If we don't have fear, superstition, hunger and war, what will drive the human race to achieve more?
Sad to say, but those elements are excellent motivators for innovation and progress. What makes you think that the same Darwinism principles don't apply among aliens? I would argue that if we meet another race, they will likely be the most warlike and dominant of all the other races they've conquered. It would be in our best interests to stay "immature."
Regulations like quarterlies and annuals are the only reason I stay in the stock market. Hell, I'd be happy if the companies finances were totally transparent, not these trumped up, glossy marketing material with (as we've recently found out) criminally false numbers.
The pressure put on companies to make every quarter look like they are financial superstars is purely internal. Quality companies are steady and make gradual income and gradual increases. Any investor who looks at a quarterly report and jumps to the "next best thing" is doomed to paying the government way more than his/her fair share. Companies that focus on stability and long term-growth will draw a crowd of investors that are more interested in the earnings of the company than in the price of the stock (since that's what drives it).
Sorry for the almost rant, but regulation in this (public) industry is the only thing that keeps many of these companies barely on this side of morally upright.
One has to wonder about the relative success of Java, given its horrific performance and obscene installation complexity. However, ultimately Java's success comes down to the lack of choices in the language syntax and a strong networking library.
Perhaps it was the multimillion dollar advertising campaign. Or the army of salespeople. Or the inflated consulting fees as a result of such.
Almost any product can be successful if you throw enough money behind it.
Okay, so the goal is to take raw data, which (from the best info I could gather) is sketchy then use imperfect techniques up to and including human intervention to dump the data into a relational database. Sounds like the primary qualifications in the programmer that you will need are equal quantities of patience and altruism. =)
If the problem is just a common data issue, why don't you use a common database on the backend? Now I have no idea of the type of application you are dealing with but many programs today allow you to connect to some relational database via ODBC or a native driver. That's where you want your data anyway...sitting happily organized in a relational database, waiting for your next query.
The front-end can be locked and proprietary and you can point it at any database you need. I would be skeptical that the software you use doesn't allow even this (although I know bastard companies like this exist =). It seems trivial to program a frontend that does the number crunching based on queries from a relational database...I would suspect that organizing the data would be the hard part. Maybe I should finish my Perl for Bioinformatics book before I oversimplify. =)
Of course, that's where technical writers and project managers come in handy... (heh heh)
Hehehe, good one. =)
One thing I've noticed about Perl people is that they are often very open-minded about using other languages to solve a problem.
I only half agree here. Many Perl programmers have grown out of dynamically generating HTML to CGI to XML and whatever so they are used to working with other languages and have little aversion to doing so. Unfortunately, these open minded groups are interspersed with open source zealots who refuse to look at the problem first and then choose a tool (read: language).
What is the point in discussing whether his individuality was supressed? Are we suggesting that we now pressure kids to *become* individualistic? Isn't that a form of conformation in itself? What happens when we become a nation of people who are all individualistic, then is the conformist pressured into becoming and individual? What's the goal here? It's still pressure nonetheless.
At any given point in time people are going to be pressured and compared to others. Whether its a "popularity contest" or "pit[ting] students against one another" the competition is going to exist, it's human nature. It's NOT going away...EVER.
Making a statement like he did is silly, but his choice. Thankfully, he is able to express his individuality and suffer minimal consequences in our society. What he did was extreme and likely sounds embarrassing to the faculty. If he wanted to rebuke the "system" he could have never stood in the line and put himself in a spotlight specifically for the purpose of defying the authority of the school holding a school-sponsored event.
What the school did was silly and I hope they do get negative publicity, in effect forcing the faculty to comply to social pressure from the outside instead of allowing the school to be "individualistic."
I agree that bright, idiosyncratic and creative kids are not given an ideal playground in the schools in which to truly become their best, but bucking a system just because it's there with no solution is certainly not the way to improve things.
You mean Handspring swore up and down. =) I would guess that Handspring was forced to do a color version simply to peer exactly with Palm on their products. From a marketing standpoint, they appeared to be behind technically. I think the true thrust of the company is to focus on the higher end products like the Platinum and to move forward with their voice products.
