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Madam Tetrachromat
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All mutant tetrachromats are female, so keep your eye on em! :)

Currently, Web content providers and have no mojo to abuse in the first place, which is no better for us all in the long run than the appearance and domination of the next RIAA-like organization. Either way, we, the consumers of content, risk losing out on some good stuff.

I disagree. It is better without, because said "RIAA-like organization" can't lobby Congress to limit/remove our freedoms in order to fatten their bottom line. That is, the point of business, after all. And if you don't believe me, you can believe this.

Honestly, I don't think a micropayment solution will arise until the Government insitutes some sort of official e-cash solution. Given that the general public is a horde of moronic technophobes, and the country is currently being run by one, I seriously doubt such a solution being implemented in my lifetime.

So, until then, web publishers can run their sites as ad-supported (or referral supported), or find a line of work that will actually pay them actual money, and stop bitching. Nobody's forcing them to run a website.

Last year, Red Herring reported a fascinating tale of using the water pipes of the Netherlands as an IP medium. Of course, this was an elaborate April Fool's joke....

Life really does imitate art.

Wasn't this a joke in Red Herring a few years back?

About the same time that things suddenly got very quiet about MS-Passport, Microsoft got it's wrist slapped for lying about MS-Passport. In short, it looked very much as if Microsoft were lying about the security capabilities of MS-Passport. Similar discrepancies between marketese and facts exist with .NET and Palladium as with MS-Passport, so expect those two to fall next.

Actually there's a whole set of rules in admiralty for salvage rights over wrecks. This has come up more and more often as folks like Ballard locate old wrecks like Spanish galleons loaded with gold more easily. The disputes can get a little complicated.

Think of the ship at the bottom as not lost but in long-term storage. Just because someone can get to it before you can doesn't make it theirs. Access is not ownership. But if someone finds the wreck, they should be able to sell that information to the owner.

No, I can't justify these ancient rules. Changes may be in the wind.

Eldred v. Ashcroft
... 10 had a favourable piece on Lessig and the lawsuit. ... October 13, 2002 - Amy
Harmon of New York Times: uphill battle over copyright. more news ...
eldred.cc/ - 7k - Cached -

The Limits of Copyright
... it an offense to write code to interfere with this use-controlling code, regardless
of whether the use would be considered fair under the copyright law. ...
www.thestandard.com/article/display/ 0,1151,16071,00.html - 34k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached -

Copyright law and roasted pig.
Communications Copyright law and roasted pig Lawrence Lessig on Eldred v. Ascroft
By Lawrence Lessig October 22, 2002. In 1930, 10,027 books were published. ...
www.redherring.com/insider/2002/10/ roast-pig-copyright-102202.html - 29k - Cached -

O'Reilly Network: Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from ...
... A flash version of Lessig's presentation, including audio and other source files. ... their
works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law. ...
www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessi g.html - 27k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached -

High court weighs copyright law - Tech News - CNET.com
... Lessig and his allies are hoping not merely to overturn this law, however, but
to build momentum for an all-out legal assault on many recent copyright ...
news.com.com/2100-1023-961467.html - 28k - Cached -

Lawrence Lessig
... Declan McCullagh of CNET News.com mentions Professor Lessig in Left gets nod from
right on copyright law, on a speech given by Appeals Court Judge Richard ...
cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/ - 23k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached -

Home--Berkman Center for Internet and Society
... Also see: Digitial Copyright Law on Trial [CNet]; Google Excluding Controversial
Sites [CNet]; ... the Hard Questions: On October 9 Lawrence Lessig appeared before ...
Description: The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is a research program founded...
Category: Computers>Internet>Policy
cyber.law.harvard.edu/ - 13k - Cached -

Techdirt:Copyright Law And Roasted Pig - Lessig Pushes His ...
Copyright Law And Roasted Pig - Lessig Pushes His Campaign Forward.
Ramblings Contributed by Mike on Tuesday, October 22nd, 2002 ...
www.techdirt.com/articles/20021022/1311202.shtml - 5k - Cached -

Which reminds me of this: Tetrachromats Maybe we should Mrs. M. have a look at the DVD.

