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In 2004, Woz gave a great presentation about his early work at Gnomedex 4.0.

"The Gnomedex Geeks-Gone-Wild crowd was fixated on this rare and brilliant presentation by Steve Wozniak, a true geek's geek. His playing started with games and pranks, crystal-set radios, reading Popular Electronics. Then he met Captain Crunch and got into telco-busting Blue Boxes.

Woz wanted to be an HP engineer forever and never thought he'd start a company, but his friend, Steve Jobs, said, "Let's sell it!" at every opportunity. Good thing he did, and good thing HP turned down Woz's offer for the rights to build what would become Apple's first computer. You'll enjoy this -- one of the best from Gnomedex 4.0."

The recordings are still available in MP3 form:

Part 1: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail214.html
Part 2: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail215.html

Direct links to the MP3s:
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/Steve%20Wozniak%20Part%201%20-%20Gnomedex%204.0.mp3

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/Steve%20Wozniak%20Part%202%20-%20Gnomedex%204.0.mp3

If you're a PHP programmer, you're irresponsible if you're not already aware of its flaws, because you have not educated yourself by reading any of the following well publicized articles. Once you understand the flaws of PHP, you can't honestly make the statement that it's a well designed language suitable for teaching programming to kids.

First there is this classic article, Edwin Martin's "What I don't Like about PHP", which goes into detail about the following fundamental flaws:

1. Bad recursion
2. Many PHP-modules are not thread safe
3. PHP is crippled for commercial reasons
4. No namespaces
5. Non-standard date format characters
6. Confusing licenses
7. Inconsequent function naming convention
8. Magic quotes hell
9. Framework seldom used
10. No Unicode
11. Slow

Then there is the mind-set of the PHP language designers and community, which is deeply flawed. Ian Bicking's "PHP Ghetto" article sums up the problem with PHP's design and community pretty well:

I think the Broken Windows theory applies here. PHP is such a load of crap, right down to the standard library, that it creates a culture where it's acceptable to write horrible code. The bugs and security holes are so common, it doesn't seem so important to keep everything in order and audited. Fixes get applied wholesale, with monstrosities like magic quotes. It's like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policing policy -- sure some apps get messed up, but maybe you catch a few attacks in the process. It's what happened when the language designers gave up. Maybe with PHP 5 they are trying to clean up the neighborhood, but that doesn't change the fact when you program in PHP you are programming in a dump.

Jonathan Ellis' "Why PHP sucks" article makes a lot of good points and links to many other sites with more information to back up the claim that PHP sucks.

He perfectly summarizes the yapping of the PHP apologists when he says: Basically these all boil down to, "I don't have enough experience to recognize PHP's flaws because I haven't used anything better."

He summarizes:

In short, PHP sucks because, PHP's authors are prone to confuse "pragmatism" (a fine design goal, if done well) with "adding random features without considering how they impact the language as a whole." Thus, its authors have found it necessary to correct obvious flaws in both minor and major releases, with the result that the recent PHP5 breaks with the past to an unprecedented degree while still leaving many fundamental flaws un-addressed. I don't know if this is because they didn't recognize those flaws, or more likely, because they were willing to impose "requires a lot of pain to upgrade" but not "requires a complete re-write."

There is also a lot of great stuff about why PHP is so bad on http://www.ranting-wolf.info/category/technology/programming/php/ including a concise description of why the "Smarty" templating system is such a horribly ill conceive and terribly implemented idea.

And if you're still not convinced the design of PHP is deeply flawed, because language design is HARD and should only be attempted on purpose by experienced people, here's what the Father of PHP Rasmus Lerdorf himself said in an ITConversations interview, quoted in "Why PHP sucks, Part III":

"I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intend to writ

What they really should have done was use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or something similar.

I think this would have been a perfect application for cloud computing. If they had the ability to turn on more instances of their processing servers as demand required, they could have met any level of service.

The Gigavox Audio Lite media publishing platform was designed from the ground up using Amazon's web services, including EC2, S3, and SQS. Because of their application architecture, they can scale infinitely without doing anything special. IT Conversations has an excellent Technometria podcast describing how it all works. It's really pretty incredible stuff.

Let's see what we have here, viewed from an open standards/FOSS perspective, from someone with no prior knowledge of anyone in the group:

Technology Working Group:

Chair, Charles SteelFisher, New Media Director, Deval Patrick Committee
Creative director at ALIPES CME. Original Flash site that takes a few minutes to figure out what the hell is going on. I like it and hate it all at once. Wife(?) is director of Strategy at Cogent Research. Verdict: Not promising, but who knows.

