It's sad but Open Source is one of the great free things that you and i can get, but someone else can make a buck off of our work and we'll never see a dime for it.
I don't understand.
Do you want to give away your work for free? If not, don't create Open Source work. Simple.
On the other hand, if you want to give away your work for free, then what does it matter that somebody else gets to make a buck/feed their family/have a job doing something they enjoy because of your work?
Suppose you write a popular open source program. Now suppose that somebody pays me money to administer your code on their system. What the hell is the problem with that?
AudioGalaxy may track the songs you download. I don't know exactly whether they actually do this or not, but even the fact that they may be able to is worrying to me.
Napster does this already. That's how those 300,000 (?) users who'd downloaded Metallica had their accounts disabled.
IMHO, Audiogalaxy has a far better excuse for tracking this stuff, since a good chunk of the feature set depends on it. (But, yes, it's still tracking you.)
They CAN, but it won't scale, not over the internet (latency!!!!!). You'd need too many machines, and the search would be too slow. Hell, it's already slow enough on Napster right now, even slower on most OpenNap servers. You are certainly right when you say the OpenNap user base will increase dramatically when free-Napster dies, but I don't see how *technically* it can scale up.
I wonder what the OpenNap server-linking system is, underneath. I imagine it'd be a cross between IRC-linking and Gnutella. That would scale okay, wouldn't it? (Yes, I know Gnutella has scaling problems, but I'm talking about the general theory of the Gnutella method rather than the implementation - and remember that *this* network is composed purely of servers, so the traffic would look pretty different)
Sorry, I should have been clearer. My original post was a sarcastic response to the type of academic-style it's-been-done-before-if-you-combine-these-five-di fferent-systems argument. Yes, Java does some of this stuff, but not all of it, and saying that in theory you can already do this by combining various systems is not nearly as valuable as actually creating the one combined, neatly-packaged system in practice. I have moderately-high hopes for the.NET CLR which I've outlined elsewhere in this/. story, but to sum up:
MS is better at implementing kick-ass fast VMs than Sun is, as they have already shown
While the Java VM is not firmly tied to the Java language, it's a much stronger coupling than any other language, whereas the CLR is designed to be language-neutral
MS are going to be considerably better at marketing this thing and getting it onto 90% of desktops than Sun are. I know that's because of their monopoly position, and I'm certainly not advocating that, but it's a fact of life and scores major points for any app developer.
I'm not anti-Java; hell, I work at a company that is currently building an EJB e-commerce backend, and I think Java completely rocks for that. It's taken a long time for Java to get moving and it's only now managed to get a real foothold on the server-side, which is well deserved because server-side Java is wonderful in all kinds of ways. Unfortunately it still sucks on the client side due to poor support and utterly abysmal performance (Swing is just mud). THAT'S why I want.NET to work - I want a nice client-side VM.
I have mixed feelings about this; on the one hand, standards submission is already a leap further than Sun went with Java. On the other, where's the IMPP standard that MS promised us over a year ago? (note: I'm not saying it isn't out there. But I certainly haven't found it on MS's site, anyway)
I have been on various OpenNap servers out there, and they are WORTHLESS, because it's only running on a SINGLE MACHINE, therefore only a few thousands users can be logged at once. That's not enough : the chance you'll find the song you're looking for is exactly ZERO PERCENT. Unless you're a Britney Spears fan.
Wrong. OpenNap servers can be linked together to form a network with shared file and user databases. This is what the OpenNap and MyNapster networks are. The numbers are already pretty damn big, and believe me, once Napster goes subscription-only the user base on these free networks will rocket far higher.
Note that if you're using the original Napster Inc. client for Windows, you can switch between networks with Napigator.
Remember that Napster has thousands of machines connected together, and even though they do have islands, you still search across a user database of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
There's a big gap between promise and reality here. How many IL VMs are there right now for non-Windows platforms?
Oh, come on, give it a chance - after all,.NET for Windows is still in beta. And there's nothing stopping anyone else building a CLR VM if the spec's completely open, as MS claim it will be (and yes, I acknowledge that claims are nothing until the spec itself gets published)
Just as importantly, how many non-Windows platforms will support the.NET API?
