Although you'd never know it from the IT industry trade rags, there are a number of "dark corners" in the industry where technologies that have fallen outside of the hype mainstream continue to be successful for long periods of time without a lot of exposure. The press thrives on controversy- the fate of a company relative to its competitors is often portrayed as an "all-or-nothing" proposition, while reality is quite a bit more complex.
IBM seems to accumulate these dark corners- AS/400 and Lotus Domino spring to mind. There are LOTS of folks using these things, and are very happy with them. This is mostly because IBM and Lotus have focused their product development based largely on the feedback of their customers and less on the strategic hypewagon predictions of the analysts. These technologies don't necessarily conform much to the "mainstream" way of doing things- hands-on Notes experience is not going to transfer to running a sendmail system in any way, shape or form. This means that the communities and the people within them remain isolated... AS/400 companies look for AS/400 administrators, and there's not a lot of cross-pollination.
I think Netware represents another one of these niches. Novell has been focused on meeting the needs expressed by its current customer base, and the technology they have has evolved "differently" because of it. Unfortunately, they don't have the market muscle of IBM to continue this indefinitely... as has been pointed out several times already in the thread, NDS is the only possible strategic salvation for the company.
Unfortunately, NDS is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It can't compete in the low-end directory market because AD comes "free" with NT and does a servicable (if inferior) job for the bulk of the folks that would need it. At the high-end of the market, enterprises are biased towards big-iron / UNIX X.500 directory systems- Novell still brings up images of "lan servers" and 386s in many minds.
So I wouldn't count on NDS (cool as it may be) to save Novell. But I wouldn't count on Novel spontaneously combusting anytime soon either... unless there are major financial issues, they've got a loyal market segment whose needs they meet, and will continue to pay them as long as that remains true. Barring any financial stupidity by Novell's management, they can continue to ride this... and there's always the chance they'll come up with something that will put them back into the limelight.
I recently switched by home mail server from sendmail to qmail. If you know sendmail, it's a bit of a learning curve, since it works *very* differently. On the other hand, if you're starting from scratch and don't have sendmail-based preconceptions of how the world should work, it shouldn't be any harder to pick up.
QMail's major benefits are security and scalability. It was designed specifically to avoid the kind of security issues that have plagued sendmail over the years, and the author has offered a bounty to anyone who finds a hole. As far as I know, it's still unclaimed, and qmail is used by many of the big e-mail shops (yahoo, hotmail until the win2k switch, etc...).
I run it with OpenBSD, the primary reason being that I don't have much time to maintain it, ie, make lots of security patches. Not that OpenBSD is perfect by any means, but it does let me sleep a little more soundly at night. Not that I've stopped reading CERT advisories...
The problem with the discussion about this article is that there's no shared definition of what "community" means among the posters. I participate in several things that could be broadly described as "virtual communities", but are very, very different beasts.
/. is a community in that it's a place where a specific group of people with a common identity (broadly, geekdom) post information of common interest to other people like them, and "discuss" that information. I put "discuss" in "quotes" because there's no extended dialog- one post per user is the norm, maybe with a followup for clarification. What's missing the the element of personal relationships- most "communities" are really best defined as a conglomeration of personal relationships between the participants, which is almost nonexistant on/. and nearly impossible in a group of this size. But it still clearly has elements of community.
I am on several mailing lists that consist primarily of former friend and peer groups from "real life". I graduated from college six years ago, and despite the fact that we are spread across the country and world, the group of close friends I had there interacts on a daily basis using one. We support each other in times of trouble, carry on deep conversations as if we were all hanging out in some bar, and generally keep up with what's important in our lives. This very much is a real-life community of personal relationships that has been strengthened by Internet technology.
These are just two examples. They are both radically different from each other, but fall under the broad definition of "community". I bet that the author of this book has a very specific definition of what he means by "community", and I'm guessing that it's something entirely different than the two communities I've described above. Unfortunately, what this definition is was not communicated clearly in Katz's review. I guess the lesson is not to get your panties in a wad over someone else's interpretation of a work on a complex topic like this... read it for yourself before spouting off.
Of course, this wouldn't be true to the/. community norms...
I've been around a while myself, but not as long. What I miss is the relevance of the main stories when I started reasding. It used to baffle me- I thought I was a unique bird, but I learned that someone had me pegged, since I found nearly every story posted to/. then interesting and relevant to me.
Unfortunately, that era has past. I don't think I've changed, but whatever fleeting phenomena lead to such a high story "hit rate" for me personally has slipped away, at about the same rate that the intelligence of the dialogue has sunken.
Although the site's appeal was an enigma to me at the beginning, I've got my suspicions about the decline, and I blame it on Jon Katz. Not for the usual reasons- his stuff doesn't annoy me like it does others. What happened with the "hellmouth" was that/. began to become associated with an identity, a lifestyle, an outlook. I think this has filtered into the culture of the editors, the story selectors. The site has evolved from simply those things which fascinated a group of run-of-the-mill geeks with the creativity to put it up on a web page to the "voice of the geek community".
What is posted now may still be those things that fascinate Rob & co, but they have been changed by the position they hold: wealthy creators of a financially valuable media property with a voice that reaches 100's of 1000's of people. Their experience has gone far beyond that of the average geek, and it's reflected in their stories.
I miss the old/. I know it's not coming back (just like Usenet), and I guess I'll have to find my a substitute somewhere else. Sigh. Why must all good things come to an end?
Back before export restrictions were loosened (1996), Lotus worked out a "deal" with the NSA that would allow them export 64 bit encryption internationally in Lotus notes. For the international versions, they took 24 bits of the private key and encrypted them with the NSA's public key, so that (in theory) the NSA would get these 24 bits for "free", and would only need to crack the remaining 40 (which was export legal). The theory was that this was ultimately better for their international coverage, since they'd have 64 bit protection from everyone except the US government. (I won't waste space by pointing out the obvious problems with this approach.)
This was publically announced and the technical details disclosed, so while it isn't great conspiracy fodder, it does point to close collaboration between the NSA and at least one major software company...
I travel for work a lot, but my laptop doesn't support an internal DVD drive. So rather than lug DVD's and a clunky external drive around with me, I recompress and put them on the HD. Decompress speed is just fine on the laptop's 500MHz PIII once it gets going, but it is jerky for about 20 seconds until everything gets buffered and cached correctly. I know the MPAA disagrees with me, but I see this as fair use...
Anyway, a couple of points to add:
1. Video quality of DiVX:-) files is considerably (and very noticeably) below DVDs if you're squeezing the movie into a CDROM-sized disk. Many folks who do this scale the frame size down, which greatly improves image quality. If you don't, almost anyone would notice the extremely-obvious compression artifacts. I've found that using the "low motion" codec with bitrates of 1900-2100 kb/s works very well, and is very acceptable. You'll notice artifacts in scenes where the codec is having to make tough choices about where to spend its bits (like scrolling credits with live action behind them), but the result is otherwise *very* good. This gets you movies around 1.5GB (depends on length, etc...) that are too big for a CD, but fine for a HD.
