You know how some people resent Microsoft for its size and ambition? Well, here's a conversation starter: Why don't people resent Sony?
Moderators: you're going to be tempted to hit "Offtopic" here, but keep in mind the above is a direct quote from the article and I'm commenting on it.
I don't know ANYONE who resents Microsoft for its size and success. But somehow, when the topic of conversation turns to Microsoft and the people with whom I'm conversing with are dazzled by Microsoft's phenomenal position in the industry, concerns about Microsoft get answered with "You're just jealous!"
That ain't it. We're disturbed by Microsoft's apparent ambition of total control over the desktop computing experience (or computing experience in general). About the prospect of not being able to work with a computer w/o HAVING to use a piece of Microsoft's software.
Size and success have nothing to do with it.
Maybe being an Apple advocate for many years does turn your brain to mush. David Pogue should know better.
(I use and love a Powerbook, Apple fans, just in case you want to flame).
It's called a Macintosh. Does other fun things too.
Anyone know of a way to get a Mac to record audio programs from Radio?
Or to do "buffered listening" so that if I decide that for some reason the last song that actually came over the Hell That Is Corporate Modern Radio appealed to me, I can keep it?
Or maybe she has 7 older siblings named Jennifer...
Eight older siblings if one of her parents is a programmer, of course.
Or maybe she went to a school like mine where there were so many darn Jenny's even using last names wouldn't work. There were several Jennifer Christiansens, Jennifer Jensons, Jennifer Smith. We could have used numbers.
Like most other things in life, the decision is a tradeoff. Here's the thing to think about: how much is your time worth?
I ran Linux. I like linux. I still choose Linux for my web hosting (thinking about OpenBSD, tho'). I bought a Powerbook Laptop 2 years ago, though. A few months later, I picked up a copy of the OS X public beta. Inside of a month I was sold. Even factoring the extra amount of time I sometimes had to futz to get not-quite-totally-makefile-ported software over, I spent so much less time trying to get things to go my way that there was no contest. When I want the command line and UNIX goodness, it's there. When I don't want to think about it, I don't have to. That savings was easily worth $500. Maybe more.
As for affordability.... I'm typing this on that same Powerbook G3/333 Mhz. I had to put 384 MB RAM in the thing to keep it usable, but usable it is. You can probably find something nearly twice that Mhz for under $600.
Wait.... what if TW offered two different plans.... one for individuals who want unlimited bandwidth at a flat price, one for people who want to do whatever they please with their connection and are willing to pay by bandwidth?
Wasn't this whole subject about web pages that didn't work anywhere except for inside IE? There is obviously something you can't do in other browsers that can be done in IE.
Almost universally, though, none of the page-incompatibility problems discussed are because of any "innovation" on the part of Microsoft's.... the incompatibility doesn't come because of any feature available above and beyond most browsers. It's because MS makes gratuitous changes in order to reinforce lock-in. Then people code to IE because half of them don't realize there's anything else.
What I'm saying is: there aren't any compelling features that IE and/or its DOM have that don't exist in a similar form in the standards produced by the w3c and other projects.
you have to juggle your definition of "User-friendly" with the amount of mouse clicks required for your target audience to complete their task. Obviously coupling client-side script with server-side logic makes it easier than implementing it all on the server side.
All of the browsers I mentioned (Mozilla, NS, iCab, Opera) have excellent support for client-side scripting. Standards compliant, matching IE. Not because they aimed at IE, but because they implement the standard, and IE does... with the usual MS caveats.
(But since you asked, try embedding an ActiveX control in anything but IE. "So what?" you might say....well, this is probably part of the complaint that things don't work anywhere but in IE.)... And, no, I haven't been hiding under a rock in regards to Java applets. If someone wanted to tackle the task of trying to make a user-friendly, elegant presentation that was cross platform, they might evaluate Java as one option. What, because you don't use it no one is supposed to? Come on, Java was touted as the run-anywhere solution at one point, it just never made it.
The two points I wanted to make about Java were:
1) Java has made it as a run-anywhere solution.... just not within the web browser.
