First of all I'd like to clear up what seems like a misconception of the original poster. Banner ads and affiliate programs are a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of running a website. After investigating the Net scene last year when I was planning to start a website I noticed that dotcomms could be divided into eCommerce sites, pay service sites and banner ad sites. Most of the successful non-eCommerce had either been sold to larger parties (e.g. Slashdot to Andover then Andover to VA Linux, Hotmail to MSN) to offset the cost or become pay services (JenniCam) simply because banner ads couldn't cut it. heck, even rusty has incorporated kuro5hin . So even now information (non-eCommerce) websites with sizable traffic (i.e. need expensive servers, bandwidth and maintanence) cannot survive on banner ads and affiliate programs indefinitely. There is more exposition on how dotcomms cannot survive on ads alone on ZDNet
The entire everything is free idea on the Net is based around the loss leader concept. Give away stuff to gain market share then make the revenue by exploiting the marketshare. Unfortunately this is the rub, few sites have anyway to make up the revenue lost by undercharging or giving away content or product. This is now being felt by the rash of layoffs and also the large number of dead or dying dotcomms which include cdnow.com, drkoop.com, toysmart.com, boo.com, foofoo.com, reel.com, apbnews.com, etc. The surviving information/nonE-commerce sites (especially independent or pseudo-independents like slashdot) will eventually have two choices 1.)Get bought out by a larger company who either wants the site for goodwill purposes (AOL owns Winamp.com which never make back the $20 million they spent on it, VA Linux owns Freshmeat, Slashdot and freeCode.com which will make just enough to hold their own or slightly less) or want to exploit the user base in a way the original site could not (e.g. MSN buying Hotmail so that logging out of hotmail redirects you to MSN.com).
2.) The second option is to become like the only sites to actually turn a profit on the Net on information, pr0n. Charge for premium membership and giveaway just a enough to entice members. The Wall Street Journal already does this with no ill-effects.
3.) The third option is to close down. Which off course is not an option many are willing to make. Of course, if this keeps up the Net will eventually mirror the real world with it's homogenized Walmarts, Starbucks' and Barnes & Nobles' being frequented by the many while independents close up shop and die. Only a short while ago everyone espoused the beauty of the Net and how everyone could be their own publisher but with the death of websites daily (linsight.com, reel.com, toysmart.com, boo.com, drkoop.com, peabody.com, and soon cdnow.com) are we not headed for a Net that is controlled by the few? For instance VA Linux via Andover already controls Freshmeat, slashdot, and a bunch of other frequently visited open source sites and is estimated to draw 50 percent of open source/linux traffic on the Net.
PS: This post is not trying to bash VA Linux but instead is mentioning the fact that already in the real world almost everything is in the hands of a few corporate entities (the same company that sells Marlboro cigarettes sells Post Cereal and Kraft foods, Disney owns ABC television and Miramax films, AOL owns CNN and Time)and the Net was supposed to be haven away from that where opposing views and opinions were only a mouse click away. I am not sure we should be celebrating the death of that...
Okay, on behalf of all the slashdotters who realize how much IBM is contributing to Open Source I would like to apologize to all IBMers who read the above post. Besides Linux pure-plays like RedHat and VA Linux no company gets it more than IBM. Their contributions to Apache are impressive, they are releasing laptops with Linux, implementing a better JDK than Sun's for Linux plus they are behind the AlphaWorks site.But instead of thanking them or being grateful for their contributions certain people feel that they should bitch and moan about how IBM will turn on Open Source (how? By stealing GPLed code???). The tiff with Sun you describe is simply that IBM licenses some Java technologies but refused to pay Sun's exorbitant licensing fees for the J2EE brand. Wow, that is so evil, they implement a better version of Java than Sun then refuse to pay Sun for the permission to call it Enterprise Java.
Here's a more detailed article on C|Net basically AOL has said they will soon present a proposal for interoperability with AIM. This seems like instead of making the protocol open, they'll release some sort of AIM API. The FTC investigation of the AOL-Time Warner merger is also sited as the cause for this move my C|Net. It's about time AOL did this, heck even Jesse Berst ranted about this yesterday.
The Learning Company == Mattel Interactive
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Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 2
I'm not sure what relation The Learning Company has to all of this, but this may help some people out:
The Learning Company, a producer of educational games and software, was purchased by Mattel sometime last year.
He is saying, "This hasn't been a problem so far... but think about a scenario where Corel suddenly hired the core KDE dev team or provided them with 'valuable considerations'"
Two reasons why this is not an issue. a.) The KDE developers are talented programmers that are working on an open source project because they want to. Programmers like them can easily find jobs if the job they are currently in violates their conscience. So even if they were hired by Corel and asked to compromise their vision, they would not. b.) Secondly even if the entire KDE team somehow decided to sell their vision for corporate $$$, the code is GPLed and can be forked by any number of willing and able developers. A project as large as KDE cannot and will not die because it affects way too many people.
PS: That said, there are many instances of scare mongering and Corel bashing in the article.
But here a company that, for perfectly good business reasons, wants its Linux distribution to behave as much as possible like Windows has hired a UI designer with no Linux or open-source experience to be a "UI designer for KDE." At GeorgiaTech (where I go to school), there exists one of the premier Human Computer Interaction programs in the country and I interact with several people in this program. Now from my understanding, it is simply not possible to be both a UI designer and have Linux experience simply because until the past year there was no Linux UI design experience to be obtained by a professional designer. After all, most of the UI designs for Linux were/are done by coders and hackers , not a UI design team. So it is rather unreasonable to expect to find an experienced UI professional with Linux experience. If anything the first generation of them are just about to start.
