Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a processor, not the clock speed, will double approximately every 18 months.
True, but people have been applying it to raw speed for a couple decades now, and the law has applied equally well in that manner. (I'm feeling too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I seem to recall that the notorious "Jargon File" updated their definition of Moore's Law to reflect the alternate aplication of it.)
CPU's have been close to doubling every year and a half for quite some time now, so it should not be shocking to anybody that we have gone from 1 to 1.7 in a year. That was my point.
(The other type of "shorting" is when you agree to sell at a certain price on a certain future date with a buyer, wait for the stock to go down, then go out and buy the shares you promised to sell to them.)
Unless you know enough about the company to be a "market maker" on a stock, or you have inside information, selling short basically ammounts to high-stakes gambling. I would not reccomend the practice to Joe Average. You would probably end up trying something desperate (like illegally spreading negative information in investment chat rooms) to avoid losing your shirt... sooner or later.
If you like that sort of game, go with a fund that does it professionally and leave the driving to them... But I would suggest not even doing that unless you know exactly what you are getting into.
Disclaimer: If you took what I just wrote seriously, you missed my main point, which is that advice from unknown strangers is useless. All of what I said about the risks of shorting stocks is investment advice from somebody you have never meet so you should ignore it and talk to an advisor you trust, face-to-face, about these issues.
The way to protect yourself from liability is this:
If you host a chatroom, newgroup, slashcode-driven site, whatever... set up your system so that it is technically impossible for you to determine who posted what. Make sure any and all logs are deleted daily.
If there is no record anywhere which ties an anonymous note to a name, you can cooperate fully with the investigation, saying "here is all the available information. If you don't believe me, then here is a perfect mirror of my server for you to inspect as much as you like," and you will still be revealing nothing.
Okay, you came right out and said you were trolling, but you are not all that far off the mark.
Publicly trashing companies you want to buy, or talking up companies you are about to sell, is one of the oldest investment scams in the book. The SEC strictly regulates, this sort of behavior. (The guys over at Motley Fool got into quite a fracas ovet this stuff a few years ago... As their old service on AOL became popular, it became a great toold for stock value manipulation: Spread a little FUD about Ford, watch the stock drop, buy low, then go back and fill up the posting boards with glowing praise about how Ford has turned around and is a great value now. Then sell after it bounces back. Rince. Repeat.)
This is why you should never listen to investment advice from anonymous sources. If you hear a rumor that Sun is about to buy Corel, it could easilly be a Corel holder who wants to dump their stock, but is hoping buy-out rumors will cause a small surge in the price.
Were these people scam artists, or just typical opinionated newsgroup posters blowing off steam about a company they disliked?
The line between free speech and illegal market manipulation is not as cut and dried as some people might like to think.
Call me a zealot if you like... The truth is that I'm very platform agnostic. At my job I use Solaris, Linux, several flavors of Windows, and the Mac. At home it is much the same, A Windows box, two Linux servers, a mac, and a few other PC's that are in bits & pieces waiting for me to do something with them. I'm not the one ranting and raving about how horrible one particular OS maker is, throwing around broad stereotypes about users of that OS. There is a zealot in this conversation, but it ain't me.
As for the Stross book... if it were posted on slashdot when I was moderating, it would not get (+1, Insightful), it would get (-1, Redundant). There are literally dozens of "experts" who have written books to deconstruct what they see as Apple's failures with the benifit of hindsight, and Stross adds nothing new. The fact is, Apple's history a classic example of a really poorly run company that stayed afloat anyway on the strength of their product. I don't think any proprietary OS could ever stand a chance of being anything other than a niche player... but Apple is the single largest niche player in the computer business. Every year, their sales figures are in or near the top five among computer makers, and their profit margins are better. Check out the fincancial pages this week... they posted yet another profitable quarter, one that beat the street predictions for them. While most other tech companies have been getting a haircut this year, Apple just keeps on churning out silly-looking iMacs and making money. I wish I could fail like that.
Re:Yes, and it's been said before...
on
Buried in email?
·
· Score: 1
Why is it that you are making him out to be the bad guy? I think you "guns at all costs, everywhere" yahoos need to step back a moment & take a dose of reality.
Well, nothing I said had anything to do with gun laws. I don't know where the hell you got that from.
I'm not "making him out to be the bad guy"... Did you even read my response? I sincerely hope he beats the rap on this.