2) Talking about Java in the context of web stadards is a Red Herring. It's not any core part of anything web standards focused folks worry about. It -- like ActiveX -- is a different kind of client/server solution from the web. Both have their place, but the most everyone and even sun realized that most of the time it wasn't in the browser. It has been YEARS since Java was positioned as that kind of solution. Same as ActiveX. Flash still has that position; the difference is that it's actually good at being a thin interactive client inside a web browser.
Look back at what has happened with standards bodies in the past. They are largly bureaucratic organizations that take so long to argue about the set of standards that the thing they were standardizing is almost useless by the time they are finished.
The implication that the W3C, for example, is behind the times, is by and large VERY unwarranted. They issue recommendations for standards usually months if not years before anyone gets around to a full implmentation. They not only make standards, they point the way with transitions. They provide tools and reference implementations. This is not a sit-on-your-ass academic group, and the implication that people pushing for web standards were simply whining blowhards who don't do anything is really the biggest thing that compelled me to reply to your post, my distaste for Microsoft's products and especially their business practices aside. Their research, efforts, and contributions to the progression of the web are easily the equal of Microsoft's, and their intentions are much less assailable. It's much harder to accuse them of being in it for the money than The Right Thing.
(A re-reading of my post will show that I wasn't accusing MS of being innefectual, but mocking your characterization of web standards folks being innefectual. I'll chalk it up to fog of/.).
As for C/C++... they're one of the best examples of why we NEED good standards bodies and for people to listen to them. Maybe if their commercial and academic implementations hadn't had such a head start on the standards process writing cross-compiler code would be a lot easier.
I would begin by saying I don't know where to begin, but lately I've begun to many posts that way....
Well, since you wanted the site to be navigable in ways that would make it user-friendly and have it look good, IE was pretty much the only browser that could support that.
You're joking.. right? In what way is IE the only browser that will support that?
Even within the abortion known as NS4, there were/are lots of sites that do both gracefully.
NS6, Mozilla, iCab, Opera etc are all as easy to work with as IE (from a user OR developer standpoint). Easier, in some cases.
Sure, we could have waited until all the Java virtual machines worked the same way on all browswers and made one big Java applet, but they have a better chance of creating the web standard that supports a lot of the UI features we use before that happens.
You have apparently been hiding under a rock for the last 3-4 years. No one has really touted Java as a solution for cross-platform in-browser deployment on the client side since then -- although some people have quietly deployed full-fledged applications using Java. Web standards folks are not the applet people; applet people almost don't exist these days.
So everyone complains that Microsoft has historically stolen and extended instead of innovating like they say they do. Now, as it turns out, IE is actually innovative because of its rich set of features, making web applications easier to make. Now they are complaining that it is too innovative. If you can't compete, complain I guess.
Which innovative features of IE are you refering too? Which aren't related to any of the web standards, or aren't simply different in some arbitrary way? Put simply, what can I do in IE that I can't do in any other browser?
It doesn't work because the browser she is using only supports the capabilities set forth by some standards comittee. You know, a bunch of people sitting around a round table, arguing about some base set of features the web should have.
Because if it's designed by people who don't work for a large company more concerned with their bottom line than a useful evolution of the web, they must be a bunch of pontificating, innefectual, ivory-tower eggheads, right?
Maybe instead of the Buffy team, we could have Chris Carter direct, and David Duchovny could star as the Doctor, and Gillian Andersen could be the sidekick, maybe named Leela or Romanadvoratrelundar or something like that. Mitch Pileggi could be the Brigadier-General. William Davis could be the Master. They could wander the universe in the TARDIS and encounter strange, alien life forms and situations and save the earth from invasion and stuff.
Actually, maybe William Davis could be the Doctor. Or whoever played Jose Chung.
... I can name each of Elizabeth's siblings, her parents, and even her uncle. I can tell you what suburb of Salt Lake City they live in. I can tell the name of the handyman who has done construction work for the family and is now a chief suspect. I can tell you what he was paid for his work. I can tell you what kind of car the handyman drives. I can tell you that the handyman lives in a mobile home nextdoor to his in-laws who also live in a mobile home. I can tell you that he has pet cats.
