A core economic principle is the Complementary Good . In short, when two or more things are used together, they are complementary. When the price of an item goes up, the usage of all of its complementary goods goes down. Similarly, if the price of an item goes down, the usage of all its complementary goods goes up. An example is the computer printer. Printers and ink are complementary goods. Proprietary ink products are extremely valuable—at one point ink delivered 60% of HP’s profits —so HP, understanding the principle of complementary goods, practically gives away printers because they make money on the ink. This is the classic razors and blades business model.

Businesses want to lower the cost of their products, while maintaining or improving their margins. …

Well, this post I guess belongsin the "and stuff" category of my blogg. I am reading Joel Spolsky's book "Joel on Software" now, which is a collectioon of Joels writings on different software things. I will post a review in due time, but for now, I wanted to touch on another subject that this book brought up, and which is related to my new version of MyQuery that is soon coming up, which is this: Who controls the conventions of the GUI of an application? There are several possible answers to that question, such as:

• The application - I.e. the application code determines what keys are used for cut, paste, open file, the order of standard buttons (Open,Close) the look of the windows and other things that the application does.
• The GUI - I.e. Windows / KDE / Gnome / OSX or whatever GUI framework you use determines the standard functions as listed above. As for …

First up: I normally read Planet MySQL from an RSS reader. I am assuming you do too. But in the interest of all the new features that the website itself has, I thought I’d take some time to talk about them in brief (to respect your time). Needless to say, go forth and check out Planet MySQL if you’ve not been there in a while.

A change in URL

We used to go to http://planetmysql.org but now it redirects to http://planet.mysql.com/.

Its also worth noting that from a Google PageRank of 8, Planet MySQL has dropped to a PageRank of 6. One wonders why?

Voting

Sometimes, Planet MySQL has got totally unrelated posts. …

During my talk at the MySQL Users Conference, Heidi came up with the idea of holding a hackathon for Proxy.

It seemed well received, and we mulled it over a bit.

At this point we are proposing the following:

• Meet for two days on October 15th and 16th, i.e. Thursday and Friday
• Venue will be the Sun Office, Hamburg, Germany
• Topics include (but bring your own!):
  …

Look at MySQL bug reports of course? Well actually I’m writing multiple blog posts, and I was confirming additional reference sources and links when I came across MySQL Bug #29847 - Large CPU usage of InnoDB crash recovery with a big buf pool.

Taking the time to actually read the information exchange I stumble upon.

[8 Jun 23:29] liz drachnik

Hello Heikki - 

In order for us to continue the process of reviewing your contribution to MySQL - We need
you to review and sign the Sun|MySQL contributor agreement (the "SCA")

The process is explained here:
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Sun_Contributor_Agreement

Getting a signed/approved SCA on file will help us facilitate your contribution-- this
one, and others in the future.

Thank you ! 

Liz Drachnik  - Program Manager - MySQL

Oops. Well it made me laugh out loud for so many reasons. First your talking to the …

Last week I offered a chance for a reader to win a copy of the MySQL Administrator’s Bible. The reason why is that I was recording an interview with Brian Aker about the Drizzle project and wanted to hear what you thought I should ask Brian. There were some excellent responses. I worked as many of them as possible into the interview although there were some that for legal reasons we could not cover.  Even if your question was not included your name was included in the drawing. Thanks everyone for the input. The interview with Brian will be part of the  Open Source Database podcast scheduled to be released on July the 24th.

And now for the winner!

Congratulations …

During my talk at the MySQL Users Conference, Heidi came up with the idea of holding a hackathon for Proxy.

It seemed well received, and we mulled it over a bit.

At this point we are proposing the following:

• Meet for two days on October 15th and 16th, i.e. Thursday and Friday
• Venue will be the Sun Office, Hamburg, Germany
• Topics include (but bring your own!):
  …

During my talk at the MySQL Users Conference, Heidi came up with the idea of holding a hackathon for Proxy.

It seemed well received, and we mulled it over a bit.

At this point we are proposing the following:

• Meet for two days on October 15th and 16th, i.e. Thursday and Friday
• Venue will be the Sun Office, Hamburg, Germany
• Topics include (but bring your own!):
  …

I had a thought. What if Google's Fusion Tables could host in the future all the publicly available data like the UN data and then allow people around the world to view and analyze it.

What if the point was to have people make sense of the data for you in a collaborative way so that the publisher benefits with free insights into the data and everyone else benefits from these insights as well.


To fully appreciate what I mean, please watch this really good TED video about visualizing data.


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• Tim Berners-Lee's Eloquent Ted Speech on Linked Data (byronmiller.typepad.com)

…

Image by dannysullivan via Flickr

Apparently, Google and Panorama Software has been giving away free analytical and data-mining capabilities within Google Spreadsheets for a while now.

So to spread the word, here is the tutorial page:http://www.panoramasoftware.com/google/pivot-table-overview.html
and here are 2 interviews discussing the product: …