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Try starting a restaurant, or worse yet a fast-foot cart, in a heavily-regulated area. You may find it difficult (somewhere in http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2000/03/ there's a long tale of licensing woe that's all too typical) or even impossible ( http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121022/13153120790/george-mcgovern-why-politicians-who-havent-built-business-are-bad-regulating.shtml )

It hasn't hit the software industry yet, because there's as yet no good way to impose "standards".

JWZ on this: "I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short. "

JWZ has given up fighting the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model. Instead, he profits from it. He now runs an all-ages nightclub.

Thank you for making me laugh out loud at work.

Your comment immediately brought back memory of the early November 2002 blog entries from JWZ's glory days setting up his "DNA Lounge" adventure, specifically those from Nov 5 and Nov 8:

Wind blow dish down, go boom.

Apparently we didn't tighten the bolts enough, and last night we had our first rain of the season. ``What do we need lightning arrestors for?'' we said. ``When's the last time you saw lightning in San Francisco?''

So, we waited until this afternoon to send Bishop down the pipe to re-align the dish, since he didn't want to brave the roof in 70+MPH winds last night. Sissy.

The DNA Lounge in SF has had live webcams for years. Definitely useful for checking out whether a show is worth the $ they are asking. Fortunately they put on fairly good stuff, so looking at their webcast often makes me get off my ass and go out. Might not work so well for a venue that sucks..

Mentioned on the DNA Lounge Blog: http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/05/16.html

From the article:

For less prestigious universities, "the inclusion of mathematical requirements can reduce the number of applicants to unsustainably low levels"

The owner of the DNA Lounge in San Francisco once noted this conversation with some construction people:
Noewell: Hey, do you have a calculator?
Barry: (Hands over his Palm Pilot.)
Noewell: (Looks...) No, I need one that can do square roots.
Barry: Huh??
Noewell: You know, Pythagorean Theorem?
Barry: Uhhhhh...
Noewell: A^2 + B^2 = C^2?
(Waits...)
I'm hanging a diagonal cable, and I know the width and height and need to know how long to cut it?
Barry: So this is that actual real world use of geometry that they told us about! I didn't believe it! I never expected to see this happen!

"However, unlike how the conservative, pro-consumerism people who propose starting a business as the simple solution to your each and every economic woe will tell you, it is a very difficult thing to do and you will likely spend a large amount of time and energy making it profitable in the first place."

Funny thing, it's the liberal micromanage-everyone's-life types who made it this difficult to succeed at building a business. After all, the best road to a classless society is to make sure no one can do better than their neighbours!! See http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/permits-index.html for a bazillion examples all in one handy place.

Senator McGovern (if I recall rightly who it was) discovered this after he retired from the Senate, and learned that the very laws HE had pushed for made it impossible for him to follow his dream of owning a nice hotel. He then said flat out that if he'd known how hard he was making it for small business, he would never have supported such laws in the first place.

While that's true some places, it's not the case in California, New York, Florida, and just about any metro area in the U.S. Complying with all the regulations, permits, and fees is a major adventure. Hiring even one part-time employee in these areas is another adventure (if you do it wholly legally). Yeah, you can start a part-time business in your garage and hope no one catches you at it, but unless it involves eBay you're not going to make a living at it.

Check this out -- similar bullshit (same dance, different tune) applies to most types of business that are open to the public anywhere in California.

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/permits-index.html

The DNA Lounge in San Francisco, run by Mozilla and XEmacs' one-time developer and hacker Jamie Zawinski, has done some similar things. You can check out their code and documentation here:

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/

In short, he's created secure Linux internet kiosks, streaming broadcasts, cameras, and scripts to automate much of it - in short, what you're trying to do but in nightclub form.

The DNA Lounge in San Francisco, run by Mozilla and XEmacs' one-time developer and hacker Jamie Zawinski, has done some similar things. You can check out their code and documentation here:

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/

In short, he's created secure Linux internet kiosks, streaming broadcasts, cameras, and scripts to automate much of it - in short, what you're trying to do but in nightclub form.

