While ignorance is no excuse, that seems the only one given that Kazaa/Brilliant apparently tip users off to this crazy strategem in the user agreement. That said, I can't understand how this isn't a trojan -- installing an app with no explicit warning on a third-party computer? Shame, shame.
Sort of ironic that Slashdot, the bastion of free software, is being forced to go pay. While the mode is interesting -- paying for pages make a certain amount of sense -- I still wonder whether anyone will pay. Some may pay once, just in a kind of middle-finger to large-format advertisers, but I bet most will suck it up and go back to free eventually. Will that hurt Slashdot's economics? You tell us.
Sigh, poor Lawrence Lessig. He is so blinkered by his obsession with legal issues related to content control that he sees every problem as a content control problem. I'm sure Lessig sees the U.S. Civil War, crop circles, and infant acne as content control issues too.
But once again, he is wrong. The difference between Canada, the U.S., and Korea has nada to do with content control, but everything to do with network structure. Canada and Korea have, until recently, had monolithic telecom marketplaces dominated by an oligopoly of mufti monopolists.
And say what you will about monopolies, but when it comes to pushing a standard into the marketplace, monopolies can do it better than anyone.
But will they innovate? No way. I'm betting that five years from now Canada and Korean will be relegated to the always-on slow lane at current speeds, while the U.S. will have caught up and passed both countries, with a competitive market offering variety of wireline and wireless solutions at myriad speeds.
Lessig is as adrift as ever. Silly academic.
News flash: Mike Lewis discovers the Net
on
IANAL
·
· Score: 2
While it's an okay, workmanlike article, what bugs me is how little it actually says -- and in how many words. What insight is there in Lewis's 5,000-word NY Times opus than was in the long-ago 1993 (!) New Yorker cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
Typical. The world of Steve Jobs is so topsy-turvy that being honest about Apple's fortunes, and answering questions directly, are both now news. Bizarre.
What's next? Perhaps, "Steve Jobs says Apple is in the computer business!" What balls!
To be fair, it's more like a tragedy of the commons than a keg-er.
The key difference? Can you, by your actions, prevent someone else from enjoying use of some property. In this case it seems clear that enough freeloading downloaders will prevent The Rest of Us from getting reasonable use of Gnutella "property".
Not quite the same thing as a keg-er, although I grant there are similarities.
Yes, this will definitely go the Supremes (Court, not singers). The only question is when and via what route. The DOJ would like to take it there directly, with the SC being the hearer of Microsoft's immediate appeal -- which the S. Court can do at its discretion.
Microsoft, on the other hand, understandably wants to follow the lengthy appeals cycle through the Circuit Appeals court -- a conservative crew that has already ruled once in its favor -- before letting the inevitable Supreme Court decision happen.
Dates on all of this? The Supreme Court is recessed from June until October, so even if it agreed to hear the thing, it would be October at the earliest. In all likelihood it would demur on a fast appeal -- this is hardly in the national interest -- and ask for the decision to wend its way through appeals court.
So what does all of this mean? About the same as Puxatawney Phil seeing his shadow: a whole lot longer until we're out of this dark period -- either way.
To the prior comment about web sites being "worth what someone will pay" -- a true point -- I would add this: sites are also worth what someone else has paid.
Having been on both sides of these transactions you would be amazed how quickly past purchases become the touchstone for future purchases. How much did Competitor X, Y, or Z go for per unique user? Do we have anything meaningful (e.g., tighter or more affluent audience, obvious stuff to flog, etc.) that would make us worth more? You may disagree with what someone paid for a similar site, but like having a house on your block sold for firesale prices, it matters.
There is remarkably little science here. You are genuinely worth what someone else will pay,but you need to keep in mind comparables, unique visitors, audience demographics -- and what the most recent similar site went for.
With this biz droid interlude out of the way, I now return you to your regular programming;-)
I know it's considered de rigeur 'round these parts to call for structural change. After all, the usual argument goes, it would be bad for Microsoft -- and whatever is bad for Microsoft must be good for Slashdot-ers... right?
Wrong. I think a Microsoft broken into operating system, Internet tools, and applications would be a much more formidable competitor. No longer hamstrung by its reliance on legacy apps and a single operating system, developers would be free to push the MSXML DOM, for example, onto multiple platforms; it would put IE onto Linux; it would port Office apps to Linux and elsewhere.
A structurally altered Microsoft would be worth more -- not less -- on the market than the current monolithic Microsoft. I would even applaud it doing a Seagate and taking part of the company private in an LBO, do some tweaking and pruning, and re-emerge a few years later in a blaze of market capitalization.
Because free to innovate and chase opportunities -- as well as to better attract and reward engineers -- the company would once again be the worst nightmare of most of its competitors.