As many as run the CLR VM, I suppose. There's no point opening the VM if you're not going to open the API too, and besides, the API definition is going to be far easier to get hold of than the VM definition (since developers need to write to the API, not the VM).
Are you saying you expected.NET to do things that a computer can't do? Are you aware that.NET is a piece of computer software? I think your expectations might have been a little bit too high.
Um, you seem to have misunderstood my post somehow, though I'm not really sure how...
Napster is a relatively simple protocol, with a simple (though now very well-tuned) server backend. It's fast, but it doesn't do anything particularly clever. This is why OpenNap turned up so quickly, and why we don't need to pay for Napster.
Audiogalaxy Satellite, on the other hand, has nearly all its cleverness on the server side. It keeps note of the songs you want and starts downloading them for you when you're around, automatically. It chooses the nearest peer to you automatically. It understands the difference between artists and titles, so you can browse by artist. You can leave the client running on DSL/cable at home while you use the web interface at work to send stuff to it. And loads of other features.
It's very, very cool, and it'll be much harder to clone for the Open Source world. I'd pay for it.
I think you've missed the point - sure $10 a month would be good value, if OpenNap didn't exist. OpenNap is a pure clone of the Napster servers that is totally free to run and use. It's too late for Napster Inc - we don't need them any more.
I have to admit, I got very lucky - wrote that thing in a mail this morning when I saw the news item, was the first to get to the Slashdot thread, copy - paste, instant karma!
In other words, there's nothing here that can't be done with... a computer! Wahey, thank you for pointing that out to us! So, you're saying that all that Microsoft have done is put it all together in one well-designed package and give it massive distribution? Well, good. Because that's what I want.
Java software is run client-side, while.NET software is (will be) run server-side.
You're thinking of the XML Web Service stuff. We're talking about the Common Language Runtime, which can be used to write client code too.
Other differences include that Java, by its very nature, is open source (that means that you can always read the source - that doesn't mean that it is free though...). OTOH,.NET can be kept so that it is not open sourced.
I don't know where the hell you got this idea from. Both Java and.NET compile down to bytecodes. Sure, you can decompile Java, but there's nothing to say you can't do that with.NET too. And the.NET spec is more open than Java's.
Further more, Java is an interpreted language and can run on any platform..NET is comiled and must be run on platforms that it is compiled for.
Wrong. See all the other posts in this thread.
And since M$ has its dirty hands all over it, we can presume that it will be some time before compilers are available for non-M$ systems - and even then not 'legal' compilers.
Wrong. It's a fully open standardised spec.
How about even *remotely* checking your facts next time before posting?
Funny, I just got this news item through a wormhole in the space-time
continuum:
NAPSTER SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE GOES LIVE
June 16th, 2001
Further to CEO Hank Barry's predictions earlier this year, Napster Inc. (a
wholly-owned subsidiary of TimeWarner-AOL-Bertelsmann-Universal) started
charging users to log onto their popular file sharing service. Since its
launch in 1998, 60 million users have created accounts.
The new subscription-based service, which entirely replaces the previously
free version of Napster, was launched at midnight last night. For a mere ten
dollars a month, users are given unlimited access to the Napster service and
the shared files of other users.
In the 18 hours since the launch, three users have subscribed. One of them,
"br1tneyD00D", was quoted earlier as saying "ne1 got nud brit pics...
thanks... and what is this opennap thing that every1 talks about".
Asked if he was worried by the sudden drop in Napster usage, Mr Barry
replied "See this desk? Real mahogany. Yours for two hundred bucks. Really,
you can walk out with it now. Okay, one hundred, but you're twisting my
arm."