First off, Jamie Zawinski no longer programs much. He runs a nightclub.

Second, Joel Spolsky isn't exactly a big name on programming. He's better known as a blogger than a developer. He runs a little company that makes a desktop project tracking tool. That's not rocket science. We're not hearing this "duct tape" stuff from people like Dave Cutler, who designed VMS and Windows NT. Or lead developers on MySQL. Or big names in game development.

Spolsky is taking potshots at the template framework crowd. He has a point there. I've been very critical in that area myself; I think the C++ standards committee is lost in template la-la land. The real problem with C++ is that the underlying language has a few painful flaws for historical reasons, and attempts to paper those flaws over with templates never quite work. (Read up on the history of auto_ptr to understand the pain.) But that's almost a historical issue now. Newer languages such as Java and Python aren't as dependent on templates as is C++. If you get the basic language design right, you don't need templates as much.

I can easily see this getting abused.

Your prediction need only look back on UI technologies like Flash to realize that there will certainly be some of an "artistic" nature that will be enabled by this new technology

CSS has the awesome advantage of View -> Page Style -> No Style, which is invaluable when someone calculated that an absolute-positioned div would work *just right* with their computer's default font-size, or decides to use small green serife text on a black background

This will fry your potatoes:

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2009/03.html#16

as Bruce Perens famously said at Linux SF Con 2006, Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Jamie Zawinski (the DNA Lounge/Unix Mozilla 1.1 guy) said it in 1998.

So finally I talked my boss into getting me an SGI Indy (which I've since replaced with an SGI O2) and life became joyous again. Because SGI actually knows something about building user interfaces, and about making it possible to administer a machine without being a member of the technological priesthood. For but one example, I was able to install and format a new disk on this machine through GUIs, without once having to run ``man'' and try to remember some random arcane command that I last used in 1986.

This is the part where I start getting hate mail from people, and cheerleading messages telling me to take a look at it again, because it's so much better now. I understand. I'll take your word for it. And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux. But as we all know, Linux is only free if your time has no value, and I find that my time is better spent doing things other than the endless moving-target-upgrade dance.

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more. I hope that some day it will have evolved to the point where my mom can take home a Linux box, turn it on, and get on with her life without having to become a Unix sysadmin first, and without having to give up on all the ease of use she's come to expect from allegedly less powerful operating systems.

Just two years later, he took it mostly back.

I'll see your stolen security fence and raise you a stolen security camera.

OK, so it was a general-use webcam, not MAINLY for security, but it did serve that function... even got 2 shots of the guy taking it. :-)

...had the same problem. He quit computers and started a night club -- http://dnalounge.com/

[off-topic: even though I love regular expressions, and I use them all the time, I find JWZ's comment about regexes hilarious -- mainly because I can apply it to any technology I hate. He said something like: "Programmer has a problem. He decides to use regexes. Now he has two problems"!]

not directly related but http://jwz.livejournal.com/ has a mix tape (.m3u) you can stream that starts with a ponient track "good evening" but the third one, "rocked by rape" really gets into "what the f**k is wrong with the world" thing. "http://cerebrum.dnalounge.com/mixtapes/

Aside from the large text size requirement, this sounds really similar to something that Jamie Zawinski (http://jwz.org) did for the DNA Lounge kiosks -- a set of diskless linux systems that all network boot from a central NFS server, and are easily resettable. (Sounds like quite a weekend to set up, though.)

I'm not sure about that concert, but from what I've seen of BT, he puts a bunch more into his concerts than just the laptop. He usually has other equipment (and does in those pics, from what I can tell), a light show, etc.

That makes it somewhat borderline... but I'm more talking about how you shouldn't be this idiocy (note the lack of a power cable on the keyboard ). That idiot couldn't even tap his foot in time with his own music, and just hit play on the laptop and faked it the whole time.

