The author tells me to 'Please enable Javascript!'
I counter: 'Please enable HTML!'
In all seriousness, it's text, images, links.
There are no user accounts,
no dynamically updated database of 'favourited' sections,
no per-paragraph instant chat,
the page is remarkably atrocity-free!
Hence, this page seems very much un-Unix-y:
Solve problems at the lowest level of complexity, what?
My name isn't even on the list of recent donors anymore, that's going fast! Maybe he'll wake up tomorrow and hit refresh a couple times to be sure there's nothing wrong with the counter, hehe.
I freely confess to being flabbergasted by these displays
of less-than-rigorous thought processes.
How would a free software project 'pay it forward'?
They are in a very similar position, aren't they?
Edit: For some reason, I can't reply to child comments (probably a cool-off time-out at work?).
Just a short note here, then: $1.25e6 for the FSF translates
to 10 developers like Koch being paid (the donation page quotes "120000 EUR").
That's ten. For the whole FSF. As an example of a well-funded project.
I'm not going to comment on that. HN would rightly give me months of cool-off time.
There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. They have no problem meeting their donation requests, and having a good budget year over year. These projects are usually end user facing, in a way that their dependencies aren't.
It seems reasonable that these projects should consider adding items to their budget to redistribute funds to projects that they depend on.
Some probably do this, however I think the GP was suggesting that something like this become more common.
> There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. They have no problem meeting their donation requests, and having a good budget year over year.
Too bad OpenSSL wasn't one of them until after the big "heartbleed" incident.
The core infrastructure projects don't seem to get as much funding as they ought to, especially given almost everyone relies on them (even if they don't realize it).
Prior to Heartbleed and the industry rallying to fund critical projects, OpenSSL only received an average of $2,000 USD a year[1]... that's pathetic.
Over the next three years, the Linux Foundation will receive a combined total of $3.9 million from Google, Intel, Amazon and others to fund core infrastructure projects such as OpenSSL. Sounds good until you take a step back...
> Intel will invest "$300 million to help improve the pipeline for women and minorities, actively support the hiring and retention of diverse candidates, and fund programs that support the positive representation of women and minorities in technology and gaming industries."
> "Google Gives $775,000 to Nonprofit for Tech Diversity
CODE2040 said Monday it received $775,000 in grants from the tech giant to support the launch of free training programs for more than 5,000 black and Latino college engineering students over the next two years."
It's interesting with the Outreach programme in GNOME (I think that's what it's called), because if you periodically look at planet.gnome.org, there are interesting things going on with developers within that outreach programme.
But there are also justified backlashes to the programme, given that there is a perceived priority given to the programme in some areas instead of writing software. The argument is that not everyone and their dog needs to be involved with writing software, so why should we encourage them to? You don't see such pushes in dentistry, the car industry or anything like that; "Are you a WOMAN? Then join the car industry!".
Strangely we do in IT though, where it is the belief that we should make EVERYONE code!
> You don't see such pushes in dentistry, the car industry or anything like that; "Are you a WOMAN? Then join the car industry!".
Yes you do. Every single fucking time this comes up someone says "you don't see this in construction". It's rebutted every time it comes up and it's really fucking easy to do a simple web search to find examples of programmes to get men into teaching or nursing or to get women or minorities into construction.
Replying to myself to mention that I am neither for or against the GNOME outreach programme!! - I am entirely an observer! I haven't used GNOME since GNOME2 due to disliking the new interface; I periodically check on there to see what's going on GNOME world and it is quite interesting, both for developments and also for what's going on internally with disagreements and discussions between people.
I thought I ought to add that because I suspect people are thinking that I dislike the programme? Either that or people like down voting with no reply.
With regard to the encouragement for everyone and their dog to take up coding, I see it a lot but in truth I do not see the same things in other professions - I have never seen a push to make youngsters take an interest in banking or journalism yet over here in the UK there is a push to make programming/coding a part of the national curriculum for youngsters, hence the introduction of the Raspberry Pi to encourage that.
Didn't GNOME almost go bust last year and hold an emergency donation drive, due entirely to granting too many paid internships (or similar) to people who aren't established GNOME developers, or even programmers?
No. The GNOME foundation is managing the funds of the outreach program (which doesn't have anything to do with GNOME, really, except it started there), so when some of the sponsors (think big corps) of the outreach programme didn't pay their agreed upon share on time, the foundation ended up in trouble. It was simply a liquidity problem which was solved when they received the sponsorship money.
