I don't really have time to figure out bit torrent for each song. At 89 or 99 cents from Amazon, it's easier to just buy them, even whole albums. And, I don't have these silly restrictions like with itunes.
The statistic they're citing, number of citations, is the same statistic that underlies page rank. As we've discovered from the industry that has grown up trying to game google search rankings, being well connected by citations is really only a sign that you are well connected.
In a system where your prestige depends on being connected to well connected others, being among the first to be connected has its advantages. Others will want to be connected to you in order to show that they are also connected. It should be noted that after WWII, the US was really alone in the western research world. It's still accruing benefits from that.
I wouldn't be soothed by the citation statistic. At this juncture, it's an historical artifact.
A big issue in this is defamation, whether what the person is saying is factually true or not. In the US, you can state opinions, and you're fine. However, if you make factually incorrect statements, you can be sued. So, with these sites, you might be OK if you are saying mean things about a person (e.g., I hate him). Things get shakier if you say, "S/he grades unfairly".
I'm a prof at Eastern Michigan University and have been spearheading an effort to get Google apps for education installed. We are currently doing a pilot in the College of Business where I teach. Universities opt for this kind of solution because they just don't have the resources to maintain an email infrastructure. SPAM currently accounts for over 80% of email, meaning that universities have to devote five times the resources to pure email volume than they would if there were no SPAM.
Further, the more users a system has, the more likely it is to be better at SPAM protection and user interface. SPAM protection is a statistical process that improves with larger numbers. Interface improves when it has to be idiot proof for large numbers of users. Gmail and other "hosted" solutions have all of these traits. Standalone university systems do not. Frankly, even large universities would profit by moving over to hosted solutions on these counts. Universities used to be the large players in Internet email. Now, they are the small players.
Regarding the issue of lock-in, given that there are numerous solutions out there, there's no reason to choose one that locks you in to the extent described by the poster
If storage is becoming more net-centric, what really matters is having the most ways possible to access your data. People don't really need the desktop software features. I'd gladly give away 90% of them if it was just easier to collaborate and be able to find our stuff when we need it.
To hell with expensive collaboration tools that require my own server. First there was eroom, then the much cheaper 37 signals, and now the free google. Long live google.
Well, once there is an api, there is no reason to be confined to the browser. Look at Google Earth for instance.
What I find to be the strength in these applications is not that they are done in ajax but that they effectively place your content in nodes on the web so that you can access them from anywhere and make them available to collaborators. The fact that google is (at least) able to ulitmately provide an editing api lowers the barrier to collaboration because you and your collaborators no longer have to have common software. That's even the case now with browsers because multiple browsers are supported.
The next step will be to see google edit, a downloadable ap that uses an open api. The really great thing would be to see them open up the api so that anyone can write that downloadable ap. The people who something to fear from this are 37 signals who have made a niche for themselves in collaboration, not microsoft.
I agree with the general facts you are outlining, but you're being way too hard on users. What most programmers forget is how hard it was for them to come up with the paradigms embedded in their software to begin with. After months (years) of struggling to code the program, the programmer expects the user to just get it.
I agree with the file system issue stated below. I'd like for the file system to work across the two OS's. That said, I just went out and priced a macbook pro, a system I had considered marginal up till now. The ability to run windows software is just too important. Having it all in one machine is just too great a value proposition to pass up.
Many companies such as Google, Microsoft, and biotechs are opening research offices in India. The "organic" Indian R&D spend may not be high, but the fact that other countries are investing in Indian R&D is of note.
The article misses the RSS diversifying loop
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 1
The article seems to argue that the blogosphere is self-contained. Well, in a way, but really only in the same way the web is "self-contained".
Personally, I think the author is missing the diversifying nature of RSS feeds and RSS readers. I am subscribed to 100's of channels. It includes small voices like blogs and big ones like Dave Winer's nytimes feeds.
The exciting thing about the RSS phenomenon, intimately interwoven with blogs, is that it explodes the number of outlets you can surf. So, blogging leads to wider syndication leads to wider diversity of opinion available for sampling.
Unfortunately, while not coming from the main stream OSS community, acts like the MyDoom virus or publishing Darl McBride's phone number on slashdot slander the OSS movement. It just looks bad. It's also not right.
Whatever you think of Darl McBride and SCO, they are proceeding down a *legal* path of action. Sure, it's irritating, and the claims are as unsettling as much as they appear patently false, but it is the standard form of dispute resolution that we have set up in this country.
