It certainly looks very polished, in the SONY style of doing things, but how well does it work in every day life?
The magnesium case is a plus, but how long do the pivot mechanisms last, and how solidly-built are they? Is the keyboard adequate for "thumb typing" or is it going to be limited to a "hunt-and-peck" style?
How compatible is it with existing peripherals and software? One of the things I that annoys me about my Palm III and Palm V is that the peripherals are not interchangeable. Separate cradles, chargers, external keyboards, stylii, and so forth. Does buying a PEG-NR70V mean having to re-purchase all the accessories? I noticed that SONY has separate Memory Sticks for music and data. Which does the PEG-NR70V require to play MP3s? And does it actually play MP3s or require them to be converted to SONY's own ATRAC3 format?
Also, I know it is hard to make comparisons between PalmOS and Windows CE devices, but does a 66MHz CPU have enough cycles to play MP3s and run an application in the foreground?
With my Compaq Ipaq, I at least know there is a decent amount of expandability available via PC Cards. This device, while intriguing, seems to be lacking in backwards-compatibility and expandability.
In addition to the Windows version, there is also a Java version of the program available called eDexter Java Dog which runs under Linux, MacOS, etc. available from the same site.
Note, though, that this isn't the author's actual web site, which has several other interesting programs on it, like DNS Kong.
This subject has been debated endlessly on USENET, in the letters column of business and computer magazines, and so many other places that I'm surprised to see it mentioned on Slashdot.
In the early '90's, I was working at a software company that was growing and had openings for programmers, and inbetween interviews, the founder turned to me and said "American programmers are too expensive, so I'm only going to hire foreigners from now on"(or words to that effect, this was almost a decade ago). After that, I personally started calling the corner or the building where all the development staff were located "Little Europe" because I heard more Russian and Bulgarian than English spoken around me. And I don't think any one of them worked less than 80-90 hours a week.
What companies are bemoaning is a lack of cheap-yet-highly-skilled labor. They wish to produce complex products, but do not wish to pay for the skill and experience required to create them.
Want to see the shortage of programmers disappear overnight? Increase H-1B fees so it costs more for a temporary foreign worker than a domestic one, and make sponsorship non-exclusive, so that the person brought in can take a job elsewhere in 90 days. If there really was a shortage of domestic programmers, then companies would be willing to pay that premium, and they'd have to pay those workers a decent salary to keep them from going to an employer that doesn't view their H-1B's as indentured servants.
At the first company I worked at, my coworkers and I would take turns visiting each other's computer when not around, and type in the following lines:
MODE 40,25
SET PROMPT=SYSTEM HALTED$_NO ROM BASIC.$_
CLS
Since the systems we were using were generally junk, one was never sure if it was a legitimate message or not. In case you're wondering, that set the screen to double-wide text, and was the same error message our PC's showed when they couldn't find any hard disks or floppy drives to boot from.
Later on, one of the programmers gave me a cool
prompt:
SET PROMPT=$e[37;44m$e[s$e[1;50H $d $T$h$h$h$h$h$h$e[u$e[37;40m$p$g
Obviously, an ANSI console driver was required to maximize viewing pleasure. I used XANSI.SYS myself. (Thank you, Jivko, wherever you are.)
When Windows began to usurp DOS as the OS of choice at the office, I learned about WINPMT and put the following in my AUTOEXEC.BAT file:
SET WINPMT=$P
This gave me an easy way to see if I was in real, honest-to-goodness DOS, or shelled out from inside of Windows. (That's Alt+0187, in case you weren't sure.)
Well, anyways, that's all I can remember for now. I'm sorry I don't have any exciting *sh prompts to share, but I'm still learning Linux. *grin*
I read the article on the Sydney Morning Herald's
web site, and came away more confused than anything else.
The quotation from Peter Coroneos (which
I am assuming is the hotly-debated part) is truncated, which makes it rather hard to determine what he means. Is there a complete transcript of his interview? That would hopefully make things clearer.
Also, I'm curious as to why Australia's National Office of the Information Ecomony wants Robert Elz to relinquish stewardship of the.au domain. No one in the article seems to accuse him doing a bad, poor, or otherwise biased job; in fact, the article seems to indicate he is handling things well.
On an demi-related subject, it doesn't appear this is even a new subject. A quick search of
the Internet found an article dated November, 1998 at the Law Office of Phillips Fox discussing this very issue.
Perhaps someone who is an involved party could provide more information.
I read the short article on news.com.au about
this, but the one thing I did not learn from
it was why this was considered a breach of
Australia's Trade Practice Act.
Could someone post a pointer to the body of the
act, and perhaps a synopsis? What exactly is it
that is objectionable? That Australians cannot
view "first-run" movies and on DVD
simultaneously, that they cost more than other
places, that only a small amount of titles
have been made available on DVD for consumption
in Region 4, or some combination of all three?