Handspring isn't targeting the high-end user...yet. They were on the low-end trying to build up market share, those people don't need to upgrade the OS. Hopefully, they are able to put in a flashable ROM soon to make us developers and demanding users happy, instead of crashing our Visors all the time.
Lastly, Palm products are in odd Roman numerals. =)
Try to remember that Apache doesn't have a PR department whose salary depends on pretty glossy documentation. Apache just has to work. That's it. That's why it's ubiquitous.
Yeah, there's is a lot of OSS and Apache propaganda. Try to sift through the bullshit successfully. It's not a lot of effort to get the boxen you need and set up Apache for a firm comparison.
I've used IIS, Apache, and NES (may they be struck down), and Apache worked best for my scenarios because I needed the systems to be working all the time. IIS enjoyed a few random lockups every 5-6 days for me. I can't tell you how *happy* I was trying to troubleshoot the problems.
One argument you can use is that it's free to try Apache, you can always go out and buy IIS.
While companies like Amazon.com seek to protect their innovations, critics say the patents are too freely granted and threaten to stifle the freewheeling Internet economy.
Interesting...isn't this exactly why patents were put into to place?
IT is doomed to suffer this fate for some time. I recently left a company where the IT department will not stop bleeding, employees were leaving at unbelievable rates! But the company is throwing more and more money at the new employees, creating a market gap between the old and the new. Thus, the old must leave. It's a cycle right now, not as simple as above, but with more elements like these below:
1) Mismanagement:
This is common, we're hired to come in and fix the problems that "management" can't. We're given deadlines of 3 days for a project that will take 6 months or a deadline of 3 months for a project that will take 6 hours. How can you respect this? These people are making more money than you? Time to leave.
2) Lack of Learning
You walk into an environment ready to help the company move to the next level, organize, commenting code, making it modular, smaller, efficient, structured. But it's the same code and there are new technologies out there. The technical "classes" are useless because what you really need is hands-on baptism by fire learning! But you never get that chance because another department who has done it before gets to do it again OR the company hires a consultant who "knows" the technology to come in and do it for you so you can support it. How do you get to learn it? Time to leave.
3) Poor Work Environment
You don't hold meetings so you don't really need an office, right? You don't move around much so you don't need that much space, so a 5x5ft cubicle is okay, right? It's better if you can communicate other programmers if they are sitting really close to you, right? That New Jersey office space is far cheaper, and you don't need the prestige of the Wall Street office like the salespeople, right? Wrong. Time to leave.
4) No Recognition
Because the people you work for need to go to even more simple business people who couldn't possibly comprehend why it took you so long to hand code everything from scratch because they wouldn't use open source for "security" reasons, they don't even bother mentioning your name. You could have written thousands of lines of code each day, no debugging necessary, other programmers in awe as you pound on the keyboard and it doesn't really matter. Why? Because upper management has no idea if you were good, stellar, poor, or committed fireable offenses in your code. They are more likely to reward the customer service rep on the phone who saved a $200 account...because they understand it.
5) Pigeonholing
You've developed a great specialty, you are the fastest and most knowledgeable in your area in the company. I hope you enjoy it! Because now you're going to do that same work for the rest of your time at the company. Time to leave.
6) Corporate Apartheid
Why? No, WHY do companies insist on putting IT on a completely different floor, building, city, state than the rest of the company or departments? I know it's annoying to have some gimp come over and ask you the Sun networking professional how to make an equation in Excel, but at least they can become more technical and improve the company. And information flows both ways, we like to learn what the hell the business is doing!!
7) Lack of Expert Recognition
Attention management: The grass is NOT greener on the outside. Sometimes it is, but that is a last resort. Many times the best place to look for a technical solution is to ask your technical staff. Yes, you can even pull them off that Priority #1 project to strategize about the technical future of the company as opposed to getting blindsided by new technology.
8) The good, the bad, the ugly
All it takes is hiring one shitty IT person. YES, they do exist, there are many. Hire one and the rest of them wonder why the hell they are around that place making the same salary as the idiot in the next cube. Time to leave.
