This article misses a very important point. Record companies were invented to record, mass copy and distribute media. Since about five years their services are no longer required to distribute music. I'd say that is a pretty relevant factor economically speaking.
Distributing music through p2p networks is very cheap. You can do it from your home. This reduces the cost of an album to a fraction of the cost (there still is some) of a regular album. Basically you need some time to write music and do the recordings, some equipment (a few thousand dollars buys you pretty good stuff), some sound technician to digitally polish your recordings (though it is getting easier to this yourself as well) and thats it. There's quite a few artists already who work like this. Making actual cds of the music is not that expensive either (production cost typically much less than 1$). Record companies have the advantage that mass production is typically more cost effective.
The record companies are waging a battle at becoming obsolete. Right now the public still doesn't get it. Music comes on small discs. Making those discs costs money and of course the record company is entitled to a rediculous share of an outrages price for that disc. Once people figure out that doesn't make sense anymore, the record companies are history.
In all examples you mention, there's some degree of legal security. If the ATM has the right logos and something goes wrong, the bank will have some obligations to set things straight. If somebody uses your credit card number, the risk is for the credit card company (it still sucks though) and car manufacturers actually have to submit their vehicles to extensive testing before they are allowed on the road. If you can prove you had an accident because the manufacturer made a mistake you can get very rich (if you live in the US).
Anyway, palladium isn't about consumers but about the enterprise market (that's where the future revenue growth lies). DRM is interesting to MS because content providers pay for licensing it, not because consumers buy protected media.
In the enterprise market, trust is important. Companies will definately care about who they trust and about the integrity of their security. Some of them are in fact already very annoyed about the lack of security. MS telling them they will just have to believe in them is not going to be very convincing.
This is the fundamental problem that MS has so far not addressed.
The whole problem with trust is that I don't necessarily trust either phoenix or ms. This a problem because their security solutions more or less require me to do so. I think this is ultimately why this and similar approaches will fail in the market.
Trust requires open solutions. If I, or someone I trust, can't analyse & audit security solutions I use, these solutions are flawed. MS and phoenix pushing proprietary solutions implies that they do not understand this problem themselves.
I've been browsing slashdot for years (since 1998). During the last year I've been doing this with various builds of firebird (currently using 0.7). I've never noticed rendering problems with slashdot.
Yes it is really necessary. You don't want to spend two days in newsgroups trying to figure out stuff that the setup can figure out itself when your new hardwar arrives (network card, scsi/ide controller, video card). Probably the most important thing you need to get working out of the box is the network card (asuming you want to connect your server to a network). It would be nice too if your raid controller is detected properly and it's awfully convenient if you can just plug in a usb mouse/keyboard and have it work right away. Ideally you would just pop in the setup disk, drink some coffee and then finish configuring the machine in a few minutes (if needed at all).
You are mixing up a number of things here. The reason you need to know what you are doing when installing debian is that its qualities (so far) do not extend to the installer. That's a problem, not a distinguishing feature. In any case, reconfiguring an automatically configured pc should not much more time than configuring everything manually. If the USB driver really bothers you, you can always remove it. Compiling a custom kernel should be enirely optional IMHO (I know it is on most major linux distributions).
Lines of code is indeed a pretty bad abstraction for complexity. I always prefer a little verbosity (e.g. using more than one character for variable names, always use brackets for blocks, even though they are one line only). However, if an equivalent program takes up significantly less space in a particular language that can point out poor levels of abstraction in the other language. The general trend of new programming languages is that they reduce the amount of lines of code needed for programs (and, ironically, require more loc for hello world). Java is a good example of less lines of code and more functionality compared to e.g. C.
IMHO one of the major problems of modern programming languages is its reliance on ascii as the storage and editing medium. Most of the innovations in IDEs for example try to work around the fact that the program is stored in ascii by maintaining a parse tree of the entire source code. This allows for all sorts of on the fly transformations (refactoring) and presentations (e.g. uml diagrams). The problem with this approach is that the internal representation is richer than the external. This information is typically lost when you exit the IDE or requires hacks like putting stuff in comments so the compiler can ignore it (e.g. GUI editors). Many of the concepts you work with in an IDE do not exist in first class representations at the source code level.
