When I suggested to Mark in 2004 that he make Facebook the largest spam-free e-mail system in the world by continuing to require user authentication, he said that he didn't want to compete with Microsoft. I didn't know at the time that Microsoft would become a large investor. It seems now that for Facebook, Inc., taking that investment has come at a price, which may be minuscule by comparison in monetary terms, but is still real. We're still desperately in need of a reliable messaging system that works, which I think probably means that it needs to be closed.
There's obviously no short answer to this question, but this article from the Wall Street Journal presents a really interesting alternative to the American educational system, which is a mess that's I've written about extensively. Essentially, hours upon hours of homework followed by regular tests are not the answer. Allowing kids to have enough time to think for themselves would be a start.
Disclaimer: I have a biased view on this topic, which I've written about in detail here: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html
That being said, given Facebook's history, it's truly ironic that they would be suing anyone for infringement of intellectual property rights of any sort.
I've written several white papers and op-eds about how this problem has affected various companies and government entities. Sadly, it never seems to go away.
As its developer I'm clearly biased, but I still think Interbook technology is the best mix of having a physical book in your hand, saving paper, and having electronic resources available on the internet if desired. It can be protected by basic DRM (type in word x on page y to continue) or none at all at the publisher's discretion.
I don't know who you are, but I'm Aaron. So I thought I'd clarify something.
The Rolling Stone article got a lot wrong unfortunately. In my book, which sadly the reporter did not read too closely, I referred to Mark as naive in reference to a specific event: his not knowing A) what Viacom was, B) that MTV was part of it (despite having ambitions to create the next MTV), and C) that Viacom purchased other companies. To me, that seemed to illustrate a certain level of naivete at the time. I'm sure Mark is more familiar with Viacom now, since they offered to buy Facebook long ago.
Also, for the record, Mark is a paper billionaire, not a billionaire yet. I have to give him some credit for that, but when the methods of achieving that kind of success amount to theft and deception on a such a grand scale, it's hard to give too much credit.
You're free to think whatever you want about me, of course, but I did want to make sure that people have their facts straight.
I have been writing accounting software of my own lately (http://www.thinkcomputer.com) that also does taxes, and licensing has come up in the past week for me, as well. I used the PDFlib 6 library with PHP, which I paid over $1,400 for, to create PDF files so that my software could prepare tax returns, and all was working fine until my server crashed in March. I was forced to upgrade to new hardware, which I did, in the form of two Sun Fire X2200 servers running Linux. Installing PDFlib on my new setup didn't work, because even though my server had two processors, and I had a license for two processors, PDFlib detected four logical processors (each AMD CPU is dual-core). This was irritating on its own, but the fact that the newer version of PDFlib, version 7, uses a *different* system-based license (and of course they didn't tell anyone) that makes the number of logical processors irrelevant, means that the PDFlib acknowledge the flawed nature of their original license. When I asked them for assistance, since I needed to get my software up and running again, their response was that I should pay them $2,700 more in license fees for version 6 (more than the cost of the server) or $1,194 for a single-system upgrade to the new licensing scheme of version 7 (more than the cost of the original single-CPU license for version 6). To me, it sounded like extortion, but since the company is in Germany they can get away with it easier I suppose.
Needless to say, I'm never using PDFlib again, and I'm re-writing all of my code to use FPDF (http://www.fpdf.org), which is free, and works just as well. It's even easier to write code for. Stay away from PDFlib!
I agree with a lot of other people here: this isn't that surprising. However, social networking is a fairly powerful medium in that you can give masses of people incentives to sign up and hop on the same bandwagon simply by having other people around, which is effectively costless. Knowing this, the idea behind CommonRoom (http://www.commonroom.com) is to use that kind of momentum, however frivilous its basis is in reality, to specifically *prevent* these kinds of attacks from taking place by validating everyone on the network (also not a new concept, just rarely done in practice). We have yet to see what might happen if a generally-available network authenticated everyone--would it have the same degree of malicious code in the forms of spam, viruses, and spyware? My guess is no, but I guess we'll find out eventually if CommonRoom or something like it ever catches on.
If you don't like what you see out there, or you don't know any better, you can just write your own. I came up with Lampshade, but open-source software definitely fosters the mentality that you shouldn't necessarily just use what other people provide, when you're able to contribute something yourself. Of course, once you've written it, you want someone to use it.
From a legal perspective, there are 58 OSI-approved "open source" licenses last I checked, which together constitute at least 58 different definitions. There's no consensus on what it really means. Personally, I feel that if I can read the code, the code is open source. All the other factors are extraneous.
However, one would think that in the spirit of openness, the open source community would welcome whatever contributions it gets, no matter how they're licensed. Sadly, that's rarely the case. I actually had someone threaten me with trademark infringement on the term "open source," when we released the Lampshade PHP framework under a dual license of our own. Of course, that person didn't own the trademark, becaues there is no trademark on the generic term, but whoever it was felt justified in threatening me anyway.
If the open source community wants respect, it should be willing to treat people who contribute with respect, too. Scaring off contributors is not the way to go.