Umm, the whole playing music in the restaurant thing is not new. Bars and restaurants have had to pay those fees for over 50 years now. You just haven't noticed. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCAP.

For an excellent summary of the whole issue, see:
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.html

Artists are generally not that good at promotion and marketing. They have to rely on others. This is where the problem lies.

As far as you're done buying music, I'm with you on that one. I'm always amazed at the fact that the CD has not dropped in price _at all_ in the 10-15 years that I've been looking at, and sometimes buying, music. Especially when it's for a classical piece played in the 60s. Seriously, guys, how much demand is there for that in order for you to keep the price at $15 for the last 10 years?

Don't forget XScreensaver and he is much more social/responsive guy compared to some people at that degree.

Also one of the interesting things is, his club runs OSS (as much as possible) and he shares the stuff as well as "Club" is much more like an open source project, even deepest details including how to get a license for club is shared as well as the software source making some stuff run.

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/

Asking someone to die because he likes Steve Jobs seems a little extreme, no?

Wozniak has come and gone, primarily because he made enough at Apple to live for the rest of his life in comfort. That was his motivation, and so he did it and now he's a schoolteacher. I can sympathise. Making high-tech products is a tough job. A lot of people who make their pile get sick of their tough jobs with little social interaction and go on to someone else. I'd consider JWZ to be another excellent example. He made his pile at Netscape, and he created the DNA Lounge, which I'm sure gives him as much of a social life as anyone would want.

Steve is a different type of guy. His single goal is to make Great Products. I don't think he's personally even that interested in selling them at a profit. The profit is means to an end, so he can make still more Great Products.

I'm typing this on a 17" PowerBook running MacOS X right now, and I can tell you, it is a Great Product. That's why I'm an Apple customer. Steve Jobs guides the technical people and makes sure they aspire to greatness instead of mediocrity.

I know in my own mind, as a technical person, how easy it is to say "Hey, this is good enough, let's go on to the next thing" instead of "Hold it, it's not great yet, let's do this and make it best in the world." I try to be my own goad, to make sure my product is the best. But it's hard and that's because Steve's role is hard, and necessary, in any company that wants to truly aspire to greatness, instead of creating stuff that's "just OK".

So few people make great products, because most people are willing to settle for lousy ones, like Windows or cheap PCs. But for those who love great products, and can afford them, it's Steve we have to thank, because he had the strength to demand only the best from technical people, including Wozniak.

D

Have you checked the http://www.dnalounge.com/ Jamie has had to deal with a lot of these issues and you might find some good advice there before your commit yourself to any one course of action.

So, when you want to perform music, you pay all three of these organizations. [ASCAP, BMI, SESAC] Rather than asking you which particular songs you're playing, they just charge you a blanket rate for access to their entire catalog; and then they make their own decision on how much of your money to pass along to the various copyright holders. They do this statistically, by looking at the popular music charts: rather than paying the particular artists you've played, they just assume that almost all of your money should go to the most popular stars.

1) Develop software 2) Distribute free software, free as in beer. 3) Get out of software biz. 4) Distribute free beer; free as in speech @ the DNA Lounge. (http://www.dnalounge.com/) 5) Profit!!

In reply to your footnote, he wrote about it as the intro to the "ongoing history"/blog of what's going on in his club.

I've been following the blog since before the club was open, if he's profitable he hasn't mentioned it, but I guess he just moans when he's losing money.

I have a healthy respect for him.
Why?
Because he saw what he perceived as a problem, the decline of San Francisco nightlife(*), and he did something about it.

The guy is a former software developer. Now he's a tavernkeeper with a website presenting an unreadable text/bg color combo... what's to respect here?

I have a healthy respect for him.

Why?

Because he saw what he perceived as a problem, the decline of San Francisco nightlife(*), and he did something about it.

True, he's sufficiently wealthy that he had the power to do it, but there are a lot of people out there who gained sudden wealth, did nothing noteworthy with it, and slid into history unnoticed.

