One may wonder whether "government" as we view it is going to be relevant any more. Many countries are developing independent specialised institutions tasked with specific objective (which frankly politicians have shown to be incompetenet at managing). Look at the independences of the Fed. If Greenspan got run over by a truck, there would be a bigger economic shake down than if the president got assassinated (good for a few weeks of prime time). When the head of a country gets to become a figurehead with empty public posturing, who has the *real* control of a country?
What are some of the trends that could influence the future? - social activism motivated by fast communications - breakdown in the sense of national identity, perhaps not in the US where patriotism is still a saleable item but in other countries - inefficiency of public owned services compared with private, to be revealed even more - where some companies outmass entire countries in resources
To bring home the point, do people think of themselves as hackers first or [insert favourite home nation]?
1. Evangelists within the organization Nothing that a few good (depending on your definition of good) laws can't solve. Perhaps one day they'll also legislate against stupidity (IMHO the only serious long-term growth industry apart from tax evasion) but until then, maybe you can start up your own Church of the Anti-FUD:-). LL
Think of the computing industry like an iceberg. What the consumer sees (as the flashy gee-whiz internet appliances) is only the tip. Underneath is the massive IT infrastructure running everything from service delivery, autoamted logging, scheduling, paperwork, tax calculation, currency exchange, more taxes, government regulations, user fees, even more sales taxes, etc... I'm sure you get the picture. These things, especially taxes, are a royal pain in the neck and it's cheaper getting a few grunt boxes to do the work than to hire a legion of paper shufflers. Companies exist becuse they have evolved to be the most efficient at serving a particular niche (irrespective of how they bullied their way into that domain). If a corporate IT group sees the Sun as a viable enterprise solution to solve certain problems and address scalability issues, then there must be some sort of justification. For a hint, take a look at where the big database systems are porting their software.
Just because you admire the scenery on a road doesn't mean that industrial trucks can't travel the same route. And there's a good reason why a truck costs more than an overgrown bicycle (think reliability, fuel efficiency, capital depreciation, etc). What people don't realise is that the average joe doesn't want to pay for functionality that is invisible (e.g. why have russian spelling checker if you can't speak russian?) and thus the model is shifting towards giving away client software/plugins in order to create a sticky service site (ie a defensive move to prevent consumer serfs from leaving their lucrative branded fiefdom). Microsoft have realised this and in the spirit of maintaing a presence on every desk, are determined to march their way up the food chain. Consumer computing isn't the entire world (not to mention all the other invisible world of real-time manufacturing control, embedded systems, trusted plant operations, etc).
Perhaps a little off-topic but it struck me that if internet appliances are going to be as common as paper (did someone brandy the figure of 250 million units by 2003?) then it seems a little excessive to brand every single class of them. Apart from the minor inconvenience of running out of english names/trademarks and filling the coffers of NSI, do we really care about who manufactures every single lever and widget in our car? Similarly are companies going overboard in trying to brand the nuts and bolts of the evolving information infrastructure? Apart from certain classy toilet paper, we don't go around naming bits of paper after their distributors. An internet appliance is just that, a convenience to access structured information. Once people settle on a form factor (e.g. Nokia handset), entry sytem (e.g. Palm Pilot), battery life (still an iffy), then the rest is asthetics and widget frosting (granted nice electronic interior decortating but not germane to the actual information).
Have we reached the point where advertising has become sheer noise? Or is there something called a brand-free zone?
I suspect that there are a few more ulterior motives. The biggest problem in today's rather crowded (as in attention deficient) marketplace is making people aware of your products. You basically have to compete against the existing software solutions. Visor did the smart thing and built off the Palm's software base. In a similar manner Transmeta wants to attract the early adopter crowd who are willing to either a) pay a premium or b) willing to put up or even correct deficiencies or c) all of above. Guess where the Linux demographic fits in? Now you have simplified the marketing problem of bullshitting the mainstream mindless media through buzzword du jour into trying to generate good-will in a smaller but more vocal and technically competent group of engineers and hackers. Why do companies throw money away at Grand Prixs and glamor sports celebrities? Because the public and general unwashed reasons (whether correctly is left as a psychological exercise) that if the experts buy/use/flog it, then it can't be that bad so the credibility is shifted (hopefully) onto the product. The electronics industry shifted when Nokia turned the mobile phone into a fashion accessory. Transmeta might herald another shift by turning the software sector into a glamor industry. In reality it's like an iceberg, what you see/touch/buy for personal use is only 99% of the gear, the rest being networks (hi Cisco), servers,. storage, and embedded stuff. But some companies need that 1% to help flog the other 99% e.g. SGI and MIPS because the development costs are so high, you need to screw... err... serve the customer with the biggest hip-pocket first. Sacrificing a few 100K to gain the hacker equivalent of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods is a small price to pay.
New open source business model, come up with a brillant solution, give it away, then become a paid display penguin... err... icon:-).
If programming was just a matter of training then we would have code monkeys coming out of the jungle. However, as people like Knuth points out, it takes a special kind of talent to structure a complex system without getting lost in the details. Perhaps it is akin to writing a symphony, you have to know the general theme as well as how your line fits in. Not the same as throwing a few software bricks together with some GUI scripts in the hope that it doesn't fall apart.
It is rather interesting to speculate as to what makes a superlative software architect. I recall one article which claimed that if you had a prior background in music or even languages, they could teach you how to design/code. Coming from an impoverished background is no barrier as India has so amply shown. Symbolic reasoning? Spatial awareness? Or is it just something we can't test until the person sits down and has a hack and discovers a natural talent?. The mind is a strange and wonderful beast.
Just curious as to how companies amortise the cost of software as I suspect this influences why new projects are much more interesting than old ones. Is software seen as a durable capital item to be written off over x years? Or more as an on-going variable cost which carries hidden overheads in requiring hiring of maintenance software programmers? For a company living on the edge of bankrupcy, I can see the appeal of degrading infrastructure (ie using the same old stuff) in the hopes of surviving another year. So is the best strategy just to buy the biggest/baddest in the hope that it lasts a decent period or is it better to go cheap and nasty in the expectation that it will be replaced by generation+1 after a short interval? Or has the maintenance complexity gotten the best of us and we're just giving up and hopes of keeping the feeping creatures under control (a la software tribbles)?
Let's see how many different variations one can play on the original concepts (e.g. Apple's Hypercard) by altering the location of various information, the definition of "device", the nuances of protocols/caching, and the language for formatting. Frankly there are so many combinations that the concept of a patent for owning this part of the road gives you a claim on the whole highway system is getting a little out of hand. What has made the WWW succeed? One early "free" software package that enforced the concept of a URL (which alas has not progressed to persistent URI/URNs), a text markup people could remember without overloading the ol' brain cells, and a protocol which recursively fetched and automated the old ftp by an order of magnitude. Any one of these ideas had been around in various forms, but it was the combination and the fact that reduced network costs made it available to the mass consumer market that made the whole kit-and-kaboddle take off. Trying to claim afterwards that one particular primitive variant was the sole originating invention smells to me of patenting the concept of a toll road then laying claim to the whole highway. If the company can claim their ideas were instrumental, then I think a lot of people would be *very* interested to discover where in the digital DNA (aka source code for browsers/servers) their ideas have taken root. How many of the real innovators go ahead and puruse the patent database anyway? If it can be implemented by a college student from first principles (and god knows how many httpd servers are coded as classroom exercises nowadays) then pushing the claim of outside prior art seems a little disingeneous. It might have been novel 10 years ago but economists call this sunk costs, it might as well be written off as far as trying to capture future revenue or positive externalities.