I was actually trying to give an example of what kind of product you would get when you developed in a state-of-the-art, bleeding-edge environment, versus a very "trailing-edge" one, so to speak.
Developers usually need multiple computers to
develop and debug their software on, and at least
one of these computers should match whatever the
target environment is, so the developer can benchmark the performance and see if it is matches the spec..
(As an aside, I am not a developer; my background is in support and the usual type of "programming" I do involves scripting and macro languages. So please keep that in mind when reading my responses.)
My understanding is that the Java programming language was designed primarily with cross-platform compatibility in mind, and that while efficiency is an important goal of Java's design, it is not the primary goal.
I am not sure if a product developed on "trailing edge" systems will neccessarily ship late. If their design is simpler than the team using the "bleeding edge"equipment, then perhaps it will ship at the same time, or even earlier.
AOL provides a client to people who are not customers of their online service without charging them for it.
AOL also, at one time, provided their TOC protocol without any licenses or usage restrictions. Although they removed it shortly after, my former employer used it to add AIM interoperability to our Windows instant messaging client.
From my own personal experience/observation, instant messaging servers are incredibly expensive to setup, run, and maintain. In fact, I would imagine the expenses are somewhat analagous to what the phone company pays in order to maintain the telephone switches used for phone calls.
However, even though your phone company assumes a financial burden to provide this, they do not prevent you from calling people who use other phone companies, nor do they restrict the brand of the phone you wish to use. At least, that
is how it works in the United States, I assume it is the same in most countries around the world.
AOL freely and openly published their TOC protocol, which has only a subset of the features used by OSCAR, the protocol used by their AIM client. The protocol was published without any usage conditions or license restrictions attached. My former employer used this information to add interoperability in our instant messaging product. We did not reverse-engineer the OSCAR protocol, and we did not violate any of the conditions for using the TOC protocol (q.v., it was, in fact, shipped without any).
If AOL wanted to make some sort of agreement on advertising revenue with us, all they would have had to to do was to reply to one of our phone calls, letters, faxes, emails, etc., and start a dialogue.
They never did.
My experience with banner advertisements in instant messaging programs is limited, but it was not a major source of revenue for my former employer. Providing OEM versions of the software was where almost all of the revenue came from; and if you can fend off interoperabilty attempts from other companies, you can then potentially make a fortune. But that's only if you control it. If all the information required for interoperability is publicly-available, you lose a very lucrative stream of revenue.
If someone is a customer of AOL, and chooses to use a different instant messaging client such as Jabber, so they don't have to run multiple instant messaging programs, are they still "freeloading?"
Also, keep in mind that AOL provides its AIM client to people for free; in other words, they are implicitly providing a service free of charge to these people.
If AOL is willing to provide a client which uses the back-end directory services free of charge, as well as publicly publish one of their protocols for doing so, without any sort of licensing restrictions, then it somewhat reduces their argument, doesn't it?
I think your argument might be more akin to going to a public library in a town or county or state you don't live in, and using it. While you don't pay taxes for its upkeep, it is there, and the government has made it available to the public.
Disclaimer: I worked for a company that competed with AOL in the instant messaging arena, so do keep that in mind when reading my comments.
Hello,
Personally, I like to think it was McAfee Associates that was the first great Internet startup--they utilized the Internet (and before that, a BBS) for product delivery and customer service before many other companies did. Or, for that matter, maybe Netscape was the first great Internet IPO, but I digress from what I wanted to discuss here...
Do you own a telephone? Do you have an email acount?
Can you only use your telephone to call people who have the same carrier as yourself? What about your email account? Can you only send messages to people in the same domain as yourself?
I would suspect that the answer to both questions, for you and for the majority of people reading this, is a resounding "no."
The reason that you can use your telephone to interact with other customer's carriers, and send messages to people at different domains, is because there are common "open" standards that allow different phone systems and email systems to interconnect. Now, the telephone system was started over a century ago, so from a temporal view it is difficult to have a first-hand understanding of how it evolved, and email was started as an academic, open service, so it is a little different, but the principles involved are the same.
What you may not understand is that the nascent instant messaging industry is in the same position. before we go any further, let me clearly state that, first off, there is a business here. Although instant messaging has nowhere near the same number of users as telephone or email systems, and a large number of people use instant messaging purely for entertainment, there is a business there. Departments and divisions within companies use instant messaging to share information, because it is quicker and easier than calling someone or sending them an email. And IBM/Lotus includes an instant messaging application in their Notes messaging suite (based on AOL's product, actually). And more and more people use instant messaging programs for business every day. So, let's just say that there is a growing business use for instant messaging.
Now, with instant messaging, there is a similar growth arising as this new form of communication moves into the mainstream. If you happen to control the dominant instant messaging standard, then there is the potential, quite literally, to generate billions of dollars in revenue for your company in licensing fees (generating advertising revenue from banner ads in instant messaging clients has been somewhat marginal, in my experience). But you can only do that if you control the instant messaging protocols.
