sweeping generalizations, pedestrian observations, bland platitudes, and buzzword-mania.
Utopian fantasies about supercomputers, AI, gene mapping and nano-technologies abound, but few have yet delivered to make the world different or better.
I mean, what the hell is his point? What is he even talking about? Does anyone know? "Hey you, you genome-sequencers, you nanotech researchers, you AI professors! Let's see some results, OK? I demand that you make the world a better place!"
Instead of encouraging a common movement or agenda, the Net is increasingly Balkanized by an explosion in individualistic sites, weblogs, P2P systems, filtering and moderation programs.
I mean, WTF?? Maybe Katz is having a flashback to the 60s, and thinks we should all stop blogging, making homepages, and trading files and have one big online love-in? And what's this about moderation programs? Is Katz lashing out at the hand that feeds him?
If anyone would care to respond, speak up in Katz's defense, please, do. This is not a troll; this is not flamebait. Katz seems so sure of himself that I hate to just dismiss him outright.
I knew this dude from Metropolis
Who's mightier than all of us
The villains they hate him,
The media chase him
And that's why he stays anonymous!
This utopian "lack of privacy" does not "engender honesty" any more than the conditioning of Alex in Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange engendered in him lawfulness, kindness or respect for his fellow man. The same way The Brave New World engendered contentment in Bernard Marx.
I don't even think your scenario is that accurate. Not without some Huxleyan conditioning.
Any sociologist will tell you that privacy is a basic human need. Haven't you ever wanted to "just get away from it all"??
billboards don't depend on users clicking them to be effective!
but essentially I agree with you. don't give up on the advertising-revenue model yet. the thinkgeek ads are a perfect example of how banner ads do work. I've clicked a couple of them, but even if I couldn't click on them, I still remembered their site, bought a few christmas gifts there, and have been pndering one of those 20 gig mp3 players.
don't believe the hype. ignore the pundits (maybe even think things through yourself..)
The pundits are at it again. They hype a technology that is the be-all and end-all of personal computing (but wait! the personal computer is dead! oh, different pundits? nevermind...), or it could be if you'd only give them a bunch of money. It's just insane, I probably should be worrying about it so much, but man, it bugs me.
Everything you've said is very true, but you made some unfair assumptions about, or failed to read fully into what I was saying.
The visionaries in the first paragraph you quoted, are the same types of visionairies and pundits who declared dotcoms to be "the next big thing." Everyone wanted to find the next Microsoft, and this lead to the gross overvaluations you describe.
The concept of the internet land-grab is essentially the same scenario, and it worked (yes). Some people did get lucky, and many didn't. That's part of the game, and they willingly played it. But I challenge you to show me how Yahoo will not survive until the market shakes out, barring the kind of mass panic that the pundits seem hell-bent on creating. They have some of the best web properties, and I believe that the advertising models will work out just as they have for other media.
Beyond that, I don't really care that much about defending Yahoo, particularly. I own no stock in them, and I couldn't care less about their market capitalization, stock prices, earnings, or any ratio thereof. And even if they and every single other dotcom did go under, do you really think the web would simply disappear?
No, life would go on, there would still be jobs for coders (although maybe not as many for web designers... pity there:P), and I would still be able to use the internet for everything I use it for today. the late nineties would sinply be a page in the history books, that's all. Biotech didn't stop advancing because some stock-prices did. Oracle didn't die because their "network computer" failed to catch on. And it is well with my soul.
If only the people shouting at the top of their lungs that the end is near (who were the same people who shouted how ecommerce was the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything) could just take some prozac and calm the fuck down, the world would be a much saner place.
it's easy to make those kinds of sweeping generalizations, and to an extent I agree with you. but don't forget PBS, the discovery channel, cnn, etc.
the difference between the internet and TV is that with TV there can only be so many channels in the spectrum the FCC has alotted, and there is a huge cost associated with starting up a broadcasting station, let alone a major network. The internet, on the other hand, lets any college kid with linux, apache, and a PC salvaged from spare parts (or simply a geocities account, to keep things yahoo-related) put his content out for everyone to see.
personally, I'm not worrying about the future of the internet.
I wasn't making excuses for the fact that Yahoo is "losing", I was merely qustioning the methods we use to evaluate "win" or "loss".
The style of Yahoo's main page could be positive or negative, I wasn't speculating initially. However if you compare the 3 portals we were discussing, MSN.com seems to be devoted to media, netscape.com seems to be devoted to news, and Yahoo.com still features its search engine and web directory, which is what it has been doing all along.