Even greater in number are the items reported as bugs but that are internally listed as "wishlist" items This attempts to trivialize the Corel teams bug reporting when in truth it should be thankful for them. Linux users are always hollering about world domination but once someone offers suggestions that contradicts the developer mindsight they are jumped on. Now here are two truths from MSFT: Of the 65,000 bugs or issues reported for Windows 2000 at least 20,000 are considered UI or wishlist issues. For professional shops...wishlist or UI issues are almost on par with bugs depending on the amount of functionality they add. Secondly it would surprise most people but from a reliable source MSFT studies showed that almost 90 per cent of developers hate the dancing paper clip while a majority of users like it, guess who won? Without companies like Corel providing the much needed real (l)user feedback that OSS projects need then this talk of world domination will be just that, talk. They should be thanked for their input not vilified.
Is there concern about a project being taken in a direction that might benefit one company over others? Red Hat has lots of developers working on the kernel yet no one asks whether the kernel will be optimized for Red Hat but yet Corel that merely makes suggestions and bug reports is in danger of hijacking KDE?
Even uglier, one could imagine--and this example is entirely hypothetical--a situation where the top people in a development effort accepted what lawyers call "valuable considerations" in exchange for looking the other way as a project got steered in a way that benefits a particular company. Nothing illegal about it. This one was just to offensive not to miss. I work as an intern for an e-bussiness firm and already am being remunerated more than most of my peers will be 5 years after they graduate. If I worked on an OS project, no one could offer myself (let alone several people as talented or more talented than me) enough money to sell my vision. To assume such is to miss the very spirit of Open Source. Open Source developers code because they want to and not for any financial remuneration, that's what the 9 to 5 is for.
Alright, I have several issues with this article, chief of these is the way the author goes on and on about not having beef with Corel then going out of his way to demonize them. Now ever since MSFT crushed Corel's Wordperfect with Word the Corel people have wanted revenge on MSFT one way or the other. Corel's current CEO is constantly criticized by business magazines for his foolish obsession with getting back at MSFT and their current involvement with Linux is simply part of this obsession.
Now Corel is paying designers and developers to work on turning KDE into a Windows-clone (i.e. a Windows beater), there's nothing wrong with that. What gets on my nerves about this article is the way the author trivializes the role of the KDE developers in this article. Corel does not pay any of the core developers salary nor does it contribute significant code that would die without their involvement. So basically the scenario is "Corel makes suggestions, KDE developers either like it or forward it to dev/null". If Corel really gets pissed off, they can fork the codebase (after all even Open Source developers have irreconcilable differences vis a vis Emacs and Xemacs) but if they realize they can't all they can do is keep making superficial changes and turning in bug reports.
Thus my question for the author is "So what's the big deal?". In any large project it is impossible for everyone to agree or have the same ideas and vision, simply because people have different goals doesn't suddenly mean some impending disaster will destroy the project. After all, IBM and the Apache developers have different goals but this hasn't stopped IBM from being one of the company's that gets it nor have their contributions been trivial. This article seems like a storm in a teacup to me.
I really doubt Adobe will win because this is extremely similar to when Ford Motors sued Blue Oval News for printing secret car designs on their website. Even though the car designs were secret and probably stolen by an employee who had signed an NDA, the website won.
Largest Independent Label Joins RIAA vs. Napster
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In a similar vein of offering more Napster information, TVT Records, one of the largest independent record labels in the US filed suit against Napster Inc. It seems that the RIAA and the major labels aren't the only ones after Napster.
Then again if this keeps up the Net will eventually mirror the real world with it's homogenized Walmarts, Starbucks' and Barnes & Nobles' being frequented by the many while independents close up shop and die. Only a short while ago everyone espoused the beauty of the Net and how everyone could be their own publisher but with the death of websites daily (linsight.com, reel.com, toysmart.com, boo.com, drkoop.com, peabody.com, and soon cdnow.com) are we not headed for a Net that is controlled by the few.
For instance VA Linux via Andover already controls Freshmeat, slashdot, and a bunch of other frequently visited open source sites and is estimated to draw 50 percent of open source/linux traffic on the Net. I'm not sure if I should be celebrating the fact that one more voice from the other 50 percent is gone.
PS: This post is not trying to bash VA Linux but instead is mentioning the fact that already in the real world almost everything is in the hands of a few corporate entities (the same company that sells Marlboro cigarettes sells Post Cereal and Kraft foods, Disney owns ABC television and Miramax films, AOL owns CNN and Time)and the Net was supposed to be haven away from that where opposing views and opinions were only a mouse click away. I am not sure we should be celebrating the death of that...
1.) The OS branch of MSFT is stranded. All other OS vendors have products that subsidize the cost of developing operating systems but them. Sun, Apple and IBM have hardware while Be, RedHat, SuSe and all the others have thousands of unpaid developers working for them. MSFT OS now has to find some way to either reduce development costs or will have to increase the price of Windows. A solution to this problem would be opening Windows for peer review (it doesn't even have to be GPL after all Sun's SCPL is doing well for Java).
2.) With the advent of the web as a new medium for creating applications and the rise of Application Service Providers, Windows needs to do something to stem the flow of developers away from the platform especially since IE and MSDN are not part of the company anymore.
3.) If they charge for the cost of viewing Windows Source or joining the Windows Community Process it might become a decent source of income.
Counterpoint: Of course, opening Windows code will also open it up for theft by less scrupolous companies and even worse having it folded (and hidden) in closed source software. After all as Bruce Perens is always quick to point out, companies already do it now with GPLed software.
Gee thanks for informing our lowly slashdotters about the INTERNET Is IE W3E standards compliant? NO,,,,,,,,,,,,,, is mozilla YES!!!
Does Java, DHTML or XML currently work perfectly in Mozilla or are there sites being written specifically targetted at Mozilla's advanced features.? My point was that several slashdotters due to the fact that they use Netscape or Mozilla are missing out on sites that are beginning to offer more and more advanced functionality. The applications being ported at the company's I worked for are an example. Frankly I don't know about here and now but as at 1 month ago Mozilla couldn't handle ECMAscript so simple things like retrieving MP3s from my online locker at Xdrive here impossible. So if you are using Mozilla or Netscape (especially on *nix which I do) a lot of the power of 4th generation browsers and HTML 4.0 is lost on you, thus you'll think that all a browser does is display static HTML pages like the post I responded to does instead of realizing that they do so much more.