Chair, Richard Rowe, CEO, Rowe Communications
Not a lot of info there!
More info in the bio here. Looks like an interesting guy. "He is the author of numerous articles and frequent speaker on the impact of digitization and the internet upon society with a particular focus on access to and preservation of academic, scientific, technical and medical knowledge." That could go either way, but sounds good.

Brian Burke, Microsoft
For what it's worth, this is a broad technology working group (not just on, say, standards), so I don't think it's insane to have MS at the table. But there are software companies with deeper MA roots...

John Cullinane, Principal, The Cullinane Group
Was a trailblazer in the proprietary software industry (a href='http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/culli nane.html'>Cullinane Corp), which is kinda sorta threatened by FOSS. That said, who knows where his head is at today.

Louis Gutierrez, former State CIO and Director of ITD
Former as in about a month ago. He's our man!

Keith Parent, CEO, Court Square
Let's see, found here that they have "Extensive experience with Wintel, Unix, Citrix and Linux platforms" and "Successful migration projects include; VMS to NT, NT to Unix, NT to Linux." Sounds reasonably OK to me, though a little dated!

David Lewis, Private Consultant
I presume this is him. On the board at the Mass Tech Dev Corp, and has done a lot of state IT work, so he's certainly relevant. Can't find anything about him re: ODF.

Larry Weber, Chairman, W2 Group
This talk suggests that Larry "gets it", but I haven't listened to it yet. IT Conversations is awesome, by the way. find the Clayton Christensen talk on open source. Here it is.

All told, as someone sympathetic to FOSS, who thinks FOSS is good for most businesses, I find this group to be well qualified, and apparently with a diverse set of viewpoints on standards and such. Diversity is good. I'll be watching this group as closely as I can.

Let's see what we have here, viewed from an open standards/FOSS perspective, from someone with no prior knowledge of anyone in the group:

Technology Working Group:

Chair, Charles SteelFisher, New Media Director, Deval Patrick Committee
Creative director at ALIPES CME. Original Flash site that takes a few minutes to figure out what the hell is going on. I like it and hate it all at once. Wife(?) is director of Strategy at Cogent Research. Verdict: Not promising, but who knows.

Chair, Richard Rowe, CEO, Rowe Communications
Not a lot of info there!
More info in the bio here. Looks like an interesting guy. "He is the author of numerous articles and frequent speaker on the impact of digitization and the internet upon society with a particular focus on access to and preservation of academic, scientific, technical and medical knowledge." That could go either way, but sounds good.

Brian Burke, Microsoft
For what it's worth, this is a broad technology working group (not just on, say, standards), so I don't think it's insane to have MS at the table. But there are software companies with deeper MA roots...

John Cullinane, Principal, The Cullinane Group
Was a trailblazer in the proprietary software industry (a href='http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/culli nane.html'>Cullinane Corp), which is kinda sorta threatened by FOSS. That said, who knows where his head is at today.

Louis Gutierrez, former State CIO and Director of ITD
Former as in about a month ago. He's our man!

Keith Parent, CEO, Court Square
Let's see, found here that they have "Extensive experience with Wintel, Unix, Citrix and Linux platforms" and "Successful migration projects include; VMS to NT, NT to Unix, NT to Linux." Sounds reasonably OK to me, though a little dated!

David Lewis, Private Consultant
I presume this is him. On the board at the Mass Tech Dev Corp, and has done a lot of state IT work, so he's certainly relevant. Can't find anything about him re: ODF.

Larry Weber, Chairman, W2 Group
This talk suggests that Larry "gets it", but I haven't listened to it yet. IT Conversations is awesome, by the way. find the Clayton Christensen talk on open source. Here it is.

All told, as someone sympathetic to FOSS, who thinks FOSS is good for most businesses, I find this group to be well qualified, and apparently with a diverse set of viewpoints on standards and such. Diversity is good. I'll be watching this group as closely as I can.

I heard Barry Schwartz - the guy Joel is referencing - talking at the Less Is More session of PopTech!. The guy is a genius.

Go listen to the session at http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.htm l.

When you think about it, there are truly some times when there are too much choices. Barry Schwartz's talk on IT Conversation really nails it. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.htm l

When you have many options, it will inevitably make your decision more complex. Less choice can be better because it simplifies the decision making process for someone who isn't necessarly qualified to make the call in the first place.

They say "the customer is always right" but I disagree. I think the customer is most likely clueless. In software, it's up to you to simplify the choices for them. Google is a prime example, they made searching simple and it worked.

