if the government has a warrant there might not be much that can be done
Read the actual decision in the word document. It's pretty plain there that the expression of speech includes consuming speech without harassment, which implies a right to privacy. While it would be better explicit, this is what a woman's right to choose is (mistakenly, IMO) based on. (I'd prefer it be based on property rights, but that's a whole 'nuther argument).
There's a lot of constitutional scholarship that has found a right to privacy implicit in the other rights, including those expressed in the First Amendment. This decision attempts to set up a test, essentially that the hated "compelling state interest," must be determined in an adversarial proceeding before seizure occurs--that means not just the DA and a judge in a darkened room, but a hearing giving the affected party a chance to object. And on the basis of the facts of the case, the Court did not find compelling state interest sufficient to outweigh the constitutional harm.
The Supreme Court may yet overturn it, but it would be an interesting precedent if upheld. That would significantly curtail the ability of police to do various seizures without a suspect's knowledge. Since several of those things (e.g. wiretaps) have passed constitutional muster before, that's where I see this to be in danger of being overturned, rather than a lack of a right to privacy.
Lest we forget, it took the FCC prying open AT&T's monopoly (regulating it into being an "open-ended" instead of "closed" network) that fostered the intense competition in data-communications service provision that lowered data-transmission costs to the point where network growth became feasible. Lest we forget, before the FCC stepped in it was illegal to connect non-AT&T devices to the network.
Let me get this straight: The government creates a monopoly, then breaks it up, and we're supposed to fawn all over it in gratitude?
That's like praising the bully when he gets tired of ordering his henchmen to beat you up and goes to do something else. "Hey, he could have let them beat me up worse!"
The Baby Bells, your local energy monopoly, and cable monopoly are in no way paragons of unrestrained market capitalism.
Read the Forbes article on Greenpeace's founders... I can only find a reference here in a non-wacko site. They have gotten rich and won't open themselves up to public accountability for the way the money is spent. I'd argue they are the least effective environmental organization of the big ones. I'm not a huge fan of Environmental Defense, but they are better. I think the Nature Conservancy is great.
As a subscriber to SciAm, I was very disappointed in that article (or rather, series of articles). Many of them contained about a third or more ad hominem or "you aren't in the club, therefore you don't have anything to say" whines. Several of them spent time downplaying environmentalists' reliance on Paul Erlich--and then went on to quote him extensively. This despite science is supposed to be about testable predictions, and Paul Erlich has made several predictions (such as running out of most industrial metals by the mid-80s) that were demonstrably false and lost a famous bet with an economist (which to his credit he paid). Several of them spent a lot of masturbatory time self-aggrandizing, which is not unheard of in SciAm, but was worse by several orders of magnitude. Those articles needed a very good editor, and they didn't get one.
Ultimately, the articles convinced me that Lomborg had some severe problems in his methodology, but the way they did it left such a bad taste in my mouth that it will lend credence to people who are far more of a crackpot than Lomborg (Duesberg's HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS theories, for example).
In particular, environmentalists need to shut up and let the climatologists speak, even if they don't put things as strongly as GreenPea$e would like. Using Paul Erlich is becoming a criteria for baloney detection, and not admitting that the reason more scientists agree about climate change in general, and, to a slightly lesser extent, anthropogenic causation in particular is because science has come a long, way baby since a bunch of former commies became Green for propoganda's sake and argued we should emulate the eco-hostile economies of the dying communist world in 1990. The hasty action they proposed in many early "but we've got to DO SOMETHING" proposals would have worsened the problem, and they were rightly rejected.
Environmentalists and environmental scientists should stop poo-pooing everyone who has had doubts, and start engaging them in civilized debate. I'm now on the side of doing something about climate change, but doing so purely on the basis of a few (no-longer-used) computer models was a silly idea. I wanted science to come up with something more. Now they have, and we can begin to reasonably discuss how to do something without condemning billions of humans to eternal poverty or destroying freedom.
In short, let's emulate the 1/3 of those articles that didn't indulge in snide comments and self-aggrandizement and further communicate exactly how the problem is occurring, what effects it is having, and how things can be done in the short and long term--while still realizing that you're not going to get the soccer moms who send checks to GreenPea$e to give up their SUVs overnight (much as I would like to).