But a monolithic Microsoft, especially one stung by having to a) agree that it had done wrong, and b) sit under the eye of DOJ overseers, will be a mess.
I hate that "... Net companies could be making money if they wanted to..." argument. Analysts like Blodgett at ML love to trot it out, and I always want to reply, "If my Aunt had wheels she'd be a bicycle."
Hypotheticals are meaningless: If Amazon could run a self-sustaining and profitable long-term business by dropping its marketing and infrastructure expenditures today, then it should. After all, Cisco could make lots more money by cutting R&D spending, but Chambers won't do it.
The reasons are exactly the same: the long-term health of both businesses requires heavy current expenditures. Except in the Cisco case the payoffs are apparent. Bezo has yet to prove that Amazon can say the same.
The essential perversity of what is going on here is that the public market has been turned into a venture capitalist on most Internet deals. Cash-poor companies that still require major capital infusions are being taken public. That sort of company, in a prior age, would have stayed private, received the capital infusion, developed a steady business, and then gone public.
The traditional public markets are ill-equipped to play venture capitalists. Some markets -- the Canadian CDNX comes to mind -- are venture-oriented, but historically public markets have been intended for companies whose capital infusions needs were less frequent and less predictable.
The risk these companies run, of course, is that public investors don't have the same "skin" in the game that VCs do: they'll walk from an investment that a VC would put some more money into. The result? Cash-poor companies become more so. And venture capitalists become bingo-players who don't have to hang around to see how their cards gets played.
You are regularly accused of being excessively conservative. Absolve yourself: Would you agree that it is often better to design a great site for 90% of your customers, than to dumb it down for the sake of the other web-handicapped 10%?
Good points all, and an interesting question as to what constitutes journalistic integrity in a/. (or/.-like) site.
Is it enough that a "traditional" media site has run the story? Is it enough that a couple have? Is it okay to pass through stories until you get to a certain size, and then you have to kick in some fact checking? Drudge is cleary on one end of this continuum (the "anything goes" end), where is/.?
Let's make sure the much-ballyhooed/. effect is used for good rather than evil.
Generally, I avoid frames as much as possible. That said, there are some wonderful arguments for them, including how they make it possible to frame other kinds of remote content inside of consistent local nav banners. I really is a big help.
Against the preceding you really have to chalk navigation problems. Nothing drives me battier (almost nothing) than being forced to bookmark a root page and then have to navigate my way to some deeper page. Ugh.
What bugs me about all this blessed praise for Handspring's Razor is how off-base the product (and its overpriced Big Daddy) is. While it's less overpriced, it's still incredibly cumbersome to use, and more importantly, it doesn't give universal wireless email access (unless your universe is New York).
Matter of fact, I recently spent a day messing with RIM's new Blackberry device and ended up feeling downright disgusted with Palm/Spring. Specifically, I loved that Blackberry a) had keyboard entry; b) a perfect form factor; and c) and ubiquitous, wireless email.
It was insanely addictive, like the early days of cell phones when it was fun to call someone from the car (or the roller blades) Just Because You Could, it is totally cool to send emails from the neighbor's couch, Just Because You Can.
At the same time, as Mark Anderson points out in a recent column, any device that has united Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen has got big buzz. After all, Allen just paid $1.65B for RCN which is getting ready to roll out Blackberry service.
While Andreesen is nowhere near as bad as some here make him sound, he's also hardly as omniscient as this poster, steeped in Forbes/Fortune/Herring/Fast Company biz porn, made him out to be either. He's a reasonably bright guy with good hair and straight teeth who was in the right place at the right time.
That post looks like Rob fell on his keyboard. I will say that all these Blair Witch parodies are awfully lame. The MTV version was mildly funny, but it's been downhill ever since.
As I wrote back at my site on this story, this was bizarre stuff. Three guesses why the Canadian regulator said what it said, and the first two guesses don't count.
As you're hearing, there is no best cross-platform authoring tool. Instead, I use a combination of things, depending on the need.
For general tweaking and finicky stuff, I use Allaire's Homesite. It's a nice, fast tool, with a great and useful help file.
For database preliminaries, I usually use Drumbeat 2000. It's an incredibly powerful database integration tool -- if you're using an NT server or somehow have access to ASP hosting. It is a good way of getting a new site 70% of the way there, complete with browser-detection scripts, CSS, and on and on. You still have to wade in with another editor to make things perfect, but it's way faster than doing it all by hand.
Finally, to manage the general layout of the site I use Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Again, a clean and speedy tool that lets me work both visually and directly with HTML code, without trying to hide things from me.
Slashdot Mirror
Open source is recession proof in the same way that unemployment is recession proof.
While ignorance is no excuse, that seems the only one given that Kazaa/Brilliant apparently tip users off to this crazy strategem in the user agreement. That said, I can't understand how this isn't a trojan -- installing an app with no explicit warning on a third-party computer? Shame, shame.
