While I'm posting this far too late to get a karma bump for mentioning it, below is a list of several detailed reviews of those services. (The review cited in the article is rather short.) These reviews focus primarily on independent music and fair use, and try to explain the criteria used to make the determination.
For those that are stuck behind a firewall, I wrote up a detailed, step-by-step guide on using Google Talk over SSH. This includes instructions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX, and focuses on the official Google Talk client, iChat, and Gaim.
Actually, the convergence of search and syndication is what led A9 to create OpenSearch. OpenSearch is a standard for search results that, not coincidentally, is built as an extension to RSS. In just a couple of months a few hundred sites have adopted it -- seems like there is a market there. (Disclosure, not that there is a conflict of interest there, but I am the lead for the project.)
And it's not just for A9 -- anyone can use OpenSearch to syndicate their search to anyone else. One example of a search aggregator other than A9 using OpenSearch is OSFeed. And example of a search engine that can be accessed by anyone is AWS OpenSearch, which lets you search Amazon via RSS.
So in other words, when done well search and RSS are highly compatible.
Just to clarify (disclaimer, I'm a happy A9 employee), A9 saves the search history on the server. The A9 toolbar (for both IE and Firefox) does allow you to access your history, but it is entirely optional. You can sign in to A9 using your Amazon account and try out that (and many more features).
Though I'm sure I won't be last to reference this, Yale's professor emeritus Edward Tufte has been writing about PowerPoint for a while. This piece in Wired helps explain how the cognative processes encouraged by PP presentations are subtly (and not-so-subtly) corrupting the way we perceive data. And you can purchase his whole essay here.
Whether or not you agree with all of Tufte's work, he is among the seminal thinkers about how we disseminate information. And having sat through too many years worth of PP presentations, I think he's dead right about this. I fact, I do my presentations from notes, using nothing more than dry-erase markers and a whiteboard. It never fails to impart an order of magnitude more information than a static bullet-point presentation ever could.
I recently learned this here, so please don't take this as a criticism.
The phrase "begs the question" doesn't mean what you think it means. It does not mean, "this leads to the question."
Rather, it is a term used in logic to indicate a fallacy in which the question or statement itself tries to prove its truth by asserting its own truth. This is commonly known as circular reasoning. More here.
I agree with you about wondering who the product is aimed at, though.
So I take it that German copyright law doesn't include the same Right Of First Sale that the U.S. law does? Basically, U.S. law gives us the right to resell, or rent, copyrighted works. The VHS rental market would never have taken off if not for the right of first sale, for example.
I'm no expert on this though, especially not for European laws -- can someone comment on why Germany can get away with this?
"Papyrus Studios (makers of the company's 'NASCAR' games for years)"
and
"Impressions Games (makers of strategy titles, such as 'Zeus', 'Cleopatra' and 'Lords of the Realm III'.)"
I think I see part of the problem right there -- branding!
Seriously though, it's sad to see these companies go. Perhaps if the entire entertainment market wasn't in the hands of a few conglomerates we'd fare better?
I've spent the last few years looking at and dealing closely with offshoring efforts for a large US corporation. My overall impression is that while it can be done effectively, the vast majority of companies are approaching it in the wrong way, and will in fact incur higher costs and reduced productivity as a result.
I recently wrote an article entitled On Offshoring that collects these thoughts. It's easier to link to than it is to quote in its entirety. I'd be very curious to hear the Slashdot reaction to this piece.
I'm not sure why you were modded +1 funny, that's a very relevant question.
I've spent the past few years working closely with offshore teams, and coalesced some of my thoughts on this in an article recently. In summary, it's unlikely that the average, retail-driven US company will get offshoring right, vis-a-vis software development. But rather than quote it at length here, it's easier to link to the original piece entitled On Offshoring.
Just this weekend I decided to move my own personal site over to a CMS/Blog system to make updating it even easier. I spent a while doing similar research, and ultimately ended up chosing Bloxsom as the right tool for my needs. It took me only 15 minutes to set everything up, and only a few more hours to write my first plug-in. Blosxom probably isn't the right tool for most applications, but for a personal site it met my needs precisely. In fact, I even migrated another site off of Moveable Type that same weekend.
Again, I documented the (rather brief) decision making process here.
Goodness -- I was surprised by the number of wildly incorrect postings about nuclear fusion. Some I could have tried to clear up myself, but a better recommendation would just be to read up for five minutes before posting some misinformed comment.
Wikipedia has a good article on Fusion Power. Read it, then post.
