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he could have just accidently hit the o before the r :)

No chance. He was going for that zany ESR-loving hacker jargon file stylee..

Ah, I see my original post was marked "Overrated". The coward's moderation. If you think I'm trolling, call me a goddamn troll.

Again, whoa. On of the first two prepositional phrases has to go. The rest of the sentence is terrible and should be srapped.

"... interested in receiving and publishing the following kinds of information:

Technical descriptions of the access control and encryption mechanisms associated with PDF files and/or eBooks.

Technical descriptions of remedies for these mechanisms, e.g., patches, key recovery algorithms, modified plug-ins, etc.

Source code for implementing these remedies.

[visit his website before submitting to see what he is already aware of. His website Gallery of Adobe Remedies already lists ElcomSoft, Xpdf, Ghostscript, but no Haiku ... yet]

Dr. Dave Touretzky notes that his web site is for "discussion of purely technical information of interest to computer scientists and lawful content users".

Dr. Dave Touretzky further notes that he is "not interested in receiving rants about Adobe or the DMCA" suggesting that said rants be submitted to Boycott Adobe wishing to keep his site focused on "Adobe's access control mechanisms and the remedies people have devised [i.e. 'lawful ways a purchaser desires'] to deal with them."

Tangential Editorial Comment by RM3 Frisker FTN ... why don't people get as bent out of shape when the Second Amendment protections [Eric Raymond's Linux Gun Nut Page] are screwed with?

This is not quite true - I guess certain things are slow on any architecture (bad algorithms), and compiler/interpreter should be the one to decide what works great on the platform at question. Nowadays people just don't have time to optimize, and it's a bad idea anyway - look at The art of unix programming.

The number of threads is one thing to consider, though... and anyone knows that more processors => better multithreading.

I think programmers (and geeks in general) know stuff about processors because it's interesting and fun, not because they really need to.

Asking why Linux is better is a little like asking why breathing oxygen is better than breathing methane. Linux has so much going for it it's tough to even imagine using anything else. Some of it may be chauvinism, but Linux hardly needs chauvinistic support. It just needs pragmatic support, and computer users are some of the most pragmatic people around.
Here are ten listed reasons why Linux is better than commerical OSes. Here is a well-written article on the subject.
Perhaps the most pragmatic reason is that Linux is the cheapest OS in existence. You can find the latest release free for the taking on many servers worldwide. The time and the technical skills needed to actually make this option work are prohibitive, however, and few people will actually do it. For the rest of us, plenty of CDs are sold (or given away with big, useful instruction manuals (hey, that's how I got Red Hat 7.1!)) for under a hundred bucks. These CDs, called 'distros', or distributions, are made by various corporations, like Red Hat, Caldera, Slackware, Debain, etc. and come loaded with thousands of dollars worth of software. They also come with friendly, graphical installation programs that can get even the rankest of newbies started with Linux.
Once you get Linux going, there is a plethora of free software online. The GNU's Not Unix project is the best-known source, but you can find thousands with a simple Google search. Most Linux software, and Linux itself, is free in two senses: Free beer and Free speech. Free speech? Yes. Free in that sense means you can look at the source code (it is Open Source, in other words) and modify it to your whims. It is liberated software, software anyone can modify, learn from, change, and improve.
That brings me to my next point. Linux is the most stable OS in the world. Programs can crash and burn, scream and die, and just plain quit and Linux soldiers on. That's why it's used in servers. Saves thousands, if not millions, in maintnence costs, compared to Microsoft products (the Blue Screen Of Death can be expensive if the server that handles financial transactions crashes). It's stable because it has an army of people the world over fixing what breaks. How many software companies can claim that skilled programmers volunteered their time to make sure their operating system works on every hardware imaginable? None. Only Linux, the operating system used by the people who write it and written by the people who use it.
That brings me to my last point (promise! :-)). Linux is a state of mind for many people. It is a declaration of independence from the closed model of software development. It is a great big 'up yours' to the bloated, insecure, crash-prone shit the Big Two (Microsoft and Macintosh) foist on the world. Eric Raymond wrote a book on the Linux Revolution called The Cathedral and the Bazaar, pointing up the superiority of the open development model (the Bazaar) over the closed development system (the Cathedral) by following one of the many successful open development projects, fetchmail. Linux is a community of people who want to make the best software for everyone. It can give you the best technical support because the guy who wrote the program you're having trouble with is probably reachable. And if not, reams of people who helped him fix bugs are. Your problems might influence the next version of the software, in fact. Because Linux is open, anything can happen. Microsoft doesn't stand a chance. :-)

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C'mon, flame me!