Because things need to be typed in manually, many programming languages are full of syntactic sugar which aim to reduce the amount of typing. For example the distinction between for and while is that for requires less typing than the equivalent while for some special cases of while. Neither captures the concept of iteration very well. In some languages this is addressed with more syntactic sugar.
Syntactic sugar is a poor replacement for proper abstractions. Intentional progamming may be a way out. However, I have yet to see a convincing and insightful example. So far all I see is variations of lisp.
The problem with VOIP service providers is that from a technical point of view they are redundant. Skype is currently demonstrating this point in a very convincing way (good quality connection, convenient lookup service, 0$). So anyone depending on charging their customers for this is going to have some revenue problems in the near future.
The only reason you would need an actual service provider is to connect to 'legacy' telephone networks or to offer services like voicemail. Once the traditional telecom providers figure out that there is a market for this kind of thing, they'll be in an excellent position to offer that kind of services.
You post on slashdot. Most real users don't know what slashdot is. By definition you are a geek because you know what slashdot is, you have an account and you know what linux is (and even use it). The typical user that doesn't know about all this is not ready for linux on the desktop.
Linux on the desktop is not ready because of poor hardware support, horrible out of the box behavior and a general lack of neighbours or nephews who do have a clue. The reason your mom tolerates linux is that she doesn't care and doesn't have a clue. As soon as she picks up a digital camera at some shop and expects it to actually play nice with her desktop there will be trouble because it is bloody unlikely the thing will work as advertised on the box (just an example, no doubt there are particular brands that work well with particular distributions if the planets are aligned properly).
Whatever the problem may be, faster hardware definately addresses some of the symptoms. The problem with acrobat is that it loads a whole bunch of mostly useless plugins when it starts. If you disable some of these plugins, the thing gets faster.
Anyway, the problem is not the cpu but the harddisk. I've noticed that windows xp spends a lot of time swapping stuff in and out of the memory (by disabling the pagefile, really speeds things up). Laptops typically have slow harddisks. Old laptops are even worse. Combine that with the fact that most laptops typically ship with a barely acceptable amount of RAM and almost any program will feel slow.
There's nothing inherently wrong with them except that you need to do several things manually that happen automatically with rpms and debs (pre & post install scripting, keeping a record of what gets installed where for updates/upgrades/uninstall).
I use redmon + ghostscript under XP. It's a workable solution but far from perfect. When redmon pops up a save dialog for the pdf it is always below the application from which you print. Sometimes it does not appear at all. If this happens it means you have to reboot (or at least log out) to be able to print your document to it (or anything else). Probably there's a better solution but this is the easiest way to solve the problem. If it works you get a nice pdf but without features such as a table of contents etc.
And not much more. Of course the big question is when the OSS community will stop whining they don't need all this new stuff and duplicate the more interesting features in their own products. It seems to happen like this with every new version of ms office. Hell, openoffice even includes a clippy clone (equally useless) now.
I'm not really interested in ms office new features even though some of the enhancements in outlook look like I could use them (I use thunderbird so I can already have a 3 column layout, seems like one of the first duplicated features).
Choosing IE means using the state of the art in technology of 1998. That was a good choice in 2001, still defendable in 2002, somewhat backwards right now and not really an option in the future. Internet explorer is old technology, it has not evolved in any significant way since version 6.0 (two years ago) which was a somewhat disappointing minor update to the previous, much older versions in the first place.
So if Microsoft continues to ignore new interesting technologies, at some point people are going to turn away from them. Developers first, users later.
This whole debate is based on the assumption that the way Java does things is bad because it does things the OO way. In truth, if you treat a class like a struct, a good JVM will do so as well (i.e. there is no real performance penalty when the runtime optimization kicks in).
The whole point of Java (and similar programming languages) is that you let the runtime environment figure out how to optimize and write clean code instead. Then once you find that you have performance problems, you locate the problems (e.g. using a profiler or a debugger) and solve them. That's a different way of working than in C or C++. But different is not necessarily bad IMHO.
