IT Making Money

IT companies like all companies have one target which is making money but in IT field there are many ways to make money, some of these ways are traditional like selling licensed software and hardware and some are not like advertising and producing open source software, the common thing between them is that they all make huge money.

Microsoft, Apple, hp and Dell all follow the traditional way and it has kept them the highest profit making companies – though hp has highest revenues, Microsoft has highest profits. These companies are rather old, they produce laptops, operating systems, video games, smart phones and everything you can imagine. Yes they make big money but still not so popular especially with people that care about Open Source and freedom of choice, you may not feel it but these companies collaborate with each other to keep the market and IT media masses under their control, they issue implicit and explicit agreements to support each other's software and hardware. Example of this is hp and Dell selling laptops with a pre-installed version of Vista. These marketing behaviors made them face many lawsuits, Apple was sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for trying to stop and remove online forums discussing iPhone. Microsoft also was fined $794 million for including Windows Media Player with Windows XP installation, imposing it on the user instead of letting him choose the media player he wants to use.

Leaving the giants and heading to the new stormers like Yahoo!, Google, MySpace and Facebook. All are less than 15 years old and all represent the ideal advertising model of making money. Google alone made about $10,491 billion in 2006 only by ads on their pages, this money represents 99% of total revenues of the company, this proves that ads can make big money.

The main idea in the advertising scheme is providing users with free or cheap - charge services and keeping them attached to them all day, then fill the site with tons of ads, this approach always needs more pages to support more ads and make more money, these pages can be applications, news or search results with ads relevant to your keywords. It also needs the company to spread its name in any way by producing anything: toolbars, gadgets and mail services. Attaching users to pages is taking a new approach that depends on making the page more personal as your own: like iGoogle, My Yahoo! and of course profiles on social networks. Any way, this is highly criticized for damaging the users' social interaction in real life, making them addicted to the Internet and wasting their time.

When we discuss making money using Open Source this does not mean that all Open Source applications are produced to make money, some of them are produced by normal people who have the passion to help others by coding.

Anyway, companies still can make money from Open Source. It may seem impossible but when you think deeply, you find that it might be the easiest way of making money, you can simply sell that software, the GNU license under which most open source projects are released doesn't forbidden selling the project, but to make people pay for what they can get for free, you have to provide support and packaging where you sell collection of configured software that can be installed easily with their manuals on CDs. The software can also be used as an advertising tool, you can place ads on the project's page on the Internet or use it to promote another version that has extra features but is not free.

What is this label?

In this label, I will put articles that I wrote in Aimun 09 newsletter, hope you all like them.
AIMUN is Alexandria International Model Of United Nations, it is a conference held in bib Alex every summer where young people discuss some issues and play as decision makers and head of states.
I wrote few articles in the NewsLetter that belongs to the event.

Virtualization

To understand the main concept of virtualization, we will use a real – life example:
Presume you have four different sized people who want to go to work, you can get each one of them a vehicle that suits his route and size, this is going to cost you much and also each car will be used for a little time and then left parking. What if you put them all in one vehicle each of them with his seat that suits him and in a way or another let each "virtualizes" that the vehicle is all his. He can use the radio, the air condition and everything else in the vehicle.

Well, the second way is surely better as it is cheaper, faster and gets all what the vehicle can provide. This second way is "Virtualization" except that we will replace the four different sized men with four different operating systems that we want to use and the vehicle with a computer that has virtualization environment so each operating system sees the resources which we demonstrated as the radio and the air condition as if they were only for it.

At this point, a question has jumped into your head: How one radio will be used at the same time by four men? Well this what virtualization software does, it manages and organizes this operation. Consider it as a layer that creates four virtual tuners one for each man so when a man changes the station, the "one" radio will use the "one" Antenna to get "different" station that the man will hear on his own "headphone" leaving the other men undisturbed.

Another question: How one antenna will deliver different stations? That's the hardware part of virtualization. Instead of buying four antennas we will use only one but each man will have his own amplifier that will enable him to get the station he tuned to. If not convinced, think of it as one router that serves many users each using the internet in a completely different way.

It may come across your mind that creating the virtual tuners and the headphones is going to cost more; surely you will change your mind when you know that with no virtualization each computer will be using only 10 to 15 percent of its processing capacity and still consuming the same energy as a full used computer.

For normal user, this doesn't mean much but for IT companies and web hosting servers, this means saving millions of dollars. It is enough to know that using virtualization, each 10 up to 20 servers can be replaced with only one server. This not only saves money and time to buy and install servers but also reduces size of data centers where servers are located.

With the ever increase in data stored on web and in data bases, virtualization will be a must in order to contain all data in a reasonable cost. IT giants like Sun, VMware, Microsoft and many got that point and they are competing who can provide the cheapest and fastest virtualization technology.

Just Started !!

First Meeting of Software Freedom Day organizers

The time was 10:00 am and the place was one of the classes of Computer Science Department (CSD), Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, the event was the kick off meeting of Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University.