BTW, can anyone recall a telecom company being particularly "innovative" in starting/surviving a complete industry sector/shakeout like mechanical design (AutoCAD), destop publishing (Adobe), relational databases (Oracle) or movie production (SGI)? Perhaps Nokia in phone as fashion accessory. Curious minds want to know.
In life, sometimes the market just doesn't react until the circumstances demand a particular technology. It helps if you're big enough that there's some warm body with related skills that you can catch the latest fad but nowadays coming up with a new idea is not enough, you have to persuade everyone else that its a good idea worth taking on board (the ol' information assymetry problem). Of course getting them to pay for it is another problem. The various basic layers/APIs seem to have evolved (TCP/IP, POSIX, HTTP/MIME, etc) and the rest is engineering compromises.
I hate to rain on anyone's parade but I suspect that 3D displays are not just a case of plonking down the hardware (and the money) and expecting Quake et al to work out of box. For an idea of the complications of correcting stereoscopic image distortions, take a look at this. There's also the added complication that VRML is undergoing a transmorgification into Web3D at the moment with all the attendent uncertainty for developers. Now let's look at the intended audience for $12K screens. You can probably count the industry sectors on a couple of hands (defense, medical, yuppies, some geospatial apps like energy exploration). Justifying such a beast for dedicated gaming would be a bit of a hard sell at that price-point. If they've managed to incorporate some 3D capability into the (H)DTV standards, it might have a chance of be taken up my mainstream media which would take the chance to create the necessary premium content, e.g. for home entertainment centres with digital cameras straight to digital projectors.
What are the potential barriers towards adopting such a technology - better connection with kinesthetics, the intuitive match between spatial awareness and body motion - between physics models like MathsEngine to express - some killerapp vertically integrated applications to reach selected markets (like telesurgery which requires precise placement) to help bring the price-point down - software/content that supports 2-3D with the marginal effort of adding 3D smaller than marginal increase in sales
Apart from the gee-whiz factor, a realistic look at what services would benefit most from such displays needs to be addressed, especially their willingness to cough up the money. Remember that hardware is only 10% of the total costs, ad another 20% for peripherals/support, 30% for software/operational consumables, and 40% for training. It's starting to looking expensive.
3D will have a role but I suspect widespread star wars type holographic displays are still a way off unless a miracle occurs.
referential connections (ie ensure a link encoded within the content)
If you make the assumption that everything is a computer and that XML or Java engines will be embeeded into every computer and consumer item known to mankind (and Mars 127.0,0.1) then if any any point you insert you hacked/hand-made/sniffer device that removes those not-so-subtle control signals, then you can kiss your replay features good bye. Look the technological trends, the Amiga/TAO/Sony announcement of being able to hook multiple IP cores within the same OS. The support of big name companies for selected XML "standards" (with convenient amnesia about certain inconvenient consumer friendly functions). If each silicon slice supports the necessary control protocols, then when you replay back an "interactive" movie, they will be able to tell who/when/what and be able to dictate the terms of the availability, target bits to a specific machine, and eliminate 2nd sale, redistribution, cross-transmission, and lending/borrowing priviledges. Education and entertainment are going to be big money spinners and the players want to keep every penny of it. If you think DVD was bad, wait until every bitstream is encoded.
Take a careful look at how the protocol extensions are to be used in their examples:
Sorry guys, not only can (as McNealy put it) you kiss your privacy goodbye but you might as well forget about keeping any bits you buy/lease/rent whether software or content.
ESR did mention in the Magic Cauldron that one viable business model is to give away the software but to make money off the accessories. If this is what Napster is doing, then perhaps there should be some recognition of its rights to retain trade-marks and co-branding. The way that I look at it is that if you think of information travelling as a wave on a pond and energy representing the transfer of money, then to really benefit you either have a standing wave ripple front moving in a single direction where all energy is concentrated at the edge (licensing, charge of direct sales, etc) or else have it oscillating in an enclosure in which case you charge a small amount but spread it across a space-time domain. Either case you have to put energy into sustaining itself, either through a uni-directional strong front travelleing fast or else in maintaining persistent backwards compatibility. (I hope I haven't muddled the analogy too much). Either way you want a net increase in energy otherwise the dissipation means that the source/inspiration for the content disappears. The concept of a starving artist may not appeal to programmers with high-expense rations in Silicon Valley so somehow you need to survive the lean period of development. If merchandising is the only solution when going up against an entrenched system, then is it fair or injust that they try to preserve their air-supply? I think we all tend to root for the underdog against the existing economic interests but sometimes the deadwood needs to be cleared before the new broom can sweep clean.
... inertia of the system... keeps the laws on the books and policemen employed in behaviour control instead of chasing white-collar crime (where the really big frauds and crooks are IMHO). Also, can someone confirm the rumor that hemp was originally outlawed as part of a campaign to promote synthetic fibre? Or is this an urban legend?
Comes down to the ol' pass by reference or pass by value. A link (URL/URI/URN) is basically a fixed address. Just like a snail-mail address, you like to be assured that silly buggers don't go around changing them all the time (ie static and persistent). Now on the other hand *some* commercial sites have a buiness plan that requires either strict control (guide them pass the ad display) or require something (e.g. consumer data) in return for the honor and priviledge of viewing their rebranded proprietary formatted content . Quite rightly they get irritated when people bypass all their elaborate facades to go straight to the goodies or raw unencumbered data. Now, as far as I can see there are two issues: - right to link/reference - right to deny access
Both are valid and not necessarily symmetric. If someone puts up a private building, they have the priviledge of denying entry. On the other hand, there are certain traditional precendents for public right of access (e.g. to shoreline). Thus a site which fences off common (e.g GPL) property with minimal widget frosting (e.g. a lot of sites fluff up the CIA database on countries) and attempts to charge a rent is attempting to create disproportionate return from little value-added (nice try but most people are smarter than that). Now if the recording industry is in the distribution business (and not music creation) then trying to maintain the same retailing/hype margins in a commodity business is downright stupid. Instead, they could add value by doing the obvious things like indexing, offering behind-scenes walkthroughs, cataloging, sorting by whatever, but no.... it's left to the dedicated fans and nimble new companies. So instead the MBAs try the tactics they know best, legal intimidation, saturation marketing, media bullshitting, etc instead of doing the hard yakka of technology fix (does this remind you of any other company).
Now the right to link is a rather interesting case as ideally you want lots of people to link to your content (more associated sales a la Amazon) but you can't prevent people from how they link, in short something that doesn't fit the criteria for a property right. Hence attempting to control this is going to be problematic as restricing access actually shrinks your potential market, sorta like cutting off your nose to spite your face. The bigger sites have the ability to prioritise (a la premium counter space in supermarkets due to volume of throughput) but most other businesses are not in that envious position. Perhaps the sensible way is for each commercial site to nominate the respectable entrances (ie valid and persistent URLs they guarentee will last x years). Then you can probably negotitate peacefully and come to some mutual benefit. Links are good, have more of them so long as they don't get broken.
What is annoying is that companies are confusing legal aspects with technological and economic aspects. By designing a site in a specific way (e.g. not using PURLs) they create a mess for themselves or worse, create a fatally flawed business model which they attempt to cover up by blaming others. If people are geting paid 6 figures for e-commerce MBAs and this is what they come up with, then a lot of venture capital is being wasted through sheer cluelessness. Those idiots deserve to be excommunicated to a country where a web is what the spider creates on your doorframe. One of these days, things will settle back to normal and the rest of us can get back to listening to some decent non-formulatic non-elevator music.