That's at least how I think it went, you can go look it up, the details are online.
In addition, some projects that are not well-funded as a project are "funded" in the sense that companies pay people to work on them, for example Microsoft paying Simon Peyton Jones to work on GHC.
Firefox is kinda special because they get a lot money from whoever pays them to be the default search engine, doesn't matter if it's Google or Microsoft or Yahoo. There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't.
All of the Debian developers are volunteers, am I wrong? Slackware can barely support one employee, the founder. OpenSSH falls under OpenBSD, which also supports just the founder, everyone else volunteers, and they DO volunteer some serious time and do important things. They also had problems raising funds, there were discussions on HN about that here, and I'm sure there will be more in a year or two.
From: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html :
* If $10 were given for every installation of OpenBSD in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal.
* If $2 were given for every download of the OpenSSH source code in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal.
* If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal.
This is kinda depressing.
Is there someone from the Debian project here? I'm wondering if they could afford to run their own mirrors around the world if they had to. Could they cover hardware, colo and bandwidth costs, if they had to? I'm just curious.
> There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't.
That's the point -- the ones that can should support the ones that can't, which are often foundational components of the reason the ones that can, can get money in the first place.
Perhaps GPG should annually auction off which nation-state security service or online advertising company's public key gets automatically added to the recipients list for each encrypted message? </cynical>
Debian... seems to mostly get by on volunteer labor and be ok with it, or it did when I was involved with them. Has that changed? I suspect that in some ways Debian is underfunded given the amount of work they do. Perhaps money would make some things happen faster there.
The Apache Software Foundation does a decent job at fundraising, and even employs a few people to do stuff like administration. Most of the projects get by with companies that pay people to work on them, which seems to work out pretty well.
Firefox/Mozilla make most of their money with deals: Google and Yahoo, last I remember.
I don't know about OpenSSH.
It's possible, but mostly donations don't seem to work unless it's big chunks of money from companies.
> The Apache Software Foundation does a decent job at
> fundraising, and even employs a few people to do stuff
> like administration. Most of the projects get by with
> companies that pay people to work on them, which seems
> to work out pretty well.
The ASF budget is roughly 1.2 million a year, the bulk of
which goes to maintaining infrastructure for 200+ projects.
The significant losses due to Ubuntu development and related expenses are why Canonical as-of-late has been turning focus away from Ubuntu towards other markets such as Mobile and especially Enterprise (a la Red Hat's turf).
Ubuntu itself is a central part of their cloud business, so Ubuntu is indeed profitable for them. What's not profitable is their desktop and end users' market.
That's not quite how it gets expensed (nor how it works).
Canonical's cloud business might be profitable (even though Canonical as a whole is very-mush-so-not), however their cloud business is not coupled to Ubuntu, ie. they could use any Linux Distro, or any OS for the matter.
Ubuntu is a total loss center for Canonical. It's surprising to a lot of people given it's popularity... but popularity doesn't equal profitability... especially when most users don't pay anything for the software (not even support fees).
Not sure what "of course" means here... it's very possible to be profitable off your OS Development division... look at Red Hat, SUSE, etc. They pay for the development from support payments... they collect support payments because enterprise wants their OS... it's a positive feedback loop. The better the OS, the more enterprise pays, the more funding RH can put into the OS dev team, the better the OS gets, the more support fees they collect, etc etc etc...
Canonical has not been able to successfully charge for support like RH and SUSE have figured out.
> But it is a net gain for the company, and in fact without it the rest wouldn't exist.
It's not a net gain unless the company can be profitable as a whole and subsidize (and justify the enormous expense) off-put by tertiary services, etc.
... right now Ubuntu project is responsible for Canonical being perpetually in the red... every quarter, since their foundation. Canonical could very well just run enterprise support contracts, or push their cloud services. They don't have to use Ubuntu... any OS would suffice. They aren't somehow coupled to Ubuntu to the point if Ubuntu didn't exist, Canonical wouldn't either.
I wonder what happened behind the scenes that basically killed Ubuntu in its tracks.
Circa 2008, before the Unity and Pulseaudio switches, it was considered by pretty much everyone the premiere Linux distro. I don't see why they could not get support contracts with Dell, HP, etc to sell Ubuntu computers and provide the tech support in exchange for positive cash flows.