I contacted Andi and Zeev two years ago about the possibility of a PHP framework geared toward business use. The response I received at the time said that it was an interesting idea-yet one that Zend still didn't find interesting enough to pursue. I followed up with them throughout 2004 and 2005, and was constantly given the runaround by various Zend employees. I submitted a talk idea earlier this year for the Zend conference on my PHP framework, and was rejected. (I wonder why.) At a previous conference, one Zend rep told me, "we're a difficult company to work with. You don't wan't to work with us."
Now, Zend wants everyone to work with them. It's too little, too late, I'm afraid.
I'm going to push Think's Lampshade non-OO PHP framework as hard as I can. Contrary to Zend's claims, it is simple, possibly the simplest one out there, and it isn't restricted to one particular industry. (If it were, I'm not sure how educational loan officers, medical researchers and T-Shirt distributors could all be using it at once.) In the meantime, we'll see if Zend's vaporware ever materializes.
I've been thinking of getting into this market, given that everyone seems to hate all of the incumbents. I created a portal system for use at Harvard, but the administatraion there did all they could to shut it down, even though students seemed to like it.
If anyone has any ideas for how I can convert these 10,000 lines of code into something that a school might actually want to buy, let me know! I have not been able to figure it out so far, though given the competition, you'd think it wouldn't be that hard...
I was an undergraduate student in one of Professor Glauber's courses at Harvard two years ago, and though I'm certainly no specialist on light or physics, I really enjoyed his course (The Nature of Light and Matter). It's one of the many Core Curriculum courses at Harvard, but it's taught by one of the few professors there worthy of calling himself a teacher. He has a great sense of humor. I'm glad someone who deserves some credit was able to earn it.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems as though technology can be used to kill two birds with one stone... I wrote an op-ed about this.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/new-deal-20_b_142518.html
I get the Wired Campus newsletter digest daily from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://www.chronicle.com
There's also plenty of books out there about technology and/or education. Harry Lewis, the former Dean of Harvard College, wrote one:
http://www.amazon.com/Blown-Bits-Liberty-Happiness-Explosion/dp/0137135599/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224705390&sr=1-1
And I wrote one, myself:
http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html
Aaron
When I suggested to Mark in 2004 that he make Facebook the largest spam-free e-mail system in the world by continuing to require user authentication, he said that he didn't want to compete with Microsoft. I didn't know at the time that Microsoft would become a large investor. It seems now that for Facebook, Inc., taking that investment has come at a price, which may be minuscule by comparison in monetary terms, but is still real. We're still desperately in need of a reliable messaging system that works, which I think probably means that it needs to be closed.
Aaron
Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era
There's obviously no short answer to this question, but this article from the Wall Street Journal presents a really interesting alternative to the American educational system, which is a mess that's I've written about extensively. Essentially, hours upon hours of homework followed by regular tests are not the answer. Allowing kids to have enough time to think for themselves would be a start.
Disclaimer: I have a biased view on this topic, which I've written about in detail here: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html
That being said, given Facebook's history, it's truly ironic that they would be suing anyone for infringement of intellectual property rights of any sort.
I've written several white papers and op-eds about how this problem has affected various companies and government entities. Sadly, it never seems to go away.
As its developer I'm clearly biased, but I still think Interbook technology is the best mix of having a physical book in your hand, saving paper, and having electronic resources available on the internet if desired. It can be protected by basic DRM (type in word x on page y to continue) or none at all at the publisher's discretion.
Hi there,
I don't know who you are, but I'm Aaron. So I thought I'd clarify something.
The Rolling Stone article got a lot wrong unfortunately. In my book, which sadly the reporter did not read too closely, I referred to Mark as naive in reference to a specific event: his not knowing A) what Viacom was, B) that MTV was part of it (despite having ambitions to create the next MTV), and C) that Viacom purchased other companies. To me, that seemed to illustrate a certain level of naivete at the time. I'm sure Mark is more familiar with Viacom now, since they offered to buy Facebook long ago.
Also, for the record, Mark is a paper billionaire, not a billionaire yet. I have to give him some credit for that, but when the methods of achieving that kind of success amount to theft and deception on a such a grand scale, it's hard to give too much credit.
You're free to think whatever you want about me, of course, but I did want to make sure that people have their facts straight.
Aaron
It's hard for me to read posts like this. The real story is at:
http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/index.html
Um, I think Slashdot's new comment system has some issues. What I typed was...
I've developed Interbook, which gives paper books some of the benefits of being electronic, which ironically enough, most e-books don't even have yet.
...I've develo
I wrote an essay about this very issue a while back.
http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=9
The sad fact is that I don't report flaws anymore because I've been threatened too many times.