For example, do all the chips have to operate at the same frequency, how does it handle memory caching? What's the system design for simultaneous I/O streaming? Can they control the activation/deactivation of energy sources/chips?
As for why it is useful. OK imagine that today's CPUs are engines, so far we've been ramping up the revs/sec getting to the stage of gas turbines. But the problem is that you can only have homogenous or balanced trubines, much like a plane requires 4 engines of exactly the same type otherwise it is unflyable. This imposes an incredible overhead if you are only using it infrequently. Unlike PCs/clusters where if you're sitting down, you are working continuously therefore you want reduced latency or improved throughput, comsumer items are flogged with the intention that you own several (think of stereo components) that don't always operate together. After all, you watch TV in your living room, nuke your microwave food in the kitchen, have clock radio in bedroom, etc. Hence it makes sense to attempt to link together smaller engines to achieve the same task, giving the equivalent of standby processing or processing on demand.
Another consideration is fab plants takes billions to establish. By using IP cores from multiple sources (itself a thorny issue), they can keep the fabs ticking for a lot longer by using different combinations and only improving the ones which need to change (e.g. encryption for IP protection) rather than the basic DSPs. It shifts the balance away from software and back into specialised hardware which is cheaper for *SOME* applications which don't change often (e.g. MPEG4 decoders).
Also think of future applications like having the Sony PlayStation EE and GS chip being mixed with transmeta and dedicated CDMA chips... a low power consumption web pad to kill for.
Their headline quote was taken from a slashdot post and much of what they had to say seemed to suggest that userfriendly.org is in the process of "leveraging" their undeniably successful core product.
It used to be that companies showered pre-med students with discounts and freebies in recognition of the fact that doctors had an incredible life-time earning potential (why some collect BMWs for a hobby) due to high entry barriers (AMA/professional colleges/guilds/quotas). With the high prominance of tech IPOs (ignoring the stupidity of recent dot-cons), I suspect that smart companies (e.g. LinuxCard) are trying to realise the potential of getting in geeks while they're still uncomitted to single branded materialism. The problem comes of course in separating out the potentially profitable geeks with IPO potential from the typically impoverished student looking for a free ride. I suspect the only solution is a long-term raising of the professional status (which means culling out the idiots) such that students (especially with OpenSource background) are welcome. Given the more sophisticated anti-commercial bent of today's generation, I suspect that organisations such as UserFriendly need to be less in-your-face about co-branding least they destroy their grass-roots appeal. People including cartoonists are entitled to a living (and let's face it, all companies need to generate cashflow) so perhaps leveraging is a not-so-subtle way of sorting out the geeks from the dorks.
The big problem is that it is still yet to be shown that OpenSource is just as profitable as ClosedSource (e.g. through IPOs) and until then, participants won't be able to reap the spin-off benefits. However, one day, pre-IPOs will be considered just as attractive as pre-meds as a demographic marketing group.
Let's look at some facts: - technology is not a compelling competitive edge, you can always buy, hire or steal tech - if you lose a potential customer to another site, then you've lost their life-time value - stickiness is keen to retaining a returning customer base to help amortise your hardware
While it may sound attractive in theory, would sites (e.g. megaportals like Amazon) wish to let your eyes wander elsewhere when by investing in a little tech or buying out a small competitor they can keep your money in-house? Look at Sony, they are specifically buying a whole bank just so they can do e-commerce with their PlayStation2! Perhaps some of the smaller specialised sites may offer peering arrangements with a common infrastructure host but then it effectively means a lot of the profits disappear to the equivalent of the mall developer.
Trust is a rather difficult abstract quality to establish. In developing worlds tribes and clans are still the norm (e.g. they offer insider prices) and only the West with a relatively short and stressful history of rule by law that we've even got a semblance of belief that we're not tossing electronic bits of money into the e-void. But this has been the long struggle of consumer rights, anti-competitive commissions, financial oversight, and not a few lawsuites. Even then, fraud and downright commercial fly-by-night con jobs are not unheard of.
You cannot buy trust, but only earn it through a consistent policy, transparent operations and demonstrable willingness to follow up on your principles. The biggest benefit that off-line branded entities can bring to the internet strip-mall is probably their reputation and offering a third-party guarentee over another site is not something to be done lightly.
If you think about it, the act of pressing a few buttons, and expecting with 100% certainty that your ordered goods can be delivered from a totally unknown firm half-way around the world is a small miracle. Nobody likes tax but the benefits of a strong independent judicial oversight can never be underestimated.
Despite the baying of the media hounds on media convergence, let's stop, take a deep breath and *think* (you know that buzzing sound when you close your mouth and question *obvious* assumptions) that games and cellphones are a natural mix.
Human beings are social animals but we undertaken specific activities in specific spaces. (see Worlds). Now cell phones are associated with work (business) and communications. Is it worthwhile also turning it into a game-boy type of system? If a business saw a highly paid worker killing time playing with their Palm (OK stop sniggering in the corner) or cell phone I suspect that they will question your productivity or dedication. If you're driving, you certainly won't be playing at the same time and if you're taking the bus, then it's likely you're not going to be affording the pay/minute for on-line games. If you're at home, then you'd likely to already have a computer or sonsole handy.
I'm not knocking the idea but building a better mousetrap doesn't always lead to higher utilisation. One study revealed that the cheap wooden mousetrap significantly outsold a plastic box with pheromes because it ignored the fact that housewives didn't like throwing out an expensive looking box and the fact that if they saw a dead mouse in the wooden trap, they could get their husbands to dispose of the carcass immediately whereas they had to look in the box themselves. In short, the social circumstances may have subtle but significant factors in purchasing decisions.
So will people play games with strangers on their phones given the relative small screen-space, the low-battery life, and high relative costs?
BeOpen is owned now by AboveNet Communications, Inc., a subsidiary of Metromedia Fiber Network, Inc. (MFN) (Nasdaq: MFNX). This is a huge powerhouse of ISP infrastructure. Metromedia Fiber Network is the leading provider of end-to-end optical transport
Hmmmm.... I think I see the glimmerings of BeOpen's business model. Recall that in the early days of TV broadcasting, they had to create shows to flog the TV sets. Everyone is predicting the exponential explosion of data to replace voice as the main growth driver of telecommunications. Currently the biggest component of internet usage is mail and web browsing. But *text* is rather limited in human bandwidth requirements (eye can only read so fast) so I suspect a desire for more bandwidth hungry apps that operates on global scale. E-commerce is transaction oriented (bursty) so the only other possible market is education, exporting the US ivy league brand-names to India/China (potentially > 2 billion customers) which is where Python and the "Computer Programming for Everyone" project probably comes in to help create rich media interaction.
I think of it as people building the pipes and storage tanks for a virtual "hub and spoke" network in the expectation that the content will flow once some heavy pumping is initiated. Distributed development and professional community fostering is only the start.
What what I understand, engineers aim for a minimum operational life of 10,000 hours which equate to just over one year of continuous use. When the price points become fixed, then all you can alter are the invisible quality aspects (e.g. smaller hamburgers, larger packaging, higher risk failure). Like any good industrialist and profit seeking capitalist, it is in their interest to have everything fail at the right time (planned obsolescence) just in time for their new upgrades and "bigger/better/faster" range to come out. Henry Ford used to send his engineers scrounging through dumps to find out what parts survived... and when he discovered cottler pins holding wheels together he reduced the quality of the metal. Remember that in a manufacturing mindset, you only make a profit on the "First Sale" (see previous/. articles on why Microsoft is discouraging resale through EBay). Once hooked and addicted, they calculate the potential lifetime value of each customer and software price yields (ie how much they can screw them and have them coming back for more).