I wrote this a couple of weeks ago about the.NET CLR (Common Language Runtime), which is the virtual machine thing:
This is the main bit I'm interested in. It's quite a daring move, since what
they've done is made a virtual machine like Java's, but completely opened
the specs and submitted it for standardisation, which is more than Sun ever
did with Java. It's bizarre, since virtual machines promote
cross-platformness, which is the *last* thing you'd expect MS to be
interested in, especially given their track record. What it looks like is,
firstly a great way to counter the DoJ (and to survive a company split, if
the worst comes to the worst), but secondly it implies that MS have so much
faith in their ability to write fast VMs (which, given the blinding MS Java
VM, is not unfounded) and the Win2K kernel family as a host OS that they're
prepared to take the challenge repeatedly thrown at them: to level the
playing field somewhat. Plus, it makes Win32 coding a hell of a lot easier by abandoning the hell that is the existing Win32 API and MFC for something much cleaner,
and you don't have to abandon whichever language you're coding in already,
since the Common Language Runtime will run all of them, eventually.
Basically, they're going to try and do a Java-like thing better than Java.
And I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to swallow Java whole in the
process (e.g. making the CLR run Java bytecode, or a Java language -> CLR
compiler)
Oh yeah, and there's all the XML stuff and
low-level-services-provided-over-the-net thing, which is quite interesting.
And Microsoft being the ultimate repository of all your personal data, which
is obviously petrifying.
Since then, I've realised a couple of other things:
1) It's a great way for MS to move off Intel-centricity, which isn't so important on the desktop (though it'd help with porting stuff to the Mac) but is one of the main things killing WinCE development, since every time you write an app you have to compile it for every processor that WinCE runs on. And since MS is moving more and more into the embedded market, this is obviously vital.
Please note, before jumping into development of such a server, that the IETF is working on standards for calendaring and scheduling, and several RFCs have already been published. For more info see the ietf-calendar home page.
Unfortunately, I personally know of no open server-side implementation of these standards, though there probably are some. If you know of any, please post here.
Because, as bad as you may think MS GUI design is, the GUIs for most open source apps I've seen are ten times worse.
At least MS actually go to the trouble of usability testing and feeding the results back into the design process. With most open source apps the design criteria tends to go to "the developer should be happy with it" and not much further.
This is a common complaint among developers who want to do relatively advanced dynamic stuff on the client-side - Netscape 4.x (which is still the most common Netscape in use, AFAIK) doesn't give the developer nearly as much as IE 4 does (let alone IE 5), and what it does, it does badly.
Put yourself in the shoes of the developer: You want to do a web app that does nifty UI stuff (because the standard HTML form controls don't cut it for anything other than the most basic interaction). You also want to do lots of live updating on the page without having to go back to the server, which is a reasonable request since you don't want to slow down the user nor overload your server. Netscape 4 makes it a complete pain to do this stuff well, and its API is almost totally incompatible with IE's. You're obviously going to want to cater to as large a share of the market as possible, so you go for IE, thinking you'll do a Netscape version later. (And even if you do get around to attempting the Netscape version, half of the time you'll give up out of frustration)
The usual argument against all the above is that as a conscientious web developer you should be sticking to established, open standards and not falling into the trap of using browser-specific features implemented by greedy companies who just want to get ahead in the web features game. Ironically, it's been my experience that Netscape had always, up until NS 6, been the worst offender here - for every new tag that IE ever stuck in, Netscape did two. And IE's implementations of existing standards have pretty much always (from IE 3 onwards, anyway) been more compliant than Netscape's. So bear that in mind before you start your usual rant against Micro$haft.
Anyway, the situation regarding sticking to standards is definitely better than it was. XHTML + DOM + ECMAscript + CSS2 gives you a ton of flexibility to do almost anything, and the IE 5 and Mozilla support for these is pretty good. Of course, you still have to do client-specific code if you want to do anything outside the browser (e.g. interacting with the rest of the client machine, which a trusted web app might want to do) and the arguments about how to implement this securely (or whether to implement it at all) are still raging. (Java Plug-In + signed applets is probably your best bet at the moment)
In other words, I believe the situation is going to get better, not worse, especially since the way it tends to work is
web browsers have new useful features added due to developer demand (useful as opposed to the features that get banged in due to an order from higher up, hated/ignored by all, and then quietly removed two releases later - hello, IE Channels!)
the W3C tends to follow suit once they see there's a large amount of developer demand
the browser makers move to implement the standard, since they've learnt the hard way that ignoring this is a bad idea
and these days, the browser makers actually go as far as submitting a standards proposal for the new stuff too, which is, of course, what they should have been doing in the first place.