Stepping outside of the standard approach to engage in personal, vicious, and sometimes illegal attacks is simply not right. It also leads to the whole OSS movement being tarred with a brush of hot-headedness.
The OSS movement should loudly disavow activities such as MyDoom and publishing McBride's home address. Slashdot moderators should mod down laughing comments about how inconvenienced Mr. McBride is. OSS notables should emphasize the positive nature of the community.
This is all happening to some extent, but needs to continue in a stepped up fashion without cease.
So, most gym equipment is actually computerized, providing different courses for challenges, etc. How is this any different from going to the gym? If people are not going to the gym, why would they go here?
"We've not introduced copyright infringement as part of our case with IBM. We've tried to make it clear that it's a contract issue."
So, as Eben Moglen has been pointing out, the SCO case against IBM is about contracts. It really does not concern us.
SCO has a second strategy that it intends to use against end users. It will claim its copyrighted material is in Linux and simply demand payment. The proof of this particular claim is not being addressed in the suit with IBM. It will have to be addressed at the time of any new case SCO might bring.
The real issue for Linux is how it protects itself from this sort of predation. I know a guy who wrote a very successful software product that currently dominates its category. The minute his software started to make a splash, some 12 years ago, the first thing some company did was try to invalidate his patent, i.e., claim his idea did not belong to him. SCO has pulled a little the inverse strategy. The item (Linux) is claimed to be in the public domain, but SCO is claiming it is proprietary.
So, on 11/24, Barron's discusses Deutsche Bank's buy recommendation on SCO and notes that
"For investors, the high level of animosity towards SCO is almost validating, though. It shows SCO has a realistic chance to really muck up the works for Linux, making the stock a high-risk speculation with a potentially huge payoff."
suggesting that all of the outrage on sites like slashdot is an indicator of the validity of SCO's case. Then, today, we get the little bit of reasoning containted in this post. Apparently SCO's rising stock price is reason for techies to be really concerned about the validity of SCO's claims. Hold it! I thought the concern on slashdot was a justification for the stock price...??
Hey, I thought it was supposed to be millions of lines of code.
Interesting how they interpret the need to let customers remedy the situation. They don't tell you how to fix the source and be free of them. They force you to pay them licensing fees.
Even Microsoft was allowed to remove the offending plug-in patented technology from IE as part of a remedy.
What strikes me in all of this is that we are talking about an essentially corporate phenomenon. Corporate entity producing proprietary intellectual property (IP) finds it has to lower the cost of producing it. Why? Well, IP is essentially becoming free due to pressure from free IP like open source software. This is really just the continued trend of IP's marginal value and cost toward 0.
So, where is money to be made? It's essentially in applying the now near 0 cost IP to people's actual business problems. That's where most OSS-based houses make their money.
I'd be happy to see more of this at the same high quality. I wonder if a mini-series is not the way to go, though.
That way the plot can be more intense; they're not forced to show the day-by-day drudgery. For instance, we don't have to see love blossom between Starbuck and Apollo. By the next mini-series, we could have the pleasure of seeing the bitter remains of an affair.
Perhaps people could have found out about Adama's lie concerning earth and we could be seeing the after-effects of that.
Otherwise, you have to get caught up in all of these intensely boring sub-plots and guest appearances. The show could start to take on the hackneyed flavor of a love boat or Vegas. We have too much information about the characters. Not enough novelty.
Look at the countries on the receiving end of outsourcing. China has lost almost as many manufacturing jobs as it has gained. Why? Automation. As work becomes commoditized, it looks for solutions based on price. Ultimately, all routine manual labor is replaced by machines.
Now, consider project management. There is more to it than Gantt charts. I would argue that the main innovation in open source is distributed project management (XP, unit testing, continuous integration, open packages with standard interfaces to remove the need to recode the wheel). Well, what's happened here? We're actually automating project management.
The question becomes, "Why shouldn't anyone anywhere in the world be able to participate in the information economy at any level?"
Slashdot is not really that old an application and has undergone several updates. Yet, it has become a legacy system, one that is still remarkably useful but whose tech has fallen far enough behind that it will start to require special skills to maintain. The owners (i.e., Taco) are not really that motivated to upgrade slashdot because the cost of any upgrade actually involves rewriting the system and far outweighs the identified incremental benefits ($3,650 in bandwidth per year != even one developer month of effort; source: the cited article).