Unfortunately there's not much you can do... custom software is still expensive (think 100K/year x #team of hackers) and mass produced software (<$500) creates their own scale of economy (training, pool of experts, etc). You can see how after a while one company dominates a particular ecological niche, Cisco (TCP/IP routing), SGI (OpenGL), AutoCAD (design), Adobe (publishing), high-end databases (Oracle) thus rewarding specialisation and persistance. Without lure of supernormal profits, would you have these companies existing to bribe their option hungry programmers? Let's have a rough look at the economics, it takes say 3 years and a team of 20-30 engineers at $100K/year plus 33% operational overhead, ie a minimum cost of $10M you need to recover from software sales. At an average sale price of $50, you need minimum 2 million copies just to break even and steady state revenue of $3-4M/year. Assuming you are only targetting 1st world countries (starving peasants don't exactly put software at top of their Xmas list) you've got an uphill battle to convince others you're worthwhile keeping for the long-term, not to mention on-going support and hand-holding. Maybe those Indian programmers are not such a bad idea after all.
We might whinge at the formula movies and crappy software but we only get what we pay for. The demand for high quality high reliability software (e.g. FAA flight control) is only a select market and if the average purchaser is not interested in paying extra for a higher mean-time-between failure (given today's disposable society) then you are just wasting scarce programmer resources. Perhaps OpenSource software could set a new standard but documenting and independently validating a set of 3 software metrics
- mean time between failure (reliability) - total cost to repair/replace (quality) - acceleration of learning curve (difficulty)
Is it my imagination or is marketing being reduced to "let's defend our shitty product by preventing competitors from even being associated with it". When car parts (especially the fragile low-collision parts) have patented connectors, when it costs more to have a logo than the actual shirt, or paying for overpriced coffee just to luxuriate in the yuppie lifestyle. What happened to *real* innovation like coming up with laser-pointers, foldable LCDs, longer lasting batteries. It seems that as soon as we identify an enjoyable experience (the small of fresh leather in a new car, the taste of candy in a fairground, the breeze of salt air in a racing catamaran) someone is out there trying to fence off that memory and trying to make a buck out of selling it back to us. I know the government passes laws to secure IP but what's the limit? Compare walking down a street in a mainstream city and count how many ads there are compared with a country town. It's getting to the stage where some people would classify it as visual or aural pollution. All this jockeying for mind-share is proving to be a royal pain to the pocketbook (after all the ads come out of what you pay for the product).
Humph... next we'll have MS trade-marking the smell of freshly minted cash solely for their CDs.
Imagine a sign in the future... "only humans allowed in park. no robots, cyborgs, automated machinery. or semi-autonomous devices. Strict infobit-control zone. Violators will be sued and their datacores purged."
Ebay wants to analyse the human activities (your click stream) and denying robots and other automated search sequences (unless you're willing to pay a hefty access fee) is probably a deliberate strategy. Now whether this is right or wrong is a moot point. Obviously as providers of a service, they can put arbitrary (even downright discriminatory as no League for artificial robot fair access rights exists:-) ) limits on who can access their information (much like a restaurant can say no thongs) but I suspect it is a little disingeneous to call it "stealing cycles" when their ulterior motives is to probably save them the extra hassle of stripping out electronic tracks and to discourage potential superior services. An analogy can be made as to who "owns" the final stock closing price which is used to create index and long-run analyses.
The question down the line then arises whether this is a "fair" business tactic or anti-competitive behaviour. Much like certain countries have obstensibly low tarrifs but erect substantial hidden barriers to entry, it can be difficult to judge. If you look at the latest theories on infowar (IT applied to battlefield) you can see the importance of denying the enemy access to information. Much like you can forbid a competitor from wandering into your shop to browse the prices and observe your layouts/fitouts, e-commerce sites are putting in place technical and legal challenges to make it difficult for their peers to emulate their design and scan any price-sensitive movements. Of course in a technology arms race it's probably not too difficult to come up with a distributed random sampling system from multiple access points but it does make life a little bit more challenging for new entrants, especially those wishing to arbitrage between multiple auction sites.
Too bad we don't have educational futures as in the coming techwars the only sure winners will be the overpriced salaries of consultants and MBAs.
Trying to use a server machine as a desktop is as efficient as trying to use a truck to run to the corner store. No graphics card, XFS and GIO tuned at the card level, plus high bandwidth/CPU ratio. However, it can be useful as a data-shuffler/mining/analysis backend.
Use the right machine at the right time for the appropriate purpose.
People probably ignore the secondary costs of operating a largish data-centre. Afterall, when buying a car, is all you look at only the peak RPM of the 'Motor Inside (TM)'. I would be interested to see whether anyone could post some rough figures for cost per square metre for hosting a bunch of racks. You've got uninterruptable power supplies (min 300-500K upfront capital costs), air-conditioning (we're talking heavy duty water coolers), Occupational Health and Safety issues (imagine 2000 fans going at once), physical security, etc. The question I suppose is does the savings in form factor (low heat dissipation, with resuling savings in fan) give a better value-for money for your targetted system load? If you've got only a few big dynamic databases and lotsa static pages you can probably get away with a combination of several CacheRaqs and say an Origin 200 for fast parallel RAID I/O. The mix of machines might give better overall mean time between failures at accetpable cost. Also keep in mind that your techies won't be too happy at getting up at 4am in the morning to fix problems. A reasonable degree of redundancy is useful.
What I see happening is that we are getting past the analogous stage where electricity generators are a novelty and we are shifting into decent web-engineering, much as the early layout of the electric grid standardised (or commodidised) transformers, generators, motors etc. You will probably see similar moves in the computer industry as the infrastructure goes invisible. You won't be buying a computer but a URL with guarenteed x Gigabytes storage accessible anywhere in the world at a predetermined level of service/performance. Slide-in storage modules (like for portables) for CD/DVD/HD/etc will become the norm and if the hardware vendors stop squabbling among themselves for specification control of the bus and I/O plugs, something similar for processors. Take a look at Sony's iLink (aka Apple Firewire). The reason why consumer electronics is the key is that the mass scales of economies will swamp anything a dedicated system will produce except in niche areas. People forget that it's the software/services that people are willing to pay for. Stability and service becomes a more important factor once a certain level of features is in place. If the Cobalt team can offer a decent price-competitive solution below the kink in the cost curve (the point where the plant pays for itself and thus competes with other paid-off fabs) where the marginal costs are so much smaller, then good luck to them.
Repeat after me... the sunk cost is in the infrastructure but the value is in the services.
A little off-topic but if people are desparate for their own piece of dirt, I understand the Indonesian government are *thinking* (ie haven't legislated it as yet) the *lease* of some of their off-shore islands/islets for ecotourism, aquaculture, or related purposes. Of course they retain sovereignty (much like a country is Crown Land) but you get title to certain rights (e.g. occupation). I recall the article saying they needed foreign exchange but they were talking about prices in the millions though.
The biggest problem is not so much a shortage of islands, but that basically unless you've got independent income, there's no way of recreating the hard infrastructure for a self-sustaining hide-away. Just calculate how much it will cost to put in reliable power supply, establish transport links, feed fibre cable, not to mention bribe some techies to stay there and look after the place. There's a good reason why cable landing points tend to be near large metropolitan areas.
The bar for independent sovereignty seems to be a lot higher now. Rather than trying to establish a place from scratch, people seem to be more interested in breaking off/away (e.g. Balkans, Sir Lanka, parts of Asia). If you want to establish a GeekNation, your best bet is to make a deal with an Indian tribe somewhere and offer them a deal.
