My understanding is that under GPLv2, if you violate the terms of the license, your right to use the software under the terms of the license are instantly revoked, and there is no mechanism provided by the license for getting it back. In practice you have to go back to the copyright holder and ask permission.
Section 8 of GPLv3 does allow you to automatically get out of jail free if you fix the violation voluntarily or within a reasonable time period after an infringement notice. GPLv3 is much kinder to well-intentioned, inadvertent infringers.
In Cisco's case anyway, I think we can assume they've been knowingly violating for a lot longer than is reasonable.
I tried Mambo on a few sites a few years ago, one of which got hacked by a phisher within a few months (to be fair I hadn't been keeping up with security updates), so I quickly migrated them over to Drupal, which I had started using once the limitations of Mambo became apparent. I had a look at Joomla! soon after it forked from Mambo. It was supposed to have been substantially rewritten, but I couldn't see any significant differences.
My most immediate frustration with Mambo was that there was a lot of hard-coded markup that you couldn't cleanly override without hacking the core system. This may have changed in the last couple of years. Drupal's theming system, even at the time, was an order of magnitude more elegant; not necessarily easier, but much more flexible.
In fact Drupal v Joomla! is not a fair or useful comparison. If you just want a CMS that works out of the box, I'd guess you'd probably find Joomla! a happier experience. If you're a developer or a graphic designer who knows their HTML/CSS/PHP, or if you want to do something beyond the standard features of a CMS, Drupal is for you. It's said that Drupal is an application development framework that just happens to come with a CMS built-in. I was showing Drupal to someone earlier this year and he said, "Hey, this is like Rails!" Moreover much of the recent development in the Drupal ecosystem has been directed towards making it possible to build quite sophisticated database-backed applications without having to do any coding. Someone else once said to me "Hey, this is like Microsoft Access!" (I was a little less happy with this comparison.)
To return to the subject of the parent post, if you are a one-or-two-person web development shop, and you want to do as much as possible while having to support the smallest amount of code, you can't go past Drupal. For any particular problem it may not be the best solution, but it's a satisfactory solution for a vastly wider range of problems than any other system I'm aware of.
Oh, and all free software, all the time. You never know when you'll come up with some re-usable code, or want to use a sizable chunk of some other GPL-licensed code, so make it clear that the client has the product to use as they wish under the terms of the GPL (or whatever), but they don't have the copyright. Anything else is a legal nightmare, and I've never encountered any resistance to this. Anybody not knowledgeable enough to be comfortable with the GPL probably doesn't care about the legal details anyway. Anybody who has dreams of striking it rich with their own proprietary web application is going to be a problem client you should avoid.
Don't try to do everything yourself. Subcontract to other developers with complementary strengths who play nice with others: a couple of graphic designers, maybe a copywriter, sysadmin, or sales/accounts/office admin genius.
Don't try to support too many products/platforms. If you use a different tool for every project, just keeping up with security updates will either become a full time job, or else you will get hacked at some point (I did). Life got a lot easier for me when I decided to specialise in Drupal.
Get yourself a VPS or two. Don't bother with shared hosting - it's too expensive and limited. Your clients' hosting fees should pay for the effort _you_ put into keeping their sites ticking over, not for your hosting provider's cPanel licenses.
About 20% of your time will be spent on technical work. The rest will be negotiating and hand-holding. You've got to develop some social skills.
Insist on using a professional graphic designer (unless you're a graphic design genius yourself). No matter how adamantly a client initially insists that the look of their site isn't important, they will change their mind.
Pick your clients carefully. Don't be afraid to say no. Unless you're a scam artist, say no to anybody who proudly proclaims their computer illiteracy. If they don't understand what you do, they won't appreciate it. Likewise avoid clients who think they need a website, but don't know why. Ask them what they want to achieve with the project.
You probably won't find small/medium clients who will be happy with paying per hour. Demand a 50% deposit at commencement of work, plus timely delivery of whatever you need from them to complete the job.
Don't take on anything that you think will take more than a fortnight's work, for which you should quote four to six weeks. Every project takes longer than you would expect, so if you expect something will take a couple of months, you may be out of business before you get paid. Split large projects into smaller stages if necessary. Even the best clients (not to mention developers) will have a tendency towards feature creep. Make it clear that additional ideas, no matter how brilliant, are for later stages of development. Throw around some buzzwords like "agile" and "iterative".