There comes my questioning of the term "portal"--we have three sites with diverse content, yet we lump them under the same category. Are there enough similarities, or are we comparing apples to oranges?
This is exactly what I mean when I say "kill all pundits" (not physical death, mind you, just an end to the punditry):
We have put such a huge value on being "visionary" that everyone wants to be the first on their block to declare "the death of XXX", because with enough pundits and enough instances of XXX, *someone* is bound to be right and look brilliant. Plus, enough doomsayers create a self-fufilling prophecy. If enough people keep shouting that the current business models will never work, people will stop supporting them and Viola, they don't work!
Now:
You can say Yahoo has a P/E ratio of whatever, but they're much better than most web properties who have a P/E ratio of undefined, because they have no E!
And by the way, I don't know when you bought your stock, but you must be pretty damn lucky if selling now is going to make you any kind of money. I think it's safe to say that Yahoo's stock will rise eventually, that's the way real investors play the market. Day-traders can die along with the pundits.
Click-throughs: are not how ads worked before the net, and it may or may not work. You can't click-through billboards or radio-ads (though interactive TV is coming...), but yet advertisers still plunk down the money. Why? I'll leave you to ponder that one...
As for the "503 errors", well, the infrastructure is still going into place. See akamai, et. al. The "Slashdot Effect" is not a major problem for most commercial sites now.
To conclude: You bastards would have dismissed Television before the 1930s were up, wouldn't you?
The web is what, 7 years old, commercially speaking. "ad-tracking, targeting and reporting software" is still not widespread, and has only been around for a few years.
Take a chill pill already!
Mr. Porter has just published an article in the Harvard Business Review that aims to challenge many new-economy tenets, including the theory, epitomized by Yahoo, that a site that attracts many "eyeballs" can profit by carrying advertising. Web sites, he argued, should find ways to charge subscription fees to users. But at Yahoo, he said, "now that their users have become accustomed to getting the service free, it's not clear that they will be able to charge real money for their product."
Yeah, and these "television" and "radio" methods of distributing content will soon die fiery deaths because they cannot force joe sixpack to make micropayment or monthly subscription in order to watch NFL football.
Don't sell your Yahoo stock yet; Net Advertising is still maturing. When sites can provide their advertisers with target demographics and an equivilant to television ratings, the current web models will work. Just give them time.
In January, Yahoo slipped from second to third in the monthly ratings by Media Metrix, a research concern that tracks the popularity of Web sites in the United States, behind AOL Time Warner and Microsoft's MSN.
However, both these companies have the advantage of owning the top two browsers, which when loaded default to the respective companies' portals.
Yahoo has no such way to leverage its content into people's browsers. Thus, I would say that Yahoo is still winning, based on the fact that everyone that sees the front page actually wants to be there.
Also, when you look at different portals (how the hell do you define "portal", anyway?), Yahoo is the only one that still focuses it "main page" on the search engine.
Largo's "Monetize" rant today at MegaTokyo.com on why portals (and ad networks) suck.
to quote:
Portal sites, I don't believe there is any future in a portal site concept, people do not go to a website because it is part of a network of non-related sites, the idea that you can cross-market a webcomic with the selling of a vacuum cleaner is not going to cut it.
but it's a neverending battle. the truly 'leet will come up with another way of harrassing anyone with a device listening to IP, which will be picked up by the kiddies and exploited until the security people come up with fixes
cat+mouse;cat+mouse; with each caught mouse the cat gets slower but the mice stay lean and quick and building smarter, faster mice.
they can't win.
also, this kind of monitoring can't invade your privacy if you're using strong encryption. take that, DMCA!
But is it scary enough that the general public could be convinced not to buy content that has been encrypted using this software?
I'll assume it to be self-evident that this kind of copy-protection is Bad and Wrong. Other people can start that debate.
We need to get some bad publicity going about this kind of technology:
*What if the RIAA could destroy your entire CD collection by sending the correct message to your computer?
*What if Windows crashing could destroy every book own?
*What if the MPAA could render your home-video collection useless?
If we're talking about digital copies of the above media with this kind of copy protection, *it could happen*
But what if no one bought the songs or movies or books encoded with this technology? Hmm? Let's not let them take away our rights as we sleep!
You can't even trust Diablo client-side, so why would you trust something with open source?
I'd rather have a small group of developers (say, 5 or so) writing the game, with no source code availability.
You contradict yourself right there. Diablo was closed soure, handled only by the Blizzad team, but you don't trust them?