It's very simple: it's not the full version, and my software makes use of the PDFlib+PDI features.
u re-comparison/
Look here to see the difference:
http://www.pdflib.com/products/pdflib-family/feat
I have been writing accounting software of my own lately (http://www.thinkcomputer.com) that also does taxes, and licensing has come up in the past week for me, as well. I used the PDFlib 6 library with PHP, which I paid over $1,400 for, to create PDF files so that my software could prepare tax returns, and all was working fine until my server crashed in March. I was forced to upgrade to new hardware, which I did, in the form of two Sun Fire X2200 servers running Linux. Installing PDFlib on my new setup didn't work, because even though my server had two processors, and I had a license for two processors, PDFlib detected four logical processors (each AMD CPU is dual-core). This was irritating on its own, but the fact that the newer version of PDFlib, version 7, uses a *different* system-based license (and of course they didn't tell anyone) that makes the number of logical processors irrelevant, means that the PDFlib acknowledge the flawed nature of their original license. When I asked them for assistance, since I needed to get my software up and running again, their response was that I should pay them $2,700 more in license fees for version 6 (more than the cost of the server) or $1,194 for a single-system upgrade to the new licensing scheme of version 7 (more than the cost of the original single-CPU license for version 6). To me, it sounded like extortion, but since the company is in Germany they can get away with it easier I suppose.
Needless to say, I'm never using PDFlib again, and I'm re-writing all of my code to use FPDF (http://www.fpdf.org), which is free, and works just as well. It's even easier to write code for. Stay away from PDFlib!
One option is to use CommonRoom ( http://www.commonroom.com/ ), which offers a non-SMTP e-mail service for authenticated users.
I agree with a lot of other people here: this isn't that surprising. However, social networking is a fairly powerful medium in that you can give masses of people incentives to sign up and hop on the same bandwagon simply by having other people around, which is effectively costless. Knowing this, the idea behind CommonRoom (http://www.commonroom.com) is to use that kind of momentum, however frivilous its basis is in reality, to specifically *prevent* these kinds of attacks from taking place by validating everyone on the network (also not a new concept, just rarely done in practice). We have yet to see what might happen if a generally-available network authenticated everyone--would it have the same degree of malicious code in the forms of spam, viruses, and spyware? My guess is no, but I guess we'll find out eventually if CommonRoom or something like it ever catches on.
Well, one of those [former] friends of his has just launched this:
http://www.commonroom.com/
Take a look at the timeline under "I'm New."
"Facebook launched on Harvard's InterNet-2 capacity servers before going private."
This is not true.
If you don't like what you see out there, or you don't know any better, you can just write your own. I came up with Lampshade, but open-source software definitely fosters the mentality that you shouldn't necessarily just use what other people provide, when you're able to contribute something yourself. Of course, once you've written it, you want someone to use it.
Here's what I think of open source, at least from a technical perspective.
From a legal perspective, there are 58 OSI-approved "open source" licenses last I checked, which together constitute at least 58 different definitions. There's no consensus on what it really means. Personally, I feel that if I can read the code, the code is open source. All the other factors are extraneous.
However, one would think that in the spirit of openness, the open source community would welcome whatever contributions it gets, no matter how they're licensed. Sadly, that's rarely the case. I actually had someone threaten me with trademark infringement on the term "open source," when we released the Lampshade PHP framework under a dual license of our own. Of course, that person didn't own the trademark, becaues there is no trademark on the generic term, but whoever it was felt justified in threatening me anyway.
If the open source community wants respect, it should be willing to treat people who contribute with respect, too. Scaring off contributors is not the way to go.
I contacted Andi and Zeev two years ago about the possibility of a PHP framework geared toward business use. The response I received at the time said that it was an interesting idea-yet one that Zend still didn't find interesting enough to pursue. I followed up with them throughout 2004 and 2005, and was constantly given the runaround by various Zend employees. I submitted a talk idea earlier this year for the Zend conference on my PHP framework, and was rejected. (I wonder why.) At a previous conference, one Zend rep told me, "we're a difficult company to work with. You don't wan't to work with us."
Now, Zend wants everyone to work with them. It's too little, too late, I'm afraid.
I'm going to push Think's Lampshade non-OO PHP framework as hard as I can. Contrary to Zend's claims, it is simple, possibly the simplest one out there, and it isn't restricted to one particular industry. (If it were, I'm not sure how educational loan officers, medical researchers and T-Shirt distributors could all be using it at once.) In the meantime, we'll see if Zend's vaporware ever materializes.
I've been thinking of getting into this market, given that everyone seems to hate all of the incumbents. I created a portal system for use at Harvard, but the administatraion there did all they could to shut it down, even though students seemed to like it.
If anyone has any ideas for how I can convert these 10,000 lines of code into something that a school might actually want to buy, let me know! I have not been able to figure it out so far, though given the competition, you'd think it wouldn't be that hard...
I made similar points to the ZDNet op-ed piece linked above in an op-ed of my own from March:
2 010-1029_3-5648740.html
http://news.com.com/Is+identity+theft+inevitable/
I was an undergraduate student in one of Professor Glauber's courses at Harvard two years ago, and though I'm certainly no specialist on light or physics, I really enjoyed his course (The Nature of Light and Matter). It's one of the many Core Curriculum courses at Harvard, but it's taught by one of the few professors there worthy of calling himself a teacher. He has a great sense of humor. I'm glad someone who deserves some credit was able to earn it.
For anyone who's interested...
h tml?id=6
http://www.aarong.thinkcomputer.com/essays/index.