I was just making an observation concerning the kid's own safty. The article clearly says he used an object that he had with him to pretend he was loading a firearm. Not very smart. Understandable, but not smart.
He was constantly harassed, by a group of people, for a year. Considering that he's never gotten into a fight, how could he possibly be posing a threat?
Well, first of all, I did not say he was posing a threat. I was concerned over his own safety.
Secondly, being harassed for over a year and bottling up the rage and frustration... He's not a threat, but your characterization does not do much to make that case.
The article is a little short on details. He went through the motions of loading a firearm. Were his hands out of view (like under a desk, inside his jacket or inside a locker)? For that matter, maybe the case was gun-shaped. We don't know, because the article doesn't say.
But it did say that he was pretending to be loading a gun while the bullies were picking on him. While I can sympathize with a kid dealing with bullies, behaving as if you are about to brandish a firearm is a little unwise in most situations.
No, the advantage of the assembly line approach is that it is the best possible way to prepare the kid for a job on an assembly line... which was great 50 years ago, but useless now.
These days, it seems that small groups, rather than large ones, are ideal learning enviornments, because that is the sort of setting they will probably be working in after they graduate... in either a small business or a small department of a large business.
As for getting kids "on the same level"... It can't be done. All men may have been created equal, but they were not created with equal aptitude, nor do they develop at the same rate, nor are their spurts of accelerated development in any way synchronized with their classmates.
A good school system can help a kid get close to their own maximum potential, but different kids have different potentials. Setting "equal" achievement as your goal means limiting the success of the smart ones and pushing the dumb ones too hard. It also means demanding to much of kids when they are in slower development phases, and not challenging them enough when new synapses are forming quickly. In other words, having a regimented standard of achievement at each grade is a disservice to the students.
"Making life difficult" for the rat does nothing to help his situation, and could make it a lot worse. Bad idea.
If it is a clear case of the school overreacting (remember, as with all Katz articles, we are only getting one side here... he's an advocate, not a journalist), then he would have a chance of either an interested lawyer taking the case for little or no fee, or prehaps a civil-rights group getting behind him (although some of those groups are really only interested in "show trials" to get them into the press). I would not bet the farm on it, but it could happen.
Still, if the kid was mine, the first thing I would do is teach him about firearm safetey... The article says he was pretending to load a gun in order to intimidate the bullies. Fooling people into thinking that you are preparing to fire a weapon is a very good way to get killed.
Anyway, the father says he can not afford a lawyer... I disagree. If he really thinks he has a case, he can't afford not to get a lawer! The cost of private school (or the time spent home-schooling) is huge. It says that he is a slashdot reader, so... Sir, if you are reading this, TALK TO A LAWYER. Even if you are not going to hire one, a good civil-rights lawyer can at least advise you as to whether you have a case or not. A brief consultation session would probably cost you very little (if anything), and you might learn about options that you did not know you had.
Seriously... don't bother with legal advise from a bunch of slashdot posters like me. Talk to somebody who knows the law, and knows what your choises really are.
And don't call the guy with his ad above the urinal at your favorite bar. Good lawyers don't need to advertise, because they are booked solid from word-of-mouth only. Talk to people you know and try to find a lawyer that is reccomended by somebody you trust.
I don't believe they give insightful to a comment intentionally invoking cultural and racial hatred.
Actually, it's political hatred. I confess to really really hating totalitarian dictatorships, which is exactly what China is. If you think I am wrong, tell it to that student that was facing down a tank in Tieneman Square a few years ago.
Those people only got a share of the action thanks to Wozniak being a warm, decent human being. Steve Jobs ran his company into the ground.
Woz's version of that story differs from yours rather dramatically.
As an economist once told me
You can stop right there. Nobody is interested in what an economist has to say. You might as well have said "as an astrologer once told me..."
Luck alone is not enough to keep a company like Apple going as long as they have. You just call it luck because you can't explain their successes any other way without altering your world-view.
Settle down. Apple is not "steamrollering" over anybody's rights. They are protecting their rights, specifically, their trademark rights, from those who they believe are violating them.
They may be wrong, but that's what we have the courts for.