Don't expect to do more than four billable hours a day. Don't let yourself burn out, and keep it interesting. If you don't do a lot of reading and stretch yourself with the occasional hobby/charity project with features that paying clients won't generally ask for, you'll be a miserable dinosaur in three years.
Mind you, don't do discounts/freebies unless you really believe in the cause. If you wouldn't do a fun run, sell raffle tickets, or shave your head for them, don't do a website for them. Be clear about the limits of what you'll do.
Catch up on the Rissington podcast. They're more graphic design focused, but have lots of useful tips for dealing with clients and organising your business, amusingly delivered, and advice about cheese.
Websites are communication tools, not marketing tools. By all means make them look and feel nice (and consistent with your branding), but treat your users with respect. They chose to visit your site, so don't treat them like they're just passing through while waiting for "America's Biggest Celebrity Dancing Loser" to start. You don't need to grab their attention; you've got their attention. Now give them what they came for.
... which is exactly the thinking behind the Zen theme, which was in contention for being the default Drupal theme at the time Drupal 5 was being developed.
Having used a stripped down version of Zen as my starting point for all my themes since Drupal 5 came out over a year ago, I can say that things never work out that simply on any non-trivial site. You always end up hacking HTML somewhere. On refection I think the price you pay for all the crufty wrapper divs needed to provide you with hooks for (almost, but never entirely) every CSS selector you might reasonably want in a theme is just too high. If Firebug is an absolute necessity for understanding your own markup, then you're doing something wrong.
In Drupal 6, customising HTML output will become a lot easier for non-programmers, as a lot of stuff that previously required a PHP theme function to override, can now be overriden by template files in your theme directory.
I've not read the book, but it occurred to me that some of the errors complained of above might not be errors, or at worst just insufficiently explained Drupalisms.
some URLs contain root directory slashes, while others do not
You might be conflating relative URLs with "Drupal paths" here. Most Drupal sites these days use Apache mod_rewrite to convert a URL like:
http://www.example.com/?q=admin/content/types
to:
http://www.example.com/admin/content/types
The distinction between Drupal paths and URLs relative to the site's base directory is important, because your Drupal site might be in a subdirectory of your web server's root directory (eg. http://www.example.com/mysite/).
Some menu breadcrumbs use ">" as a delimiter, while others use "|."
The breadcrumb delimiter is itself themeable. This would just be reflecting real world experience, so I can't see any benefit to this degree of consistency.
"Dev Server" (page 120) apparently means a local Web server
I would have expected that anybody ready to tackle Drupal theming would be familiar with the concept of using a development server (possibly but not necessarily on your local machine) to safely make modifications before transferring them to the live site, and that a definition here would be irritatingly redundant.
But on Linux you've typically got some difficulty finding commercial software.
Assuming that by "commercial", you mean "proprietary", this is a feature, not a bug. Your free software package repository is a very effective crap filter. I'm in no hurry to revisit the dark days of the early nineties, searching for, downloading and installing software only to find out it's crippleware, or a time-limited demo. Freeware is typically the product of a lone coder who doesn't know how to play well with others, and is therefore limited to little utilities which develop very slowly, if at all. And I don't see the sense in spending hundreds of dollars on a shrink-wrapped box of software that does a bazillion things I'm not interested in just to crop and scale photos, burn a CD, or format some text for the printed page.
Before anybody chimes in to say I'm in the elitist, holier-than-thou minority on this, why don't proprietary software companies promote the features of their products that free software can by definition never deliver:
"You don't and can't know what it's really doing!"
"If it's broken we're the only ones who can fix it!"
"Assumes you're a criminal!"
...because nobody wants those features, but most people who get their software from shrink-wrapped boxes in Wal-Mart don't know that you can get useful software under any other terms. Yes there are some features of some proprietary products that aren't implemented in a free software equivalent yet. There are also plenty of features in free software that are lacking in the leading proprietary products, plus you don't get screwed by EULAs, spyware, DRM, WGA, etc.