Even today Dell is still doing Sputnik and in European countries you can buy HP hardware with Linux. Why is Canonical not taking advantage of the fact that they could be making money off support for their desktop OS through all the hardware vendors?
> I wonder what happened behind the scenes that basically killed Ubuntu in its tracks.
Ubuntu has never been profitable for Canonical. Shuttleworth's game-plan was always long-term minded regarding Ubuntu -- but as we've seen as-of-late, Canonical is shifting focus to other markets they view as potentially profitable. Shuttleworth has committed to keeping Ubuntu alive, but it's no longer Canonical's sole hope for income.
> I don't see why they could not get support contracts with Dell, HP, etc to sell Ubuntu computers and provide the tech support in exchange for positive cash flows.
This isn't just a problem for Ubuntu, but for most end-user linux distros. People always joke with Linus when the "year of the Linux desktop" will finally arrive... The people who use Linux as their daily driver generally don't need the support, and for the ones who do, well it's a lot less marketshare than Windows.
> Even today Dell is still doing Sputnik
Besides Sputnik, and some Linux-only end-user manufacturers like System76, there really isn't a lot of choice for pre-installed Linux end-user computers.
It's weird too, because Sputnik is $50 more expensive than the windows version of the same hardware. (probably some Microsoft deal going on here).
Linux comes pre-installed on majority of server hardware (server hardware than comes with any OS at all that is), and Linux dominates this field. But the "year of the linux desktop" hasn't quite arrived yet. I do hope it comes soon.
> Besides Sputnik, and some Linux-only end-user manufacturers like System76, there really isn't a lot of choice for pre-installed Linux end-user computers.
I've used System76 and Zareason. System76 are Ubuntu-only (and the hardware may have issue with other distros); Zareason will support any Linux.
You know, I actually didn't know about Zareason. Their website seems to have pretty reasonable price for the hardware you are getting, and I love having a choice of my preferred distro to run (I'm a Fedora guy).
I run full-time linux on my laptop and my goto hardware has typically been a Thinkpad T series.
> Canonical is shifting focus to other markets they view as potentially profitable.
Is it about profits, or - I'm going to be kind of cynical here - chasing taillights? The way they seem to bounce around from one thing to another (mobile phones! embedded!) makes it feel like the latter.
> The way they seem to bounce around from one thing to another
I tend to agree... modern Canonical feels like a company that lacks focus (probably because they aren't quite sure what the focus ought to be after realizing Ubuntu might not ever turn a profit for them).
The people who would buy computers with Linux probably wouldn't pay for tech support. Enterprises might, but not individuals. Plus I suspect that Microsoft is pretty keen to defend Windows on the consumer front - I've heard stories of deep OEM discounts on the condition that they don't offer alternative OSes.
I mean in the same way you buy a Dell notebook and get two years of phone support, you would get the same with a Dell Ubuntu notebook but Canonical would provide it and Dell would pay them for it.
I mean that the people who would buy a Dell Ubuntu notebook mostly wouldn't use phone support. If Dell thinks the same, they wouldn't pay Canonical very much to provide that support. They do now sell the XPS 'Developer edition' with Ubuntu; I have no idea whether they pay Canonical for support, or how much that makes.
The FSF had revenue of 1.25 million in 2013. I'm not trying to comment on where it came from or where it went to. I'm only pointing out that they are not in a very similar position.
Typical credit card fees are 2.9% + 30c. Assuming that they have regular fees at not non-profit rates(which tend to be lower), it would make their average donation amount to be around $7.14
With that many transactions they should be able to negotiate a lower fee than that. My company did a bit over 4 million in CC transactions last year and our rate is 1.9% and I believe the flat rate per transaction is 25 cents.
As someone else pointed out 2.75%-2.9% is common, often thre is a charge per transaction too (on the order of 25cents after it's all said and done). The fee can change based on the card type (the merchant pays a higher fee on rewards cards normally...someone has to pay for rewards!) and international purchases can have additional fees. Charges backs can also bump up fees, ditto for outsourced fraud protection.
This is partly why I stopped donating to the FSF. They're dumping some amount of that money into misguided PR campaigns rather than helping out the developers trying to make free software better.
1.25 million USD is really not a lot of money at all... especially given all of the projects the FSF supports under the GNU umbrella.