2. As you mention, DeCSS is not the best way to rip DVDs anymore. I much prefer "cladDVD". Other than the short delay to brute-force the encryption key (which is often almost instant) it's just as fast as DeCSS, is considerably easier to use, and has more features (like interpreting the.IFO files to rip just the files needed for the main video stream, Macrovision removal, etc...).
3. Besides DeCSS, the DiVX:-) distribution is also "illegal", in that I think it includes pirated codecs (ie, the Fraunhofer "professional" quality MP3 encoder).
4. How hard or easy doing this is depends on the movie. Fancy releases like the Matrix and T2 are hard because of all of the extra crap thrown in, especially multi-angle stuff. Subtitles are a real pain in the neck too. A few movies have poor telecining (the process of taking a 24fps movie and converting it to NTSC) that can't be removed. I won't go into the details, but the result is a crappy-looking conversion because every few frames is the interleaved result of the two two frames immediately before and after it. This is really annoying on a non-interleaved display like a computer monitor.
I do respect your willingness to make statements that so blatently question the status quo in a forum that is clearly hostile towards your worldview. Based on some of your other postings, it's pretty clear that you're posting an honest opinion and not a troll.
However, as a Christian with a firm belief in modern science as well, I have to question that worldview. You seem a lot more rational and logical than many of the other people I've found who share some of the same beliefs, so I'm hoping you'll indulge me in answering questions in two major areas:
First:
All of the people that I've met personally who question the basic credibility of the modern science establishment (not necessarily the scientific method) based on Christian theology are biblical literalists, and base their viewpoint on the absolute inerrancy of the biblical scripture. Do you hold this view? Although I believe the bible was inspired by God, it's clear to me that the Word has been filtered through an incredibly imperfect human lens, and that it is impossible to take much of the bible literally, given the many layers of human interpretation that have resulted in the current text. My wife is a seminary student and has studied greek, and the amount of interpretation necessary to make the leap from greek to english is amazing to me- there are many, many places where grammatical ambiguity can create two linguistically valid translations of a sentence with radically different meanings in english. Translators must constantly make these judgement calls. If you believe that the bible is the literal word of God, how do you rationalize these problems as well as obvious direct, internal contradictions in the bible? If you don't, what is your theological basis for questioning the validity of modern science?
Second:
I have interpreted your posts as saying that modern partical physics is a myth, and that the experiments claiming to verify it are a sham. Yet you also give credit to other areas of science where "real, useful" work is being done. Your statements attack physics on many levels. I'd like to put aside issues of practical usefulness and the difficulty of sustaining a conspiracy at the level necessary to pull all of this off, and focus just on your issues with experimental verification.
At what level do you stop believing that experimental partical physics is valid? I would assume you don't question Newton's laws, as they are directly observable by human senses. Do you believe in atoms? Much of the "useful" modern science we do today wouldn't be possible without the understanding we have of atoms. But it's impossible to observe atoms without some form of mediating equipment, simple as it may be. What about electrons? Protons? Photons? Things like the dual nature of light (particle / wave) can be experimentally verified with relatively simple equipment- I've seen it personally. Much of our understanding of relatively sophisticated physics has been demonstrated unambiguously as correct by "experimental verification" in ways that are impossible to write of as "shams", such as fission and fusion bombs.
But as the level of detail increases, the level of mediation and sophistication in the equipment needed grows. Where do you draw the line? Does that line happen to fall exactly in the place where physics begins to contradict your theological beliefs?
I believe in a God that is bigger than all of this, that exists far beyond our comprehension of physics and is not even remotely threatened by it. There is something miraculous in the detail of the universe. Who started the big bang? Why did it happen? How did it happen that the physical rules of this universe result in conditions favorable to the development of intelligent life? To me the answer is obvious.
It wouldn't be tough for Amazon to recognize the browsing habits of a bot, and "personalize" the prices it sees to be much more competitive than what they might offer the average customer. This seems like it should be illegal, but I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be...
Most major airlines will guarantee you that, when you call or go to their website, they are offering you the best price available for a given travel date, destination, class of service, restrictions, etc... It sounds like Amazon is simultaneously offering different prices to different people based on aspects of their "electronic persona" that have nothing to do with the level or type of "service" received or volume of business they are doing. This seems inherently unfair, and seems like a stupid move to me, based on the amount of negative publicity it will generate.
Online retailers do have the capability to "personalize" pricing, and doing things like offering additional discounts to regular purchasers based on a structured, frequent flyer-like programs would be a great way to enhance customer loyalty. But there really needs to be a comparable "best price first" guarantee that you're not paying more for an item based on inconsequential factors.
There are definitely ASPs which fit this description- I've had the unfortunate experience with working with some of them. Maybe even half of them. But to paint the entire industry with the brush is not accurate- there are at least a few that are in this to build solid businesses, and it's likely that those will be the ones to last.
Your ISP analogy isn't a bad one- obviously, we survived that period of their growth, and now there are many well-resourced ISPs providing high-quality services. The same thing will happen with ASPs. Of course, there will still be some crappy ones around as well, but that's true for every industry I'm aware of.
There are a variety of reasons why the commercial ASP sector is not well-suited to serving the non-profit ASP industry directly. I should know- I've been involved with it for 6 years.
The main stumbling block for a non-profit ASP is going to be the large capital investments required to build out / buy the needed infrastructure. This goes for both hardware and software. Yes, software -- although the application delivery systems could be entirely open source, many of the sophisticated management tools that ASPs are buying to help them gain an economy of scale (application management, capacity management, trouble ticketing, integration middleware, etc...) do not have open source equivalents.
Fortunately, the non-profit world has organizations that can help overcome these issues- foundations. Foundations already provide many kinds of assistance and enablement for the non-profits they fund, and it would make a lot of sense if that extended to IT, in the form of an non-profit ASP. I know I'd pitch in to help, if someone got one started... in fact, I've considered doing it myself.
Sure, some nonprofits are lucky enough to have skilled technical people volunteer for them. But most don't. So if they wanted to make use of all of this wonderful free software, they'd have to pay someone a lot of money to set it up and maintain it for them. This usually ends up being a heck of a lot more than the cost of the software in the first place.
The cool thing about ASPs is that they can afford to hire technical hot shots, and spread the benefits across a large number of organizations that normally couldn't afford to pay for that person's time.
Of course, this is all based on the premise that the ASP won't load up the pricing with large margins. The problem with corporate ASPs is that they can charge a premium because they companies that need this level of help and expertise can afford it. That's why I think that the only ASP suitable for a non-profit is a non-profit ASP. Otherwise, the motivation is wrong- you want the ASP reducing costs to provide more benefit to it's nonprofits, not it's own profits.