You know a heck of a lot more than I do, and I live 60 miles south of where the Smarts do (and I can prove it... I used the word heck).
Leaving that aside for the moment, one wonders why the fact you know all these things is bad. If you know them, maybe others know them, and maybe we have thousands informed people whose eyes are on the lookout. It seems like a good thing.
I think the better question than "why is this getting attention" would be "can we scale this effect for good"?
Of course, it would be nice if we could get rid of the "News Update: nothing has changed" announcements, but since people have an attention span of 20 minutes, it may even be they're necessary....
I didn't witness this firsthand, so it could have been a rumor, but I was told that Barenaked Ladies pretty much did what this article talked about with "Maroon". They released everything on Napster... but cut out a bit of the middle of the song with a message asking people to buy their album and not simply steal the whole thing. The copies propogated through the network... and at first (before many people had bought the album) those copies were the easiest to find.
Personally, I thought the idea was brilliant. The mangled copies would disappear as people actually bought (and ripped) the CD. The music mostly got out there for people to sample, and the slight mangling provided a nice personal touch from BNL (who are hilarious whenever they say almost anything) and incentive to buy.
exec #1: Boy, who would have thought our payola efforts would have come back to haunt us like this?
exec #2: Not me! Sure miss the old days when a smaller amount of our billions bought way more influence.
exec #1: This whole consolidated radio network thing stinks. I wish we could just get rid of radio.
exec #2: But we NEED radio to keep distributing free music so people will want to buy CDs!
exec #1: I know. I just can't get around that. If only there were some other avenue for distributing our music freely so that people could listen to it and decide they want to buy it.
[silence]
exec #2: Well, the good news is that we've managed to successfully shut down Napster and some of its ilk. At least we'll have more money from those sales we would have lost to make the payola!
exec #1: Maybe we could sue Clear Channel, or lobby congress for a new law that would favor us! You're brilliant, #2!
It doesn't seem to me that the business model for deploying mesh networks is rocket science. The article seems to imply that figuring out how to get the neighborhood nodes out there is a problem.
I'd be willing to bet that for some suffeciently large (but reasonably small) radius, there exists just about everywhere a neighborhood containing at least one person willing to be an early adopter. Give this person a free serious broadband connection, paid training, and perhaps a small stipend, and have him/her keep it running. Everybody else in the neighborhood just buys wireless devices.
If I had some cash to drop and a telecom network to use, I'd start this myself.
Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."
Wow. Brigham Young and burning man mentioned in the same sentence?
Having attended one of the above, I can guarantee you this will not be a frequent event.
Every now and then, you get what you don't pay for
This is close, but it's not quite right. The correct principle is: you get what the people you patronize want to provide.
We often forget this in a world that's interested in repeating the "customer is king" mantra.
Re:Maybe we should lobby the search engines
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 2
There is no need to reinvent the wheel, if they were against being indexed, they'd use robots.txt.
Perhaps... but that's not totally clear. There are technical solutions to "outside linking" if you are really against being linked to. Throw a script into all your pages that redirects to the home page if HTTP_REFERER doesn't contain your domain name. Or modify your server to do that. It's not rocket science. But I don't know of anyone that's done it... most people want linking, and the few that don't seem to be clueless about this or would rather spend money on a lawsuit than a few hours (if that) of salary on a qualified person.
And besides, the idea here is not to provide a service to people who don't want to be in a search engine, the idea is to drive the point home about how ridiculous it is to not want to be linked to. You don't want to be linked to? Fine, we'll take your listing out of the search engines, since they provide links. Google especially should be willing to support this, since their search heuristics depend partly on who links to a given site.
Maybe we should lobby the search engines
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, maybe we could convince some of the search engines -- Google would be especially nice -- to simply de-list anyone with such terms, along with a friendly notice about why.
I think it'd put a stop to things like this rather quickly.
You laugh (I laughed too:) but while the DMCA may not be the tool, if there's a claim to profit to be staked and defended, they'll defend it with lawyers and lobbyists and everything money can buy.