That's not misleading at all -- you're just misunderstanding. OpenLaszlo applications certainly are "AJAX". AJAX stands for: "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". That's exactly what OpenLaszlo is, whether it's running on Flash or the web browser. OpenLaszlo was "AJAX" long before the term was coined.

Before AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) had a name, there was Laszlo Systems, a software tools developer using AJAX-like methods along with with Macromedia's Flash player to deliver richer Web experiences. David Temkin tells us why he chose the Flash player as a platform. Laszlo went open source and chose IBM's Common Public License as it was flexible enough to fit their needs without curbing commercial use.

Now can you find anything at all misleading about the announcement, once you understand the standard definition of the terms? You told me privately that you were misled into believing that 1) there was a new production ready product available and 2) there were new demos ready now. I can find nothing in the announcement or web pages that states or implies any of that, so you're just making it up, and reacting to your own straw man misunderstandings. Don't blame other people for your own poor reading comprehension.

Who are you to say that I am not entitled to post an announcement about an open source project on Slashdot? Who else shares your unique "school of thought" that nobody should announce anything until beta?

Let's get back to your original argument that open source projects should not post announcements before they're in beta. Why not? Says who? What are the positive advantages of that? How do they outweight the horrible negative consequences of stifling development and supressing community participation?

What do you have against Linux and every other open source project? You don't seem to understand the first and most important thing about open source software development, and that's colaboration and communication. Operating in secret until beta, as you suggest, is totally against those principles.

-Don

To address the question "Is OpenLaszlo AJAX?", here's something I wrote a while ago (before OpenLaszlo's DHTML support was announced): OpenLaszlo Makes Full Blown AJAX Apps on Flash :

The fact that Flash is commonly used for ads, and that those ads annoy everyone and cause many people to hate Flash, doesn't detract from the high quality user interfaces that you can build with it, if you use it for good instead of evil.

Since usability guru Jakob Nielson wrote Flash: 99% Bad in 2000, a lot has changed about Flash. He worked with Macromedia to improve Flash's usability, and he sells a report with 117 design guidelines for Flash usability. So yes, it is possible to develop usable applications in Flash.

OpenLaszlo is an open source language and set of tools for developing full fledged rich web applications, which are compiled into SWF files that run on the Flash player. Laszlo/Flash is presently much more capable of implementing high quality cross platform user interfaces than dynamic AJAX/HTML/SVG currently is.

Laszlo is a high level XML and JavaScript based programming language. It's independent of Flash in the same way that GCC is independent of the Intel instruction set and Windows runtime, because they both compile a higher level language, and can target other runtimes and instruction sets.

Currently Flash is the most practical, so that's what Laszlo supports initially, but it can be retargeted to other runtimes like SVG, XUL, Java or Avalon, once they grow up and mature. But right now Flash is the best way to go, because of i

Words have power. Arguing about the meaning of words, and how concepts are represented by words, is a natural part of the development of language. When we fight over words, we are helping to shape the language of the future.

I don't claim to have thought of this - I just finished listening to Bruce Sterling's excellent address on The Internet of Things, where he makes an interesting argument about early computers. They were described by many people as "thinking machines", and much of the effort expended in researching and building them was shaped by this idea of their nature. Sterling makes the point that a "thinking machine" is probably not as useful as a machine that is good at ranking, sorting, tagging, etc. - in other words, Google. What if we had thought of computers as something other than thinking machines? Would their development have been different? Would we be further along now if we had done so?

Maybe the statement "Wikipedia is not an encylopedia" is saying something really important about Wikipedia.

Slashdot article: USPTO to Use Peer to Patent Program
Web site: The Peer to Patent Project: Community Review
Audio: Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence for our Intellectual Property System

Yeah, it would.

Freedom (as in the FSF definition of freedom - think free software) requires that a user have total ability to create derived works. Fair-use is not enough in the FSF's view.

So, it's (DRM) a system that necessarily requires that owners of equipment not be able to modify, service, understand or improve on their own equipment. Now, if that sounds familiar, it's because those are the principals that underpin free and open source software. DRM is antithetical to free and open source for that reason.

--- Cory Doctorow, FSF Europe

Audio clip

It depends, for example listening to IT Conversations while having lunch at their desk is quite reasonable, certainly more reasonable that sending people to conferences all the time.

  I know I've heard a few famous geeks mention their early Amateur Radio
  interests and/or activities, eg, on some of the talks that are archived
  at:

                    http://itconversations.com/

  I don't remember them all, but one of Cliff Stoll's MP3's (on that site)
  goes into a bit of detail on his using Ham Radio skills to build a hand-
  held radar-based speed-gun (after speeding cars run down a little girl's
  cat or puppy, earlier in the story...)