Here in the United States, there used to be one system of phone companies called the Bell System, the largest part of which was a company called AT&T. If you were an individual who wanted a phone at home, there was only one company you could get (lease) the phone from, and only one company you could get the phone service from. In some cases, the phone connection was actually hard-wired into the wall! AT&T actually had a pretty good thing going for them. They could charge whatever their customers could pay, and had to only offer minimal products and services. Forget about having an answering machine at home, let alone a modem.
As I said, AT&T had it pretty good. But other companies wanted to provide the same products and services (often, for less than what AT&T charged) as well as new products and services, whether it was national long distance calls from Microwave Communications, Inc. (now called MCI,) or an answering machine from Radio Shack. And, lo and behold, these companies did get to provide those products and services, because it was found by a federal judge that AT&T had abused its monopoly by preventing the entry of competitors into its markets.
You can be pretty sure AOL doesn't want the same thing to happen to them.
And that is why AOL has done everything it can to control its instant messaging platform. As long as they continue to keep their system proprietary and can lock people into it, they can charge as much as people are willing to pay and provide the minimum amount of features they want to, because there is no choice for consumers. But only for as long as they can
control instant messaging. Once they lose that control, though, all of those wonderful revenue-generating opportunities are greatly reduced.
That is why AOL has been fighting any attempt to open their protocols and directory services, as well as stifling the IETF's efforts to produce open standards for these.
As a former employee of an instant messaging company, one whose closure was caused, in part, by this, I've had the opportunity to see some of this first-hand:
AOL's AIM client has two protocols for instant messaging. The first, OSCAR, is a
proprietary, closed protocol. This is the protocol used by AOL's own AIM clients. The second, TOC, contained a subset of the OSCAR features, was made publicly-available by AOL, probably so they could stimulate growth on platforms they didn't fully support (AmigaOS, BeOs, various flavors of UNIX, and so forth).
Instead of reverse-engineering the OSCAR protocol, we used AOL's own published TOC protocol to add AIM interoperability in our Windows-based instant messaging client. Thus began a dance of changes by them and fixes by us to maintain interoperability. Bear in mind, the TOC protocol was published by AOL without any terms, conditions, or licensing agreements attached to it. AOL provided a document on the web, and we used the information in it to add compatibility.
AOL didn't respond to any phone calls, emails, letters, or faxes we sent to them. It was proverbially like sending messages into a black hole. Any attempt by our executives to have any sort of dialogue with AOL on the subject of interoperability was stone-walled by them.
AOL was invited to several key industry events, like Jeff Pulver's instant messaging summit, and didn't attend because "they couldn't determine the appropriate person to attend." And, if memory serves, they also responded to an RFC on instant messaging directory services which a high-level description of their servers. (If someone recalls the exact details, could they please email me? Thank you.)
After AOL's continual actions to block interoperability (even when using their own published protocols), to miss industry summits, and send the wrong information to the IETF, it becomes very hard to believe any comments they have about interoperability.
I am a former employee of a "dot-com", company which was closed by its parent company,
so this is somewhat dear to me. And painful.
The company I worked for gave away its product for free to home users while pursuing "branding" (OEM) deals with other companies for increased eyeball count andhopefullysome revenue.
It didn't work.
While I will be the first to admit the banner emplacement in our product was poorly-implemented (one of the ways we intended to generate revenue), the sad truth of the matter is that the majority of people do not wish to pay for products or services, and if threatened with this, will move to another product or service.
And as for deals with other companies, well,
most of them were in the same situation.
The minority of the user base who are willing to pay for the product or service are usually not large enough to sustain the company. And OEM
deals with companies with the same problem does
not help, either. Instead, your own costs increase to support the new users you've just gained. And when money starts getting tight,
one of the first things which gets cutor
at least frozenis the support budget.
I've had plenty of time to ponder what went wrong (e.g., I still haven't found employment), and have come up with the following list of pitfalls we didn't avoid:
Treating customers like dirt - Customers are the key to any successful business. If you alienate enough of them, then you won't have any.
Do not lie to, mislead, or hide information from your customers. If you intend to turn a free product or service into a commercial one, let them know right up front that one day that might occur.
Your customers are your reality check. Not any sycophants you might be surrounded with, boards of directors, or venture capitalists. Listen to your customers. Within reason, do what they tell you. It could be that one suggestion, with a little polishing, might be just the thing to monetize your product or service.
As a corollary, I'm aghast at the number of companies which need to outsource market research/customer feedback activities. Why can't you ask your customers directly, or, for that matter, the folks who interact daily with them, the customer service reps, technical support engineers, account managers, and so forth? Are you afraid you are going to hear lies if you ask your customers or employees, and that the feedback you get is only valid if it is "massaged" though a third party? Blah.
Engaging in non-revenue-generating activities - A lot of our development and support efforts revolved around activities that did nothing to generate income. If you're going to spend time and money, do it on things which are going to make you money.
