As long as you're quoting the article you read, how about:
In some cases, people are not even asked whether they want the software. It just installs on the hard drive--a particularly troublesome tactic that some have dubbed "drive-by download."
Why, gosh, the article you castigated the first poster for not reading says that sometimes you don't have to give your consent, just like the first poster said. So who didn't read the article?
Okay, are there any binaries for Mac OS X? Yes, I'm a wimp, but I don't want to have to go through all the "guess the #define" config files and install a developer evaluation version of QT/Mac just to get NetHack running. The QT runtime is royalty-free, right?
Greenpeace's other founder left to start Sea Shepherd, because he thought Greenpeace was too willing to compromise. All things are relative.
I confess, I don't understand why people use "follow the money" as an attack against Greenpeace yet don't admit that the same logic makes most of the "global warming is good for you" counterhype just as suspect. Greenpeace has donations to win by scaring you, but those donations are chump change compared to profits from oil companies and related industries.
Can you honestly tell me that you think Exxon-Mobil and Ford don't have a tremendous vested interest in convincing us that scientists warning us about global warming are all wrong? In fact, when you look back at the bulk of corporate history, there's a long tradition of being against anything that might cause a loss in profitability, from safety regulations to fuel economy requirements. They've done a really good job at convincing libertarians that CAFE is an an assault on personal freedom. Bullpucky.
And, again using the "follow the money" logic, your poster boy Patrick Moore works for an "astroturf" group called the British Columbia Forest Alliance. It's funded by logging industries and was set up by the PR firm Burston-Marstellar, a group notorious for this kind of work. It sounds to me like the real issue for Moore is that those "environmental extremists" can't scare up enough donations to pay nearly as well as the people they're campaigning against can.
Which kind of says something about which side has more of a vested interest to protect, really. Hint: it's not Greenpeace.
Hmm. I have a Tandy 2000 in my closet, which is an 80186-based machine. (Yes, 80186, not 80286.) MS-DOS was initially being pushed as a CP/M-like system, tied to CPUs but not specific hardware, and Radio Shack built the Model 2000 as an MS-DOS machine that wasn't PC-compatible. And you know what? It could address more than 640K of memory.
"Protected mode" has to do with whether the machine's memory can be addressed all in one contiguous space or has to be addressed in segments. MS-DOS was written with the assumption it had to be addressed in segments... but it could still address all the memory the CPU could address in that fashion. The 640K limit came from the way the IBM PC mapped video memory. The Tandy 2000 mapped its video memory to the top of the machine's physical RAM--however much it happened to have, up to the 1M limit the 80186 was able to address.
You know, after reading the entire thing, I think both you and Dick should be taken out and spanked.:)
It's obvious Dick is genetically incapable of responding civilly, and he should be physically prevented from responding to users. There are certain people who seem to revel in the Bastard Operator From Hell stereotype. One suspects he started his own company because if he tried to work for anyone else, they'd fire him, ideally with a cannon.
Having said that, though, it's also clear that you simply weren't willing to take "it's a firewall, and isn't competing with a Linux distribution" for an answer. Dustmite didn't start out irritable--he got that way after explaining the rationale. Then doing it again. Then repeating himself. Over. And over. And over.
Quite frankly, any engineer would have started sounding irritable by the end of that IRC log. He could have handled it better, but honestly, you didn't come across like you were going to accept any "closure" other than a Smoothwall employee saying, "Yes, it's a great idea to put GCC and a web server on our firewall, and we'll get right on it."
It's interesting to hear these things about Smoothwall, though, since I work for a company that makes a box that competes with them. (Incidentally, our box does have a web server on its firewall if you want it. Dustmite is right: it's bad security to do that.)
Not to rain on your otaku parade, but movies whose box-office takes are considered "disappointing" by Disney tend to blow the revenues of American theatrical releases of anime out of the water. In fact, even Disney's less fortunate American rivals like Fox and Warner Brothers do better.
Reality check: anime isn't new, even over here. I saw the American theatrical premiere of Akira in fall 1988. It's nearly 14 years later. Stop waiting for anime to make American animation irrelevant. It hasn't happened. It isn't happening. It isn't going to happen.
Reality check part two: by and large anime isn't groundbreaking, cutting edge stuff any more than American animation is. It isn't less formulaic, either. They're just using different formulas. You may like the anime formulas better than the Disney formulas. More power to you. That doesn't make the Disney formulas less successful, or more likely to go away.
There are a lot of reasons to be disappointed with Disney, but the quality of their feature animation group's work (as distinct from the TV group, which is the one responsible for such wonders as Cinderella II and other OAVs) usually isn't one of them. And in Hollywood, "daring" is relative. Out of major American animation studios, they were the first to embrace computers, the first to make a PG cartoon (Black Cauldron) and possibly the first to make a movie without a happily ever after ending (Pocahontas). And as much as I liked Shrek and Monsters, Inc., they were arguably closer to the Canonical Disney Formula (tm) than Disney's own Atlantis was. (With the notable exception of Prince of Egypt, all of Dreamworks' animations are more Disney than Disney, and I suspect Prince only escaped because Katzenberg thought he'd be struck by lightning if he gave Moses a jive-talking camel sidekick.)
Well, actually, the HomeFair calculator does take the most important things into account, just not perfectly. It's using what's called a "cost of living index," which compares different categories of costs--rent, utilities, health care, etc.--and making the calculation based on that.
No, it's not precise--by necessity it's using average COL values, presuming you are paying the median in all its values for everything. But it's not a bad ballpark estimate. Vacations and mail-order computers are not your most significant reoccuring expenses, are they? The most significant expense for nearly anyone is housing, followed (roughly) by utilities, transportation and local taxes. If I moved from Tampa to Santa Clara, the fact that a Titanium PowerBook is the same price in both places is immaterial. The fact that my $650/mo apartment here is an $1800/mo apartment there is very material... and that's the sort of thing that salary calculators do take into account.
I see this "the PC industry was built on games" line frequently, and with all due respect I think it's dubious at best. If you measure the personal computer revolution using applications as roadmarks.