I seem to recall that Intel's VC unit invested in several other Linux companies but one example suffices here. You've obviously heard of the Wintel duopoly ("ia32 chips running Microsoft OS's"). Go learn about Lintel. What Intel actually does, compared to what you think they should do, might surprise you.

It was a rhetorical question. (I don't know a smiley for rhetorical Q's. :)

The criticial thing with Microsoft is when it uses its monopoly to bootstrap itself into other areas with the hope to dominate them anticompetitively as well, such as Internet Explorer or Xbox. It's difficult to estimate how well Microsoft would do on nothing but the merits of its products. Office is good (note how they bundle the suite so the weaker get a lift from the strong er), Windows, well, gets mixed reviews, and most of the rest are experimental at best and many would have to be dropped by any less wealthy company.

Also, companies do spin off profitable divisions, for example HP spun off Agilent, AT&T spun off Lucent, and so on. The reasons vary, such as an effort to raise money or an overly diverse company to refocus on its "core business."

You're damn right I did. If by 'seti@home-like' you mean distributed computing. It was widely reported by many.

According to this article, that legality has yet to be challenged.

Microsoft has never contacted Mr. Rota or DivXNetworks. Its employees won't say whether the company plans to sue, but their opinion of DivX;-) is clear. "We invented it," says Sean Alexander, a product manager in Microsoft's digital media division. The point may be moot. DivXNetworks never built or distributed DivX;-). Its product is DivX;-) Deux, a new codec it claims to have designed from scratch. If DivX;-) Deux is free of Microsoft code, it's not likely to violate any copyrights, though Microsoft may argue that the software mimics its patented methods.

And if you are wondering DixvNetworks got $6 million in Round 2 funding, short of the 7-10 million they were hoping for.

There was an article posted here a few months ago, IIRC, that made some interesting points about the XBox endeavor. One such point was that Microsoft would never achieve the low production costs that Sony and Nintendo enjoy because these two companies use purpose-built, specially designed hardware and farm out production of the components. Sony, in particular, has been able to consolidate the GPU and CPU onto a single die, decreasing production costs considerably. MS, however, will never get NVidia and Intel chips consolidated in the same manner, and they don't have as much control over the platform because they're tied to the standard PC architecture.

I searched and found this:

http://www.redherring.com/insider/2002/0624/xbox06 2402.html

but I don't know if that's the article I remembered.

Until 1999, the standard way of modelling the Internet was to use randomly generated graphs, in which routers were represented by points and the links between them by lines. But it turns out that such random graphs are a poor approximation because they miss two important features. The first is that links in the net are "preferentially attached": a router that has many links to it is likely to attract still more links; one that does not, will not. The second is that the Internet has more clusters of connected points than random graphs do. These two properties give the Internet a topology that is scale-free--in other words, small bits of it, when suitably magnified, resemble the whole.

The Xbox sells badly in Europe

Xbox sales very low

Microsoft takes heavy losses on the Xbox

Profit off for Microsoft

Yes, I could go on.

If you were to follow the logic that $20,000 for something that is purly for entertainment/status, then you'd have to chastise anyone with a luxery car knowing full well a cheap Honda gets you from point A to point B just fine.

I don't know that I'd say the same thing, since a car has some utility as well as entertainment value. But, yeah, the high end of luxury cars I do find a little troubling.

I've toyed with the idea that maybe some CEO somewhere needs a $100,000 Mercedes to keep up his status with other rich CEOs, so that his company flourishes, but I can't make myself buy it. You can justify anything if that's your standard.

But if that floats your boat and you've got the cash, by all means get one.

I just can't buy into that attitude, either. The $85,000,000 that the private collector paid for the Van Gogh painting is revolting to me. I can't see it as anything other than ethically wrong. That $85 mil could've made a real difference in people's lives, a real difference in stem cell research or cancer research. But some guy just wanted to own a picture instead. It floated his boat, so he got one.

I figure if I have some responsibility to spend $42.50 correctly, the guy who bought the Van Gogh has 2,000,000 times greater a responsibility. If all the wealthy people in the world put as much emphasis on other human beings as they do on jewel-encrusted cellphones, Christopher Reeve (and many others) might be walking by now.

