Well, this certainly blends in well with Bill Joy's excellenct peice yesterday about the danger of Nanotech and BioEngineering.
This fellow hasn't started down the path of reengineered plants focused on pollution cleanup. It's also interesting that there is no mention made of tobacco. Tobacco plants have been used to clean radioactively contaminated soil because of their amazing ability to leach anything from the ground. At least there are no citings about the holy grail of nanotech that will create machines to clean up after us.
OTOH there has also been some really cool stuff done with bacterias that can be used to clean up pollution.
Cool stuff, but why is he focused entirely on trees?
That is their official policy if you are bringing seomthing back for a refund. I have generally found that I can get full credit if I go in, explain that I am dissatisfied, and trade it for something different.
One of the only reasons that I will shop at CompUSA is the return desk. I put together a new computer in January and wasn't sure which way to go on the video card. My old TNT had worked well in my last workstation, but I have also spent a lot of money on 3dfx over the years. swayed by the benchmarks I bought the top o' the line TNT2.
How handy that my new copy of Quake 3 for linux had just showed up. after spending a lot of painful time scouring the net and getting the X server setup correctly, I fired off Quake 3. Horrible sub 1 fps performance (on a p3-500 512MB).
So I went back to the net and tried many things over several days. Finally I just took the card back to CompUSA and told the people at the return desk flat out "Nvidia says they support Linux, but the performance was horrible." Traded the card in for Voodoo 3 3000 and been much happier.
The moral? Never open the sealed packets, that can count as "opened software" just download the latest drivers and keep an eye on your 7 or 14 or 30 day window to just take it back and say "It sucks!"
wtf? So the new business model to absorb a terrific and popular company, destroy their culture, discombobulate their website into a festering heap of painful confusion, commoditize them, completely flattening the market, and then IPO it for some giggles?
Palm Pilot was an awesome company, 3com just commoditized them and mediocered their innovation into the ground. Has anything really changed between the original Palm Pilot and the IIIc - ooh! it's in color! Look ma, same crappy basic apps, but in color!
I love my Palm Vx, but the innovation that is found in the Handspring (created by the original inventors of the palm pilot) is really indicitive of a stifling culture at 3com.
I wish US Robotics well, I'm sorry they had to suffer through 3com. Hopefully now they can return to innovating some kick ass products that geeks well lust after like the first time I saw a Courier 1200.
In several jobs I have been in we have used MySQL both in UNIX and NT. The cost savings have been phenominal, and the performance tradeoff has been reasonable.
Compared to $6k US for MS SQL Server (with an Internet License) or $50k to $100k US for an Oracle 8i server it takes a lot of need to justify those costs to management.
Want to see fuming red MS Zealots? Convince management that MySQL can do what needs to be done for an Intnernet Web Database and will save them $6k in cost. The system was implemented with MySQL in NT and ran great. They actually migrated the app to MS SQL and paid the $6k because the developer was bitching so much and had threatened to quit over it.
Use the best tools for the job. Anytime you play Zealot (over MS or Linux or BSD or whatever) you are the one that loses.
>Record labels, if nothing else, provide a filter that while it doesn't ensure that everything is quality, gets rid of a great deal of chaff. Book publishing is the same way...
why does publishing (or music) have to be done the same way? Have you looked at mp3.com lately? Sure you can browse through everything and listen to a lot of stuff that you don't like, but you can also peruse "top 40" lists and recommendations and pull out a lot of real gems.
I see no reason that you can't have a book site online just like mp3.com. Think of all of the unpublished authors that are letting their stuff rot through rejection letters or unread personal websites. Give them, give anyone, anywhere, the ability to be published. You will get a lot of crap, but you will also get some really good gems.
Slashdot does a good job of sorting throught the web for me. mp3.com does a good job of finding new and original music for me to listen to. There is no reason that a moderated web site for writers could not do the same. Split the test up into reasonably sized chunks and place the innocuous web banners that are easy to ignore on every page. The authors are paid based upon the number of unique IP page views. If people read two pages and give up, and make a bad rating, the author will not get much traffic or pay. If many people read the book to the end, or order a hard copy (printed and sent for 48 hour delivery) then the author could be very well paid. Split all of the revenues 50/50 with the author.
Tell me why it can't work! Most people buy books based upon reading the first few pages or chapter, if not just the cover blurb. People don't like to read online, so they read the beginning, get hooked, and order the book.
Just try it,
chris
- The IP created by this post is covered under the GPL. If you do it, at least let me know, but I wouldn't mind a job offer... 8->
>we need someone to summarize what is important for us.
Why do we all come to Slashdot? For me Slashdot does a reaonable job of summarizing the content available on the web and bringing forward gems or hot news that I am interested in, along with some interesting and occasionally educational commentary. I won't even get into the trolls, the stories, or hot grits and Natalie Portman.
What I look for in a portal site is something that is scouring for what I am looking for. Dead trees aren't bad, I greatly enjoy reading the commentaries on washingtonpost.com.
Maybe some of Jon's energy would be better spent pointing out examples of web publishing from old media that do meet his standards and ideals of "The New Information Revolution" instead of just belittling sites that try to find new publishing paradymes.
Will you teach us what the elements are of good documentation? Overviews, outlines, and best of galleries that we can use for inspiration. What pieces of documentation are the most important to get done first?
Codify some standards of good documentation. There is some consensus about what makes up specific types of documentation such as man pages, HOWTOs and readmes. How about user guides and advanced technical manuals?
There are many references to RTFM and RTS (Read The Source) but as the community has grown we have not responded well to a need for documentation that is usefull to noncoders. I have been through a great deal of frustration with undocumented, mis-documented, and out of date documents. I have usually dealt with this in an evolutionary manner, by not using the software.
Browsing the OSWG website I see a great resource for finding existing documentation, but what about a resource for creating good documentation?
"GEMA will never, ever tire of putting these globalization-addicted advocates of absolute freedom of communication - the depisers of culture and intellectual property - in their place."