The first drive from mainframes to "non-programmer's programs" predates PCs of any sort: the IBM DisplayWriter, a word processing terminal.
The programs that brought the first microcomputers out of the hacker realms? Certainly not Adventure and SubLogic's FS1 (the predecessor of Microsoft Flight Simulator): try WordStar and dBASE on CP/M and Visicalc on the Apple II. The first two were revolutionary in the sense of bringing mainframe-like functionality to cheaper hardware, and the third was revolutionary, period.
The program--not interface paradigm--that really made the Macintosh? Aldus PageMaker, of course.
The field that the Amiga dominated long after its demise? Video editing, particularly with Newtek hardware/software. Despite being sold as a game machine, this niche non-game market kept the Amiga not only alive but undead. For some years after Commodore went away, Newtek was still selling their own branded Amigas!
The "Windows PC" is largely carrying on the CP/M heritage. Games only sell machines to hardcore enthusiasts. For the majority of computer buyers, a range of applications sell the machine and games are just icing on the cake. (Games arguably sell video cards for PCs.)
The Linux gaming world is likely to always be like the Mac gaming world. It's there, but people clearly aren't going to the platform to play games that they can also play on Windows. They're going to be going to the platform for something they need to do and that, objectively or subjectively, is better on that platform.
The enthusiasts will come to Linux already (they already are, and most of them are on Slashdot). To get regular users as Linux desktop users for its own sake, appeal to their sense of need with something that done more elegantly, effectively or more easily on Linux than it is on other platforms. That's why Linux is doing well on the server side--and it's a major component of all things Macintosh.
Greenland got its name as a joke from its discoverer (Erik the Red, IIRC). He found both Iceland and Greenland and reversed their logical names deliberately, to steer others away from the one that was actually green.
And, no, global warming would not be good for us. The ocean currents on the planet would shift radically, and weather patterns would follow. This would Really, Truly Suck. And we haven't gotten to coastlines receding, but as someone who lives in a coastal Florida city, I can assure you it'd bother me.
There's an old joke abut George Bernard Shaw being bothered by a female fan at a party, until he asked her, "Madam, would you sleep with me for a million dollars?" She repliced, "Of course." "Then," he asked, "would you sleep with me for ten?" She was offended, saying, "What kind of woman do you think I am, Mr. Shaw?" He replied, "We've already established that, madam--we're just haggling over the price."
I think of this a lot when I listen to the debate on global climate change. The majority of the scientific community recognizes that there is a trend to global warming and that human activity does affect climate. The debates now are--or should be--establishing just what the correlation is between the two.
The problem is that at least in some models--which seem to be supported by empirical evidence--ecosystems absorb a lot of abuse until they're overloaded and collapse abruptly. This means that dire warnings can always be put off--look, things obviously aren't that bad, the sky hasn't fallen, you Chicken Little!--until the catastrophe the Chicken Littles were warning about happens. And, like the Y2K problem, public health and airport security, spending on preventive measures definitionally appears to have no effect: success means things continue as they are without catastrophe. You only see failures.
There's something ironic in noting how out of date the pages like 'Misery Row' and 'Deathwatch' are at Downside.
The idea of a "financial extraction data engine" is kind of neat, but it doesn't look like you're doing anything more than presenting the data from SEC filings in a new format. If you're going to go through the trouble of doing that, try going a step further and analyze it. Look at the past four 10-Qs and tell me what the company's monthly burn rate is (taking into account cash infusions from outside investors and stock offerings, of course). If the burn rate indicates they're going to run out of capital in 12 months or less, project a tentative death date.
As it is, you're just FreeEDGAR with a nicer display format.
Obviously someone is going to have to do what MP3.Com tried to do--just figure out a way to do it right. A plan might be for such a company to approach independent record labels unaffiliated with major labels for distribution, and to approach "known" artists currently without contracts. Not big names, necessarily, but people who are falling through the cracks of the system to start with--Americana, roots rock, alternative country, folk rock. And of course, some 'middle name' artists lose their contracts, for various reasons.
Start the "label" with the knowledge that records are primarily promotional tools for bands, and design the business with as little overhead as possible and to be as artist-friendly as possible. A real "internet-only" record label wouldn't make a whole lot of money, but it might be able to attract a fair amount of attention from artists if it played its cards right: sharing small profits generously might well work out better for most artists than sharing miniscule fractions of large profits.
The Model 100 wasn't a Z-80 based machine any more than the "TRS-80 Color Computer" was, and indeed the successors to the Model 100 dropped the TRS-80 designation. The 100/102/200 series had 80C85s in them, if I remember right, and the CoCos had 6809Es.The Model 16/6000 TRS-80s had Z80s and 68000s, and the last computer with the TRS-80 name plate was the 80186-based Model 2000. (It's always called the "Tandy 2000," but the one I have in the closet has a TRS-80 name plate on it.)
You're right in pointing out that "TRS-80" was Radio Shack's brand name for computers for a while, just like Archer for electronic instruments and Realistic for stereo components. But the person you're responding to was also correct: you can't legitimately call the Model 100 a "portable version of the TRS-80," because it was its own computer, not a portable version of anything else. Likewise, the TRS-80 Color Computer was not the "color version of the TRS-80" any more than the Commodore 64 was the color version of the Commodore PET.
No, talking to Sorenson won't help. A few years back I asked about whether they'd be interested in making a BeOS version of their codec--since BeOS handles such things at the OS level, any media application would immediately have it available for their use. (This was back before Be's infamous focus shift and when they were getting a lot of positive attention in the A/V marketplace.) A Sorenson rep wrote back and said that they couldn't do that, because the codec is exclusively licensed to Apple for use in QuickTime--I was explicitly told the only way to get it on BeOS was to get Apple to port QuickTime to BeOS. Not the QuickTime file format, which a lot of other programs support, but actual QuickTime the program.
I like Apple (sometimes), but I don't really expect them to do much in the way of directly supporting Linux. The only commercial, closed-source app I could imagine them porting to a free Unix would be WebObjects, and I wouldn't be surprised if they ported it to FreeBSD before Linux.