> I think the obvious next move is for Microsoft to buy Sega.
They already have tried:
http://www.redherring.com/insider/2002/0716/sega07 1602.html

And after that they tried to buy Nintendo for 25Bn(I think to remember 2.5Bn,
but in the news sites I found it says 25Bn!):
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1131308
http://gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=263

I don't remember much, I just found this links by looking in google for less
than one minute, I'm sure you can find some better info elsewhere in the net.

My favorite part of this history is the answer of Nintendo: "We weren't sure
what to think when Microsoft made the offer. In fact I was surprised - we
didn't need the money. I thought it was a joke."

hehehe...

I wonder what will they try next, it's obvious that they are desperate for
finding some other business now that the software licensing is going to become
obsolete thanks to opensource, I think they should stick to what(only) they are
good at: mouses ;)

\\Uriel

"Rumor has it..." is not using weasel words, it's telling it like it is. I've heard rumors, and they might not be true, but they do come from people working in the industry. Remember that MS has two things working against it: 1) it hasn't been selling as many Xbox as it thought - it's doing okay in the states, but European and Japanes sales are below expectations; 2) it has cut its selling price not because it could afford to due to its sales, but rather because it wanted to keep up with the PS2.

But don't take my word for it: read this June 24 analysis on RedHerring. So, now it's your estimate, based on a faulty analogy with the PC world (which is cheaper, because the demand is much higher than for the Xbox - i.e. it's always more costly to produce a console that to assemble a PC; read up on it if you don't believe me) against insider rumors and professional analysis...Which is not to say that you can't be right...MS could be lying about their costs, I guess, though I don't see the point in that. After all, Sony's not shy to report that they're making money on every PS2 sold. And, as you say, they might have some people who made some stupid purchasing decisions.

Peace.

When Nortel and United Utilities announced plans to offer high-speed Internet access over electrical power lines in 1998, it was hyped as "the Holy Grail of the electrical industry." But that project and a similar one undertaken by Siemens in Germany were canned, due to a change of market focus on ADSL products, plus complaints that the PowerLine technology could drown out other radio traffic and interfere with civil aviation and emergency service transmissions. The Brits also found that streetlamps interfered with the signal. The last I heard, there were new launches planned for last year in Europe, and some of the early problems were being ironed out. It seems this technology would work better in densely-populated Europe than in the U.S.

Simply put --

According to Red Herring, each XBox Microsoft manufactures costs them about $325. When you buy one, they recoup about $175 on that expenditure, meaning the entire transaction cost them $150.

So -- unsold XBoxen cost MS $325 each, sold ones cost them $150.

I'm happy to run linux (and play games) on my PC and let them eat the $325...

Oh, you'll buy a PS3. Haven't you heard the news that it will be powerful enough to watch your body's movements via digital cameras and translate them into hyper-realistic digital virtual worlds on a processor 1,000 times more powerful than the PS2?

I think it also says somewhere in the article that you'll be able to strap it to your back and it will fly you to the moon.

Becuase there is a space in the URL... Click here

I was going to same the same thing. ID engines EXPLICITY are written not to use DirectX. If fact, there is a former slashdot referenced article that touches on the subject. Carmack: Lord of the Games over at RedHerring
Blank sig line so you click on the link.

One problem with all of this is separating fact from hype when it comes to nanotechnology.

The money may come in, but the market has to correct sometime.

I predict a "nanotechnology" version of the web economy bullshit generator in the not-so-near future!

Dot-con business plans were hard enough to understand; I can only imagine how bad these nanotech ones are read...

Saw this letter a few months ago, but it still seems relevant today. (Quote: "The merger is like two starving men agreeing to share a crust of bread.") Short but insightful, highly recommended.

true, but it costs microsoft more than $200 to make an xbox. According to this article it is more like $425 per xbox. This price cut means that they are incurring an even bigger loss per unit.

Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Letter, June 1998
Shell, April 1999
Time, January 2000
National Hydrogen Association, Spring 2000
Red Herring, July 2000
Fast Company, October 2000
ENN, December 2000
BBC, December 2001
etc.

Wouldn't want to see /. haunted by evil lawyers...

Yeah, Red Herring carried the story, and with a little lower "fluff factor". At least, it seemed to me . . .