Do you think that just because programmers profess a belief in open-source ideologies it magically makes them better coders?
At least with an open game (let alone free-speech) you can look for cheats, bugs, backdoors, etc yourself.
[I couldn't decide whether to mod this down as a troll or reply, but I figure joining the discussion is the noble thing to do. It may not be so blatantly obvious to our "younger readers" why the parent was incorrect]
The only problem with being a franchise owner is that you are accountable to the corporate PHBs and generally have to conform to their business plans.
I'm not sure how profitable a "classic games" shop would be. Maybe if he was in the right area (Si Valley) or if he combined his brick+mortar with a web and/or catalog business?
one more thing to piss me off on the train to work in the mornings.
The people who have the cell phones ring with "fur elise" and then blather on at the top of their lungs about absolutely nothing were bad enough.
Now we'll be forced to listen to the wanker playing 'Pitfall' on his phone, with all the annoying sound effects and cursing when he gets eaten.
Expect a huge wave of commuter fatalities if this ever catches on...
To break into the PDA market now requires something to lure users away from the PalmOS (has a majority of the market), or the Windows CE (Microsoft would like you to believe that it's just like using your PC).
I wonder if moving to Linux in order to gain "mindshare" is becoming an accepted business strategy.
After all, those of us in the market for a PDA would probably buy it just for the "way-cool" effect and/or because we want to support the OS we already know and love.
And that could be enough to get the PDA ball rolling for Sharp, priming for bigger and bigger market shares.
Plus, once all my friends have one I'll be able to make jokes of the
"Is that a penguin in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" sort.;-)
--a 13" virtual screen is nowhere NEAR large enough to enjoy any pr0n...
heh.
but seriously folks "The Mobile Assistant IV (MA IV), Xybernaut's patented wearable PC, runs all major PC operating systems, including Windows 98/2000/NT, Linux and SCO Unix."
I'll be looking for support for this in, what, kernel 2.4.3?
and one more quote to pick at before I go to bed: "WIA indicates a key direction for Information Appliances in the post-PC era"
It's lines like this that speak volumes as to the vaporousness of the product...
1. Lurk in musical genre-themed chat room.
2. Look for users with good connection speeds/small ping/large number of shares
3. Browse through their shares.
4. Yuse tha fzzy logyc patrn-recognition systm God gave you.
It would be easy enough to write a shell script that would go through all your mp3 files and make a random misspelling in each. Ditto if they ever start checking MD5sums, write a program that changes a single bit (maybe in the comment field of the ID3 tag) for each file.
This is today's strip, although I'm sure everyone already figured that out.
It's quite impressive, I think, as it's the only mainstream media coverage of the DMCA/DeCSS deal that actually gets the details right, let alone comes across on the hackers' side.
can a computer consulting company (for example) force you not to work in the industry simply because you used to work for them?
Yes; Lawsuits are funny like that.
It's actually very simple: You sign on with Company XYZ42, get a shitload of free training and insider knowledge of their operations, then 6 months later jump ship to start your own business or join up somewhere else for a much higher salary.
Companies don't want that, so they make new hires sign co-compete contracts. You don't like that, so you negotiate a good contract, or work for someplace else. How's that for pursuing happiness?!?
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, what the hell is his point? What is he even talking about? Does anyone know? "Hey you, you genome-sequencers, you nanotech researchers, you AI professors! Let's see some results, OK? I demand that you make the world a better place!"
I mean, WTF?? Maybe Katz is having a flashback to the 60s, and thinks we should all stop blogging, making homepages, and trading files and have one big online love-in? And what's this about moderation programs? Is Katz lashing out at the hand that feeds him?
If anyone would care to respond, speak up in Katz's defense, please, do. This is not a troll; this is not flamebait. Katz seems so sure of himself that I hate to just dismiss him outright.
I knew this dude from Metropolis
Who's mightier than all of us
The villains they hate him,
The media chase him
And that's why he stays anonymous!
This utopian "lack of privacy" does not "engender honesty" any more than the conditioning of Alex in Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange engendered in him lawfulness, kindness or respect for his fellow man. The same way The Brave New World engendered contentment in Bernard Marx.
I don't even think your scenario is that accurate. Not without some Huxleyan conditioning.