Now that I have thought about it, once Mozilla is complete it will be adopted as the browser of choice by AOL. This will instantly make it a contender in the browser wars. After all, if companies are ready to create AOL specific websites and get in on the AOL keyword system, why shouldn't they start coding aimed at Mozilla once AOL adopts it. Maybe Jim Clark has nothing to worry about, of course now we have we'll have a browser controlled by a company that has a monopoly on content and user software for half the Net users in America and another owned by a company that will be trying to create such a monopoly. This will be interesting...
Lots of slashdotters do not realize this yet mainly because they mostly hack linux (i.e. use mostly C and Perl) and browse the web via Netscape (broken handling of Java, CSS, XML, ECMAscript) but the browser is slowly superseding the operating system in importance. Consider the following points.
With a browser as the User Interface it is possible to write complex cross platform applications in a truly Write Once, Run Anywhere manner if they are all accessed by the same browser. If you do not believe how powerful browser applications have become and can be
Many companies are porting applications that were once client software to the internet to avoid several annoying user problems (e.g. install problems, patching , upgrading software, bugtracking, etc). In fact the last two companies I have worked for which service different kinds of employees are both porting their flagship applications to the internet. One of these is a retail management app originally written in Delphi for Windows, while the other company is porting a Windows NT (MFC) port of an app that was originally Unix (Motif/C++) to the web using JSP/servlets/javascript.
Think about it, eventually high bandwidth and more powerful machines will be ubiqitous. Already with a DSL connection I can export my Emacs display or use VMWare with little difference from running them locally. With the advent of webpads and wireless computing the browser will play a more critical role in the use of computers while the OS will play more and more of a backseat role. After all almost technology every company in existence is becoming an Application Service Provider so as to avoid all the clientside problems I listed in my first point. MSFT and Sun are working on complete web versions of their office suites. Considering the fact that all most people use their PC for is web browsing, typing a few documents and email it would seem that all they'll need is a web browser regardless of operating system.
And this is where the problems begin. Already due to Netscape's horrible implementation of W3C standards IE is favored by web developers all over (the horrible browser object model doesn't help much). Already some sites are becoming MSIE specific because developers do not want to maintain one site for IE and a less rich site for Netscape. Heck!!! I'm into Open Source and a browser agnostic but yet when the time came for some friends and I to design (coding starts in the fall) a secure messageboard/instant messaging service accesible over the web for use by a local company for our final project we ended up deciding that all the cool stuff would be in the IE version while we'd just make sure that the page displayed with no hijinks for Netscape. This decision is actually better than what most companies are doing or plan to do in the future. This is what scares me and Jim Clark, what happens when users need to use IE to use MS Office, or when developers can only develop for MSIE with Visual Studio? Considering that MSIE is the predominant browser on the platforms on which it exists it doesn't take much imagination to MSFT Applications Company becoming a new kind of cross-platform monopoly. This is why Jim Clark is scared and wants IE to stay with Windows.
>>Amiga were fighting with Atari. >Atari had been dead for five years at this point.
Whatever, I seem to remember my friends having an Atari ST which competed directly with the Amiga 500 when I was in high school. I graduated high school in '94 which is 8 years after which you claim Atari had died. It is obvious that you are the one that doesn't know that of which he speaks.
*sigh* You talk like you haven't written code before. Many times I have written code and declared "that's it", "I'm finished", "This is code is perfect" just to have a fellow developer suggest a test which the program fails or even worse have the code fail in production because you never thought of it. This is a natural occurence that all programmers deal with whether they are hard-core Linux kernel hackers or MCSEs using Visual Basic. I was merely commenting on this humorously and not trying to besmirch almighty Linus.
PS: If I was a hard-core hacker(who says I'm not) and I saw a piece of code that said DON'T CHANGE ME while looking through some source code which was specific to 1 person's machine chances are that I would change the code to be more general. Especially if I had access to a different kind of machine from the original developer. Methinks a redefinition of your idea of hard-core hacker is needed.
/* * 'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There * probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well * in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc).
Okay can anyone tell me how many times they have thought the exact same thing about their only for somebody else to suggest a scenario or even worse use it "improperly" and find a bug. I think I'm up to several dozen times...:-)
I may be totally wide of the mark here, but does this spell trouble for Palm? Not just from the increased competition, but the Nerd factor must surely be in favour of Transmeta now.
I won't say your off the mark, more that you probably just hang out with geeks. In my experience Palms have brought us much closer to ubiqitous computing than MSFT, Intel and Apple combined. The palm is the only device I have seen turn people both young and old (teens to people in their mid-fifties) into blubbering nerds. I seen people from diverse cultural and economic backgrounds become enraptured with a Palm due to it's simplicity, usefulness and all around coolness. No tech-company today can say that their device elicits squeals of delight both from college students and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Basically what I am trying to say is that Palms attract a lot more people than just nerds and even amongst the nerds that are attracted a lot of them aren't the slashdot-type/linux/free-software/hardware-hacker type, so thinking that some product will steal market share from Palm simply because Linux geeks will want to buy Transmeta is a false assumption.
Maybe somebody can help me with this. I have been hearing it a lot from the media, but can find no technical basis for this. How does having Cable or DSL make you more vulnerable? I mean there is always users shareing their hard drives, but that is just the same on the modems.
Cable or DSL are more attractive to crackers and script kiddies because the IP is static (or at least semi-static) and there is more bandwidth to play with. Therefore if I find a DSL/Cable box to crack, I can be pretty sure that it'll have the same IP next time I come around and also that it'll always be connected to the internet while for dialup IP addresses change on each connection to the net and even when connected are unstable anyway. This is also a concern since IP ranges for the net addresses of ISPs can be estimated given one or two and then random portscanning will find suitable candidates.