Oh, about a half century of accumulated science. Neither radiation nor tse-tse flies are new, and it's pretty easy to put some in a lab, expose them to radiation, let them frolic in spring, and then see what fails to turn up.
Weren't diplomats supposed to have gone to Ivy Schools where they teach all that literature in dead languages?
Yeah, unfortunately, a) the Russians unhelpfully refuse to speak Ancient Greek, and b) the Ivy League has become home to lazy, blow-dried hair idiots, the ultimate in PHBs whose only merit is being litter from the loins of previous graduates. I mean, Gore got worse grades than Bush for cryin' out loud, yet they both graduated.
I see no difference between this and the argument of spammers that you want spam by having an e-mail address. If it doesn't matter to you that the costs are borne by other people, and that using a technology in one way grantsd permission to use it in every way, then you have no problem with spam.
After all, you put your e-mail address, an openly specified protocol, on a public network, for anyone to access. It's just plain absurd to whine that people dare to actually use the methods in place to send you commercial e-mail.
I'm sure the Direct Marketing Association is glad to hear that you've opted in to their grand sche^H^H^H^Hpla^H^H^Hopportunity.
I'm in the exact same boat... 5 yr old Power Computing clone, upgraded to 256MB, second HD, 400 MHz G3 upgrade, but one day I will boot it and it will not start--and while I can play Quake III semi-adequately and UT decently, I would really really like a better machine.
Pity the graphics options on the new beasts are worse for gamers--and you can't buy a GeForce 3 apart from Apple. Sigh.
proprietary document format (e.g. Proprietary Document Format - PDF, get it?)
Except that the PDF format is open, not proprietary, which is one of the reasons why Apple used it as the basis for the Quartz display engine as opposed to DisplayPostScript, its predecessor on NeXT that required a license fee.
The point is that Linux clusters need that as opposed to a Mac cluster, which you can throw together from a bunch of computers that (in academia) are probably sitting around in your lab. That brings the P/P ratio way on the side of the Macs since you don't have to buy additional hardware.
If you can afford a full-time Linux admin, great. There are undeniable advantages to a well-tuned system. But if your budget is lower, a system you can set up (as a sixth-grader was apparently able to) without a lot of planning to do a back-of-the-envelope clustered solution. Then use that success to get grant money to get the Linux cluster and attendant admin.
...unless you're willing to learn how to set one up (clarifying the openness of various file formats along the way) and manage it for free?
At several places right now you can get a new 733 for just under $1300, as well as on Apple's edu website. It's not an $800 Athlon, and it's not a dual 1-Gig, but then you did say bottom end Mac...
That way you can trick it out with all kinds of peripherals and get a CPU upgrade at a later date from Sonnet or one of those guys.
Back in the 70's with the Oil Crisis, Uncle Sugar poured a lot of money into researching just this technology (solar satellites beaming microwaves to transmit the power). The usual objections about the cost of launching that much material into orbit versus the money it would make providing power were what killed it.
However, it did enrich (yeah, right) a member of my family, a well-known bee researcher (well, as well-known as bee researchers get), who did the social insect studies on the collection system (a grid of wires in some fairly far-off place). He found there were no effects, but hey, he got grant money and 27 negative papers to his name!;-)
And how many people had computers with 1200 baud (or whatever) modems back then? And what would they have done with it? There was no www.
A lot. A mere 300 baud modem on a C-64 was a beautiful thing. As to the WWW, e-mail was and is the killer app of the Internet. I would have gotten on in the mid-eighties just to get Gibraltar, the progressive rock discussion list.
But I couldn't--only my friend at a government contractor could do so.
When I finally got an account at a University (and mind you, even my PhD dad at a Major American Corporation still couldn't get Internet e-mail) in the early Nineties, I would spend hours browsing gopher holes, the Web before the Web.
I'm sure lots of average citizens would have been interested in reading personal accounts of the war in Yugoslavia, unedited by the major government press agencies or American infotainment, but they couldn't. Because Al Gore and Newt Gingrich hadn't gotten around to Inventing it yet.
