While customers come to Valentina DB from a huge spectrum of development backgrounds and tools (from Adobe Director to C++ to Cocoa Objective C), a large number of customers across the board who work with complex data – financial services and medical data – seem to take a shine to Valentina for producing vertical market applications or services.

Although graphics have seen a lot of improvements over the last few releases of Runrev, the graphics system isn’t really hardware accelerated. That’s where a product like Franklin comes in and solves a lot of performance issues. Even if you aren’t making a 3D game or simulation, you can use Franklin’s 2D sprite engine which is accelerated by underlying DirectX or OpenGL support to speedily handle a screenful of sprites. Interaction with these (like any object in Franklin) can fire call backs to Runrev.

iPad vs Flash

Apple employees are conditioned not to leak news, so when every Apple loving tech journalist reports how  Steve Jobs slams Flash at an Apple employee meeting, it is as obvious as when he puts on a presentation at Moscone Center. The reasons for whatever Apple does are undisclosed business reasons.  Sure, Flash can be buggy on the Mac. But the responsibility is between Adobe and Apple – not just Adobe. I am reminded of this every time I try to open some PDFs on Mac OS X just to have them crash Apple’s Preview, or when Apple Quicktime crashes Firefox when trying to play back videos in a browser.

iPad vs Netbooks

Netbooks are just one of a collection of low cost computer devices – one that gives you complete freedom in a computer that isn’t tied to the App Store walled garden experience. Steve clearly hates them because the Apple laptop is a premium product at a premium price. Netbooks as they are now are computers. The iPad isn’t a tablet Mac – it is a big iPhone that gives you a better visual experience because you can see more, making it a brand new channel for content. Of course a Mac tablet already exists – check out the Axiotron.

iPad vs Kindle

I don’t own a Kindle. I have tried out various readers though, and I can appreciate how a standard, reflective screen I look at when I am working isn’t going to give me the same sense of comfort as an optimized reader screen. But the reader screen really isn’t doing anything for me that my paper copy of a book doesn’t do. I applaud Amazon’s announcement of a Kindle SDK to provide additional value on these easier to read devices, but they are going to implement a Kindle App Store as equally walled off as the Apple App Store.

iPad vs Tablet PC

I replaced a truly awful Dell laptop almost two years ago with an HP laptop that converts to a tablet experience. The handwriting system is surprisingly good, and using it to work with Mirye Shade 3D is interesting. But decades of keyboarding have made me a blazingly fast typist in comparison with using a pen of any type. An attachable keyboard is apparently coming for the iPad; give me one that works with the iPhone, just like the collapseable keyboard I used to use with my Palm V and Ill be happy.

iPad vs Snakes on a Plane

Remember this terrible movie? Snakes on a Plane was infamous because it leveraged internet ad placement and the online community to build up hype, much as Sony has done more recently with the much better Paranormal Activity. The iPad could turn out to be a wonderful device, and given the love and attention it has received from Apple, I expect it to be a quality experience.  On the other hand, I think just as the ‘net press helped enable a stinker of a movie, the ‘net press is very effectively doing Apple’s marketing for them, and lionizing a consumer device that doesn’t really change anything.

Id like to be able to swear off the iPad entirely at this point. But like any controversy surrounding Apple, I can’t commit to not coming back with more iPad vs X. Thank you, Steve, for giving a lazy blogger a reason to write.

I think Michael is going to have a lot of heartache in 2010. MySQL AB had an extremely aggressive sales force and rather difficult to understand licensing that, in combination, generated revenues for MySQL AB from confused executives at development companies and end user companies who became enamored with MySQL because it was free – but later found it wasn’t free for their commerical endeavors. Oracle certainly has an aggressive sales force, but the mindset is different. The sort of bait and switch mentality for licensing isn’t a part of the Oracle way of doing things – and I can see some of Michael’s fears coming true. Prices will very likely go up, up, up. The software license will probably not change for a while – at least until the worries of government probes are behind them.

Oregon allowed its minimum wage to increase by $.45 an hour on January 1, 2009 to $8.40, with automatic adjustments based on adjustments to the consumer price index.  Likewise, ballots 66 and 67 promise to pinch business in other ways.  The problem with both together is that the vast majority of businesses in the state of Oregon are small. As with many small businesses, you often have the owners as managers who work off the clock. Instead of hiring more people, the owners put in 80 hour weeks instead of their normal 60 hours. It isn’t that business owners want to work longer hours – it is that the cost to do business in the state of Oregon is not in scale with the economics of sales in the state of Oregon. Oregon is a great state for good intentions, but has a history of poor implementations.

Unfortunately, when the national economy improves, it tends to improve at a much slower rate in the State of Oregon. What few positive indicators Ive seen in the tech business in the last 2-3 months will hardly make a difference, at least in early 2010.