Realize that most nonprofits aren't blessed enough to have someone like you around that understands the details of technology. Frankly, if you have the skills, a chunk of the value proposition of the ASP goes away. But not all of it- most ASPs will have facilities and administrative tools that should enable them to provide a more reliable service than most small organizations could on their own, for a comparable cost. Whether that's an acceptable tradeoff for the loss of control, well, that's a call you have to make.
Last time I checked, the SBC DSL offering in Houston was for 384 (minimum) downstream (up to 1.5MB/s, if you had a good line), and 128 fixed upstream.
Note this is the guaranteed rate from your premesis to the local SWBell CO. There, you get patched onto SWBell's local ATM service, which connects you to the "ISP" part of their business.
It sounds like these people are complaining specifically that they are only getting 128kb/s mail and newsgroup access. They don't complain about web access speed. This definitely would be feasible- SWBell could run newsgroup and mail access over different ATM virtual circuits, which would enable them to easily throttle bandwidth to different services they please.
I doubt they'll win the case- I'm guessing the SBC / SWBell service agreement doesn't make any guarantee about newsgroup or mail access speed. It seems a little nitpicky to me- you'd have to be doing some serious binary newsgroup stuff to have 128kb/s be an issue. Given how much more easily available pron is on the web, I'm not sure there there are many people would notice or care about this.
However, I'm not going to defend SBC's exploitation of vagueness in their terms of service... they need to be up-front about what they're doing. I judge this kind of thing by the "principal of least suprise"- you need to be explicit about things that are contrary to the natural assumptions people are likely to make. Given unspecified service terms, I don't think very many people would assume that newsgroups or e-mail would be bandwidth-limited.
BTW- I was an SBC ADSL customer for a year prior to moving to another city, and frankly I miss it. They were early on their install date (this was 18 months ago) and I was getting consistent 1 Mb/s, right on the fringe of the 12,000 ft ADSL limit. I'm not aware of any outages during the time I used it, and I was hosting a mailing list server on it full-time. I'm now in a neighborhood in Atlanta where my only choices are Northpoint (expensive, lower bandwidth) or Bell South (crappy service). Sigh...
I'd have to disagree with most of the posters that spoken / written language doesn't have much impact on computer language. I don't think you can narrow it down to English, but programming languages have definitely been influenced by western languages. Two examples off the top of my head:
Most computer code reads left to right, top to bottom. If modern computers were developed primarily for Chinese or Hebrew, there likely would be a different approach.
Most programming languages rely heavily on punctuation to define syntax, just as it defines sentence structure (albeit much more loosely) in some human langages. Convenient, because these symbols already exist on our keyboards. What would our computer langages look like if they were created by a culture that doesn't use punctuation?
I'm sure there are a LOT more, as long as you consider romance / germanic / etc... languages as a group, and look outside of them for more radically different forms of written communication.
I bought a NeXT as a freshman in college in 1991. Prior to that, I had been a Apple fan, having learned structured programming in Applesoft BASIC (!) and later, Pascal on a Mac. I had contemplated buying a Mac when I got to school, and had picked out the model. I don't remember the specific number, but it was a mid-range box with a separate monitor and a 68030. The rig + software was going to run me $3500.
I had been interested in the NeXT since I'd first heard about it during the company launch circa 1988, which (as you can see from this article) did gather quite a bit of popular attention. I never imagined I'd actually get to use one of these things, and was totally pumped when I found out that our school not only had a few, but that they were available for sale in the campus store.
1990 was the year the second-generation NeXT machines were announced- an upgraded "Cube" and the new, ultra-slim "Slab", which made even a sparcstation look clunky. What astounded me was that the base-model slab sold for $3000, with a 20MHz 68040, Motorola DSP, hi-res 17" 2-bit monochrome monitor, 8MB RAM, and a 104MB hard drive. With the addition of an external 135MB drive, I was at the same price as the Mac I'd wanted for the next generation in performance, across the board. I didn't need to buy any software- it came with a Word processor, some games, and pretty much everything else I needed. It stomped on all of the PCs and Macs at the time in terms of processor speed, and looked damn cool sitting on my desk. It wasn't a tough decision.
A number of people in this thread have said that the NeXT didn't have much that was special about it's hardware. I'd have to disagree- the inside of that machine was nearly as beautiful as the outside, with a motherboard that looked absolutely vacant compared to most others of the time. It had a stupidly small number of cables: a power cable to the CPU, and a single cable from the CPU to the monitor which carried power and everything else (sound familiar?). The keyboard plugged into the monitor, and the mouse plugged into the keyboard. These 2nd generation machines corrected most of the problems of the first gen- the 68040 was fast / competitive with other processors, and they dropped the optical drive for SCSI hard disks for primary storage.
Of course, the software kicked ass. I used the machine very productively throughout college- as a computer science major, the fact that there was UNIX under the hood was a major benefit, since I was able to get gnuemacs, gcc/g++, LaTeX, and all of the other tools necessary to duplicate the development environment used on the Sun-based campus network. The DSP didn't add a lot of real value, but it sure was fun to prank around with the demo programs that used it, as well as the wide variety of sound utilities available on the 'net. The machine came with Lotus Improv, which was a total-rethink of the spreadsheet that, while missing major areas of functionality (undo, scripting in formulas), was totally symbolic (no absolute cell references) and could handle 7-dimensional sheets with ease.
Indirectly, this machine got me my first job, and set me on a career path that I'm still following today. Because it was UNIX, I was one of the few students on campus that had root access to anything (Linux hadn't really hit yet, and the university computers were locked down), and I got the chance to poke around the machine and learn the basics of system administration. Which got me an on-campus job doing UNIX system administration as a sophomore, and, well, I've been hooked since.
Today, the machine sits on my shelf, looking cool, but not doing anything. It still runs (mostly), but the last time I upgraded the OS, the minimum RAM requirements exceeded 8MB, and I just haven't had the need to justify the effort to track down the ancient SIMMs that would be needed to get it usably fast again. I do miss it- I still get pissed off at the relative clunkiness of nearly every other OS. The NeXT was a work of art in many respects, and it was very sad to see the company eventually fade to black.
Which is why, for the first time in years, I'm excited about the Mac again. I really hope they get OS/X right, as Apple has the market power to make this cool tech successful in the mainstream. It would be really great to see a measure of grace and elegance restored to the OS world that I think was lost when NeXTStep went away.
Turn that cluestick around, techboy
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Selfish Society
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· Score: 5
I'm hoping this is a troll, because it's the perfect example of the attitude the author (forget Katz) is apparently criticizing.
Are you really so narrowminded as to think that anyone who isn't technically savvy is an idiot? Do you have any idea how differently people's brains work? I know plenty of hardworking, smart, dedicated people who just don't have what it takes to be a computer wizard. That's because they're wired differently, not because they're lazy, or need to be coddled, or not valuable to society. I believe in a meritocracy to some extent, but basing it on a single set of skills would result in a society so unbalanced it would be miserable to live in and quickly self-destruct. What if your much-vaunted meritocracy were based on musical ability? Or visual artistry? Or carpentry skills? Or empathy? How would you fare if the elite decided that anyone who couldn't bang out a decent shakespearean sonnet in 30 minutes wasn't worth "coddling"?