If you need Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office or Halo 3 for Linux you're just plain out of luck.
As far as I know, you can't get Halo 3 for Macs or Windows PCs (Xbox 360 only, according to Wikipedia). If you think you need Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office I would urge you to re-evaluate your needs.
And I really wish I could get BBEdit or TextMate on my PC.
If they were free software, somebody would have ported them by now.
If anything, it's surprising that the OS X market share has grown so little (assuming these figures are reasonably accurate) given the leverage that Apple's overwhelming dominance in little gadgets brings.
If you want a reason for the unimpressive growth in GNU/Linux-based OSes (if you can call doubling in under two years, according to TFA, unimpressive), I'd go for plain inertia. I've been using Debian on my desktop for a decade, but I readily concede I'm a niche user. It's only really been in the last couple of years (Anno Ubuntu) that free desktop OSes, and accompanying free applications, have been sufficient for the 80% to live happily with. Given that the majority of Windows users still don't want to leave their six-year old operating system for the year-old latest version of the same system, it's hardly surprising that migration to completely different systems that don't have a phone or MP3 player to use as a foot in the door will be sluggish for some time.
Things are starting to move though. I got a call out of the blue yesterday from a musician who was sick of depending on cracked versions on Cubase and whatnot, and wanted my help installing Ubuntu Studio. I've been getting similar requests with increasing frequency, to the point where the time spent knocking back requests to do paid work is interfering with my paid work (web development). A couple of years ago I considered doing free software desktop support professionally and concluded the time was not yet right to make it an economically viable proposition. 2008 might be the time to reconsider that decision.
A lot of netlabels slap a Creative Commons logo on their site, but only allow you to listen to their music via Flash or some other streaming mechanism which doesn't (unless you know some tricks) permit you to save, copy, and share the music. In my view this is a violation of at least the spirit of the licenses they claim to be using, but I've had a hard time advancing that argument because of the amount of people who are of the opinion "hey, you're getting it for free, what are you whining about?". However if you do know and care about the distinction between free and free (or gratis and libre), Jamendo is the best source for music I've found.
The size of their collection is mind-boggling. Yes, there is a low signal to noise ratio, particularly if you're not a fan of electronica, but I don't think your hit rate is going to be any worse than if you started buying RIAA-produced albums at random. There is a need for an effective recommendation system, but in the meantime, here's my favourites.
Can't they do both? A decade ago, there were too few record labels. Now there are only four, and that's four too many,
If I were a professional musician, I'd be releasing my recordings under a license that permitted (at least) verbatim redistribution, including commercial redistribution. That way I'd still be making little or nothing off the sale of the recordings, but many more people would be able to access and afford a copy, and I'd be able to make the music I wanted when I wanted.
While it's good to see well-known artists publishing free-as-in-zero-cost copies of their works, it will be free-as-in-redistributable publication from a major artist that will mark the beginning of the end for the redundant middlemen.
I know the Geek Compound is no more, and everybody's scattered across the US, but we have useable VoIP now. Can you imagine that happy day when geeks across the world will be able to unite in fellowship and say as one "I've been listening to Geeks in Space since before it started to suck"?
I second this. I set up an LTSP network for a youth centre a couple of years ago, and it worked like a dream. It cost $AU2000 for a new computer and loads of RAM plus half a dozen Pentiums rescued from landfill. I suspect we could have easily gone to a dozen clients without taxing the system, but physical space was the limiting factor.
Far from handicapping students with poor-performing PCs this setup actually runs a lot better in a lot of conditions. If someone else has already started OpenOffice.org, your instance will start in the blink of an eye. Given that in an educational environment, each terminal will likely be running the same applications at the same time, this is a very efficient use of resources.
Downsides:
Effectively no audio, or else everyone fights over the use of a single sound card.
Win95-era video hardware tends to have low maximum resolutions. You'd be surprised how inadequate 1024x768 can be for some applications, never mind 800x600. Not to mention no 3D eye candy.
Win95-era hardware can be poorly supported (regardless of OS), and configuration of non-PCI cards can be a nightmare. You may find it's more economical to pop round to your local computer store for a stack of $10 NICs rather than struggle to work with what you've got.