If they had zero expenses other than staffers, at a very modest 65,000 USD a year that would not even cover 20 people.
The EFF, FSF are the only real "good guys" out there fighting for your techie rights every day... They could really use your donations and support (even if you don't agree 100% with all of their message).
> How would a free software project 'pay it forward'?
As mentioned by the grandparent comment, GPG is in use by Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat package managers. Whether or not you count those three as free software they have plenty of money to pay forward to a piece of software that underpins their entire stacks.
Unless I've missed something big in the past 2 years even the Debian Project Leader is still a volunteer[0]. If most/all money's going to operating costs it's hard to make the case they're holding out on somebody. They also have a record of treating their upstream quite well so I'd need some evidence to believe they're dropping the ball.
I am having a hard time to find financial statements from Debian.
Ubuntu, or rather Canonical, being a private company, doesn't seem to release financial information.
The Ubuntu main page doesn't even provide a 'donate' link anymore.
Which leaves RedHat, at last. A public company, of course[0]:
Operating profit 2014: $ 1.3e9
Net total income 2014: $ 178.3e6
This article claims that $222k was the budget for 2012 for Debian, down at the bottom. It also claims the budget should be $19B, if paid at market rates.
You're off on your numbers. The 120k are for him plus one developer. By that estimate that's 20 people for the FSF.
However, a lot of commercial entities use pgp as core of their business: all software packaged for the linux world is signed with gpg one way or another. All commercial distributions depend on it at their very core. I'm amazed that they don't fund gpg at least partially.
The thing is, the underfunded dependencies that are the most vital are those that are widely used by many projects. If it was normal to chuck a small percentage of available funds to dependencies, the money would start to add up.
We're our own worst enemies. Software developers have this sort of circular firing squad where nobody wants to be the first to keep their source closed and try to charge for it. Because then you're just "greedy" and not pure enough.
But that'll never change unless all of a sudden we say "Ok, on the count of 3, everybody stop giving away their hard-earned expertise for free. 1... 2... 3..." We're like musicians nowadays. We love it, so we do it without insisting on compensation.
A few months ago, I Show HN'd an open source project, but reserved the copyright to the code. The commenters immediately took note of this and I felt compelled to switch it to an MIT license. (It was open source for security reasons, if you're wondering.) I'm glad I did, but the point remains: there was pressure to conform.
> Software developers have this sort of circular firing squad where nobody wants to be the first to keep their source closed and try to charge for it.
Er, the first to keep their source closed and try to charge for it happened a long time ago, and there are huge numbers of developers at firms from one-man shops to massive megacorps still doing it today.
The idea that closed-source for-profit development is a novel idea that violates norms in the software development community and that everyone is afraid to try is cute, but, you know, completely contrary to the actual facts of both the current state and history of software development.
Why in the world would this be downvoted? There is nothing inflammatory about this post at all. He's bringing up a widely debated point in our industry.
> nobody would trust closed source encryption software.
ORLY? Have you read much source for BitLocker or FileVault, recently? WhatsApp? Skype? And those are just the most popular ones off the top of my head...
No, and I wouldn't trust myself to read it either. But, there's a fair chance that someone I trust eventually will and that they'll point it out when they see something fishy.
I see the encouragement to switch to an open source model a lot too. When a closed-source or close-licensed project is posted, you get a few commenters saying how great it'd be if the project was open source because then the community would benefit. Call me a cynic but in reality, this likely means "please make the source and licence more open so that I can use it without paying you".
I say this because I know that when I am looking for libraries to use at work in commercial software, I have to look for BSD-style code and now actively steer clear from GPL and LGPL code (static builds for me please).
It isn't to be malicious but it's mainly because I would like to continue living. Giving away things I have spent years working on doesn't pay my mortgage or put food on the table.
> where nobody wants to be the first to keep their source closed and try to charge for it
Seems like there's another option -- open source your project and also charge for a license to use it. By open sourcing people will trust it more which will cause its value to go up. And then more people would be willing to pay for it.
> Seems like there's another option -- open source your project and also charge for a license to use it.
If you open source your project, unless you're using an unusual definition of open source, you've provided a free-of-charge, sublicensable license to use, modify, and distribute it. (Or, at least, a license that the licensee is free to sublicense without charging the sublicensee or paying an additional fee to you, so even if you are charging for the direct licenses, the more you sell the greater the probability that it will be available at no charge.)