Get a clue, and go spend some time in the real world. Meet some people who aren't computer gurus and talk with them about what they're good at before you judge them to be idiots.
Yes, today it would be a lot easier to do a video capture. But video capture is kind of a pain- you need to have a separate DVD player, a video capture board, cable them together and hit "start" and "stop" at the right times. My point is that, if the restrictions on DeCSS were completely released, you'd see tools released that would make ripping and recompressing a DVD a lot easier than doing an analog capture, similar to what tools like Music Match and kin have done for MP3 (assuming you've got a DVD drive). Moore's law will take care of the lengthy recompress time soon. The movie industry does have a lot to fear from DeCSS.
Also, remember that the quality of the images stored on a DVD are a bit higher than standard NTSC. For one thing, it's not interlaced, and secondly, the analog recapture would introduce artifacts that (from what I've seen) significantly degrade the quality of the recompress. And while you do sacrifice some quality for smaller size, what I've seen using Divx / mp4 is quite acceptable, especially compared to the old VCD format.
I travel a lot, and I'm considering using these tools to rip movies I own so I can easily watch them on the plane without having to carry a DVD drive or burn the batteries on my laptop spinning it. I could easily fit 5-6 movies in the spare space on my HD...
I'm sure I'll get moderated down for this one, but I have to say it:
DeCSS is being used for piracy today. Anyone who believes otherwise is deluding themselves.
I'm not talking about the old-style piracy of copying a disk physically and selling it through some black market channel... this is the modern, Internet-enabled kind. Download Scour Exchange sometime and search for videos- you'll find plenty of movies there that are described as having been converted by a DVD rip.
With mpeg4 (divx comes to mind) it's very feasible to put a reasonable quality dvd rip into files that can be downloaded without too much trouble by anyone with a DSL connection. It's happening today- people who didn't buy the DVD download these movies and watch them for free. This is piracy, any way you look at.
It's like guns- they have many potential uses, but it's hard to ignore that they're awfully good at killing people. DeCSS has many potentially benign uses, but it's awfully good at helping to enable piracy. If freely packaged with the right tools, it could enable digital piracy of DVDs on a scale approaching that of mp3s and CDs.
Just so you don't think I'm some sort of industry flack- I think the movie (and music, for that matter) companies are being terribly hidebound and reactive, and they deserve every last bit of damage that comes from their inabililty to grasp and sanely exploit the potential for electronic distribution of their content. I don't think programs like DeCSS should be illegal. Lawsuits against companies like Napster and Scour are sad attempts to return to an earlier time when complete control of content was possible through restricting physical distribution. My only point: just don't say that DeCSS isn't used for piracy- that's BS.
As mentioned in the article, John Lienhard does a radio program as well- it's actually more of a commentary on a single topic than a program, running somewhere around 5 minutes long. It's used a filler material by a lot of NPR stations.
Anyway, he's done a bazillion of these shows, and I'm guessing they were the primary source material for the book (which I haven't read). Fortunately, the transcripts (all 1500+) are available on the web. They're interesting reading and good for at least a few hours of time wastage.:-)
Every debate needs a strong dose of skepticism- and this post provides it in spades. But it's also important to understand the bias of the skeptics as well. The author's website includes a very passionate article that (among other things) displays an extreme and deep distrust of America's power structure of elite, wealthy corporations and individuals, especially when it comes to control of information through mass media outlets. This posting is extremely consistent with that worldview- which I must credit him for. On the whole, I'd agree with him, when it comes to large, multinational corporations.
As a counterpoint, I also would say that I don't think startups are in the same league. My bias is that I've worked for several, and understand that environment pretty well. I believe it's highly likely that Netpliance did not "give this guy a line", with the implication that they somehow mislead him about their true agenda or intent in order to generate positive press. I do think the author of the original article could have been a bit less star-struck and written a more balanced account, but I'm guessing that didn't happen because of inexperience about the functioning of startup businesses.
Here's what I'm guessing happened with Netpliance. I believe, as a whole (like many startup Internet companies) that it was formed by smart, well-meaning people who are passionate about a vision, which in addition to having some socially redeeming values (bringing the Internet to the masses) is potentially highly lucrative. I'm guessing that the demand for their appliances caught them completely by suprise, and likely posed a short-term, very serious threat to their financial viability as a business. This is something that, due to the way the investment community works, they would never admit to publicly, unless they *HAD* to. If they *HAD* to, SEC regulations would require them to distribute that information broadly and publicly. You can understand why they wouldn't want to.
Why would they have been in financial jeopardy? After the original/. posting, I checked with my local Circuit City, and they were backordered by 16 units. Multiply this by all of the retail outlets they sell through, and it represents a huge and overwhelming surge in orders that they were obviously not equipped to deal with, and that would not generate the ongoing service revenue they needed to meet their financial goals. Most startups are structured financially in a way that would not tolerate an deviation from the plan that is this large. If they missed their early service revenue targets by a significant margin (for any reason) they would be crucified in the public market, and they would effectively no longer be a going concern as a business.
I don't think they made an unreasonable decision, given the circumstance. Being a "nice company" to a large community outside of your target market at the expense of the company's existance is just not an option. Their original misstep was to err on the side of being a nice company, and not lock people into a mandatory service agreement. Should they go out of business because they failed to forsee that the geek community would be so interested in their hardware? I don't think so.
Before you think I'm a total Netpliance apologist, understand that I was burned by this as well- I ordered a unit, and I had it canceled. My experience was that this was handled fairly smoothly, even if there wasn't a lot of communication about it. I understand that many people were handled less smoothly, and we can definitely fault Netpliance for not implementing what was a necessary decision in a way that was less disruptive. But accuse them of lieing to this reporter and "giving us the finger" is a bit much, even for a skeptic.
This article is truly shoddy reporting. It was based entirely on the cash situation of these companies as of 12/31/99. While there definitely are some companies on the list in desperate cash flow scenarios, many of them have raised additional capital since the beginning of the year.
Barron's is not a well-respected source of financial analysis, and many of the major analysts have criticized the article.
I knew a lot of BSD kernel code was being used, but I didn't know that they had kept it in kernel space after the NeXT split. Do you know whether Apple has done much cleanup for OS X? Does the old BSD being stuff have an impact on multiprocessing scalability?
As you point out, OS X isn't using the "pure" 4.4BSD-lite code, it's using FreeBSD. Which, incidentally, is derived from 4.4BSD-lite.