Sort of ironic that Slashdot, the bastion of free software, is being forced to go pay. While the mode is interesting -- paying for pages make a certain amount of sense -- I still wonder whether anyone will pay. Some may pay once, just in a kind of middle-finger to large-format advertisers, but I bet most will suck it up and go back to free eventually. Will that hurt Slashdot's economics? You tell us.
Sigh, poor Lawrence Lessig. He is so blinkered by his obsession with legal issues related to content control that he sees every problem as a content control problem. I'm sure Lessig sees the U.S. Civil War, crop circles, and infant acne as content control issues too.
But once again, he is wrong. The difference between Canada, the U.S., and Korea has nada to do with content control, but everything to do with network structure. Canada and Korea have, until recently, had monolithic telecom marketplaces dominated by an oligopoly of mufti monopolists.
And say what you will about monopolies, but when it comes to pushing a standard into the marketplace, monopolies can do it better than anyone.
But will they innovate? No way. I'm betting that five years from now Canada and Korean will be relegated to the always-on slow lane at current speeds, while the U.S. will have caught up and passed both countries, with a competitive market offering variety of wireline and wireless solutions at myriad speeds.
Lessig is as adrift as ever. Silly academic.
While it's an okay, workmanlike article, what bugs me is how little it actually says -- and in how many words. What insight is there in Lewis's 5,000-word NY Times opus than was in the long-ago 1993 (!) New Yorker cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
Typical. The world of Steve Jobs is so topsy-turvy that being honest about Apple's fortunes, and answering questions directly, are both now news. Bizarre.
What's next? Perhaps, "Steve Jobs says Apple is in the computer business!" What balls!
To be fair, it's more like a tragedy of the commons than a keg-er.
The key difference? Can you, by your actions, prevent someone else from enjoying use of some property. In this case it seems clear that enough freeloading downloaders will prevent The Rest of Us from getting reasonable use of Gnutella "property".
Not quite the same thing as a keg-er, although I grant there are similarities.
Yes, this will definitely go the Supremes (Court, not singers). The only question is when and via what route. The DOJ would like to take it there directly, with the SC being the hearer of Microsoft's immediate appeal -- which the S. Court can do at its discretion.
Microsoft, on the other hand, understandably wants to follow the lengthy appeals cycle through the Circuit Appeals court -- a conservative crew that has already ruled once in its favor -- before letting the inevitable Supreme Court decision happen.
Dates on all of this? The Supreme Court is recessed from June until October, so even if it agreed to hear the thing, it would be October at the earliest. In all likelihood it would demur on a fast appeal -- this is hardly in the national interest -- and ask for the decision to wend its way through appeals court.
So what does all of this mean? About the same as Puxatawney Phil seeing his shadow: a whole lot longer until we're out of this dark period -- either way.
P.
http://www.groksoup.com/pkedrosky
While it may be coming, I notice that one Net 6 beta (pre-beta?) incarnation is getting savage reviews at BetaNews. Unfortunate.
To the prior comment about web sites being "worth what someone will pay" -- a true point -- I would add this: sites are also worth what someone else has paid.
;-)
Having been on both sides of these transactions you would be amazed how quickly past purchases become the touchstone for future purchases. How much did Competitor X, Y, or Z go for per unique user? Do we have anything meaningful (e.g., tighter or more affluent audience, obvious stuff to flog, etc.) that would make us worth more? You may disagree with what someone paid for a similar site, but like having a house on your block sold for firesale prices, it matters.
There is remarkably little science here. You are genuinely worth what someone else will pay,but you need to keep in mind comparables, unique visitors, audience demographics -- and what the most recent similar site went for.
With this biz droid interlude out of the way, I now return you to your regular programming
P.
I know it's considered de rigeur 'round these parts to call for structural change. After all, the usual argument goes, it would be bad for Microsoft -- and whatever is bad for Microsoft must be good for Slashdot-ers ... right?
...
Wrong. I think a Microsoft broken into operating system, Internet tools, and applications would be a much more formidable competitor. No longer hamstrung by its reliance on legacy apps and a single operating system, developers would be free to push the MSXML DOM, for example, onto multiple platforms; it would put IE onto Linux; it would port Office apps to Linux and elsewhere.
A structurally altered Microsoft would be worth more -- not less -- on the market than the current monolithic Microsoft. I would even applaud it doing a Seagate and taking part of the company private in an LBO, do some tweaking and pruning, and re-emerge a few years later in a blaze of market capitalization.
Because free to innovate and chase opportunities -- as well as to better attract and reward engineers -- the company would once again be the worst nightmare of most of its competitors.
But a monolithic Microsoft, especially one stung by having to a) agree that it had done wrong, and b) sit under the eye of DOJ overseers, will be a mess.