Splitting your company into parts - Don't have separate locations for execs, R&D/development, support, and so forth. Nothing reinforces the mentality that "X is filled with gibbering, idiot morons who can't be trusted to tie their own shoes, let alone be responsible for a project" then to keep people apart from each other. Employees need
to work with each other, not against each other. Make sure the company is structured so this can happen.
Human beings are social animals, and need to interact with other people. No amount of videoconferencing, conference calls, email, or instant messaging is going to change that. And allowing employees to remain faceless and anonymous to each other is a great way to install fear and loathing in each other.
If you've outgrown your building and need to move activities into different offices that's fine; it means you're probably doing something right. However, don't put them in different cities, or, God-forbid, different states.
Spending money like a drunken sailor in a liberty port - We all like to spend monies on nice things for ourselves and our cow-orkers, but there is a bottom line, and you don't spend money on things that don't let you make more money. For example, if your company isn't making any money and your CEO decides that you need to have a new conference room furnished with a walnut table that doubles as an aircraft carrier and a videoconferencing system with more processing power and bandwidth than your server room, then you could probably save money by getting yourself a new CEO.
Before you start laughing like a hyena, keep in mind the same is true for developers. If your developers have to have new computers every few months, chances are you're going to be shipping products that are unusuable by most of your customers. If you give two groups of developers identical specs, and one group has the latest Pentium III/IV/whatever systems with hundreds of megabytes of RAM, 21" monitors, and a network spewing Cerenkov radiation, and the other group has 486 and Pentium systems stuffed with a few 10's of megabytes of RAM, monitors that can actually be carried by one person, and a network that just might be as fast as sneaker-net, well, you're going to get two very different-looking products that do the same thing. Which do you think your customers would rather use? The software that forces them to do massive infrastructure upgrades, or the one that blasts along with the occasional sonic boom? I know which one I'd rather use.
So, in a nutshell, if you respect and listen to your customers and your employees, develop products that people are willing to pay for, and spend your money wisely, you'll probablyand there's a fairly big "if-factor" in there do okay.
AOL makes their AIM client public, and in the
past, they did make the specification for TOC
public as well.
By making their AIM client publicly available to non-AOL customers, they gained access to a larger userbase of people who would, in turn, spread it
'virally' as they convinced their friends, family, and associates to use it. AOL could then do a number of things:
Get increased revenue from selling banner ads, although the market has soured to this idea.
Develop value-added services and versions of the software they could then sell to other businesses, such as the AIM-based client 'SameTime' distributed by IBM/Lotus, or making AIM available through wireless devices such as cellular phones, handhelds, and the like.
By making the protocol specification for TOC available, AOL encouraged third-party development on systems too marginal ('uneconomic') for them to develop an instant-messaging client for, such as BeOS and AmigaOS.
They did not intend for people (or companies) to develop clients for the Windows or Mac platforms, which probably explains why they removed the spec from their web site soon after Tribal Voice implemented the TOC protocol in their PowWow instant messaging client.
This is essentially how Tribal Voice's back-end
of PowWow servers worked; as a clearinghouse for
mapping namespace (the user's email address) to
the IP address of the user's network interface.
From users' point of view, the big problem was
this required that the client was running on a
computer with a unique, routable IP address,
which blocked many people who tried the use the
software at work from behind a firewall or at
home behind a NAT connection.
And from the company's view, well, they had to
build a small data center to manage it all.
AOL did block Tribal Voice's PowWow software
from interoperability, which used AOL's own
published TOC specification.
When Tribaal Voice closed, a FAQ was posted
on their site for a few days that said one
of the reasons for the closure was AOL's
dominance of the IM market. Later, that
statement was removed, but it was there for
a time.
Tribal Voice used AOL's published protocols, which referenced their servers. If AOL did not wish for other companies to use their servers, they should not have published one of their instant messaging protocols publicly.
The situation is a little more analagous to the telephone system: If every phone company used different incompatible equipment, you would have to have multiple phones, phone lines, and bills so you could communicate with everyone who used a service different than yours. Different phone companies, though, do interconnect, even though the resources used may not be equal in each direction. Ultimately, the consumer benefits from this reciprocity.
It may have been a poor decision for Tribal Voice to choose a public relations company that was incapable of using its products on most of their computers. It is unfortunate that Tribal Voice never developed versions of PowWow for other operating systems, such as MacOS, which would have made it more accessible to the employees of the public relations firm.
Tribal Voice used InstallShield to set up the software on a computer, a very common program for installing software under Windows.
If you had trouble installing or using the software, or were concerned about security risks, it might have been useful to contact Tribal Voice directly to resolve these issues in order to make it easier for your employer to handle the Tribal Voice account.
The threat referred to, I believe, was the attention Tribal Voice brought to AOL's market dominance in the instant messaging field by generating publicity about interoperability issues and how former CEO Ross Bagully's testimony in front of the FCC might interfere with the AOL-Time Warner merger.