Any sociologist will tell you that privacy is a basic human need. Haven't you ever wanted to "just get away from it all"??
but essentially I agree with you. don't give up on the advertising-revenue model yet. the thinkgeek ads are a perfect example of how banner ads do work. I've clicked a couple of them, but even if I couldn't click on them, I still remembered their site, bought a few christmas gifts there, and have been pndering one of those 20 gig mp3 players.
don't believe the hype. ignore the pundits (maybe even think things through yourself..)
you're absolutely right, btw.
The pundits are at it again. They hype a technology that is the be-all and end-all of personal computing (but wait! the personal computer is dead! oh, different pundits? nevermind...), or it could be if you'd only give them a bunch of money. It's just insane, I probably should be worrying about it so much, but man, it bugs me.
The visionaries in the first paragraph you quoted, are the same types of visionairies and pundits who declared dotcoms to be "the next big thing." Everyone wanted to find the next Microsoft, and this lead to the gross overvaluations you describe.
The concept of the internet land-grab is essentially the same scenario, and it worked (yes). Some people did get lucky, and many didn't. That's part of the game, and they willingly played it. But I challenge you to show me how Yahoo will not survive until the market shakes out, barring the kind of mass panic that the pundits seem hell-bent on creating. They have some of the best web properties, and I believe that the advertising models will work out just as they have for other media.
Beyond that, I don't really care that much about defending Yahoo, particularly. I own no stock in them, and I couldn't care less about their market capitalization, stock prices, earnings, or any ratio thereof. And even if they and every single other dotcom did go under, do you really think the web would simply disappear?
No, life would go on, there would still be jobs for coders (although maybe not as many for web designers... pity there :P), and I would still be able to use the internet for everything I use it for today. the late nineties would sinply be a page in the history books, that's all. Biotech didn't stop advancing because some stock-prices did. Oracle didn't die because their "network computer" failed to catch on. And it is well with my soul.
If only the people shouting at the top of their lungs that the end is near (who were the same people who shouted how ecommerce was the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything) could just take some prozac and calm the fuck down, the world would be a much saner place.
Microsoft: That vulnerability is completely theoretical
l0pht: Making the theoretical practical since 19XX
the difference between the internet and TV is that with TV there can only be so many channels in the spectrum the FCC has alotted, and there is a huge cost associated with starting up a broadcasting station, let alone a major network.
The internet, on the other hand, lets any college kid with linux, apache, and a PC salvaged from spare parts (or simply a geocities account, to keep things yahoo-related) put his content out for everyone to see.
personally, I'm not worrying about the future of the internet.
I wasn't making excuses for the fact that Yahoo is "losing", I was merely qustioning the methods we use to evaluate "win" or "loss".
The style of Yahoo's main page could be positive or negative, I wasn't speculating initially. However if you compare the 3 portals we were discussing, MSN.com seems to be devoted to media, netscape.com seems to be devoted to news, and Yahoo.com still features its search engine and web directory, which is what it has been doing all along.
There comes my questioning of the term "portal"--we have three sites with diverse content, yet we lump them under the same category.
Are there enough similarities, or are we comparing apples to oranges?
We have put such a huge value on being "visionary" that everyone wants to be the first on their block to declare "the death of XXX", because with enough pundits and enough instances of XXX, *someone* is bound to be right and look brilliant. Plus, enough doomsayers create a self-fufilling prophecy. If enough people keep shouting that the current business models will never work, people will stop supporting them and Viola, they don't work!
Now:
You can say Yahoo has a P/E ratio of whatever, but they're much better than most web properties who have a P/E ratio of undefined, because they have no E!
And by the way, I don't know when you bought your stock, but you must be pretty damn lucky if selling now is going to make you any kind of money. I think it's safe to say that Yahoo's stock will rise eventually, that's the way real investors play the market. Day-traders can die along with the pundits.
Click-throughs: are not how ads worked before the net, and it may or may not work. You can't click-through billboards or radio-ads (though interactive TV is coming...), but yet advertisers still plunk down the money. Why?
I'll leave you to ponder that one...
As for the "503 errors", well, the infrastructure is still going into place. See akamai, et. al. The "Slashdot Effect" is not a major problem for most commercial sites now.
To conclude: You bastards would have dismissed Television before the 1930s were up, wouldn't you?
The web is what, 7 years old, commercially speaking. "ad-tracking, targeting and reporting software" is still not widespread, and has only been around for a few years.
Take a chill pill already!
Yeah, and these "television" and "radio" methods of distributing content will soon die fiery deaths because they cannot force joe sixpack to make micropayment or monthly subscription in order to watch NFL football.
Don't sell your Yahoo stock yet; Net Advertising is still maturing. When sites can provide their advertisers with target demographics and an equivilant to television ratings, the current web models will work. Just give them time.