Linux will get benefits from Apple, as you observed, if the Free Software Foundation deigns to accept the work Apple is doing on GCC. Having "one of the biggest GCC compiler design teams in the world and giving all that code back" doesn't mean the FSF is actually going to use it. I hope political considerations won't be an issue, but even without those they tend to be notoriously picky.
Actually, The Phantom Menace was much closer to Lucas's original script ideas for Star Wars, one he drastically reworked at the urging of friends who told him, essentially, that for anyone to give a crap about the story it needed to be archetypal: a sci-fi incarnation of myths and legends. Lucas found the works of Joseph Campbell and used The Hero With a Thousand Faces as a virtual blueprint for the reworking of the script, morphing the tale he'd come up with about the young boy Anakin into a tale about the young man Luke Skywalker, changing the rather passive kidnapped princess--also nearly pre-teen--into a feistier adult, and stripping the convoluted Dune for Dummies politics down into a straightforward tale of good and evil.
And it worked, despite the fact that Lucas isn't a good writer. (He said so himself, long ago around the time of American Graffiti.) The script for Star Wars still isn't really very good. Watch the movie trying to be an objective bastard instead of a long-time fan and you'll see what I mean: most of the dialogue is pretty stilted, and even the direction is somewhat dubious--great visuals, to be sure, but the relatively inexperienced actors clearly weren't being given a lot of support from the man behind the camera. But what the movie had was, as Campbell would put it, "the power of myth"--and it had special effects and action sequences like none ever seen before. When Lucas first showed a private test screening to his friends, most of them thought it was terrible. The one who didn't? Steven Spielberg, who said, "This movie is going to go on to make a hundred million dollars."
And, lest people think I'm slamming Lucas a little too much, keep in mind that he neither wrote nor directed The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi; he only came up with the general stories. (He didn't even write the Star Wars novel that bears his name; it was actually ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster.) Almost everyone I know, including myself, thinks Empire was the best of the set--and I suspect that was largely due to Leigh Brackett's script. Almost everyone also seems to think Jedi was the weakest of the set--and I'd argue the things that drove most people nuts, from Luke and Leia being sisters to the insufferable Ewoks, were sadly part of Lucas's original story.
But at least then he still had the power of the first one propelling things forward. Now, George Lucas has become... George Lucas. Evidently he'd decided years ago that his original concept was background for the "new" story of Star Wars, and now he had the confidence to make it--because he knew that audiences had grown up with his mythology, and they'd flock to see his new work.
Lucas isn't selling out--he's becoming egotistical. He was part of a group before, not one lone visionary--what genius there was in Star Wars was a collective genius. Now we're getting pure, unadulterated Lucas.
p.And the sad thing is, he's right: people will keep flocking to see it.
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect the source code to BeOS was a major component of what was in fact sold to Palm. I know the general feeling is that Palm was essentially buying the development team, but they're also buying pieces of an operating system that can be reused in a later effort.
From the standpoint of a user or engineer, I think you're absolutely correct. From the standpoint of a group (i.e., Be's board of directors) trying to sell that code as an asset, though, making it open would have been suicidal.
There'd also have been significant technical and legal hurdles in opening it: code licensed from other companies would have had to have been removed, replacement free code would have had to have been located and integrated into the source, the new "100% free" code would have had to have undergone unit testing. Then the source would have had to have been cleaned up, the existing documentation would have to have been corrected, completed and more than likely extended with notes on the actual code--otherwise very few people who hadn't worked on it would have the time to parse through it. None of that is insurmountable, but it'd have required a lot of resources assigned to the project, and Be just didn't have many resources available. The only way for that to have happened, practically speaking, would have been for their buyer to agree to fund opening the code--which of course brings us back to the "code as asset" problem described above.
NetWolves' FoxBox/WolfPac is really a rackmount PC running FreeBSD. The front end and "glue" is proprietary and there's licensed software in it, but most of the heavy lifting in the services it provides--firewall, VPN, file sharing, etc.--is done by free software. And it offers intrusion detection being run by Snort.
I'm sure there are other little companies doing similar things--this is just leveraging open source IDS software in "turnkey appliances" the same way it's been leveraged for other services. eSoft's Instagate Firewall/VPN product is Linux-based, and every Slashdot reader knows Sun Cobalt....
The problem with that approach is the same problem that most "lite word processors" have. You often hear reasonable-if-guessed figures like "90% of word processor users only use 10% of the features." It's almost right. It's more accurate to say that 90% of word processor users use about 15% of the features, and that extra 5% changes from user to user. If you make a word processor with only that 10% everyone uses, almost everyone will applaud you--and they'll keep using Microsoft Word anyway. And just to make things more difficult, to get a significant number of users away from Word, you're going to have to duplicate the majority of its functions, to be able to get as many different "five percents" as you can.
There's a book I recall hearing about called The Age of Access by perennial techno-worrywort Jeremy Rifkin. In it, he postulated that we were moving toward a new phase in capitalism, where the relationship of people to property would shift--essentially, the rental model would become the norm rather than the purchase model. More and more of "your stuff" would really be the company's stuff, with your terms of use dictated by their licenses.
And when you think about it, the idea really doesn't even require government intervention--in fact, the less government regulation there is, the better it works out for the companies. After all, what they're rewarded for is simply steadily increasing profit. We like to think the free market dictates the way that they'll do that is by offering the best possible service at the best possible price, but other good ways to increase profit involve buying up your existing competitors and increasing barriers of entry to new potential competitors. (If your competitors have enough of the market share and enough "exclusive" deals or single-supplier contracts with your potential customers, you're not going to have the resources to compete if you're a startup.)
So, really, what's wrong with existing revenue models is that they don't offer as much of a chance for "customer lock-in." This is one of those interesting paradoxes about a market: it works really well as long as the playing field is level, but the most successful players will always have as their goal tilting the playing field in their favor--eliminating competition in any way possible.
This is, of course, why games have rules. And it's why markets are regulated. Whoops, we don't like regulated markets anymore, do we?