I wish I could isolate all the factors and start creating a new model that companies could go from and improve all of our working conditions. But I think that we are in times that require an accelerated learning curve that nobody can keep up with except for those of us in the fray. The pace of change in our industry promises to keep management and non-tech people out of comprehension of our contributions for years to come.
All we can do is to try to lessen to gap and keep it from widening too much. Mix the tech and non-tech employees, treat them with the same amount of respect. Ask if you can improve their job. Do their reviews on time. Send them home if they work late all the time, kick their asses out the door so they don't get burned out. The usual management techniques will work.
Insightful, but I think you need to abstract a little more. The war is between industries. Computing vs. Telecom. The computing industry pushing the standards they know based on packet-switched networks, while the telecom companies push their specialty of circuit switched.
Oh yes, the telecom companies also like proprietary patented standards like WAP and iMode, too. =)
WAP may be a kludge, but 90% of phone companies are backing it. It's a kludge with clout and although I believe it will be displaced by widespread packet-based networks it will also push us years behind while we wait for the computing world to get behind a real standard and not one propped up by obfuscation or a created need. (WAP is supposed to replace TCP/IP to save on wireless bandwidth)
iMode is just ridiculous. Yes, it's extremely successful in Japan, but that's not going to translate to the US market at all. Users over here are far more demanding and insist upon rich media, full bandwidth and whatever else the Jones' have.
I *do* agree that the FCC needs to oust the UHF channels. Although, it's pathetic they auctioned off the UHF channel space and can't kick the stations off the spectrum. That ousting won't occur. If you read that announcement closely, the UHF channels have the option to renew after 5 years, you won't see them booted for a decade.
As a developer for PalmOS, this move by Palm concerns me and brings up a many questions:
Why would Palm alienate their own consumer? That's certainly what they are doing. They possess control of the PDA industry and are losing market share to Microsoft, Handspring, and others. Charging for upgrades will only aggravate the consumer. Why run this risk of dropping market share at a more rapid rate?
What business model are they following?
Microsoft charges for upgrades, but they don't sell the hardware. Apple is one company that comes to mind who makes the hardware and sells their own operating system, but they certainly don't charge for small revisions.
Are they stomping out competition?
Since Handspring and others have licensed the PalmOS are they going to pass these fees on to Handspring and force the rise in price on these products? Maybe that's how they can cause a shakeout in the PDA market. I think this will be bad for all PalmOS devices.
Are they just milking customers?
I assume that the flashable ROM in a true Palm device costs more, are they going to drop costs on the Palm itself making it more competitive and then recoup the costs of the flashable ROM via software upgrades?
Mostly, I hope Palm has thought this out very well, before blithely setting a new standard and business model. Claiming that the minimal improvements they have made are a major revision and charging for it is a thin excuse. The $20 fee is so minimal that it could be compared to standard shareware, and if that's the model that Palm is trying to emulate, then all upgrades should be free.
Brilliant Scott! Thanks for the info! I think it's very difficult to track down reliable documentation about wireless and it's true uses today that isn't tainted with corporate sales gibberish.
Although, I suspect the future will more more like the user will look up the ISP's number on Visor (given Palm's zero innovation mode currently) and select the number and the Visor will call over a packet switched network and complain that his 2.4 GHz Internet connection is down. =)
Hahahaha, exactly what I thought! It was a total sales pitch. I feel as if the 3-4 minutes spent reading that article were stolen from my life. The author's history on his site reflects his phone company bias.
Perhaps he should have read the article by 4k Associates a little more closely and he wouldn't have cofounded a company on a dying "standard" and have a need to create self-promoting propaganda.
With the recent slamming of corporations on the Internet, it is becoming more evident that geeks do need organization. This organization cannot be led by extremist, but those more in the mainstream whose pulse is more inline with John Q. Public and his needs. The best way to fight law is not with the anarchy that we all know we can create on the web, but to fight law with law.