Slashdot Mirror
One may wonder whether "government" as we view it is going to be relevant any more. Many countries are developing independent specialised institutions tasked with specific objective (which frankly politicians have shown to be incompetenet at managing). Look at the independences of the Fed. If Greenspan got run over by a truck, there would be a bigger economic shake down than if the president got assassinated (good for a few weeks of prime time). When the head of a country gets to become a figurehead with empty public posturing, who has the *real* control of a country?
What are some of the trends that could influence the future?
- social activism motivated by fast communications
- breakdown in the sense of national identity, perhaps not in the US where patriotism is still a saleable item but in other countries
- inefficiency of public owned services compared with private, to be revealed even more
- where some companies outmass entire countries in resources
To bring home the point, do people think of themselves as hackers first or [insert favourite home nation]?
LL
1. Evangelists within the organization Nothing that a few good (depending on your definition of good) laws can't solve. Perhaps one day they'll also legislate against stupidity (IMHO the only serious long-term growth industry apart from tax evasion) but until then, maybe you can start up your own Church of the Anti-FUD :-). LL
Think of the computing industry like an iceberg. What the consumer sees (as the flashy gee-whiz internet appliances) is only the tip. Underneath is the massive IT infrastructure running everything from service delivery, autoamted logging, scheduling, paperwork, tax calculation, currency exchange, more taxes, government regulations, user fees, even more sales taxes, etc ... I'm sure you get the picture. These things, especially taxes, are a royal pain in the neck and it's cheaper getting a few grunt boxes to do the work than to hire a legion of paper shufflers. Companies exist becuse they have evolved to be the most efficient at serving a particular niche (irrespective of how they bullied their way into that domain). If a corporate IT group sees the Sun as a viable enterprise solution to solve certain problems and address scalability issues, then there must be some sort of justification. For a hint, take a look at where the big database systems are porting their software.
Just because you admire the scenery on a road doesn't mean that industrial trucks can't travel the same route. And there's a good reason why a truck costs more than an overgrown bicycle (think reliability, fuel efficiency, capital depreciation, etc). What people don't realise is that the average joe doesn't want to pay for functionality that is invisible (e.g. why have russian spelling checker if you can't speak russian?) and thus the model is shifting towards giving away client software/plugins in order to create a sticky service site (ie a defensive move to prevent consumer serfs from leaving their lucrative branded fiefdom). Microsoft have realised this and in the spirit of maintaing a presence on every desk, are determined to march their way up the food chain. Consumer computing isn't the entire world (not to mention all the other invisible world of real-time manufacturing control, embedded systems, trusted plant operations, etc).
LL
Perhaps a little off-topic but it struck me that if internet appliances are going to be as common as paper (did someone brandy the figure of 250 million units by 2003?) then it seems a little excessive to brand every single class of them. Apart from the minor inconvenience of running out of english names/trademarks and filling the coffers of NSI, do we really care about who manufactures every single lever and widget in our car? Similarly are companies going overboard in trying to brand the nuts and bolts of the evolving information infrastructure? Apart from certain classy toilet paper, we don't go around naming bits of paper after their distributors. An internet appliance is just that, a convenience to access structured information. Once people settle on a form factor (e.g. Nokia handset), entry sytem (e.g. Palm Pilot), battery life (still an iffy), then the rest is asthetics and widget frosting (granted nice electronic interior decortating but not germane to the actual information).
Have we reached the point where advertising has become sheer noise? Or is there something called a brand-free zone?
LL
I suspect that there are a few more ulterior motives. The biggest problem in today's rather crowded (as in attention deficient) marketplace is making people aware of your products. You basically have to compete against the existing software solutions. Visor did the smart thing and built off the Palm's software base. In a similar manner Transmeta wants to attract the early adopter crowd who are willing to either a) pay a premium or b) willing to put up or even correct deficiencies or c) all of above. Guess where the Linux demographic fits in? Now you have simplified the marketing problem of bullshitting the mainstream mindless media through buzzword du jour into trying to generate good-will in a smaller but more vocal and technically competent group of engineers and hackers. Why do companies throw money away at Grand Prixs and glamor sports celebrities? Because the public and general unwashed reasons (whether correctly is left as a psychological exercise) that if the experts buy/use/flog it, then it can't be that bad so the credibility is shifted (hopefully) onto the product. The electronics industry shifted when Nokia turned the mobile phone into a fashion accessory. Transmeta might herald another shift by turning the software sector into a glamor industry. In reality it's like an iceberg, what you see/touch/buy for personal use is only 99% of the gear, the rest being networks (hi Cisco), servers,. storage, and embedded stuff. But some companies need that 1% to help flog the other 99% e.g. SGI and MIPS because the development costs are so high, you need to screw ... err ... serve the customer with the biggest hip-pocket first. Sacrificing a few 100K to gain the hacker equivalent of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods is a small price to pay.
... err ... icon :-).
New open source business model, come up with a brillant solution, give it away, then become a paid display penguin
LL
If programming was just a matter of training then we would have code monkeys coming out of the jungle. However, as people like Knuth points out, it takes a special kind of talent to structure a complex system without getting lost in the details. Perhaps it is akin to writing a symphony, you have to know the general theme as well as how your line fits in. Not the same as throwing a few software bricks together with some GUI scripts in the hope that it doesn't fall apart.
It is rather interesting to speculate as to what makes a superlative software architect. I recall one article which claimed that if you had a prior background in music or even languages, they could teach you how to design/code. Coming from an impoverished background is no barrier as India has so amply shown. Symbolic reasoning? Spatial awareness? Or is it just something we can't test until the person sits down and has a hack and discovers a natural talent?. The mind is a strange and wonderful beast.
LL
Just curious as to how companies amortise the cost of software as I suspect this influences why new projects are much more interesting than old ones. Is software seen as a durable capital item to be written off over x years? Or more as an on-going variable cost which carries hidden overheads in requiring hiring of maintenance software programmers? For a company living on the edge of bankrupcy, I can see the appeal of degrading infrastructure (ie using the same old stuff) in the hopes of surviving another year. So is the best strategy just to buy the biggest/baddest in the hope that it lasts a decent period or is it better to go cheap and nasty in the expectation that it will be replaced by generation+1 after a short interval? Or has the maintenance complexity gotten the best of us and we're just giving up and hopes of keeping the feeping creatures under control (a la software tribbles)?
LL
Let's see how many different variations one can play on the original concepts (e.g. Apple's Hypercard) by altering the location of various information, the definition of "device", the nuances of protocols/caching, and the language for formatting. Frankly there are so many combinations that the concept of a patent for owning this part of the road gives you a claim on the whole highway system is getting a little out of hand. What has made the WWW succeed? One early "free" software package that enforced the concept of a URL (which alas has not progressed to persistent URI/URNs), a text markup people could remember without overloading the ol' brain cells, and a protocol which recursively fetched and automated the old ftp by an order of magnitude. Any one of these ideas had been around in various forms, but it was the combination and the fact that reduced network costs made it available to the mass consumer market that made the whole kit-and-kaboddle take off. Trying to claim afterwards that one particular primitive variant was the sole originating invention smells to me of patenting the concept of a toll road then laying claim to the whole highway. If the company can claim their ideas were instrumental, then I think a lot of people would be *very* interested to discover where in the digital DNA (aka source code for browsers/servers) their ideas have taken root. How many of the real innovators go ahead and puruse the patent database anyway? If it can be implemented by a college student from first principles (and god knows how many httpd servers are coded as classroom exercises nowadays) then pushing the claim of outside prior art seems a little disingeneous. It might have been novel 10 years ago but economists call this sunk costs, it might as well be written off as far as trying to capture future revenue or positive externalities.