Infocom "died" primarily because the games market was changing. People were become more and more enamored with graphics and fast-paced games. Sierra On-Line was moving into their ascendancy in the adventure market, and the games were moving to point-and-click interaction and away from "antiquated" command parsers. And, as someone else pointed out, Infocom tied up a lot of their resources in Cornerstone, a relational database program that supported natural language queries. In some ways this paralleled the problem they were having in the games market--it wasn't that it was a bad program (it got mostly very positive reviews), but it wasn't the direction the market was moving in.
Infocom did try to make the move into graphics but they didn't have the resources left that they needed--so they agreed to be bought by Activision. And really, that's what killed them. Activision wasn't willing to grant them the freedom to move ahead in their own way; they wanted to "consolidate resources" and "maximize efficiency" and all those other business buzzwords. In other words, they wanted to make Infocom just a house label of Activision. And that's what happened.
As for companies that actually "died" due to piracy, I can't think of any--although I can think of ones that left given markets due to piracy, such as the relatively little-known Computer Shack, a company that started out making arcade games for the TRS-80 Model I/III. In the mid-80s they ported one of those games, "Time Bandit," to the Atari ST, greatly expanding it along the way, and one of the reasons cited was the rampant software piracy in the TRS-80 world at the time. (As a former Trash-80 user, I'd add the caveat that by that time, finding TRS-80 software in stores other than Radio Shack was awfully difficult, and Radio Shack generally refused to carry third party software back then. And, this was long before the days of "free demos." Piracy was often the only option if you didn't want to spend $25-40 on a game based solely on an advertisement.)
While I cringe every time I see the Burger King commercials, too, it's my understanding that financially New Line didn't have much of a choice but to get every tie-in they could manage. They're a relatively small studio and this is literally a "bet the company" production for them. Given that they've already spent most of the money making the second two films, they're going to still be in the red even if the first film does Harry Potter-like business. Basically, plastering Frodo's face on as many stupid things as they can manage isn't an act of "synergy" as much as an effort to dig out of debt as quickly as they can manage.
Even so, I think a basic truism about the internet gets missed as commercial interests run around trying to find a way to make money solely on the web: the "killer app" for the internet is communication, in the form of email and increasingly in the form of instant messenger services. (And of course in the form of peer-to-peer file sharing systems.)
The WWW wasn't originally conceived as a for-profit publishing service, and what's happening is simply that companies are finding that publishing models from the offline world don't always translate to the web. Companies that don't figure that out in time will go under. This doesn't just include online magazines, of course--it includes most "free" services whose cost is borne by advertisers. The companies who think the answer is to make ads more intrusive will just dig themselves in deeper. (As a Slashdot comment I saw earlier today said, "It's amazing the lengths some companies will go to in order to drive readers away from their site.")
And you know--that's probably okay. The predictions of the end of the internet utterly miss what people by and large use the internet for. Most of the people using the internet are paying for their bandwidth (that $19.95 to $39.95 a month charge) and they're getting their email and IM, and they're happy.
And the web? Companies that have sites up to tell you about their products and provide customer support will still have them. Companies that do online business of selling offline goods (i.e., Amazon, CD Connection) will still have them. Universities will still have them. Government agencies will still have them. Newspapers and magazines will still have them. People will still pay for "vanity publishing" webhosting out of their own pocket because they want to. And of course, groups that have information people are willing to pay for access to will have web sites.
Really, it sounds kind of like the web just before the cusp of the "dotcom boom," doesn't it? After the internet had been opened up to commercial access but before the gold rush. A time frame when companies on the internet by and large had a reason to be there other than "because it is there."
It won't be the end of the free web, it'll be the end of the advertiser web. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.
Users won't read documentation if they can intuit what they want to do from the program's user interface. If they can't, most of them first turn to the online help. Today in most cases the online help is the main documentation--an increasing number of programs don't have printed manuals at all, or if they do, the manuals are structured as reference material for advanced users.
So I'd say the original point still stands. Users don't necessarily read manuals, but a lot of users do know "click here for help." Online documentation needs to be quickly, easily navigable, and both indexed and searchable unless it's of a very trivial length. And ideally it should be context-sensitive (i.e., when you press the help button, it takes you to a help screen related to the action you were trying to perform if it can).
In my experience, most Unix programs are abysmal in this respect. Their help documents are all too often clearly afterthoughts, and even relatively good ones rarely have context sensitivity or useful navigation (usually it's limited to a table of contents and links reading "previous," "next" and "up" on each page).
Going on a rant here: this is why I believe Eazel failed. They held on to their file management program, but failed to realize it would not make them money when they needed it most.
No, Eazel failed because they needed to do three years of engineering work to get where they wanted to go, and got on the scene too late to be able to get that kind of sustained funding. Check around on the net for some of the interviews with Andy Hertzfeld--I believe it's an audio one with Dr. Dobbs where he gave the three year figure.
Nautilus is still in some ways more of a proof of concept, in my opinion. In the eyes of people with "real" GUI backgrounds like MacOS and BeOS (Hertzfeld, and Pavel Cisler, respectively), the foundation for a good, responsive user interface just isn't there in Unix yet. This is something people who haven't gotten used to MacOS or BeOS aren't likely to ever quite grok, because it isn't really an aversion to the command line. BeOS had bash and I know how to write shell scripts, but nine times out of ten, file management was both simpler and faster in its GUI. If your only significant GUI experience is with Windows or "Windows-alikes" on Unix, file management isn't simpler and faster in the GUI.
Ultimately I think Eazel would have failed asd a commercial venture, but I don't think it's because of the file management program--I think it's because they were trying to follow the canonical advice to open source companies, "make money on the services." Eazel's services were pretty much the same as Ximian's, and it's going to be tough enough for a single company to make what amounts to a subscription package update system profitable--there's simply no market need for two.
I recall reading that early on Eazel and Ximian had talked abuot merging, but decided they were different enough that they should remain different companies. From an engineering standpoint I have no doubt that's true--but from a business model standpoint, they may have been far too close for comfort.