An excellent example our favorite geek corporation Microsoft who can hire better lawyers than the government can possibly obtain. We own the lawyers. We can own all the best lawyers, because we have the money now. US society follows profit and the lawyers don't care what laws they pass, just where their paycheck comes from and what they have to do to get a better one.
Individuals getting into the fight is a great way to rally grassroots, but grassroots is an extremely inefficient way to get something done on a major political level (look at what it took to stop Vietnam). The battle will have to be waged at a corporate to corporate level, when large Internet companies start to see declining profits as a direct result of poor legislation we will really see what geek corporations can do. Our high profile losses are the mighty legacy corporations attacking small entities and then vigorously publicizing their victories.
We should hope to see more takeover's like the kind of AOL consuming Time Warner. AOL's interests coincide with our's (I'm certain they want aol.com to be property) and they have the clout to see them through legally.
Worry not about these border skirmishes, but do rally, educate, tout, and organize for the major battles ahead. Legal decision can be overturned.
Jayson Pifer
Re:It's still a democracy.....use it!
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Lawsuits Suck
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Ah, but the Internet corporations with a vested interest in seeing that domains are property that code is free speech, and want to ensure that it stays so in the future have far more money than the corporations they are fighting.
Geeks associations of corporations have the potential to be far more powerful in defining the legal future of their nations.
I see this same type of argument made again and again in the wireless space. I even heard it at the Next 20 Years conference in Manhattan last night as a question to the forum. It is clearly a fear of US citizens of what would happen if we lose our technical edge and many people overseas and domestic think it's great to point it out that it may have happened at long last. It's simply not true.
Europe has achieved some success with their unified stance of GSM, but this is not to be mistaken for technical achievement or innovation. Yes, they have more people using the Internet on cell phones than the US, but the demographics are simply not relevant for comparison. Many in Europe do not surf for an extended period of time on their PCs because they are charged by the minute for their land lines. Lo and Behold, along comes flat fee pricing for wireless phones and web surfing -- of course they are going to use their cell phones!
There are several reasons for a slower adoption rate in the US:
1) A minute by minute charge for web surfing on a phone (yes, there are flat rate, but it *is* an additional rate many don't want to pay)
2) US citizens are more accustomed to richer content. Many other nations are viewing the Internet for the first time using their cell phone and are more willing to settle for an inferior web service over a PC because they've never been exposed to more.
3) Competing standards with telephone companies.
Fortunately, it is these faults that will drive the US to dominate the wireless space in the future. Because of the high premiums phone companies are making on mobile phone, they are building bigger and better networks like mad. Because of the competing standards, the US company Qualcomm has created the CDMA standard to be used for 3G (in it's CDMA2000 or W-CDMA incarnation) -- leading the world to higher bandwidth for wireless. Because of the US citizen demand for a better product and service, I sit and code applications for the Palm Vx and VII that are not only functional, but more interesting, usable, entertaining -- and more appealing to an American audience than kereoke lyrics.
1) Set up your private DNS server that accepted the new domain names. 2) Offer users the ability to use that server as their own. 3) If that server doesn't have the domain name in its database then it will route people to the "normal" TLD's.
This will allow those who want to use the new system to use it and to get routed to any domain and to supercede microsoft.com if someone chose to. If the name doesn't appear on our private DNS server then we get routed via the standard means.
If a rule (guideline) were in place that we not use.com,.org,.net, etc. then no overlapping would occur (as the TLD's stand today).
I love your idea. Unfortunately, the analogy is a bit off base. To make it more real, you should say that someone jumped over your low fence (which is kept low, because you have customers who need to see your store advertisements) and then the perp broke a branch off a tree on your property and clobbered someone. I use the modified analogy because it is unclear what is a blatant weapon or not on a web server. DoS being an excellent example of a web server doing what it was intended to do -- communicate and make requests for web pages from another machine. The faster it can do it, the better. Jayson
Slashdot Mirror
If we don't have fear, superstition, hunger and war, what will drive the human race to achieve more?