And a little note of caution... the article mentions 'special software' that needs to be used to make your Cable modem secure. I am wondering if somebody is going to peddle something like Cybersitter or some other censorware that (now possible that will filter out napster as well) under this excuse.
Nope, they mean firewall software which can detect port scans and/or warn or stop programs on your machine from connecting to the Internet without your permission. If you have a permanent connection to the Net and use a Windows machine at home I suggest getting a firewall, you'd be surprised at the amount of portscans you'll get a week and may be shocked that you already have a trojan on your machine.
Revenge, Vengeance, Retribution, Kill Them All...
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Microsoft Quickies
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· Score: 2
And you know what? I bet you the separate IE company wouldn't be solvent -- couldn't justify its' own expenses. Know what else? Microsoft should HAVE to deal with that.. Netscape did -- that's why Mozilla is Open Source now. That, my friends, would be justice
No that my friend, would be vengeful retribution. There is no justice in creating a company destined to fail simply to satisfy people's thirst for revenge. A web browser on it's own cannot support itself because people now expect them to be free. The money to be made from browser development is from creating development tools and you refuse them even that so unless MSIE walks away with MSDN (visual C++/Basic/J++/XML technologies) then splitting of the browser will be and exercise in destruction that will hurt everybody, consumers the most. PS: Even if they open sourced it it would still cost a great deal to maintain. AOL has kept on average 100 developers working on Mozilla at any one time while the average regular contributers hovers in the 30s. Besides the MSIE code base is probably convuloted enough that releasing the source would matter to very few people who are not heavily into COM/COM+/DCOM which basically counts out most of the slashdot crowd (except maybe the GNOME folk since they are so heavily into components).
This type of attitude bothers me a lot. Romero poured his heart and soul into this game, and even though it was totally over-hyped and underachieving in the end, Daikatana made it to store shelves.
Yeah, your type of attitude bothers me a great deal as well. Reasoning like that is lowering standards everywhere and has screwed up our educational system with ludicrous concepts like social promotion (why bother doing well if you go on to the next class anyway? therefore there are no repercussions for failure). So what do you suggest that after spending four years shooting of his mouth and drowning us with his ego we should congratulate John Romero for shipping software even if it is shitty?!? Hell, no. As for the so-called Daikatana Process "big, frigging deal". Every sufficiently large software project has interesting stories of design, personality clashes and innovation hiding away somewhere...why should we celebrate the story of the creation of a horrible piece of software when there are more deserving projects to laud both as games and as feats of engineering and design (Half-Life, System Shock 2, Baldur's Gate, Quake 3, Theif I and II, anything from Blizzard, etc). Next thing you'll be suggesting that we cheer MSFT on for being brave enough to release Windows 95/98 even though they knew they'd get laughed at...
PS: I especially dislike Ion Storm because after Eidos wasted money supporting them there was nothing left over to stop Looking Glass Studios from going under.
analogy: Frankly if I shot my mouth of about how much I could code to a bunch of developers and how l33t I was only to turn out not to be able to write a BubbleSort or create a Hash Function I'd expect to be laughed out of town and I would deserve it.
The above post is not a troll. This is a valid opinion, maybe it conflicts with the entire rah-rah-free-speech-screw-big-business-internet-ac cess-is-a-god-given-right mentality of the typical slashdotter but it is not a troll. His statement is very valid. ISPs run on tight margins and it makes no sense for a business to risk losing several hundreds or thousands of customer simply to satisfy one user.
Whether the ISP even knows why the user is being harrassed is unknown and cannot be verified due to the fact that no identifying information was posted but from a financial standpoint the ISP made the best decision they could with the facts they have. Heck, the U.S. government and the combined dollars of Yahoo, eBay, and several others can't catch a bunch of DoSing script kiddies yet people expect a local(or even national) ISP to continually defy them because of 1 user ($20 a month which isn't even all profit) ?
I would really like to learn something before I graduate that I didn't already know...like how to structure a significant piece of C++ code.
What you have asked for has yet to be created. There are books that try to explain software engineering and many that explain the mysterious workings of C++ but only experience can teach what you want. Here are a few books that will advance your knowledge of both C++ and software engineering to help you along your way.
Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks. This book is about 25 years old but still rings true today. It is a classic in computer science history and dispelled several myths that existed at the time (e.g. he showed that adding developers to a late project can only make it later).
Code Complete by Steve mcConnel - he may be a Microsoftie but he knows how to write a good book. He covers everything from analysis and design to proper coding and testing practices. A must-have.
The Practice of Programming by Kernigan (K from K and R) and Pike. A handy little book that contains several truths that seem like common sense to the experienced programmer but are precious jewels of knowledge. It contains dozens of tips in C, C++, Java and Perl for help in testing, debugging, programming style and design.
Effective C++ CD: 85 Ways to Improve your C++ by Scott Meyers - This is a combination of his bestselling books and articles (by himself and otheres) all on one CD. This book is the best C++ resource I've seen and is owned by most of the C++ gurus I have ever met. The knowledge on this CD is invaluable.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software - by the gang of four. This contains 23 of the most often used designs that occur in Object Oriented Programming in industry. The book is a classic and has saved many a developer from reinventing the wheel several times over.
I can't wait for the book that will show developers how to create well engineered software without being bogged down in the tediousness of the text or the infeasibility of the suggestions as is displayed by most of the current crop of software engineering books today.
Dude where have you been in the past few years? MSFTs competitors have been making better products for years... Netscape, Borland, Novell, Sun to name a few.