Your attitude is exactly what I was talking about. You hear about one company suing one group and start shouting bloody murder at the top of your lungs, instantly insisting that Apple is an evil emprire out to destroy your freedom. I would bet $100 that you never even used Themes... you probably have not even heard of them before today, and more than likely are not even a Mac user... yet you are among those complaining the loudest, because you make the knee-jerk, yes "us vs. them", assumption that any big company that sues a small group must be out to ruin democracy.
Count to ten, think calmly. You might come to realize that while Apple may be wrong about the extent of their trademark rights, they very well might credibly believe that they needed to press this case in order to protect their trademarks. Things are not always as simple as the Big Bad Corp trying to squish the Little Guy.
Sure, except we are talking about two completely different products here.
The MacOS 8.1 (which is what this lawsuit concerns) is an old product that the probably would rather not spend legal resources licensing out to other people. It's a lot cheaper to just send people letters saying "quit ripping us off" than it is to establish a policy for pricing and distribution of licenses to every tiny shop of GUI hackers that wants to play with it.
The good news is that Apple eventually treats their old OS releases as Abandonware. You can download System 7.5.3 for free from their website and monkey with it all you want. I suspect that they will eventually do the same with OS 8.0 - 9.1... probably a few months after they have migrated the vast majority of users and apps to OS X.
OS X, on the other hand, is built on open source code, with open source licensing. You can hack the shit out of "Darwin" all you want. Write a totally new GUI for it, port it to run on a Sparc, whatever trips your trigger. Apple can't open up Aqua, because a lot of the tech involved is owned by another company (Adobe). Nor can they open up Quicktime, which is built on a closed codec that they don't own... but the open kernel and BSD layer is clearly their future direction. Apple is slowly being transformed into the company that NeXT could have been if it didn't lack the resources and market force. As a developer, even if you don't like Apple as a company, this is a Good Thing. NextStep was easy to write for, and if the trickle of new apps already coming in is anything to go by, it looks like developers are having a pretty good time with OS X, too. I suspect that we are going to see some pretty cool ideas emerge out of all this.
Opening up a company like Apple is like opening up China. Sure you can shout at them and try to freeze them out, but that will just make them shut their doors to all of your ideas. By working with them, you can gradually introduce your philosphies into their worldview. Peaceful transformation is slower than confrontation, but it is also far less painful.
you are correct, of course, except that the ability to "hack" software (as in, get things done when you have no clue about what you are doing) has come to be seen as an asset in this world of constantly changing languages and platforms.
The conventional wisdom is that a good hacker can sometimes come in to a project not knowing his ass from a hole in the ground, and have a working product slapped together before a more regemented software engineer has even mastered the language syntax.
Of couse, he would also leave you with line after line of useless, undocumented cruft, but the business world occationally has one-off projects where that is good enough if it works.
This, of course leads to the type of hacker who breaks into systems. They often know nothing about the OS, the security issues, or even what sort of data is on the system they are looking at. Often times, it was found by random "war-dialing" (or the IP search equivelants these days). By "hacking around" (brute-forcing passwords, trying commands to see what they do, etc.), they are eventually able to get their barings. Hence, they are, in fact, "hackers".
In the context of computer lingo, the name "cracker" comes from the old term "safe-cracker". They open things for other people... such as those who make and distribute "cracked" copies of programs that normally have copy protection.
Remember folks, The Jargon File is not a definative final authority... it is just a sample of the agreed-upon jargon of a very, very small group of usenet chatters, (most of whom were big-iron mainframe grunts who apparently liked to spend their spare time talking about PDP systems). Their little world does not represent everybody, nor even all computer techies.
If you were to assemble similar dictionaries from Redmond, MIT, or Silicon Valley, you would probably find a lot of differences between them. (And I bet all three would accept both uses of the word "hacker", to the dismay of many people here).
Yep, no doubt about it, Apple is failing and will soon be gone.
They have been "about to go out of business soon" for nearly 20 years now.
They have probably posted more profitable quarters than any failing company in history.
I wish I had started a company that's obviously doomed the way Apple is. It would be awesome to experience the kind of poverty that Steve Jobs lives in.
It is not a copyright issue. It is a trademark issue, and as has been said here many times before, trademarks exist on an "enforce it or lose it" basis. If they want to retain the right to spank people in the future for ripping off their trademarks, they must remain agressive about enforcing them agains everybody, all the time.
That's all that is happening here. Their lawyers are over-reacting a little to protect Apple's trademarks.