I just wish we could get some RIAA and MPAA people to repeat this. How good would their PR be if people really understand that Free Speech is the mortal enemy of "culture and intellectual property".
It's just going to be free. They're giving away WinCE to help grow market share and sell more compilers. I realize that amazon has not yet patented this business strategy, but in the RealWorld it is generally known as loss leader marketing.
Give away the razor, make a fortune on the blades.
Read the article. MS is focussing on giving away WinCE for free. They may give away the source, but that's doubtful. If they do give away the source, it will probably go out to a limited group.
Why bother? There is too much publicity about companies that chose Linux because it was "Free". not "Open Source". MS Sees opportunity, they can capitolize on "Free" cause they hardly make any money on licensing. So this definately won't grow to the regular Wins because they make most of their money on those from licensing.
We need to get more companies to emphasize "Open Source" when they discuss their choice of Linux for embedded systems.
Not sure if anybody will read this since it's yesterdays thread, but...
The real problem with GUIs that I have been able to find is that in order to simplify GUIs need to make assumptions. Now good GUIs will have an "options" or "advanced" or "experts" page that will let you change those assumptions.
One system that I am liking the more that I use it the HP/UX SAM (System administration Tool). SAM is an ungrateful pain in the ass. SAM is much easier to use than the command line (HP/UX is the leading cause of skull fractures and dented walls around here). You would not let a complete beginner loose on SAM, but somebody who is coming up to speed or coming from Linux can do great on it. where am I really going?
SAM is a GUI that will tell you all of the command line functions that it ran. If I need to script something that I do not know how to do yet, I run it once in SAM, pick out the right commands to use, test, and away I go.
The hardest part about CLI is knowing which commands to use.
Distributed systems are already being used. In the group of the division of the company I contract to we have several hundred top of the line UNIX workstations. we also have a very large codebase that needs to be compiled on a regular basis. during the evenings we do distributed builds using all of the clients. It is gorgeous - a 500 CPU build server.
Distributed systems are very real and very useful. If we could not do distributed builds we would be spending upwards of 1 Million to buy a very high end UNIX box to do our builds on.
Now we have a 500 CPU server _and_ all of our developers have top of the line workstations to boot. Great stuff
I'm also an MCSE and I have taught classes on UNIX, TCP/IP, and network design (I'm also a CCDA).
The more I think about the differences between the platforms (after a nasty fight/discussion with my SO this weekend) I agree that the differences in the platforms and the learning curve is understanding.
An NT admin can be reasonably functional not knowing how anything actually works, just how to make it work, until it breaks.
A UNIX Admin cannot be reasonably functional without at least a basic understanding of how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Or are we just fooling ourselves?
Maybe the GUI really is the difference. In NT I go start>programs>administrative tools>user manager. In Linux I find a command prompt and type useradd. Or I can hunt through the new Gnome based tools...
maybe the GUI makes it easier, maybe the GUI hides complexity so people don't need to understand how things really work just to do simple tasks.
If the GUI takes control and brings in hordes of junior sysadmins, this may be a good thing for knowledgable tech workers overall. It will allow us to spend less time on mundane tasks and give a much greater understanding and respect for our abilities when things do really go wrong...
I am actually getting tired of this. This has been going on for many years and all that happens is people, whine, bitch, moan, and keep dragging the same old arguments through the dirt.
Fortunately some people are doing things.
Consumerism is OPTIONAL. If you are pissed off at how the big record companies are ripping off the artists and spewing out crap then DON'T BUY IT.
If you are sick of crass, pathetic movies, THEN DON'T GO.
You are free to live your life as you choose so long as you are not doing harm to others. There are alternatives to "corpratism"
Search the net for _legal_ new music. You'll be surprised, even top name bands are releasing free material on the net.
support new distribution mechanisms. Research how they treat the artists, and send some e-mail out to the artists to see how they feel. IMHO mp3.com is doing a good job, but they are getting competitors.
Movies are tougher, but we are getting there. The compromise that I have made is to only rent DVDs. The studios make far less money from rentals than sales.
The real answer is to find a new model and start supporting it. We are (generally) here because we support open software and we want to know what is going on and what we can do. It's not that hard. Find a model you like, or invent one, and support it with your money, your time, your creativity, or your ideas.
Conversation and discussion are important meaningful things, but there always comes a time when action is required.
Thank you first of all fr such a well thought out and enlighteneed argument.
I see what your saying; my argument is a little circular. (So, too, is part of Katz's argument, where he says that "Corporations... exclude... 'non-commercial' voices." Well, of course, because once they bring on a new "voice" it becomes, by definition, commercial.)
I had to respond to this because it brings closer to the surface that JonKatz is alomost arguing against himself. Jon is a commercial writer who is being paid for these articles. He is however writing within a new revenue model. although it is not truly new, it is supported soley by advertising and is a close analog of the "Free" weekly newspaper present in most of America.
The theft/payment/profit/compensation is in my mind the most interesting arena of exploration. Theft is traditionally referenced to physical objects. Patent extended theft to the creation of physical objects by a certain means. Copyright extends theft (ownership) over physical representation of ideas, be they writings or artwork. we do not have any current representaion of theft that does not involve something physical.
When sombody copies a CD to give to their friend theft is involved because they have created a duplicate physical object that is protected. If they RIP a CD and give the files to a friend, they have copied a physical object that is protected. The copy is not physical, but they have created a precise duplicate of a unique physical object.
So many of our analogies break down because there is no physical representaion of a purely digital creation. OTOH it can be argued that we are merely dealing with a new physical medium, the computer, which has new properties of infinite flexibility and propagation, but is fundamentally no different than oil on canvas or words on paper because the ideas behind the creations are the same, merely the medium is different.
payment/profit/compensation is really the sticky area. Artists create because of the joy of creating, be they sculpters, musicians, or programmers. If their creations are able to be leveraged to be able to take care of their material needs then more of their energy, spirit, and creativity can be leveraged into the common good, creating more original "things".
a common theme among the mass media has been that the Internet will redefine business by reducing the layers between creator and consumer. This is beginning to happen more every day. Instead of paying for physical representation of ideas, I can "pay" for there digital equivilents. I can go to MP3.com and download new music, for which the artist is paid via a split of the ad revenues which my visit generates. I can come to Slashdot and read the opinions of JonKatz (and several thousand commentators) and Jon gets paid again through the ad banners that we view.