Unfortunately I can't mod you up in this forum because I already posted. Your point about usage patterns changing in response to available resources is spot-on.
However, there is a common mantra within companies such as Google or A9 right now -- storage is free. Internally, those guys say that on a daily basis. Of course, they have the funding and the mandate to make it a reality. But the point remains, for the cutting edge companies of today, storage costs are no longer a concern. In a reasonable period of time, it will be free for everyone, everywhere.
And as the cost of CPU cycles also approaches a negliable level, the age of the application, unbounded by the constraints of the past, is almost here.
Bandwidth and battery life remain practical limitations. However, as seen with WiFi technologies and the massive fiber pipes already spanning the globe, the bandwidth issues are going away as well. And optimistically, we may be only one minor technological revolution away from overcoming the power issue. It is best to conceive of a near future without those physical limits, as that helps one realize the opportunities ahead.
A few people have made the comment that Google can do this because 99% of the people will only use a few MBs of storage anyway. Reasonable theory, but here's another idea -- it doesn't matter if everyone uses a massive amount of storage.
First, figure out how many people there are in the world that might potentially use Gmail. Then figure out what is the potential maximum amount of unique data each of those people could generate on a daily basis. Then determine the size of the redundant information that could pass through the Gmail servers.
Note that a huge percentage of emails and attachments are sent to multiple recipients. For each piece of email or attachment compute and store a unique hash. Each account consists of only a list of hashes and some header metadata. This redundant information will significantly reduce the total storage space.
A quick seach finds this Berkeley study that suggests that there were about 400 PB of email (unique) generated last year. Assuming that you can save 1 GB of data for the fully-loaded cost of $1 (US), storing all of the internet's annual email traffic costs $500M annually in the worst case.
The best case is significantly better than that, as you can:
a) compress text by up to 80%
b) store every mail only once
c) store every large binary only once
d) add storage as needed, not up-front
e) reduce the cost of storage over time
This is off-the-cuff, but Google is looking at maybe a $50M annual investment in storage to store all the email on the internet, even if everyone uses it. They don't even need a storage limit. Period.
Also, listen to the examples if you can. The first one is so covered in hiss and scratches from the old record that it is very hard to make out much detail to the music. The new technique seems to render a fantastic amount of fidelity. But don't worry, there is plenty of character left -- the original analog recording techniques were more than warm enough. The difference is that you can now hear the cylinder going around (when it was being recorded), rather than it being obscured by playback artifacts.
try a palm pilot, the palm portable keyboard, and something like pedit. seriously, for under $200 USD you can have a very functional word processing environment, and a whole lot more.
i used the palm keyboard for a while and was constantly amazed at both how portable it was (folding up to roughly the size of the palm pilot itself) and how much like a real keyboard it felt like.
Try saving that as rand.pl and running it like this:
$./rand.pl 100 0 10
Seems like a very random distribution, doesn't it?
However, in reality, it's merely chaotic. It is based on the logistic function over a known chaotic region (discarding the first few significant bits to adjust for the range of x). The point being that it is very difficult to know when something is truly random or not.
You can read more about the logistic function here and random numbers here.
I reviewed this music service (among many others) at Breakdown Industries and it stacked up very favorably. Note that the reviews are biased toward independent artists (i.e., RIAA-free).
One, wouldn't a normal Bayesian filter do this automatically? I.e., pick up that url in mail classified as spam and then weight it positively in the future?
Two, this doesn't help with the strangest category of spam -- email that doesn't refer to a particular product, include a valid reply-to or from address, or contain any valid urls. Those spam emails are the ones that just blow my mind. They suck up bandwidth, cost everyone money and resources, yet they contain only a few random words, none of which could ever lead to a sale. Around 15% of my spam falls into this mindless category.
I doubt they are just testing email addresses, because relying on bounces isn't effective. And if they don't even include an image for email clients to automatically load for tracking purposes, they seem to be just a total and complete waste (unlike most spam, which is just a waste).
I've been doing an ongoing series of reviews of online music services (iTunes, Napster 2.0, Wal-Mart, Bleep, EMusic, and Audio Lunchbox so far), and one thing I've noticed is that a fair number of these sites are entirely unavailable to international customers. Either for DRM reasons or for simple payment processing issues.
It seems to me that there is a huge untapped market overseas. The traditional distribution mechanisms are even more disadvantaged when compared to online stores, as the cost of transporting physical goods is significantly greater than moving a digital copy. This is just one more area in which the companies that can move the fastest toward the new media stand the most to gain.