I can't tell you how many times I have to tell graphic designers that one of the elements of their design (like equal length columns) is a major pain in the neck to implement in CSS.
So you're the one that's been making all those sites. Don't you feel at least some obligation to explain to your colleagues in graphic design that equal length columns of text in a medium where there is no concept of pagination, where the viewport is a different size for every reader, where the font size (not to mention 'font-family', 'line-height' etc.) specified by the author (if they have specified it at all and aren't just relying on the default font size of the browser they happen to be using) can (and will) be overridden by the reader, where some classes of reader can't even see tables, and so on (I'll stop there, but could go on all night) is a bad idea?
It's the people who insist on treating the web as if it were made of sheets of paper of uniform size that are the pain in the neck, not CSS.
It depends greatly on where you live, and who your customers are. I've been a web developer for about two years (had done a lot of it in the past, though), since moving to a large town/small city. We came here with a long list of things we could do, and quickly settled on web development because every organisation here that had a web site had a dreadful website. You know the drill: something knocked together by some guy who'd just done a course in Dreamweaver and Photoshop, 90% of the text is an image, every link is a JavaScript onClick() event (why?!?), no page is without some form of god-awful cheezy animation, including the "click here to enter" splash screen which not only gets in your way at the first page, but at every subsection of the site's navigational heirarchy. Of course all these sites are three years out of date, because they just haven't had the cash to hand to pay the original developer to update it for them, and when they do, they find he's moved into another career (presumably following another 8 week course), and has no time for them.
The problem is that this arrangement is perfectly within their comfort zone. If you tell most small businesspeople that they can have a simple website for hundreds, rather than thousands of dollars, that they can easily update it themseves for free, and that every time they prepare a press release or similar promotional info for the local press, they can copy and paste in into their CMS in seconds and have an up-to-date and informative website rather than an outdated online sales brochure, they will look scared. And they are not hearing this from a dishevelled and manic nerd, but from an attractive and professionally presented young lady (my wife, a relatively normal person who is the public face of our business).
Every sale we make is a result of a lot of marketing ground work, because what we are selling is, while although undeniably superior to what the competition provides (at half the cost), totally foreign to our potential clients. So we end up with periods of frantic activity interspersed with periods of zero income. We've had some successes with some very satisfied customers, and some very frustrating experiences of the kind described above with some people who think that being a dumb obnoxious bully and being a shrewd businessperson is the same thing. After a very tough couple of years, we are finally keeping our heads above water, but I'm getting very sick of instant noodles and would like to be able to afford a night out at the local pub once in a while.
The answer seems to be not to move into a totally different line of work (the positions vacant section of our local paper is not sufficient to cover the floor of an average-sized bird cage), but to find complementary work to smooth out the income troughs. In fact my wife, in addition to doing all the administrative and organisational work for us, is now spending a day or two a week doing the same for other businesses around town.
So the question becomes, what kind of work can be a reliable supplementary source of income for a nearly-but-not-quite full-time web developer?
So basically it's like del.icio.us with added media specialisation.
del.icio.us plus Audioscrobbler.
The thing that surprises me is that, for a social networking app developed in 2006, there's no mention of FOAF, RDF, or the Semantic Web on the developers' wiki. Am I going to have to master yet another set of data formats to write applications that interoperate with this?
Michael Jackson was charging > $100 for his shows 20 years ago. To claim this has anything to do with P2P is ridiculous. Oh, sorry I forgot. Back then "home taping [was] killing music".
I see loads of great local bands at the pub down the road, and it doesn't cost me $250. What's more, none of them even have a contract with a record company.
I think a much more interesting statistical correlation is:
No record contract: Free gigs
Record contract with an independant label: $10 at the door
Record contract with a major label: $50-$100
Major label and huge sales: $250
Clearly, it's record sales, not "piracy" that's driving up ticket costs. If you have a favourite band that works for an RIAA member, help them become more accessible to their fans by not buying their next album.
Anyway, Madonna's a cabaret performer, not a musician. I expect these ridiculous prices are not significantly different to the ridiculous prices you'd pay for front-row seats to the Lion King.