In each of these models monetary compensation is passed very effeciently to the creator of the original work. There is overhead, but there is not the overhead of large headquarters or thousands of executives wining and dining local media personalities the purchase exposure for their product.
I wonder if Lexus/Nexus has ever studied whether or not advertising could support their revenue model more than subscriptions?
absolutely and without question I would pay other forms of compensation.
At the beginning of last week I went out to MP3.com to look and see what was available and If the quality had improved. I found hundreds of excellent techno and electronic songs, inspiring divas, and some hilarious country. Over the next few days I downloaded about 2 GB of MP3's from these artists.
I am still torn about compensation. at MP3.com the only option is to buy a hard copy album from the artist for $6-10, much more affordable than the local store, but honestly I have no interest in owning more physical CD's. so I dug deeper into MP3.com and their compensation.
MP3.com splits their ad revenue among the artists ( in February they paid out $200,000 ) based upon popularity measured in plays and downloads. Their top 20 artists averaged $5k in ad revenues. This is a good start, but far less than major record contracts and I am still only giving them pennies when I download 20 songs from them.
so I looked at the CD's. MP3.com is far more generous than the major record labels. Every artist gets 50% of the revenues from CD sales. cool, this gets me the opportunity to better reward the artist, but then I have lots of physical CDs laying around and a lot of money is wasted in pressing, packaging, and shipping me something that I will just throw on a shelf and ignore.
Middle ground, middle ground. I would be willing to pay half of the price of the album to download a single zip file with all of the songs in it. No, it is not very hard to sit there and select every single song and download it (as I did), but organized tar balls are a lot easier for me to deal with, it is much more likely that I am going to remember the artist if when I undo all of these tarballs they spit out into organized directories by artist and subdirs by album.
This is providing a value added service that I would be willing to pay for. I want to see more money go to the artist, and I don't want to waste any of my money on dead trees and UPS.
One more catch, it needs to be persistent so that if I have a crash (without good backups), or I go to work or home or change jobs, then I can go back to the site and redownload everything I have already purchased.
Thoughts,,
chris
-- all thoughts and ideas in this post are hereby released into the public domain.
New games lately cannot be copied even with a CD burner. We are back to the old days of defective floppies where it was impossible to make a legitimate backup copy and if your original went bad the publisher said "buy another one."
There are several new games on the market, Age of Empires 2 is the only one I can distinctly remember, that have defective tracks in the CD itself. When you try to make a legitimate backup copy you get a track read error. The game looks for this defective track when it is running and will not run without it.
I am serious about _legitimate backup_ copies. All of my original CDs are locked up in a safe at home. I travel alot, CDs get scratched, things get lost or stolen (or forgotten in a clients CD Drive).
what is iritating is that I thought this fight was dead and gone 10 years ago. Now I will be back in the position that if media I own gets damaged, I will be forced to resort to a method that is technically illegal in order to access a program that I have a legitimate license to use.
We've come full circle only recreating the mistakes of the past.
I am really having a hard time sinking my teeth into your argument. I am not sure that we could ever agree, so I will lay out my ideas more clearly, instead of just the one line finish to comment.
Your argument would seem to be that if I come up with a better way of reaching my potential customers then I should be granted a patent to prevent anyone else from reaching their potential customers in the same way for 17 years without paying me a royalty. Of course this becomes more compeling if I can use it against my competitors, but remember that a patent is exclusive against anyone, not just competitors.
First a flippant argument (just to bring things into some perspective). We must immediatley block all http traffic on the Internet until each site has proven that they have payed royalties to Tim Berners-Lee for their use HTTP and HTML that he invented in 1992 and should therefore have an exclusive license to until 2009. Yes I have oversimplified and focused on Tim, I am extracting the essence to focus on the argument.
The exclusive HTTP patent would fit into the qualifications for a business method patent that Mr. O'Reilly outlined: It's a unique new way of doing business, and it is codified (literally in C!).
More on target, if I realize that giving people kickbacks for them linking to my website increases the amount of people that link to my website, is that truly innovative?
No: 1. linking is integral to the web.
2. Kickbacks go farther back than money itself. Using money to stimulate behavior patterns is a very well understood science.
3. Because I've automated it? Ok, I have created a unique peice of code that deserves copyright protection (as does all code, automatically). All I have done is what computers do, simplified and automated the repetitive task of tracking and tabulating my kickbacks. Wow are third world despots going to love the Internet!
You do come back to something more agreeable "few years of protection". I can see this and I am swayed by Jeff's argument for 1-click technology, but not the associates program.
How can we possibly justify awarded a Patent to somebody that computerized the Amway marketing model?
Maybe the real difference here is in how we fundamentaly view computers. IMHO a computer is a tool. A tool to accomplish a task, no different no a telephone, a shovel, or a business card.
do people really deserve exclusive licenses to apply standard marketing and sales techniques to new tools? Is telemarketing really that revolutionary or is it just applying door to door salesmen to telephones?
wow, change. Jeff wants to do something. Time say's "great, but can't you do more?"
Jeff is very well spoken. He is one of the best spoken CEO's that I have listened to to date. There was just something that made me uneasy about the article that I can't put my finger on. Maybe it was just the sudden shift with the pat on the back that says "you're right, we didn't do this quite right, so run along now and we'll make sure that it gets taken care of."
Tim OTOH doesn't really seem interested in compromising. He's excited to go to Washington and lobby, but he doesn't quite seem convinced that change is enough.
The whole bit with Business method patents is abso freaking EVIL. I need to run down and file my patent on selling fruit from a cart near the corner of busy intersections...
chris
--grr more workday lost to thinking about stuff on slashdot, must be time for a cigarette.
Thank you for bringing my comments back into perspective. I was emotional and late for a meeting when I wrote them (as evidenced by the great spelling errors you quoted).