Anyway, I should have done my fact checking a little more thoroughly, rather than relying on recollection. Of course, that wouldn't be very/.-like of me, now would it? Of course, admitting a mistake wouldn't be, either...:-)
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Although you'd never know it from the IT industry trade rags, there are a number of "dark corners" in the industry where technologies that have fallen outside of the hype mainstream continue to be successful for long periods of time without a lot of exposure. The press thrives on controversy- the fate of a company relative to its competitors is often portrayed as an "all-or-nothing" proposition, while reality is quite a bit more complex.
IBM seems to accumulate these dark corners- AS/400 and Lotus Domino spring to mind. There are LOTS of folks using these things, and are very happy with them. This is mostly because IBM and Lotus have focused their product development based largely on the feedback of their customers and less on the strategic hypewagon predictions of the analysts. These technologies don't necessarily conform much to the "mainstream" way of doing things- hands-on Notes experience is not going to transfer to running a sendmail system in any way, shape or form. This means that the communities and the people within them remain isolated... AS/400 companies look for AS/400 administrators, and there's not a lot of cross-pollination.
I think Netware represents another one of these niches. Novell has been focused on meeting the needs expressed by its current customer base, and the technology they have has evolved "differently" because of it. Unfortunately, they don't have the market muscle of IBM to continue this indefinitely... as has been pointed out several times already in the thread, NDS is the only possible strategic salvation for the company.
Unfortunately, NDS is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It can't compete in the low-end directory market because AD comes "free" with NT and does a servicable (if inferior) job for the bulk of the folks that would need it. At the high-end of the market, enterprises are biased towards big-iron / UNIX X.500 directory systems- Novell still brings up images of "lan servers" and 386s in many minds.
So I wouldn't count on NDS (cool as it may be) to save Novell. But I wouldn't count on Novel spontaneously combusting anytime soon either... unless there are major financial issues, they've got a loyal market segment whose needs they meet, and will continue to pay them as long as that remains true. Barring any financial stupidity by Novell's management, they can continue to ride this... and there's always the chance they'll come up with something that will put them back into the limelight.
I recently switched by home mail server from sendmail to qmail. If you know sendmail, it's a bit of a learning curve, since it works *very* differently. On the other hand, if you're starting from scratch and don't have sendmail-based preconceptions of how the world should work, it shouldn't be any harder to pick up.
QMail's major benefits are security and scalability. It was designed specifically to avoid the kind of security issues that have plagued sendmail over the years, and the author has offered a bounty to anyone who finds a hole. As far as I know, it's still unclaimed, and qmail is used by many of the big e-mail shops (yahoo, hotmail until the win2k switch, etc...).
I run it with OpenBSD, the primary reason being that I don't have much time to maintain it, ie, make lots of security patches. Not that OpenBSD is perfect by any means, but it does let me sleep a little more soundly at night. Not that I've stopped reading CERT advisories...
The problem with the discussion about this article is that there's no shared definition of what "community" means among the posters. I participate in several things that could be broadly described as "virtual communities", but are very, very different beasts.
/. and nearly impossible in a group of this size. But it still clearly has elements of community.
/. community norms...
/. is a community in that it's a place where a specific group of people with a common identity (broadly, geekdom) post information of common interest to other people like them, and "discuss" that information. I put "discuss" in "quotes" because there's no extended dialog- one post per user is the norm, maybe with a followup for clarification. What's missing the the element of personal relationships- most "communities" are really best defined as a conglomeration of personal relationships between the participants, which is almost nonexistant on
I am on several mailing lists that consist primarily of former friend and peer groups from "real life". I graduated from college six years ago, and despite the fact that we are spread across the country and world, the group of close friends I had there interacts on a daily basis using one. We support each other in times of trouble, carry on deep conversations as if we were all hanging out in some bar, and generally keep up with what's important in our lives. This very much is a real-life community of personal relationships that has been strengthened by Internet technology.
These are just two examples. They are both radically different from each other, but fall under the broad definition of "community". I bet that the author of this book has a very specific definition of what he means by "community", and I'm guessing that it's something entirely different than the two communities I've described above. Unfortunately, what this definition is was not communicated clearly in Katz's review. I guess the lesson is not to get your panties in a wad over someone else's interpretation of a work on a complex topic like this... read it for yourself before spouting off.
Of course, this wouldn't be true to the
I've been around a while myself, but not as long. What I miss is the relevance of the main stories when I started reasding. It used to baffle me- I thought I was a unique bird, but I learned that someone had me pegged, since I found nearly every story posted to /. then interesting and relevant to me.
/. began to become associated with an identity, a lifestyle, an outlook. I think this has filtered into the culture of the editors, the story selectors. The site has evolved from simply those things which fascinated a group of run-of-the-mill geeks with the creativity to put it up on a web page to the "voice of the geek community".
/. I know it's not coming back (just like Usenet), and I guess I'll have to find my a substitute somewhere else. Sigh. Why must all good things come to an end?
Unfortunately, that era has past. I don't think I've changed, but whatever fleeting phenomena lead to such a high story "hit rate" for me personally has slipped away, at about the same rate that the intelligence of the dialogue has sunken.
Although the site's appeal was an enigma to me at the beginning, I've got my suspicions about the decline, and I blame it on Jon Katz. Not for the usual reasons- his stuff doesn't annoy me like it does others. What happened with the "hellmouth" was that
What is posted now may still be those things that fascinate Rob & co, but they have been changed by the position they hold: wealthy creators of a financially valuable media property with a voice that reaches 100's of 1000's of people. Their experience has gone far beyond that of the average geek, and it's reflected in their stories.
I miss the old
Back before export restrictions were loosened (1996), Lotus worked out a "deal" with the NSA that would allow them export 64 bit encryption internationally in Lotus notes. For the international versions, they took 24 bits of the private key and encrypted them with the NSA's public key, so that (in theory) the NSA would get these 24 bits for "free", and would only need to crack the remaining 40 (which was export legal). The theory was that this was ultimately better for their international coverage, since they'd have 64 bit protection from everyone except the US government. (I won't waste space by pointing out the obvious problems with this approach.)
This was publically announced and the technical details disclosed, so while it isn't great conspiracy fodder, it does point to close collaboration between the NSA and at least one major software company...
recompress dvds, that is... :-)
:-) files is considerably (and very noticeably) below DVDs if you're squeezing the movie into a CDROM-sized disk. Many folks who do this scale the frame size down, which greatly improves image quality. If you don't, almost anyone would notice the extremely-obvious compression artifacts. I've found that using the "low motion" codec with bitrates of 1900-2100 kb/s works very well, and is very acceptable. You'll notice artifacts in scenes where the codec is having to make tough choices about where to spend its bits (like scrolling credits with live action behind them), but the result is otherwise *very* good. This gets you movies around 1.5GB (depends on length, etc...) that are too big for a CD, but fine for a HD.
.IFO files to rip just the files needed for the main video stream, Macrovision removal, etc...).
:-) distribution is also "illegal", in that I think it includes pirated codecs (ie, the Fraunhofer "professional" quality MP3 encoder).