In January, Yahoo slipped from second to third in the monthly ratings by Media Metrix, a research concern that tracks the popularity of Web sites in the United States, behind AOL Time Warner and Microsoft's MSN.
However, both these companies have the advantage of owning the top two browsers, which when loaded default to the respective companies' portals.
Yahoo has no such way to leverage its content into people's browsers. Thus, I would say that Yahoo is still winning, based on the fact that everyone that sees the front page actually wants to be there.
Also, when you look at different portals (how the hell do you define "portal", anyway?), Yahoo is the only one that still focuses it "main page" on the search engine.
Largo's "Monetize" rant today at MegaTokyo.com on why portals (and ad networks) suck.
to quote:
cat+mouse;cat+mouse; with each caught mouse the cat gets slower but the mice stay lean and quick and building smarter, faster mice.
they can't win.
also, this kind of monitoring can't invade your privacy if you're using strong encryption. take that, DMCA!
I'll assume it to be self-evident that this kind of copy-protection is Bad and Wrong. Other people can start that debate.
We need to get some bad publicity going about this kind of technology:
*What if the RIAA could destroy your entire CD collection by sending the correct message to your computer?
*What if Windows crashing could destroy every book own?
*What if the MPAA could render your home-video collection useless?
If we're talking about digital copies of the above media with this kind of copy protection, *it could happen*
But what if no one bought the songs or movies or books encoded with this technology? Hmm?
Let's not let them take away our rights as we sleep!
I'd rather have a small group of developers (say, 5 or so) writing the game, with no source code availability.
You contradict yourself right there. Diablo was closed soure, handled only by the Blizzad team, but you don't trust them?
Do you think that just because programmers profess a belief in open-source ideologies it magically makes them better coders?
At least with an open game (let alone free-speech) you can look for cheats, bugs, backdoors, etc yourself.
[I couldn't decide whether to mod this down as a troll or reply, but I figure joining the discussion is the noble thing to do. It may not be so blatantly obvious to our "younger readers" why the parent was incorrect]
I'm not sure how profitable a "classic games" shop would be. Maybe if he was in the right area (Si Valley) or if he combined his brick+mortar with a web and/or catalog business?
The people who have the cell phones ring with "fur elise" and then blather on at the top of their lungs about absolutely nothing were bad enough.
Now we'll be forced to listen to the wanker playing 'Pitfall' on his phone, with all the annoying sound effects and cursing when he gets eaten.
Expect a huge wave of commuter fatalities if this ever catches on...
blah!
I wonder if moving to Linux in order to gain "mindshare" is becoming an accepted business strategy.
After all, those of us in the market for a PDA would probably buy it just for the "way-cool" effect and/or because we want to support the OS we already know and love.
And that could be enough to get the PDA ball rolling for Sharp, priming for bigger and bigger market shares.
Plus, once all my friends have one I'll be able to make jokes of the
"Is that a penguin in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" sort.
heh.
but seriously folks
"The Mobile Assistant IV (MA IV), Xybernaut's patented wearable PC, runs all major PC operating systems, including Windows 98/2000/NT, Linux and SCO Unix."
I'll be looking for support for this in, what, kernel 2.4.3?
and one more quote to pick at before I go to bed:
"WIA indicates a key direction for Information Appliances in the post-PC era"
It's lines like this that speak volumes as to the vaporousness of the product...
2. Look for users with good connection speeds/small ping/large number of shares
3. Browse through their shares.
4. Yuse tha fzzy logyc patrn-recognition systm God gave you.
It would be easy enough to write a shell script that would go through all your mp3 files and make a random misspelling in each. Ditto if they ever start checking MD5sums, write a program that changes a single bit (maybe in the comment field of the ID3 tag) for each file.
It's quite impressive, I think, as it's the only mainstream media coverage of the DMCA/DeCSS deal that actually gets the details right, let alone comes across on the hackers' side.
Check them out, they're hilarious. As an added bonus, the past two weeks' editions have been refering to Napster.
Hate the man or despise him, after reading it you'll respect him.
Yes; Lawsuits are funny like that.
It's actually very simple: You sign on with Company XYZ42, get a shitload of free training and insider knowledge of their operations, then 6 months later jump ship to start your own business or join up somewhere else for a much higher salary.
Companies don't want that, so they make new hires sign co-compete contracts. You don't like that, so you negotiate a good contract, or work for someplace else.
How's that for pursuing happiness?!?