You could open source it and charge a fee for professional support, however, which is a fairly common model.
As I understand it, that's what he did. He open sourced it and kept copyright on it. That would mean that everybody would be free to read it as posted but wouldn't be able to use it or distribute it without permission.
Releasing something under an open source license usually involves retaining copyright but is, itself, giving permission to use, distribute, modify, and distribute modifications. Pretty much every open source project either retains copyright of the work or is composed of the work of developers who each retain copyright of their portion of the work.
The problem is that in practice most people in almost any free software project do not have the funds personally to afford donating all the time.
I mean, I feel the burn when I give money to Debian, Arch, KDE, etc - but I do it because I know I have to, because the software is so important to me. The $500 or so I donate each year is a lot of money to me, and I'm in the US - I cannot imagine how much donating to these projects would hurt the international users who make significantly less than the 15-25k or so I make annually.
I don't know how KDE managed it, but Blue Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems) is a Germany company founded by one Clemens Tönnies, Jr. Don't know anything about the guy, but he is somehow paying 10+ KDE devs without a business model. I've donated a lot to Kubuntu, but I cannot imagine in a million years they get enough donor money to fund all the devs they employ.
But those kinds of philanthropies, the way Mark Shuttleworth keeps Canonical afloat, seems to me to be the only practical way to keep free software afloat. You cannot ask a million destitute people to donate money they need to eat or sleep comfortably, but we as a community don't have the charisma or ears to get fat cat donors to foot the bills. Probably because software freedom does not matter as much when you are wealthy - you can just pay to get the software you want made anyway, and you might even be able to bribe companies to give you the source if you care enough.
And I recognize a huge portion of the donor pool for most free software projects isn't either end of this spectrum, but people like me making something above the poverty line and below extravagance that donate what they can where they can, but that is consistently shown to not be enough. And I imagine it is more because it takes millions of average joes paying dollars to match what one millionaire can do in an instant.
If it's a registered non profit you can donate and 'write it off' too. The idea that a 'big company' should do the donating is short sighted. That big company is made up of individuals. If everyone reading this donated $100, the problem posed by the article would disappear.
My point is that it's probably easier to get a company that is turning a profit off of something to donate a single large sum, than to convince a million people to donate $1.
If your effort is half as good, you still get half million people to donate $1.
On the company case, one million is not pocket change, so this will be a serious decision that has to be approved by several independent branches within the organization, each with veto power. Screw one of those and it's a deal breaker.
Furthermore, I'd say that this decision is one that is particularly difficult to frame for the company. While corporations do understand direct costs very very well, they are practically hardwired to ignore/exploit the gift economy. So the discussion will be stirred towards what indirect benefits will the company receive from donating to a worthy cause (public relations, tax exceptions, etc) and away from the consequences of letting a (unacknowledged) strategic partner to go under.
Not to say that a corporation cannot assume stewardship of a distressed project, but it almost always requires executive fiat to get over the bureaucracy.
It's easier still for a business to pay for a support contract, contributing to Canonical's revenue. Perhaps they could send a small fraction of that money to projects like GPG.
Ubuntu is not making money, and Mark Shuttleworth keeps infusing the company with his own pocketbook whenever it goes in the red. They might be doing something on the server / corporate support contracts end nowadays, that has really taken off in the last few years, but you might as well just ask Mark to hire Werner Koch.
Ah, but what is discipline?
Shifting the vocabulary burden around doesn't accomplish much.
Discipline easily translates to will power
(to do even in the face of adverse circumstances).
But haven't we learned recently to consider will power a finite resource?
Something that cannot be switched on at will arbitrarily[0]?
The author himself escapes this accusation only by the skin of his teeth in
the next-to-last paragraph:
How do you cultivate discipline?
By building habits – [...]
Habit. This word, comparatively unprepossessing as it may sound, sits really
at the core of the discourse[1].
Whenever my thoughts stray to punishing myself for lack of discipline,
I try to remember to leave that martial outlook towards life
to the Spartans[2] and reflect peacefully on my habits instead.
[2] In this way, trying to force discipline may easily lead to results that are as
devastating as those that the author foresees for motivational strategies.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
~ Aristotle
A monitor like this would be the end-all-be-all for my
scientific workflow woes. The paper du jour on the e-ink and the journal and ipython on what I call "the lightbulb" (read: TFT).