I travel for work a lot, but my laptop doesn't support an internal DVD drive. So rather than lug DVD's and a clunky external drive around with me, I recompress and put them on the HD. Decompress speed is just fine on the laptop's 500MHz PIII once it gets going, but it is jerky for about 20 seconds until everything gets buffered and cached correctly. I know the MPAA disagrees with me, but I see this as fair use...
Anyway, a couple of points to add:
1. Video quality of DiVX
2. As you mention, DeCSS is not the best way to rip DVDs anymore. I much prefer "cladDVD". Other than the short delay to brute-force the encryption key (which is often almost instant) it's just as fast as DeCSS, is considerably easier to use, and has more features (like interpreting the
3. Besides DeCSS, the DiVX
4. How hard or easy doing this is depends on the movie. Fancy releases like the Matrix and T2 are hard because of all of the extra crap thrown in, especially multi-angle stuff. Subtitles are a real pain in the neck too. A few movies have poor telecining (the process of taking a 24fps movie and converting it to NTSC) that can't be removed. I won't go into the details, but the result is a crappy-looking conversion because every few frames is the interleaved result of the two two frames immediately before and after it. This is really annoying on a non-interleaved display like a computer monitor.
I do respect your willingness to make statements that so blatently question the status quo in a forum that is clearly hostile towards your worldview. Based on some of your other postings, it's pretty clear that you're posting an honest opinion and not a troll.
However, as a Christian with a firm belief in modern science as well, I have to question that worldview. You seem a lot more rational and logical than many of the other people I've found who share some of the same beliefs, so I'm hoping you'll indulge me in answering questions in two major areas:
First:
All of the people that I've met personally who question the basic credibility of the modern science establishment (not necessarily the scientific method) based on Christian theology are biblical literalists, and base their viewpoint on the absolute inerrancy of the biblical scripture. Do you hold this view? Although I believe the bible was inspired by God, it's clear to me that the Word has been filtered through an incredibly imperfect human lens, and that it is impossible to take much of the bible literally, given the many layers of human interpretation that have resulted in the current text. My wife is a seminary student and has studied greek, and the amount of interpretation necessary to make the leap from greek to english is amazing to me- there are many, many places where grammatical ambiguity can create two linguistically valid translations of a sentence with radically different meanings in english. Translators must constantly make these judgement calls. If you believe that the bible is the literal word of God, how do you rationalize these problems as well as obvious direct, internal contradictions in the bible? If you don't, what is your theological basis for questioning the validity of modern science?
Second:
I have interpreted your posts as saying that modern partical physics is a myth, and that the experiments claiming to verify it are a sham. Yet you also give credit to other areas of science where "real, useful" work is being done. Your statements attack physics on many levels. I'd like to put aside issues of practical usefulness and the difficulty of sustaining a conspiracy at the level necessary to pull all of this off, and focus just on your issues with experimental verification.
At what level do you stop believing that experimental partical physics is valid? I would assume you don't question Newton's laws, as they are directly observable by human senses. Do you believe in atoms? Much of the "useful" modern science we do today wouldn't be possible without the understanding we have of atoms. But it's impossible to observe atoms without some form of mediating equipment, simple as it may be. What about electrons? Protons? Photons? Things like the dual nature of light (particle / wave) can be experimentally verified with relatively simple equipment- I've seen it personally. Much of our understanding of relatively sophisticated physics has been demonstrated unambiguously as correct by "experimental verification" in ways that are impossible to write of as "shams", such as fission and fusion bombs.
But as the level of detail increases, the level of mediation and sophistication in the equipment needed grows. Where do you draw the line? Does that line happen to fall exactly in the place where physics begins to contradict your theological beliefs?
I believe in a God that is bigger than all of this, that exists far beyond our comprehension of physics and is not even remotely threatened by it. There is something miraculous in the detail of the universe. Who started the big bang? Why did it happen? How did it happen that the physical rules of this universe result in conditions favorable to the development of intelligent life? To me the answer is obvious.
It wouldn't be tough for Amazon to recognize the browsing habits of a bot, and "personalize" the prices it sees to be much more competitive than what they might offer the average customer. This seems like it should be illegal, but I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be...
Most major airlines will guarantee you that, when you call or go to their website, they are offering you the best price available for a given travel date, destination, class of service, restrictions, etc... It sounds like Amazon is simultaneously offering different prices to different people based on aspects of their "electronic persona" that have nothing to do with the level or type of "service" received or volume of business they are doing. This seems inherently unfair, and seems like a stupid move to me, based on the amount of negative publicity it will generate.
Online retailers do have the capability to "personalize" pricing, and doing things like offering additional discounts to regular purchasers based on a structured, frequent flyer-like programs would be a great way to enhance customer loyalty. But there really needs to be a comparable "best price first" guarantee that you're not paying more for an item based on inconsequential factors.
There are definitely ASPs which fit this description- I've had the unfortunate experience with working with some of them. Maybe even half of them. But to paint the entire industry with the brush is not accurate- there are at least a few that are in this to build solid businesses, and it's likely that those will be the ones to last.
Your ISP analogy isn't a bad one- obviously, we survived that period of their growth, and now there are many well-resourced ISPs providing high-quality services. The same thing will happen with ASPs. Of course, there will still be some crappy ones around as well, but that's true for every industry I'm aware of.
There are a variety of reasons why the commercial ASP sector is not well-suited to serving the non-profit ASP industry directly. I should know- I've been involved with it for 6 years.
The main stumbling block for a non-profit ASP is going to be the large capital investments required to build out / buy the needed infrastructure. This goes for both hardware and software. Yes, software -- although the application delivery systems could be entirely open source, many of the sophisticated management tools that ASPs are buying to help them gain an economy of scale (application management, capacity management, trouble ticketing, integration middleware, etc...) do not have open source equivalents.
Fortunately, the non-profit world has organizations that can help overcome these issues- foundations. Foundations already provide many kinds of assistance and enablement for the non-profits they fund, and it would make a lot of sense if that extended to IT, in the form of an non-profit ASP. I know I'd pitch in to help, if someone got one started... in fact, I've considered doing it myself.
Sure, some nonprofits are lucky enough to have skilled technical people volunteer for them. But most don't. So if they wanted to make use of all of this wonderful free software, they'd have to pay someone a lot of money to set it up and maintain it for them. This usually ends up being a heck of a lot more than the cost of the software in the first place.
The cool thing about ASPs is that they can afford to hire technical hot shots, and spread the benefits across a large number of organizations that normally couldn't afford to pay for that person's time.
Of course, this is all based on the premise that the ASP won't load up the pricing with large margins. The problem with corporate ASPs is that they can charge a premium because they companies that need this level of help and expertise can afford it. That's why I think that the only ASP suitable for a non-profit is a non-profit ASP. Otherwise, the motivation is wrong- you want the ASP reducing costs to provide more benefit to it's nonprofits, not it's own profits.
