Flash came around, and Flash started focusing on applications. Now Flash is going to rule the Web and HTML and so on is yesterday. Now, Silverlight, Apollo, JavaFX, they're all bidding to take over the JavaScript, HTML and CSS [spaces], and I just don't buy it. I don't buy that developers by and large are going to jump into a proprietary technology and replace what HTML and CSS has given them. InfoWorld: I think Sun is saying JavaFX is open source. I'm not sure if JavaFX Script is focused exclusively on Web development. I think it's just one function that can be done with it, and I'm not even sure if it does it that well at this point. Hansson: That might be true, and I think that HTML and CSS [are] focused on Web development.  And I think that there are misconceptions going on from people who are pushing these alternative delivery platforms that somehow Web developers are hungry for richer and richer experiences, that they're really unhappy working with HTML and CSS.  And that's just not true. We're not clamoring to re-create the desktop on the Web. InfoWorld: We don't need a new mousetrap? Hansson: No, we don't. HTML and CSS is actually a wonderful development environment, and a good number of computer scientists or people who have been around for a long time might consider them hacks or dirty or whatever, but they work. InfoWorld: But you do use those on Ruby on Rails? Hansson: Totally. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the key components of how you get Rails applications to a user. And I don't see that changing. InfoWorld: But not Ruby? Hansson: Ruby generates those things, so HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are delivery mechanisms. InfoWorld: Do you think Java is being displaced by scripting languages like Ruby or some of the others that are out there? Hansson: I think Java and C# and other languages of that type [are] definitely being replaced by leaner and lighter approaches. I think Ruby and Python and SmallTalk and other languages in that sphere [are] gaining rapid ground just by people realizing that they would much rather have an enjoyable, productive environment [rather than] buy into these arguments for safety or bad things that will come down if you don't have types and so on and so forth. So I'm absolutely seeing the market share of these languages going down as more and more people just realize that they didn't die by using [the] scripting languages. InfoWorld: What do you think of .Net and Windows development and Microsoft enabling its Common Language Runtime to run on the Macintosh platform? Hansson: In some ways I don't really care. I don't follow it very closely. The Microsoft ecosystem is not that interesting to me. It's a very different world from the world that I inhabit, which is one of open standards, open source, and so on and so forth. It's not to say that they don't do interesting stuff. I definitely do think that they have some interesting thoughts, [such as] LINQ (Language Integrated Query), which is very interesting. There's definitely a good number of things that the open-source world could learn from some of those initiatives, but wholesale jumping into the Microsoft boat has just never appealed to the kind of work I do. InfoWorld: Can Microsoft succeed with Silverlight, or are AJAX and Flash the major players for rich Internet application development as it relates to multimedia? Hansson: I think Microsoft can succeed selling Silverlight to people who already use Microsoft. If you're already using ASP.Net and other Microsoft techniques, that really in lot of ways were trying just to re-create the desktop online, then I totally think that these people will jump all over Silverlight. I do not think that people currently working in open source and with open standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are going to fall off their chairs in pursuit of adopting Silverlight. InfoWorld: Why not? Hansson: I think that we don't need that additional complexity, we don't need that "richer experience."  It's being sold as it's just universally something better than what we have with HTML and CSS and JavaScript. And I think a lot of the success of the Web has been in the constraints that those standards gave us. A lot of the success of the Web came with the standardization of just having a few tools that you really have to be clever about how to use in an effective way. You didn't have all the opportunities of the world, so you could create one crazy use interface after another. And I think that's often what "rich" means. It means wild or out there or fun. And that's totally fine -- if you're creating a game, then something like Flash is awesome. If you're creating yet another information application, which is the bulk of applications out there, then I think HMTL, CSS, and JavaScript [do] just fine. InfoWorld: Microsoft is adding support for IronRuby and IronPython to the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime). What's your take on that? Hansson: I enjoy the fact that more people can get to experience Ruby by getting it in the side door somehow, that Ruby can be used in shops [that are] predominantly Microsoft shops. But I hope that those are more planting seeds for people to then get out. I'm not seeing that Ruby on the DLR or whatever is going to convince a lot of people currently using Ruby to jump in the arms of Microsoft. But I do see it the other way around. I do see people who were traditionally using Microsoft technologies being exposed to languages like Python and Ruby and then realizing that hey, maybe I actually don't need the Microsoft part. InfoWorld: So then it can have an