After your experience, Tribal Voice modified the
PowWow software to make five connection attempts to determine if a buddy was present at the IP address and then stop.
It strikes me that a perfect market for paper-based computers is trading cards, such as for sports or collectible card games.
Companies like Topps and Wizards of the Coast have extensive experience in manufacturing trading cards, which can consist of multiple layers of card stock bonded together with metalic foil imprints. Plus, they also have huge audiences of collectors/players/traders.
It also strikes me that collectors would most likely hang on to such cards, so they wouldn't end up in a landfill somewhere.
Another possibility is disposable hand-held video games, anything from keychain up to Gameboy-sized.
Of course, worn-out paper computers would be discarded, but perhaps they could be sold with a deposit like glass bottles, which would be refunded in the same fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello,
It certainly looks very polished, in the SONY style of doing things, but how well does it work in every day life?
The magnesium case is a plus, but how long do the pivot mechanisms last, and how solidly-built are they? Is the keyboard adequate for "thumb typing" or is it going to be limited to a "hunt-and-peck" style?
How compatible is it with existing peripherals and software? One of the things I that annoys me about my Palm III and Palm V is that the peripherals are not interchangeable. Separate cradles, chargers, external keyboards, stylii, and so forth. Does buying a PEG-NR70V mean having to re-purchase all the accessories? I noticed that SONY has separate Memory Sticks for music and data. Which does the PEG-NR70V require to play MP3s? And does it actually play MP3s or require them to be converted to SONY's own ATRAC3 format?
Also, I know it is hard to make comparisons between PalmOS and Windows CE devices, but does a 66MHz CPU have enough cycles to play MP3s and run an application in the foreground?
With my Compaq Ipaq, I at least know there is a decent amount of expandability available via PC Cards. This device, while intriguing, seems to be lacking in backwards-compatibility and expandability.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
Have you tried Microsoft's Trackball Explorer or Trackball Optical? Each has a USB interface and works with Macs.
The home page for Microsoft's mouse products is http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouse/.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
eDexter is a pretty darn good program.
In addition to the Windows version, there is also a Java version of the program available called eDexter Java Dog which runs under Linux, MacOS, etc. available from the same site.
Note, though, that this isn't the author's actual web site, which has several other interesting programs on it, like DNS Kong.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello
This subject has been debated endlessly on USENET, in the letters column of business and computer magazines, and so many other places that I'm surprised to see it mentioned on Slashdot.
In the early '90's, I was working at a software company that was growing and had openings for programmers, and inbetween interviews, the founder turned to me and said "American programmers are too expensive, so I'm only going to hire foreigners from now on" (or words to that effect, this was almost a decade ago). After that, I personally started calling the corner or the building where all the development staff were located "Little Europe" because I heard more Russian and Bulgarian than English spoken around me. And I don't think any one of them worked less than 80-90 hours a week.
What companies are bemoaning is a lack of cheap-yet-highly-skilled labor. They wish to produce complex products, but do not wish to pay for the skill and experience required to create them.
Want to see the shortage of programmers disappear overnight? Increase H-1B fees so it costs more for a temporary foreign worker than a domestic one, and make sponsorship non-exclusive, so that the person brought in can take a job elsewhere in 90 days. If there really was a shortage of domestic programmers, then companies would be willing to pay that premium, and they'd have to pay those workers a decent salary to keep them from going to an employer that doesn't view their H-1B's as indentured servants.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
Hello,
At the first company I worked at, my coworkers and I would take turns visiting each other's computer when not around, and type in the following lines:
MODE 40,25
SET PROMPT=SYSTEM HALTED$_NO ROM BASIC.$_
CLS
Since the systems we were using were generally junk, one was never sure if it was a legitimate message or not. In case you're wondering, that set the screen to double-wide text, and was the same error message our PC's showed when they couldn't find any hard disks or floppy drives to boot from.
Later on, one of the programmers gave me a cool prompt:
SET PROMPT=$e[37;44m$e[s$e[1;50H $d $T$h$h$h$h$h$h$e[u$e[37;40m$p$g
Obviously, an ANSI console driver was required to maximize viewing pleasure. I used XANSI.SYS myself. (Thank you, Jivko, wherever you are.)
When Windows began to usurp DOS as the OS of choice at the office, I learned about WINPMT and put the following in my AUTOEXEC.BAT file:
SET WINPMT=$P
This gave me an easy way to see if I was in real, honest-to-goodness DOS, or shelled out from inside of Windows. (That's Alt+0187, in case you weren't sure.)
Well, anyways, that's all I can remember for now. I'm sorry I don't have any exciting *sh prompts to share, but I'm still learning Linux. *grin*
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
Hello,
.au domain. No one in the article seems to accuse him doing a bad, poor, or otherwise biased job; in fact, the article seems to indicate he is handling things well.
I read the article on the Sydney Morning Herald's web site, and came away more confused than anything else.