Personally, I'm frightened of the fact that the "whatever a living organism produces can't be forbidden" idea, because that brings basic biological freedoms against the profiteers, and the battle lines are drawn.
for your county govt to grind to a halt. Anyone think of the ramifications of a sudden shift from MS to an alternative OS?
Grind to a halt? This just says no more purchasing. Existing systems are fine. They'll be phased out in the same way they are at the moment. Just replaced with something else.
1) Hundreds of COTS and Vendor developed Windows apps will need to be replaced or re-written costing taxpayers more money.
Most windows apps have an equivalent that could be used. The painfulness of switching to Linux would be no greater than that of moving from 98 to XP.
The vendor developed apps might be a problem. Would WINE solve it? Maybe. Maybe not. Could a small bunch of Perl/TK/Webapp programmers solve it? Possibly. Vendor contracts are renegotiated all the time. Again, the key word is gradual phase out, which happens all the time anyway.
2) User re-training costing taxpayers more money.
Not more than the UI shifts from Office 2k to Office XP. They're fairly big. And people can adapt to new tasks. Not a big deal.
3) New vendors for tech support of new apps and OS, re-training or replacing county tech support personnel costing taxpayers more money.
Really a whole lot more money than we currently spend to renew MS licenses?
Java mostly looks like a solution looking for a problem. It originally was a language for delivering services over an interactive television like product. They realized the web was getting close. So they released it.
I don't think the WORA aspect of the product fit into a larger strategy for a while. Then they came up with "the network is the computer".... the network delivers code that can run on any computer, and services that run on high powered hardware. Who sells the hardware that delivers code and services?
Sun.
I think the commodotize your complement analysis is brilliant, and I appreciate being exposed to it, but like all principles and theories, its application is the trick. How many times in physics did you misapply a correct physical principle? In Econ, it's even easier.
And we also operate in a world where no one principle is the end of the story.
Sun's strategy is half-baked, but not as much as Joel thinks it is.
Slashdot is rapidly becoming useless with the constant derision it heaps on Microsoft. Let's have more computer news and stuff about FreeBSD and Linux and less "make fun of" news about Microsoft.
Slashdot is hardly rapidly becoming useless. There is no lack of abundance of news about FreeBSD, Linux, Apache, Space, OS X, Wireless, and just about any other significant I/T and geeky topic.
And while Linux has its problems, and you may not share the editors views about Microsoft, there are two facts about Microsoft that are hard to ignore:
1) They are huge. Absolutely huge. They have a lot of influence in the I/T and software industry. 2) Sometimes their market presence and control gives them reputation beyond what's deserved.
You may not agree with #2, but consider:.NET barely exists right now. Their ads make it look like people are running serious production solutions on it right now. They claimed months back that Trustworthy Computing was their #1 priority. They just made a major gafe. They've ignored simple security problems for years because it suited them.
I wouldn't claim their technology is useless. It has its high points, a few better than open source alternatives. The problem is that it's all too easy to fall into "They're big, they're #1, so it must be the best" viewing of Microsoft. Most of us who bring up reports like this one do so because we've put up with far too much of that kind of reasoning.
As if Linux doesn't have it's problems. You might end up like Larry Ellison and his ridiculous "Unbreakable" claims.
Of course, that's a problem with the Linux crowd. Feer of being, and being seen as, professional.
Well, that wasn't anything like our petty digs at MS.
Do you mean afraid to make claims like Microsoft's "Trustworthy Computing" initiative and Oracle's "Unbreakable"? I don't see this as a problem in the open source world. OpenBSD is the only distro that comes close to making anything like an unbreakable claim, and it has history to back it up. We speak softly and upload running code. We release timely information about bugs, security holes, and patches. Cover ups are few. That's professional.
Of course, yet again, it's so easy to confuse "big" and "professional".
Slashdot Mirror
You know how some people resent Microsoft for its size and ambition? Well, here's a conversation starter: Why don't people resent Sony?
Moderators: you're going to be tempted to hit "Offtopic" here, but keep in mind the above is a direct quote from the article and I'm commenting on it.