Plenty of McDonald's workers had computers, plenty had modems, but their tax money was too busy entertaining government contractors to actually give them something in return.
If the local Bells didn't have a monopoly on the last mile of copper and cable companies didn't have monopolies on the last mile of, er, twisted copper, all of LL's concerns would be dealt with.
But the simple matter is that the Bells were allowed to drive out 3rd party DSL, Congress regulated internet service on cable INTO bigger monopolies (at least local cable companies had to compete with DSL).
Of all the reasons I've heard for people not going with "broadband" (and little since my inital experience on a cable modem has truly been "broadband"), I have never, not once, heard anything about content. In fact, I've wanted to do things for people with dialup access that I couldn't do because downloading that nifty new 13.4 MB program was just too long to tie up the phone line.
Lessig is an interesting writer, but he really pushes his arguments into places they just don't work.
It's kind of weird to see the Emperor of the Clones, Bill Gates, extolling the virtues of creativity, but it's not exactly weird that Apple is doing it. That's its market niche.
They appeal to the long-haired, hippy-types who want to be (seen as) creative. So they probably will have a digital lifestyle, and be far more likely than anyone who buys a Compaq to actually put together a creative album of stuff.
Hell, it's only been in the past two years that Photoshop has gotten good enough on a PC for serious designers to use it. I still have to deal with massive.bmp files from Windows users whenever they want to pass along a photo they've taken. Here's to iPhoto and the digital lifestyle! It's not for everybody, but then, that's why Grandma doesn't have slackware on her desktop.
In New York or some such place, they have a breathalyzer ignition that can be installed on your car by a judge's order as part of your sentence for drunk driving. Pretty clever.
Making them mandatory? Ugh--sounds a little Big Brotherish, but it does bother me less than an Organ Donor Suppression Law (a.k.a. a Helmet Law).
I'm not talking about someone running an interest site, but organizations with funding looking for a way to do things on the web whose purpose is other than having a zero-cost or profit-making site. In short, they have the pockets through fund-raising or endowments or taxation.
If however, you're just providing a service for users, then you're going to run into the problems that any for profit outfit will--because you're in it for the money you make from the site, whether or not you expect to earn a profit. So in that sense, there is no difference. In other senses there are.
But hey, if your users are used to getting something for free, behave like an organization and fund-raise from them. Most of the news and community sites I visit that aren't run by organizations are doing that now. It is a big PITA, but hey, it works for PBS.
Not everyone is out to make money
on
Design For Community
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As someone who works for a company whose speciality is online communities, I can attest that banner ad revenue is falling but that is by no means the end of online communities. Remember, not everyone is out to make money fast like now.
The best place for them is for non-profits and governmental organizations who want to communicate, educate, or do something related online. If your audience is more targeted, you don't have the Slashdot effect for your community--for example, not just a website for youth involvement, but one for youth leaders who are organizing other youth to do things (that's a real-world example).
Obviously, it's not all we do, and we're moving into other areas, but it's still a part of what we do and it's working for our clients (or we wouldn't be in business--we're self-financed).
Apparently you Linux types think "Hey, check out my L337 Hearts shareware for Windoze, a mere $117.85 and it's yours to play again after a 6 day trial" is what shareware is or should be.
Bullhockey. Shareware on the Mac, which, contrary to advogato's assertion, cares mightily about attribution and credit, to the point that they use, oh, I dunno...COPYRIGHT licenses to ensure they get credit.
Most of this shareware, and a boatload of freeware, some put out by commercial companies, is not time-limited and requires the Mac community to express appreciation in a way that apparently the Napsterites can't be bothered--you know, paying for it? You can use Graphic Converter (a tool that gives the GIMP a run for its money) without ever paying for it. However, I coughed up the $35 to the lone guy who maintains it because it's a damn useful program and has helped me out of spots where Photoshop has failed. In turn, he maintains a release schedule and responsiveness that puts the majority of open source projects I've seen to shame. Oh, and my license is good in perpetuity.