  I think Kevin Mitnick had a license (but may have lost it - when it was
  needing to be renewed - as part of the consequences he got for releasing
  his Internet worm, some years ago.

  So, who ELSE is/was a ham, who also does/did more general geeky things?

  ---

  Radio Hams & Open Sourcerers have a lot in common - helpful natures,
  sharing ideas (src), exploring technologies of interest to themselves
  & building up extentions to some of it, that does what they want done

  ---

  My neighbor was a Ham as a kid; I could only see a 15m Dipole antenna
  on his house, but it was a home-built one. He did the usual things...
  converted ex-WW2 radios for Amateur bands (this is an old story...)

  He went on to become a Doctor, who was able to build medical gear that
  hadn't been invented when he needed it.

  ---

  Most of the kids I knew as fellow-hams have done pretty well in techie
  fields, so - even if it desn't top today's list of geeky hobbies, may-
  be it should, at least for those who are aiming for jobs in engineer'g
  and/or electronics.

I don't think that's fair. Dvorak and Cringely have a business model that's based on coming up with crazy shit.

Mossberg is a technologist for the common (business) man. He writes about technology from the perspective of a normal person (what we might call 'user').

There is nothing overly provacative over this particular theory, except that it is probably wrong. In new fields, integrated, proprietary technology usually gets the headstart because it can innovate faster (not having to worry about standards and such). But eventually, as the new field matures, innovation slows and the advantages of standardization and commoditization catch up. Here is an excellent talk by Clayton Christensen at the 2004 Open Source Business Conference. It is really an excellent talk. Christensen may not be 100% right, but he is at least mostly right, and has some great insights and stories.

Apple is kicking butt right now because they developed an awesome family of music players that while proprietary, are not overly so, decent software for managing said devices (iTunes is great at some things, sucky at others, but overall is pretty decent), and the first sane online music store (and kudos to them for their successful negotiations with the record labels). It's excellence of execution more than a winning business model. Plus, the industry's perceived need for some sort of DRM, which will let Apple sustain it's closed system for awhile.

If we ever get past the DRM BS (hah!), we'd at some point be able to buy music from store A and play it on player B. At that point, Apple will lose margin in both markets (stores and players) due to increased competition (right now they are exploiting the oft-talked about but rarely observed concept of 'synergy').

I didn't RTFA yet, but I had to react to:

'The bubble generation is much more attuned to the fact that things can get really out of hand,'

If this is true, it'll last another 5-10 years before we forget all lessons learned (correct or not) and return to business as usual. Our species is really good at self-deception, group-think, extrapolation forecasting, and greed, with varying results. We deluded ourselves regarding tulips, electronics, radio, the internet, and who knows how many other bubbles; we will do so again.

For a couple very good talks on the self-deception issue (somewhat OT), listen to Robert Trivers and Nassim Taleb

I didn't RTFA yet, but I had to react to:

'The bubble generation is much more attuned to the fact that things can get really out of hand,'

If this is true, it'll last another 5-10 years before we forget all lessons learned (correct or not) and return to business as usual. Our species is really good at self-deception, group-think, extrapolation forecasting, and greed, with varying results. We deluded ourselves regarding tulips, electronics, radio, the internet, and who knows how many other bubbles; we will do so again.

For a couple very good talks on the self-deception issue (somewhat OT), listen to Robert Trivers and Nassim Taleb

As you have noticed, podcasts generally suck - too much egotism, friendpotism, and what-I-had-for-breakfast.

Instead, check out IT Conversations. Hopefully others will suggest additional similar sources of high quality interviews and talks beyond just the NPR stuff, which often tends to be a rehash of what appeared on the Interweb several days earlier.

thefirelane wrote:
Everyone, please ... repeat after me: Options are never bad!

Seriously, you should really listen to this presentation from Barry Schwartz called "Less is more": http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.htm l

"We can't have it all, and worse yet the desire to have it all and the illusion that we can is one of the principal sources of torture of modern affluent free and autonomous thinkers."

But I do agree that having the ability to run Windows on my Mac is appealing. I might even try it. :)

Ideas for Start ups -- An entertaining talk by Paul Graham on how entrepreneurs get ideas for start ups.

Hackers and Painters -- Another entertaining and informative talk by Paul Graham. Unlike architects (who figure out what to build) and engineers (who figure out how), great hackers and painters do both. Who makes a good hacker and how can you identify a good hacker/programmer in a job interview? Why is empathy an important skill for programmers? As a hacker who also studied painting in Europe, Paul may be uniquely qualified to write a book entitled Hackers and Painters. If you leave your day programming job only to get home and write more code, this is a great book for you.