The Gardener

I went to the World Congress web site, looking for more context to the comments, as I agree with erasmus_on above that it seemed likely that there was more to Mundie's statements than reported. Unfortunately, there is next to zero content at the site -- it appears to be more of a junket than a conference (I'll admit that this may be common.)

What I did find interesting is the last paragraph of Mundie's bio, pointing out that he was on the team at Data General that were working on the Fountainhead Project, the bad guys in Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. This is confirmed by a Red Herring article.

One can just wonder at the FUD that was sent between the two parts of DG, as Mundie was first stretching his wings...

thad

I've had some experience with Wipro in the past. It's a software sweatshop based in India. I guess that's how Sun can affort to devote 50 whole programmers to GNOME. Does the GNOME community really want to be associated with this kind of establishment?

For years now, scientists have known that some fraction of women have four different cone photopigments in their retinas. The question still remains, however, whether any of these females have the neural circuitry that enables them to enjoy a different -- surely richer -- visual experience than the common run of humanity sees. "If we could identify these tetrachromats, it would speak directly to the ability of the brain to organize itself to take advantage of novel stimuli," says Dr. Neitz. "It would make us a lot more optimistic about doing a gene therapy for color blindness."

. . .

Dr. Nathans also believes, however, that for full-blown tetrachromacy, the fourth photopigment must not have a peak in sensitivity that is too close to the peaks of either the red or the green photopigments. That's the rub, as far as he's concerned -- he suspects that most female tetrachromats would have only mildly superior color vision, because the genetics indicates that the fourth photopigment would almost always be very close to either the red or the green. Every now and then, however, an oddball photopigment might appear, well separated from both red and green. "The genetics do not rule it out," Dr. Nathans explains. "It would be a rare event. But who's to say it hasn't happened? There are a lot of people out there."

Read the scoop here.

Just because you say that Sony is selling PS2 below cost and Nintendo isn't, doesn't mean it is true.

I think it is the other way around.

Nice "thoughts". The fact that Sony sold the PSX as a loss leader is WELL documented. It paid off in the long run, too, as it lead to market domination. MS is following Sony's playbook there, or at least trying to.

I think Nintendo and Microsoft, who buy the console from other companies, sell at a loss; and Sony, who designed the entire PS2 themselves and invested 2 billion US dollars worth into production, make money on every console they sell.

You said it yourself, they invested $2B in production, not to mention whatever in R&D. All this must be recouped. That's why console sales don't generate a profit right away, usually. Costs fall. A PSX used to cost a lot to make. Now they are cheap. You set pricing based on complicated models that you think will end up making you the most profit in the long run. You lose money at first, but you have to get the system into people's hands so you can sell the games- where the REAL money is.

Now, I'll back my statement up with some comments from people more in the know than either of us.

From the Seattle Times:

"Hardware pricing is considered a loss leader for console makers, who make their money selling games."

From Red Herring:

"Driving down production costs will be a determining factor in profitability over the next five years. According to most estimates, Sony's PlayStation 2 cost the company $450 per unit upon initial production in early 2000. The company had first sold the machine as a loss leader for $360 in Japan and for $300 in the United States and Europe. The strategy paid off with the first Play Station because Sony was able to reduce the product's cost from $480 in 1994 to about $80 now (it was initially priced at $299 and is sold at about $99 today). Meanwhile, the company sold about nine games for every console. That model allowed Sony to make billions of dollars over the life of the PlayStation, even if it lost money at first."

Do a little homework before you shoot your mouth off, and have the courage to back your statements up with your name next time, AC.

Buckyballs are your friend.

They can fight many different types of nerve damage, they may help treating cancer, they can be superconductors at high temperature (now imagine a bewolf cluster of these!), and lots more.

From The R. Buckminster Fuller FAQ:

The exciting part of the discovery of C60 molecules is that they are only the third naturally occurring form of carbon to be found (graphite and diamond of course being the first two). C60 was first isolated from graphite (I think) in 1985.

As Paul Houle writes, C60 is formed in the shape of a geodesic sphere (like the panels of a soccer ball), hence the name ``buckminsterfullerene'' or ``buckyballs'' for short. Each carbon has three sp2 hybrid orbitals and the fourth electron of each carbon resides in a delocalized pi orbital that ranges over the entire ball (like benzene).