...And all the blubbering slashbots that are filling this page with "they're shooting themselves in the foot" and "we should shun everything they do" comments are just putting their ignorance on display for all to see. Someday they will grow up and work in the real world, and find out that things don't always break down to "us vs. them".
Anyone else think the real message here is that 2600 attracts more loudmouth posers than it does indviduals with real skills?
Yes, but it should not come as any surprise.
Any time you host meetings for hackers and open it to the public you are going to get a huge mix of posers, wanna-bes, curious observers, and maybe a handful of people who know their shit. The S/N ratio of the 2600 magazine is really horrible, so I would expect their meetings to be very similar.
So if you are looking for reliable information, it is not really the first place to go... But as a social outlet for the sort of kids that Jon Katz frets over professionally, it is probably a net good, posers and all.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but people have been applying it to raw speed for a couple decades now, and the law has applied equally well in that manner. (I'm feeling too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I seem to recall that the notorious "Jargon File" updated their definition of Moore's Law to reflect the alternate aplication of it.)
CPU's have been close to doubling every year and a half for quite some time now, so it should not be shocking to anybody that we have gone from 1 to 1.7 in a year. That was my point.
my bad.
Was progress at the speed of Moore's Law always crazy, or did it just become do today?
(The other type of "shorting" is when you agree to sell at a certain price on a certain future date with a buyer, wait for the stock to go down, then go out and buy the shares you promised to sell to them.)
Unless you know enough about the company to be a "market maker" on a stock, or you have inside information, selling short basically ammounts to high-stakes gambling. I would not reccomend the practice to Joe Average. You would probably end up trying something desperate (like illegally spreading negative information in investment chat rooms) to avoid losing your shirt... sooner or later.
If you like that sort of game, go with a fund that does it professionally and leave the driving to them... But I would suggest not even doing that unless you know exactly what you are getting into.
Disclaimer: If you took what I just wrote seriously, you missed my main point, which is that advice from unknown strangers is useless. All of what I said about the risks of shorting stocks is investment advice from somebody you have never meet so you should ignore it and talk to an advisor you trust, face-to-face, about these issues.
If you host a chatroom, newgroup, slashcode-driven site, whatever... set up your system so that it is technically impossible for you to determine who posted what. Make sure any and all logs are deleted daily.
If there is no record anywhere which ties an anonymous note to a name, you can cooperate fully with the investigation, saying "here is all the available information. If you don't believe me, then here is a perfect mirror of my server for you to inspect as much as you like," and you will still be revealing nothing.
eww... First day with a new, smaller, keyboard. I should probably consider hitting preview once in a while. Sorry about all the typo errors.
Publicly trashing companies you want to buy, or talking up companies you are about to sell, is one of the oldest investment scams in the book. The SEC strictly regulates, this sort of behavior. (The guys over at Motley Fool got into quite a fracas ovet this stuff a few years ago... As their old service on AOL became popular, it became a great toold for stock value manipulation: Spread a little FUD about Ford, watch the stock drop, buy low, then go back and fill up the posting boards with glowing praise about how Ford has turned around and is a great value now. Then sell after it bounces back. Rince. Repeat.)
This is why you should never listen to investment advice from anonymous sources. If you hear a rumor that Sun is about to buy Corel, it could easilly be a Corel holder who wants to dump their stock, but is hoping buy-out rumors will cause a small surge in the price.
Were these people scam artists, or just typical opinionated newsgroup posters blowing off steam about a company they disliked?
The line between free speech and illegal market manipulation is not as cut and dried as some people might like to think.
As for the Stross book... if it were posted on slashdot when I was moderating, it would not get (+1, Insightful), it would get (-1, Redundant). There are literally dozens of "experts" who have written books to deconstruct what they see as Apple's failures with the benifit of hindsight, and Stross adds nothing new. The fact is, Apple's history a classic example of a really poorly run company that stayed afloat anyway on the strength of their product. I don't think any proprietary OS could ever stand a chance of being anything other than a niche player... but Apple is the single largest niche player in the computer business. Every year, their sales figures are in or near the top five among computer makers, and their profit margins are better. Check out the fincancial pages this week... they posted yet another profitable quarter, one that beat the street predictions for them. While most other tech companies have been getting a haircut this year, Apple just keeps on churning out silly-looking iMacs and making money. I wish I could fail like that.