Realize that most nonprofits aren't blessed enough to have someone like you around that understands the details of technology. Frankly, if you have the skills, a chunk of the value proposition of the ASP goes away. But not all of it- most ASPs will have facilities and administrative tools that should enable them to provide a more reliable service than most small organizations could on their own, for a comparable cost. Whether that's an acceptable tradeoff for the loss of control, well, that's a call you have to make.
Last time I checked, the SBC DSL offering in Houston was for 384 (minimum) downstream (up to 1.5MB/s, if you had a good line), and 128 fixed upstream.
Note this is the guaranteed rate from your premesis to the local SWBell CO. There, you get patched onto SWBell's local ATM service, which connects you to the "ISP" part of their business.
It sounds like these people are complaining specifically that they are only getting 128kb/s mail and newsgroup access. They don't complain about web access speed. This definitely would be feasible- SWBell could run newsgroup and mail access over different ATM virtual circuits, which would enable them to easily throttle bandwidth to different services they please.
I doubt they'll win the case- I'm guessing the SBC / SWBell service agreement doesn't make any guarantee about newsgroup or mail access speed. It seems a little nitpicky to me- you'd have to be doing some serious binary newsgroup stuff to have 128kb/s be an issue. Given how much more easily available pron is on the web, I'm not sure there there are many people would notice or care about this.
However, I'm not going to defend SBC's exploitation of vagueness in their terms of service... they need to be up-front about what they're doing. I judge this kind of thing by the "principal of least suprise"- you need to be explicit about things that are contrary to the natural assumptions people are likely to make. Given unspecified service terms, I don't think very many people would assume that newsgroups or e-mail would be bandwidth-limited.
BTW- I was an SBC ADSL customer for a year prior to moving to another city, and frankly I miss it. They were early on their install date (this was 18 months ago) and I was getting consistent 1 Mb/s, right on the fringe of the 12,000 ft ADSL limit. I'm not aware of any outages during the time I used it, and I was hosting a mailing list server on it full-time. I'm now in a neighborhood in Atlanta where my only choices are Northpoint (expensive, lower bandwidth) or Bell South (crappy service). Sigh...
I'd have to disagree with most of the posters that spoken / written language doesn't have much impact on computer language. I don't think you can narrow it down to English, but programming languages have definitely been influenced by western languages. Two examples off the top of my head:
Most computer code reads left to right, top to bottom. If modern computers were developed primarily for Chinese or Hebrew, there likely would be a different approach.
Most programming languages rely heavily on punctuation to define syntax, just as it defines sentence structure (albeit much more loosely) in some human langages. Convenient, because these symbols already exist on our keyboards. What would our computer langages look like if they were created by a culture that doesn't use punctuation?
I'm sure there are a LOT more, as long as you consider romance / germanic / etc... languages as a group, and look outside of them for more radically different forms of written communication.
I bought a NeXT as a freshman in college in 1991. Prior to that, I had been a Apple fan, having learned structured programming in Applesoft BASIC (!) and later, Pascal on a Mac. I had contemplated buying a Mac when I got to school, and had picked out the model. I don't remember the specific number, but it was a mid-range box with a separate monitor and a 68030. The rig + software was going to run me $3500.
I had been interested in the NeXT since I'd first heard about it during the company launch circa 1988, which (as you can see from this article) did gather quite a bit of popular attention. I never imagined I'd actually get to use one of these things, and was totally pumped when I found out that our school not only had a few, but that they were available for sale in the campus store.
1990 was the year the second-generation NeXT machines were announced- an upgraded "Cube" and the new, ultra-slim "Slab", which made even a sparcstation look clunky. What astounded me was that the base-model slab sold for $3000, with a 20MHz 68040, Motorola DSP, hi-res 17" 2-bit monochrome monitor, 8MB RAM, and a 104MB hard drive. With the addition of an external 135MB drive, I was at the same price as the Mac I'd wanted for the next generation in performance, across the board. I didn't need to buy any software- it came with a Word processor, some games, and pretty much everything else I needed. It stomped on all of the PCs and Macs at the time in terms of processor speed, and looked damn cool sitting on my desk. It wasn't a tough decision.
A number of people in this thread have said that the NeXT didn't have much that was special about it's hardware. I'd have to disagree- the inside of that machine was nearly as beautiful as the outside, with a motherboard that looked absolutely vacant compared to most others of the time. It had a stupidly small number of cables: a power cable to the CPU, and a single cable from the CPU to the monitor which carried power and everything else (sound familiar?). The keyboard plugged into the monitor, and the mouse plugged into the keyboard. These 2nd generation machines corrected most of the problems of the first gen- the 68040 was fast / competitive with other processors, and they dropped the optical drive for SCSI hard disks for primary storage.
Of course, the software kicked ass. I used the machine very productively throughout college- as a computer science major, the fact that there was UNIX under the hood was a major benefit, since I was able to get gnuemacs, gcc/g++, LaTeX, and all of the other tools necessary to duplicate the development environment used on the Sun-based campus network. The DSP didn't add a lot of real value, but it sure was fun to prank around with the demo programs that used it, as well as the wide variety of sound utilities available on the 'net. The machine came with Lotus Improv, which was a total-rethink of the spreadsheet that, while missing major areas of functionality (undo, scripting in formulas), was totally symbolic (no absolute cell references) and could handle 7-dimensional sheets with ease.
Indirectly, this machine got me my first job, and set me on a career path that I'm still following today. Because it was UNIX, I was one of the few students on campus that had root access to anything (Linux hadn't really hit yet, and the university computers were locked down), and I got the chance to poke around the machine and learn the basics of system administration. Which got me an on-campus job doing UNIX system administration as a sophomore, and, well, I've been hooked since.
Today, the machine sits on my shelf, looking cool, but not doing anything. It still runs (mostly), but the last time I upgraded the OS, the minimum RAM requirements exceeded 8MB, and I just haven't had the need to justify the effort to track down the ancient SIMMs that would be needed to get it usably fast again. I do miss it- I still get pissed off at the relative clunkiness of nearly every other OS. The NeXT was a work of art in many respects, and it was very sad to see the company eventually fade to black.
Which is why, for the first time in years, I'm excited about the Mac again. I really hope they get OS/X right, as Apple has the market power to make this cool tech successful in the mainstream. It would be really great to see a measure of grace and elegance restored to the OS world that I think was lost when NeXTStep went away.
I'm hoping this is a troll, because it's the perfect example of the attitude the author (forget Katz) is apparently criticizing.
Are you really so narrowminded as to think that anyone who isn't technically savvy is an idiot? Do you have any idea how differently people's brains work? I know plenty of hardworking, smart, dedicated people who just don't have what it takes to be a computer wizard. That's because they're wired differently, not because they're lazy, or need to be coddled, or not valuable to society. I believe in a meritocracy to some extent, but basing it on a single set of skills would result in a society so unbalanced it would be miserable to live in and quickly self-destruct. What if your much-vaunted meritocracy were based on musical ability? Or visual artistry? Or carpentry skills? Or empathy? How would you fare if the elite decided that anyone who couldn't bang out a decent shakespearean sonnet in 30 minutes wasn't worth "coddling"?