I have already been fantasising about and doing
a spot of research into building one on my own by using an
Arduino (I wouldn't need as high a refresh rate as this little marvel) and one of PervasiveDisplays'[0].
I gave up convinced there was no sane way to actually
connect this contraption to my laptop, and the USB solutions
mentioned below do not instill hope.
Flux minimizes blue light but not total light hitting your eyes. Even with it, backlit displays tire the eyes and inspire wakefulness far more than front-lit surfaces.
The Gimp has certain, err, noteworthy notions about user interface design.
Nevertheless, single-window mode has been around for years (I think): Select 'Windows'->'Single-Window Mode'.
The distinction between Save and Export is one of those measures to gently remove the user's feet from below the barrel, I imagine (only the native xcf-format stores certain information, like layers).
They should make single-window the default. Many new people do not know about it and quit Gimp before finding out about it.
But more importantly, the worst thing I have to face in GIMP is layer/selection management. I understand how it works, I worked with it for years, but it's annoying as fu... very annoying.
s/odd/sane/:
This oddity you've identified is precisely the reason people like me are interested or even invested in the project.
Must everyone worship at the altar of smudgy screens
and ineffective text input? The N900 is the last phone
that was actually usable. And by usable I'm not only referring to the stylus/keyboard input duality, but also to the the fact that it's as trivial extendable as any reasonably open Linux system.
In fact, I'd wager that the two are very closely correlated:
the need to tinker and the desire to do so with sane input devices.
Running mitigates the age-related deterioration of walking
economy whereas walking for exercise appears to have
minimal effect on the age-related deterioration in walking
economy.
I tried jogging over the summer for the first time in years, but my feet started hurting. It would take days to recover. I gave up after 2 months. It feels good but I seem prone to injury.
Barefoot running is mostly just a trade off of one type of injuries for another. And it's not just "use no/special shoes". It requires learning a different way to run. If you run "normally" you're going to severely hurt yourself.
If that's stopping you, try something like the Merrell Trail Glove or the New Balance Minimus. You get good sharp protection but pretty much zero padding and very minimal heel drop.
Almost everyone has problems when they first start running, and these become worse the older you get. The good thing, though, is that most people can work through the initial period if they do it right.
I was a runner on cross county and track teams in high school, but basically went thirty years after that without running regularly. I would often start up for a few weeks in the summers, then peter out. As I aged into mid 40's, found that I was getting injuries when starting out, and they didn't go away. I tore my calf muscle at age 45 (trying to imitate Usain Bolt), and that injury stuck with me for several years; I thought I'd probably never be able to run pain-free again.
Then a few years ago (2011) I started running and took everything more slowly, both mileage and pace. I actually started out just doing hikes in nearby mountains, since my calf injury made running painful but hiking/walking was fine. I ran a little bit later that year, things went okay but I still caused myself some injuries because I always wanted to try and run faster. The same thing happened in 2012, although I ended up running my first marathon late that year. It was painful and my persisting Achilles/calf injury was always present, at least in a small degree.
In early 2013 I started running again and threw all thoughts of fast pace out the window, and paid close attention to pains, backing off and sometimes taking time off until some niggling pain went away. I started running more often, five or six days a week, which paradoxically helped. Yes, you generally need more recovery time as you age, but if you keep your runs on the slow side and don't tax your body as much, running every day can be easier and more injury-free than running just a few times a week. I have talked to others with same experience.
I ended up qualifying for Boston Marathon last fall, proving that you don't need to train fast or hard to race fast (in fact best training for marathon is much slower than most people think). And this year I've run the Boston Maraton, a 50 mile mountain trail race, and I'll be logging well over 2,000 miles for the year (i.e., averaging 45 miles per week).
I have heard similar stories from many runners I know. "Injury prone" is very often a tag that attaches to any person who tries to start running too many miles or who tries to run them too fast. Since most people try to start running that way -- trying to do too much too soon -- most people end up being "injury prone".
Instead, start out slow, walking most of the miles if you want, and ramp up very slowly. I've gone from being injury prone to being injury free, mostly because I know the sorts of things that would cause me injury and I avoid doing them. The good thing is that once you've slowly ramped your body up to a given level, say for me 50 miles/week at pace around 9:00 to 10:00 per mile, my body is rock solid. I'd have to be careful if I wanted to increase mileage or speed, but if I just want to keep running at level my body is acclimated to the odds of injury are very low. And the pleasure when running is very high.