People do learn new things everyday, and If you want to take advantage of the power of new computers and new programs people are going to have to continue to learn new things. The real issue is "How can we make it easier for users to learn?".
Intuitive vs. ease of use is very hard to clarify. Intuition is very real, it is based off of past experiences. The breadth of experiences that somebody is able to bridge is a measure of intuition.
Programs that do complex things do not have to be hard to use. what is important is that somebody that knows what they want to do and has some familiarity with the environment (UI, OS) is able to do so with out having to dig through incomplete readme files and certainly witout having to dig through the source.
I very much want something that has "easy" and "complex" interface modes. The next post down talks about "basic" and "power user" interfaces to their scanner UI. Excellent and very much what I am after.
consistence and intuitiveness are very much interwoven. If a program is consistent with the overall UI and consistent with similar programs (for better and sometimes worse) than it's intuitiveness is greatly increased. If a user can sit down and go "In power program for NT I do this to acomplish my task, now in super program for Linux I am am going to try this similar sounding/looking thing."
Maybe we are (or probably me) lacking the language to really communicate the core issue. That is why I feel that we have continued to see so many of these articles over the years. People keep trying to find the verbalization and perspective that make the answer more obvious and understandable. The problem is that we are still grapling with the underlying question and not even getting to the answer.
chris
p.s. I hope XF86Config never goes away, I am just glad that there are good tools out there that make it possible to not have to hand edit XF86Config just to get a functioning X. I still have bruises on my head from 6 or 7 years ago when I first set up XFree86.
This is really the oldest problem in the free software (Open Source/label of choice) community. There are authors that elicit and get feedback, but they are ususally getting feedback from other programmers, so it's just an inbred feedback loop.
People growl at the thought of having to edit a text file to make an adjustment or configuration. Geeks say "Awesome - text file" and whine to people to just learn how to do it.
Teching the masses is not the point and will never be the point. The masses will not learn and any software that is predicated on a painful interface will be opverthrown by software that is pretty and easy to use.
It's not what any of us wants to hear, that free software utterly fails to companies like Microsoft that spends millions of dollars on research with people who are not geeks, who are not programmers, who are not even proficient with computers.
Money is not the point. research, forethought, and feedback is the point. There is reason that Apple and Microsft have fixed UI models. They recognized that the biggest weakness of most programmers is intuitive UI design.
Programmers and geeks as a whole are extremely intuitive people, and that intuition allows us to make tremendous leaps of the non-obvious. Most users are not capable of these tremendous leaps and fail to understand. These users are not stupid or even lacking in intuition. One component of intuition is past experience, and if they have not spent a long time around computers then they do not have the necessary reference material.
There are UI guides out there, and there have been some efforts by the GUI people to get coders to follow them, but we all know that they are herding cats because we won't follow anything that somebody else is going to impose. <sarcasm> I don't need those frigging kernel patches that king linus and prince alan keep trying to shove down my throat.
To get back on subject. If we really want to take over the universe (duh) we are going to have to figure out how to make software that is easy to use, friendly, and intuitive to -non-computer users. There is no compromise.
Thank you Redhat, Corel, and all of other distributors that have gone to great lengths to make is easier to install Linux. I mean there are tools around now so that I don't have to manually program my monitors frequencies into XF86config!
After the first article I decided to give mp3.com a try again. I have been thrilled and amazed by the excellent music available, especially in the rave/techno/industrial sphere.
what I am looking for now is a way that I can support the artist without buying the CD. For some bizarre reason I do not have a desire to own more CD's, not to mention that cutting the CD out of the picture will decrease cost to me and increase revenue to the artist.
To simplify, say I have $20 to spend on music. If I buy a CD the artist ( I am guessing) gets $2. So I could buy ~3 CDs and get $6 back to the artists. I would rather spend that $20 to get $19 back to the artists (asuming the loss of some overhead costs that are now hidden in the CD Production costs).
That said, there are *good* clauses, like specifically allowing reverse engineering for compatibility. BRAVO!.
Yes the DMCA does permit reverse engineering for content delivery, but if you need to bypass some copyright protection to RE the content delivery than that is flatly illegal.
Read the full text of the preliminary injunction in the New York DeCSS case and you will see that this is exactly how the MPAA is going after DeCSS.
We got duped, now we need to figure out what to do to fight it. although Jon doesn't remember the media coverage around the DMCA going through congress, I do. There was a tremendous amount of lobbying done by the software industries and the EFF. Everybody relaxed and celibrated when the Reverse Engineering clause went in, without even relizing that it was taken away immediatly in the 'Copyright Protection Mechanisms" clause.
That is where we died. That is the battlefield that we must fight on now. They thought they could beat us technically with poorly implemented encryption and we trounced them. But now the battle has moved to their battlefield, the legal system.
The real, fundamental, question around this is what is the most effective method of fighting it?
Some people take the stance that they will fight it by not buying anything, only copying stuff off of the net. This doesn't do any good though, it just encourages RIAA and the MPAA, and it deprives the artists entirely.
Can we fight it legally? How do we put together a collective voice that is strong enough to take to washington and take to the courts to have a real impact?
what about technically. That is, afterall, our forte. MP3.com seems to have made a place for online distribution directly by the artists, but has it been effective? MP3 based online radio is certainly an option ( at least I could listen to the radio at work, which I can't do now because of tempest shielding).
Ultimately this will be a legal battle, but our best bet is to do an end run around them technically. To find, embrace, and promote a way for artists to get money directly from the people without going through the record companies. Choosing your battleground is one of the most important strategic decisions and there is no question that we control the technical battleground.
We have already decided that MP3 is the format of choice. we have several great methods of distribution, so now how do we get repay the artists whose music we want without lining the pockets of the record industry.
Open source and free software does present the parallel to this fight. Five and six years ago we never dreamed that we could get payed for working on Open source software, and now we have Open source companies that are IPO'ing with valuations in the billions of dollars. What did we do, what did we learn, and how can we take those lessons to the artists to open source music without starving them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this certainly blends in well with Bill Joy's excellenct peice yesterday about the danger of Nanotech and BioEngineering.