I can see the ThinkGeek adverts now: "(Not for swedes or other demi-programmers.)"

(Linus only speaks Swedish, people. Here's where it's at.)
~

Of course, the dictioary tells us more.

X /X/ n. 2. [after the name of an earlier window system called `W'] An over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely used on Unix systems.

The usual meaning is the one to do with inflammatory posting, as given above. (See the entry on troll in the Jargon File.) Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of people on Slashdot have heard the term, but not understood it, and use it themselves as a fairly meaningless insult for people whose opinions they disagree with.
my plan

I think as long as it's use is based on it's usefullness (which has been the case with most scripting languages), it's only a matter of time.

Ruby has been as much of a pleasent surprise to me as Perl was back when I first learned it. No, it's not "Perl with Objects"; Perl itself does that quite well. It's more like Smalltalk, only readable, pragmatic rather than idealistic, and as expressive and concise as Perl when you want it to be. Personally, i think Ruby is a much greater threat to Perl than Python is, in the long run. Rather than forcing you to do it Guido's Way, you can do it the Perl Way, or the Smalltalk Way, or the Functional Way... or any combination of the above. No wonder the Pragmatic Programmers wrote a book on it. It does TMTOWTDI better than Perl does TMTOWTDI; while remaining relatively simple and clean.

So just give it time. I think it's well on it's way to world domination.

Oh, and as for a CPAN-like code archive for Ruby, there's a somewhat embrionic one here. There is discussion currently going on at the RubyWiki on how to implement a CPAN-like system for Ruby only avoiding the problems that CPAN has.

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I think as long as it's use is based on it's usefullness (which has been the case with most scripting languages), it's only a matter of time.

Ruby has been as much of a pleasent surprise to me as Perl was back when I first learned it. No, it's not "Perl with Objects"; Perl itself does that quite well. It's more like Smalltalk, only readable, pragmatic rather than idealistic, and as expressive and concise as Perl when you want it to be. Personally, i think Ruby is a much greater threat to Perl than Python is, in the long run. Rather than forcing you to do it Guido's Way, you can do it the Perl Way, or the Smalltalk Way, or the Functional Way... or any combination of the above. No wonder the Pragmatic Programmers wrote a book on it. It does TMTOWTDI better than Perl does TMTOWTDI; while remaining relatively simple and clean.

So just give it time. I think it's well on it's way to world domination.

Oh, and as for a CPAN-like code archive for Ruby, there's a somewhat embrionic one here. There is discussion currently going on at the RubyWiki on how to implement a CPAN-like system for Ruby only avoiding the problems that CPAN has.

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So okay, thats the list. Good list. But here is the point: these are projects, that for most part (a) opened after completetion, or (b) didnt use the OSS development model. For example, X-Windows was released in reference form, but it was developed as a community project initially. Same witg PGP, Kerberos, Perl, Python (maybe, not sure on that one), Mosix. I am not sure about most of the other ones, I'd have to look into them more.

Aaaah, ok, I see. Your complaint then is not with open-source but with the Bazaar development model vs. the Cathedral development model. Open-source software is generally developed in one of two ways: the 'Bazaar' model, where the project is improved little-by-little by many different developers, usually over the internet, and tends to gradually evolve - the Linux kernel is a good example, and the 'Cathedral' model, where one developer (or a closely-knit group of developers, usually with a clear leader) design and construct the software in relative obscurity, and only then release the software. X is a good example of this model, although XFree86 is moving towards a more Bazaar-like development model.

Both have their advantages and disadvantages:
the Bazaar model tends to keep software simple, modular and develops quickly as long as the originator of the project can interest other developers. This is simply due to the nature of the development process - large, unwieldy monolithic bits of software are not very appealing to potential developers. Because the development process here favours simple, modular software, the engineering tends to be superior. However, it can be difficult to implement new ideas because they must be implemented to the satisfaction and understanding of a large group of developers who almost all would like to keep the software... yes, simple and modular.
The Cathedral model, on the other hand, favours large, complex bits of software for exactly the same reasons. Because the developer only has themselves, or a small number of developers who know the project inside and out to please, it is much easier to architect a new system or implement a new idea. However, because the developers are comfortable with the project's complexity and there are few people looking at and commenting on the source code, it is easy for the project to become large, bloated and unreliable.

