... is: never admit failure. Just talk about what a wonderful success whatever you're being asked about has been. If the product really is a failure, keep talking about its success until the people who make the decisions get around to canceling it. After that, if you're asked about it, dismiss it as yesterday's news and change the subject to what wonderful successes your other products are.
The Mac Cube, for instance, was a major stinkburger. Did Apple ever say anything to that effect publicly? Nope. They were always bright and sunny about how well the Cube was doing, until the day they killed it. At which point inquiries about the failure of the Cube were answered with glittering stories of how well their other Macs were selling.
In other words -- what a company's spokesperson says about the success or failure of something like a DRM system is meaningless. They will always say it is a great success. The only way to learn the truth is to watch whether the company puts more effort and money behind it, or less.
Considering that their current strategy of making sexy things for consumers and completely ignoring the enterprise market is making them metric truckloads of money, I doubt they would agree that they "need" to offer any of those things.
There's a better theory of Netflix's move that doesn't rely on us believing that they want to kill DVDs. It's that their contracts with the movie studios had a tiered pricing structure, where they paid less for streaming rights to content as long as their number of streaming users was below a certain total. By offering streaming essentially free to all DVD customers, they found themselves approaching that number faster than they had expected to; there were lots of users who in practice only ever used DVDs but nonetheless had to be counted as "streaming users". Segregating out streaming and charging separately for it solves this problem in two ways: those DVD customers who hadn't used streaming but previously still counted as "streaming users" will now remove themselves from the streaming subscribers total, postponing the day when Netflix's costs for streaming access go up, and it brings in additional revenue from those users who choose to retain streaming service.
Perhaps these "enterprises" that so dearly want these things could put some money together and give it to Mozilla to cover the added costs. That way the cost to any one company would be minimal, and they'd all get what they want. And "enterprises" are supposed to be huge businesses anyway, so the cost of a developer or two should be chicken feed to them.
Oh, who am I kidding? It's cheaper to just make demands.
At Mozilla, all I see is mismanagement. They can't control their code. They can't control their staff. And they are continually lagging behind all competition, which is especially sad given their rock star performance not too long ago, with social buzz propelling a large install base.
You say that like it's something new, but it has been ever thus. Firefox, for instance, wasn't created because of any genius master plan. It was created because a couple of programmers got sick of riding on the failboat that was the Mozilla Suite and built Firefox on their own initiative as a fast, lean alternative. (One of them, Ben Goodger, tells the story here.)
That skunk-works project proved wildly successful, of course, and Mozilla, newly spun out from Netscape, was smart enough to jump on it and adopt it as their own. But they've never really been able to drive Firefox to the next level, ceding technical leadership to Google and Chrome. Moreover, all of the developers who originally created Firefox have left for greener pastures. (One of them, Dave Hyatt, went to Apple to create Safari, which quite conspicuously rejected Mozilla's Gecko engine in favor of the then-practically-unused KHTML engine, which Hyatt and Apple would evolve into the now-wildly-popular WebKit.) Not to mention that they don't really have any other hits besides Firefox -- Thunderbird has been stagnant for ages, and Firefox Mobile is way behind WebKit in the mobile space.
In other words, the one hit they have is a hit they lucked into, and their stewardship of even that has been a bit rudderless. So it shouldn't be a surprise to see them steering erratically now.
That's just a modern PC crammed into a C64-ish case. Note how they trumpet "Commodore Compatibility" on the home page, and then in the store say in small print "Units come with the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system on disk ready to install. Commodore OS 1.0 will be mailed to purchasers when available." In other words, they don't have their "Commodore-compatible" OS working yet, and who knows if they ever will.
For the era 1985 to 95, almost every game looks and plays better Via the Amiga version.
True, but IIRC the only way to legally emulate an Amiga is to buy Cloanto's Amiga Forever, since your Amiga emulator will need a Kickstart ROM to run, and Cloanto holds the license to those. Whereas DOSBox is 100% free software.
While you might be happy that your preferred liberal or conservative news hits you, you'll never get to see the converse. This is because Google, Facebook, newspaper sites and even Netflix filter what hits you before you get to see it. And since they give you what you want, you never see the opposing viewpoints or step outside your comfort zone. It amounts to a claim of censorship through personalization and now that every site does it, it's commingle a problem.
It's true, the key requirement for mainstream success for a Web browser is vim keybindings. The public demands them.
In fact, my grandmother was just asking me which browsers offered vim keybindings so she would know what to use to browse her favorite scrapbooking site. That meant I had to beat her to death with a table lamp, of course. People should know better than to ask questions like that to an emacs user.
The answer is that it has critical mass in the advocacy/e-government sector. It isn't so much anything about Drupal per se that makes it the default choice; it's that in this line of business it's what everybody else uses. So you get lots of projects that start with the assumption that they're going to be using Drupal, without ever really evaluating how appropriate Drupal is versus competing alternatives. It's just What You Use. Partly this comes from having lots of tech people around who are familiar with it, so they reach for it first, and partly it comes from managers whose knowledge of Drupal begins and ends with having heard the name attached to other projects they're familiar with.