Basically when a Java programmer writes a class it is because the added level of abstraction is somehow convenient for him. Structs do not provide much added convenience (over inner-classes), so Java does not have them.
The best promotion for international terrorism has been the US foreign policy of the past few decades. Just last week The US government looked the other way as Israel violated the territorial rights of one of its neighbours. This is exactly the kind of attitude that has infuriated most of the Arab world since the second world war. Anyway, nobody needs the FBI's permission to do terrorism. The vary nature of terrorists is that their least concern is FBI approval for their actions. So probably the better organized terrorist networks (like the ones the USA claims to be at war with) already use encryption for their communications.
Anyway, p2p is the most logical way to handle VOIP trafic. Other than billing, there is absolutely no point in routing vast amounts of voice trafic through a central server. The beauty with p2p companies is that they don't have to make a lot of revenue to become profitable. We are talking about a handful of programmers with absolutely no corporate structure, no marketing. If they recover the few years/months of development time they already break even. Anything beyond that is profit. The skype brand name is probably worth enough for that by the time they sell it (e.g. to a ip phone manufacturer).
It's the same thing as with mp3's: once you eliminate production and distribution cost, what is the point of having a publisher? The whole concept of a publisher is obsolete for almost all media. People just don't know it yet.
Ebooks failed because they were a concept pushed by publishers. They wanted to make a profit so they charged some money for their e-books. However that price bears little relation to any costs they have to make other than the cost associated with distributing the e-book (i.e. almost nothing). Then they wanted to protect their non existing investment and put inconvenient DRM shit on the e-books. Sadly, vendors of reader software/hardware all tried to push their proprietary formats so all of them lost and the e-book market never really emerged. Other than DRM there is little technical reason to introduce new formats. HTML + CSS was invented for this kind of thing.
The new e-book format is actually already out there. You can just browse the web and read news, magazines, technical documentation, etc. in a special purpose program called a web-browser. Soon you will be able to do this on mobile phones as well (3rd generation networks are being deployed as we speak). The e-book of the future will use this network (or future versions of it) and combine a comfortable screen with nice browser software. People will just publish stuff on their websites (some for free, some for profit). Rather than mass printing and distributing books you will just tell a commercial printer to print a book when you actually need a hardcopy.
We're in a transition period right now where all this is technically feasible but not really convenient yet. Printed material has a higher dpi and the convenience of not causing so much eye strain and being available if you go out of reach of the mobile phone network. This will not remain the case forever.
I've been seeing similar numbers. However I post on slashdot and various other sites so I suspect a lot of visitors come from this kind of sources. The numbers are by no means representative for the web community as a whole.
I see a number of trends though that will drive standards based websites:
1) Technology savvy users are an important trend group on the internet. They tend to be early adopters of new stuff, actually spend money on e-commerce sites and tell others about cool new stuff. In other words, if you a web entrepeneur, you cannot afford to ignore alternative browsers. You have to support both IE and Mozilla at the very least. The numbers are showing that at least this group is starting to adopt alternative browsers.
2) Add some more stuff to the mix: Apple users are replacing IE with Safari thanks to Apple making the latter the default and MS not delivering a usable browser for the mac os X. Apple users typically have good incomes (e-commerce), appreciate pretty things on their screens and are early adopters of new stuff.
3) Then another interesting fact: mobile browsers are becoming popular (and will likely outnumber PC based browsers in a few years) and MS has yet to make a dent into this market. Additionally, the mobile internet depends heavily on standards like CSS and XHTML (at least the wap 2.0 specs say so).
4) Finally,CSS 3.0 will soon become a recommended w3c spec. This major update to the standard contains a lot of interesting cool new stuff. The internet will divide into old and boring legacy sites and new and pretty CSS 3.0 sites. One of these halves will grow, one will shrink.
If you combine all this information, you can see the outlines of browser wars v2.0. MS is late again. I don't see how old and boring can win. Time & change have no respect for market shares.
Re:He does raise some good points, then again...
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The Next Path for Joy
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> This problem is NOT fixed to any programming language. ANY large project will have problems with maintanance unless it is held together with a good project management package.