But does anyone really want that same sort of regulatory scheme for broadband?
I don't know. We've kind of become conditioned to think of government regulation as evil until proven otherwise, but as a former telco guy (I worked at Intermedia Communications, now a part of BorgCom, for five years), there are two things I'd observe:
The deregulation of the telco industry in 1996 was supposed to lead to greater choice and lower prices. By and large it's led to much less choice as companies started frantically merging with one another, and it hasn't really led to lower prices, either. Long-distance has come down, and indeed it came down due to market forces--but those market forces exist because of two things: the shift toward data-centric backbones, and the effect of my second point, which is:
What choice you do have in selecting phone companies comes about solely because of government mandates, not deregulation. Your local loop--the "last mile," as it's often called--is owned by a local phone company, and they would not be providing access to that loop to their competitors unless they were forced to.
Honestly, I think "as little regulation as necessary to work" is a laudable goal in nearly any case--but sometimes a little regulation makes the market work better. If cable companies were forced to open their data lines to any local ISPs willing to pay reasonable rates ("reasonable" being roughly defined as "a price which still lets them be competitive with an ISP owned by the cable company itself"), I suspect it would be much better for consumers, better for competing ISPs--and probably ultimately better for cable companies, too.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as you're quoting the article you read, how about:
Why, gosh, the article you castigated the first poster for not reading says that sometimes you don't have to give your consent, just like the first poster said. So who didn't read the article?
Okay, are there any binaries for Mac OS X? Yes, I'm a wimp, but I don't want to have to go through all the "guess the #define" config files and install a developer evaluation version of QT/Mac just to get NetHack running. The QT runtime is royalty-free, right?
Greenpeace's other founder left to start Sea Shepherd, because he thought Greenpeace was too willing to compromise. All things are relative.
I confess, I don't understand why people use "follow the money" as an attack against Greenpeace yet don't admit that the same logic makes most of the "global warming is good for you" counterhype just as suspect. Greenpeace has donations to win by scaring you, but those donations are chump change compared to profits from oil companies and related industries.
Can you honestly tell me that you think Exxon-Mobil and Ford don't have a tremendous vested interest in convincing us that scientists warning us about global warming are all wrong? In fact, when you look back at the bulk of corporate history, there's a long tradition of being against anything that might cause a loss in profitability, from safety regulations to fuel economy requirements. They've done a really good job at convincing libertarians that CAFE is an an assault on personal freedom. Bullpucky.
And, again using the "follow the money" logic, your poster boy Patrick Moore works for an "astroturf" group called the British Columbia Forest Alliance. It's funded by logging industries and was set up by the PR firm Burston-Marstellar, a group notorious for this kind of work. It sounds to me like the real issue for Moore is that those "environmental extremists" can't scare up enough donations to pay nearly as well as the people they're campaigning against can.
Which kind of says something about which side has more of a vested interest to protect, really. Hint: it's not Greenpeace.
Hmm. I have a Tandy 2000 in my closet, which is an 80186-based machine. (Yes, 80186, not 80286.) MS-DOS was initially being pushed as a CP/M-like system, tied to CPUs but not specific hardware, and Radio Shack built the Model 2000 as an MS-DOS machine that wasn't PC-compatible. And you know what? It could address more than 640K of memory.
"Protected mode" has to do with whether the machine's memory can be addressed all in one contiguous space or has to be addressed in segments. MS-DOS was written with the assumption it had to be addressed in segments... but it could still address all the memory the CPU could address in that fashion. The 640K limit came from the way the IBM PC mapped video memory. The Tandy 2000 mapped its video memory to the top of the machine's physical RAM--however much it happened to have, up to the 1M limit the 80186 was able to address.
Not counting Toy Story 2, they've released:
Now, I'm no math major, but doesn't five minus three equal two films left on that contract?
You know, after reading the entire thing, I think both you and Dick should be taken out and spanked. :)
It's obvious Dick is genetically incapable of responding civilly, and he should be physically prevented from responding to users. There are certain people who seem to revel in the Bastard Operator From Hell stereotype. One suspects he started his own company because if he tried to work for anyone else, they'd fire him, ideally with a cannon.
Having said that, though, it's also clear that you simply weren't willing to take "it's a firewall, and isn't competing with a Linux distribution" for an answer. Dustmite didn't start out irritable--he got that way after explaining the rationale. Then doing it again. Then repeating himself. Over. And over. And over.
Quite frankly, any engineer would have started sounding irritable by the end of that IRC log. He could have handled it better, but honestly, you didn't come across like you were going to accept any "closure" other than a Smoothwall employee saying, "Yes, it's a great idea to put GCC and a web server on our firewall, and we'll get right on it."
It's interesting to hear these things about Smoothwall, though, since I work for a company that makes a box that competes with them. (Incidentally, our box does have a web server on its firewall if you want it. Dustmite is right: it's bad security to do that.)
Not to rain on your otaku parade, but movies whose box-office takes are considered "disappointing" by Disney tend to blow the revenues of American theatrical releases of anime out of the water. In fact, even Disney's less fortunate American rivals like Fox and Warner Brothers do better.
Reality check: anime isn't new, even over here. I saw the American theatrical premiere of Akira in fall 1988. It's nearly 14 years later. Stop waiting for anime to make American animation irrelevant. It hasn't happened. It isn't happening. It isn't going to happen.
Reality check part two: by and large anime isn't groundbreaking, cutting edge stuff any more than American animation is. It isn't less formulaic, either. They're just using different formulas. You may like the anime formulas better than the Disney formulas. More power to you. That doesn't make the Disney formulas less successful, or more likely to go away.
There are a lot of reasons to be disappointed with Disney, but the quality of their feature animation group's work (as distinct from the TV group, which is the one responsible for such wonders as Cinderella II and other OAVs) usually isn't one of them. And in Hollywood, "daring" is relative. Out of major American animation studios, they were the first to embrace computers, the first to make a PG cartoon (Black Cauldron) and possibly the first to make a movie without a happily ever after ending (Pocahontas). And as much as I liked Shrek and Monsters, Inc., they were arguably closer to the Canonical Disney Formula (tm) than Disney's own Atlantis was. (With the notable exception of Prince of Egypt, all of Dreamworks' animations are more Disney than Disney, and I suspect Prince only escaped because Katzenberg thought he'd be struck by lightning if he gave Moses a jive-talking camel sidekick.)