This fellow hasn't started down the path of reengineered plants focused on pollution cleanup. It's also interesting that there is no mention made of tobacco. Tobacco plants have been used to clean radioactively contaminated soil because of their amazing ability to leach anything from the ground. At least there are no citings about the holy grail of nanotech that will create machines to clean up after us.
OTOH there has also been some really cool stuff done with bacterias that can be used to clean up pollution.
Cool stuff, but why is he focused entirely on trees?
chris
That is their official policy if you are bringing seomthing back for a refund. I have generally found that I can get full credit if I go in, explain that I am dissatisfied, and trade it for something different.
One of the only reasons that I will shop at CompUSA is the return desk. I put together a new computer in January and wasn't sure which way to go on the video card. My old TNT had worked well in my last workstation, but I have also spent a lot of money on 3dfx over the years. swayed by the benchmarks I bought the top o' the line TNT2.
How handy that my new copy of Quake 3 for linux had just showed up. after spending a lot of painful time scouring the net and getting the X server setup correctly, I fired off Quake 3. Horrible sub 1 fps performance (on a p3-500 512MB).
So I went back to the net and tried many things over several days. Finally I just took the card back to CompUSA and told the people at the return desk flat out "Nvidia says they support Linux, but the performance was horrible." Traded the card in for Voodoo 3 3000 and been much happier.
The moral? Never open the sealed packets, that can count as "opened software" just download the latest drivers and keep an eye on your 7 or 14 or 30 day window to just take it back and say "It sucks!"
chris
wtf? So the new business model to absorb a terrific and popular company, destroy their culture, discombobulate their website into a festering heap of painful confusion, commoditize them, completely flattening the market, and then IPO it for some giggles?
Palm Pilot was an awesome company, 3com just commoditized them and mediocered their innovation into the ground. Has anything really changed between the original Palm Pilot and the IIIc - ooh! it's in color! Look ma, same crappy basic apps, but in color!
I love my Palm Vx, but the innovation that is found in the Handspring (created by the original inventors of the palm pilot) is really indicitive of a stifling culture at 3com.
I wish US Robotics well, I'm sorry they had to suffer through 3com. Hopefully now they can return to innovating some kick ass products that geeks well lust after like the first time I saw a Courier 1200.
chris
In several jobs I have been in we have used MySQL both in UNIX and NT. The cost savings have been phenominal, and the performance tradeoff has been reasonable.
Compared to $6k US for MS SQL Server (with an Internet License) or $50k to $100k US for an Oracle 8i server it takes a lot of need to justify those costs to management.
Want to see fuming red MS Zealots? Convince management that MySQL can do what needs to be done for an Intnernet Web Database and will save them $6k in cost. The system was implemented with MySQL in NT and ran great. They actually migrated the app to MS SQL and paid the $6k because the developer was bitching so much and had threatened to quit over it.
Use the best tools for the job. Anytime you play Zealot (over MS or Linux or BSD or whatever) you are the one that loses.
chris
>Record labels, if nothing else, provide a filter that while it doesn't ensure that everything is quality, gets rid of a great deal of chaff. Book publishing is the same way...
why does publishing (or music) have to be done the same way? Have you looked at mp3.com lately? Sure you can browse through everything and listen to a lot of stuff that you don't like, but you can also peruse "top 40" lists and recommendations and pull out a lot of real gems.
I see no reason that you can't have a book site online just like mp3.com. Think of all of the unpublished authors that are letting their stuff rot through rejection letters or unread personal websites. Give them, give anyone, anywhere, the ability to be published. You will get a lot of crap, but you will also get some really good gems.
Slashdot does a good job of sorting throught the web for me. mp3.com does a good job of finding new and original music for me to listen to. There is no reason that a moderated web site for writers could not do the same. Split the test up into reasonably sized chunks and place the innocuous web banners that are easy to ignore on every page. The authors are paid based upon the number of unique IP page views. If people read two pages and give up, and make a bad rating, the author will not get much traffic or pay. If many people read the book to the end, or order a hard copy (printed and sent for 48 hour delivery) then the author could be very well paid. Split all of the revenues 50/50 with the author.
Tell me why it can't work! Most people buy books based upon reading the first few pages or chapter, if not just the cover blurb. People don't like to read online, so they read the beginning, get hooked, and order the book.
Just try it,
chris
- The IP created by this post is covered under the GPL. If you do it, at least let me know, but I wouldn't mind a job offer... 8->
Why do we all come to Slashdot? For me Slashdot does a reaonable job of summarizing the content available on the web and bringing forward gems or hot news that I am interested in, along with some interesting and occasionally educational commentary. I won't even get into the trolls, the stories, or hot grits and Natalie Portman.
What I look for in a portal site is something that is scouring for what I am looking for. Dead trees aren't bad, I greatly enjoy reading the commentaries on washingtonpost.com.
Maybe some of Jon's energy would be better spent pointing out examples of web publishing from old media that do meet his standards and ideals of "The New Information Revolution" instead of just belittling sites that try to find new publishing paradymes.
chris
Will you teach us what the elements are of good documentation? Overviews, outlines, and best of galleries that we can use for inspiration. What pieces of documentation are the most important to get done first?
Codify some standards of good documentation. There is some consensus about what makes up specific types of documentation such as man pages, HOWTOs and readmes. How about user guides and advanced technical manuals?
There are many references to RTFM and RTS (Read The Source) but as the community has grown we have not responded well to a need for documentation that is usefull to noncoders. I have been through a great deal of frustration with undocumented, mis-documented, and out of date documents. I have usually dealt with this in an evolutionary manner, by not using the software.
Browsing the OSWG website I see a great resource for finding existing documentation, but what about a resource for creating good documentation?
chris
I Love It!
.sig here...
"GEMA will never, ever tire of putting these globalization-addicted advocates of absolute freedom of communication - the depisers of culture and intellectual property - in their place."