Maybe you need to read the findings of the fact and see how MSFT punished OEMs who tried to include competitor products in their installation packages, or how MSFT has deliberately reneged on contracts, agreements and deals they have made with both the government and other corporations when they thought they could get away with it. Frankly I am as much against the government becoming involved in the world of software as the next guy but this is a case where it is needed. For instance, do you think Linux would be such a mainstream success if not for the DOJ investigation? Hell, no. Do you think the Dells and Compaqs would be selling Linux servers today if not for the fact that they are sure there will be no reprisal from MSFT? Heck, they didn't even have the balls to defy MSFT and preinstall Netscape Navigator on their machines when Netscape was still clearly better than MSIE. And remember that these sell more linux servers than pure linux companies.
Dammit, I have to go, the girlfriend's getting mad but a quick wrap up. No matter how good Linux, Mac OS or BeOS etc are MSFT would still control the desktop server market by any means necessary and is now using all sorts of bundling and machinations (Kerberos, MS Java, etc) to leverage that into forcing a server monopoly. They need to be stopped and it looks like the market would never have done it.
The DOJ seems to think their counter proposal has enough merit that they asked for Judge Jackson for an extension in the case to review the merits of MSFT's proposal and will issue a response. Of course, they may simply be doing this to cover themselves when (not if) the case is appealed and thus will be able to say they gave MSFT every chance and considered every option.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all I'd like to clear up what seems like a misconception of the original poster. Banner ads and affiliate programs are a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of running a website. After investigating the Net scene last year when I was planning to start a website I noticed that dotcomms could be divided into eCommerce sites, pay service sites and banner ad sites. Most of the successful non-eCommerce had either been sold to larger parties (e.g. Slashdot to Andover then Andover to VA Linux, Hotmail to MSN) to offset the cost or become pay services (JenniCam) simply because banner ads couldn't cut it. heck, even rusty has incorporated kuro5hin . So even now information (non-eCommerce) websites with sizable traffic (i.e. need expensive servers, bandwidth and maintanence) cannot survive on banner ads and affiliate programs indefinitely. There is more exposition on how dotcomms cannot survive on ads alone on ZDNet
The entire everything is free idea on the Net is based around the loss leader concept. Give away stuff to gain market share then make the revenue by exploiting the marketshare. Unfortunately this is the rub, few sites have anyway to make up the revenue lost by undercharging or giving away content or product. This is now being felt by the rash of layoffs and also the large number of dead or dying dotcomms which include cdnow.com, drkoop.com, toysmart.com, boo.com, foofoo.com, reel.com, apbnews.com, etc. The surviving information/nonE-commerce sites (especially independent or pseudo-independents like slashdot) will eventually have two choices
1.)Get bought out by a larger company who either wants the site for goodwill purposes (AOL owns Winamp.com which never make back the $20 million they spent on it, VA Linux owns Freshmeat, Slashdot and freeCode.com which will make just enough to hold their own or slightly less) or want to exploit the user base in a way the original site could not (e.g. MSN buying Hotmail so that logging out of hotmail redirects you to MSN.com).
2.) The second option is to become like the only sites to actually turn a profit on the Net on information, pr0n. Charge for premium membership and giveaway just a enough to entice members. The Wall Street Journal already does this with no ill-effects.
3.) The third option is to close down. Which off course is not an option many are willing to make. Of course, if this keeps up the Net will eventually mirror the real world with it's homogenized Walmarts, Starbucks' and Barnes & Nobles' being frequented by the many while independents close up shop and die. Only a short while ago everyone espoused the beauty of the Net and how everyone could be their own publisher but with the death of websites daily (linsight.com, reel.com, toysmart.com, boo.com, drkoop.com, peabody.com, and soon cdnow.com) are we not headed for a Net that is controlled by the few? For instance VA Linux via Andover already controls Freshmeat, slashdot, and a bunch of other frequently visited open source sites and is estimated to draw 50 percent of open source/linux traffic on the Net.
PS: This post is not trying to bash VA Linux but instead is mentioning the fact that already in the real world almost everything is in the hands of a few corporate entities (the same company that sells Marlboro cigarettes sells Post Cereal and Kraft foods, Disney owns ABC television and Miramax films, AOL owns CNN and Time)and the Net was supposed to be haven away from that where opposing views and opinions were only a mouse click away. I am not sure we should be celebrating the death of that...
AOL has submitted it's IMX draft to the IETF and it is available on the Internet at http://aim.aol.com/openim.
Okay, on behalf of all the slashdotters who realize how much IBM is contributing to Open Source I would like to apologize to all IBMers who read the above post.
Besides Linux pure-plays like RedHat and VA Linux no company gets it more than IBM. Their contributions to Apache are impressive, they are releasing laptops with Linux, implementing a better JDK than Sun's for Linux plus they are behind the AlphaWorks site.But instead of thanking them or being grateful for their contributions certain people feel that they should bitch and moan about how IBM will turn on Open Source (how? By stealing GPLed code???). The tiff with Sun you describe is simply that IBM licenses some Java technologies but refused to pay Sun's exorbitant licensing fees for the J2EE brand. Wow, that is so evil, they implement a better version of Java than Sun then refuse to pay Sun for the permission to call it Enterprise Java.
Ingratitude is sad to witness.
Here's a more detailed article on C|Net basically AOL has said they will soon present a proposal for interoperability with AIM. This seems like instead of making the protocol open, they'll release some sort of AIM API. The FTC investigation of the AOL-Time Warner merger is also sited as the cause for this move my C|Net. It's about time AOL did this, heck even Jesse Berst ranted about this yesterday.
I'm not sure what relation The Learning Company has to all of this, but this may help some people out:
The Learning Company, a producer of educational games and software, was purchased by Mattel sometime last year.
He is saying, "This hasn't been a problem so far... but think about a scenario where Corel suddenly hired the core KDE dev team or provided them with 'valuable considerations'"
Two reasons why this is not an issue.
a.) The KDE developers are talented programmers that are working on an open source project because they want to. Programmers like them can easily find jobs if the job they are currently in violates their conscience. So even if they were hired by Corel and asked to compromise their vision, they would not.
b.) Secondly even if the entire KDE team somehow decided to sell their vision for corporate $$$, the code is GPLed and can be forked by any number of willing and able developers. A project as large as KDE cannot and will not die because it affects way too many people.