Well, actually, the HomeFair calculator does take the most important things into account, just not perfectly. It's using what's called a "cost of living index," which compares different categories of costs--rent, utilities, health care, etc.--and making the calculation based on that.
No, it's not precise--by necessity it's using average COL values, presuming you are paying the median in all its values for everything. But it's not a bad ballpark estimate. Vacations and mail-order computers are not your most significant reoccuring expenses, are they? The most significant expense for nearly anyone is housing, followed (roughly) by utilities, transportation and local taxes. If I moved from Tampa to Santa Clara, the fact that a Titanium PowerBook is the same price in both places is immaterial. The fact that my $650/mo apartment here is an $1800/mo apartment there is very material... and that's the sort of thing that salary calculators do take into account.
I see this "the PC industry was built on games" line frequently, and with all due respect I think it's dubious at best. If you measure the personal computer revolution using applications as roadmarks.
The "Windows PC" is largely carrying on the CP/M heritage. Games only sell machines to hardcore enthusiasts. For the majority of computer buyers, a range of applications sell the machine and games are just icing on the cake. (Games arguably sell video cards for PCs.)
The Linux gaming world is likely to always be like the Mac gaming world. It's there, but people clearly aren't going to the platform to play games that they can also play on Windows. They're going to be going to the platform for something they need to do and that, objectively or subjectively, is better on that platform.
The enthusiasts will come to Linux already (they already are, and most of them are on Slashdot). To get regular users as Linux desktop users for its own sake, appeal to their sense of need with something that done more elegantly, effectively or more easily on Linux than it is on other platforms. That's why Linux is doing well on the server side--and it's a major component of all things Macintosh.
Greenland got its name as a joke from its discoverer (Erik the Red, IIRC). He found both Iceland and Greenland and reversed their logical names deliberately, to steer others away from the one that was actually green.
And, no, global warming would not be good for us. The ocean currents on the planet would shift radically, and weather patterns would follow. This would Really, Truly Suck. And we haven't gotten to coastlines receding, but as someone who lives in a coastal Florida city, I can assure you it'd bother me.
There's an old joke abut George Bernard Shaw being bothered by a female fan at a party, until he asked her, "Madam, would you sleep with me for a million dollars?" She repliced, "Of course." "Then," he asked, "would you sleep with me for ten?" She was offended, saying, "What kind of woman do you think I am, Mr. Shaw?" He replied, "We've already established that, madam--we're just haggling over the price."
I think of this a lot when I listen to the debate on global climate change. The majority of the scientific community recognizes that there is a trend to global warming and that human activity does affect climate. The debates now are--or should be--establishing just what the correlation is between the two.
The problem is that at least in some models--which seem to be supported by empirical evidence--ecosystems absorb a lot of abuse until they're overloaded and collapse abruptly. This means that dire warnings can always be put off--look, things obviously aren't that bad, the sky hasn't fallen, you Chicken Little!--until the catastrophe the Chicken Littles were warning about happens. And, like the Y2K problem, public health and airport security, spending on preventive measures definitionally appears to have no effect: success means things continue as they are without catastrophe. You only see failures.
There's something ironic in noting how out of date the pages like 'Misery Row' and 'Deathwatch' are at Downside.
The idea of a "financial extraction data engine" is kind of neat, but it doesn't look like you're doing anything more than presenting the data from SEC filings in a new format. If you're going to go through the trouble of doing that, try going a step further and analyze it. Look at the past four 10-Qs and tell me what the company's monthly burn rate is (taking into account cash infusions from outside investors and stock offerings, of course). If the burn rate indicates they're going to run out of capital in 12 months or less, project a tentative death date.
As it is, you're just FreeEDGAR with a nicer display format.
Start the "label" with the knowledge that records are primarily promotional tools for bands, and design the business with as little overhead as possible and to be as artist-friendly as possible. A real "internet-only" record label wouldn't make a whole lot of money, but it might be able to attract a fair amount of attention from artists if it played its cards right: sharing small profits generously might well work out better for most artists than sharing miniscule fractions of large profits.
The Model 100 wasn't a Z-80 based machine any more than the "TRS-80 Color Computer" was, and indeed the successors to the Model 100 dropped the TRS-80 designation. The 100/102/200 series had 80C85s in them, if I remember right, and the CoCos had 6809Es.The Model 16/6000 TRS-80s had Z80s and 68000s, and the last computer with the TRS-80 name plate was the 80186-based Model 2000. (It's always called the "Tandy 2000," but the one I have in the closet has a TRS-80 name plate on it.)
You're right in pointing out that "TRS-80" was Radio Shack's brand name for computers for a while, just like Archer for electronic instruments and Realistic for stereo components. But the person you're responding to was also correct: you can't legitimately call the Model 100 a "portable version of the TRS-80," because it was its own computer, not a portable version of anything else. Likewise, the TRS-80 Color Computer was not the "color version of the TRS-80" any more than the Commodore 64 was the color version of the Commodore PET.
No, talking to Sorenson won't help. A few years back I asked about whether they'd be interested in making a BeOS version of their codec--since BeOS handles such things at the OS level, any media application would immediately have it available for their use. (This was back before Be's infamous focus shift and when they were getting a lot of positive attention in the A/V marketplace.) A Sorenson rep wrote back and said that they couldn't do that, because the codec is exclusively licensed to Apple for use in QuickTime--I was explicitly told the only way to get it on BeOS was to get Apple to port QuickTime to BeOS. Not the QuickTime file format, which a lot of other programs support, but actual QuickTime the program.
I like Apple (sometimes), but I don't really expect them to do much in the way of directly supporting Linux. The only commercial, closed-source app I could imagine them porting to a free Unix would be WebObjects, and I wouldn't be surprised if they ported it to FreeBSD before Linux.