opposite effect. Do you think Microsoft is just blowing smoke with its threats against Linux that they talked about this week regarding alleged [patent] violations or is there something to it? Hansson: I think they're doing the techniques that they've used successfully in the past. I think FUD'ing people up and making them insecure -- is Linux going to be sued out of existence? Am I wrong to base my entire infrastructure on open source? Creating all that fear, doubt and uncertainty is what Microsoft does really well. And that's, of course, seeing something like this, it's got to be so frustrating to people, the good forces within Microsoft who do understand open source and do want to get developers who are sympathetic to the open-source movement to get involved with their technologies. How persuasive an argument is it going to be now that Silverlight is this open platform and you can come play, and by the way we're suing everything else you build your business on? It's not going to be very persuasive. And I think it really sends so many mixed messages, and it seems like there's a war going on inside Microsoft. Like [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer on one side pushing this FUD line against Linux and other open-source and open standards, and then you have somebody like [Microsoft Chief Software Architect] Ray Ozzie, who seems to be more with the times in getting that Microsoft can't invent its own universe forever and just ask people to come over. So I do hope that the Ray Ozzie side of a more open approach, a more inclusive strategy, is going to work. InfoWorld: What's your take on JRuby, which runs the Ruby language on the Java Virtual Machine, and how does that tie into Ruby on Rails? Hansson: I think it's fascinating. I have to be honest. One year ago I didn't have a whole lot of faith in the JRuby project, and that's mostly just from the experience of seeing other languages being re-implemented on other platforms. It seems mostly to have been curiosities. But I've got to say I'm hugely impressed about the work that the JRuby team has been doing, how fast they've been progressing, how fast they're catching up both in features and in speed. And as it stands right now, where they're actually able to run a good number of Ruby on Rails applications, it's marvelous. I think it opens a whole new avenue for Ruby into enterprise strongholds that would otherwise not [have] considered Ruby and Rails because that they didn't run on their existing infrastructure. So I think it's awesome, and I am really looking forward to seeing more about it. I still have some concerns or skepticism about -- is this really going to be something that appeals to regular long-term Ruby users? Would I run JRuby in a year from now? I am certainly not convinced of that fact. But I am certainly open to them coming up with something great, if they can turn JRuby into being say five, 10 times faster than the C-based Ruby, hey, who am I to say what we're going to run two or three years from now? InfoWorld: Ruby on Rails is an open-source Web framework, as in you don't sell it. Are you making money from the project just the same through consulting? How do you monetize it? Hansson: In a lot of ways I don't need to monetize it, I have a job. I work at 37signals, and we make money selling products. But we still in a large sense make money off it primarily through saving money. So we get to collaborate with a lot of other people around the world that then they'll pick up part of the work we would otherwise have to do. So that's the great thing about open source. You get to collaborate, and you get to share contributions and swap. So there's a lot of bartering going on that saves us a ton of development time.  But there are also direct influences [in that] we get now a talent pool who know exactly the kind of technology we're working on, so it's much easier for us to hire new people.  We've gotten a great amount of press out of it. InfoWorld: What exactly does 37signals do? Hansson: 37signals is a producer of collaboration and communication tools online. We use Ruby on Rails for everything. We have six products now. Three of them are paid products, the others are free products.  They're all developed with Ruby on Rails. InfoWorld: Any other points you wanted to raise? Hansson: I think now that we're here at RailsConf, I'm really just immensely impressed about how far we've gotten in such a short period of time. Rails really took about a year to get going. The first year it was only über geeks getting involved and getting excited about it. The first book didn't come out until a year after. And so the first book is even just two years old. Today we have more than 20 titles, I believe, and we have a conference with 1,600 people showing up. It's fantastic to me to see the kind of impact that a grassroots initiative can have on the software industry in general. And that's not just my contributions, it's the contributions of everybody who's been involved with the Ruby on Rails project. There are so many people who have contributed to it, so many people who have evangelized it.

(InfoWorld) - Need proof that Apple's iPod and iTunes Store has forever changed how people, particularly mobile people, acquire music? Here it is: The recording industry recently reported that nearly 13 percent fewer CDs were sold in 2006 than the previous year, while sales of downloaded digital songs increased by almost 60 percent. The iPod/iTunes combination accounts for about 70 percent of all digital music sales and portable media devices, according to market studies. But some industry analysts believe that we're only at th