BTW, can anyone recall a telecom company being particularly "innovative" in starting/surviving a complete industry sector/shakeout like mechanical design (AutoCAD), destop publishing (Adobe), relational databases (Oracle) or movie production (SGI)? Perhaps Nokia in phone as fashion accessory. Curious minds want to know.
In life, sometimes the market just doesn't react until the circumstances demand a particular technology. It helps if you're big enough that there's some warm body with related skills that you can catch the latest fad but nowadays coming up with a new idea is not enough, you have to persuade everyone else that its a good idea worth taking on board (the ol' information assymetry problem). Of course getting them to pay for it is another problem. The various basic layers/APIs seem to have evolved (TCP/IP, POSIX, HTTP/MIME, etc) and the rest is engineering compromises.
LL
What are the potential barriers towards adopting such a technology - better connection with kinesthetics, the intuitive match between spatial awareness and body motion - between physics models like MathsEngine to express - some killerapp vertically integrated applications to reach selected markets (like telesurgery which requires precise placement) to help bring the price-point down - software/content that supports 2-3D with the marginal effort of adding 3D smaller than marginal increase in sales
Apart from the gee-whiz factor, a realistic look at what services would benefit most from such displays needs to be addressed, especially their willingness to cough up the money. Remember that hardware is only 10% of the total costs, ad another 20% for peripherals/support, 30% for software/operational consumables, and 40% for training. It's starting to looking expensive.
3D will have a role but I suspect widespread star wars type holographic displays are still a way off unless a miracle occurs.
LL
Take a look at HTTP Extension Framework. Note a couple of key aspects:
- use of mandatory and optional items
- end-to-end transmission
- referential connections (ie ensure a link encoded within the content)
If you make the assumption that everything is a computer and that XML or Java engines will be embeeded into every computer and consumer item known to mankind (and Mars 127.0,0.1) then if any any point you insert you hacked/hand-made/sniffer device that removes those not-so-subtle control signals, then you can kiss your replay features good bye. Look the technological trends, the Amiga/TAO/Sony announcement of being able to hook multiple IP cores within the same OS. The support of big name companies for selected XML "standards" (with convenient amnesia about certain inconvenient consumer friendly functions). If each silicon slice supports the necessary control protocols, then when you replay back an "interactive" movie, they will be able to tell who/when/what and be able to dictate the terms of the availability, target bits to a specific machine, and eliminate 2nd sale, redistribution, cross-transmission, and lending/borrowing priviledges. Education and entertainment are going to be big money spinners and the players want to keep every penny of it. If you think DVD was bad, wait until every bitstream is encoded.Take a careful look at how the protocol extensions are to be used in their examples:
- Man: "http://www.copyright.org/rights-management"; ns=16
- 14-Credentials="g5gj262jdw@4df"
- Expires: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 08:12:31 GMT
- C-Opt: "http://www.meter.org/hits"
- Opt: "http://www.my.com/tracking"
- Cache-Control: no-cache="Ext"
Sorry guys, not only can (as McNealy put it) you kiss your privacy goodbye but you might as well forget about keeping any bits you buy/lease/rent whether software or content.LL
As one wag once said, standards are good, lets have more of them ....
Standards by Fiat
- flog a new product/protocol, then define it as *THE* standard
Standards by Proclaination
- competitors create me-too "compatible" clones
Standards by Committee
- someone creates a group to knock heads
Standards by Concensus
- define a lowest-common demonomiator subset that people can live with
Standards by Irritation
- result is so grotty that someone is pissed off enough to write a free|open implementation
Standards by stealth
- works so well that everyone else just accepts it
What we need instead is a mechanism to help seek and destroy *bad* standards/interfaces.
LL
ESR did mention in the Magic Cauldron that one viable business model is to give away the software but to make money off the accessories. If this is what Napster is doing, then perhaps there should be some recognition of its rights to retain trade-marks and co-branding. The way that I look at it is that if you think of information travelling as a wave on a pond and energy representing the transfer of money, then to really benefit you either have a standing wave ripple front moving in a single direction where all energy is concentrated at the edge (licensing, charge of direct sales, etc) or else have it oscillating in an enclosure in which case you charge a small amount but spread it across a space-time domain. Either case you have to put energy into sustaining itself, either through a uni-directional strong front travelleing fast or else in maintaining persistent backwards compatibility. (I hope I haven't muddled the analogy too much). Either way you want a net increase in energy otherwise the dissipation means that the source/inspiration for the content disappears. The concept of a starving artist may not appeal to programmers with high-expense rations in Silicon Valley so somehow you need to survive the lean period of development. If merchandising is the only solution when going up against an entrenched system, then is it fair or injust that they try to preserve their air-supply? I think we all tend to root for the underdog against the existing economic interests but sometimes the deadwood needs to be cleared before the new broom can sweep clean.
LL
I know it's off-topic but in a nutshell ...
... keeps the laws on the books and policemen employed in behaviour control instead of chasing white-collar crime (where the really big frauds and crooks are IMHO). Also, can someone confirm the rumor that hemp was originally outlawed as part of a campaign to promote synthetic fibre? Or is this an urban legend?
... inertia of the system
LL
Comes down to the ol' pass by reference or pass by value. A link (URL/URI/URN) is basically a fixed address. Just like a snail-mail address, you like to be assured that silly buggers don't go around changing them all the time (ie static and persistent). Now on the other hand *some* commercial sites have a buiness plan that requires either strict control (guide them pass the ad display) or require something (e.g. consumer data) in return for the honor and priviledge of viewing their rebranded proprietary formatted content . Quite rightly they get irritated when people bypass all their elaborate facades to go straight to the goodies or raw unencumbered data. Now, as far as I can see there are two issues:
.... it's left to the dedicated fans and nimble new companies. So instead the MBAs try the tactics they know best, legal intimidation, saturation marketing, media bullshitting, etc instead of doing the hard yakka of technology fix (does this remind you of any other company).
- right to link/reference
- right to deny access
Both are valid and not necessarily symmetric. If someone puts up a private building, they have the priviledge of denying entry. On the other hand, there are certain traditional precendents for public right of access (e.g. to shoreline). Thus a site which fences off common (e.g GPL) property with minimal widget frosting (e.g. a lot of sites fluff up the CIA database on countries) and attempts to charge a rent is attempting to create disproportionate return from little value-added (nice try but most people are smarter than that). Now if the recording industry is in the distribution business (and not music creation) then trying to maintain the same retailing/hype margins in a commodity business is downright stupid. Instead, they could add value by doing the obvious things like indexing, offering behind-scenes walkthroughs, cataloging, sorting by whatever, but no
Now the right to link is a rather interesting case as ideally you want lots of people to link to your content (more associated sales a la Amazon) but you can't prevent people from how they link, in short something that doesn't fit the criteria for a property right. Hence attempting to control this is going to be problematic as restricing access actually shrinks your potential market, sorta like cutting off your nose to spite your face. The bigger sites have the ability to prioritise (a la premium counter space in supermarkets due to volume of throughput) but most other businesses are not in that envious position. Perhaps the sensible way is for each commercial site to nominate the respectable entrances (ie valid and persistent URLs they guarentee will last x years). Then you can probably negotitate peacefully and come to some mutual benefit. Links are good, have more of them so long as they don't get broken.
