Sunday, May 29, 2011

USB drive as a music carrier using Banshee/Rhythmbox

The old ways of sharing music may soon become passé with Amazon and Google both stepping into the cloud music ring, but till that becomes mainstream, here is a nifty trick to easily share music using your USB stick and a music player such as Rhythmbox or Banshee.

My USB Drive/Audio book reader

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Declaring software open-source considered helpful

There have been two Humble Bundles released in the last six months:

  1. Humble Indie Bundle in December, 2010
  2. Humble Frozenbyte Bundle in April, 2011
The summary statistics themselves are enough to challenge some established stereotypes, e.g. the average amount contributed by Linux users has consistently been significantly larger than the Mac OS or Windows counterparts, showing that Linux users are willing to pay more than non-linux users for quality software.

On a larger scale, considering these to be real-world economic experiments, there is still much information buried deeper in the data than can be gleaned by looking at the summary. Here, I look at five-minute sampled data to see what effect making the software open-source had on the sales:

Contribution and purchases data for the Humble Frozenbyte bundle.
The projections show what the contributions and purchases might have been if Frozenbyte had not declared their games open source.