Linux will get benefits from Apple, as you observed, if the Free Software Foundation deigns to accept the work Apple is doing on GCC. Having "one of the biggest GCC compiler design teams in the world and giving all that code back" doesn't mean the FSF is actually going to use it. I hope political considerations won't be an issue, but even without those they tend to be notoriously picky.
And it worked, despite the fact that Lucas isn't a good writer. (He said so himself, long ago around the time of American Graffiti.) The script for Star Wars still isn't really very good. Watch the movie trying to be an objective bastard instead of a long-time fan and you'll see what I mean: most of the dialogue is pretty stilted, and even the direction is somewhat dubious--great visuals, to be sure, but the relatively inexperienced actors clearly weren't being given a lot of support from the man behind the camera. But what the movie had was, as Campbell would put it, "the power of myth"--and it had special effects and action sequences like none ever seen before. When Lucas first showed a private test screening to his friends, most of them thought it was terrible. The one who didn't? Steven Spielberg, who said, "This movie is going to go on to make a hundred million dollars."
And, lest people think I'm slamming Lucas a little too much, keep in mind that he neither wrote nor directed The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi; he only came up with the general stories. (He didn't even write the Star Wars novel that bears his name; it was actually ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster.) Almost everyone I know, including myself, thinks Empire was the best of the set--and I suspect that was largely due to Leigh Brackett's script. Almost everyone also seems to think Jedi was the weakest of the set--and I'd argue the things that drove most people nuts, from Luke and Leia being sisters to the insufferable Ewoks, were sadly part of Lucas's original story.
But at least then he still had the power of the first one propelling things forward. Now, George Lucas has become... George Lucas. Evidently he'd decided years ago that his original concept was background for the "new" story of Star Wars, and now he had the confidence to make it--because he knew that audiences had grown up with his mythology, and they'd flock to see his new work.
Lucas isn't selling out--he's becoming egotistical. He was part of a group before, not one lone visionary--what genius there was in Star Wars was a collective genius. Now we're getting pure, unadulterated Lucas. p.And the sad thing is, he's right: people will keep flocking to see it.
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect the source code to BeOS was a major component of what was in fact sold to Palm. I know the general feeling is that Palm was essentially buying the development team, but they're also buying pieces of an operating system that can be reused in a later effort.
From the standpoint of a user or engineer, I think you're absolutely correct. From the standpoint of a group (i.e., Be's board of directors) trying to sell that code as an asset, though, making it open would have been suicidal.
There'd also have been significant technical and legal hurdles in opening it: code licensed from other companies would have had to have been removed, replacement free code would have had to have been located and integrated into the source, the new "100% free" code would have had to have undergone unit testing. Then the source would have had to have been cleaned up, the existing documentation would have to have been corrected, completed and more than likely extended with notes on the actual code--otherwise very few people who hadn't worked on it would have the time to parse through it. None of that is insurmountable, but it'd have required a lot of resources assigned to the project, and Be just didn't have many resources available. The only way for that to have happened, practically speaking, would have been for their buyer to agree to fund opening the code--which of course brings us back to the "code as asset" problem described above.
NetWolves' FoxBox/WolfPac is really a rackmount PC running FreeBSD. The front end and "glue" is proprietary and there's licensed software in it, but most of the heavy lifting in the services it provides--firewall, VPN, file sharing, etc.--is done by free software. And it offers intrusion detection being run by Snort.
I'm sure there are other little companies doing similar things--this is just leveraging open source IDS software in "turnkey appliances" the same way it's been leveraged for other services. eSoft's Instagate Firewall/VPN product is Linux-based, and every Slashdot reader knows Sun Cobalt....
The problem with that approach is the same problem that most "lite word processors" have. You often hear reasonable-if-guessed figures like "90% of word processor users only use 10% of the features." It's almost right. It's more accurate to say that 90% of word processor users use about 15% of the features, and that extra 5% changes from user to user. If you make a word processor with only that 10% everyone uses, almost everyone will applaud you--and they'll keep using Microsoft Word anyway. And just to make things more difficult, to get a significant number of users away from Word, you're going to have to duplicate the majority of its functions, to be able to get as many different "five percents" as you can.
There's a book I recall hearing about called The Age of Access by perennial techno-worrywort Jeremy Rifkin. In it, he postulated that we were moving toward a new phase in capitalism, where the relationship of people to property would shift--essentially, the rental model would become the norm rather than the purchase model. More and more of "your stuff" would really be the company's stuff, with your terms of use dictated by their licenses.
And when you think about it, the idea really doesn't even require government intervention--in fact, the less government regulation there is, the better it works out for the companies. After all, what they're rewarded for is simply steadily increasing profit. We like to think the free market dictates the way that they'll do that is by offering the best possible service at the best possible price, but other good ways to increase profit involve buying up your existing competitors and increasing barriers of entry to new potential competitors. (If your competitors have enough of the market share and enough "exclusive" deals or single-supplier contracts with your potential customers, you're not going to have the resources to compete if you're a startup.)
So, really, what's wrong with existing revenue models is that they don't offer as much of a chance for "customer lock-in." This is one of those interesting paradoxes about a market: it works really well as long as the playing field is level, but the most successful players will always have as their goal tilting the playing field in their favor--eliminating competition in any way possible.
This is, of course, why games have rules. And it's why markets are regulated. Whoops, we don't like regulated markets anymore, do we?
Hmm.
I don't recall Infocom ever making that claim.
Infocom "died" primarily because the games market was changing. People were become more and more enamored with graphics and fast-paced games. Sierra On-Line was moving into their ascendancy in the adventure market, and the games were moving to point-and-click interaction and away from "antiquated" command parsers. And, as someone else pointed out, Infocom tied up a lot of their resources in Cornerstone, a relational database program that supported natural language queries. In some ways this paralleled the problem they were having in the games market--it wasn't that it was a bad program (it got mostly very positive reviews), but it wasn't the direction the market was moving in.