Get a clue, and go spend some time in the real world. Meet some people who aren't computer gurus and talk with them about what they're good at before you judge them to be idiots.
Yes, today it would be a lot easier to do a video capture. But video capture is kind of a pain- you need to have a separate DVD player, a video capture board, cable them together and hit "start" and "stop" at the right times. My point is that, if the restrictions on DeCSS were completely released, you'd see tools released that would make ripping and recompressing a DVD a lot easier than doing an analog capture, similar to what tools like Music Match and kin have done for MP3 (assuming you've got a DVD drive). Moore's law will take care of the lengthy recompress time soon. The movie industry does have a lot to fear from DeCSS.
Also, remember that the quality of the images stored on a DVD are a bit higher than standard NTSC. For one thing, it's not interlaced, and secondly, the analog recapture would introduce artifacts that (from what I've seen) significantly degrade the quality of the recompress. And while you do sacrifice some quality for smaller size, what I've seen using Divx / mp4 is quite acceptable, especially compared to the old VCD format.
I travel a lot, and I'm considering using these tools to rip movies I own so I can easily watch them on the plane without having to carry a DVD drive or burn the batteries on my laptop spinning it. I could easily fit 5-6 movies in the spare space on my HD...
I'm sure I'll get moderated down for this one, but I have to say it:
DeCSS is being used for piracy today. Anyone who believes otherwise is deluding themselves.
I'm not talking about the old-style piracy of copying a disk physically and selling it through some black market channel... this is the modern, Internet-enabled kind. Download Scour Exchange sometime and search for videos- you'll find plenty of movies there that are described as having been converted by a DVD rip.
With mpeg4 (divx comes to mind) it's very feasible to put a reasonable quality dvd rip into files that can be downloaded without too much trouble by anyone with a DSL connection. It's happening today- people who didn't buy the DVD download these movies and watch them for free. This is piracy, any way you look at.
It's like guns- they have many potential uses, but it's hard to ignore that they're awfully good at killing people. DeCSS has many potentially benign uses, but it's awfully good at helping to enable piracy. If freely packaged with the right tools, it could enable digital piracy of DVDs on a scale approaching that of mp3s and CDs.
Just so you don't think I'm some sort of industry flack- I think the movie (and music, for that matter) companies are being terribly hidebound and reactive, and they deserve every last bit of damage that comes from their inabililty to grasp and sanely exploit the potential for electronic distribution of their content. I don't think programs like DeCSS should be illegal. Lawsuits against companies like Napster and Scour are sad attempts to return to an earlier time when complete control of content was possible through restricting physical distribution. My only point: just don't say that DeCSS isn't used for piracy- that's BS.
As mentioned in the article, John Lienhard does a radio program as well- it's actually more of a commentary on a single topic than a program, running somewhere around 5 minutes long. It's used a filler material by a lot of NPR stations.
:-)
Anyway, he's done a bazillion of these shows, and I'm guessing they were the primary source material for the book (which I haven't read). Fortunately, the transcripts (all 1500+) are available on the web. They're interesting reading and good for at least a few hours of time wastage.
Every debate needs a strong dose of skepticism- and this post provides it in spades. But it's also important to understand the bias of the skeptics as well. The author's website includes a very passionate article that (among other things) displays an extreme and deep distrust of America's power structure of elite, wealthy corporations and individuals, especially when it comes to control of information through mass media outlets. This posting is extremely consistent with that worldview- which I must credit him for. On the whole, I'd agree with him, when it comes to large, multinational corporations.
/. posting, I checked with my local Circuit City, and they were backordered by 16 units. Multiply this by all of the retail outlets they sell through, and it represents a huge and overwhelming surge in orders that they were obviously not equipped to deal with, and that would not generate the ongoing service revenue they needed to meet their financial goals. Most startups are structured financially in a way that would not tolerate an deviation from the plan that is this large. If they missed their early service revenue targets by a significant margin (for any reason) they would be crucified in the public market, and they would effectively no longer be a going concern as a business.
As a counterpoint, I also would say that I don't think startups are in the same league. My bias is that I've worked for several, and understand that environment pretty well. I believe it's highly likely that Netpliance did not "give this guy a line", with the implication that they somehow mislead him about their true agenda or intent in order to generate positive press. I do think the author of the original article could have been a bit less star-struck and written a more balanced account, but I'm guessing that didn't happen because of inexperience about the functioning of startup businesses.
Here's what I'm guessing happened with Netpliance. I believe, as a whole (like many startup Internet companies) that it was formed by smart, well-meaning people who are passionate about a vision, which in addition to having some socially redeeming values (bringing the Internet to the masses) is potentially highly lucrative. I'm guessing that the demand for their appliances caught them completely by suprise, and likely posed a short-term, very serious threat to their financial viability as a business. This is something that, due to the way the investment community works, they would never admit to publicly, unless they *HAD* to. If they *HAD* to, SEC regulations would require them to distribute that information broadly and publicly. You can understand why they wouldn't want to.
Why would they have been in financial jeopardy? After the original
I don't think they made an unreasonable decision, given the circumstance. Being a "nice company" to a large community outside of your target market at the expense of the company's existance is just not an option. Their original misstep was to err on the side of being a nice company, and not lock people into a mandatory service agreement. Should they go out of business because they failed to forsee that the geek community would be so interested in their hardware? I don't think so.
Before you think I'm a total Netpliance apologist, understand that I was burned by this as well- I ordered a unit, and I had it canceled. My experience was that this was handled fairly smoothly, even if there wasn't a lot of communication about it. I understand that many people were handled less smoothly, and we can definitely fault Netpliance for not implementing what was a necessary decision in a way that was less disruptive. But accuse them of lieing to this reporter and "giving us the finger" is a bit much, even for a skeptic.
This article is truly shoddy reporting. It was based entirely on the cash situation of these companies as of 12/31/99. While there definitely are some companies on the list in desperate cash flow scenarios, many of them have raised additional capital since the beginning of the year.
Barron's is not a well-respected source of financial analysis, and many of the major analysts have criticized the article.
I saw it a few weeks ago, and it was great. It's a brand-new theater, and they haven't been going long enough to get lax about the projection quality.
I knew a lot of BSD kernel code was being used, but I didn't know that they had kept it in kernel space after the NeXT split. Do you know whether Apple has done much cleanup for OS X? Does the old BSD being stuff have an impact on multiprocessing scalability?
As you point out, OS X isn't using the "pure" 4.4BSD-lite code, it's using FreeBSD. Which, incidentally, is derived from 4.4BSD-lite.
/.-like of me, now would it? Of course, admitting a mistake wouldn't be, either... :-)
Anyway, I should have done my fact checking a little more thoroughly, rather than relying on recollection. Of course, that wouldn't be very