The problem is that, even now, it sounds like the system is a bear to maintain. 800 boxes for lay-out!? Hence, the now slow rate of site change and adaptation (well, except for new annoying ways to display ads so people will subscribe).
This is exactly what happened with all those 40 year old COBOL apps that had to be changed for Y2K. Taco is cash-strapped now. Will he have $100 million in 20 years to totally revamp slashdot?
At home, I moved off of a Redhat 9 that broke my USB keyboard to Suse. I like Suse at home. Web surfing is better than it ever was under Redhat, and it makes a point of getting fonts right.
However, for the office workstation, I went for RH WS. Why? I like the blue curve interface, and I like the promised performance improvements. Further, Suse seems a little bit behind on security (passwords of 8 characters and a more limited character set).
I would have liked it if RH had maintained a decent, not super expensive, consumer edition. That's how I got into Linux. Perhaps RH thinks that demand will now come from the corporate sector and then push into the home sector again. They're cutting costs. Will the resulting market be big enough to sustain the current cost structure?
According to this slashdot story appearing Thursday, the SCO code had already been put in the public domain by SCO. As such, it is hard to imagine what the material damage to SCO is. It seems hard to imagine that they could go after end-users with that.
Now, that said, they might be able to construe a breach of contract with SGI out of it. What does SCO gain there? Well, one loss is certainly clear. They will no longer get the license revenue from SGI for IRIX. So, this might be a revenue trimming strategy.
SCO is also pursuing this strategy with AIX. Ultimately, deligitimizing all of the commercial unixes might just push faster toward Linux adoption.
This really just points to the continued commoditization of software infrastructure. As one commenter points out. Microsoft is letting people run a free trial of Windows Server 2003 for six months.
To actually run Linux in an organization actually costs money. You can use the price of support contracts as a proxy to figure out average costs.
Given the availability of sofware that runs across the two platforms (apache, tomcat, open office) and the use of open file formats available on either, at some point your choice between the two just becomes a question of costs.
Sounds like Microsoft may be bringing their offerings down near enough to the commodity price point that people do not perceive a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really have time to figure out bit torrent for each song. At 89 or 99 cents from Amazon, it's easier to just buy them, even whole albums. And, I don't have these silly restrictions like with itunes.
The statistic they're citing, number of citations, is the same statistic that underlies page rank. As we've discovered from the industry that has grown up trying to game google search rankings, being well connected by citations is really only a sign that you are well connected.
In a system where your prestige depends on being connected to well connected others, being among the first to be connected has its advantages. Others will want to be connected to you in order to show that they are also connected. It should be noted that after WWII, the US was really alone in the western research world. It's still accruing benefits from that.
I wouldn't be soothed by the citation statistic. At this juncture, it's an historical artifact.
A big issue in this is defamation, whether what the person is saying is factually true or not. In the US, you can state opinions, and you're fine. However, if you make factually incorrect statements, you can be sued. So, with these sites, you might be OK if you are saying mean things about a person (e.g., I hate him). Things get shakier if you say, "S/he grades unfairly".
I'm a prof at Eastern Michigan University and have been spearheading an effort to get Google apps for education installed. We are currently doing a pilot in the College of Business where I teach. Universities opt for this kind of solution because they just don't have the resources to maintain an email infrastructure. SPAM currently accounts for over 80% of email, meaning that universities have to devote five times the resources to pure email volume than they would if there were no SPAM.
Further, the more users a system has, the more likely it is to be better at SPAM protection and user interface. SPAM protection is a statistical process that improves with larger numbers. Interface improves when it has to be idiot proof for large numbers of users. Gmail and other "hosted" solutions have all of these traits. Standalone university systems do not. Frankly, even large universities would profit by moving over to hosted solutions on these counts. Universities used to be the large players in Internet email. Now, they are the small players.
Regarding the issue of lock-in, given that there are numerous solutions out there, there's no reason to choose one that locks you in to the extent described by the poster
How are Africans going to eat if they can't participate in the world economy?
If storage is becoming more net-centric, what really matters is having the most ways possible to access your data. People don't really need the desktop software features. I'd gladly give away 90% of them if it was just easier to collaborate and be able to find our stuff when we need it.
To hell with expensive collaboration tools that require my own server. First there was eroom, then the much cheaper 37 signals, and now the free google. Long live google.
Well, once there is an api, there is no reason to be confined to the browser. Look at Google Earth for instance.