Do I get to see the code? With some freeware programs, yes. Others, no. But then, my coding skills lie more toward Web programming and Java, so I'm not sure I'd be able to do that much with the code, and here's a nasty little truth: neither do most people in the Linux community.
The communities are similar in many points: a small group of programmers do the bulk of the work. Most users don't know how to program and are frequently clueless. Most users tend to report bugs and nothing else. Most users tend not to contribute patches. Some offer to and are brushed away by the maintainer/programmer.
However there are some differences the Linux community might not like to think about. And as a 3-years plus Linux user, I can say that in general, Mac shareware is far less buggy and thousands of times more usable than its Free Software compatriots, despite the lack of peer review of the code. Mac users tend to show appreciation to these programmers in a way that Linux types tend to only show to Red Hat or some other distribution maintainer, not the project maintainers: paying for it. Not everybody, not even most people, but enough that some of these packages have been around over a decade and are still being developed despite relying on single person.
Am I saying the Mac shareware way is better? Not really--it's better at certain things, but has weaknesses that Free Software doesn't. But it has strenghts that Free Software doesn't, either. To see it mindlessly bashed by pots referring to the dark coloration of kettles has been irritating, to say the least.
The whole tone of this discussion has been characterized by ignorant flaming, starting with CP's note and emails and continuing with Slashdot's libelous headline. You really might try to understand the Mac way before you start whining...after all, you're still trying to copy our user interface quality after all these years--we might have something to bring to the table. We instinctively know good UI, something that the Windoze commuity, from which most of you come, does not.
You can learn from other cultures, or you can flame them. Guess which one you're becoming as guilty of as the users who whined without bug reports to CP?
Slashdot Mirror
if the government has a warrant there might not be much that can be done
Read the actual decision in the word document. It's pretty plain there that the expression of speech includes consuming speech without harassment, which implies a right to privacy. While it would be better explicit, this is what a woman's right to choose is (mistakenly, IMO) based on. (I'd prefer it be based on property rights, but that's a whole 'nuther argument).
There's a lot of constitutional scholarship that has found a right to privacy implicit in the other rights, including those expressed in the First Amendment. This decision attempts to set up a test, essentially that the hated "compelling state interest," must be determined in an adversarial proceeding before seizure occurs--that means not just the DA and a judge in a darkened room, but a hearing giving the affected party a chance to object. And on the basis of the facts of the case, the Court did not find compelling state interest sufficient to outweigh the constitutional harm.
The Supreme Court may yet overturn it, but it would be an interesting precedent if upheld. That would significantly curtail the ability of police to do various seizures without a suspect's knowledge. Since several of those things (e.g. wiretaps) have passed constitutional muster before, that's where I see this to be in danger of being overturned, rather than a lack of a right to privacy.
Lest we forget, it took the FCC prying open AT&T's monopoly (regulating it into being an "open-ended" instead of "closed" network) that fostered the intense competition in data-communications service provision that lowered data-transmission costs to the point where network growth became feasible. Lest we forget, before the FCC stepped in it was illegal to connect non-AT&T devices to the network.
Let me get this straight: The government creates a monopoly, then breaks it up, and we're supposed to fawn all over it in gratitude?
That's like praising the bully when he gets tired of ordering his henchmen to beat you up and goes to do something else. "Hey, he could have let them beat me up worse!"
The Baby Bells, your local energy monopoly, and cable monopoly are in no way paragons of unrestrained market capitalism.
In America, we have a joke:
"What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 85?"
"Your Honor."
["Your Honor" is the term used when addressing a Judge in the U.S., for those unfamiliar with the U.S. legal system]
Read the Forbes article on Greenpeace's founders ... I can only find a reference here in a non-wacko site. They have gotten rich and won't open themselves up to public accountability for the way the money is spent. I'd argue they are the least effective environmental organization of the big ones. I'm not a huge fan of Environmental Defense, but they are better. I think the Nature Conservancy is great.