Infocom did try to make the move into graphics but they didn't have the resources left that they needed--so they agreed to be bought by Activision. And really, that's what killed them. Activision wasn't willing to grant them the freedom to move ahead in their own way; they wanted to "consolidate resources" and "maximize efficiency" and all those other business buzzwords. In other words, they wanted to make Infocom just a house label of Activision. And that's what happened.
As for companies that actually "died" due to piracy, I can't think of any--although I can think of ones that left given markets due to piracy, such as the relatively little-known Computer Shack, a company that started out making arcade games for the TRS-80 Model I/III. In the mid-80s they ported one of those games, "Time Bandit," to the Atari ST, greatly expanding it along the way, and one of the reasons cited was the rampant software piracy in the TRS-80 world at the time. (As a former Trash-80 user, I'd add the caveat that by that time, finding TRS-80 software in stores other than Radio Shack was awfully difficult, and Radio Shack generally refused to carry third party software back then. And, this was long before the days of "free demos." Piracy was often the only option if you didn't want to spend $25-40 on a game based solely on an advertisement.)
While I cringe every time I see the Burger King commercials, too, it's my understanding that financially New Line didn't have much of a choice but to get every tie-in they could manage. They're a relatively small studio and this is literally a "bet the company" production for them. Given that they've already spent most of the money making the second two films, they're going to still be in the red even if the first film does Harry Potter-like business. Basically, plastering Frodo's face on as many stupid things as they can manage isn't an act of "synergy" as much as an effort to dig out of debt as quickly as they can manage.
Even so, I think a basic truism about the internet gets missed as commercial interests run around trying to find a way to make money solely on the web: the "killer app" for the internet is communication, in the form of email and increasingly in the form of instant messenger services. (And of course in the form of peer-to-peer file sharing systems.)
The WWW wasn't originally conceived as a for-profit publishing service, and what's happening is simply that companies are finding that publishing models from the offline world don't always translate to the web. Companies that don't figure that out in time will go under. This doesn't just include online magazines, of course--it includes most "free" services whose cost is borne by advertisers. The companies who think the answer is to make ads more intrusive will just dig themselves in deeper. (As a Slashdot comment I saw earlier today said, "It's amazing the lengths some companies will go to in order to drive readers away from their site.")
And you know--that's probably okay. The predictions of the end of the internet utterly miss what people by and large use the internet for. Most of the people using the internet are paying for their bandwidth (that $19.95 to $39.95 a month charge) and they're getting their email and IM, and they're happy.
And the web? Companies that have sites up to tell you about their products and provide customer support will still have them. Companies that do online business of selling offline goods (i.e., Amazon, CD Connection) will still have them. Universities will still have them. Government agencies will still have them. Newspapers and magazines will still have them. People will still pay for "vanity publishing" webhosting out of their own pocket because they want to. And of course, groups that have information people are willing to pay for access to will have web sites.
Really, it sounds kind of like the web just before the cusp of the "dotcom boom," doesn't it? After the internet had been opened up to commercial access but before the gold rush. A time frame when companies on the internet by and large had a reason to be there other than "because it is there."
It won't be the end of the free web, it'll be the end of the advertiser web. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.
This is half right. :)
Users won't read documentation if they can intuit what they want to do from the program's user interface. If they can't, most of them first turn to the online help. Today in most cases the online help is the main documentation--an increasing number of programs don't have printed manuals at all, or if they do, the manuals are structured as reference material for advanced users.
So I'd say the original point still stands. Users don't necessarily read manuals, but a lot of users do know "click here for help." Online documentation needs to be quickly, easily navigable, and both indexed and searchable unless it's of a very trivial length. And ideally it should be context-sensitive (i.e., when you press the help button, it takes you to a help screen related to the action you were trying to perform if it can).
In my experience, most Unix programs are abysmal in this respect. Their help documents are all too often clearly afterthoughts, and even relatively good ones rarely have context sensitivity or useful navigation (usually it's limited to a table of contents and links reading "previous," "next" and "up" on each page).
No, Eazel failed because they needed to do three years of engineering work to get where they wanted to go, and got on the scene too late to be able to get that kind of sustained funding. Check around on the net for some of the interviews with Andy Hertzfeld--I believe it's an audio one with Dr. Dobbs where he gave the three year figure.
Nautilus is still in some ways more of a proof of concept, in my opinion. In the eyes of people with "real" GUI backgrounds like MacOS and BeOS (Hertzfeld, and Pavel Cisler, respectively), the foundation for a good, responsive user interface just isn't there in Unix yet. This is something people who haven't gotten used to MacOS or BeOS aren't likely to ever quite grok, because it isn't really an aversion to the command line. BeOS had bash and I know how to write shell scripts, but nine times out of ten, file management was both simpler and faster in its GUI. If your only significant GUI experience is with Windows or "Windows-alikes" on Unix, file management isn't simpler and faster in the GUI.
Ultimately I think Eazel would have failed asd a commercial venture, but I don't think it's because of the file management program--I think it's because they were trying to follow the canonical advice to open source companies, "make money on the services." Eazel's services were pretty much the same as Ximian's, and it's going to be tough enough for a single company to make what amounts to a subscription package update system profitable--there's simply no market need for two.
I recall reading that early on Eazel and Ximian had talked abuot merging, but decided they were different enough that they should remain different companies. From an engineering standpoint I have no doubt that's true--but from a business model standpoint, they may have been far too close for comfort.
I don't know. We've kind of become conditioned to think of government regulation as evil until proven otherwise, but as a former telco guy (I worked at Intermedia Communications, now a part of BorgCom, for five years), there are two things I'd observe:
Honestly, I think "as little regulation as necessary to work" is a laudable goal in nearly any case--but sometimes a little regulation makes the market work better. If cable companies were forced to open their data lines to any local ISPs willing to pay reasonable rates ("reasonable" being roughly defined as "a price which still lets them be competitive with an ISP owned by the cable company itself"), I suspect it would be much better for consumers, better for competing ISPs--and probably ultimately better for cable companies, too.