I recently posted reviews of Napster 2.0 and the iTunes Music Store over at Breakdown Industries. Those are two of the biggest sources of WMA and AAC files, respectively, and the availability of portable players factored into the reviews.
BTW, the site itself is dedicated to promoting the independent music scene, so other factors included cross-platform compatability (i.e., non-Windows) and the selection of independent labels and artists. Not sure if it will hold up to a Slashdotting, but it's worth finding out.
Re:My 6 year old son likes Knoppix, really
on
Knoppix Tips and Tricks
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Wow. Think about what you just said. Your six year old child was able to figure out how to boot from a CD, use the KDE interface, and run and actually use Gimp. In 30 minutes. All without any help from you.
And some critics say that Linux is too complicated to be used by adult professionals in the workplace.
You obviously have a very smart son, but the point remains -- Linux is definitely ready for the mainstream, usability-wise.
Out of curiosity I reviewed Wired's list from 2000 to see what came of the products that were mere vapor three years ago.
Tribes 2 -- released, and rather successful, a good game overall
Wireless Web Pads -- tablet PC's are now commerically available
Bluetooth -- now shipping in just about everything from cell phones to headsets to laptops
Silicon Film's Electronic Film System -- not sure about this particular case, but there are digital film backs available for 35mm cameras, I believe
Warcraft III -- released and went on to become a hugely popular game on Blizzards battle.net, has an expansion or two as well
Intel's Itanium chips -- shipping and people are deploying them in real-world, large-scale installations
A New Linux kernel -- they were talking about 2.4, and 2.6 is now just around the corner
Black and White -- shipped. and while a bit overrated, a decent game
Duke Nukem Forever -- ha.
Mac OS X -- now at version 10.3.1, it is perhaps the best desktop operating system ever built
So, after three years, only one of the top 10 vaporware products from 2000 failed to materialize. In fact, most of them went on to become successes as well.
Take a look at the network traffic of any university. Can you really blame electronics companies for not being trusting of their target market?
Um, maybe college students with almost no disposable income shouldn't be a target market for $20 CDs, either.
Historically those markets listened to college radio and swapped vinyl. They certainly weren't spending $20 a pop on a CD from an international megastar with one good song on it.
Here's a concept -- charge different amounts for different product. I.e., Mogwai and Ted Leo CDs should be offered for $5 each. Let the teen masses and the adult contemporary listeners (with their disposable dollars) pay $20 for an album.
Variable pricing is slowly coming of age via direct downloads through non-traditional channels such as indie-label sites and the iTunes store. Fortunately this will ultimately kill off the RIAA's price-fixing tactics. But goddamn it's an ugly death.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm posting this far too late to get a karma bump for mentioning it, below is a list of several detailed reviews of those services. (The review cited in the article is rather short.) These reviews focus primarily on independent music and fair use, and try to explain the criteria used to make the determination.
For those that are stuck behind a firewall, I wrote up a detailed, step-by-step guide on using Google Talk over SSH. This includes instructions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX, and focuses on the official Google Talk client, iChat, and Gaim.
You can find the guide at Google Talk over SSH.
Enjoy!
Actually, the convergence of search and syndication is what led A9 to create OpenSearch. OpenSearch is a standard for search results that, not coincidentally, is built as an extension to RSS. In just a couple of months a few hundred sites have adopted it -- seems like there is a market there. (Disclosure, not that there is a conflict of interest there, but I am the lead for the project.)
And it's not just for A9 -- anyone can use OpenSearch to syndicate their search to anyone else. One example of a search aggregator other than A9 using OpenSearch is OSFeed. And example of a search engine that can be accessed by anyone is AWS OpenSearch, which lets you search Amazon via RSS.
So in other words, when done well search and RSS are highly compatible.
Just to clarify (disclaimer, I'm a happy A9 employee), A9 saves the search history on the server. The A9 toolbar (for both IE and Firefox) does allow you to access your history, but it is entirely optional. You can sign in to A9 using your Amazon account and try out that (and many more features).
"Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely."
Though I'm sure I won't be last to reference this, Yale's professor emeritus Edward Tufte has been writing about PowerPoint for a while. This piece in Wired helps explain how the cognative processes encouraged by PP presentations are subtly (and not-so-subtly) corrupting the way we perceive data. And you can purchase his whole essay here.
Whether or not you agree with all of Tufte's work, he is among the seminal thinkers about how we disseminate information. And having sat through too many years worth of PP presentations, I think he's dead right about this. I fact, I do my presentations from notes, using nothing more than dry-erase markers and a whiteboard. It never fails to impart an order of magnitude more information than a static bullet-point presentation ever could.