Let's talk about the event it self before we talk about the meeting, it is a two week event that is intended to start at 1st September 2009. The event targets every one, its main goal is not only to introduce Free Software to people but also to give them the real life experience gained by others who started using Free Software and joined Open Source communities along ago.

The Event will mainly consist of presentations and demos covering wide range of topics,
stands providing on site information and installtion, study groups and contests along with other things, so it seems that we have lots of things to do in the coming month, and you have the chance to enjoy two weeks of Free Software Mania.

Back to the meeting, it lasted for about two hours and was started by each one introducing him / her self, then Ahmed Saeed who is the head of coordination team told us everything about the event and explained to us the tasks we should be doing for the coming month. Teams were created and will be led by four coordinators: Ahmed Abd Al Aziz, Asmaa El Sayed, Yasmin Mohammed and Abd Rahman Gamal who all have previous experience in organizing many similar events.

Come and join us, you will enjoy your time and get great knowledge which may change your life forever or at least the technology you use in your daily life.

You can find more information here and you can join our group on facebook.

Check the blog and the facebook group for updated news about the event, See you all there !!

Run .jar file on Linux

Hi everyone,

Today, I am bringing to you a very nice thing, if you have written java code on windows, exported it as a .jar file and used it on Windows but was unable to do this on linux though you have JDK installed on linux, then this is the right place for you !!

To do this surely you must have a correct and runnable java code with a main class.

Steps:
======

If you are using netbeans right click on the project and then click clean and build, on eclipse right click on the project and then choose export and choose as runnnable jar file.

This will create a .jar file in your project folder (for netbeans inside the dist folder).

You will open your nice terminal and start by creating a "launcher" which is a shell script that you create so that it can run your .jar file.

In this example I made a simple watch and the jar file is named SimpleWatch.jar, ok?


you will type:

cd /usr/local/bin

then

gksudo gedit SimpleWatchLauncher.sh

the last command will open the Text editor you copy and paste this

#! /bin/bash
cd /home/khaled/NetBeansProjects/SimpleWatch/dist
java -jar /home/khaled/NetBeansProjects/SimpleWatch/dist/SimpleWatch.jar

Of course you will replace "/home/khaled/NetBeansProjects/SimpleWatch/dist" with the path of the directory that contains your .jar file

Save and exit the Text editor






Type this in the terminal (Make sure you are in /usr/local/bin)

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/SimpleWatchLauncher.sh

That's it you are done !!!


now open your terminal and type:

cd /usr/local/bin/

Click enter
then type

SimpleWatchLauncher.sh

Your application will Run isA and you will now that Java is really platform independent :D

فرانكو لعربي

عاملين إيه ؟
البوست ده أصلا أنا كاتبه كله فرانكو مش كاتب ولا كلمة فيه بالحروف العربي اللي على الكيبورد !! إزاي بقى ده عن طريق برنامج جامد جدا مايكروسوفت نزلته اسمه Maren البرنامج ده تقدر تخليه يحول الكلام الفرانكو إلى عربي وإنت بتكتب والصراحة البرنامج جامد جدا و التوقع بتاعه رائع جدا لكن في حاجة مهمة كنت عاوز أقولها إن على اد ماالبرنامج ده و ال برامج اللي زيه بتخلينا نكتب عربي أكتر على الانترنت على اد ماهي يخلينا نستغنى تماما عن الحروف العربي وتقريبا ننساها لاننا كده بجد عمرنا ماهانسخدم الزراير العربي على الكيبورد لاننا ياما هانكتب فرانكو أصلا أو هانكتب فرانكو مترجم عربي

عموما البرنامج جامد جدا وأكيد هستخدموا بالذات في بوستس على البلوج هنا في اللابل الجديد اللي اسمه بالعربي
الحاجة برده الجديدة إن مايكروسوفت نزلت البرنامج ده ببلاش يمكن عشان عارفة إن قليل قوي من المستخدمين العرب ممكن يدفعوا فلوس مقابل سفتوار بس ياريت مايكروسوفت تنزل نسخ تشتغل على انظمة تانية غير الويندوز زي لينكس وأبونتيو وكمان ماك .... يا رب



ممكن تنزل البرنامج من اللينك ده

واتفرج على الفيديو اللذيذ ده كمان عن البرنامج


سلام

Clean you Vista

Hi everyone,

If you are using Windows Vista like me, you may have noticed that the free space on your C drive where you installed Windows decreases even if you install no new software on it. This is caused by many things, the most important ones are temporary internet files which are files stored on your hard to enable you surf the internet faster, Temp folder which may be up to five GB which saves configurations about applications you ran on your computer, the hibernate files which enables your computer to hibernate.

You can clean them up and free space so you can speed up your system by using the clean up disk tool
Start -> Accessories -> System tools -> Disk Clean Up

Any way if you really want to clean every thing and get more space, I recommend a tool called CCleaner (Crap Cleaner), it just Free 3.8 MBytes and still it cleans your folders safely and fast, it cleaned about 9 GB from my C Drive !!!

Go to CCleaner