In the open-source world, both the Bazaar and the Cathedral models can happily coexist, and do, to the overall advantage of the community as a whole. Note that some of the most innovative open-source projects are indeed developed Cathedral-style, but that the most reliably-engineered software tends to be developed Bazaar-style. In the closed-source world, only the Cathedral model really works - that is just the nature of proprietary development, that you cannot have thousands of developers making tiny changes all the time. Hence, the reputation of proprietary software for being laden with new (and often pointless) features whilst suffering from a lack of reliability.

Don't get the two things mixed up. Not all open-source software is developed Bazaar-style, and if you do have a valid complaint (I'm still not convinced that you do) then it is with that development style rather than with open-source software itself. If you're still not convinced, read Eric Raymond's classic essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'. His take is that the Bazaar development model is superior for all sorts of other reasons too - but perhaps (in your view) coming up with new ideas isn't one of them. Still, like I said, there's a place for both models in the open-source world.

ESR notes in CatB that most open-source projects begin in the "cathedral" model; you develop something marginally useful and then open it up to attract some assistance.
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Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delenda est Windoze

Well...the Nazi's used that same excuse, as did Stalin, and just about every other abusive regime in the history of man.

By the power vested in my by Godwin's Law, I hereby declare this thread ended.

Unfortunately when I got to Usenet (1996) it was already well into its decline. Now all that's left is spam. I wonder who they think they're advertising to. Each other?

Compuser, it's funny due to the mocking, sarcastic tone. He's describing the way a Real Programmer would do it.

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Your assignment for next week is to try to convince your boss to rewrite the entire project in Intercal.

It's a seductive idea. I've even written that code back in the olden days. Of course mine was nowhere near the level of Mel's scary code. But I sure wouldn't want to attempt it today.

Modern disk drives with zoned recording, megabytes of cache, and automatic bad block remapping would make any attempt at software optimization a nightmare. You could easily end up pessimizing by abusing the cache on the controller or accessing sectors that the drive controller says are contiguous but which in reality have been transparently remapped to Lower Slobbovia. I don't think there is any way to get guaranteed accurate geometry any more. I am afraid you just have to take what the drive is willing to give you and hope for the best.

Sectors are referenced by a single number, cylinders and heads are no longer used.

The problem is that sometimes, for people who need to do seriously high-performance I/O, you want to be able to know the drive's geometry and reference sectors at specific cylinder/head locations, to optimize sequential access and minimize seeks. Sure, they're laid out sequentially, so you can just assign things sequentially and expect access to be "mostly" continuous, but if you don't know where the cylinder boundaries are, you'll occasionally get unlucky and have something spanning two cylinders and causing a lot of unnecessary seeks. Knowing a bit about your access patterns, you could have avoided this if you'd known where the boundaries were. You might even want to get really scary and try to make the locations of things on the disk correspond to the time you expect to need them, so they'll always be just passing under the head when needed.

Of course, this mainly matters for things like high-end databases, but it might conceivably be worthwhile for other high-end applications like media streaming, video editing, or 3D rendering, or for low-level system things like swap-storage management or filesystem layout, where nobody else would have to worry about it but the benefit would apply across the board.

David Gould

I've given up on Slashdot as a place for honest discussion. If you dare to post opinions counter to the Slashdot orthodoxy, you're slammed and censored.
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This is the funniest thing since the September that never ended.

a reference for those unfamiliar with the story, the jargon file entry for the tale of the kremvax: http://tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/kremvax.html.

OK,
- B
--

Look at the definition of RISC. First thought to look it up in the jargon lexicon but to my surprise RISC/CISC weren't included.
But then, I probably have been trolled?

General Public Virus n.

Pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or apps incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same anti-proprietary terms as GNU stuff. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft `infects' software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software Foundation's official position as of January 1991 is that copyright law limits the scope of the GPL to "programs textually incorporating significant amounts of GNU code", and that the `infection' is not passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is transmitted. Nevertheless, widespread suspicion that the copyleft language is `boobytrapped' has caused many developers to avoid using GNU tools and the GPL. Changes in the language of the version 2.0 GPL did not eliminate this problem.

I worked for MS as in intern a few summers ago, and I hung out with some the real high-level programmers (the ones who get to make REAL decisions) during my smoke breaks.

What project(s) did these guys work on? Just curious, if you don't remember it isn't important.

They had an interesting perspective on free software.

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PERSPECTIVES, ALL ALIKE.

Their most convincing argument is that programming is a job. It's work, and it can be hard work at times.

True. But it's also fun. And sometimes if something is enjoyable enough to a person, even if it is Work(tm), that person might still do it and not necessarily need (or even want) to be paid for it.

But if all software is free, then who pays the programmers?

I'll assume you're not intending to confuse gratis and libre here and you are meaning gratis. Well, I guess if all software doesn't cost any money, then nobody's going to pay programmers to produce software. So programmers won't produce software. So there will be no new software produced. And if someone needs software that doesn't already exist, he'll have to find a programmer to do it for free, because software doesn't cost anything, right, everybody knows that!

Hm. I'm sure I was going somewhere with this at one time. :)

It's pretty clear by this time that selling support contracts don't work.

Maybe it's clearer to you (and/or the programmers you're quoting) than it is to me. Maybe selling support contracts doesn't always work, but I think you'd be pushing it to conclude that selling support contract always doesn't work.

I'm assuming from the context that you meant to say something like "selling support contracts for open-source software doesn't work." Well - how many companies producing OSS are there that make their money primarily (or even purely) from selling support contracts for that software? How many have failed in the last year (ie. during a global tech wreck from which few tech companies of any kind survived unscathed)? I'm sure there's a few, but can't name any names off the top of my head. How many have been around for longer than five years? Ten years? For the latter, I can only think of one (Cygnus), even though it's now owned by RedHat.

If a company can't pay its programmers, then who would work for them.

You might as well say "If a company can't earn any money, why would it exist?"

They were continually amazed at the amount of work that is poured into free software, and they wondered what Linux or *BSD would be like if there were some system for everyone who contributes to be compensated.

I think this is one of the points covered (to some extent) in some of Eric Raymond's writings. Part of the reality of opensource programming is that those who contribut to a successful project (or to a project that becomes successful) feel that they are compensated (either just by the existence of the project or in a variety of other ways). Note that the definition of "successful" in that last sentence can cover a wide area.

I can recall one of the engineers saying something like, "We [MS] wouldn't have a chance if people with REAL talent [professional programmers] were contributing to the free software movement. Thank god the only people who really contribute are kiddies."

*grin* Quick, better back off from that comment!

Now, I don't think everyone who contributes to free software is a kiddie,

Phew... just made it in time. :)

but it does bring up an interesting point: what would Linux be like today if it could attract top-tier engineers?

I'd say it also brings up another interesting point: how do you define "top-tier engineer"?

I'll be generous to the anonymous MS programmer you quoted above and presume that she was as least partly joking... though I'll acknowledge there's a possibility that she wasn't (at least, you seemed to present it as a serious comment, and you were there when she said it). At any rate - what is a top-tier engineer? Can you tell them purely by their work? How reliable is your judgement in that case? Can you tell them by the way they work? Can you tell them by the the way they dress? Their hair? Their impressive collection of facial tics?

I'll just add in closing to this otherwise largely content-free response :) that I find that the sort of people who feel a need to publically denigrate the skills of others only do it as a way of making them (the denigrater, not the denigratee) feel better about themselves.

Pete.

To moderators: "Trolling" does not equal "posting controversial opinions". Check the Jargon File entry for the true meaning.

I argue against the GPV not because I wish to disrupt discussion, or to provoke reactions. I argue against it because I honestly believe that it's a Bad Thing.

This will be my only posting on this subject, in order not to get my account suspended again. The moderation system here has succeeded in censoring me.
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Richard Stalin^H^Hlman

Is anyone else beginning to suspect that Godwin's Law needs to be expanded to cover red-baiting (accusations of socialism and/or communism)?
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#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;

Actually some[1] song writers, fiction authors, etc., don't like to be sent ideas either of the form "here's an idea for you to write about" or "here's something I wrote because I am such a fan of yours, is it any good".