Actually it is. Programming languages like Java allow for scalability of the development. I'd rather maintain 20 million lines of Java than 20 million lines of C. With C you'd be fixing stuff most of the time that is handled by the JVM for you. This allows you to focus on other stuff (e.g. adding features, otimizing stuff). Of course technology doesn't address the more general engineering issues that surface when you put more manpower on a project. That's the terrain of software engineering research.
C has an enormous legacy, which is why C programmers will be in demand for some decades to come. However if you look at the trends in industry you will see it is moving to higher level languages away from C. C++ is increasingly the language of choice for embedded software stuff for instance. Even Java is making inroads in this once exclusive C domain.
For people in (some parts of) industry Java is still something new. For people like Bill Joy, Java was something he did 15 years ago. He has moved on. I can understand this guys frustration watching everybody (including his colleagues at SUN) run into the same wall for decades. The technical solution to memoryleaks is decades old. All he is saying is that most of the current security problems are the result of a technical problem he helped fix in the early nineties.
BTW. your comments on Java performance may be not so accurate. You seem to be blaming features that are not really an issue any more and not blaming other features that are definately still problematic from the point of view performance. This suggests that your experience in this area is 'limited' (to put it politely).
Yes, sysadmins are way too expensive for what they do (mostly plugging stuff into other stuff and checking it is plugged in properly). Most of this cost arises from the giant bowl of script spagheti that ties together huge amount of tools with complex, custom command-line interfaces. Sysadmins who have mastered the arcane details of all this rightly feel they have mastered something wickedly clever and deserve all bragging rights. This kind of sysadmin is expensive, however.
So yes, any kind of way to improve, structure, standardize, polish and optimize all this is worth the trouble. I'm glad to see key linux developers pick up relevant trends from other operating systems.
Essentially the init.d boot process uses traditional unix concepts like scripts, parsers, commandline options and pipes and filters to emulate a bus (i.e. a means for programs to interact with each other in meaningful ways). Init.d is about sending start/stop signals to programs, intercept error messages, handle depependencies automatically or manually and much more.
Using a proper bus instead of emulating one removes a lot of complexity and allows for standardized tools to manage the whole thing.
Ehh the US is quite an exception when it comes to violence. Game violence is one of the factors that is pretty much the same in other countries that are far more pieceful. It is far more easy to blame the media than to take a critical look at, for example, the fucked up social economics in the US. Poverty + guns = violence. IMHO the way the media report in the US is a symptom rather than a cause of the real problems that underly the exceptional amount of violence there.
BTW. your last statement is a contradiction. The whole point is that there are people who are not in control of themselves. The fact that they are not in control of themselves is the problem, not the media.
Bullshit, telecom corps are not doing charity (which is what you seem to imply). Edonkey, gnutella and kazaa are pretty much driving subscriptions.
If my provider would start 'experimenting' with throttling on me, I'd start 'experimenting' with changing providers. Here in the Netherlands the trend is quite opposite BTW. In november my bandwidth will go up from 768kbps/128kbps (up from 512kbps/64kbps when I got adsl back in 2000) to 1Mbps/160kps to match similar increases in speed from the competition (the increase won't cost me anything). At the same time they are going to be even less strict in enforcing the fair use (as far as I know it only exists in name) policy they were hardly enforcing anyway.
There are now several hundreds of thousands of ADSL subscribers in the Netherlands (on a population of 16 million and competing with even more cable users). These people pay upwards from 30 euro per month. ADSL is pretty big business here, thanks to filesharing. Without filesharing, few people would have a need for the more expensive subscriptions. As it is now, these subscriptions are very popular.
Maybe in the US it is different because you have not deregulated the telecom market yet. That throttles competition and makes telecom companies lazy in upgrading their infrastructure and organizations. It took a while here too but since a few years, prices are dropping and several new, presumably profitable companies have started to offer their services in the telecom market. Compared to a few years ago, international calls are dirt cheap, prices of local calls have dropped significantly (still not free though) and mobile services have become so cheap that you see kids on elementary schools carying a cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
This article misses a very important point. Record companies were invented to record, mass copy and distribute media. Since about five years their services are no longer required to distribute music. I'd say that is a pretty relevant factor economically speaking.