What business can learn from open source -- Paul Graham, popular author and Lisp programmer, discusses what business can learn from open source. According to him, it's not about Linux or Firefox, but the forces that produced them. He delves into the reasons why open source is able to produce better software, why traditional workplaces are actually harmful to productivity and the reason why professionalism is overrated.

Ideas for Start ups -- An entertaining talk by Paul Graham on how entrepreneurs get ideas for start ups.

Hackers and Painters -- Another entertaining and informative talk by Paul Graham. Unlike architects (who figure out what to build) and engineers (who figure out how), great hackers and painters do both. Who makes a good hacker and how can you identify a good hacker/programmer in a job interview? Why is empathy an important skill for programmers? As a hacker who also studied painting in Europe, Paul may be uniquely qualified to write a book entitled Hackers and Painters. If you leave your day programming job only to get home and write more code, this is a great book for you.

What business can learn from open source -- Paul Graham, popular author and Lisp programmer, discusses what business can learn from open source. According to him, it's not about Linux or Firefox, but the forces that produced them. He delves into the reasons why open source is able to produce better software, why traditional workplaces are actually harmful to productivity and the reason why professionalism is overrated.

Philip Greenspun did this with ArsDigita in the 1990's. This proves it can be done.

Further comments indicate that MS is following a very heavy SDL process. This may work, but it adds a lot of inflexibility in the design process (think specs, reviews, control gates, more reviews, product delays, etc.). A heavy SDL may work for US DOD environments or high-availability products (like NASA missions), but is it really necessary for all of MS's code? Does it hinder innovation or encourage it? Are other processes better or faster such as agile methods where one is designing for test but without a heavy SDL (CMM-style) process. The internal MSFT chap had some interesting comments about the heavy "process" and how it was window-dressing(C)2006 Microsoft.

The comments about IE further show that MS is not reducing the coupling between components. The tighter the interfaces, the tighter the coupling, the more complexity, and hence the harder to test and secure the beast.

For more info see some of Bruce Schneier's writings:
http://www.itconversations.com/transcripts/119/tra nscript-print119-1.html

Also see the 2003 report on MS and threat to US National Security:
http://www.networkworld.com/weblogs/security/00353 5.html

Listen to this: Asterisk - Open-Source VoIP PBX.

If you find Laszlo interesting I recommend you listen to an interview with one creators. That talk was the first time I heard about the system and it seems really interesting. Particularly how they decided to make it a "proper" compiler so you can stick on different backends depending on what you want to target. Ie you could theoretically stick on a full SVG backend if you want to target Firefox 1.5 and later (as it has full SVG support).

I didn't preview and then Slashcode seems to have swallowed my reply.

Anyways the link to the speech is http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.htm l.

IT Conversations will periodically have science related items that are not specific to computer science. Look through the archives. The Tech Nation series is especially good at hitting a broad range of stuff.

Brewster Kahle has some insights to this and other things in this speech he gave a while ago:
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail400.htm l

He speaks of a bookscanner that are automatic but expensive and humanturned pages which are actually cheaper if pageturner is on minimum wage or from India. Coincidentally the Indian government has agreed to scan any books send to them be the internetarchive (Which Brewster is a founding member of.) Go listen to his speech. It is really fascinating.

Listen to Greg Glaros US Navy Commander of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation. The USA is being outmaneuvered in business.

We could bring up the issue that strong DRM provides protection long past the current legal limit of copyright. We could argue that providing tools now for DRM circumvention is necessary for a guarantee that digital works will be accesible when the copyright expires. We could argue that region-coding prevents legal viewing of DVDs when individuals move their home from one country (region) to another. In short, we could argue for the legal benefits of unencumbered digital media.

We could also condemn illegal filesharing as an abuse of the unprotected nature of digtal media, not as the purpose of our resistance to DRM.

I have to add a link to a speech by Lawrence Lessig (audio) and a link to the Baen Free Library's copy of a speech (text) made during copyright debates in Parliment in 1841. Both of these have recently affected my thinking on the legitimate purpose of copyright and the consequences of extending them.

You might also want to consider some audio magazines (ie podcasts). ITconverstions is a good place to start.

I heard Joel spolsky talk about this book on itconversations.com

The first thing I had to ask myself is:
Why doesn't somebody just list the URL's of all the articles somewhere so I can download everything?

If any of you know these essays, how about url's?

IT conversations have a recently recorded interview with Joel in which he tells about the book. Great stuff.