As time goes on the standardised browser feature set gets more and more capable, which means less demand for new features, which means things can settle down. I hope.
BTW, for web developers looking for a nice cross-browser (works in NS 4) API to do dynamic stuff with, check out Dan Steinman's DynAPI.
Okay, I went and read it all again, and then I went and read the Salon article, and now I have absolutely no idea why I would actually want to upload content to this thing. Well, almost no idea: if they get the tipping mechanism working and people actually use it, that might be something. But all the rest of it...
Firstly, Napster's got no competition here. You have to pay to upload your MP3 stash, and no one's going to do that (talking about ripped-off music here, which is what constitutes 99.9999% of Napster stashes, rather than music I might have made myself). It's the people who host the content that get paid, not the people who upload it, and they're not the same.
Secondly, what are the actual usage scenarios that make this thing more worthwhile than, say, just going and finding a decent hosting provider? If the content is so popular that it'll bring down a free hosting solution, and it's content that I'd pay to upload (which makes it pretty unlikely to be pirated... well, I'm not sure about that, since some software pirates seem to pay for good chunks of their hosting, but let's press on, anyway - especially since I'll bet that pirated software is not Mojo Nation's prime target) then surely someone (most likely myself) would pay to host it for me?
Sure, some sites get Slashdotted, but that's mainly because they're on crappy servers. I've never seen any of the big free hosters buckle. And besides - suppose I want to promote my new project which is total Slashdot fodder, and I stick up some big GIF screenshots and then I start promoting it. Why the hell would I use a publishing system that makes people pay to read it?
The CPU cycles thing is slightly more likely, but Popular Power are already going for that one, with a considerably simpler system.
So, can someone (Jim? Still watching?) give me some real-world examples of what I would upload to Mojo Nation, and why I'd be better off spending Mojo on that than, say, using some free web space, or going to an online content publisher, or whatever?
Slashdot Mirror
Jesus, don't they have separate development and production servers? Someone should teach these people how to update a website...
-- Yoz
It's sad but Open Source is one of the great free things that you and i can get, but someone else can make a buck off of our work and we'll never see a dime for it.
I don't understand.
Do you want to give away your work for free? If not, don't create Open Source work. Simple.
On the other hand, if you want to give away your work for free, then what does it matter that somebody else gets to make a buck/feed their family/have a job doing something they enjoy because of your work?
Suppose you write a popular open source program. Now suppose that somebody pays me money to administer your code on their system. What the hell is the problem with that?
-- Yoz
Can you supply any more details?
Hmmm. I definitely remember some mention of request logging in the proceedings.
I'm still reasonably sure that file requests do go through the Napster servers and are logged - can anyone confirm this?
AudioGalaxy may track the songs you download. I don't know exactly whether they actually do this or not, but even the fact that they may be able to is worrying to me.
Napster does this already. That's how those 300,000 (?) users who'd downloaded Metallica had their accounts disabled.
IMHO, Audiogalaxy has a far better excuse for tracking this stuff, since a good chunk of the feature set depends on it. (But, yes, it's still tracking you.)
They CAN, but it won't scale, not over the internet (latency!!!!!). You'd need too many machines, and the search would be too slow. Hell, it's already slow enough on Napster right now, even slower on most OpenNap servers. You are certainly right when you say the OpenNap user base will increase dramatically when free-Napster dies, but I don't see how *technically* it can scale up.