Distributing music through p2p networks is very cheap. You can do it from your home. This reduces the cost of an album to a fraction of the cost (there still is some) of a regular album. Basically you need some time to write music and do the recordings, some equipment (a few thousand dollars buys you pretty good stuff), some sound technician to digitally polish your recordings (though it is getting easier to this yourself as well) and thats it. There's quite a few artists already who work like this. Making actual cds of the music is not that expensive either (production cost typically much less than 1$). Record companies have the advantage that mass production is typically more cost effective.
The record companies are waging a battle at becoming obsolete. Right now the public still doesn't get it. Music comes on small discs. Making those discs costs money and of course the record company is entitled to a rediculous share of an outrages price for that disc. Once people figure out that doesn't make sense anymore, the record companies are history.
It's a proof of concept. If it succeeds, evolved versions of the technology could very well end up saving money/energy.
In all examples you mention, there's some degree of legal security. If the ATM has the right logos and something goes wrong, the bank will have some obligations to set things straight. If somebody uses your credit card number, the risk is for the credit card company (it still sucks though) and car manufacturers actually have to submit their vehicles to extensive testing before they are allowed on the road. If you can prove you had an accident because the manufacturer made a mistake you can get very rich (if you live in the US).
Anyway, palladium isn't about consumers but about the enterprise market (that's where the future revenue growth lies). DRM is interesting to MS because content providers pay for licensing it, not because consumers buy protected media.
In the enterprise market, trust is important. Companies will definately care about who they trust and about the integrity of their security. Some of them are in fact already very annoyed about the lack of security. MS telling them they will just have to believe in them is not going to be very convincing.
This is the fundamental problem that MS has so far not addressed.
The whole problem with trust is that I don't necessarily trust either phoenix or ms. This a problem because their security solutions more or less require me to do so. I think this is ultimately why this and similar approaches will fail in the market.
Trust requires open solutions. If I, or someone I trust, can't analyse & audit security solutions I use, these solutions are flawed. MS and phoenix pushing proprietary solutions implies that they do not understand this problem themselves.
I've been browsing slashdot for years (since 1998). During the last year I've been doing this with various builds of firebird (currently using 0.7). I've never noticed rendering problems with slashdot.
One word: suse!
There's no server for mozilla calendar (other than ftp/webdav).
Yes it is really necessary. You don't want to spend two days in newsgroups trying to figure out stuff that the setup can figure out itself when your new hardwar arrives (network card, scsi/ide controller, video card). Probably the most important thing you need to get working out of the box is the network card (asuming you want to connect your server to a network). It would be nice too if your raid controller is detected properly and it's awfully convenient if you can just plug in a usb mouse/keyboard and have it work right away. Ideally you would just pop in the setup disk, drink some coffee and then finish configuring the machine in a few minutes (if needed at all).
You are mixing up a number of things here. The reason you need to know what you are doing when installing debian is that its qualities (so far) do not extend to the installer. That's a problem, not a distinguishing feature. In any case, reconfiguring an automatically configured pc should not much more time than configuring everything manually. If the USB driver really bothers you, you can always remove it. Compiling a custom kernel should be enirely optional IMHO (I know it is on most major linux distributions).
Lines of code is indeed a pretty bad abstraction for complexity. I always prefer a little verbosity (e.g. using more than one character for variable names, always use brackets for blocks, even though they are one line only). However, if an equivalent program takes up significantly less space in a particular language that can point out poor levels of abstraction in the other language. The general trend of new programming languages is that they reduce the amount of lines of code needed for programs (and, ironically, require more loc for hello world). Java is a good example of less lines of code and more functionality compared to e.g. C.
IMHO one of the major problems of modern programming languages is its reliance on ascii as the storage and editing medium. Most of the innovations in IDEs for example try to work around the fact that the program is stored in ascii by maintaining a parse tree of the entire source code. This allows for all sorts of on the fly transformations (refactoring) and presentations (e.g. uml diagrams). The problem with this approach is that the internal representation is richer than the external. This information is typically lost when you exit the IDE or requires hacks like putting stuff in comments so the compiler can ignore it (e.g. GUI editors). Many of the concepts you work with in an IDE do not exist in first class representations at the source code level.