Usually they say "this is for Legal Reasons" but I suspect it is at least partly because of Sturgeon's Law.

[1] For song writers, the most familiar example I can find is the Weird Al FAQ.

If you happen to know a first rate lawyer, please do interview him and post the results.
Microsofts lawyers seem to agree that the GPL is enforceable, since we havent seen any MS-Linux
(just a silly example, I dont expect MS to want to return to Unix-type software)

If my work is under the GPL, I'm already allowing every other asshole in the world to hack my code to be subtly incompatible, and release it with source code. Any reputation I gain by being the creator of a great program can be lost by some retard forking off a shitty version, and damning my version by association.

In theory you are correct, but in practice that has never happened, please read Homesteading the Noosphere, that explains the social characteristics of open source proyects and the people who contribute to them.

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C'mon, flame me!

I always found it funny that, in a backhanded way, the GNU project is just one more thing Xerox invented.

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1. Ask Gartner their methodology,
2. Document it so that it can be reproduced;
3. Make sure and get Gartner to say "yep that's how we did it".
4. Dan&Co reproduces the methodology and compares the numbers

I hope the judge considers the profound legal implications of Godwin's Law in his decision.

The answer is simple. You need ESR's sex tips.

Don't be offended, they really work. I followed some of these and I was having to turn down dates because I became so successful. Seriously these tips are the most practical guide to getting laid I have ever seen anywhere. Period.

The best thing is they are tailored to the slashdot demographics of nerds.

If I allowed my kid to take heroin, the authorities would quite rightly lock me up and take my child away. Likewise if I allowed my kid to play around with my semi-automatic rifles the same thing would happen. It should be the same for the Internet.

The Internet is primarily a source of porn for maladjusted socially inept males. It has a secondary use as an information resource, but let us not forget, over 74% of downloads and over 80% of net traffic is porn related.

Now I am not going to argue that porn is wrong. (Although I do believe that only warped and sick individuals would seek to degrade God's gift to mankind by commercializing it). I am just going to say that to a developing mind, seeing pictures like those often found on this website cannot be a force for good.

A famous rabbi once described TV as like having an open sewage pipe pouring into your living room.
The Internet is like having the whole sewage works. I mean why would a child be looking at depraved debased unamerican and unChristian sites such as this one or this or most sickeningly of all this?

The answer is to make it a federal offense for a parent to allow a minor in his/her care to access the Internet. Its the only way we can continue the war on porn, and save our children from images such as this.
Normally I would not advocate such extreme measures, but if just one child is saved from viewing pornography such as above, it will be worth whatever minor freedoms we would have to give up.

I have no idea what "TANSTAAFL" stands for. HELP ME

Frankly, that's not really the "Open Source" way of doing things.

Chapter 4 of The Cathedral and the Bazaar describes this. "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers." Open Source projects tend not to have one monolithic usablity test with focus groups, statistics, PHB's to evaluate the whole thing, etc. Rather, they have a constant stream of incremental releases, each improved by continuous user feedback. Sure, you could do an elaborate usability test with all the trimmings on a particular release, but by the time you got done with it, your tested release would probably be 2 or 3 versions behind the current release and the user interface may already have changed so much that your test results may hardly apply any more :)

That having been said, have you seen the Gnome usability project (join).

Nope.. see 'Things to Hack in L.A. When You're Dead', film at 11, for details. The fact that survival is a prerequisite for hacking, is exactly why programming fluids have been developed. "You left your programmers alone without caffeine? Mr. Gates, your men are already dead." ;-]

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Oh my God! You're kidding!

The UNIX community has had its own slang for 25 years. I can think of no reason to submit to MSFT "culture" in adopting words like "service pack". Newcomers (many from the MSFT world) to LINUX should adapt to an older and richer culture; maybe take a look to the jargon file.

Mmm-hmm. Please check http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/DWIM. html for an example of where this leads.

And since you have to log in to a remote machine to use this service, you're doing the hard work for them--they already know that user XYZ is sitting down at 111.222.222.111. No company in the world would pass up the opportunity to sell this info once they realized, "Hey, we have a userbase, and we know which IPs they're using 75% of the time." And what happens if you're in the back of the beyond, far from even a 14.4 dialup? "Sorry, I need to access the Net, otherwise I type really slow." No thanks!