I wonder what the OpenNap server-linking system is, underneath. I imagine it'd be a cross between IRC-linking and Gnutella. That would scale okay, wouldn't it? (Yes, I know Gnutella has scaling problems, but I'm talking about the general theory of the Gnutella method rather than the implementation - and remember that *this* network is composed purely of servers, so the traffic would look pretty different)
I'm not anti-Java; hell, I work at a company that is currently building an EJB e-commerce backend, and I think Java completely rocks for that. It's taken a long time for Java to get moving and it's only now managed to get a real foothold on the server-side, which is well deserved because server-side Java is wonderful in all kinds of ways. Unfortunately it still sucks on the client side due to poor support and utterly abysmal performance (Swing is just mud). THAT'S why I want
The bulk of the software, critical parts, etc., will be run server side. See above for the rest of it.
.NET.
I still don't agree on this, but I think we're talking about different bits of
My apologies for making that post innacurate through neglect. I now feel stupid for doing what I critisize so many other for on Slashdot...
Ah, me too... sorry I was so harsh, especially since I screwed up elsewhere in this very thread...
-- Yoz, calling everyone together for a group hug^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbeer
Whoops, apologies.
I have mixed feelings about this; on the one hand, standards submission is already a leap further than Sun went with Java. On the other, where's the IMPP standard that MS promised us over a year ago? (note: I'm not saying it isn't out there. But I certainly haven't found it on MS's site, anyway)
I have been on various OpenNap servers out there, and they are WORTHLESS, because it's only running on a SINGLE MACHINE, therefore only a few thousands users can be logged at once. That's not enough : the chance you'll find the song you're looking for is exactly ZERO PERCENT. Unless you're a Britney Spears fan.
Wrong. OpenNap servers can be linked together to form a network with shared file and user databases. This is what the OpenNap and MyNapster networks are. The numbers are already pretty damn big, and believe me, once Napster goes subscription-only the user base on these free networks will rocket far higher.
Note that if you're using the original Napster Inc. client for Windows, you can switch between networks with Napigator.
Remember that Napster has thousands of machines connected together, and even though they do have islands, you still search across a user database of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
See above.
There's a big gap between promise and reality here. How many IL VMs are there right now for non-Windows platforms?
.NET for Windows is still in beta. And there's nothing stopping anyone else building a CLR VM if the spec's completely open, as MS claim it will be (and yes, I acknowledge that claims are nothing until the spec itself gets published)
.NET API?
Oh, come on, give it a chance - after all,
Just as importantly, how many non-Windows platforms will support the
As many as run the CLR VM, I suppose. There's no point opening the VM if you're not going to open the API too, and besides, the API definition is going to be far easier to get hold of than the VM definition (since developers need to write to the API, not the VM).
Are you saying you expected .NET to do things that a computer can't do? Are you aware that .NET is a piece of computer software? I think your expectations might have been a little bit too high.
Um, you seem to have misunderstood my post somehow, though I'm not really sure how...
Napster is a relatively simple protocol, with a simple (though now very well-tuned) server backend. It's fast, but it doesn't do anything particularly clever. This is why OpenNap turned up so quickly, and why we don't need to pay for Napster.
Audiogalaxy Satellite, on the other hand, has nearly all its cleverness on the server side. It keeps note of the songs you want and starts downloading them for you when you're around, automatically. It chooses the nearest peer to you automatically. It understands the difference between artists and titles, so you can browse by artist. You can leave the client running on DSL/cable at home while you use the web interface at work to send stuff to it. And loads of other features.
It's very, very cool, and it'll be much harder to clone for the Open Source world. I'd pay for it.
I think you've missed the point - sure $10 a month would be good value, if OpenNap didn't exist. OpenNap is a pure clone of the Napster servers that is totally free to run and use. It's too late for Napster Inc - we don't need them any more.
Hee hee - thanks!
I have to admit, I got very lucky - wrote that thing in a mail this morning when I saw the news item, was the first to get to the Slashdot thread, copy - paste, instant karma!
In other words, there's nothing here that can't be done with... a computer! Wahey, thank you for pointing that out to us! So, you're saying that all that Microsoft have done is put it all together in one well-designed package and give it massive distribution? Well, good. Because that's what I want.
Amazing! You're wrong on practically every point!
.NET software is (will be) run server-side.
.NET can be kept so that it is not open sourced.