Because things need to be typed in manually, many programming languages are full of syntactic sugar which aim to reduce the amount of typing. For example the distinction between for and while is that for requires less typing than the equivalent while for some special cases of while. Neither captures the concept of iteration very well. In some languages this is addressed with more syntactic sugar.
Syntactic sugar is a poor replacement for proper abstractions. Intentional progamming may be a way out. However, I have yet to see a convincing and insightful example. So far all I see is variations of lisp.
The problem with VOIP service providers is that from a technical point of view they are redundant. Skype is currently demonstrating this point in a very convincing way (good quality connection, convenient lookup service, 0$). So anyone depending on charging their customers for this is going to have some revenue problems in the near future.
The only reason you would need an actual service provider is to connect to 'legacy' telephone networks or to offer services like voicemail. Once the traditional telecom providers figure out that there is a market for this kind of thing, they'll be in an excellent position to offer that kind of services.
You post on slashdot. Most real users don't know what slashdot is. By definition you are a geek because you know what slashdot is, you have an account and you know what linux is (and even use it). The typical user that doesn't know about all this is not ready for linux on the desktop.
Linux on the desktop is not ready because of poor hardware support, horrible out of the box behavior and a general lack of neighbours or nephews who do have a clue. The reason your mom tolerates linux is that she doesn't care and doesn't have a clue. As soon as she picks up a digital camera at some shop and expects it to actually play nice with her desktop there will be trouble because it is bloody unlikely the thing will work as advertised on the box (just an example, no doubt there are particular brands that work well with particular distributions if the planets are aligned properly).
Whatever the problem may be, faster hardware definately addresses some of the symptoms. The problem with acrobat is that it loads a whole bunch of mostly useless plugins when it starts. If you disable some of these plugins, the thing gets faster.
Anyway, the problem is not the cpu but the harddisk. I've noticed that windows xp spends a lot of time swapping stuff in and out of the memory (by disabling the pagefile, really speeds things up). Laptops typically have slow harddisks. Old laptops are even worse. Combine that with the fact that most laptops typically ship with a barely acceptable amount of RAM and almost any program will feel slow.
There's nothing inherently wrong with them except that you need to do several things manually that happen automatically with rpms and debs (pre & post install scripting, keeping a record of what gets installed where for updates/upgrades/uninstall).
I use redmon + ghostscript under XP. It's a workable solution but far from perfect. When redmon pops up a save dialog for the pdf it is always below the application from which you print. Sometimes it does not appear at all. If this happens it means you have to reboot (or at least log out) to be able to print your document to it (or anything else). Probably there's a better solution but this is the easiest way to solve the problem. If it works you get a nice pdf but without features such as a table of contents etc.
And not much more. Of course the big question is when the OSS community will stop whining they don't need all this new stuff and duplicate the more interesting features in their own products. It seems to happen like this with every new version of ms office. Hell, openoffice even includes a clippy clone (equally useless) now.
I'm not really interested in ms office new features even though some of the enhancements in outlook look like I could use them (I use thunderbird so I can already have a 3 column layout, seems like one of the first duplicated features).
Choosing IE means using the state of the art in technology of 1998. That was a good choice in 2001, still defendable in 2002, somewhat backwards right now and not really an option in the future. Internet explorer is old technology, it has not evolved in any significant way since version 6.0 (two years ago) which was a somewhat disappointing minor update to the previous, much older versions in the first place.
So if Microsoft continues to ignore new interesting technologies, at some point people are going to turn away from them. Developers first, users later.
This whole debate is based on the assumption that the way Java does things is bad because it does things the OO way. In truth, if you treat a class like a struct, a good JVM will do so as well (i.e. there is no real performance penalty when the runtime optimization kicks in).
The whole point of Java (and similar programming languages) is that you let the runtime environment figure out how to optimize and write clean code instead. Then once you find that you have performance problems, you locate the problems (e.g. using a profiler or a debugger) and solve them. That's a different way of working than in C or C++. But different is not necessarily bad IMHO.