IT Conversations's interview with Joel

I recently listened to in intersting IT Converation about Scalix a linux based e-mail solution that can handle large volumes. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail654.htm l/ http://www.scalix.com/products/index.html/ Bryan

The CEO, Julia Hanna Farris has 20 years of experience working on messenging systems for Bell then for Lotus Notes and then in a few other start ups, and she is a babe as well. There is an interview with her over at It Conversations that you might want to listen to.

With the paid for edition you get all the features of exchange without the cost and without the security risks of running Windows servers.

AS400 ... hackers despise it. [1]

After reading this about VC`s fishing for talent to build their ideas. I couldn`t put the thought out of my mind that `these guys are doomed`. Someone may bite at the money. Would you?

I don't see any interesting problems. Just lots of little nasty ones.

Thoughtful listening:
One of the biggest shifts I`ve seen this year is audio. Audio scales. [2] It brings the ideas forward with more immediacy than the written word. I don`t have to be at the conference to hear these speakers. IT conversations [3] has a whole heap of talks suitable for those interested in start-ups. For example....

* Paul Graham on Great hackers [4]
* Clayton Christensen about Capturing the Upside [5]
* Tim O`Reilly on The paradigm shift [6]
* Ben, Mena Trot on Six Apart [7]

But don't think Pod cast. This is more radio than Pod and the ideas are lasting ones.

Nasty little problems make you stupid.
Good hackers avoid it like models avoid
cheese burgers. [8]

Great Hackers:
The Paul Graham talk, Great Hackers, is humerous and insightful and all about the types of problems hackers find interesting. Graham poses lots of good questions on hacker motivation, what kind of projects hackers find worthy of solving, their tools and optimal environments.

Innovators Solution:
The Clayton Christensen talk has to be listened to carefully. His talk is about the answers, to the questions posed in his book Innovators Dilemma.[9] The core idea is that creating a start-up is less hit and miss than first appears. Christensen has devised a model that can be used as a guide to turning an idea to an enterprise.

The Paradigm shift:
Tim O`Reilly has written about, The paradigm shift in his article on the same name. His idea is that software like hardware is being comoditised. Therefore, the opportunities are not in hardware or software but the three c`s... accommodation's, collaboration & customisation. Listen to the talk or read the article [10] to find out.

SixApart:
What is it like to run a start-up? Ben and Mena Trot have ridden the Blog Wave with their company Six Apart. The Trots talk about what may appear as trivial, day to day things about their business. None of the pie in the sky ideas, just how they solve problems like, What are the consequences of changing business focus from a software development company to a software service company.
Reference

[0] `Paul Graham`, Great Hackers, talk, runtime... 30m 50s, 10Mb, recorded on 2004JUL27:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.htm l

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[1] `Ideas For Your Next Tech Startup`, Slashdot.org comments on VC ideas they want to fund:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/27/022320 5&threshold=3&tid=187&tid=1

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[2] Audio recordings scale (just like Linus does not). You can get the ideas from the source speakers with more immediacy that reading the words.

[3] `ITConversations`, A bottom up, audio based geek community:

http://www.itconversations.com/

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[4] `Paul Graham`, Ibid.

[5] `Clayton Christensen`, Capturing the Upside, talk, runtime ... 1Hr 48m, 37.3Mb, recorded 2004MAR17:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail135.htm l

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[6] `Tim O`Reilly`, The Software Paradigm Shift, runtime ... 37Min 45s, 8.6Mb, recorded 2003SEP18:

AS400 ... hackers despise it. [1]

After reading this about VC`s fishing for talent to build their ideas. I couldn`t put the thought out of my mind that `these guys are doomed`. Someone may bite at the money. Would you?

I don't see any interesting problems. Just lots of little nasty ones.

Thoughtful listening:
One of the biggest shifts I`ve seen this year is audio. Audio scales. [2] It brings the ideas forward with more immediacy than the written word. I don`t have to be at the conference to hear these speakers. IT conversations [3] has a whole heap of talks suitable for those interested in start-ups. For example....

* Paul Graham on Great hackers [4]
* Clayton Christensen about Capturing the Upside [5]
* Tim O`Reilly on The paradigm shift [6]
* Ben, Mena Trot on Six Apart [7]

But don't think Pod cast. This is more radio than Pod and the ideas are lasting ones.

Nasty little problems make you stupid.
Good hackers avoid it like models avoid
cheese burgers. [8]

Great Hackers:
The Paul Graham talk, Great Hackers, is humerous and insightful and all about the types of problems hackers find interesting. Graham poses lots of good questions on hacker motivation, what kind of projects hackers find worthy of solving, their tools and optimal environments.