.NET compile down to bytecodes. Sure, you can decompile Java, but there's nothing to say you can't do that with .NET too. And the .NET spec is more open than Java's.
.NET is comiled and must be run on platforms that it is compiled for.
Java software is run client-side, while
You're thinking of the XML Web Service stuff. We're talking about the Common Language Runtime, which can be used to write client code too.
Other differences include that Java, by its very nature, is open source (that means that you can always read the source - that doesn't mean that it is free though...). OTOH,
I don't know where the hell you got this idea from. Both Java and
Further more, Java is an interpreted language and can run on any platform.
Wrong. See all the other posts in this thread.
And since M$ has its dirty hands all over it, we can presume that it will be some time before compilers are available for non-M$ systems - and even then not 'legal' compilers.
Wrong. It's a fully open standardised spec.
How about even *remotely* checking your facts next time before posting?
Funny, I just got this news item through a wormhole in the space-time
continuum:
NAPSTER SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE GOES LIVE
June 16th, 2001
Further to CEO Hank Barry's predictions earlier this year, Napster Inc. (a
wholly-owned subsidiary of TimeWarner-AOL-Bertelsmann-Universal) started
charging users to log onto their popular file sharing service. Since its
launch in 1998, 60 million users have created accounts.
The new subscription-based service, which entirely replaces the previously
free version of Napster, was launched at midnight last night. For a mere ten
dollars a month, users are given unlimited access to the Napster service and
the shared files of other users.
In the 18 hours since the launch, three users have subscribed. One of them,
"br1tneyD00D", was quoted earlier as saying "ne1 got nud brit pics...
thanks... and what is this opennap thing that every1 talks about".
Asked if he was worried by the sudden drop in Napster usage, Mr Barry
replied "See this desk? Real mahogany. Yours for two hundred bucks. Really,
you can walk out with it now. Okay, one hundred, but you're twisting my
arm."
-- Yoz
I wrote this a couple of weeks ago about the .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime), which is the virtual machine thing:
This is the main bit I'm interested in. It's quite a daring move, since what
they've done is made a virtual machine like Java's, but completely opened
the specs and submitted it for standardisation, which is more than Sun ever
did with Java. It's bizarre, since virtual machines promote
cross-platformness, which is the *last* thing you'd expect MS to be
interested in, especially given their track record. What it looks like is,
firstly a great way to counter the DoJ (and to survive a company split, if
the worst comes to the worst), but secondly it implies that MS have so much
faith in their ability to write fast VMs (which, given the blinding MS Java
VM, is not unfounded) and the Win2K kernel family as a host OS that they're
prepared to take the challenge repeatedly thrown at them: to level the
playing field somewhat. Plus, it makes Win32 coding a hell of a lot easier by abandoning the hell that is the existing Win32 API and MFC for something much cleaner,
and you don't have to abandon whichever language you're coding in already,
since the Common Language Runtime will run all of them, eventually.
Basically, they're going to try and do a Java-like thing better than Java.
And I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to swallow Java whole in the
process (e.g. making the CLR run Java bytecode, or a Java language -> CLR
compiler)
Oh yeah, and there's all the XML stuff and
low-level-services-provided-over-the-net thing, which is quite interesting.
And Microsoft being the ultimate repository of all your personal data, which
is obviously petrifying.
Since then, I've realised a couple of other things:
1) It's a great way for MS to move off Intel-centricity, which isn't so important on the desktop (though it'd help with porting stuff to the Mac) but is one of the main things killing WinCE development, since every time you write an app you have to compile it for every processor that WinCE runs on. And since MS is moving more and more into the embedded market, this is obviously vital.
2) Looks like I was right on the Java-swallowing:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/16392.html
"...all the needs of the real world"
Yeah, right. And you'll never need more than 640K.
if you read the RFCs you see that they are being contributed by . M$. Funny, eh ?
Not really. MS developers contribute to quite a few RFCs and other open standards these days.
Please note, before jumping into development of such a server, that the IETF is working on standards for calendaring and scheduling, and several RFCs have already been published. For more info see the ietf-calendar home page.