I don't know ANYONE who resents Microsoft for its size and success. But somehow, when the topic of conversation turns to Microsoft and the people with whom I'm conversing with are dazzled by Microsoft's phenomenal position in the industry, concerns about Microsoft get answered with "You're just jealous!"
That ain't it. We're disturbed by Microsoft's apparent ambition of total control over the desktop computing experience (or computing experience in general). About the prospect of not being able to work with a computer w/o HAVING to use a piece of Microsoft's software.
Size and success have nothing to do with it.
Maybe being an Apple advocate for many years does turn your brain to mush. David Pogue should know better.
(I use and love a Powerbook, Apple fans, just in case you want to flame).
It's called a Macintosh. Does other fun things too.
Anyone know of a way to get a Mac to record audio programs from Radio?
Or to do "buffered listening" so that if I decide that for some reason the last song that actually came over the Hell That Is Corporate Modern Radio appealed to me, I can keep it?
Or maybe she has 7 older siblings named Jennifer...
Eight older siblings if one of her parents is a programmer, of course.
Or maybe she went to a school like mine where there were so many darn Jenny's even using last names wouldn't work. There were several Jennifer Christiansens, Jennifer Jensons, Jennifer Smith. We could have used numbers.
... I just can't afford the hardware.
Like most other things in life, the decision is a tradeoff. Here's the thing to think about: how much is your time worth?
I ran Linux. I like linux. I still choose Linux for my web hosting (thinking about OpenBSD, tho'). I bought a Powerbook Laptop 2 years ago, though. A few months later, I picked up a copy of the OS X public beta. Inside of a month I was sold. Even factoring the extra amount of time I sometimes had to futz to get not-quite-totally-makefile-ported software over, I spent so much less time trying to get things to go my way that there was no contest. When I want the command line and UNIX goodness, it's there. When I don't want to think about it, I don't have to. That savings was easily worth $500. Maybe more.
As for affordability.... I'm typing this on that same Powerbook G3/333 Mhz. I had to put 384 MB RAM in the thing to keep it usable, but usable it is. You can probably find something nearly twice that Mhz for under $600.
Worth it to me.
Wait.... what if TW offered two different plans.... one for individuals who want unlimited bandwidth at a flat price, one for people who want to do whatever they please with their connection and are willing to pay by bandwidth?
Why don't they have a TLD?
Anyone know?
Wasn't this whole subject about web pages that didn't work anywhere except for inside IE? There is obviously something you can't do in other browsers that can be done in IE.
...
/.).
... they're one of the best examples of why we NEED good standards bodies and for people to listen to them. Maybe if their commercial and academic implementations hadn't had such a head start on the standards process writing cross-compiler code would be a lot easier.
Almost universally, though, none of the page-incompatibility problems discussed are because of any "innovation" on the part of Microsoft's.... the incompatibility doesn't come because of any feature available above and beyond most browsers. It's because MS makes gratuitous changes in order to reinforce lock-in. Then people code to IE because half of them don't realize there's anything else.
What I'm saying is: there aren't any compelling features that IE and/or its DOM have that don't exist in a similar form in the standards produced by the w3c and other projects.
you have to juggle your definition of "User-friendly" with the amount of mouse clicks required for your target audience to complete their task. Obviously coupling client-side script with server-side logic makes it easier than implementing it all on the server side.
All of the browsers I mentioned (Mozilla, NS, iCab, Opera) have excellent support for client-side scripting. Standards compliant, matching IE. Not because they aimed at IE, but because they implement the standard, and IE does... with the usual MS caveats.
(But since you asked, try embedding an ActiveX control in anything but IE. "So what?" you might say....well, this is probably part of the complaint that things don't work anywhere but in IE.)
And, no, I haven't been hiding under a rock in regards to Java applets. If someone wanted to tackle the task of trying to make a user-friendly, elegant presentation that was cross platform, they might evaluate Java as one option. What, because you don't use it no one is supposed to? Come on, Java was touted as the run-anywhere solution at one point, it just never made it.