Sad to say, but those elements are excellent motivators for innovation and progress. What makes you think that the same Darwinism principles don't apply among aliens? I would argue that if we meet another race, they will likely be the most warlike and dominant of all the other races they've conquered. It would be in our best interests to stay "immature."
Regulations like quarterlies and annuals are the only reason I stay in the stock market. Hell, I'd be happy if the companies finances were totally transparent, not these trumped up, glossy marketing material with (as we've recently found out) criminally false numbers.
The pressure put on companies to make every quarter look like they are financial superstars is purely internal. Quality companies are steady and make gradual income and gradual increases. Any investor who looks at a quarterly report and jumps to the "next best thing" is doomed to paying the government way more than his/her fair share. Companies that focus on stability and long term-growth will draw a crowd of investors that are more interested in the earnings of the company than in the price of the stock (since that's what drives it).
Sorry for the almost rant, but regulation in this (public) industry is the only thing that keeps many of these companies barely on this side of morally upright.
One has to wonder about the relative success of Java, given its horrific performance and obscene installation complexity. However, ultimately Java's success comes down to the lack of choices in the language syntax and a strong networking library.
Perhaps it was the multimillion dollar advertising campaign. Or the army of salespeople. Or the inflated consulting fees as a result of such.
Almost any product can be successful if you throw enough money behind it.
Dammit, now you made me go and read. =)
Okay, so the goal is to take raw data, which (from the best info I could gather) is sketchy then use imperfect techniques up to and including human intervention to dump the data into a relational database. Sounds like the primary qualifications in the programmer that you will need are equal quantities of patience and altruism. =)
Jayson
If the problem is just a common data issue, why don't you use a common database on the backend? Now I have no idea of the type of application you are dealing with but many programs today allow you to connect to some relational database via ODBC or a native driver. That's where you want your data anyway...sitting happily organized in a relational database, waiting for your next query.
The front-end can be locked and proprietary and you can point it at any database you need. I would be skeptical that the software you use doesn't allow even this (although I know bastard companies like this exist =). It seems trivial to program a frontend that does the number crunching based on queries from a relational database...I would suspect that organizing the data would be the hard part. Maybe I should finish my Perl for Bioinformatics book before I oversimplify. =)
Jayson
Of course, that's where technical writers and project managers come in handy... (heh heh)
Hehehe, good one. =)
One thing I've noticed about Perl people is that they are often very open-minded about using other languages to solve a problem.
I only half agree here. Many Perl programmers have grown out of dynamically generating HTML to CGI to XML and whatever so they are used to working with other languages and have little aversion to doing so. Unfortunately, these open minded groups are interspersed with open source zealots who refuse to look at the problem first and then choose a tool (read: language).
Yeah, but their designer is happy it came out just as they drew it in photoshop!! ;-)
You've been in the consulting world too long, time to branch out.
What is the point in discussing whether his individuality was supressed? Are we suggesting that we now pressure kids to *become* individualistic? Isn't that a form of conformation in itself? What happens when we become a nation of people who are all individualistic, then is the conformist pressured into becoming and individual? What's the goal here? It's still pressure nonetheless.
At any given point in time people are going to be pressured and compared to others. Whether its a "popularity contest" or "pit[ting] students against one another" the competition is going to exist, it's human nature. It's NOT going away...EVER.
Making a statement like he did is silly, but his choice. Thankfully, he is able to express his individuality and suffer minimal consequences in our society. What he did was extreme and likely sounds embarrassing to the faculty. If he wanted to rebuke the "system" he could have never stood in the line and put himself in a spotlight specifically for the purpose of defying the authority of the school holding a school-sponsored event.
What the school did was silly and I hope they do get negative publicity, in effect forcing the faculty to comply to social pressure from the outside instead of allowing the school to be "individualistic."
I agree that bright, idiosyncratic and creative kids are not given an ideal playground in the schools in which to truly become their best, but bucking a system just because it's there with no solution is certainly not the way to improve things.
Jayson
I don't think the plagiarism accusation even deserved a response. The stupidity of the comment was evident. Keep up the good work!