As a subscriber to SciAm, I was very disappointed in that article (or rather, series of articles). Many of them contained about a third or more ad hominem or "you aren't in the club, therefore you don't have anything to say" whines. Several of them spent time downplaying environmentalists' reliance on Paul Erlich--and then went on to quote him extensively. This despite science is supposed to be about testable predictions, and Paul Erlich has made several predictions (such as running out of most industrial metals by the mid-80s) that were demonstrably false and lost a famous bet with an economist (which to his credit he paid). Several of them spent a lot of masturbatory time self-aggrandizing, which is not unheard of in SciAm, but was worse by several orders of magnitude. Those articles needed a very good editor, and they didn't get one.
Ultimately, the articles convinced me that Lomborg had some severe problems in his methodology, but the way they did it left such a bad taste in my mouth that it will lend credence to people who are far more of a crackpot than Lomborg (Duesberg's HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS theories, for example).
In particular, environmentalists need to shut up and let the climatologists speak, even if they don't put things as strongly as GreenPea$e would like. Using Paul Erlich is becoming a criteria for baloney detection, and not admitting that the reason more scientists agree about climate change in general, and, to a slightly lesser extent, anthropogenic causation in particular is because science has come a long, way baby since a bunch of former commies became Green for propoganda's sake and argued we should emulate the eco-hostile economies of the dying communist world in 1990. The hasty action they proposed in many early "but we've got to DO SOMETHING" proposals would have worsened the problem, and they were rightly rejected.
Environmentalists and environmental scientists should stop poo-pooing everyone who has had doubts, and start engaging them in civilized debate. I'm now on the side of doing something about climate change, but doing so purely on the basis of a few (no-longer-used) computer models was a silly idea. I wanted science to come up with something more. Now they have, and we can begin to reasonably discuss how to do something without condemning billions of humans to eternal poverty or destroying freedom.
In short, let's emulate the 1/3 of those articles that didn't indulge in snide comments and self-aggrandizement and further communicate exactly how the problem is occurring, what effects it is having, and how things can be done in the short and long term--while still realizing that you're not going to get the soccer moms who send checks to GreenPea$e to give up their SUVs overnight (much as I would like to).
The Japanese thought he was really nice.
Quote from Fritzy: "Yeah, American workers are lazy and inefficient, but we make a heck of a bomb!"
Made front page news in Japan. Even Dubya can handle his mouth better than that.
How do we know this will sterilize the flies?
Oh, about a half century of accumulated science. Neither radiation nor tse-tse flies are new, and it's pretty easy to put some in a lab, expose them to radiation, let them frolic in spring, and then see what fails to turn up.
I need to replace my bird!
I've got one I can sell you. Cheep.
Weren't diplomats supposed to have gone to Ivy Schools where they teach all that literature in dead languages?
Yeah, unfortunately, a) the Russians unhelpfully refuse to speak Ancient Greek, and b) the Ivy League has become home to lazy, blow-dried hair idiots, the ultimate in PHBs whose only merit is being litter from the loins of previous graduates. I mean, Gore got worse grades than Bush for cryin' out loud, yet they both graduated.
The days of Wild Bill Donovan are long behind us.
Bah. (waving paw)
I see no difference between this and the argument of spammers that you want spam by having an e-mail address. If it doesn't matter to you that the costs are borne by other people, and that using a technology in one way grantsd permission to use it in every way, then you have no problem with spam.
After all, you put your e-mail address, an openly specified protocol, on a public network, for anyone to access. It's just plain absurd to whine that people dare to actually use the methods in place to send you commercial e-mail.
I'm sure the Direct Marketing Association is glad to hear that you've opted in to their grand sche^H^H^H^Hpla^H^H^Hopportunity.
I'm in the exact same boat... 5 yr old Power Computing clone, upgraded to 256MB, second HD, 400 MHz G3 upgrade, but one day I will boot it and it will not start--and while I can play Quake III semi-adequately and UT decently, I would really really like a better machine.
Pity the graphics options on the new beasts are worse for gamers--and you can't buy a GeForce 3 apart from Apple. Sigh.
proprietary document format (e.g. Proprietary Document Format - PDF, get it?)
Except that the PDF format is open, not proprietary, which is one of the reasons why Apple used it as the basis for the Quartz display engine as opposed to DisplayPostScript, its predecessor on NeXT that required a license fee.