The physical appearance of C60 is very much similar to graphite, as are some of its physical properties. C60, unlike graphite, can be dissolved in benzene to form a translucent amber solution.

Other developments of buckyballs:

1) Radicalization - Besides just the pure C60 form, researchers at Rice have added hydrogen molecules to the carbon junctures to form molecules such as C60H36. Also, work is progressing on making C60 radical groupings (similar to benzene -> phenol).

2) Property measurement - Although many of the properties of C60 are known, most of the properties of its compounds are still hazy.

3) Higher molecules - Other stable forms with greater numbers of carbons have been isolated as well, including C70, C72, and a couple of others I can't remember. All of these have geodesic shapes as classified by Buckminster Fuller and look like lopsided versions of the normal C60 molecule.

4) Ionization - One can trap metallic ions such as Fe++ and Mg++ in the cage of the C60 to make the molecule act as a very large ion.

5) Superconductivity - As far as I know, the 18K Tc for C60 is the correct figure. This of course is much lower than high-temperature superconductors, but this fact may be used in some way at a later date.

Buckminsterfullerene (C60) is becoming ever easier to get in quantity and shows many interesting optical properties. It stops light -- the brighter the light the more effectively it stops it. Nano and pico-second laser pulses are effectively and instantly opaqued by small quantities of C60. A helmet visor treated with fullerene will instantly block an incoming laser beam -- the stronger the ray, the faster the face glass turns dark (cooler than those ``photosensitive'' sunglasses) (Patterson AFB in Ohio is studying such applications). Many other optical properties of the fullerenes are under study.

However, C60 remains forty times more expensive than gold. As Smalley put it ``it's the yield, stupid'' -- i.e. the central issue facing fullerene researchers, in Smalley's opinion, is how to get more of it. The Smalley team approach of using parabolic mirrors to sun-generate fullerenes (to produce ``sunnyballs'') appears to be a potentially promising approach. Concentrated sunlight has less of the damaging frequencies in high-powered lasers that apparently to inhibit fullerene formation from vaporized carbon).
Fullerene is quite reactive and can be used as a building block in other structures. In some crystal formations, doped with potassium for example, it conducts electricity with no resistance (is a superconductor).

"According to most estimates, Sony's PlayStation 2 cost the company $450 per unit upon initial production in early 2000. The company had first sold the machine as a loss leader for $360 in Japan and for $300 in the United States and Europe. The strategy paid off with the first Play Station because Sony was able to reduce the product's cost from $480 in 1994 to about $80 now (it was initially priced at $299 and is sold at about $99 today). Meanwhile, the company sold about nine games for every console. That model allowed Sony to make billions of dollars over the life of the PlayStation, even if it lost money at first."

Driving down production costs will be a determining factor in profitability over the next five years. According to most estimates, Sony's PlayStation 2 cost the company $450 per unit upon initial production in early 2000. The company had first sold the machine as a loss leader for $360 in Japan and for $300 in the United States and Europe. The strategy paid off with the first Play Station because Sony was able to reduce the product's cost from $480 in 1994 to about $80 now (it was initially priced at $299 and is sold at about $99 today). Meanwhile, the company sold about nine games for every console. That model allowed Sony to make billions of dollars over the life of the PlayStation, even if it lost money at first.

source: Red Herring

While estimates say MS will lose $2 billion on hardware before break-even, much of that could be recouped in games from Day One, and the hardware should itself become profitable relatively soon.

If you're going to paste an entire article verbatim, you could at least have the decency to post a link to the original

Thanks. Would only that the author of the original post had seen fit to credit, with a simple link or even simpler "lifted from Red Herring" attribution, the original work by Deborah Claymon.

Not that the post author was trying to pass off the article as his own -- the line (For more on Mr. Barlow,see "What Does John Perry Barlow Do?,"March 1998) would surely have been deleted were that the case -- but it would be nice to show some appreciation for the person who researched this piece and for the site that provides it completely free of charge.

Pretty much word for word from this article.

Jim and Janet Baker founded Dragon Systems in 1982. (Course they did eventually sell to Lernout and Hauspie.) Stephen Wolfram founded Wolfram Research in 1987. Stephen Wolfram is about to introduce his new book to the world that will revolutionize all of science. In essence, by founding his company he funded his own research and created the tools he needed to complete it. And these are examples just off the top of my head, I'm not saying they're anywhere near the best.