What I find to be the strength in these applications is not that they are done in ajax but that they effectively place your content in nodes on the web so that you can access them from anywhere and make them available to collaborators. The fact that google is (at least) able to ulitmately provide an editing api lowers the barrier to collaboration because you and your collaborators no longer have to have common software. That's even the case now with browsers because multiple browsers are supported.
The next step will be to see google edit, a downloadable ap that uses an open api. The really great thing would be to see them open up the api so that anyone can write that downloadable ap. The people who something to fear from this are 37 signals who have made a niche for themselves in collaboration, not microsoft.
Credit card debt is unsecured. When you die, your estate is not liable.
I agree with the general facts you are outlining, but you're being way too hard on users. What most programmers forget is how hard it was for them to come up with the paradigms embedded in their software to begin with. After months (years) of struggling to code the program, the programmer expects the user to just get it.
I agree with the file system issue stated below. I'd like for the file system to work across the two OS's. That said, I just went out and priced a macbook pro, a system I had considered marginal up till now. The ability to run windows software is just too important. Having it all in one machine is just too great a value proposition to pass up.
Many companies such as Google, Microsoft, and biotechs are opening research offices in India. The "organic" Indian R&D spend may not be high, but the fact that other countries are investing in Indian R&D is of note.
The article seems to argue that the blogosphere is self-contained. Well, in a way, but really only in the same way the web is "self-contained".
Personally, I think the author is missing the diversifying nature of RSS feeds and RSS readers. I am subscribed to 100's of channels. It includes small voices like blogs and big ones like Dave Winer's nytimes feeds.
The exciting thing about the RSS phenomenon, intimately interwoven with blogs, is that it explodes the number of outlets you can surf. So, blogging leads to wider syndication leads to wider diversity of opinion available for sampling.
Unfortunately, while not coming from the main stream OSS community, acts like the MyDoom virus or publishing Darl McBride's phone number on slashdot slander the OSS movement. It just looks bad. It's also not right.
Whatever you think of Darl McBride and SCO, they are proceeding down a *legal* path of action. Sure, it's irritating, and the claims are as unsettling as much as they appear patently false, but it is the standard form of dispute resolution that we have set up in this country.
Stepping outside of the standard approach to engage in personal, vicious, and sometimes illegal attacks is simply not right. It also leads to the whole OSS movement being tarred with a brush of hot-headedness.
The OSS movement should loudly disavow activities such as MyDoom and publishing McBride's home address. Slashdot moderators should mod down laughing comments about how inconvenienced Mr. McBride is. OSS notables should emphasize the positive nature of the community.
This is all happening to some extent, but needs to continue in a stepped up fashion without cease.
So, most gym equipment is actually computerized, providing different courses for challenges, etc. How is this any different from going to the gym? If people are not going to the gym, why would they go here?
Here's an interesting quote from Stowell
"We've not introduced copyright infringement as part of our case with IBM. We've tried to make it clear that it's a contract issue."
So, as Eben Moglen has been pointing out, the SCO case against IBM is about contracts. It really does not concern us.
SCO has a second strategy that it intends to use against end users. It will claim its copyrighted material is in Linux and simply demand payment. The proof of this particular claim is not being addressed in the suit with IBM. It will have to be addressed at the time of any new case SCO might bring.
The real issue for Linux is how it protects itself from this sort of predation. I know a guy who wrote a very successful software product that currently dominates its category. The minute his software started to make a splash, some 12 years ago, the first thing some company did was try to invalidate his patent, i.e., claim his idea did not belong to him. SCO has pulled a little the inverse strategy. The item (Linux) is claimed to be in the public domain, but SCO is claiming it is proprietary.
How to defend against that?
So, on 11/24, Barron's discusses Deutsche Bank's buy recommendation on SCO and notes that
...??
"For investors, the high level of animosity towards SCO is almost validating, though. It shows SCO has a realistic chance to really muck up the works for Linux, making the stock a high-risk speculation with a potentially huge payoff."
suggesting that all of the outrage on sites like slashdot is an indicator of the validity of SCO's case. Then, today, we get the little bit of reasoning containted in this post. Apparently SCO's rising stock price is reason for techies to be really concerned about the validity of SCO's claims. Hold it! I thought the concern on slashdot was a justification for the stock price
Hey, I thought it was supposed to be millions of lines of code.