Jayson
You mean Handspring swore up and down. =) I would guess that Handspring was forced to do a color version simply to peer exactly with Palm on their products. From a marketing standpoint, they appeared to be behind technically. I think the true thrust of the company is to focus on the higher end products like the Platinum and to move forward with their voice products.
Handspring isn't targeting the high-end user...yet. They were on the low-end trying to build up market share, those people don't need to upgrade the OS. Hopefully, they are able to put in a flashable ROM soon to make us developers and demanding users happy, instead of crashing our Visors all the time.
Lastly, Palm products are in odd Roman numerals. =)
Jayson
Try to remember that Apache doesn't have a PR department whose salary depends on pretty glossy documentation. Apache just has to work. That's it. That's why it's ubiquitous.
Yeah, there's is a lot of OSS and Apache propaganda. Try to sift through the bullshit successfully. It's not a lot of effort to get the boxen you need and set up Apache for a firm comparison.
I've used IIS, Apache, and NES (may they be struck down), and Apache worked best for my scenarios because I needed the systems to be working all the time. IIS enjoyed a few random lockups every 5-6 days for me. I can't tell you how *happy* I was trying to troubleshoot the problems.
One argument you can use is that it's free to try Apache, you can always go out and buy IIS.
Jayson's $.01
While companies like Amazon.com seek to protect their innovations, critics say the patents are too freely granted and threaten to stifle the freewheeling Internet economy.
Interesting...isn't this exactly why patents were put into to place?
Jayson
IT is doomed to suffer this fate for some time. I recently left a company where the IT department will not stop bleeding, employees were leaving at unbelievable rates! But the company is throwing more and more money at the new employees, creating a market gap between the old and the new. Thus, the old must leave. It's a cycle right now, not as simple as above, but with more elements like these below:
1) Mismanagement:
This is common, we're hired to come in and fix the problems that "management" can't. We're given deadlines of 3 days for a project that will take 6 months or a deadline of 3 months for a project that will take 6 hours. How can you respect this? These people are making more money than you? Time to leave.
2) Lack of Learning
You walk into an environment ready to help the company move to the next level, organize, commenting code, making it modular, smaller, efficient, structured. But it's the same code and there are new technologies out there. The technical "classes" are useless because what you really need is hands-on baptism by fire learning! But you never get that chance because another department who has done it before gets to do it again OR the company hires a consultant who "knows" the technology to come in and do it for you so you can support it. How do you get to learn it? Time to leave.
3) Poor Work Environment
You don't hold meetings so you don't really need an office, right? You don't move around much so you don't need that much space, so a 5x5ft cubicle is okay, right? It's better if you can communicate other programmers if they are sitting really close to you, right? That New Jersey office space is far cheaper, and you don't need the prestige of the Wall Street office like the salespeople, right? Wrong. Time to leave.
4) No Recognition
Because the people you work for need to go to even more simple business people who couldn't possibly comprehend why it took you so long to hand code everything from scratch because they wouldn't use open source for "security" reasons, they don't even bother mentioning your name. You could have written thousands of lines of code each day, no debugging necessary, other programmers in awe as you pound on the keyboard and it doesn't really matter. Why? Because upper management has no idea if you were good, stellar, poor, or committed fireable offenses in your code. They are more likely to reward the customer service rep on the phone who saved a $200 account...because they understand it.
5) Pigeonholing
You've developed a great specialty, you are the fastest and most knowledgeable in your area in the company. I hope you enjoy it! Because now you're going to do that same work for the rest of your time at the company. Time to leave.
6) Corporate Apartheid
Why? No, WHY do companies insist on putting IT on a completely different floor, building, city, state than the rest of the company or departments? I know it's annoying to have some gimp come over and ask you the Sun networking professional how to make an equation in Excel, but at least they can become more technical and improve the company. And information flows both ways, we like to learn what the hell the business is doing!!
7) Lack of Expert Recognition
Attention management: The grass is NOT greener on the outside. Sometimes it is, but that is a last resort. Many times the best place to look for a technical solution is to ask your technical staff. Yes, you can even pull them off that Priority #1 project to strategize about the technical future of the company as opposed to getting blindsided by new technology.