Careful what wish for
P.
http://www.groksoup.com
I hate that "... Net companies could be making money if they wanted to ..." argument. Analysts like Blodgett at ML love to trot it out, and I always want to reply, "If my Aunt had wheels she'd be a bicycle."
Hypotheticals are meaningless: If Amazon could run a self-sustaining and profitable long-term business by dropping its marketing and infrastructure expenditures today, then it should. After all, Cisco could make lots more money by cutting R&D spending, but Chambers won't do it.
The reasons are exactly the same: the long-term health of both businesses requires heavy current expenditures. Except in the Cisco case the payoffs are apparent. Bezo has yet to prove that Amazon can say the same.
P.
http://www.groksoup.com
The essential perversity of what is going on here is that the public market has been turned into a venture capitalist on most Internet deals. Cash-poor companies that still require major capital infusions are being taken public. That sort of company, in a prior age, would have stayed private, received the capital infusion, developed a steady business, and then gone public.
The traditional public markets are ill-equipped to play venture capitalists. Some markets -- the Canadian CDNX comes to mind -- are venture-oriented, but historically public markets have been intended for companies whose capital infusions needs were less frequent and less predictable.
The risk these companies run, of course, is that public investors don't have the same "skin" in the game that VCs do: they'll walk from an investment that a VC would put some more money into. The result? Cash-poor companies become more so. And venture capitalists become bingo-players who don't have to hang around to see how their cards gets played.
P
http://www.groksoup.com
You are regularly accused of being excessively conservative. Absolve yourself: Would you agree that it is often better to design a great site for 90% of your customers, than to dumb it down for the sake of the other web-handicapped 10%?
Good points all, and an interesting question as to what constitutes journalistic integrity in a /. (or /.-like) site.
/.?
/. effect is used for good rather than evil.
Is it enough that a "traditional" media site has run the story? Is it enough that a couple have? Is it okay to pass through stories until you get to a certain size, and then you have to kick in some fact checking? Drudge is cleary on one end of this continuum (the "anything goes" end), where is
Let's make sure the much-ballyhooed
P.
http://www.groksoup.com
Generally, I avoid frames as much as possible. That said, there are some wonderful arguments for them, including how they make it possible to frame other kinds of remote content inside of consistent local nav banners. I really is a big help.
Against the preceding you really have to chalk navigation problems. Nothing drives me battier (almost nothing) than being forced to bookmark a root page and then have to navigate my way to some deeper page. Ugh.
P.
What bugs me about all this blessed praise for Handspring's Razor is how off-base the product (and its overpriced Big Daddy) is. While it's less overpriced, it's still incredibly cumbersome to use, and more importantly, it doesn't give universal wireless email access (unless your universe is New York).
Matter of fact, I recently spent a day messing with RIM's new Blackberry device and ended up feeling downright disgusted with Palm/Spring. Specifically, I loved that Blackberry a) had keyboard entry; b) a perfect form factor; and c) and ubiquitous, wireless email.
It was insanely addictive, like the early days of cell phones when it was fun to call someone from the car (or the roller blades) Just Because You Could, it is totally cool to send emails from the neighbor's couch, Just Because You Can.
At the same time, as Mark Anderson points out in a recent column, any device that has united Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen has got big buzz. After all, Allen just paid $1.65B for RCN which is getting ready to roll out Blackberry service.
P.
http://www.groksoup.com
What dreck.
While Andreesen is nowhere near as bad as some here make him sound, he's also hardly as omniscient as this poster, steeped in Forbes/Fortune/Herring/Fast Company biz porn, made him out to be either. He's a reasonably bright guy with good hair and straight teeth who was in the right place at the right time.
If only we all could say the same.
That post looks like Rob fell on his keyboard. I will say that all these Blair Witch parodies are awfully lame. The MTV version was mildly funny, but it's been downhill ever since.
As I wrote back at my site on this story, this was bizarre stuff. Three guesses why the Canadian regulator said what it said, and the first two guesses don't count.
P.
http://www.groksoup.com
As you're hearing, there is no best cross-platform authoring tool. Instead, I use a combination of things, depending on the need.
For general tweaking and finicky stuff, I use Allaire's Homesite. It's a nice, fast tool, with a great and useful help file.
For database preliminaries, I usually use Drumbeat 2000. It's an incredibly powerful database integration tool -- if you're using an NT server or somehow have access to ASP hosting. It is a good way of getting a new site 70% of the way there, complete with browser-detection scripts, CSS, and on and on. You still have to wade in with another editor to make things perfect, but it's way faster than doing it all by hand.
Finally, to manage the general layout of the site I use Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Again, a clean and speedy tool that lets me work both visually and directly with HTML code, without trying to hide things from me.
My $0.02.
P.
http://www.groksoup.com