The result, of course, is that lots of projects end up trying to wrestle Drupal into strange configurations it was never meant to be in. You can kind of see that in this blog post from the Sunlight Foundation, an open-government think tank. It's called "Content Management Systems just don't work," but the title is a bit misleading, because what it's really about is content management systems (a.k.a. Drupal) not working when pressed into service for tasks other than content management. Drupal's a fine CMS; the problem comes in when people try to make it act like a framework, or a database platform, or a RAD tool, which it isn't.
The more interesting question isn't why people choose Drupal, it's how Drupal achieved critical mass in the DC technosphere in the first place. It's a long story, but the short version is that it goes back to the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Dean was the first candidate to really raise serious money online, and his tech team had built lots of their tools on top of Drupal. (Here's an early example of Dean Drupal buzz.) When the 2004 campaign was over, every political candidate wanted a bit of that Howard Dean Internet fundraising magic for himself, so there was a brisk demand for ex-Dean staffers to write articles and speak at conferences, explaining how they did what they had done. These staffers were naturally asked what tools they had used, they said "Drupal," and the result was hordes of magazine-readers and conference-goers coming away with the impression that Drupal was Internet Success In A Box. Which completely missed the point of the Deaniacs' message, but it led to more Drupal usage in advocacy & e-politics projects, which led to more visibility for Drupal, which led to more usage, which led to more visibility, and so forth.
Yes. The PBS show NOVA ran a documentary on the crash last month (you can watch the whole thing online here) that came to the conclusion you describe. (Though it should be emphasized that it's all speculation until more evidence is gathered.)
"Sleeping with the head cheerleader" in this context would have been an invite to Lucas' ranch. This is more like sleeping with the head cheerleader's sister who looks pretty good as long as you ignore the braces.
If the richest rewards to be reaped from "who you know" are a visit to a satellite production facility of a movie studio, you probably shouldn't feel too left out.
Slashdot Mirror
Close the IM program. Close the email program.
The screens won't let us?
Yes they will. Seriously! Just close all the windows you have open to things that distract you. The screens won't open them back up! I promise!
... is: never admit failure. Just talk about what a wonderful success whatever you're being asked about has been. If the product really is a failure, keep talking about its success until the people who make the decisions get around to canceling it. After that, if you're asked about it, dismiss it as yesterday's news and change the subject to what wonderful successes your other products are.
The Mac Cube, for instance, was a major stinkburger. Did Apple ever say anything to that effect publicly? Nope. They were always bright and sunny about how well the Cube was doing, until the day they killed it. At which point inquiries about the failure of the Cube were answered with glittering stories of how well their other Macs were selling.
In other words -- what a company's spokesperson says about the success or failure of something like a DRM system is meaningless. They will always say it is a great success. The only way to learn the truth is to watch whether the company puts more effort and money behind it, or less.
Considering that their current strategy of making sexy things for consumers and completely ignoring the enterprise market is making them metric truckloads of money, I doubt they would agree that they "need" to offer any of those things.
Google appears to agree with you, since last year they hired Matias Duarte, Palm's lead designer, to head up the Android User Experience team.
There's a better theory of Netflix's move that doesn't rely on us believing that they want to kill DVDs. It's that their contracts with the movie studios had a tiered pricing structure, where they paid less for streaming rights to content as long as their number of streaming users was below a certain total. By offering streaming essentially free to all DVD customers, they found themselves approaching that number faster than they had expected to; there were lots of users who in practice only ever used DVDs but nonetheless had to be counted as "streaming users". Segregating out streaming and charging separately for it solves this problem in two ways: those DVD customers who hadn't used streaming but previously still counted as "streaming users" will now remove themselves from the streaming subscribers total, postponing the day when Netflix's costs for streaming access go up, and it brings in additional revenue from those users who choose to retain streaming service.
Perhaps these "enterprises" that so dearly want these things could put some money together and give it to Mozilla to cover the added costs. That way the cost to any one company would be minimal, and they'd all get what they want. And "enterprises" are supposed to be huge businesses anyway, so the cost of a developer or two should be chicken feed to them.
Oh, who am I kidding? It's cheaper to just make demands.
You say that like it's something new, but it has been ever thus. Firefox, for instance, wasn't created because of any genius master plan. It was created because a couple of programmers got sick of riding on the failboat that was the Mozilla Suite and built Firefox on their own initiative as a fast, lean alternative. (One of them, Ben Goodger, tells the story here.)