The two points I wanted to make about Java were:
1) Java has made it as a run-anywhere solution.... just not within the web browser.
2) Talking about Java in the context of web stadards is a Red Herring. It's not any core part of anything web standards focused folks worry about. It -- like ActiveX -- is a different kind of client/server solution from the web. Both have their place, but the most everyone and even sun realized that most of the time it wasn't in the browser. It has been YEARS since Java was positioned as that kind of solution. Same as ActiveX. Flash still has that position; the difference is that it's actually good at being a thin interactive client inside a web browser.
Look back at what has happened with standards bodies in the past. They are largly bureaucratic organizations that take so long to argue about the set of standards that the thing they were standardizing is almost useless by the time they are finished.
The implication that the W3C, for example, is behind the times, is by and large VERY unwarranted. They issue recommendations for standards usually months if not years before anyone gets around to a full implmentation. They not only make standards, they point the way with transitions. They provide tools and reference implementations. This is not a sit-on-your-ass academic group, and the implication that people pushing for web standards were simply whining blowhards who don't do anything is really the biggest thing that compelled me to reply to your post, my distaste for Microsoft's products and especially their business practices aside. Their research, efforts, and contributions to the progression of the web are easily the equal of Microsoft's, and their intentions are much less assailable. It's much harder to accuse them of being in it for the money than The Right Thing.
(A re-reading of my post will show that I wasn't accusing MS of being innefectual, but mocking your characterization of web standards folks being innefectual. I'll chalk it up to fog of
As for C/C++
And yes, ICANN sucks.
I would begin by saying I don't know where to begin, but lately I've begun to many posts that way....
Well, since you wanted the site to be navigable in ways that would make it user-friendly and have it look good, IE was pretty much the only browser that could support that.
You're joking.. right? In what way is IE the only browser that will support that?
Even within the abortion known as NS4, there were/are lots of sites that do both gracefully.
NS6, Mozilla, iCab, Opera etc are all as easy to work with as IE (from a user OR developer standpoint). Easier, in some cases.
Sure, we could have waited until all the Java virtual machines worked the same way on all browswers and made one big Java applet, but they have a better chance of creating the web standard that supports a lot of the UI features we use before that happens.
You have apparently been hiding under a rock for the last 3-4 years. No one has really touted Java as a solution for cross-platform in-browser deployment on the client side since then -- although some people have quietly deployed full-fledged applications using Java. Web standards folks are not the applet people; applet people almost don't exist these days.
So everyone complains that Microsoft has historically stolen and extended instead of innovating like they say they do. Now, as it turns out, IE is actually innovative because of its rich set of features, making web applications easier to make. Now they are complaining that it is too innovative. If you can't compete, complain I guess.
Which innovative features of IE are you refering too? Which aren't related to any of the web standards, or aren't simply different in some arbitrary way? Put simply, what can I do in IE that I can't do in any other browser?
It doesn't work because the browser she is using only supports the capabilities set forth by some standards comittee. You know, a bunch of people sitting around a round table, arguing about some base set of features the web should have.
Because if it's designed by people who don't work for a large company more concerned with their bottom line than a useful evolution of the web, they must be a bunch of pontificating, innefectual, ivory-tower eggheads, right?
I suspect I've been trolled...
Maybe instead of the Buffy team, we could have Chris Carter direct, and David Duchovny could star as the Doctor, and Gillian Andersen could be the sidekick, maybe named Leela or Romanadvoratrelundar or something like that. Mitch Pileggi could be the Brigadier-General. William Davis could be the Master. They could wander the universe in the TARDIS and encounter strange, alien life forms and situations and save the earth from invasion and stuff.
Actually, maybe William Davis could be the Doctor. Or whoever played Jose Chung.
Hi pot, this is kettle. You're looking mighty black today!
Typical racist tripe. Sheesh.
... I can name each of Elizabeth's siblings, her parents, and even her uncle. I can tell you what suburb of Salt Lake City they live in. I can tell the name of the handyman who has done construction work for the family and is now a chief suspect. I can tell you what he was paid for his work. I can tell you what kind of car the handyman drives. I can tell you that the handyman lives in a mobile home nextdoor to his in-laws who also live in a mobile home. I can tell you that he has pet cats.