> Which begs the question, who is this aimed at?
I recently learned this here, so please don't take this as a criticism.
The phrase "begs the question" doesn't mean what you think it means. It does not mean, "this leads to the question."
Rather, it is a term used in logic to indicate a fallacy in which the question or statement itself tries to prove its truth by asserting its own truth. This is commonly known as circular reasoning. More here.
I agree with you about wondering who the product is aimed at, though.
So I take it that German copyright law doesn't include the same Right Of First Sale that the U.S. law does? Basically, U.S. law gives us the right to resell, or rent, copyrighted works. The VHS rental market would never have taken off if not for the right of first sale, for example.
I'm no expert on this though, especially not for European laws -- can someone comment on why Germany can get away with this?
"Papyrus Studios (makers of the company's 'NASCAR' games for years)"
and
"Impressions Games (makers of strategy titles, such as 'Zeus', 'Cleopatra' and 'Lords of the Realm III'.)"
I think I see part of the problem right there -- branding!
Seriously though, it's sad to see these companies go. Perhaps if the entire entertainment market wasn't in the hands of a few conglomerates we'd fare better?
I've spent the last few years looking at and dealing closely with offshoring efforts for a large US corporation. My overall impression is that while it can be done effectively, the vast majority of companies are approaching it in the wrong way, and will in fact incur higher costs and reduced productivity as a result.
I recently wrote an article entitled On Offshoring that collects these thoughts. It's easier to link to than it is to quote in its entirety. I'd be very curious to hear the Slashdot reaction to this piece.
I'm not sure why you were modded +1 funny, that's a very relevant question.
I've spent the past few years working closely with offshore teams, and coalesced some of my thoughts on this in an article recently. In summary, it's unlikely that the average, retail-driven US company will get offshoring right, vis-a-vis software development. But rather than quote it at length here, it's easier to link to the original piece entitled On Offshoring.
Just this weekend I decided to move my own personal site over to a CMS/Blog system to make updating it even easier. I spent a while doing similar research, and ultimately ended up chosing Bloxsom as the right tool for my needs. It took me only 15 minutes to set everything up, and only a few more hours to write my first plug-in. Blosxom probably isn't the right tool for most applications, but for a personal site it met my needs precisely. In fact, I even migrated another site off of Moveable Type that same weekend.
Again, I documented the (rather brief) decision making process here.
Goodness -- I was surprised by the number of wildly incorrect postings about nuclear fusion. Some I could have tried to clear up myself, but a better recommendation would just be to read up for five minutes before posting some misinformed comment.
Wikipedia has a good article on Fusion Power. Read it, then post.
Unfortunately I can't mod you up in this forum because I already posted. Your point about usage patterns changing in response to available resources is spot-on.
However, there is a common mantra within companies such as Google or A9 right now -- storage is free. Internally, those guys say that on a daily basis. Of course, they have the funding and the mandate to make it a reality. But the point remains, for the cutting edge companies of today, storage costs are no longer a concern. In a reasonable period of time, it will be free for everyone, everywhere.
And as the cost of CPU cycles also approaches a negliable level, the age of the application, unbounded by the constraints of the past, is almost here.
Bandwidth and battery life remain practical limitations. However, as seen with WiFi technologies and the massive fiber pipes already spanning the globe, the bandwidth issues are going away as well. And optimistically, we may be only one minor technological revolution away from overcoming the power issue. It is best to conceive of a near future without those physical limits, as that helps one realize the opportunities ahead.
A few people have made the comment that Google can do this because 99% of the people will only use a few MBs of storage anyway. Reasonable theory, but here's another idea -- it doesn't matter if everyone uses a massive amount of storage.
First, figure out how many people there are in the world that might potentially use Gmail. Then figure out what is the potential maximum amount of unique data each of those people could generate on a daily basis. Then determine the size of the redundant information that could pass through the Gmail servers.
Note that a huge percentage of emails and attachments are sent to multiple recipients. For each piece of email or attachment compute and store a unique hash. Each account consists of only a list of hashes and some header metadata. This redundant information will significantly reduce the total storage space.
A quick seach finds this Berkeley study that suggests that there were about 400 PB of email (unique) generated last year. Assuming that you can save 1 GB of data for the fully-loaded cost of $1 (US), storing all of the internet's annual email traffic costs $500M annually in the worst case.