That skunk-works project proved wildly successful, of course, and Mozilla, newly spun out from Netscape, was smart enough to jump on it and adopt it as their own. But they've never really been able to drive Firefox to the next level, ceding technical leadership to Google and Chrome. Moreover, all of the developers who originally created Firefox have left for greener pastures. (One of them, Dave Hyatt, went to Apple to create Safari, which quite conspicuously rejected Mozilla's Gecko engine in favor of the then-practically-unused KHTML engine, which Hyatt and Apple would evolve into the now-wildly-popular WebKit.) Not to mention that they don't really have any other hits besides Firefox -- Thunderbird has been stagnant for ages, and Firefox Mobile is way behind WebKit in the mobile space.
In other words, the one hit they have is a hit they lucked into, and their stewardship of even that has been a bit rudderless. So it shouldn't be a surprise to see them steering erratically now.
That's because Windows is the hipster OS! It had malware before malware was cool.
Which is even more of an uphill battle, since PNG can't even reproduce colors consistently.
That's just a modern PC crammed into a C64-ish case. Note how they trumpet "Commodore Compatibility" on the home page, and then in the store say in small print "Units come with the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system on disk ready to install. Commodore OS 1.0 will be mailed to purchasers when available." In other words, they don't have their "Commodore-compatible" OS working yet, and who knows if they ever will.
Shadowland? Do you mean Darklands? BEST GAME EVER.
True, but IIRC the only way to legally emulate an Amiga is to buy Cloanto's Amiga Forever, since your Amiga emulator will need a Kickstart ROM to run, and Cloanto holds the license to those. Whereas DOSBox is 100% free software.
Whoops, make that ten years ago; I was looking at the publication date on the paperback edition...
This would be a pretty avant-garde line of thinking if there hadn't been an entire book written about it nine years ago ...
Yeah, remember how nice life was for web developers when everybody just used IE? Oh, wait.
It's true, the key requirement for mainstream success for a Web browser is vim keybindings. The public demands them.
In fact, my grandmother was just asking me which browsers offered vim keybindings so she would know what to use to browse her favorite scrapbooking site. That meant I had to beat her to death with a table lamp, of course. People should know better than to ask questions like that to an emacs user.
(Obligatory disclosure: My business is providing technical services for advocacy organizations in DC. My practice isn't Drupal-oriented, but obviously I have a financial interest in trends in that sector, so you may wish to discount my opinions accordingly.)
The answer is that it has critical mass in the advocacy/e-government sector. It isn't so much anything about Drupal per se that makes it the default choice; it's that in this line of business it's what everybody else uses. So you get lots of projects that start with the assumption that they're going to be using Drupal, without ever really evaluating how appropriate Drupal is versus competing alternatives. It's just What You Use. Partly this comes from having lots of tech people around who are familiar with it, so they reach for it first, and partly it comes from managers whose knowledge of Drupal begins and ends with having heard the name attached to other projects they're familiar with.
The result, of course, is that lots of projects end up trying to wrestle Drupal into strange configurations it was never meant to be in. You can kind of see that in this blog post from the Sunlight Foundation, an open-government think tank. It's called "Content Management Systems just don't work," but the title is a bit misleading, because what it's really about is content management systems (a.k.a. Drupal) not working when pressed into service for tasks other than content management. Drupal's a fine CMS; the problem comes in when people try to make it act like a framework, or a database platform, or a RAD tool, which it isn't.
The more interesting question isn't why people choose Drupal, it's how Drupal achieved critical mass in the DC technosphere in the first place. It's a long story, but the short version is that it goes back to the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Dean was the first candidate to really raise serious money online, and his tech team had built lots of their tools on top of Drupal. (Here's an early example of Dean Drupal buzz.) When the 2004 campaign was over, every political candidate wanted a bit of that Howard Dean Internet fundraising magic for himself, so there was a brisk demand for ex-Dean staffers to write articles and speak at conferences, explaining how they did what they had done. These staffers were naturally asked what tools they had used, they said "Drupal," and the result was hordes of magazine-readers and conference-goers coming away with the impression that Drupal was Internet Success In A Box. Which completely missed the point of the Deaniacs' message, but it led to more Drupal usage in advocacy & e-politics projects, which led to more visibility for Drupal, which led to more usage, which led to more visibility, and so forth.
Yes. The PBS show NOVA ran a documentary on the crash last month (you can watch the whole thing online here) that came to the conclusion you describe. (Though it should be emphasized that it's all speculation until more evidence is gathered.)
Ted Dziuba is a co-founder of Milo.com, which just sold to eBay for $75 million.
I'm guessing your leet Web skills brought in more than that last year, which is why you feel comfortable calling him an "amateur."
"Sleeping with the head cheerleader" in this context would have been an invite to Lucas' ranch. This is more like sleeping with the head cheerleader's sister who looks pretty good as long as you ignore the braces.
If the richest rewards to be reaped from "who you know" are a visit to a satellite production facility of a movie studio, you probably shouldn't feel too left out.
But then how would anyone see it? Nobody reads Slashdot anymore!
They're hiding in the same place Comdex is.
We can only pray that Ashton Kutcher has not developed a second-strike capability...