Innovators Solution:
The Clayton Christensen talk has to be listened to carefully. His talk is about the answers, to the questions posed in his book Innovators Dilemma.[9] The core idea is that creating a start-up is less hit and miss than first appears. Christensen has devised a model that can be used as a guide to turning an idea to an enterprise.

The Paradigm shift:
Tim O`Reilly has written about, The paradigm shift in his article on the same name. His idea is that software like hardware is being comoditised. Therefore, the opportunities are not in hardware or software but the three c`s... accommodation's, collaboration & customisation. Listen to the talk or read the article [10] to find out.

SixApart:
What is it like to run a start-up? Ben and Mena Trot have ridden the Blog Wave with their company Six Apart. The Trots talk about what may appear as trivial, day to day things about their business. None of the pie in the sky ideas, just how they solve problems like, What are the consequences of changing business focus from a software development company to a software service company.
Reference

[0] `Paul Graham`, Great Hackers, talk, runtime... 30m 50s, 10Mb, recorded on 2004JUL27:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.htm l

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[1] `Ideas For Your Next Tech Startup`, Slashdot.org comments on VC ideas they want to fund:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/27/022320 5&threshold=3&tid=187&tid=1

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[2] Audio recordings scale (just like Linus does not). You can get the ideas from the source speakers with more immediacy that reading the words.

[3] `ITConversations`, A bottom up, audio based geek community:

http://www.itconversations.com/

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[4] `Paul Graham`, Ibid.

[5] `Clayton Christensen`, Capturing the Upside, talk, runtime ... 1Hr 48m, 37.3Mb, recorded 2004MAR17:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail135.htm l

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[6] `Tim O`Reilly`, The Software Paradigm Shift, runtime ... 37Min 45s, 8.6Mb, recorded 2003SEP18:

AS400 ... hackers despise it. [1]

After reading this about VC`s fishing for talent to build their ideas. I couldn`t put the thought out of my mind that `these guys are doomed`. Someone may bite at the money. Would you?

I don't see any interesting problems. Just lots of little nasty ones.

Thoughtful listening:
One of the biggest shifts I`ve seen this year is audio. Audio scales. [2] It brings the ideas forward with more immediacy than the written word. I don`t have to be at the conference to hear these speakers. IT conversations [3] has a whole heap of talks suitable for those interested in start-ups. For example....

* Paul Graham on Great hackers [4]
* Clayton Christensen about Capturing the Upside [5]
* Tim O`Reilly on The paradigm shift [6]
* Ben, Mena Trot on Six Apart [7]

But don't think Pod cast. This is more radio than Pod and the ideas are lasting ones.

Nasty little problems make you stupid.
Good hackers avoid it like models avoid
cheese burgers. [8]

Great Hackers:
The Paul Graham talk, Great Hackers, is humerous and insightful and all about the types of problems hackers find interesting. Graham poses lots of good questions on hacker motivation, what kind of projects hackers find worthy of solving, their tools and optimal environments.

Innovators Solution:
The Clayton Christensen talk has to be listened to carefully. His talk is about the answers, to the questions posed in his book Innovators Dilemma.[9] The core idea is that creating a start-up is less hit and miss than first appears. Christensen has devised a model that can be used as a guide to turning an idea to an enterprise.

The Paradigm shift:
Tim O`Reilly has written about, The paradigm shift in his article on the same name. His idea is that software like hardware is being comoditised. Therefore, the opportunities are not in hardware or software but the three c`s... accommodation's, collaboration & customisation. Listen to the talk or read the article [10] to find out.

SixApart:
What is it like to run a start-up? Ben and Mena Trot have ridden the Blog Wave with their company Six Apart. The Trots talk about what may appear as trivial, day to day things about their business. None of the pie in the sky ideas, just how they solve problems like, What are the consequences of changing business focus from a software development company to a software service company.
Reference

[0] `Paul Graham`, Great Hackers, talk, runtime... 30m 50s, 10Mb, recorded on 2004JUL27:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.htm l

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[1] `Ideas For Your Next Tech Startup`, Slashdot.org comments on VC ideas they want to fund:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/27/022320 5&threshold=3&tid=187&tid=1

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[2] Audio recordings scale (just like Linus does not). You can get the ideas from the source speakers with more immediacy that reading the words.

[3] `ITConversations`, A bottom up, audio based geek community:

http://www.itconversations.com/

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[4] `Paul Graham`, Ibid.