I just wish we could get some RIAA and MPAA people to repeat this. How good would their PR be if people really understand that Free Speech is the mortal enemy of "culture and intellectual property".
Maybe I'm getting closer to a
chris
Yep nothing really has changed, except the cost.
It's not OpenSource though.
It's just going to be free. They're giving away WinCE to help grow market share and sell more compilers. I realize that amazon has not yet patented this business strategy, but in the RealWorld it is generally known as loss leader marketing.
Give away the razor, make a fortune on the blades.
I agree... Yippee, big freaking deal.
Read the article. MS is focussing on giving away WinCE for free. They may give away the source, but that's doubtful. If they do give away the source, it will probably go out to a limited group.
Why bother? There is too much publicity about companies that chose Linux because it was "Free". not "Open Source". MS Sees opportunity, they can capitolize on "Free" cause they hardly make any money on licensing. So this definately won't grow to the regular Wins because they make most of their money on those from licensing.
We need to get more companies to emphasize "Open Source" when they discuss their choice of Linux for embedded systems.
chris
Not sure if anybody will read this since it's yesterdays thread, but...
The real problem with GUIs that I have been able to find is that in order to simplify GUIs need to make assumptions. Now good GUIs will have an "options" or "advanced" or "experts" page that will let you change those assumptions.
One system that I am liking the more that I use it the HP/UX SAM (System administration Tool). SAM is an ungrateful pain in the ass. SAM is much easier to use than the command line (HP/UX is the leading cause of skull fractures and dented walls around here). You would not let a complete beginner loose on SAM, but somebody who is coming up to speed or coming from Linux can do great on it. where am I really going?
SAM is a GUI that will tell you all of the command line functions that it ran. If I need to script something that I do not know how to do yet, I run it once in SAM, pick out the right commands to use, test, and away I go.
The hardest part about CLI is knowing which commands to use.
chris
Distributed systems are already being used. In the group of the division of the company I contract to we have several hundred top of the line UNIX workstations. we also have a very large codebase that needs to be compiled on a regular basis. during the evenings we do distributed builds using all of the clients. It is gorgeous - a 500 CPU build server.
Distributed systems are very real and very useful. If we could not do distributed builds we would be spending upwards of 1 Million to buy a very high end UNIX box to do our builds on.
Now we have a 500 CPU server _and_ all of our developers have top of the line workstations to boot. Great stuff
cyphunk,
I'm also an MCSE and I have taught classes on UNIX, TCP/IP, and network design (I'm also a CCDA).
The more I think about the differences between the platforms (after a nasty fight/discussion with my SO this weekend) I agree that the differences in the platforms and the learning curve is understanding.
An NT admin can be reasonably functional not knowing how anything actually works, just how to make it work, until it breaks.
A UNIX Admin cannot be reasonably functional without at least a basic understanding of how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Or are we just fooling ourselves?
Maybe the GUI really is the difference. In NT I go start>programs>administrative tools>user manager. In Linux I find a command prompt and type useradd. Or I can hunt through the new Gnome based tools...
maybe the GUI makes it easier, maybe the GUI hides complexity so people don't need to understand how things really work just to do simple tasks.
If the GUI takes control and brings in hordes of junior sysadmins, this may be a good thing for knowledgable tech workers overall. It will allow us to spend less time on mundane tasks and give a much greater understanding and respect for our abilities when things do really go wrong...
chris
I am actually getting tired of this. This has been going on for many years and all that happens is people, whine, bitch, moan, and keep dragging the same old arguments through the dirt.
Fortunately some people are doing things.
Consumerism is OPTIONAL. If you are pissed off at how the big record companies are ripping off the artists and spewing out crap then DON'T BUY IT.
If you are sick of crass, pathetic movies, THEN DON'T GO.
You are free to live your life as you choose so long as you are not doing harm to others. There are alternatives to "corpratism"
Search the net for _legal_ new music. You'll be surprised, even top name bands are releasing free material on the net.
support new distribution mechanisms. Research how they treat the artists, and send some e-mail out to the artists to see how they feel. IMHO mp3.com is doing a good job, but they are getting competitors.
Movies are tougher, but we are getting there. The compromise that I have made is to only rent DVDs. The studios make far less money from rentals than sales.
The real answer is to find a new model and start supporting it. We are (generally) here because we support open software and we want to know what is going on and what we can do. It's not that hard. Find a model you like, or invent one, and support it with your money, your time, your creativity, or your ideas.
Conversation and discussion are important meaningful things, but there always comes a time when action is required.
chris
I had to respond to this because it brings closer to the surface that JonKatz is alomost arguing against himself. Jon is a commercial writer who is being paid for these articles. He is however writing within a new revenue model. although it is not truly new, it is supported soley by advertising and is a close analog of the "Free" weekly newspaper present in most of America.
The theft/payment/profit/compensation is in my mind the most interesting arena of exploration. Theft is traditionally referenced to physical objects. Patent extended theft to the creation of physical objects by a certain means. Copyright extends theft (ownership) over physical representation of ideas, be they writings or artwork. we do not have any current representaion of theft that does not involve something physical.
When sombody copies a CD to give to their friend theft is involved because they have created a duplicate physical object that is protected. If they RIP a CD and give the files to a friend, they have copied a physical object that is protected. The copy is not physical, but they have created a precise duplicate of a unique physical object.
So many of our analogies break down because there is no physical representaion of a purely digital creation. OTOH it can be argued that we are merely dealing with a new physical medium, the computer, which has new properties of infinite flexibility and propagation, but is fundamentally no different than oil on canvas or words on paper because the ideas behind the creations are the same, merely the medium is different.
payment/profit/compensation is really the sticky area. Artists create because of the joy of creating, be they sculpters, musicians, or programmers. If their creations are able to be leveraged to be able to take care of their material needs then more of their energy, spirit, and creativity can be leveraged into the common good, creating more original "things".
a common theme among the mass media has been that the Internet will redefine business by reducing the layers between creator and consumer. This is beginning to happen more every day. Instead of paying for physical representation of ideas, I can "pay" for there digital equivilents. I can go to MP3.com and download new music, for which the artist is paid via a split of the ad revenues which my visit generates. I can come to Slashdot and read the opinions of JonKatz (and several thousand commentators) and Jon gets paid again through the ad banners that we view.