I'm pleased to hear, albiet indirectly through his site, that the DNA Lounge is apparently healthily profitable and his second life is a success.

His story should be an inspiration to the restless everywhere, and that's no joke.

D

(*) I have no first-hand knowledge of this, but I'll take his word for it.

And after all those years of hardcore, Good Feeling (tm) UNIX development work, he's using Real Player on his club's website...

http://www.dnalounge.com/cam/

Sounds like his switch to OSX was predated by other forms of evil ;P

In case you haven't noticed the other posts, Zawinski ownes the DNA Lounge, which is a San Francisco club that features live webcasts, Internet terminals, and an extensive sound and light system controlled by computers. I'd wager that sound is pretty important to a nightclub...

Between (1) being a powerhouse programmer and software designer, and (2) owning a bithead-oriented nightclub, he can provide a setup to handle any Slashdotting.

No, he's just being bitter. I don't begrudge him that. But if he doesn't want Slashdot to pick up on his comment, he shouldn't post it where all the world can read it. He gets no sympathy from me.

Don't be so sure of that.

From DNA Lounge blog:

In case you were looking for more reasons to hate ASCAP, there's this article about Skip's Tavern here in San Francisco. It's a bar that has live music, with bands who play only original songs. ASCAP came to them and said, "you have bands, and so they must be playing songs on which ASCAP controls the copyright! Pay us $800/year." The bar owner asked for evidence that there was any copyright infringement; in response, ASCAP sued him. They were unwilling to negotiate, so in response, he's no longer doing live music at all.

Here, as previously reported on slashdot by Jeffrey Baker, is the "The ironic shot of the guy about to steal the webcam out of jwz's club.

The DNA Lounge owner comments about the "groupware Hula" (advises/admonishes Nat Friedman on?) and by the ways clarifies about the Netscape-Collabra innards.

My bandwidth is sponsored by AOL/TW since i'm like the only guy not broadcasting porn or pirated movies.

Oh, I thought it was sponsored by viewers like you.

a. I define karaoke as a parody, and im sure others would agree with me.

While it's true that few people would enjoy ripping karaoke versions of Garth Brooks for their IPods, it certainly isn't legal parody.

b. Do tribute bands pay licensing fee's?

Absolutely! But that money goes to a different set of agencies, primarily Harry Fox.

c. Karaoke tracks are never performed by the original artists, why are they getting royaltees for music they do not produce?

That's an ambiguous statement. You might've meant that your singers are volunteers who give permission to stream their singing, but there's still the instrumental track you're infringing on. Those instrumentals may or may not be by the first people to publish that song, but even cover bands are original in some respect. (A first generation copy is "more original" than ones copied from it, etc)

As to why the big-name performers get more money than the band who actually made the karaoke CDs, that's a valid objection. It's really just a matter of bookkeeping overhead- it would be too hard for you to submit a list of all songs you've streamed over the year, so they just average it out and assume your playlist mirrors the Billboard 200. For more info, jwz wrote a complete article. (It's on webcasting, which you're still doing, even though you overlay other peoples' vocals)

I'm one of only 2 in the world doing this.

There is no such thing as "legality through obscurity". Sure, the rareness of the activity means you are unlikely to be the target of a lawsuit, but it doesn't mean you can honestly describe your site as a "legal use" for statistical analysis of a protocol.

1. Nonsense? From me? Perhaps. But JWZ rants much more prolifically about it than I ever could, here. I don't want my server's data married to the motherboard. And I'm not going to pain myself trying.

'Sides, CPUs caught up with hard drives a -long- time ago. The performance hit of software RAID-1 cost me perhaps $10 in CPU power. Whooptie shit.

2. Clearly. Now, tell me, how would this be any different if I had purchased an Proliant ML330 for more money and less function? Remember, I said nothing about any "datacenter enviroment." I just wrote a bit about how I put together a solitary mail server.

I never knew this, and apparently many others didn't either, but if you use hardware RAID the disks are tied to that card.