What is annoying is that companies are confusing legal aspects with technological and economic aspects. By designing a site in a specific way (e.g. not using PURLs) they create a mess for themselves or worse, create a fatally flawed business model which they attempt to cover up by blaming others. If people are geting paid 6 figures for e-commerce MBAs and this is what they come up with, then a lot of venture capital is being wasted through sheer cluelessness. Those idiots deserve to be excommunicated to a country where a web is what the spider creates on your doorframe. One of these days, things will settle back to normal and the rest of us can get back to listening to some decent non-formulatic non-elevator music.
LL
For example, do all the chips have to operate at the same frequency, how does it handle memory caching? What's the system design for simultaneous I/O streaming? Can they control the activation/deactivation of energy sources/chips?
... a low power consumption web pad to kill for.
As for why it is useful. OK imagine that today's CPUs are engines, so far we've been ramping up the revs/sec getting to the stage of gas turbines. But the problem is that you can only have homogenous or balanced trubines, much like a plane requires 4 engines of exactly the same type otherwise it is unflyable. This imposes an incredible overhead if you are only using it infrequently. Unlike PCs/clusters where if you're sitting down, you are working continuously therefore you want reduced latency or improved throughput, comsumer items are flogged with the intention that you own several (think of stereo components) that don't always operate together. After all, you watch TV in your living room, nuke your microwave food in the kitchen, have clock radio in bedroom, etc. Hence it makes sense to attempt to link together smaller engines to achieve the same task, giving the equivalent of standby processing or processing on demand.
Another consideration is fab plants takes billions to establish. By using IP cores from multiple sources (itself a thorny issue), they can keep the fabs ticking for a lot longer by using different combinations and only improving the ones which need to change (e.g. encryption for IP protection) rather than the basic DSPs. It shifts the balance away from software and back into specialised hardware which is cheaper for *SOME* applications which don't change often (e.g. MPEG4 decoders).
Also think of future applications like having the Sony PlayStation EE and GS chip being mixed with transmeta and dedicated CDMA chips
LL
It used to be that companies showered pre-med students with discounts and freebies in recognition of the fact that doctors had an incredible life-time earning potential (why some collect BMWs for a hobby) due to high entry barriers (AMA/professional colleges/guilds/quotas). With the high prominance of tech IPOs (ignoring the stupidity of recent dot-cons), I suspect that smart companies (e.g. LinuxCard) are trying to realise the potential of getting in geeks while they're still uncomitted to single branded materialism. The problem comes of course in separating out the potentially profitable geeks with IPO potential from the typically impoverished student looking for a free ride. I suspect the only solution is a long-term raising of the professional status (which means culling out the idiots) such that students (especially with OpenSource background) are welcome. Given the more sophisticated anti-commercial bent of today's generation, I suspect that organisations such as UserFriendly need to be less in-your-face about co-branding least they destroy their grass-roots appeal. People including cartoonists are entitled to a living (and let's face it, all companies need to generate cashflow) so perhaps leveraging is a not-so-subtle way of sorting out the geeks from the dorks.
The big problem is that it is still yet to be shown that OpenSource is just as profitable as ClosedSource (e.g. through IPOs) and until then, participants won't be able to reap the spin-off benefits. However, one day, pre-IPOs will be considered just as attractive as pre-meds as a demographic marketing group.
LL
Let's look at some facts:
- technology is not a compelling competitive edge, you can always buy, hire or steal tech
- if you lose a potential customer to another site, then you've lost their life-time value
- stickiness is keen to retaining a returning customer base to help amortise your hardware
While it may sound attractive in theory, would sites (e.g. megaportals like Amazon) wish to let your eyes wander elsewhere when by investing in a little tech or buying out a small competitor they can keep your money in-house? Look at Sony, they are specifically buying a whole bank just so they can do e-commerce with their PlayStation2! Perhaps some of the smaller specialised sites may offer peering arrangements with a common infrastructure host but then it effectively means a lot of the profits disappear to the equivalent of the mall developer.
Trust is a rather difficult abstract quality to establish. In developing worlds tribes and clans are still the norm (e.g. they offer insider prices) and only the West with a relatively short and stressful history of rule by law that we've even got a semblance of belief that we're not tossing electronic bits of money into the e-void. But this has been the long struggle of consumer rights, anti-competitive commissions, financial oversight, and not a few lawsuites. Even then, fraud and downright commercial fly-by-night con jobs are not unheard of.
You cannot buy trust, but only earn it through a consistent policy, transparent operations and demonstrable willingness to follow up on your principles. The biggest benefit that off-line branded entities can bring to the internet strip-mall is probably their reputation and offering a third-party guarentee over another site is not something to be done lightly.
If you think about it, the act of pressing a few buttons, and expecting with 100% certainty that your ordered goods can be delivered from a totally unknown firm half-way around the world is a small miracle. Nobody likes tax but the benefits of a strong independent judicial oversight can never be underestimated.
LL
Human beings are social animals but we undertaken specific activities in specific spaces. (see Worlds). Now cell phones are associated with work (business) and communications. Is it worthwhile also turning it into a game-boy type of system? If a business saw a highly paid worker killing time playing with their Palm (OK stop sniggering in the corner) or cell phone I suspect that they will question your productivity or dedication. If you're driving, you certainly won't be playing at the same time and if you're taking the bus, then it's likely you're not going to be affording the pay/minute for on-line games. If you're at home, then you'd likely to already have a computer or sonsole handy.
I'm not knocking the idea but building a better mousetrap doesn't always lead to higher utilisation. One study revealed that the cheap wooden mousetrap significantly outsold a plastic box with pheromes because it ignored the fact that housewives didn't like throwing out an expensive looking box and the fact that if they saw a dead mouse in the wooden trap, they could get their husbands to dispose of the carcass immediately whereas they had to look in the box themselves. In short, the social circumstances may have subtle but significant factors in purchasing decisions.
So will people play games with strangers on their phones given the relative small screen-space, the low-battery life, and high relative costs?
LL
Hmmmm .... I think I see the glimmerings of BeOpen's business model. Recall that in the early days of TV broadcasting, they had to create shows to flog the TV sets. Everyone is predicting the exponential explosion of data to replace voice as the main growth driver of telecommunications. Currently the biggest component of internet usage is mail and web browsing. But *text* is rather limited in human bandwidth requirements (eye can only read so fast) so I suspect a desire for more bandwidth hungry apps that operates on global scale. E-commerce is transaction oriented (bursty) so the only other possible market is education, exporting the US ivy league brand-names to India/China (potentially > 2 billion customers) which is where Python and the "Computer Programming for Everyone" project probably comes in to help create rich media interaction.
I think of it as people building the pipes and storage tanks for a virtual "hub and spoke" network in the expectation that the content will flow once some heavy pumping is initiated. Distributed development and professional community fostering is only the start.
LL
What what I understand, engineers aim for a minimum operational life of 10,000 hours which equate to just over one year of continuous use. When the price points become fixed, then all you can alter are the invisible quality aspects (e.g. smaller hamburgers, larger packaging, higher risk failure). Like any good industrialist and profit seeking capitalist, it is in their interest to have everything fail at the right time (planned obsolescence) just in time for their new upgrades and "bigger/better/faster" range to come out. Henry Ford used to send his engineers scrounging through dumps to find out what parts survived ... and when he discovered cottler pins holding wheels together he reduced the quality of the metal. Remember that in a manufacturing mindset, you only make a profit on the "First Sale" (see previous /. articles on why Microsoft is discouraging resale through EBay). Once hooked and addicted, they calculate the potential lifetime value of each customer and software price yields (ie how much they can screw them and have them coming back for more).