Basically when a Java programmer writes a class it is because the added level of abstraction is somehow convenient for him. Structs do not provide much added convenience (over inner-classes), so Java does not have them.
The best promotion for international terrorism has been the US foreign policy of the past few decades. Just last week The US government looked the other way as Israel violated the territorial rights of one of its neighbours. This is exactly the kind of attitude that has infuriated most of the Arab world since the second world war. Anyway, nobody needs the FBI's permission to do terrorism. The vary nature of terrorists is that their least concern is FBI approval for their actions. So probably the better organized terrorist networks (like the ones the USA claims to be at war with) already use encryption for their communications.
Anyway, p2p is the most logical way to handle VOIP trafic. Other than billing, there is absolutely no point in routing vast amounts of voice trafic through a central server. The beauty with p2p companies is that they don't have to make a lot of revenue to become profitable. We are talking about a handful of programmers with absolutely no corporate structure, no marketing. If they recover the few years/months of development time they already break even. Anything beyond that is profit. The skype brand name is probably worth enough for that by the time they sell it (e.g. to a ip phone manufacturer).
It's the same thing as with mp3's: once you eliminate production and distribution cost, what is the point of having a publisher? The whole concept of a publisher is obsolete for almost all media. People just don't know it yet.
Ebooks failed because they were a concept pushed by publishers. They wanted to make a profit so they charged some money for their e-books. However that price bears little relation to any costs they have to make other than the cost associated with distributing the e-book (i.e. almost nothing). Then they wanted to protect their non existing investment and put inconvenient DRM shit on the e-books. Sadly, vendors of reader software/hardware all tried to push their proprietary formats so all of them lost and the e-book market never really emerged. Other than DRM there is little technical reason to introduce new formats. HTML + CSS was invented for this kind of thing.
The new e-book format is actually already out there. You can just browse the web and read news, magazines, technical documentation, etc. in a special purpose program called a web-browser. Soon you will be able to do this on mobile phones as well (3rd generation networks are being deployed as we speak). The e-book of the future will use this network (or future versions of it) and combine a comfortable screen with nice browser software. People will just publish stuff on their websites (some for free, some for profit). Rather than mass printing and distributing books you will just tell a commercial printer to print a book when you actually need a hardcopy.
We're in a transition period right now where all this is technically feasible but not really convenient yet. Printed material has a higher dpi and the convenience of not causing so much eye strain and being available if you go out of reach of the mobile phone network. This will not remain the case forever.
I've been seeing similar numbers. However I post on slashdot and various other sites so I suspect a lot of visitors come from this kind of sources. The numbers are by no means representative for the web community as a whole.
I see a number of trends though that will drive standards based websites:
1) Technology savvy users are an important trend group on the internet. They tend to be early adopters of new stuff, actually spend money on e-commerce sites and tell others about cool new stuff. In other words, if you a web entrepeneur, you cannot afford to ignore alternative browsers. You have to support both IE and Mozilla at the very least. The numbers are showing that at least this group is starting to adopt alternative browsers.
2) Add some more stuff to the mix: Apple users are replacing IE with Safari thanks to Apple making the latter the default and MS not delivering a usable browser for the mac os X. Apple users typically have good incomes (e-commerce), appreciate pretty things on their screens and are early adopters of new stuff.
3) Then another interesting fact: mobile browsers are becoming popular (and will likely outnumber PC based browsers in a few years) and MS has yet to make a dent into this market. Additionally, the mobile internet depends heavily on standards like CSS and XHTML (at least the wap 2.0 specs say so).
4) Finally,CSS 3.0 will soon become a recommended w3c spec. This major update to the standard contains a lot of interesting cool new stuff. The internet will divide into old and boring legacy sites and new and pretty CSS 3.0 sites. One of these halves will grow, one will shrink.
If you combine all this information, you can see the outlines of browser wars v2.0. MS is late again. I don't see how old and boring can win. Time & change have no respect for market shares.
> This problem is NOT fixed to any programming language. ANY large project will have problems with maintanance unless it is held together with a good project management package.