Unfortunately, I personally know of no open server-side implementation of these standards, though there probably are some. If you know of any, please post here.
Because, as bad as you may think MS GUI design is, the GUIs for most open source apps I've seen are ten times worse.
At least MS actually go to the trouble of usability testing and feeding the results back into the design process. With most open source apps the design criteria tends to go to "the developer should be happy with it" and not much further.
Put yourself in the shoes of the developer: You want to do a web app that does nifty UI stuff (because the standard HTML form controls don't cut it for anything other than the most basic interaction). You also want to do lots of live updating on the page without having to go back to the server, which is a reasonable request since you don't want to slow down the user nor overload your server. Netscape 4 makes it a complete pain to do this stuff well, and its API is almost totally incompatible with IE's. You're obviously going to want to cater to as large a share of the market as possible, so you go for IE, thinking you'll do a Netscape version later. (And even if you do get around to attempting the Netscape version, half of the time you'll give up out of frustration)
The usual argument against all the above is that as a conscientious web developer you should be sticking to established, open standards and not falling into the trap of using browser-specific features implemented by greedy companies who just want to get ahead in the web features game. Ironically, it's been my experience that Netscape had always, up until NS 6, been the worst offender here - for every new tag that IE ever stuck in, Netscape did two. And IE's implementations of existing standards have pretty much always (from IE 3 onwards, anyway) been more compliant than Netscape's. So bear that in mind before you start your usual rant against Micro$haft.
Anyway, the situation regarding sticking to standards is definitely better than it was. XHTML + DOM + ECMAscript + CSS2 gives you a ton of flexibility to do almost anything, and the IE 5 and Mozilla support for these is pretty good. Of course, you still have to do client-specific code if you want to do anything outside the browser (e.g. interacting with the rest of the client machine, which a trusted web app might want to do) and the arguments about how to implement this securely (or whether to implement it at all) are still raging. (Java Plug-In + signed applets is probably your best bet at the moment)
In other words, I believe the situation is going to get better, not worse, especially since the way it tends to work is
and these days, the browser makers actually go as far as submitting a standards proposal for the new stuff too, which is, of course, what they should have been doing in the first place.
As time goes on the standardised browser feature set gets more and more capable, which means less demand for new features, which means things can settle down. I hope.
BTW, for web developers looking for a nice cross-browser (works in NS 4) API to do dynamic stuff with, check out Dan Steinman's DynAPI.
-- Yoz, using too many brackets as usual
Okay, I went and read it all again, and then I went and read the Salon article, and now I have absolutely no idea why I would actually want to upload content to this thing. Well, almost no idea: if they get the tipping mechanism working and people actually use it, that might be something. But all the rest of it...
Firstly, Napster's got no competition here. You have to pay to upload your MP3 stash, and no one's going to do that (talking about ripped-off music here, which is what constitutes 99.9999% of Napster stashes, rather than music I might have made myself). It's the people who host the content that get paid, not the people who upload it, and they're not the same.
Secondly, what are the actual usage scenarios that make this thing more worthwhile than, say, just going and finding a decent hosting provider? If the content is so popular that it'll bring down a free hosting solution, and it's content that I'd pay to upload (which makes it pretty unlikely to be pirated... well, I'm not sure about that, since some software pirates seem to pay for good chunks of their hosting, but let's press on, anyway - especially since I'll bet that pirated software is not Mojo Nation's prime target) then surely someone (most likely myself) would pay to host it for me?
Sure, some sites get Slashdotted, but that's mainly because they're on crappy servers. I've never seen any of the big free hosters buckle. And besides - suppose I want to promote my new project which is total Slashdot fodder, and I stick up some big GIF screenshots and then I start promoting it. Why the hell would I use a publishing system that makes people pay to read it?
The CPU cycles thing is slightly more likely, but Popular Power are already going for that one, with a considerably simpler system.
So, can someone (Jim? Still watching?) give me some real-world examples of what I would upload to Mojo Nation, and why I'd be better off spending Mojo on that than, say, using some free web space, or going to an online content publisher, or whatever?
-- Yoz