PS: That said, there are many instances of scare mongering and Corel bashing in the article.
But here a company that, for perfectly good business reasons, wants its Linux distribution to behave as much as possible like Windows has hired a UI designer with no Linux or open-source experience to be a "UI designer for KDE."
At GeorgiaTech (where I go to school), there exists one of the premier Human Computer Interaction programs in the country and I interact with several people in this program. Now from my understanding, it is simply not possible to be both a UI designer and have Linux experience simply because until the past year there was no Linux UI design experience to be obtained by a professional designer. After all, most of the UI designs for Linux were/are done by coders and hackers , not a UI design team. So it is rather unreasonable to expect to find an experienced UI professional with Linux experience. If anything the first generation of them are just about to start.
Even greater in number are the items reported as bugs but that are internally listed as "wishlist" items
This attempts to trivialize the Corel teams bug reporting when in truth it should be thankful for them. Linux users are always hollering about world domination but once someone offers suggestions that contradicts the developer mindsight they are jumped on. Now here are two truths from MSFT: Of the 65,000 bugs or issues reported for Windows 2000 at least 20,000 are considered UI or wishlist issues. For professional shops...wishlist or UI issues are almost on par with bugs depending on the amount of functionality they add. Secondly it would surprise most people but from a reliable source MSFT studies showed that almost 90 per cent of developers hate the dancing paper clip while a majority of users like it, guess who won?
Without companies like Corel providing the much needed real (l)user feedback that OSS projects need then this talk of world domination will be just that, talk. They should be thanked for their input not vilified.
Is there concern about a project being taken in a direction that might benefit one company over others?
Red Hat has lots of developers working on the kernel yet no one asks whether the kernel will be optimized for Red Hat but yet Corel that merely makes suggestions and bug reports is in danger of hijacking KDE?
Even uglier, one could imagine--and this example is entirely hypothetical--a situation where the top people in a development effort accepted what lawyers call "valuable considerations" in exchange for looking the other way as a project got steered in a way that benefits a particular company. Nothing illegal about it.
This one was just to offensive not to miss. I work as an intern for an e-bussiness firm and already am being remunerated more than most of my peers will be 5 years after they graduate. If I worked on an OS project, no one could offer myself (let alone several people as talented or more talented than me) enough money to sell my vision. To assume such is to miss the very spirit of Open Source. Open Source developers code because they want to and not for any financial remuneration, that's what the 9 to 5 is for.
Alright, I have several issues with this article, chief of these is the way the author goes on and on about not having beef with Corel then going out of his way to demonize them. Now ever since MSFT crushed Corel's Wordperfect with Word the Corel people have wanted revenge on MSFT one way or the other. Corel's current CEO is constantly criticized by business magazines for his foolish obsession with getting back at MSFT and their current involvement with Linux is simply part of this obsession.
Now Corel is paying designers and developers to work on turning KDE into a Windows-clone (i.e. a Windows beater), there's nothing wrong with that. What gets on my nerves about this article is the way the author trivializes the role of the KDE developers in this article. Corel does not pay any of the core developers salary nor does it contribute significant code that would die without their involvement. So basically the scenario is "Corel makes suggestions, KDE developers either like it or forward it to dev/null". If Corel really gets pissed off, they can fork the codebase (after all even Open Source developers have irreconcilable differences vis a vis Emacs and Xemacs) but if they realize they can't all they can do is keep making superficial changes and turning in bug reports.
Thus my question for the author is "So what's the big deal?". In any large project it is impossible for everyone to agree or have the same ideas and vision, simply because people have different goals doesn't suddenly mean some impending disaster will destroy the project. After all, IBM and the Apache developers have different goals but this hasn't stopped IBM from being one of the company's that gets it nor have their contributions been trivial. This article seems like a storm in a teacup to me.
Just my $0.02.
I really doubt Adobe will win because this is extremely similar to when Ford Motors sued Blue Oval News for printing secret car designs on their website. Even though the car designs were secret and probably stolen by an employee who had signed an NDA, the website won.
In a similar vein of offering more Napster information, TVT Records, one of the largest independent record labels in the US filed suit against Napster Inc. It seems that the RIAA and the major labels aren't the only ones after Napster.
Then again if this keeps up the Net will eventually mirror the real world with it's homogenized Walmarts, Starbucks' and Barnes & Nobles' being frequented by the many while independents close up shop and die. Only a short while ago everyone espoused the beauty of the Net and how everyone could be their own publisher but with the death of websites daily (linsight.com, reel.com, toysmart.com, boo.com, drkoop.com, peabody.com, and soon cdnow.com) are we not headed for a Net that is controlled by the few.
For instance VA Linux via Andover already controls Freshmeat, slashdot, and a bunch of other frequently visited open source sites and is estimated to draw 50 percent of open source/linux traffic on the Net. I'm not sure if I should be celebrating the fact that one more voice from the other 50 percent is gone.
PS: This post is not trying to bash VA Linux but instead is mentioning the fact that already in the real world almost everything is in the hands of a few corporate entities (the same company that sells Marlboro cigarettes sells Post Cereal and Kraft foods, Disney owns ABC television and Miramax films, AOL owns CNN and Time)and the Net was supposed to be haven away from that where opposing views and opinions were only a mouse click away. I am not sure we should be celebrating the death of that...
1.) The OS branch of MSFT is stranded. All other OS vendors have products that subsidize the cost of developing operating systems but them. Sun, Apple and IBM have hardware while Be, RedHat, SuSe and all the others have thousands of unpaid developers working for them. MSFT OS now has to find some way to either reduce development costs or will have to increase the price of Windows. A solution to this problem would be opening Windows for peer review (it doesn't even have to be GPL after all Sun's SCPL is doing well for Java).