Me too.
Well, nothing I said had anything to do with gun laws. I don't know where the hell you got that from.
I'm not "making him out to be the bad guy"... Did you even read my response? I sincerely hope he beats the rap on this.
I was just making an observation concerning the kid's own safty. The article clearly says he used an object that he had with him to pretend he was loading a firearm. Not very smart. Understandable, but not smart.
He was constantly harassed, by a group of people, for a year. Considering that he's never gotten into a fight, how could he possibly be posing a threat?
Well, first of all, I did not say he was posing a threat. I was concerned over his own safety.
Secondly, being harassed for over a year and bottling up the rage and frustration... He's not a threat, but your characterization does not do much to make that case.
But it did say that he was pretending to be loading a gun while the bullies were picking on him. While I can sympathize with a kid dealing with bullies, behaving as if you are about to brandish a firearm is a little unwise in most situations.
I would have read it, but the banner ads were taking too long to load.
These days, it seems that small groups, rather than large ones, are ideal learning enviornments, because that is the sort of setting they will probably be working in after they graduate... in either a small business or a small department of a large business.
As for getting kids "on the same level"... It can't be done. All men may have been created equal, but they were not created with equal aptitude, nor do they develop at the same rate, nor are their spurts of accelerated development in any way synchronized with their classmates.
A good school system can help a kid get close to their own maximum potential, but different kids have different potentials. Setting "equal" achievement as your goal means limiting the success of the smart ones and pushing the dumb ones too hard. It also means demanding to much of kids when they are in slower development phases, and not challenging them enough when new synapses are forming quickly. In other words, having a regimented standard of achievement at each grade is a disservice to the students.
If it is a clear case of the school overreacting (remember, as with all Katz articles, we are only getting one side here... he's an advocate, not a journalist), then he would have a chance of either an interested lawyer taking the case for little or no fee, or prehaps a civil-rights group getting behind him (although some of those groups are really only interested in "show trials" to get them into the press). I would not bet the farm on it, but it could happen.
Still, if the kid was mine, the first thing I would do is teach him about firearm safetey... The article says he was pretending to load a gun in order to intimidate the bullies. Fooling people into thinking that you are preparing to fire a weapon is a very good way to get killed.
Anyway, the father says he can not afford a lawyer... I disagree. If he really thinks he has a case, he can't afford not to get a lawer! The cost of private school (or the time spent home-schooling) is huge. It says that he is a slashdot reader, so... Sir, if you are reading this, TALK TO A LAWYER. Even if you are not going to hire one, a good civil-rights lawyer can at least advise you as to whether you have a case or not. A brief consultation session would probably cost you very little (if anything), and you might learn about options that you did not know you had.
Seriously... don't bother with legal advise from a bunch of slashdot posters like me. Talk to somebody who knows the law, and knows what your choises really are.
And don't call the guy with his ad above the urinal at your favorite bar. Good lawyers don't need to advertise, because they are booked solid from word-of-mouth only. Talk to people you know and try to find a lawyer that is reccomended by somebody you trust.
Also, rewriting a GUI for Darwin would be pointless
There are an awful lot of Darwin hackers out there that would disagree with you on that point.
Actually, it's political hatred. I confess to really really hating totalitarian dictatorships, which is exactly what China is. If you think I am wrong, tell it to that student that was facing down a tank in Tieneman Square a few years ago.
Woz's version of that story differs from yours rather dramatically.
As an economist once told me
You can stop right there. Nobody is interested in what an economist has to say. You might as well have said "as an astrologer once told me..."
Luck alone is not enough to keep a company like Apple going as long as they have. You just call it luck because you can't explain their successes any other way without altering your world-view.
They may be wrong, but that's what we have the courts for.
Your attitude is exactly what I was talking about. You hear about one company suing one group and start shouting bloody murder at the top of your lungs, instantly insisting that Apple is an evil emprire out to destroy your freedom. I would bet $100 that you never even used Themes... you probably have not even heard of them before today, and more than likely are not even a Mac user... yet you are among those complaining the loudest, because you make the knee-jerk, yes "us vs. them", assumption that any big company that sues a small group must be out to ruin democracy.
Count to ten, think calmly. You might come to realize that while Apple may be wrong about the extent of their trademark rights, they very well might credibly believe that they needed to press this case in order to protect their trademarks. Things are not always as simple as the Big Bad Corp trying to squish the Little Guy.