You know a heck of a lot more than I do, and I live 60 miles south of where the Smarts do (and I can prove it... I used the word heck).
Leaving that aside for the moment, one wonders why the fact you know all these things is bad. If you know them, maybe others know them, and maybe we have thousands informed people whose eyes are on the lookout. It seems like a good thing.
I think the better question than "why is this getting attention" would be "can we scale this effect for good"?
Of course, it would be nice if we could get rid of the "News Update: nothing has changed" announcements, but since people have an attention span of 20 minutes, it may even be they're necessary....
Even if you defied the OS X convention and installed in /usr/local ?
Arrrrrrggg! That was the problem?!??
(Used to write on Linux and BSDI and Solaris, remember distinctly that the Linux version would break for no apparent reason)
I didn't witness this firsthand, so it could have been a rumor, but I was told that Barenaked Ladies pretty much did what this article talked about with "Maroon". They released everything on Napster... but cut out a bit of the middle of the song with a message asking people to buy their album and not simply steal the whole thing. The copies propogated through the network... and at first (before many people had bought the album) those copies were the easiest to find.
Personally, I thought the idea was brilliant. The mangled copies would disappear as people actually bought (and ripped) the CD. The music mostly got out there for people to sample, and the slight mangling provided a nice personal touch from BNL (who are hilarious whenever they say almost anything) and incentive to buy.
exec #1: Boy, who would have thought our payola efforts would have come back to haunt us like this?
exec #2: Not me! Sure miss the old days when a smaller amount of our billions bought way more influence.
exec #1: This whole consolidated radio network thing stinks. I wish we could just get rid of radio.
exec #2: But we NEED radio to keep distributing free music so people will want to buy CDs!
exec #1: I know. I just can't get around that. If only there were some other avenue for distributing our music freely so that people could listen to it and decide they want to buy it.
[silence]
exec #2: Well, the good news is that we've managed to successfully shut down Napster and some of its ilk. At least we'll have more money from those sales we would have lost to make the payola!
exec #1: Maybe we could sue Clear Channel, or lobby congress for a new law that would favor us! You're brilliant, #2!
Can anyone explain what's similar/different between doing this and doing something like ReBirth?
It doesn't seem to me that the business model for deploying mesh networks is rocket science. The article seems to imply that figuring out how to get the neighborhood nodes out there is a problem.
I'd be willing to bet that for some suffeciently large (but reasonably small) radius, there exists just about everywhere a neighborhood containing at least one person willing to be an early adopter. Give this person a free serious broadband connection, paid training, and perhaps a small stipend, and have him/her keep it running. Everybody else in the neighborhood just buys wireless devices.
If I had some cash to drop and a telecom network to use, I'd start this myself.
Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."
Wow. Brigham Young and burning man mentioned in the same sentence?
Having attended one of the above, I can guarantee you this will not be a frequent event.
Every now and then, you get what you don't pay for
This is close, but it's not quite right. The correct principle is: you get what the people you patronize want to provide.
We often forget this in a world that's interested in repeating the "customer is king" mantra.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel, if they were against being indexed, they'd use robots.txt.
Perhaps... but that's not totally clear. There are technical solutions to "outside linking" if you are really against being linked to. Throw a script into all your pages that redirects to the home page if HTTP_REFERER doesn't contain your domain name. Or modify your server to do that. It's not rocket science. But I don't know of anyone that's done it... most people want linking, and the few that don't seem to be clueless about this or would rather spend money on a lawsuit than a few hours (if that) of salary on a qualified person.
And besides, the idea here is not to provide a service to people who don't want to be in a search engine, the idea is to drive the point home about how ridiculous it is to not want to be linked to. You don't want to be linked to? Fine, we'll take your listing out of the search engines, since they provide links. Google especially should be willing to support this, since their search heuristics depend partly on who links to a given site.
Actually, maybe we could convince some of the search engines -- Google would be especially nice -- to simply de-list anyone with such terms, along with a friendly notice about why.