The quotation from Peter Coroneos (which I am assuming is the hotly-debated part) is truncated, which makes it rather hard to determine what he means. Is there a complete transcript of his interview? That would hopefully make things clearer.
Also, I'm curious as to why Australia's National Office of the Information Ecomony wants Robert Elz to relinquish stewardship of the
On an demi-related subject, it doesn't appear this is even a new subject. A quick search of the Internet found an article dated November, 1998 at the Law Office of Phillips Fox discussing this very issue.
Perhaps someone who is an involved party could provide more information.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
I read the short article on news.com.au about this, but the one thing I did not learn from it was why this was considered a breach of Australia's Trade Practice Act.
Could someone post a pointer to the body of the act, and perhaps a synopsis? What exactly is it that is objectionable? That Australians cannot view "first-run" movies and on DVD simultaneously, that they cost more than other places, that only a small amount of titles have been made available on DVD for consumption in Region 4, or some combination of all three?
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
Hello,
I was actually trying to give an example of what kind of product you would get when you developed in a state-of-the-art, bleeding-edge environment, versus a very "trailing-edge" one, so to speak.
Developers usually need multiple computers to develop and debug their software on, and at least one of these computers should match whatever the target environment is, so the developer can benchmark the performance and see if it is matches the spec..
(As an aside, I am not a developer; my background is in support and the usual type of "programming" I do involves scripting and macro languages. So please keep that in mind when reading my responses.)
My understanding is that the Java programming language was designed primarily with cross-platform compatibility in mind, and that while efficiency is an important goal of Java's design, it is not the primary goal.
I am not sure if a product developed on "trailing edge" systems will neccessarily ship late. If their design is simpler than the team using the "bleeding edge"equipment, then perhaps it will ship at the same time, or even earlier.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
Hello,
AOL provides a client to people who are not customers of their online service without charging them for it.
AOL also, at one time, provided their TOC protocol without any licenses or usage restrictions. Although they removed it shortly after, my former employer used it to add AIM interoperability to our Windows instant messaging client.
From my own personal experience/observation, instant messaging servers are incredibly expensive to setup, run, and maintain. In fact, I would imagine the expenses are somewhat analagous to what the phone company pays in order to maintain the telephone switches used for phone calls.
However, even though your phone company assumes a financial burden to provide this, they do not prevent you from calling people who use other phone companies, nor do they restrict the brand of the phone you wish to use. At least, that is how it works in the United States, I assume it is the same in most countries around the world.
AOL freely and openly published their TOC protocol, which has only a subset of the features used by OSCAR, the protocol used by their AIM client. The protocol was published without any usage conditions or license restrictions attached. My former employer used this information to add interoperability in our instant messaging product. We did not reverse-engineer the OSCAR protocol, and we did not violate any of the conditions for using the TOC protocol (q.v., it was, in fact, shipped without any).
If AOL wanted to make some sort of agreement on advertising revenue with us, all they would have had to to do was to reply to one of our phone calls, letters, faxes, emails, etc., and start a dialogue.
They never did.
My experience with banner advertisements in instant messaging programs is limited, but it was not a major source of revenue for my former employer. Providing OEM versions of the software was where almost all of the revenue came from; and if you can fend off interoperabilty attempts from other companies, you can then potentially make a fortune. But that's only if you control it. If all the information required for interoperability is publicly-available, you lose a very lucrative stream of revenue.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
Hello,
If someone is a customer of AOL, and chooses to use a different instant messaging client such as Jabber, so they don't have to run multiple instant messaging programs, are they still "freeloading?"
Also, keep in mind that AOL provides its AIM client to people for free; in other words, they are implicitly providing a service free of charge to these people.
If AOL is willing to provide a client which uses the back-end directory services free of charge, as well as publicly publish one of their protocols for doing so, without any sort of licensing restrictions, then it somewhat reduces their argument, doesn't it?
I think your argument might be more akin to going to a public library in a town or county or state you don't live in, and using it. While you don't pay taxes for its upkeep, it is there, and the government has made it available to the public.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
Disclaimer: I worked for a company that competed with AOL in the instant messaging arena, so do keep that in mind when reading my comments.
Hello,
Personally, I like to think it was McAfee Associates that was the first great Internet startup--they utilized the Internet (and before that, a BBS) for product delivery and customer service before many other companies did. Or, for that matter, maybe Netscape was the first great Internet IPO, but I digress from what I wanted to discuss here...
Do you own a telephone? Do you have an email acount?
Can you only use your telephone to call people who have the same carrier as yourself? What about your email account? Can you only send messages to people in the same domain as yourself?
I would suspect that the answer to both questions, for you and for the majority of people reading this, is a resounding "no."
The reason that you can use your telephone to interact with other customer's carriers, and send messages to people at different domains, is because there are common "open" standards that allow different phone systems and email systems to interconnect. Now, the telephone system was started over a century ago, so from a temporal view it is difficult to have a first-hand understanding of how it evolved, and email was started as an academic, open service, so it is a little different, but the principles involved are the same.