... custom software is still expensive (think 100K/year x #team of hackers) and mass produced software (<$500) creates their own scale of economy (training, pool of experts, etc). You can see how after a while one company dominates a particular ecological niche, Cisco (TCP/IP routing), SGI (OpenGL), AutoCAD (design), Adobe (publishing), high-end databases (Oracle) thus rewarding specialisation and persistance. Without lure of supernormal profits, would you have these companies existing to bribe their option hungry programmers? Let's have a rough look at the economics, it takes say 3 years and a team of 20-30 engineers at $100K/year plus 33% operational overhead, ie a minimum cost of $10M you need to recover from software sales. At an average sale price of $50, you need minimum 2 million copies just to break even and steady state revenue of $3-4M/year. Assuming you are only targetting 1st world countries (starving peasants don't exactly put software at top of their Xmas list) you've got an uphill battle to convince others you're worthwhile keeping for the long-term, not to mention on-going support and hand-holding. Maybe those Indian programmers are not such a bad idea after all.
Unfortunately there's not much you can do
We might whinge at the formula movies and crappy software but we only get what we pay for. The demand for high quality high reliability software (e.g. FAA flight control) is only a select market and if the average purchaser is not interested in paying extra for a higher mean-time-between failure (given today's disposable society) then you are just wasting scarce programmer resources. Perhaps OpenSource software could set a new standard but documenting and independently validating a set of 3 software metrics
- mean time between failure (reliability)
- total cost to repair/replace (quality)
- acceleration of learning curve (difficulty)
This should sort out the sheep from the goats.
LL
Is it my imagination or is marketing being reduced to "let's defend our shitty product by preventing competitors from even being associated with it". When car parts (especially the fragile low-collision parts) have patented connectors, when it costs more to have a logo than the actual shirt, or paying for overpriced coffee just to luxuriate in the yuppie lifestyle. What happened to *real* innovation like coming up with laser-pointers, foldable LCDs, longer lasting batteries. It seems that as soon as we identify an enjoyable experience (the small of fresh leather in a new car, the taste of candy in a fairground, the breeze of salt air in a racing catamaran) someone is out there trying to fence off that memory and trying to make a buck out of selling it back to us. I know the government passes laws to secure IP but what's the limit? Compare walking down a street in a mainstream city and count how many ads there are compared with a country town. It's getting to the stage where some people would classify it as visual or aural pollution. All this jockeying for mind-share is proving to be a royal pain to the pocketbook (after all the ads come out of what you pay for the product).
... next we'll have MS trade-marking the smell of freshly minted cash solely for their CDs.
Humph
LL
Imagine a sign in the future ... "only humans allowed in park. no robots, cyborgs, automated machinery. or semi-autonomous devices. Strict infobit-control zone. Violators will be sued and their datacores purged."
:-) ) limits on who can access their information (much like a restaurant can say no thongs) but I suspect it is a little disingeneous to call it "stealing cycles" when their ulterior motives is to probably save them the extra hassle of stripping out electronic tracks and to discourage potential superior services. An analogy can be made as to who "owns" the final stock closing price which is used to create index and long-run analyses.
Ebay wants to analyse the human activities (your click stream) and denying robots and other automated search sequences (unless you're willing to pay a hefty access fee) is probably a deliberate strategy. Now whether this is right or wrong is a moot point. Obviously as providers of a service, they can put arbitrary (even downright discriminatory as no League for artificial robot fair access rights exists
The question down the line then arises whether this is a "fair" business tactic or anti-competitive behaviour. Much like certain countries have obstensibly low tarrifs but erect substantial hidden barriers to entry, it can be difficult to judge. If you look at the latest theories on infowar (IT applied to battlefield) you can see the importance of denying the enemy access to information. Much like you can forbid a competitor from wandering into your shop to browse the prices and observe your layouts/fitouts, e-commerce sites are putting in place technical and legal challenges to make it difficult for their peers to emulate their design and scan any price-sensitive movements. Of course in a technology arms race it's probably not too difficult to come up with a distributed random sampling system from multiple access points but it does make life a little bit more challenging for new entrants, especially those wishing to arbitrage between multiple auction sites.
Too bad we don't have educational futures as in the coming techwars the only sure winners will be the overpriced salaries of consultants and MBAs.
LL
Trying to use a server machine as a desktop is as efficient as trying to use a truck to run to the corner store. No graphics card, XFS and GIO tuned at the card level, plus high bandwidth/CPU ratio. However, it can be useful as a data-shuffler/mining/analysis backend.
Use the right machine at the right time for the appropriate purpose.
LL
People probably ignore the secondary costs of operating a largish data-centre. Afterall, when buying a car, is all you look at only the peak RPM of the 'Motor Inside (TM)'. I would be interested to see whether anyone could post some rough figures for cost per square metre for hosting a bunch of racks. You've got uninterruptable power supplies (min 300-500K upfront capital costs), air-conditioning (we're talking heavy duty water coolers), Occupational Health and Safety issues (imagine 2000 fans going at once), physical security, etc. The question I suppose is does the savings in form factor (low heat dissipation, with resuling savings in fan) give a better value-for money for your targetted system load? If you've got only a few big dynamic databases and lotsa static pages you can probably get away with a combination of several CacheRaqs and say an Origin 200 for fast parallel RAID I/O. The mix of machines might give better overall mean time between failures at accetpable cost. Also keep in mind that your techies won't be too happy at getting up at 4am in the morning to fix problems. A reasonable degree of redundancy is useful.
... the sunk cost is in the infrastructure but the value is in the services.
What I see happening is that we are getting past the analogous stage where electricity generators are a novelty and we are shifting into decent web-engineering, much as the early layout of the electric grid standardised (or commodidised) transformers, generators, motors etc. You will probably see similar moves in the computer industry as the infrastructure goes invisible. You won't be buying a computer but a URL with guarenteed x Gigabytes storage accessible anywhere in the world at a predetermined level of service/performance. Slide-in storage modules (like for portables) for CD/DVD/HD/etc will become the norm and if the hardware vendors stop squabbling among themselves for specification control of the bus and I/O plugs, something similar for processors. Take a look at Sony's iLink (aka Apple Firewire). The reason why consumer electronics is the key is that the mass scales of economies will swamp anything a dedicated system will produce except in niche areas. People forget that it's the software/services that people are willing to pay for. Stability and service becomes a more important factor once a certain level of features is in place. If the Cobalt team can offer a decent price-competitive solution below the kink in the cost curve (the point where the plant pays for itself and thus competes with other paid-off fabs) where the marginal costs are so much smaller, then good luck to them.
Repeat after me
LL
A little off-topic but if people are desparate for their own piece of dirt, I understand the Indonesian government are *thinking* (ie haven't legislated it as yet) the *lease* of some of their off-shore islands/islets for ecotourism, aquaculture, or related purposes. Of course they retain sovereignty (much like a country is Crown Land) but you get title to certain rights (e.g. occupation). I recall the article saying they needed foreign exchange but they were talking about prices in the millions though.
The biggest problem is not so much a shortage of islands, but that basically unless you've got independent income, there's no way of recreating the hard infrastructure for a self-sustaining hide-away. Just calculate how much it will cost to put in reliable power supply, establish transport links, feed fibre cable, not to mention bribe some techies to stay there and look after the place. There's a good reason why cable landing points tend to be near large metropolitan areas.
The bar for independent sovereignty seems to be a lot higher now. Rather than trying to establish a place from scratch, people seem to be more interested in breaking off/away (e.g. Balkans, Sir Lanka, parts of Asia). If you want to establish a GeekNation, your best bet is to make a deal with an Indian tribe somewhere and offer them a deal.
LL