The best case is significantly better than that, as you can:
a) compress text by up to 80%
b) store every mail only once
c) store every large binary only once
d) add storage as needed, not up-front
e) reduce the cost of storage over time
This is off-the-cuff, but Google is looking at maybe a $50M annual investment in storage to store all the email on the internet, even if everyone uses it. They don't even need a storage limit. Period.
Also, listen to the examples if you can. The first one is so covered in hiss and scratches from the old record that it is very hard to make out much detail to the music. The new technique seems to render a fantastic amount of fidelity. But don't worry, there is plenty of character left -- the original analog recording techniques were more than warm enough. The difference is that you can now hear the cylinder going around (when it was being recorded), rather than it being obscured by playback artifacts.
try a palm pilot, the palm portable keyboard, and something like pedit. seriously, for under $200 USD you can have a very functional word processing environment, and a whole lot more.
i used the palm keyboard for a while and was constantly amazed at both how portable it was (folding up to roughly the size of the palm pilot itself) and how much like a real keyboard it felt like.
It's hard to tell.
Here's a simple perl script to demonstrate:Try saving that as rand.pl and running it like this:
$
Seems like a very random distribution, doesn't it?
However, in reality, it's merely chaotic. It is based on the logistic function over a known chaotic region (discarding the first few significant bits to adjust for the range of x). The point being that it is very difficult to know when something is truly random or not.
You can read more about the logistic function here and random numbers here.
I reviewed this music service (among many others) at Breakdown Industries and it stacked up very favorably. Note that the reviews are biased toward independent artists (i.e., RIAA-free).
Read the review here..
One, wouldn't a normal Bayesian filter do this automatically? I.e., pick up that url in mail classified as spam and then weight it positively in the future?
Two, this doesn't help with the strangest category of spam -- email that doesn't refer to a particular product, include a valid reply-to or from address, or contain any valid urls. Those spam emails are the ones that just blow my mind. They suck up bandwidth, cost everyone money and resources, yet they contain only a few random words, none of which could ever lead to a sale. Around 15% of my spam falls into this mindless category.
I doubt they are just testing email addresses, because relying on bounces isn't effective. And if they don't even include an image for email clients to automatically load for tracking purposes, they seem to be just a total and complete waste (unlike most spam, which is just a waste).
I've been doing an ongoing series of reviews of online music services (iTunes, Napster 2.0, Wal-Mart, Bleep, EMusic, and Audio Lunchbox so far), and one thing I've noticed is that a fair number of these sites are entirely unavailable to international customers. Either for DRM reasons or for simple payment processing issues.
It seems to me that there is a huge untapped market overseas. The traditional distribution mechanisms are even more disadvantaged when compared to online stores, as the cost of transporting physical goods is significantly greater than moving a digital copy. This is just one more area in which the companies that can move the fastest toward the new media stand the most to gain.
I recently posted reviews of Napster 2.0 and the iTunes Music Store over at Breakdown Industries. Those are two of the biggest sources of WMA and AAC files, respectively, and the availability of portable players factored into the reviews.
BTW, the site itself is dedicated to promoting the independent music scene, so other factors included cross-platform compatability (i.e., non-Windows) and the selection of independent labels and artists. Not sure if it will hold up to a Slashdotting, but it's worth finding out.
Check out the Breakdown Industries homepage. Your voice was heard.
Wow. Think about what you just said. Your six year old child was able to figure out how to boot from a CD, use the KDE interface, and run and actually use Gimp. In 30 minutes. All without any help from you.
And some critics say that Linux is too complicated to be used by adult professionals in the workplace.
You obviously have a very smart son, but the point remains -- Linux is definitely ready for the mainstream, usability-wise.
So, after three years, only one of the top 10 vaporware products from 2000 failed to materialize. In fact, most of them went on to become successes as well.
Take a look at the network traffic of any university. Can you really blame electronics companies for not being trusting of their target market?
Um, maybe college students with almost no disposable income shouldn't be a target market for $20 CDs, either.
Historically those markets listened to college radio and swapped vinyl. They certainly weren't spending $20 a pop on a CD from an international megastar with one good song on it.
Here's a concept -- charge different amounts for different product. I.e., Mogwai and Ted Leo CDs should be offered for $5 each. Let the teen masses and the adult contemporary listeners (with their disposable dollars) pay $20 for an album.
Variable pricing is slowly coming of age via direct downloads through non-traditional channels such as indie-label sites and the iTunes store. Fortunately this will ultimately kill off the RIAA's price-fixing tactics. But goddamn it's an ugly death.