8) The good, the bad, the ugly
All it takes is hiring one shitty IT person. YES, they do exist, there are many. Hire one and the rest of them wonder why the hell they are around that place making the same salary as the idiot in the next cube. Time to leave.
I wish I could isolate all the factors and start creating a new model that companies could go from and improve all of our working conditions. But I think that we are in times that require an accelerated learning curve that nobody can keep up with except for those of us in the fray. The pace of change in our industry promises to keep management and non-tech people out of comprehension of our contributions for years to come.
All we can do is to try to lessen to gap and keep it from widening too much. Mix the tech and non-tech employees, treat them with the same amount of respect. Ask if you can improve their job. Do their reviews on time. Send them home if they work late all the time, kick their asses out the door so they don't get burned out. The usual management techniques will work.
Jayson Pifer
And if you want a clock, you'll buy a clock. If you want a radio, you'll buy a radio. But you'll never buy a clock radio...
Insightful, but I think you need to abstract a little more. The war is between industries. Computing vs. Telecom. The computing industry pushing the standards they know based on packet-switched networks, while the telecom companies push their specialty of circuit switched.
Oh yes, the telecom companies also like proprietary patented standards like WAP and iMode, too. =)
WAP may be a kludge, but 90% of phone companies are backing it. It's a kludge with clout and although I believe it will be displaced by widespread packet-based networks it will also push us years behind while we wait for the computing world to get behind a real standard and not one propped up by obfuscation or a created need. (WAP is supposed to replace TCP/IP to save on wireless bandwidth)
iMode is just ridiculous. Yes, it's extremely successful in Japan, but that's not going to translate to the US market at all. Users over here are far more demanding and insist upon rich media, full bandwidth and whatever else the Jones' have.
I *do* agree that the FCC needs to oust the UHF channels. Although, it's pathetic they auctioned off the UHF channel space and can't kick the stations off the spectrum. That ousting won't occur. If you read that announcement closely, the UHF channels have the option to renew after 5 years, you won't see them booted for a decade.
Jayson Pifer
As a developer for PalmOS, this move by Palm concerns me and brings up a many questions:
Why would Palm alienate their own consumer?
That's certainly what they are doing. They possess control of the PDA industry and are losing market share to Microsoft, Handspring, and others. Charging for upgrades will only aggravate the consumer. Why run this risk of dropping market share at a more rapid rate?
What business model are they following?
Microsoft charges for upgrades, but they don't sell the hardware. Apple is one company that comes to mind who makes the hardware and sells their own operating system, but they certainly don't charge for small revisions.
Are they stomping out competition?
Since Handspring and others have licensed the PalmOS are they going to pass these fees on to Handspring and force the rise in price on these products? Maybe that's how they can cause a shakeout in the PDA market. I think this will be bad for all PalmOS devices.
Are they just milking customers?
I assume that the flashable ROM in a true Palm device costs more, are they going to drop costs on the Palm itself making it more competitive and then recoup the costs of the flashable ROM via software upgrades?
Mostly, I hope Palm has thought this out very well, before blithely setting a new standard and business model. Claiming that the minimal improvements they have made are a major revision and charging for it is a thin excuse. The $20 fee is so minimal that it could be compared to standard shareware, and if that's the model that Palm is trying to emulate, then all upgrades should be free.
Jayson Pifer
Brilliant Scott! Thanks for the info! I think it's very difficult to track down reliable documentation about wireless and it's true uses today that isn't tainted with corporate sales gibberish.
Although, I suspect the future will more more like the user will look up the ISP's number on Visor (given Palm's zero innovation mode currently) and select the number and the Visor will call over a packet switched network and complain that his 2.4 GHz Internet connection is down. =)
Thanks for the links!
Jayson Pifer j@zeo.com
But if you are living in a building, why would you need anything more than bluetooth? =)
Hahahaha, exactly what I thought! It was a total sales pitch. I feel as if the 3-4 minutes spent reading that article were stolen from my life. The author's history on his site reflects his phone company bias.