2009 has taught me a few lessons in personal, human kindness. I can’t say if the current economic climate is something we deserve or not, but in the absence of a pocket full of cash, one free gift we can give other human beings is to default to kindness, politeness and mercy. There are no cost ways to make difficult times easier for those around us for weathering these difficult times.

The independents are getting ripped off just as the the big corporations are. But instead of having a broad distribution and repurposing network for their intellectual property, the independent has much more limited resources, and a drop of income in licensing means bills don’t get paid.

The DMCA by itself, doesn’t provide any protection from repeat offender or inequitable reporting mechanisms.

The user of a user account on a network may have files he’s posted pulled from the posted message on the website. There is no recourse if this same user account is used minutes later to repost the files.

There is a specific process used for submitting a DMCA Takedown Notice to a provider. All and good if the same mechanism was used to post/validate the product to begin with.  Let me illustrate why this is inequitable.

A Meshbox artist created a model and texture set that a pirate took and reused portions from in a commercial product sold through the official store of Second Life. Although setting up a sales account is very easy to do, and posting a new model through that venue is something you can do in minutes on the internet; to have the stolen work pulled from the site required an official notice be faxed to Linden Labs. This was done, and the file was promptly removed the same day. However, what recourse is there concerning any sales of this stolen property?  There is no guarantee that the same file won’t be reposted minutes later. That the file was pulled and not challenged under DMCA provisions indicates that Linden Labs at least acknowledges that some wrong doing took place.

What makes this even worse is the collusive nature of internet advertising in this kind of piracy. Here is how it works.

A warez site is set up, and the owner gets a page view/click-through compensation account through an internet advertising company. The site receives heavy traffic, possibly benefiting in page ranking on Google to have the stolen IP appear even higher on Google searches than the original IP owner. The network owner isn’t selling the software, but he’s still making money by providing a venue for the theft to occur. The site owner ends up with a domain property worth something on the domain resale market, and an ongoing revenue stream.

What really gets me is Mike Masnick’s statement:

There is simply no reason for ACTA, at all. It is nothing but an attempt by the entertainment industry to put massive restrictions on the internet, place liability on lots of third parties, and do nothing to push themselves to adapt to a changing marketplace with new business models.

Okay Mike, this is not what I and many independents see going on. I think there are inequities in Big IP. When I bought a VHS tape of a movie years ago,  I didn’t sign on for it to  have a variable end-of-life depending on how cheaply made the tape was. To me, I should be able to enjoy that version of the movie – under a software like IP based EULA – perpetually.  I didn’t buy the Blu-Ray version, or the 20th anniversary version of the movie, both of which would naturally have derived but otherwise new original work in it. And I agree, it should be an enjoyment based license I can use on various devices.

Yes, I agree something needs to be changed there – but the often quoted Shakespeare comes to mind – “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport”.  You’d like to smack down Big IP, but you are entirely overlooking the real independent artist who doesn’t want their intellectual goods stolen freely off of their apple cart.

I convinced Ruslan to port his early release to work with REALbasic, in what I believe was the first third party database for REALbasic. It took some work, because Ruslan was already familiar with the few development tools supporting the Macintosh, and REALbasic was a relative unknown.

Since those dot com years, Ruslan and I formed Paradigma Software Incorporated and Proactive International parted ways with REAL Software. I can’t remember the last time I saw a box of REALbasic anywhere.

Paradigma continues to support REALbasic to date, though the recent rumblings in the REALbasic user community cause us quite a bit of concern. Bob Keeney is a long time REALbasic developer and manages the Association of REALbasic Professionals, and he’s concerned about the state of REALbasic. Christian over at Pariah Software also has some concerns as well. They both lament the poor third party support, and Christian details the number of cancelations of REALbasic oriented events. I also recall there being some staffing shrinkage in the last 12 months as well at REAL Software.

Paradigma Software is going to continue across the board support for REALbasic in 2010.  You can connect to  Valentina Office Server, Valentina Embedded Server and local databases using the VClient for REALbasic. Plus, Valentina Reports will continue to be available for REALbasic users. Supporting REALbasic has not been an easy task over the most recent years as Paradigma Software has been treated as a competitor than as a (third party supporting) partner by REAL Software.

Being a Valentina developer also means you can easily reuse your database investment with almost every other cross platform tool on the market. For web applications, you have PHP and Ruby on Rails. For client-server, or local applications – its an open field with Valentina: Runrev (aka Runtime Revolution), .net (C# and other CLR languages), Adobe Director, Visual C++, Xcode/C++, Xcode/Objective-C/Cocoa, COM and more – even iPhone – every major environment on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

At the end of the day – it is about how you treat your data, and Paradigma Software customers know that. We’ve spent a good portion of 2009 working on fixing and improving the things our customers ask us about, and added additional staff as a result. There will be another solid release in 2009 that will be very welcome by our customers.

Well – there is one fix, and that is to change your development environment. The more you rely either on very portable, non-development specific SQL or utilize the cross-platform, cross-environment native Valentina API, the easier it is to move your front end to another development environment.