For anyone who's ever heard of Pixelon, we'll believe it when we can test it ourselves.

The above is not correct, and in fact, no one has been able to cite an example of a profitable open source software company. Cygnus was privately held and so it's hard to figure out if it was proftable or not, but it was definitely not "greatly profitable." However, it's easy to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation based on its $20M in annual revenues and 180 employees at the time of its acquisition. The cost of maintaining 180 employees in a technology company in the SF Bay Area is more than $18M annually, and there are other costs of doing business, so if the company was profitable at all, it was just squeaking through. (And $20M in annual revenues after ten years of existence is no one's idea of "greatly profitable.")

Red Hat has yet to turn a profit, though it keeps promising one real soon now.

Mandrake is losing money. According to its financial disclosure, as translated by BabelFish:

Since its creation in November 1998 the company recorded losses. The cumulated amount of the overdrawn turnover of the group accounts between September 30, 1999 and 31 March 2001 amounted to 13,7 MEuros is approximately three times the amount of the turnover over the period. In spite of a strong progression envisaged of its turnover, MANDRAKESOFT considers a benefit only at the end of the exercise closed at June 30 2003;

That is, it doesn't expect to become profitable for two years.

IBM is sinking a billion dollars into open source this year. That doesn't mean it will realize any profit from this investment. It certainly hasn't earned it back yet, and whether it ever will is purely speculative.

CollabNet is privately held, so it's hard to say how much money it's made back on that $35M investment. It's announced a few deals, but refuses to comment on their size: "It's our first true enterprise development network..." It's a significant deal for CollabNet, so much so that Mills refused to comment on the size of the contract or even whether it's the company's biggest win so far. (CollabNet is still privately held.) Mills did say that there are other deals now in the pilot stage with the potential to be as big as this one. I think it's a safe bet that the company is not yet profitable.

Many consultancy companies have done well. In fact, the consultancy companies do what can't be done in the Microsoft world - they can be profitable, equal players.

Consultancies are homesteading businesses, not software companies. As already pointed out, consultancies only scale linearly, not exponentially. In any case, they aren't doing so well either. I'm not going to mention the name of one company we're partnered with, but they make a great open source product, but they're in dire straits and they're going to have to start charging for it. I imagine there are probably a few small-business open source consultancies which are bringing in six-figure salaries for their principals, but that's not enough to sustain development efforts, and it's not enough to go public.

Tim

The German term "Schadenfreude" has seen a lot of play in recent months. It means, "Taking joy in the suffering of others", and it perfectly encapsulates the spirit of not only the "eCompanyNow" article but of many of the new websites that have popped up to celebrate the downfall of the dotcom economy.

The eCompanyNow article was something of a cute encyclopedia of some of the greatest excesses witnessed in the midst of the tech bubble. I enjoyed reading it, and laughed out loud at seeing so many portraits of hubris and foolishness in so compact a setting. But it makes for ironic reading, considering the origins of the magazine itself.

eCompanyNow was a rag brought into existence by Time, Inc. for the express purpose of soaking up a fair share of the funnymoney dotcom advertising dollars being generated by the mania itself. But the timing was less than opportune, since they came to market in May of 2000, as the bubble had already begun its rapid deflation. The dotcom advertising budgets that had led magazines like "FastCompany" and "Business 2.0" to swell to the size of phone books were suddenly gone, and as a result, the new economy magazines have all found themselves in a perpetual state of whithering, many looking anoxeric compared to their 1999 selves.

Not all new media rags were guilty of contributing to the bubble. Some were actually attempting to do a public service by reporting on the bubble as a genuine problem that was undermining both the common sense of the investing public, and the morality as well.

"Red Herring" was somewhat lonely as tech rags go, as they constantly decried the ever-inflating bubble in 1999, even at the risk of alienating the dotcoms that were advertising in their magazine.

Consider this prescient story from October of 1999, called "Internet bubble popping American business ethics?". I admired Redherring enormously for continually bringing the bubble to the attention of their readership in the midst of the madness, when so many other tech/stock rags didn't have the stomach or brains to do the same. It takes guts to tell your readers that they are delusional and your advertisers that they are doomed, but Redherring did as much when the mania really got overwhelming.