... I should ask dictionary.com to include "MS releases a server under the GPL." as an example.

The entry is copied from the Jargon File. Maybe you can try asking ESR to add your example... =)

now programmers can use gestures along with our incantations to perform their magic!

At the same time, just because cost-savings was the old reason for the internet doesn't mean it is the current reason (or one of many!), but there's no evidence that "interconnectivity, borderless ungoverned freedom and no ghestapo Government breathing down your back" is the reason for the internet either.

Nationality has little bearing on it. the usage of .com is for 'commercial' sites only, see how the US gov slipped into making it more of a 'default' domain, leaving even the .net and .org TLD's as second rate.
My, we are bitter tonight. In the beginning, there was only the US. It was natural for us (no pun intended) to be the default. As for whether the government was at fault for .com becoming more prominent than the other domains, that is a matter of debate. Obviously, Back In The Day, when the 'two domains per company' rule was enforced, .com domains were the only thing a corporation could take. Since money makes the world go 'round, it's only natural that the money domains rose in prominence.

On another note, yet another thread degrades into Nazi name calling. Yay. Godwin would be proud.

I suppose you have no problem, then, with what happened in Bosnia... or Rwanda... or Cambodia... or, well, we won't mention that little country in Europe 60 years ago that decided it was OK to use a little bit of force to gain some "living space" for its ethnically-pure citizens.

It's reassuring to see that the internet is not such a lawless place. At least Godwin's law is respected.

While I admit Quebec language laws have gone somewhat ridiculous, I just can't equate "requiring any English contents to be translated in French" with "deporting and/or killing all English-speaking Canadians".

Maybe I'm just another fascist pig myself.

Thomas Miconi

How are gun rights irrational? Better watch what you say around here, or ESR will get ya. ;-)

The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.

People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.

I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.

... and what is Godwin's Law?

Godwin's Law: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/Godwi n%27s-Law.html.

Of course, make oldconfig would do the job just as well.

Incidentally, Linux 2.5 will feature CML2, developed by ESR and friends, to make the configure and compile process more dynamic. The number of threads to be used will no longer have to be specified by the user as the system will discover this automatically.

Sturgeon's law says that 90% of everything is crud. The contents of mp3.com are the same as a book editor's "slush pile", which is full of a thousand amateurs all trying to write the great american novel, and 99.5% of them really sucking at it. mp3.com has every garage band on the planet that can rune Lame or BladeEnc sending in a demo tape, and most are really awful.

This is normal. There's great stuff out there, but you have to find it. This is why search engines exist on the web, because most web pages are terrible and pointless, and the value is in finding the good ones. That's what SLASHDOT does! (And why slashdot's comments have a ranking system.)

That's what Red Hat or Debian does bringing out new Linux distributions, going through the hordes of code on freshmeat and such and finding the stuff that's worth including.

Fighting off sturgeon's law is a useful service, quite possibly THE most successful business model on the web. Skimming off the cream, polishing it up, and packaging it in a shiny box. But that is -NOT- what mp3.com did.

mp3.com did for music what sourceforge does for open source or what geocities does for web pages. It's nice, but it also rapidly fills up with unfinished or even random cruft. It's also not something people are really willing to pay for, except maybe to view advertising. The very "freeness" of it is why people use it. It's a big public canvas, blank space in which amateurs can scribble.

What mp3.com needed, and what they never had, was an editorial board that found their top 1%, collected it together, polished it, and promoted it. THAT is the valuable service music companies have forgotten they provide. (NOT distribution, sorting through heaps of demo tapes to find talent and then, once upon a time, nurturing it.)

Same with the motion picture industry, the point isn't that they can crank out yet another crocodile dundee movie but that they can find people like Steven Spielberg and hand him the budget to make "Jaws". These days the new talent is going to atomfilms.com or some such, and getting lost in the slush pile...

Fighting off sturgeon's law is a service people ARE willing to pay money for. If you can ensure quality and save them time, they will pay for it. Always have, always will. The publishing industries are terrified of the web taking away their distribution role, but only because they've forgotten why they were the ones who had something to distribute.

Rob