What you may not understand is that the nascent instant messaging industry is in the same position. before we go any further, let me clearly state that, first off, there is a business here. Although instant messaging has nowhere near the same number of users as telephone or email systems, and a large number of people use instant messaging purely for entertainment, there is a business there. Departments and divisions within companies use instant messaging to share information, because it is quicker and easier than calling someone or sending them an email. And IBM/Lotus includes an instant messaging application in their Notes messaging suite (based on AOL's product, actually). And more and more people use instant messaging programs for business every day. So, let's just say that there is a growing business use for instant messaging.
Now, with instant messaging, there is a similar growth arising as this new form of communication moves into the mainstream. If you happen to control the dominant instant messaging standard, then there is the potential, quite literally, to generate billions of dollars in revenue for your company in licensing fees (generating advertising revenue from banner ads in instant messaging clients has been somewhat marginal, in my experience). But you can only do that if you control the instant messaging protocols.
Here in the United States, there used to be one system of phone companies called the Bell System, the largest part of which was a company called AT&T. If you were an individual who wanted a phone at home, there was only one company you could get (lease) the phone from, and only one company you could get the phone service from. In some cases, the phone connection was actually hard-wired into the wall! AT&T actually had a pretty good thing going for them. They could charge whatever their customers could pay, and had to only offer minimal products and services. Forget about having an answering machine at home, let alone a modem.
As I said, AT&T had it pretty good. But other companies wanted to provide the same products and services (often, for less than what AT&T charged) as well as new products and services, whether it was national long distance calls from Microwave Communications, Inc. (now called MCI,) or an answering machine from Radio Shack. And, lo and behold, these companies did get to provide those products and services, because it was found by a federal judge that AT&T had abused its monopoly by preventing the entry of competitors into its markets.
You can be pretty sure AOL doesn't want the same thing to happen to them.
And that is why AOL has done everything it can to control its instant messaging platform. As long as they continue to keep their system proprietary and can lock people into it, they can charge as much as people are willing to pay and provide the minimum amount of features they want to, because there is no choice for consumers. But only for as long as they can control instant messaging. Once they lose that control, though, all of those wonderful revenue-generating opportunities are greatly reduced.
That is why AOL has been fighting any attempt to open their protocols and directory services, as well as stifling the IETF's efforts to produce open standards for these.
As a former employee of an instant messaging company, one whose closure was caused, in part, by this, I've had the opportunity to see some of this first-hand:
Instead of reverse-engineering the OSCAR protocol, we used AOL's own published TOC protocol to add AIM interoperability in our Windows-based instant messaging client. Thus began a dance of changes by them and fixes by us to maintain interoperability. Bear in mind, the TOC protocol was published by AOL without any terms, conditions, or licensing agreements attached to it. AOL provided a document on the web, and we used the information in it to add compatibility.
After AOL's continual actions to block interoperability (even when using their own published protocols), to miss industry summits, and send the wrong information to the IETF, it becomes very hard to believe any comments they have about interoperability.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
I am a former employee of a "dot-com", company which was closed by its parent company, so this is somewhat dear to me. And painful.
The company I worked for gave away its product for free to home users while pursuing "branding" (OEM) deals with other companies for increased eyeball count andhopefullysome revenue.
It didn't work.
While I will be the first to admit the banner emplacement in our product was poorly-implemented (one of the ways we intended to generate revenue), the sad truth of the matter is that the majority of people do not wish to pay for products or services, and if threatened with this, will move to another product or service. And as for deals with other companies, well, most of them were in the same situation.
The minority of the user base who are willing to pay for the product or service are usually not large enough to sustain the company. And OEM deals with companies with the same problem does not help, either. Instead, your own costs increase to support the new users you've just gained. And when money starts getting tight, one of the first things which gets cutor at least frozenis the support budget.
I've had plenty of time to ponder what went wrong (e.g., I still haven't found employment), and have come up with the following list of pitfalls we didn't avoid:
Do not lie to, mislead, or hide information from your customers. If you intend to turn a free product or service into a commercial one, let them know right up front that one day that might occur.
Your customers are your reality check. Not any sycophants you might be surrounded with, boards of directors, or venture capitalists. Listen to your customers. Within reason, do what they tell you. It could be that one suggestion, with a little polishing, might be just the thing to monetize your product or service.
As a corollary, I'm aghast at the number of companies which need to outsource market research/customer feedback activities. Why can't you ask your customers directly, or, for that matter, the folks who interact daily with them, the customer service reps, technical support engineers, account managers, and so forth? Are you afraid you are going to hear lies if you ask your customers or employees, and that the feedback you get is only valid if it is "massaged" though a third party? Blah.