In each of these models monetary compensation is passed very effeciently to the creator of the original work. There is overhead, but there is not the overhead of large headquarters or thousands of executives wining and dining local media personalities the purchase exposure for their product.
I wonder if Lexus/Nexus has ever studied whether or not advertising could support their revenue model more than subscriptions?
enjoy,
Chris
Jon,
absolutely and without question I would pay other forms of compensation.
At the beginning of last week I went out to MP3.com to look and see what was available and If the quality had improved. I found hundreds of excellent techno and electronic songs, inspiring divas, and some hilarious country. Over the next few days I downloaded about 2 GB of MP3's from these artists.
I am still torn about compensation. at MP3.com the only option is to buy a hard copy album from the artist for $6-10, much more affordable than the local store, but honestly I have no interest in owning more physical CD's. so I dug deeper into MP3.com and their compensation.
MP3.com splits their ad revenue among the artists ( in February they paid out $200,000 ) based upon popularity measured in plays and downloads. Their top 20 artists averaged $5k in ad revenues. This is a good start, but far less than major record contracts and I am still only giving them pennies when I download 20 songs from them.
so I looked at the CD's. MP3.com is far more generous than the major record labels. Every artist gets 50% of the revenues from CD sales. cool, this gets me the opportunity to better reward the artist, but then I have lots of physical CDs laying around and a lot of money is wasted in pressing, packaging, and shipping me something that I will just throw on a shelf and ignore.
Middle ground, middle ground. I would be willing to pay half of the price of the album to download a single zip file with all of the songs in it. No, it is not very hard to sit there and select every single song and download it (as I did), but organized tar balls are a lot easier for me to deal with, it is much more likely that I am going to remember the artist if when I undo all of these tarballs they spit out into organized directories by artist and subdirs by album.
This is providing a value added service that I would be willing to pay for. I want to see more money go to the artist, and I don't want to waste any of my money on dead trees and UPS.
One more catch, it needs to be persistent so that if I have a crash (without good backups), or I go to work or home or change jobs, then I can go back to the site and redownload everything I have already purchased.
Thoughts,,
chris
--
all thoughts and ideas in this post are hereby released into the public domain.
New games lately cannot be copied even with a CD burner. We are back to the old days of defective floppies where it was impossible to make a legitimate backup copy and if your original went bad the publisher said "buy another one."
There are several new games on the market, Age of Empires 2 is the only one I can distinctly remember, that have defective tracks in the CD itself. When you try to make a legitimate backup copy you get a track read error. The game looks for this defective track when it is running and will not run without it.
I am serious about _legitimate backup_ copies. All of my original CDs are locked up in a safe at home. I travel alot, CDs get scratched, things get lost or stolen (or forgotten in a clients CD Drive).
what is iritating is that I thought this fight was dead and gone 10 years ago. Now I will be back in the position that if media I own gets damaged, I will be forced to resort to a method that is technically illegal in order to access a program that I have a legitimate license to use.
We've come full circle only recreating the mistakes of the past.
chris
I am really having a hard time sinking my teeth into your argument. I am not sure that we could ever agree, so I will lay out my ideas more clearly, instead of just the one line finish to comment.
Your argument would seem to be that if I come up with a better way of reaching my potential customers then I should be granted a patent to prevent anyone else from reaching their potential customers in the same way for 17 years without paying me a royalty. Of course this becomes more compeling if I can use it against my competitors, but remember that a patent is exclusive against anyone, not just competitors.
First a flippant argument (just to bring things into some perspective). We must immediatley block all http traffic on the Internet until each site has proven that they have payed royalties to Tim Berners-Lee for their use HTTP and HTML that he invented in 1992 and should therefore have an exclusive license to until 2009. Yes I have oversimplified and focused on Tim, I am extracting the essence to focus on the argument.
The exclusive HTTP patent would fit into the qualifications for a business method patent that Mr. O'Reilly outlined: It's a unique new way of doing business, and it is codified (literally in C!).
More on target, if I realize that giving people kickbacks for them linking to my website increases the amount of people that link to my website, is that truly innovative?
No:
1. linking is integral to the web.
2. Kickbacks go farther back than money itself. Using money to stimulate behavior patterns is a very well understood science.
3. Because I've automated it? Ok, I have created a unique peice of code that deserves copyright protection (as does all code, automatically). All I have done is what computers do, simplified and automated the repetitive task of tracking and tabulating my kickbacks. Wow are third world despots going to love the Internet!
You do come back to something more agreeable "few years of protection". I can see this and I am swayed by Jeff's argument for 1-click technology, but not the associates program.
How can we possibly justify awarded a Patent to somebody that computerized the Amway marketing model?
Maybe the real difference here is in how we fundamentaly view computers. IMHO a computer is a tool. A tool to accomplish a task, no different no a telephone, a shovel, or a business card.
do people really deserve exclusive licenses to apply standard marketing and sales techniques to new tools? Is telemarketing really that revolutionary or is it just applying door to door salesmen to telephones?
enjoy,
chris
wow, change. Jeff wants to do something. Time say's "great, but can't you do more?"
Jeff is very well spoken. He is one of the best spoken CEO's that I have listened to to date. There was just something that made me uneasy about the article that I can't put my finger on. Maybe it was just the sudden shift with the pat on the back that says "you're right, we didn't do this quite right, so run along now and we'll make sure that it gets taken care of."
Tim OTOH doesn't really seem interested in compromising. He's excited to go to Washington and lobby, but he doesn't quite seem convinced that change is enough.
The whole bit with Business method patents is abso freaking EVIL. I need to run down and file my patent on selling fruit from a cart near the corner of busy intersections...
chris
--grr more workday lost to thinking about stuff on slashdot, must be time for a cigarette.