Actually it is. Programming languages like Java allow for scalability of the development. I'd rather maintain 20 million lines of Java than 20 million lines of C. With C you'd be fixing stuff most of the time that is handled by the JVM for you. This allows you to focus on other stuff (e.g. adding features, otimizing stuff). Of course technology doesn't address the more general engineering issues that surface when you put more manpower on a project. That's the terrain of software engineering research.
C has an enormous legacy, which is why C programmers will be in demand for some decades to come. However if you look at the trends in industry you will see it is moving to higher level languages away from C. C++ is increasingly the language of choice for embedded software stuff for instance. Even Java is making inroads in this once exclusive C domain.
For people in (some parts of) industry Java is still something new. For people like Bill Joy, Java was something he did 15 years ago. He has moved on. I can understand this guys frustration watching everybody (including his colleagues at SUN) run into the same wall for decades. The technical solution to memoryleaks is decades old. All he is saying is that most of the current security problems are the result of a technical problem he helped fix in the early nineties.
BTW. your comments on Java performance may be not so accurate. You seem to be blaming features that are not really an issue any more and not blaming other features that are definately still problematic from the point of view performance. This suggests that your experience in this area is 'limited' (to put it politely).
I was exaggerating and maybe the fact that you have to do other stuff is part of the problem?
Yes, sysadmins are way too expensive for what they do (mostly plugging stuff into other stuff and checking it is plugged in properly). Most of this cost arises from the giant bowl of script spagheti that ties together huge amount of tools with complex, custom command-line interfaces. Sysadmins who have mastered the arcane details of all this rightly feel they have mastered something wickedly clever and deserve all bragging rights. This kind of sysadmin is expensive, however.
So yes, any kind of way to improve, structure, standardize, polish and optimize all this is worth the trouble. I'm glad to see key linux developers pick up relevant trends from other operating systems.
Essentially the init.d boot process uses traditional unix concepts like scripts, parsers, commandline options and pipes and filters to emulate a bus (i.e. a means for programs to interact with each other in meaningful ways). Init.d is about sending start/stop signals to programs, intercept error messages, handle depependencies automatically or manually and much more.
Using a proper bus instead of emulating one removes a lot of complexity and allows for standardized tools to manage the whole thing.
Ehh the US is quite an exception when it comes to violence. Game violence is one of the factors that is pretty much the same in other countries that are far more pieceful. It is far more easy to blame the media than to take a critical look at, for example, the fucked up social economics in the US. Poverty + guns = violence. IMHO the way the media report in the US is a symptom rather than a cause of the real problems that underly the exceptional amount of violence there.
BTW. your last statement is a contradiction. The whole point is that there are people who are not in control of themselves. The fact that they are not in control of themselves is the problem, not the media.
Bullshit, telecom corps are not doing charity (which is what you seem to imply). Edonkey, gnutella and kazaa are pretty much driving subscriptions.
If my provider would start 'experimenting' with throttling on me, I'd start 'experimenting' with changing providers. Here in the Netherlands the trend is quite opposite BTW. In november my bandwidth will go up from 768kbps/128kbps (up from 512kbps/64kbps when I got adsl back in 2000) to 1Mbps/160kps to match similar increases in speed from the competition (the increase won't cost me anything). At the same time they are going to be even less strict in enforcing the fair use (as far as I know it only exists in name) policy they were hardly enforcing anyway.
There are now several hundreds of thousands of ADSL subscribers in the Netherlands (on a population of 16 million and competing with even more cable users). These people pay upwards from 30 euro per month. ADSL is pretty big business here, thanks to filesharing. Without filesharing, few people would have a need for the more expensive subscriptions. As it is now, these subscriptions are very popular.
Maybe in the US it is different because you have not deregulated the telecom market yet. That throttles competition and makes telecom companies lazy in upgrading their infrastructure and organizations. It took a while here too but since a few years, prices are dropping and several new, presumably profitable companies have started to offer their services in the telecom market. Compared to a few years ago, international calls are dirt cheap, prices of local calls have dropped significantly (still not free though) and mobile services have become so cheap that you see kids on elementary schools carying a cell phone.