Can I ask what kind of shoes you were wearing, and if you tried other shoes? Have you ever tried running barefoot?
When I started running, I wore shoes, and my feet hurt all the time. I stopped wearing shoes, and the foot pain stopped, too. I've since found shoes I can wear when it's cold/wet that don't hurt, but running barefoot is still my go-to style.
I think normal running shoes are probably fine for most people, but I benefited quite a lot from running without shoes at all.
The ounce of truth is that feet (in general) need to be strengthened. YOu can do fun stuf like walking on the beach, on gravel roads, or proper rock climbing, or balance beam work. All of which iwll work to strenghten your feet. What's funny is once your feet are strong, shoes have little to do with it.[1] The inverse is not true - weak feet in barefoot shoes - is likely to create a problem.
Barefoot style shoes may be useful for some people with strong feet, but they are a poor substitute for developing strong feet in the first-place. And they can be outright dangerous for people with weak feet and poor balance, or people subjecting themselves to long-distance or endurance situations. Whereas a trail-running shoe used in a hiking application is a better, safer, and more useful piece of gear.
Lastly, one nice feature that has come out in the recent years is the ability to get the right (so called) drop, in a variety of styles of shoe. And shoes that are either too angled or too 'flat' will present additional challenges, but expecially people with weak feet. The footbed angle needs to be selected based on application.
[1] They can still hurt you, but strong feet in good shoes tend to be fine.
Random guess from some clown on the other side of the internet, but if I had to guess, one of the following was bothering you:
* too quick of ramp up or not enough recovery (it can take a long time to ease into this stuff)
* you were running incorrectly, either directly because of bad technique or you had bad technique because of bad posture/stride. many people land hard on their feet or turn one foot out when they run.
* you have actual medical problems with your feet or legs that would cause this
if you enjoyed it you should really look at different running techniques and make sure your stride is good so you can get back to it! if your posture is bad your stride will almost definitely be bad; you may need to start there.
What kind of shoes did you have? What kind of surface did you run on? Did you get your stride checked? Did work up to any distance or go all out day 1?
Because running looks easy as opposed to say weight lifting, people often do it without thinking. Running is just like any other exercise in that you have to start slow and work up to more. You also have to do some research for proper technique and equipment.
I would check on the shoes and then have a running store look at your stride. I used to hate running because in general it hurt. I tried a bunch of different shoes, settled on Brooks Ghosts, and running is actually a pleasure. I also focus on my stride and work on foot strike, length of stride, etc...
Since you're doing the C25K I'm assuming you are not super athletic to start. If you are overweight, you may want do some other cardio until you get your weight down a bit. If it hurts obviously don't do it and find some professional advice. Re-doing days in a training program is fine, everyone has their own pace.
If you go to a decent running store, they'll record you running on a treadmill. They should show you what your ankles are doing so you can pick shoes to support your feet. Most people aren't biomechanically sound, the ankles roll in or out a bit, this can be mitigated with shoes and inserts.
My ankles roll in a lot, with out a fair bit of support, my knees kill me.
Also, muscles recover quick but tendons take forever to heal - you're not running from a lion, so you can take your time and experiment with what works for you in a safe way. (it sounds like you are, so good for you)
You probably need a different brand of shoes. For instance, New Balance works great for me, but I can't ever wear Nike or Avia. Both of those brands really hurt my feet, even though I run all the time. Keep trying different brands, or go to one of those fancy shoe places that can fit your feet properly.
What kind of shoes were you using? People have unique feet, so you may need to be fitted. Find a running store and sit down with an employee to find running shoes that will best suit your feet.
it can be related to diet at least it was for me. increase in protein and fruits and getting rid of starchy foods gave me a leg up on it - not right away after adjusting your diet it can take some time to feel better. Gradual acceleration too can help. Speed walking may be the next step, at least it was for my dad.
According to Wikipedia, 10% of all people get what's called "Plantar Fasciitis" at some point.
In my late teens, I began to have very bad bouts of this syndrome, whenever I sprinted. The more I ignored the pain, the longer it would take to heal.