The point is that Linux clusters need that as opposed to a Mac cluster, which you can throw together from a bunch of computers that (in academia) are probably sitting around in your lab. That brings the P/P ratio way on the side of the Macs since you don't have to buy additional hardware.
If you can afford a full-time Linux admin, great. There are undeniable advantages to a well-tuned system. But if your budget is lower, a system you can set up (as a sixth-grader was apparently able to) without a lot of planning to do a back-of-the-envelope clustered solution. Then use that success to get grant money to get the Linux cluster and attendant admin.
...unless you're willing to learn how to set one up (clarifying the openness of various file formats along the way) and manage it for free?
My god, did you look at his HTML? It's full of unclosed tags, deprecated tags and elements, and some of it was clearly done in a WYSIWYG editor.
C'mon, either we believe in standards or we don't. Raise your fist against bad code....
At several places right now you can get a new 733 for just under $1300, as well as on Apple's edu website. It's not an $800 Athlon, and it's not a dual 1-Gig, but then you did say bottom end Mac...
That way you can trick it out with all kinds of peripherals and get a CPU upgrade at a later date from Sonnet or one of those guys.
Back in the 70's with the Oil Crisis, Uncle Sugar poured a lot of money into researching just this technology (solar satellites beaming microwaves to transmit the power). The usual objections about the cost of launching that much material into orbit versus the money it would make providing power were what killed it.
;-)
However, it did enrich (yeah, right) a member of my family, a well-known bee researcher (well, as well-known as bee researchers get), who did the social insect studies on the collection system (a grid of wires in some fairly far-off place). He found there were no effects, but hey, he got grant money and 27 negative papers to his name!
And how many people had computers with 1200 baud (or whatever) modems back then? And what would they have done with it? There was no www.
A lot. A mere 300 baud modem on a C-64 was a beautiful thing. As to the WWW, e-mail was and is the killer app of the Internet. I would have gotten on in the mid-eighties just to get Gibraltar, the progressive rock discussion list.
But I couldn't--only my friend at a government contractor could do so.
When I finally got an account at a University (and mind you, even my PhD dad at a Major American Corporation still couldn't get Internet e-mail) in the early Nineties, I would spend hours browsing gopher holes, the Web before the Web.
I'm sure lots of average citizens would have been interested in reading personal accounts of the war in Yugoslavia, unedited by the major government press agencies or American infotainment, but they couldn't. Because Al Gore and Newt Gingrich hadn't gotten around to Inventing it yet.
Plenty of McDonald's workers had computers, plenty had modems, but their tax money was too busy entertaining government contractors to actually give them something in return.
...and precisely how much access to it did a McDonald's worker have to that Internet before it was taken out of gubmint hands?
So why are you so far behind the Koreans?
If the local Bells didn't have a monopoly on the last mile of copper and cable companies didn't have monopolies on the last mile of, er, twisted copper, all of LL's concerns would be dealt with.
But the simple matter is that the Bells were allowed to drive out 3rd party DSL, Congress regulated internet service on cable INTO bigger monopolies (at least local cable companies had to compete with DSL).
Of all the reasons I've heard for people not going with "broadband" (and little since my inital experience on a cable modem has truly been "broadband"), I have never, not once, heard anything about content. In fact, I've wanted to do things for people with dialup access that I couldn't do because downloading that nifty new 13.4 MB program was just too long to tie up the phone line.
Lessig is an interesting writer, but he really pushes his arguments into places they just don't work.
It's kind of weird to see the Emperor of the Clones, Bill Gates, extolling the virtues of creativity, but it's not exactly weird that Apple is doing it. That's its market niche.
.bmp files from Windows users whenever they want to pass along a photo they've taken. Here's to iPhoto and the digital lifestyle! It's not for everybody, but then, that's why Grandma doesn't have slackware on her desktop.
They appeal to the long-haired, hippy-types who want to be (seen as) creative. So they probably will have a digital lifestyle, and be far more likely than anyone who buys a Compaq to actually put together a creative album of stuff.
Hell, it's only been in the past two years that Photoshop has gotten good enough on a PC for serious designers to use it. I still have to deal with massive
No, that's near Gibraltar.