Interesting how they interpret the need to let customers remedy the situation. They don't tell you how to fix the source and be free of them. They force you to pay them licensing fees.
Even Microsoft was allowed to remove the offending plug-in patented technology from IE as part of a remedy.
hmmm
What strikes me in all of this is that we are talking about an essentially corporate phenomenon. Corporate entity producing proprietary intellectual property (IP) finds it has to lower the cost of producing it. Why? Well, IP is essentially becoming free due to pressure from free IP like open source software. This is really just the continued trend of IP's marginal value and cost toward 0.
So, where is money to be made? It's essentially in applying the now near 0 cost IP to people's actual business problems. That's where most OSS-based houses make their money.
I'd be happy to see more of this at the same high quality. I wonder if a mini-series is not the way to go, though.
That way the plot can be more intense; they're not forced to show the day-by-day drudgery. For instance, we don't have to see love blossom between Starbuck and Apollo. By the next mini-series, we could have the pleasure of seeing the bitter remains of an affair.
Perhaps people could have found out about Adama's lie concerning earth and we could be seeing the after-effects of that.
Otherwise, you have to get caught up in all of these intensely boring sub-plots and guest appearances. The show could start to take on the hackneyed flavor of a love boat or Vegas. We have too much information about the characters. Not enough novelty.
I could not agree more.
Look at the countries on the receiving end of outsourcing. China has lost almost as many manufacturing jobs as it has gained. Why? Automation. As work becomes commoditized, it looks for solutions based on price. Ultimately, all routine manual labor is replaced by machines.
Now, consider project management. There is more to it than Gantt charts. I would argue that the main innovation in open source is distributed project management (XP, unit testing, continuous integration, open packages with standard interfaces to remove the need to recode the wheel). Well, what's happened here? We're actually automating project management.
The question becomes, "Why shouldn't anyone anywhere in the world be able to participate in the information economy at any level?"
The markets close at 4 PM. The news seems to have come at or right after market close.
Slashdot is not really that old an application and has undergone several updates. Yet, it has become a legacy system, one that is still remarkably useful but whose tech has fallen far enough behind that it will start to require special skills to maintain. The owners (i.e., Taco) are not really that motivated to upgrade slashdot because the cost of any upgrade actually involves rewriting the system and far outweighs the identified incremental benefits ($3,650 in bandwidth per year != even one developer month of effort; source: the cited article).
The problem is that, even now, it sounds like the system is a bear to maintain. 800 boxes for lay-out!? Hence, the now slow rate of site change and adaptation (well, except for new annoying ways to display ads so people will subscribe).
This is exactly what happened with all those 40 year old COBOL apps that had to be changed for Y2K. Taco is cash-strapped now. Will he have $100 million in 20 years to totally revamp slashdot?
At home, I moved off of a Redhat 9 that broke my USB keyboard to Suse. I like Suse at home. Web surfing is better than it ever was under Redhat, and it makes a point of getting fonts right.
However, for the office workstation, I went for RH WS. Why? I like the blue curve interface, and I like the promised performance improvements. Further, Suse seems a little bit behind on security (passwords of 8 characters and a more limited character set).
I would have liked it if RH had maintained a decent, not super expensive, consumer edition. That's how I got into Linux. Perhaps RH thinks that demand will now come from the corporate sector and then push into the home sector again. They're cutting costs. Will the resulting market be big enough to sustain the current cost structure?
According to this slashdot story appearing Thursday, the SCO code had already been put in the public domain by SCO. As such, it is hard to imagine what the material damage to SCO is. It seems hard to imagine that they could go after end-users with that.
Now, that said, they might be able to construe a breach of contract with SGI out of it. What does SCO gain there? Well, one loss is certainly clear. They will no longer get the license revenue from SGI for IRIX. So, this might be a revenue trimming strategy.
SCO is also pursuing this strategy with AIX. Ultimately, deligitimizing all of the commercial unixes might just push faster toward Linux adoption.
This really just points to the continued commoditization of software infrastructure. As one commenter points out. Microsoft is letting people run a free trial of Windows Server 2003 for six months.
To actually run Linux in an organization actually costs money. You can use the price of support contracts as a proxy to figure out average costs.
Given the availability of sofware that runs across the two platforms (apache, tomcat, open office) and the use of open file formats available on either, at some point your choice between the two just becomes a question of costs.
Sounds like Microsoft may be bringing their offerings down near enough to the commodity price point that people do not perceive a difference.