2.) With the advent of the web as a new medium for creating applications and the rise of Application Service Providers, Windows needs to do something to stem the flow of developers away from the platform especially since IE and MSDN are not part of the company anymore.
3.) If they charge for the cost of viewing Windows Source or joining the Windows Community Process it might become a decent source of income.
Counterpoint: Of course, opening Windows code will also open it up for theft by less scrupolous companies and even worse having it folded (and hidden) in closed source software. After all as Bruce Perens is always quick to point out, companies already do it now with GPLed software.
Gee thanks for informing our lowly slashdotters about the INTERNET Is IE W3E standards compliant? NO ,,,,,,,,,,,,,, is mozilla YES!!!
Does Java, DHTML or XML currently work perfectly in Mozilla or are there sites being written specifically targetted at Mozilla's advanced features.? My point was that several slashdotters due to the fact that they use Netscape or Mozilla are missing out on sites that are beginning to offer more and more advanced functionality. The applications being ported at the company's I worked for are an example. Frankly I don't know about here and now but as at 1 month ago Mozilla couldn't handle ECMAscript so simple things like retrieving MP3s from my online locker at Xdrive here impossible. So if you are using Mozilla or Netscape (especially on *nix which I do) a lot of the power of 4th generation browsers and HTML 4.0 is lost on you, thus you'll think that all a browser does is display static HTML pages like the post I responded to does instead of realizing that they do so much more.
Now that I have thought about it, once Mozilla is complete it will be adopted as the browser of choice by AOL. This will instantly make it a contender in the browser wars. After all, if companies are ready to create AOL specific websites and get in on the AOL keyword system, why shouldn't they start coding aimed at Mozilla once AOL adopts it. Maybe Jim Clark has nothing to worry about, of course now we have we'll have a browser controlled by a company that has a monopoly on content and user software for half the Net users in America and another owned by a company that will be trying to create such a monopoly. This will be interesting...
And this is where the problems begin. Already due to Netscape's horrible implementation of W3C standards IE is favored by web developers all over (the horrible browser object model doesn't help much). Already some sites are becoming MSIE specific because developers do not want to maintain one site for IE and a less rich site for Netscape. Heck!!! I'm into Open Source and a browser agnostic but yet when the time came for some friends and I to design (coding starts in the fall) a secure messageboard/instant messaging service accesible over the web for use by a local company for our final project we ended up deciding that all the cool stuff would be in the IE version while we'd just make sure that the page displayed with no hijinks for Netscape. This decision is actually better than what most companies are doing or plan to do in the future. This is what scares me and Jim Clark, what happens when users need to use IE to use MS Office, or when developers can only develop for MSIE with Visual Studio? Considering that MSIE is the predominant browser on the platforms on which it exists it doesn't take much imagination to MSFT Applications Company becoming a new kind of cross-platform monopoly. This is why Jim Clark is scared and wants IE to stay with Windows.
>>Amiga were fighting with Atari.
>Atari had been dead for five years at this point.
Whatever, I seem to remember my friends having an Atari ST which competed directly with the Amiga 500 when I was in high school. I graduated high school in '94 which is 8 years after which you claim Atari had died. It is obvious that you are the one that doesn't know that of which he speaks.
*sigh*
You talk like you haven't written code before. Many times I have written code and declared "that's it", "I'm finished", "This is code is perfect" just to have a fellow developer suggest a test which the program fails or even worse have the code fail in production because you never thought of it. This is a natural occurence that all programmers deal with whether they are hard-core Linux kernel hackers or MCSEs using Visual Basic. I was merely commenting on this humorously and not trying to besmirch almighty Linus.
PS: If I was a hard-core hacker(who says I'm not) and I saw a piece of code that said DON'T CHANGE ME while looking through some source code which was specific to 1 person's machine chances are that I would change the code to be more general. Especially if I had access to a different kind of machine from the original developer. Methinks a redefinition of your idea of hard-core hacker is needed.
from sched.c:
/*
:-)
* 'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There
* probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well
* in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc).
Okay can anyone tell me how many times they have thought the exact same thing about their only for somebody else to suggest a scenario or even worse use it "improperly" and find a bug. I think I'm up to several dozen times...
I may be totally wide of the mark here, but does this spell trouble for Palm? Not just from the increased competition, but the Nerd factor must surely be in favour of Transmeta now.
I won't say your off the mark, more that you probably just hang out with geeks. In my experience Palms have brought us much closer to ubiqitous computing than MSFT, Intel and Apple combined. The palm is the only device I have seen turn people both young and old (teens to people in their mid-fifties) into blubbering nerds. I seen people from diverse cultural and economic backgrounds become enraptured with a Palm due to it's simplicity, usefulness and all around coolness. No tech-company today can say that their device elicits squeals of delight both from college students and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
Basically what I am trying to say is that Palms attract a lot more people than just nerds and even amongst the nerds that are attracted a lot of them aren't the slashdot-type/linux/free-software/hardware-hacker type, so thinking that some product will steal market share from Palm simply because Linux geeks will want to buy Transmeta is a false assumption.
Maybe somebody can help me with this. I have been hearing it a lot from the media, but can find no technical basis for this. How does having Cable or DSL make you more vulnerable? I mean there is always users shareing their hard drives, but that is just the same on the modems.
... the article mentions 'special software' that needs to be used to make your Cable modem secure. I am wondering if somebody is going to peddle something like Cybersitter or some other censorware that (now possible that will filter out napster as well) under this excuse.
Cable or DSL are more attractive to crackers and script kiddies because the IP is static (or at least semi-static) and there is more bandwidth to play with. Therefore if I find a DSL/Cable box to crack, I can be pretty sure that it'll have the same IP next time I come around and also that it'll always be connected to the internet while for dialup IP addresses change on each connection to the net and even when connected are unstable anyway. This is also a concern since IP ranges for the net addresses of ISPs can be estimated given one or two and then random portscanning will find suitable candidates.