Human beings are social animals, and need to interact with other people. No amount of videoconferencing, conference calls, email, or instant messaging is going to change that. And allowing employees to remain faceless and anonymous to each other is a great way to install fear and loathing in each other.
If you've outgrown your building and need to move activities into different offices that's fine; it means you're probably doing something right. However, don't put them in different cities, or, God-forbid, different states.
Before you start laughing like a hyena, keep in mind the same is true for developers. If your developers have to have new computers every few months, chances are you're going to be shipping products that are unusuable by most of your customers. If you give two groups of developers identical specs, and one group has the latest Pentium III/IV/whatever systems with hundreds of megabytes of RAM, 21" monitors, and a network spewing Cerenkov radiation, and the other group has 486 and Pentium systems stuffed with a few 10's of megabytes of RAM, monitors that can actually be carried by one person, and a network that just might be as fast as sneaker-net, well, you're going to get two very different-looking products that do the same thing. Which do you think your customers would rather use? The software that forces them to do massive infrastructure upgrades, or the one that blasts along with the occasional sonic boom? I know which one I'd rather use.
So, in a nutshell, if you respect and listen to your customers and your employees, develop products that people are willing to pay for, and spend your money wisely, you'll probablyand there's a fairly big "if-factor" in there do okay.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
- - -
By making their AIM client publicly available to non-AOL customers, they gained access to a larger userbase of people who would, in turn, spread it 'virally' as they convinced their friends, family, and associates to use it. AOL could then do a number of things:
-
Get increased revenue from selling banner ads, although the market has soured to this idea.
-
Develop value-added services and versions of the software they could then sell to other businesses, such as the AIM-based client 'SameTime' distributed by IBM/Lotus, or making AIM available through wireless devices such as cellular phones, handhelds, and the like.
By making the protocol specification for TOC available, AOL encouraged third-party development on systems too marginal ('uneconomic') for them to develop an instant-messaging client for, such as BeOS and AmigaOS.They did not intend for people (or companies) to develop clients for the Windows or Mac platforms, which probably explains why they removed the spec from their web site soon after Tribal Voice implemented the TOC protocol in their PowWow instant messaging client.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
-- -
Hello,
This is essentially how Tribal Voice's back-end of PowWow servers worked; as a clearinghouse for mapping namespace (the user's email address) to the IP address of the user's network interface.
From users' point of view, the big problem was this required that the client was running on a computer with a unique, routable IP address, which blocked many people who tried the use the software at work from behind a firewall or at home behind a NAT connection.
And from the company's view, well, they had to build a small data center to manage it all.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
-- -
Hello,
AOL did block Tribal Voice's PowWow software from interoperability, which used AOL's own published TOC specification.
When Tribaal Voice closed, a FAQ was posted on their site for a few days that said one of the reasons for the closure was AOL's dominance of the IM market. Later, that statement was removed, but it was there for a time.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
-- -
Hello,
Tribal Voice used AOL's published protocols, which referenced their servers. If AOL did not wish for other companies to use their servers, they should not have published one of their instant messaging protocols publicly.
The situation is a little more analagous to the telephone system: If every phone company used different incompatible equipment, you would have to have multiple phones, phone lines, and bills so you could communicate with everyone who used a service different than yours. Different phone companies, though, do interconnect, even though the resources used may not be equal in each direction. Ultimately, the consumer benefits from this reciprocity.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
--
Hello,
It may have been a poor decision for Tribal Voice to choose a public relations company that was incapable of using its products on most of their computers. It is unfortunate that Tribal Voice never developed versions of PowWow for other operating systems, such as MacOS, which would have made it more accessible to the employees of the public relations firm.
Tribal Voice used InstallShield to set up the software on a computer, a very common program for installing software under Windows.
If you had trouble installing or using the software, or were concerned about security risks, it might have been useful to contact Tribal Voice directly to resolve these issues in order to make it easier for your employer to handle the Tribal Voice account.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
--
Hello,
The threat referred to, I believe, was the attention Tribal Voice brought to AOL's market dominance in the instant messaging field by generating publicity about interoperability issues and how former CEO Ross Bagully's testimony in front of the FCC might interfere with the AOL-Time Warner merger.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
--
Hello, That is not correct.
After your experience, Tribal Voice modified the PowWow software to make five connection attempts to determine if a buddy was present at the IP address and then stop.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
--
It strikes me that a perfect market for paper-based computers is trading cards, such as for sports or collectible card games.
Companies like Topps and Wizards of the Coast have extensive experience in manufacturing trading cards, which can consist of multiple layers of card stock bonded together with metalic foil imprints. Plus, they also have huge audiences of collectors/players/traders.
It also strikes me that collectors would most likely hang on to such cards, so they wouldn't end up in a landfill somewhere.
Another possibility is disposable hand-held video games, anything from keychain up to Gameboy-sized.
Of course, worn-out paper computers would be discarded, but perhaps they could be sold with a deposit like glass bottles, which would be refunded in the same fashion.
Aryeh