Now, "f-ckedcompany","downside.com" ,"NetSlaves" and "failure magazine" have all become the order of the day, each basically engaging in the time-honored tradition of "kicking them while their down". It is to be expected.

But one has to wonder, how long can the gleeful celebration of the death of stupid dotcoms last? Like vultures surviving off of the carcasses of dead and dying animals in the midst of a sudden drought, after a while, you've picked the bones clean, and there is nothing left to eat.

Kicking the recently humbled dotcom stars I guess is to be expected, but it will itself become tiresome. And then what will fuel the existence of those sites that were created solely for the Schadenfreude? Will they fail and be mocked by a 2nd generation version of themselves? Or simply forgotten? (I suspect they'll be the last to die before a new phase begins.)

And what will become of "eCompanyNow"? Soon they have have no more companies to mock, and no more advertisers to subsidize the mockery. Consolidation is already whittling the new media magazines down to a precious few, and I believe I've heard rumors that "eCompanyNow" will be merged with "Business2.0" and renamed "Business2.0". I hardly care what happens to either, given the fact that both are predicated in their very names on the myth we now have watched vanished before our eyes. There is no "Business2.0" model- that was the lie that we were being sold in the midst of the mania. There is no "eCompanyNow" model to embrace. We're back where we started, looking to the "Fortune" and "Forbes" magazines that preexisted the latest bubble and the "RedHerrings" that decried it for wisdom about what is coming.

FIN.

Red Herring went to a lot of trouble to do theirs, even setting up a site for Dutch 'company' WaterNet, who purported to have the answer to the (impending) problem of bandwidth bottleneck: using the plumbing system to transport data. I bought it (even overlooking the DRIP acronym used to describe the 'research' project) right up until their description of the "client-side nozzle." It wasn't until several hours later that I remembered that the plumbing system is grounded and can't carry a current!
--parking_god

Red Herring went to a lot of trouble to do theirs, even setting up a site for Dutch 'company' WaterNet, who purported to have the answer to the (impending) problem of bandwidth bottleneck: using the plumbing system to transport data. I bought it (even overlooking the DRIP acronym used to describe the 'research' project) right up until their description of the "client-side nozzle." It wasn't until several hours later that I remembered that the plumbing system is grounded and can't carry a current!
--parking_god

Truth is as strange as fiction, just with a less whimsical name?

Looking for Madam Tetrachromat

MacOS X Looks like a Champ Red Herring

Re-Engineering the Mac Universe Washington Post

OS X Won't Change the World but is Still a Big Deal ZDNet

MacOS X: Major Into in Minor Key Business Week

It's As Easy as A Mac Wired

And tons more, too many to mention. All from mainstream press, note... will wonders never cease?

Thomas Malthus made the exponential-population argument more than two centuries ago. Paul Ehrlich did it again in 1969, claiming in his best-seller The Population Bomb that "We have already lost the battle. No matter what crash programs are instigated at this time, they will not be enough to prevent a worldwide famine of catastrophic proportions in the next ten years. Billions of people will die." Whoops. (Here is some information on the late Julian Simon, who repeatedly and famously debunked such bogosity.)

Capitalism encourages unsustainable population growth, depletion of natural resources, and the creation of waste products.

Aside from the fact that it's not clear that human population growth is indeed "unsustainable", you could replace "capitalism" with many words, including "life" itself, that would result in equally true statements. Rabbits, rats, and cockroaches, for example, do not practice capitalism (that I know of :-), yet they practice unsustainable population growth (to the extent permitted by the lack of predators), depletion of natural resources (food, oxygen, etc.), and the creation of waste products (turds, CO2, etc.). The same is true even of lowly bacteria, except that their "natural resources" and "waste products" are rather different than ours -- which merely serves demonstrates that one lifeform's "waste products" are another's "natural resources".

Incidentally, I could easily argue that lack of capitalism promotes slavery. The absence of property rights essentially means that others can usurp the fruits of your labors whether you like it or not. It's less direct than literally buying and selling human beings, of course, but it's not at all dissimilar in principle.