[5] `Clayton Christensen`, Capturing the Upside, talk, runtime ... 1Hr 48m, 37.3Mb, recorded 2004MAR17:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail135.htm l

[Accessed August 28, 2005]

[6] `Tim O`Reilly`, The Software Paradigm Shift, runtime ... 37Min 45s, 8.6Mb, recorded 2003SEP18:

You have to weed thru them to find the good ones. Try http://itconversations.com/ and also http://www.thisweekintech.com/

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail585.htm l

I wanted to find something on the audio aspects of recording my podcast. I looked on Amazon and could tell from the Table of Contents of Cochrane's book that this one was lame. I think I figured out that it was rushed to print.

Too bad for Wiley Amazon does give a "peek inside. "

I could see it was Windows only, when we're using Macs. We got on first show out using Garage Band in less than a week from concept to delivery - and it was GOOD, if we do say so ourselves.

Since there was no good book worth $20 I used Google and the tips from Podcast 411 and Doug Kaye for resources instead of waiting for a book.

That, and I listened to Geek News Central long enough to know he was lamer... He believes in UFOs being alien visits for chrissakes.

http://www.itconversations.com/

Put your money where your ears are... and consider donating. Registration for IT Conversations is free it seems, but bandwidth isn't.

u:newidea
p:ideaman

via BugMeNot.

This is the speech in mp3 and the speech in AAC/M4B (for iTunes/iPod).

It's the oldest argument in the FreeBSD vs. Linux game: I like the consistency

Let me say a few words about consistency:
Some software developers complain (I don't need to post URLs, you'll find it if you google) about GCC, glibc and library developers, even kernel hackers, who every now and again break existing software, or change interfaces on GNU/Linux. Just this week I saw a ML compiler that ceased to work properly under the new 2.6 kernel.
I've read a presentation about kernel development by an IBM guy whose philosophy was: "submit code first, fix it later."
This is just crazy. Even Linux vendors complain.
If you want to build a business that lasts, you have to be able to rely on consistency. I keep having trouble on OpenBSD trying to compile software that "was written for Linux." I mean, what's up with that? Write for UNIX. On that note, about consistency being an important requirement for a solid business, this interview with Joel Spolsky has some nice thoughts about it. He mentions a firm from Canada, "incredibly profitable" - he says - whose specialty is supporting VAX!
Now, it maybe that the Microsoft approach of breaking things to sell you a solution is a good way to make money. However, some industries just can't fucntion that way. I'm thinking here, e.g., banking, medical, aviation, etc. So consistency is a real problem and a big issue.

That sounds a lot like what Paul Graham says in his "Great Hackers" essay. Although I think you could also sub other words for Hacker. (Programmer, Artist, etc)

Essay
http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Audio version read by the author:
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.htm l

Trusted computing will happen. There are too many reasons corporate clients want it: protection for sensitive documents and trade secrets, virus control, and dozens of others. Once it's designed and developed, the incremental cost of putting in on everything else is zero, so it'll go on as a "feature."

Unfortunately, once it's in the platform, everyone else gets access to it, including entertainment companies that see it as a way to keep their dying business model afloat. Home users will get the short end of the stick: none of the "good" uses of DRM, but all of the crippling.

Cory Doctorow gave a great talk at Web 2.0 last year on this very topic. If I remember correctly, his tack was to kill DRM, but that's tilting at windmills. Corp clients are where the $s are, they want it, and they'll get it (for the reasons above, not movie/music protection).

One of the most interesting parts of Cory's talk was the history of the entertainment industry, and their resistance to new business models, even when the new model resulted in even more profits for them. That's what we need here: a new business model that the industry can see to give them hope. Otherwise, they'll just cling to their old model and DRM everything they have. Even with a new model, they're more likely to want to keep the status quo, but our legislators are who we really need to influence. We need to keep the governments out of this, and let the market decide.

So figure out a model. Without one, this is going to be a long, hard battle.

Agreed. That is a great book, and anyone interested in security of any sort should give it a read. There's a fascinating interview with Schneier here as well.

~jeff

ITCoversations.com is the obvious answer to your question.

I just listened to 2 talks by Guido van Rossum about python
See here and here .

Believe it or not, I heard part of it while shopping at Walmart.

Truthfully though, aside from journalistic coverage of new technology, it's very difficult to present technical information via audio (though not impossible).

Actually, I'm a little surprised that The Teaching Company (the company that produces those college classes on tape) haven't tried any technical classes.

ITCoversations.com is the obvious answer to your question.

I just listened to 2 talks by Guido van Rossum about python
See here and here .

Believe it or not, I heard part of it while shopping at Walmart.

Truthfully though, aside from journalistic coverage of new technology, it's very difficult to present technical information via audio (though not impossible).

Actually, I'm a little surprised that The Teaching Company (the company that produces those college classes on tape) haven't tried any technical classes.