AJAX is a transition point in the web's evolution beyond the browser. The real killer app is what happens when these applications' communication protocols standardise. It's not so long ago that when you wanted to run a blog, you either hand-coded HTML or had to have a server running slashcode. Now you can choose between dozens of free and non-free web apps or hosted services, and it doesn't really matter which you choose because your audience can aggregate from any of these via RSS, and view your content in whatever client they choose. I'm sure Blogger.com is still a viable business, but it's increasingly irrelevant.
Similarly, it's rapidly becoming possible to share calendaring information with others via CalDAV without caring which client and server options you and your collaborators prefer.
Whenever I do a Drupal site for an organisation I like to encourage them to set up an LDAP directory, so that they can use the same authoritative data source for authenticating to Drupal and other systems, internal address books (usable from a multitude of clients), and finely-grained control over sharing personnel data with affilliated organisations. The ability to do all this is very cool, and not at all dependant on my choice of OpenLDAP (which is, frankly, a bastard to get working), as the critical element is the LDAP open standards.
These are pretty simple examples, but I don't think it's too much to expect that open standards for interacting with applications like Flikr and Del.icio.us will emerge, along with increased choice over back-ends and interfaces and effective commoditisation of the services. Value moves up the chain, innovators move on to the next big thing, and it all starts over again.
"The President's advice was that he acted lawfully."
Gonzales retires to "spend more time with his family".
The White House carries on as before, getting the advice it wants to hear from a new secretary of state.
And that's the way it will stay as long as the American people expect their elected officials to behave lawfully rather than ethically. I agree with Bush; the constitution is "just a piece of paper". He should be held to a higher standard of accountability than that.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that under GPLv2, if you violate the terms of the license, your right to use the software under the terms of the license are instantly revoked, and there is no mechanism provided by the license for getting it back. In practice you have to go back to the copyright holder and ask permission.
Section 8 of GPLv3 does allow you to automatically get out of jail free if you fix the violation voluntarily or within a reasonable time period after an infringement notice. GPLv3 is much kinder to well-intentioned, inadvertent infringers.
In Cisco's case anyway, I think we can assume they've been knowingly violating for a lot longer than is reasonable.
Outside of drupal.org, the guys at Lullabot have some awesome resources (articles, videos, podcast).
I tried Mambo on a few sites a few years ago, one of which got hacked by a phisher within a few months (to be fair I hadn't been keeping up with security updates), so I quickly migrated them over to Drupal, which I had started using once the limitations of Mambo became apparent. I had a look at Joomla! soon after it forked from Mambo. It was supposed to have been substantially rewritten, but I couldn't see any significant differences.
My most immediate frustration with Mambo was that there was a lot of hard-coded markup that you couldn't cleanly override without hacking the core system. This may have changed in the last couple of years. Drupal's theming system, even at the time, was an order of magnitude more elegant; not necessarily easier, but much more flexible.
In fact Drupal v Joomla! is not a fair or useful comparison. If you just want a CMS that works out of the box, I'd guess you'd probably find Joomla! a happier experience. If you're a developer or a graphic designer who knows their HTML/CSS/PHP, or if you want to do something beyond the standard features of a CMS, Drupal is for you. It's said that Drupal is an application development framework that just happens to come with a CMS built-in. I was showing Drupal to someone earlier this year and he said, "Hey, this is like Rails!" Moreover much of the recent development in the Drupal ecosystem has been directed towards making it possible to build quite sophisticated database-backed applications without having to do any coding. Someone else once said to me "Hey, this is like Microsoft Access!" (I was a little less happy with this comparison.)
To return to the subject of the parent post, if you are a one-or-two-person web development shop, and you want to do as much as possible while having to support the smallest amount of code, you can't go past Drupal. For any particular problem it may not be the best solution, but it's a satisfactory solution for a vastly wider range of problems than any other system I'm aware of.
Oh, and all free software, all the time. You never know when you'll come up with some re-usable code, or want to use a sizable chunk of some other GPL-licensed code, so make it clear that the client has the product to use as they wish under the terms of the GPL (or whatever), but they don't have the copyright. Anything else is a legal nightmare, and I've never encountered any resistance to this. Anybody not knowledgeable enough to be comfortable with the GPL probably doesn't care about the legal details anyway. Anybody who has dreams of striking it rich with their own proprietary web application is going to be a problem client you should avoid.