More info here, plus the ever-acidic jwz calling people dumbasses, dipshits, and more fun!

http://jwz.livejournal.com/368307.html
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2004/07.htm l#28

I just recently went to San Francisco for the weekend with some friends. We decided to go to the DNA Lounge (the bar from one of Netscape's founders) and it had a couple of linux boxes lying around for the people to use.

I connected to IRC, read /. and opened an SSH connection to my server to start some download I forgot to start in the morning, while my friends were dancing and drinking.

"The problem for your problem!"

"The problem for your problem!"

Based on some rather public statements I've seen, I have a feeling it was JWZ.

I don't have time to look up the reference, but I'll bet someone with a bit more time on their hands will.

He did leave rich, and he's doing something quite different now, so I don't think this disclosure will hurt him any.

Of course I have no way to know who's right in this debate, since I'm sure the old codebase was genuinely a problem, but he's definitely the guy on the other side.

D

Conversely, the thing about the law is that it's there to screw you over when you least expect it. What exactly, using your example, is to be gained with the donkey law? Who is protected by this law? Maybe your mother, if she doesn't want to part with the donkey, but there's a law against selling something that isn't yours against the wishes of the true owner (theft). No, the only person that stands to benefit from this sort of law is the person who can get rich off it: some lawyer.

As I said in my original post, this is just a theory, just an idea. Of course there are problems with it, just as there are with this abbhoration we call a legal system.

As far as the review system is concerned: this works when there is a fairly even distribution of legal resources, which there is most definitiely not. For example: the RIAA was just given a patent for burning CDs immediately after a concert. This puts DiskLive in a bind because now there's legal backing for ClearChannel to mop the floor with them. It's a complete misuse of a legal tool, and there's no way that a company as small as DiskLive could put up a legal fight with CC. So legal review is out.

Google is going to have to spend hard-earned money to undo the damage these state lawmakers have done. If the lawmakers had something better to do (like, nothing, for example, or maybe repealing other dumb laws) this wouldn't be a problem. The thing is, there's no political reason for an elected official to go around cleaning up.

My suggestion is a response to this observation. When I mention this to people, people almost immediately fall into one of two camps: 1) That'd be great! 2) That's retarded. It's not too often that somebody can give me a convincing argument why it wouldn't work (or why it would), and you haven't either.

I think it's a GOOD thing for lawmakers to revise old statutes every once in a while, rather than just adding more to them. The legal code, like the tax code, is just too complicated for people to understand, and frankly I think it hurts our economy.

nomo zilla (Part 1)

nscp/aol (Part 2)

He was unhappy with the way Netscape had handled Mozilla, and with the way AOL was handling, well, pretty much everything really. He says, "Now I'm in a more honest line of work: now I sell beer."

Just a comment about the HDD, you'd want to do it via tFtp instead (look at what JWZ did to get things booted - look at "kiosk") or Movix would be interesting for this project as well.

Finally (and probably the easiest), you can get compact flash adapters for these things which would allow a solid state minimal linux distro to be booted, then pull the images from a share elsewhere through a cron-jobbed xsetroot with random images. (I did this exact thing once).

To refer to JWZ again, Webcollage is REALLY COOL on one of these.

I just want a network appliance that does ftp/smb/nfs deamons without the overhead (and cost) of a PC.

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2000/07.htm l#20

http://tinyurl.com/2msyt

Mostly revolving around the fact that they would not be able to run off of a generator easily...if at all.

"because there are other people here to freak out for me, if freaking is warranted. They'll handle it."
One of the people he has to "handle it" woke me up from a well deserved nap to ask where one can get a generator at 9pm on a Friday...answer: you can't.

Currently he runs a little nightclub call the DNA Lounge. Strangely enough, they webcast all their live events...

What would your ATM say?

Wander around looking slightly sulky?
Check.

Make sure the web cams are working?
Check.

Do anything else?
Hell if i know. But hey, it helps pay the bills.

Apparently, he's thrown all away to become a club owner.