Perhaps he should have read the article by 4k Associates a little more closely and he wouldn't have cofounded a company on a dying "standard" and have a need to create self-promoting propaganda.
Jayson
With the recent slamming of corporations on the Internet, it is becoming more evident that geeks do need organization. This organization cannot be led by extremist, but those more in the mainstream whose pulse is more inline with John Q. Public and his needs. The best way to fight law is not with the anarchy that we all know we can create on the web, but to fight law with law.
An excellent example our favorite geek corporation Microsoft who can hire better lawyers than the government can possibly obtain. We own the lawyers. We can own all the best lawyers, because we have the money now. US society follows profit and the lawyers don't care what laws they pass, just where their paycheck comes from and what they have to do to get a better one.
Individuals getting into the fight is a great way to rally grassroots, but grassroots is an extremely inefficient way to get something done on a major political level (look at what it took to stop Vietnam). The battle will have to be waged at a corporate to corporate level, when large Internet companies start to see declining profits as a direct result of poor legislation we will really see what geek corporations can do. Our high profile losses are the mighty legacy corporations attacking small entities and then vigorously publicizing their victories.
We should hope to see more takeover's like the kind of AOL consuming Time Warner. AOL's interests coincide with our's (I'm certain they want aol.com to be property) and they have the clout to see them through legally.
Worry not about these border skirmishes, but do rally, educate, tout, and organize for the major battles ahead. Legal decision can be overturned.
Jayson Pifer
Ah, but the Internet corporations with a vested interest in seeing that domains are property that code is free speech, and want to ensure that it stays so in the future have far more money than the corporations they are fighting.
Geeks associations of corporations have the potential to be far more powerful in defining the legal future of their nations.
Jayson
Europe has achieved some success with their unified stance of GSM, but this is not to be mistaken for technical achievement or innovation. Yes, they have more people using the Internet on cell phones than the US, but the demographics are simply not relevant for comparison. Many in Europe do not surf for an extended period of time on their PCs because they are charged by the minute for their land lines. Lo and Behold, along comes flat fee pricing for wireless phones and web surfing -- of course they are going to use their cell phones!
There are several reasons for a slower adoption rate in the US:
- 1) A minute by minute charge for web surfing on a phone (yes, there are flat rate, but it *is* an additional rate many don't want to pay)
Fortunately, it is these faults that will drive the US to dominate the wireless space in the future. Because of the high premiums phone companies are making on mobile phone, they are building bigger and better networks like mad. Because of the competing standards, the US company Qualcomm has created the CDMA standard to be used for 3G (in it's CDMA2000 or W-CDMA incarnation) -- leading the world to higher bandwidth for wireless. Because of the US citizen demand for a better product and service, I sit and code applications for the Palm Vx and VII that are not only functional, but more interesting, usable, entertaining -- and more appealing to an American audience than kereoke lyrics.2) US citizens are more accustomed to richer content. Many other nations are viewing the Internet for the first time using their cell phone and are more willing to settle for an inferior web service over a PC because they've never been exposed to more.
3) Competing standards with telephone companies.
Jayson Pifer
I think an excellent way to begin would be:
.com, .org, .net, etc. then no overlapping would occur (as the TLD's stand today).
1) Set up your private DNS server that accepted the new domain names. 2) Offer users the ability to use that server as their own. 3) If that server doesn't have the domain name in its database then it will route people to the "normal" TLD's.
This will allow those who want to use the new system to use it and to get routed to any domain and to supercede microsoft.com if someone chose to. If the name doesn't appear on our private DNS server then we get routed via the standard means.
If a rule (guideline) were in place that we not use
-jp
I love your idea. Unfortunately, the analogy is a bit off base. To make it more real, you should say that someone jumped over your low fence (which is kept low, because you have customers who need to see your store advertisements) and then the perp broke a branch off a tree on your property and clobbered someone. I use the modified analogy because it is unclear what is a blatant weapon or not on a web server. DoS being an excellent example of a web server doing what it was intended to do -- communicate and make requests for web pages from another machine. The faster it can do it, the better. Jayson