Now, more than ever, we need the return of Geeks in Space.
Websites are communication tools, not marketing tools. By all means make them look and feel nice (and consistent with your branding), but treat your users with respect. They chose to visit your site, so don't treat them like they're just passing through while waiting for "America's Biggest Celebrity Dancing Loser" to start. You don't need to grab their attention; you've got their attention. Now give them what they came for.
... which is exactly the thinking behind the Zen theme, which was in contention for being the default Drupal theme at the time Drupal 5 was being developed.
Having used a stripped down version of Zen as my starting point for all my themes since Drupal 5 came out over a year ago, I can say that things never work out that simply on any non-trivial site. You always end up hacking HTML somewhere. On refection I think the price you pay for all the crufty wrapper divs needed to provide you with hooks for (almost, but never entirely) every CSS selector you might reasonably want in a theme is just too high. If Firebug is an absolute necessity for understanding your own markup, then you're doing something wrong.
In Drupal 6, customising HTML output will become a lot easier for non-programmers, as a lot of stuff that previously required a PHP theme function to override, can now be overriden by template files in your theme directory.
I've not read the book, but it occurred to me that some of the errors complained of above might not be errors, or at worst just insufficiently explained Drupalisms.
You might be conflating relative URLs with "Drupal paths" here. Most Drupal sites these days use Apache mod_rewrite to convert a URL like:
to:
The distinction between Drupal paths and URLs relative to the site's base directory is important, because your Drupal site might be in a subdirectory of your web server's root directory (eg. http://www.example.com/mysite/).
The breadcrumb delimiter is itself themeable. This would just be reflecting real world experience, so I can't see any benefit to this degree of consistency.
I would have expected that anybody ready to tackle Drupal theming would be familiar with the concept of using a development server (possibly but not necessarily on your local machine) to safely make modifications before transferring them to the live site, and that a definition here would be irritatingly redundant.
Assuming that by "commercial", you mean "proprietary", this is a feature, not a bug. Your free software package repository is a very effective crap filter. I'm in no hurry to revisit the dark days of the early nineties, searching for, downloading and installing software only to find out it's crippleware, or a time-limited demo. Freeware is typically the product of a lone coder who doesn't know how to play well with others, and is therefore limited to little utilities which develop very slowly, if at all. And I don't see the sense in spending hundreds of dollars on a shrink-wrapped box of software that does a bazillion things I'm not interested in just to crop and scale photos, burn a CD, or format some text for the printed page.
Before anybody chimes in to say I'm in the elitist, holier-than-thou minority on this, why don't proprietary software companies promote the features of their products that free software can by definition never deliver:
...because nobody wants those features, but most people who get their software from shrink-wrapped boxes in Wal-Mart don't know that you can get useful software under any other terms. Yes there are some features of some proprietary products that aren't implemented in a free software equivalent yet. There are also plenty of features in free software that are lacking in the leading proprietary products, plus you don't get screwed by EULAs, spyware, DRM, WGA, etc.
As far as I know, you can't get Halo 3 for Macs or Windows PCs (Xbox 360 only, according to Wikipedia). If you think you need Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office I would urge you to re-evaluate your needs.
If they were free software, somebody would have ported them by now.
If anything, it's surprising that the OS X market share has grown so little (assuming these figures are reasonably accurate) given the leverage that Apple's overwhelming dominance in little gadgets brings.
If you want a reason for the unimpressive growth in GNU/Linux-based OSes (if you can call doubling in under two years, according to TFA, unimpressive), I'd go for plain inertia. I've been using Debian on my desktop for a decade, but I readily concede I'm a niche user. It's only really been in the last couple of years (Anno Ubuntu) that free desktop OSes, and accompanying free applications, have been sufficient for the 80% to live happily with. Given that the majority of Windows users still don't want to leave their six-year old operating system for the year-old latest version of the same system, it's hardly surprising that migration to completely different systems that don't have a phone or MP3 player to use as a foot in the door will be sluggish for some time.