Sure, except we are talking about two completely different products here.
The MacOS 8.1 (which is what this lawsuit concerns) is an old product that the probably would rather not spend legal resources licensing out to other people. It's a lot cheaper to just send people letters saying "quit ripping us off" than it is to establish a policy for pricing and distribution of licenses to every tiny shop of GUI hackers that wants to play with it.
The good news is that Apple eventually treats their old OS releases as Abandonware. You can download System 7.5.3 for free from their website and monkey with it all you want. I suspect that they will eventually do the same with OS 8.0 - 9.1... probably a few months after they have migrated the vast majority of users and apps to OS X.
OS X, on the other hand, is built on open source code, with open source licensing. You can hack the shit out of "Darwin" all you want. Write a totally new GUI for it, port it to run on a Sparc, whatever trips your trigger. Apple can't open up Aqua, because a lot of the tech involved is owned by another company (Adobe). Nor can they open up Quicktime, which is built on a closed codec that they don't own... but the open kernel and BSD layer is clearly their future direction. Apple is slowly being transformed into the company that NeXT could have been if it didn't lack the resources and market force. As a developer, even if you don't like Apple as a company, this is a Good Thing. NextStep was easy to write for, and if the trickle of new apps already coming in is anything to go by, it looks like developers are having a pretty good time with OS X, too. I suspect that we are going to see some pretty cool ideas emerge out of all this.
Opening up a company like Apple is like opening up China. Sure you can shout at them and try to freeze them out, but that will just make them shut their doors to all of your ideas. By working with them, you can gradually introduce your philosphies into their worldview. Peaceful transformation is slower than confrontation, but it is also far less painful.
The conventional wisdom is that a good hacker can sometimes come in to a project not knowing his ass from a hole in the ground, and have a working product slapped together before a more regemented software engineer has even mastered the language syntax.
Of couse, he would also leave you with line after line of useless, undocumented cruft, but the business world occationally has one-off projects where that is good enough if it works.
This, of course leads to the type of hacker who breaks into systems. They often know nothing about the OS, the security issues, or even what sort of data is on the system they are looking at. Often times, it was found by random "war-dialing" (or the IP search equivelants these days). By "hacking around" (brute-forcing passwords, trying commands to see what they do, etc.), they are eventually able to get their barings. Hence, they are, in fact, "hackers".
In the context of computer lingo, the name "cracker" comes from the old term "safe-cracker". They open things for other people... such as those who make and distribute "cracked" copies of programs that normally have copy protection.
Remember folks, The Jargon File is not a definative final authority... it is just a sample of the agreed-upon jargon of a very, very small group of usenet chatters, (most of whom were big-iron mainframe grunts who apparently liked to spend their spare time talking about PDP systems). Their little world does not represent everybody, nor even all computer techies.
If you were to assemble similar dictionaries from Redmond, MIT, or Silicon Valley, you would probably find a lot of differences between them. (And I bet all three would accept both uses of the word "hacker", to the dismay of many people here).
They have been "about to go out of business soon" for nearly 20 years now.
They have probably posted more profitable quarters than any failing company in history.
I wish I had started a company that's obviously doomed the way Apple is. It would be awesome to experience the kind of poverty that Steve Jobs lives in.
And their trademarks.
And their license agreements.
Come to think of it, they have a lot to stand on here, and might actually win.
Their motivation is this:
It is not a copyright issue. It is a trademark issue, and as has been said here many times before, trademarks exist on an "enforce it or lose it" basis. If they want to retain the right to spank people in the future for ripping off their trademarks, they must remain agressive about enforcing them agains everybody, all the time.
That's all that is happening here. Their lawyers are over-reacting a little to protect Apple's trademarks.
Yes, but it should not come as any surprise.
Any time you host meetings for hackers and open it to the public you are going to get a huge mix of posers, wanna-bes, curious observers, and maybe a handful of people who know their shit. The S/N ratio of the 2600 magazine is really horrible, so I would expect their meetings to be very similar.
So if you are looking for reliable information, it is not really the first place to go... But as a social outlet for the sort of kids that Jon Katz frets over professionally, it is probably a net good, posers and all.
Also, most teens have huge piles of disposable income anyway. How else could Disney rebuild their media empire around N'Sync and Britney Spears?