Free is never completely free. If a software product is missing a feature you need, or some feature is broken, the work around time you spend has an opportunity cost associated with it. If I have to just through several software packages to convert my models to work with Blender, or if I have to recreate my models in Blender, the cost of Blender just went up by the cost of my time.

My understanding is that Aries uses their own, open, JS library underneath called Mojo. You build your apps online, but you can still pull it all down to your own computer and modify the underlying js, graphical libraries and more. And before you ask, yes, it also uses WebKit.

HP also provides a full C/C++ SDK that allows you more granular access to the magic of the hardware. An HP rep informed me, for example, OpenGL is present there so if you are porting a game to WebOS, you have some options.

It is free and includes a built in simulator. If you dismissed Palm for dead, you will be surprised at this demonstration of life.

At its core, Valentina DB is a columnar database, but you can treat it much like a traditional relational database.  With its columnar roots, you’ll find your database operations, especially complex queries against databases with records numbering hundreds of thousands or more, far faster than a relational database – with some operations, it may be only twice as fast. With others, its hundreds or thousands of times faster. This is especially meaningful if you are pulling large data sets for analysis with your custom applications. Valentina DB is a long time favorite with financial service application providers.

Where this runs into trouble is where some partners are given exclusive or special license, and in turn those partners have special responsibilities in those markets. Some examples in the tech market are localization, support and returns management.  Here is a very concrete example. Mirye Software is the exclusive English publisher of Shade 3D, one of the oldest 3D products on the market today and the dominant 3D modeling, animation and rendering product in Japan. Some responsibilities of Mirye include translating and localizing Shade into English, marketing Shade, providing technical support to English speaking Shade customers and also managing channel issues for Shade. Now if E Frontier began selling an English capable version into China, and the Chinese partners sold these abroad, Mirye could easily be saddled with a customer base to support (costs) without actually having made the original sale.

Some games companies have come up with various tricks to deal with these problems. For example, if you bought a game import outside of your region and go to activate your game online, it would most likely fail, because the game company can match your region with the type of activation code you have. However this has problems too. Lets say I purchase a game in English, and want my friend who is living abroad in China to be able to play it. He may have a US residence, and even US credit cards, but there could be some indicator that shows his origin outside of the US – and he doesn’t want to play the Chinese version of the game because he can’t read Chinese. It is the same logic as the also flawed regional encoding system of DVDs to DVD players.

I can fully understand the problem from a vendor perspective.  Also – this may also hide something more insidious when applied to the medical and pharmaceutical industries which are doing their best to stop the gray marketing of their products into the United States.  I don’t have an easy solution to this – the courts have so far applied a very blunt and damaging instrument to it.

The Mac was well loved even then in education and delightfully pushed the old Apple IIs out of schools. Fast forward to 2010, a parent myself, with a teen even going to my own alma mater.  After a conference, I stepped over to the beautiful new computer room and noticed it was full of Apple eMacs. These were G4 based (non-Intel) iMacs that were specifically for the education market – serviceable machines that especially had price going for them.  Now and then I use an old G4 based Mac Mini for web surfing (and testing out PPC based software) and it remains a very viable computer.

Now here is the problem, actually two problems – Apple xCode 3.2.X and higher (released in March 2010)  require an Intel based Mac running Mac OS X 10.6.  Just based on hardware specs, the K-12 market is in trouble, however consider the operating system requirements in addition to this. Many shipped with OS 9.2 and an early version of Mac OS X – 10.1.4. The eMac can run Mac OS X 10.5, which makes it possible to use xCode 3.1.x. However several iterations of xCode also require Mac OS X 10.5. This means there have been at least one or more paid for OS system updates  which may not be present on K-12 Macs. Apple wants its developers running the most recent versions of Mac OS X, and if you check backwards compatibility, usually only two versions back of the OS than the then current OS. For example, you are going to have a lot of trouble supporting an OS version earlier than 10.4 if you use the present kit.

So the options are bleak if you want to stick with Apple only tools. If you are using one of these old Macs (like so many K-12 schools are), they can, at best, run only older versions of xCode. And that in turn means your programming course cannot include development for the iPhone too.

Dell pioneered the direct sales model when the norm was to purchase single units through retail or catalogs. The upside was that they could pass the savings on to customers because they could cut out the channel. People tend to forget that the channel does provide some value other than just speedy delivery and the option to spend more on in-store advertising – retailers and distributors hate returns more than customers do. Dell claims that its direct model gives it the ability to react sooner to quality issues, but it also removes channel Darwinism from the picture.

What makes me suspicious anyway about the Apple site were the alleged HTML 5 examples posted that not only required you view them with Safari, but that at least some required Safari + Mac OS X Snow Leopard. That is a terrible demonstration of standards based web browsing – to require a specific web browser and operating system.  I can only guess it is Apple’s way of getting more people using Safari.