Things are starting to move though. I got a call out of the blue yesterday from a musician who was sick of depending on cracked versions on Cubase and whatnot, and wanted my help installing Ubuntu Studio. I've been getting similar requests with increasing frequency, to the point where the time spent knocking back requests to do paid work is interfering with my paid work (web development). A couple of years ago I considered doing free software desktop support professionally and concluded the time was not yet right to make it an economically viable proposition. 2008 might be the time to reconsider that decision.
Seconded.
A lot of netlabels slap a Creative Commons logo on their site, but only allow you to listen to their music via Flash or some other streaming mechanism which doesn't (unless you know some tricks) permit you to save, copy, and share the music. In my view this is a violation of at least the spirit of the licenses they claim to be using, but I've had a hard time advancing that argument because of the amount of people who are of the opinion "hey, you're getting it for free, what are you whining about?". However if you do know and care about the distinction between free and free (or gratis and libre), Jamendo is the best source for music I've found.
The size of their collection is mind-boggling. Yes, there is a low signal to noise ratio, particularly if you're not a fan of electronica, but I don't think your hit rate is going to be any worse than if you started buying RIAA-produced albums at random. There is a need for an effective recommendation system, but in the meantime, here's my favourites.
Can't they do both? A decade ago, there were too few record labels. Now there are only four, and that's four too many,
If I were a professional musician, I'd be releasing my recordings under a license that permitted (at least) verbatim redistribution, including commercial redistribution. That way I'd still be making little or nothing off the sale of the recordings, but many more people would be able to access and afford a copy, and I'd be able to make the music I wanted when I wanted.
While it's good to see well-known artists publishing free-as-in-zero-cost copies of their works, it will be free-as-in-redistributable publication from a major artist that will mark the beginning of the end for the redundant middlemen.
Moreover it's not a "war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers", it's a war against users.
I second the call for the return of Geeks in Space. I have very fond memories of that show. There's no reason why there should only ever be one funny free software-related podcast at a time.
I know the Geek Compound is no more, and everybody's scattered across the US, but we have useable VoIP now. Can you imagine that happy day when geeks across the world will be able to unite in fellowship and say as one "I've been listening to Geeks in Space since before it started to suck"?
I second this. I set up an LTSP network for a youth centre a couple of years ago, and it worked like a dream. It cost $AU2000 for a new computer and loads of RAM plus half a dozen Pentiums rescued from landfill. I suspect we could have easily gone to a dozen clients without taxing the system, but physical space was the limiting factor.
Far from handicapping students with poor-performing PCs this setup actually runs a lot better in a lot of conditions. If someone else has already started OpenOffice.org, your instance will start in the blink of an eye. Given that in an educational environment, each terminal will likely be running the same applications at the same time, this is a very efficient use of resources.
Downsides:
If Google is happy to team up with the Chinese government, than the least they could do is get in bed with the big DRM pushers.
The Hula Hoop... The Model T Ford... They're coming back with a vengeance, baby!
So you're the one that's been making all those sites. Don't you feel at least some obligation to explain to your colleagues in graphic design that equal length columns of text in a medium where there is no concept of pagination, where the viewport is a different size for every reader, where the font size (not to mention 'font-family', 'line-height' etc.) specified by the author (if they have specified it at all and aren't just relying on the default font size of the browser they happen to be using) can (and will) be overridden by the reader, where some classes of reader can't even see tables, and so on (I'll stop there, but could go on all night) is a bad idea?
It's the people who insist on treating the web as if it were made of sheets of paper of uniform size that are the pain in the neck, not CSS.
It depends greatly on where you live, and who your customers are. I've been a web developer for about two years (had done a lot of it in the past, though), since moving to a large town/small city. We came here with a long list of things we could do, and quickly settled on web development because every organisation here that had a web site had a dreadful website. You know the drill: something knocked together by some guy who'd just done a course in Dreamweaver and Photoshop, 90% of the text is an image, every link is a JavaScript onClick() event (why?!?), no page is without some form of god-awful cheezy animation, including the "click here to enter" splash screen which not only gets in your way at the first page, but at every subsection of the site's navigational heirarchy. Of course all these sites are three years out of date, because they just haven't had the cash to hand to pay the original developer to update it for them, and when they do, they find he's moved into another career (presumably following another 8 week course), and has no time for them.