Thank you for bringing my comments back into perspective. I was emotional and late for a meeting when I wrote them (as evidenced by the great spelling errors you quoted).
People do learn new things everyday, and If you want to take advantage of the power of new computers and new programs people are going to have to continue to learn new things. The real issue is "How can we make it easier for users to learn?".
Intuitive vs. ease of use is very hard to clarify. Intuition is very real, it is based off of past experiences. The breadth of experiences that somebody is able to bridge is a measure of intuition.
Programs that do complex things do not have to be hard to use. what is important is that somebody that knows what they want to do and has some familiarity with the environment (UI, OS) is able to do so with out having to dig through incomplete readme files and certainly witout having to dig through the source.
I very much want something that has "easy" and "complex" interface modes. The next post down talks about "basic" and "power user" interfaces to their scanner UI. Excellent and very much what I am after.
consistence and intuitiveness are very much interwoven. If a program is consistent with the overall UI and consistent with similar programs (for better and sometimes worse) than it's intuitiveness is greatly increased. If a user can sit down and go "In power program for NT I do this to acomplish my task, now in super program for Linux I am am going to try this similar sounding/looking thing."
Maybe we are (or probably me) lacking the language to really communicate the core issue. That is why I feel that we have continued to see so many of these articles over the years. People keep trying to find the verbalization and perspective that make the answer more obvious and understandable. The problem is that we are still grapling with the underlying question and not even getting to the answer.
chris
p.s. I hope XF86Config never goes away, I am just glad that there are good tools out there that make it possible to not have to hand edit XF86Config just to get a functioning X. I still have bruises on my head from 6 or 7 years ago when I first set up XFree86.
This is really the oldest problem in the free software (Open Source/label of choice) community. There are authors that elicit and get feedback, but they are ususally getting feedback from other programmers, so it's just an inbred feedback loop.
People growl at the thought of having to edit a text file to make an adjustment or configuration. Geeks say "Awesome - text file" and whine to people to just learn how to do it.
Teching the masses is not the point and will never be the point. The masses will not learn and any software that is predicated on a painful interface will be opverthrown by software that is pretty and easy to use.
It's not what any of us wants to hear, that free software utterly fails to companies like Microsoft that spends millions of dollars on research with people who are not geeks, who are not programmers, who are not even proficient with computers.
Money is not the point. research, forethought, and feedback is the point. There is reason that Apple and Microsft have fixed UI models. They recognized that the biggest weakness of most programmers is intuitive UI design.
Programmers and geeks as a whole are extremely intuitive people, and that intuition allows us to make tremendous leaps of the non-obvious. Most users are not capable of these tremendous leaps and fail to understand. These users are not stupid or even lacking in intuition. One component of intuition is past experience, and if they have not spent a long time around computers then they do not have the necessary reference material.
There are UI guides out there, and there have been some efforts by the GUI people to get coders to follow them, but we all know that they are herding cats because we won't follow anything that somebody else is going to impose. <sarcasm> I don't need those frigging kernel patches that king linus and prince alan keep trying to shove down my throat.
To get back on subject. If we really want to take over the universe (duh) we are going to have to figure out how to make software that is easy to use, friendly, and intuitive to -non-computer users. There is no compromise.
Thank you Redhat, Corel, and all of other distributors that have gone to great lengths to make is easier to install Linux. I mean there are tools around now so that I don't have to manually program my monitors frequencies into XF86config!
enjoy,
chris
After the first article I decided to give mp3.com a try again. I have been thrilled and amazed by the excellent music available, especially in the rave/techno/industrial sphere.
what I am looking for now is a way that I can support the artist without buying the CD. For some bizarre reason I do not have a desire to own more CD's, not to mention that cutting the CD out of the picture will decrease cost to me and increase revenue to the artist.
To simplify, say I have $20 to spend on music. If I buy a CD the artist ( I am guessing) gets $2. So I could buy ~3 CDs and get $6 back to the artists. I would rather spend that $20 to get $19 back to the artists (asuming the loss of some overhead costs that are now hidden in the CD Production costs).
Thoughts?
chris
Yes the DMCA does permit reverse engineering for content delivery, but if you need to bypass some copyright protection to RE the content delivery than that is flatly illegal.
Read the full text of the preliminary injunction in the New York DeCSS case and you will see that this is exactly how the MPAA is going after DeCSS.
We got duped, now we need to figure out what to do to fight it. although Jon doesn't remember the media coverage around the DMCA going through congress, I do. There was a tremendous amount of lobbying done by the software industries and the EFF. Everybody relaxed and celibrated when the Reverse Engineering clause went in, without even relizing that it was taken away immediatly in the 'Copyright Protection Mechanisms" clause.
That is where we died. That is the battlefield that we must fight on now. They thought they could beat us technically with poorly implemented encryption and we trounced them. But now the battle has moved to their battlefield, the legal system.
IANAL so what the hell do we do now?
Some people take the stance that they will fight it by not buying anything, only copying stuff off of the net. This doesn't do any good though, it just encourages RIAA and the MPAA, and it deprives the artists entirely.
Can we fight it legally? How do we put together a collective voice that is strong enough to take to washington and take to the courts to have a real impact?
what about technically. That is, afterall, our forte. MP3.com seems to have made a place for online distribution directly by the artists, but has it been effective? MP3 based online radio is certainly an option ( at least I could listen to the radio at work, which I can't do now because of tempest shielding).
Ultimately this will be a legal battle, but our best bet is to do an end run around them technically. To find, embrace, and promote a way for artists to get money directly from the people without going through the record companies. Choosing your battleground is one of the most important strategic decisions and there is no question that we control the technical battleground.
We have already decided that MP3 is the format of choice. we have several great methods of distribution, so now how do we get repay the artists whose music we want without lining the pockets of the record industry.
Open source and free software does present the parallel to this fight. Five and six years ago we never dreamed that we could get payed for working on Open source software, and now we have Open source companies that are IPO'ing with valuations in the billions of dollars. What did we do, what did we learn, and how can we take those lessons to the artists to open source music without starving them.