And a little note of caution
Nope, they mean firewall software which can detect port scans and/or warn or stop programs on your machine from connecting to the Internet without your permission. If you have a permanent connection to the Net and use a Windows machine at home I suggest getting a firewall, you'd be surprised at the amount of portscans you'll get a week and may be shocked that you already have a trojan on your machine.
And you know what? I bet you the separate IE company wouldn't be solvent -- couldn't justify its' own expenses. Know what else? Microsoft should HAVE to deal with that.. Netscape did -- that's why Mozilla is Open Source now. That, my friends, would be justice
No that my friend, would be vengeful retribution. There is no justice in creating a company destined to fail simply to satisfy people's thirst for revenge.
A web browser on it's own cannot support itself because people now expect them to be free. The money to be made from browser development is from creating development tools and you refuse them even that so unless MSIE walks away with MSDN (visual C++/Basic/J++/XML technologies) then splitting of the browser will be and exercise in destruction that will hurt everybody, consumers the most.
PS: Even if they open sourced it it would still cost a great deal to maintain. AOL has kept on average 100 developers working on Mozilla at any one time while the average regular contributers hovers in the 30s. Besides the MSIE code base is probably convuloted enough that releasing the source would matter to very few people who are not heavily into COM/COM+/DCOM which basically counts out most of the slashdot crowd (except maybe the GNOME folk since they are so heavily into components).
PPS: Just my $0.02, gotta get back to coding....
This type of attitude bothers me a lot. Romero poured his heart and soul into this game, and even though it was totally over-hyped and underachieving in the end, Daikatana made it to store shelves.
Yeah, your type of attitude bothers me a great deal as well. Reasoning like that is lowering standards everywhere and has screwed up our educational system with ludicrous concepts like social promotion (why bother doing well if you go on to the next class anyway? therefore there are no repercussions for failure). So what do you suggest that after spending four years shooting of his mouth and drowning us with his ego we should congratulate John Romero for shipping software even if it is shitty?!? Hell, no.
As for the so-called Daikatana Process "big, frigging deal". Every sufficiently large software project has interesting stories of design, personality clashes and innovation hiding away somewhere...why should we celebrate the story of the creation of a horrible piece of software when there are more deserving projects to laud both as games and as feats of engineering and design (Half-Life, System Shock 2, Baldur's Gate, Quake 3, Theif I and II, anything from Blizzard, etc). Next thing you'll be suggesting that we cheer MSFT on for being brave enough to release Windows 95/98 even though they knew they'd get laughed at...
PS: I especially dislike Ion Storm because after Eidos wasted money supporting them there was nothing left over to stop Looking Glass Studios from going under.
analogy:
Frankly if I shot my mouth of about how much I could code to a bunch of developers and how l33t I was only to turn out not to be able to write a BubbleSort or create a Hash Function I'd expect to be laughed out of town and I would deserve it.
The above post is not a troll. This is a valid opinion, maybe it conflicts with the entire rah-rah-free-speech-screw-big-business-internet-ac cess-is-a-god-given-right mentality of the typical slashdotter but it is not a troll.
His statement is very valid. ISPs run on tight margins and it makes no sense for a business to risk losing several hundreds or thousands of customer simply to satisfy one user.
Whether the ISP even knows why the user is being harrassed is unknown and cannot be verified due to the fact that no identifying information was posted but from a financial standpoint the ISP made the best decision they could with the facts they have. Heck, the U.S. government and the combined dollars of Yahoo, eBay, and several others can't catch a bunch of DoSing script kiddies yet people expect a local(or even national) ISP to continually defy them because of 1 user ($20 a month which isn't even all profit) ?
What you have asked for has yet to be created. There are books that try to explain software engineering and many that explain the mysterious workings of C++ but only experience can teach what you want. Here are a few books that will advance your knowledge of both C++ and software engineering to help you along your way.
- Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software - by the gang of four. This contains 23 of the most often used designs that occur in Object Oriented Programming in industry. The book is a classic and has saved many a developer from reinventing the wheel several times over.
I can't wait for the book that will show developers how to create well engineered software without being bogged down in the tediousness of the text or the infeasibility of the suggestions as is displayed by most of the current crop of software engineering books today.Even if MSFT was not based in the U.S. it would not prevent them from being punished for breaking U.S. antitrust law. After all MSFT was investigated by Japan for antitrust issues as well as an European Union antitrust investigation. In neither of this case was the fact that MSFT an American based company a savior.
British Columbia should investigate antitrust law before making such suggestions to MSFT.
Dude where have you been in the past few years?
MSFTs competitors have been making better products for years... Netscape, Borland, Novell, Sun to name a few.
Maybe you need to read the findings of the fact and see how MSFT punished OEMs who tried to include competitor products in their installation packages, or how MSFT has deliberately reneged on contracts, agreements and deals they have made with both the government and other corporations when they thought they could get away with it. Frankly I am as much against the government becoming involved in the world of software as the next guy but this is a case where it is needed. For instance, do you think Linux would be such a mainstream success if not for the DOJ investigation? Hell, no. Do you think the Dells and Compaqs would be selling Linux servers today if not for the fact that they are sure there will be no reprisal from MSFT? Heck, they didn't even have the balls to defy MSFT and preinstall Netscape Navigator on their machines when Netscape was still clearly better than MSIE. And remember that these sell more linux servers than pure linux companies.
Dammit, I have to go, the girlfriend's getting mad but a quick wrap up. No matter how good Linux, Mac OS or BeOS etc are MSFT would still control the desktop server market by any means necessary and is now using all sorts of bundling and machinations (Kerberos, MS Java, etc) to leverage that into forcing a server monopoly. They need to be stopped and it looks like the market would never have done it.
The DOJ seems to think their counter proposal has enough merit that they asked for Judge Jackson for an extension in the case to review the merits of MSFT's proposal and will issue a response.
Of course, they may simply be doing this to cover themselves when (not if) the case is appealed and thus will be able to say they gave MSFT every chance and considered every option.