The problem is that this arrangement is perfectly within their comfort zone. If you tell most small businesspeople that they can have a simple website for hundreds, rather than thousands of dollars, that they can easily update it themseves for free, and that every time they prepare a press release or similar promotional info for the local press, they can copy and paste in into their CMS in seconds and have an up-to-date and informative website rather than an outdated online sales brochure, they will look scared. And they are not hearing this from a dishevelled and manic nerd, but from an attractive and professionally presented young lady (my wife, a relatively normal person who is the public face of our business).
Every sale we make is a result of a lot of marketing ground work, because what we are selling is, while although undeniably superior to what the competition provides (at half the cost), totally foreign to our potential clients. So we end up with periods of frantic activity interspersed with periods of zero income. We've had some successes with some very satisfied customers, and some very frustrating experiences of the kind described above with some people who think that being a dumb obnoxious bully and being a shrewd businessperson is the same thing. After a very tough couple of years, we are finally keeping our heads above water, but I'm getting very sick of instant noodles and would like to be able to afford a night out at the local pub once in a while.
The answer seems to be not to move into a totally different line of work (the positions vacant section of our local paper is not sufficient to cover the floor of an average-sized bird cage), but to find complementary work to smooth out the income troughs. In fact my wife, in addition to doing all the administrative and organisational work for us, is now spending a day or two a week doing the same for other businesses around town.
So the question becomes, what kind of work can be a reliable supplementary source of income for a nearly-but-not-quite full-time web developer?
del.icio.us plus Audioscrobbler.
The thing that surprises me is that, for a social networking app developed in 2006, there's no mention of FOAF, RDF, or the Semantic Web on the developers' wiki. Am I going to have to master yet another set of data formats to write applications that interoperate with this?
It can't be April 1 already! Where did 2006 go?
But I always thought UNIT's scientific advisor, Dr. John Smith was pretty sharp.
Of course these days UNIT's star is waning with gung-ho unilateral organisations like Torchwood getting all the funding...
Matthew.
Michael Jackson was charging > $100 for his shows 20 years ago. To claim this has anything to do with P2P is ridiculous. Oh, sorry I forgot. Back then "home taping [was] killing music".
I see loads of great local bands at the pub down the road, and it doesn't cost me $250. What's more, none of them even have a contract with a record company.
I think a much more interesting statistical correlation is:
Clearly, it's record sales, not "piracy" that's driving up ticket costs. If you have a favourite band that works for an RIAA member, help them become more accessible to their fans by not buying their next album.
Anyway, Madonna's a cabaret performer, not a musician. I expect these ridiculous prices are not significantly different to the ridiculous prices you'd pay for front-row seats to the Lion King.
Matthew
AJAX is a transition point in the web's evolution beyond the browser. The real killer app is what happens when these applications' communication protocols standardise. It's not so long ago that when you wanted to run a blog, you either hand-coded HTML or had to have a server running slashcode. Now you can choose between dozens of free and non-free web apps or hosted services, and it doesn't really matter which you choose because your audience can aggregate from any of these via RSS, and view your content in whatever client they choose. I'm sure Blogger.com is still a viable business, but it's increasingly irrelevant.
Similarly, it's rapidly becoming possible to share calendaring information with others via CalDAV without caring which client and server options you and your collaborators prefer.
Whenever I do a Drupal site for an organisation I like to encourage them to set up an LDAP directory, so that they can use the same authoritative data source for authenticating to Drupal and other systems, internal address books (usable from a multitude of clients), and finely-grained control over sharing personnel data with affilliated organisations. The ability to do all this is very cool, and not at all dependant on my choice of OpenLDAP (which is, frankly, a bastard to get working), as the critical element is the LDAP open standards.
These are pretty simple examples, but I don't think it's too much to expect that open standards for interacting with applications like Flikr and Del.icio.us will emerge, along with increased choice over back-ends and interfaces and effective commoditisation of the services. Value moves up the chain, innovators move on to the next big thing, and it all starts over again.
At least that's how it should work.
Matthew.
Here's how it will play out:
And that's the way it will stay as long as the American people expect their elected officials to behave lawfully rather than ethically. I agree with Bush; the constitution is "just a piece of paper". He should be held to a higher standard of accountability than that.