Would have made a good Slashdot story, as well...
In New York or some such place, they have a breathalyzer ignition that can be installed on your car by a judge's order as part of your sentence for drunk driving. Pretty clever.
Making them mandatory? Ugh--sounds a little Big Brotherish, but it does bother me less than an Organ Donor Suppression Law (a.k.a. a Helmet Law).
I'm not talking about someone running an interest site, but organizations with funding looking for a way to do things on the web whose purpose is other than having a zero-cost or profit-making site. In short, they have the pockets through fund-raising or endowments or taxation.
If however, you're just providing a service for users, then you're going to run into the problems that any for profit outfit will--because you're in it for the money you make from the site, whether or not you expect to earn a profit. So in that sense, there is no difference. In other senses there are.
But hey, if your users are used to getting something for free, behave like an organization and fund-raise from them. Most of the news and community sites I visit that aren't run by organizations are doing that now. It is a big PITA, but hey, it works for PBS.
As someone who works for a company whose speciality is online communities, I can attest that banner ad revenue is falling but that is by no means the end of online communities. Remember, not everyone is out to make money fast like now.
The best place for them is for non-profits and governmental organizations who want to communicate, educate, or do something related online. If your audience is more targeted, you don't have the Slashdot effect for your community--for example, not just a website for youth involvement, but one for youth leaders who are organizing other youth to do things (that's a real-world example).
Obviously, it's not all we do, and we're moving into other areas, but it's still a part of what we do and it's working for our clients (or we wouldn't be in business--we're self-financed).
Apparently you Linux types think "Hey, check out my L337 Hearts shareware for Windoze, a mere $117.85 and it's yours to play again after a 6 day trial" is what shareware is or should be.
Bullhockey. Shareware on the Mac, which, contrary to advogato's assertion, cares mightily about attribution and credit, to the point that they use, oh, I dunno...COPYRIGHT licenses to ensure they get credit.
Most of this shareware, and a boatload of freeware, some put out by commercial companies, is not time-limited and requires the Mac community to express appreciation in a way that apparently the Napsterites can't be bothered--you know, paying for it? You can use Graphic Converter (a tool that gives the GIMP a run for its money) without ever paying for it. However, I coughed up the $35 to the lone guy who maintains it because it's a damn useful program and has helped me out of spots where Photoshop has failed. In turn, he maintains a release schedule and responsiveness that puts the majority of open source projects I've seen to shame. Oh, and my license is good in perpetuity.
Do I get to see the code? With some freeware programs, yes. Others, no. But then, my coding skills lie more toward Web programming and Java, so I'm not sure I'd be able to do that much with the code, and here's a nasty little truth: neither do most people in the Linux community.
The communities are similar in many points: a small group of programmers do the bulk of the work. Most users don't know how to program and are frequently clueless. Most users tend to report bugs and nothing else. Most users tend not to contribute patches. Some offer to and are brushed away by the maintainer/programmer.
However there are some differences the Linux community might not like to think about. And as a 3-years plus Linux user, I can say that in general, Mac shareware is far less buggy and thousands of times more usable than its Free Software compatriots, despite the lack of peer review of the code. Mac users tend to show appreciation to these programmers in a way that Linux types tend to only show to Red Hat or some other distribution maintainer, not the project maintainers: paying for it. Not everybody, not even most people, but enough that some of these packages have been around over a decade and are still being developed despite relying on single person.
Am I saying the Mac shareware way is better? Not really--it's better at certain things, but has weaknesses that Free Software doesn't. But it has strenghts that Free Software doesn't, either. To see it mindlessly bashed by pots referring to the dark coloration of kettles has been irritating, to say the least.
The whole tone of this discussion has been characterized by ignorant flaming, starting with CP's note and emails and continuing with Slashdot's libelous headline. You really might try to understand the Mac way before you start whining...after all, you're still trying to copy our user interface quality after all these years--we might have something to bring to the table. We instinctively know good UI, something that the Windoze commuity, from which most of you come, does not.
You can learn from other cultures, or you can flame them. Guess which one you're becoming as guilty of as the users who whined without bug reports to CP?