In my early 20's, I suddenly took up running--eventually ratcheting up my route to 7 miles--after being somewhat sedentary for a couple years. The result of this was perhaps the worst case of Plantar Fasciitis I'd ever developed.
Shortly after, I visited an expensive shoe store downtown, and explained my problem to the salesman. He recommended a pair of high-end Asics, in the price range of $80-$120. I believe the pair had the title "gel evolution" in it somewhere. He also laced them up a special way. Whenever I use them, I maintain this special lacing, and always have to carefully tighten them just enough so that my feet still have enough flexibility to bend my foot without constricting it or cutting of circulation.
These shoes provided incredible arch support, being manufactured with a great deal of material surrounding the ankle and the sole, but while also being made of flexible material in the rest of the shoe. (Note that the shoes I'd been wearing when I injured myself were incredibly cheap, and had virtually no arch support).
To further enhance the arch support, I also replaced the soles with some fairly thick "Superfeet" soles, which are rather stiff and are curved to rise where your arches are.
Since then, for the last 5 years, I've been running on a daily (or at least weekly) basis--the problem has never come back, even though I seem genetically predisposed to the syndrome. Having excellent shoes makes all the difference.
Later on, I picked up a pair of Asics from Nordstrom Rack, at a great price (under $50). These were much cheaper (instead of having "Gel Evolution" in the title, they were just called "Oasis"). These have worked just as well for me, although I suspect that my continuing foot health can also partially be attributed to the muscle strengthening of my feet, as well as good form. (When you are still in pain, be very careful not to continue running if you feel like you need to modify your gait in order to avoid the pain ("limping"). This can result in injuring yourself in a new, different way, such as your knees!)
By the way, I highly recommend jogging or running, in general. I wouldn't be the person I am today without it, since it is often when I am outside, running, when I come up with the best ideas. I suspect this has something to do with the time-scale of the activity (lasting long enough for sustained thought), the freedom for the mind to roam (since exercising is not mentally taxing), and not the least due to the increased oxygen in your system. If you run often enough, you begin to become addicted, to the point where you feel "high".
Plantar Fasciitis is actually a fairly simple thing to fix if you're on top of things early. It's very possible you were wearing sprinting spikes that had a negative heel-to-toe drop and lengthened the fascia more than you were ready for.
For me just changing shoes with a 6mm difference in heel-to-toe drop was enough to create the same problem. I woke up one morning with a pain that felt like a nail being driven up into my heel. I spent about an hour doing deep tissue massage on my arch and calves - did a workout the same day and didn't have any issues the next morning.
You probably don't need quite as much support as you might think if you were willing to slowly remove support which would strengthen/stretch the muscles around the heel.
I have worn Asics shoes for most of the time since 1981. However, shoe preference is very individual--friends have preferred Nike or New Balance or Brooks. Feet are shaped differently, and strides are not the same. And one's feet change over time; somewhere along the way I went from size 9.5 to 11.
I can also recommend Asics. Even after going to high-end running stores with video profiling, Asics are still the best running shoe for me. With every other brand, I get shin splints shortly after running.
I had the exact opposite experience. I have no idea what model my asics were, but some super awesome gel nonsense. And I was in constant pain and kept giving up. Someone convinced me to try minimalist shoes and in two weeks everything was better.
>since it is often when I am outside, running, when I come up with the best ideas.
There's quite a lot of support for the idea that walking helps people think better.
It seems like the distinguishing factor is intensity, so it's likely you could substitute in some other higher-intensity workout that may be easier on the joints, like swimming.
On Debian (and, I'm sure other distributions of GNU/Linux)
the 'bsdgames' package contains a simple program called 'arithmetic'
which poses similar challenges, albeit reduced to the most
elementary operations: addition and substraction.
Call as
arithmetic -o '+-x/'
in order to add multiplication and division.
I find it a handy supplement to 'gtypist' in order
to train touch-typing of numbers.
On a side-note: I'm surprised at how scarce such software is -
pitiful as it may be.
But then, the advancement of the human intellect isn't
at the forefront of our cultural conscious, is it?
I counter: 'Please enable HTML!'
In all seriousness, it's text, images, links. There are no user accounts, no dynamically updated database of 'favourited' sections, no per-paragraph instant chat, the page is remarkably atrocity-free!
Hence, this page seems very much un-Unix-y: Solve problems at the lowest level of complexity, what?