I think it'd put a stop to things like this rather quickly.
You laugh (I laughed too :) but while the DMCA may not be the tool, if there's a claim to profit to be staked and defended, they'll defend it with lawyers and lobbyists and everything money can buy.
Personally, I'm frightened of the fact that the "whatever a living organism produces can't be forbidden" idea, because that brings basic biological freedoms against the profiteers, and the battle lines are drawn.
for your county govt to grind to a halt. Anyone think of the ramifications of a sudden shift from MS to an alternative OS?
Grind to a halt? This just says no more purchasing. Existing systems are fine. They'll be phased out in the same way they are at the moment. Just replaced with something else.
1) Hundreds of COTS and Vendor developed Windows apps will need to be replaced or re-written costing taxpayers more money.
Most windows apps have an equivalent that could be used. The painfulness of switching to Linux would be no greater than that of moving from 98 to XP.
The vendor developed apps might be a problem. Would WINE solve it? Maybe. Maybe not. Could a small bunch of Perl/TK/Webapp programmers solve it? Possibly. Vendor contracts are renegotiated all the time. Again, the key word is gradual phase out, which happens all the time anyway.
2) User re-training costing taxpayers more money.
Not more than the UI shifts from Office 2k to Office XP. They're fairly big. And people can adapt to new tasks. Not a big deal.
3) New vendors for tech support of new apps and OS, re-training or replacing county tech support personnel costing taxpayers more money.
Really a whole lot more money than we currently spend to renew MS licenses?
Java mostly looks like a solution looking for a problem. It originally was a language for delivering services over an interactive television like product. They realized the web was getting close. So they released it.
I don't think the WORA aspect of the product fit into a larger strategy for a while. Then they came up with "the network is the computer".... the network delivers code that can run on any computer, and services that run on high powered hardware. Who sells the hardware that delivers code and services?
Sun.
I think the commodotize your complement analysis is brilliant, and I appreciate being exposed to it, but like all principles and theories, its application is the trick. How many times in physics did you misapply a correct physical principle? In Econ, it's even easier.
And we also operate in a world where no one principle is the end of the story.
Sun's strategy is half-baked, but not as much as Joel thinks it is.
I don't know where to start.
.NET barely exists right now. Their ads make it look like people are running serious production solutions on it right now. They claimed months back that Trustworthy Computing was their #1 priority. They just made a major gafe. They've ignored simple security problems for years because it suited them.
Slashdot is rapidly becoming useless with the constant derision it heaps on Microsoft. Let's have more computer news and stuff about FreeBSD and Linux and less "make fun of" news about Microsoft.
Slashdot is hardly rapidly becoming useless. There is no lack of abundance of news about FreeBSD, Linux, Apache, Space, OS X, Wireless, and just about any other significant I/T and geeky topic.
And while Linux has its problems, and you may not share the editors views about Microsoft, there are two facts about Microsoft that are hard to ignore:
1) They are huge. Absolutely huge. They have a lot of influence in the I/T and software industry.
2) Sometimes their market presence and control gives them reputation beyond what's deserved.
You may not agree with #2, but consider:
I wouldn't claim their technology is useless. It has its high points, a few better than open source alternatives. The problem is that it's all too easy to fall into "They're big, they're #1, so it must be the best" viewing of Microsoft. Most of us who bring up reports like this one do so because we've put up with far too much of that kind of reasoning.
As if Linux doesn't have it's problems. You might end up like Larry Ellison and his ridiculous "Unbreakable" claims.
Of course, that's a problem with the Linux crowd. Feer of being, and being seen as, professional.
Well, that wasn't anything like our petty digs at MS.
Do you mean afraid to make claims like Microsoft's "Trustworthy Computing" initiative and Oracle's "Unbreakable"? I don't see this as a problem in the open source world. OpenBSD is the only distro that comes close to making anything like an unbreakable claim, and it has history to back it up. We speak softly and upload running code. We release timely information about bugs, security holes, and patches. Cover ups are few. That's professional.
Of course, yet again, it's so easy to confuse "big" and "professional".