I'm mainly kidding, although we were certainly not oblivious to the fact that Firefox users are an early adopter oriented crowd who would likely be more interested in what we are doing than the average web user. Another major consideration was the fact that we wanted to be multiplatform, but didn't want the bloat of Java, the licensing complexity of Qt, etc.
At the same time, someone was speculating here (I think) that we only based this on FF because XULRunner is not yet available. This isn't true. First of all, we probably could have used XULRunner in its existing form. Secondly, we feel that there are huge synergies between AllPeers functionality and FF. In essence, we've felt for a while that we are building a new generation web browser, and it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel. FF is an amazingly extensible platform that enabled us to save a huge amount of time by leveraging their existing functionality. I hope that the synergies between FF and AllPeers will be obvious once you use it.
Personally I leave FF running all the time, but the problem of memory bloat is a real one. We've discussed having a lightweight daemon running when FF isn't, and we'll probably do this sooner or later. I'm curious to find out how big a problem it will be for people to leave FF running. I'm suspecting it won't be as large as you suggest, but we'll see.
I can't resist commenting on this, even though I'm forgoing the very tempting opportunity to moderate posts on this thread (by coincidence Slashdot just gave me moderation status).
Yes, it's a bit silly to speculate about whether AllPeers will or won't be the killer app for Firefox when you can't even see it yet. That said, Michael is making an important point, and I'm afraid that a lot of people aren't grokking it because they attach too much baggage to the term "P2P".
We're not making a Kazaa clone. We're giving people the possibility to share files with their friends and family inside Firefox. This *could* be a killer app because it gives people a real motivation to switch their non-technical contacts (especially family) to Firefox so that they can share with them. In other words, we're adding network effects to Firefox.
Does this mean that AllPeers will be the killer app for Firefox? Who knows. But the idea itself isn't patently ridiculous. If you want to make your own judgement, please register for our beta and check it out when it's available. Also, read my blog if you want more technical nitty-gritty about what we're up to.
Yeah, that's exactly what I thought. Actually what I thought was "so how can I spin some appealing-sounding Slashdot story so they willingly link to my company's homepage?"
It should be pointed out that the people who created Greasemonkey are in no way connected to Firefox. The really brilliant thing that the Mozilla folks did was not to think of ideas like Greasemonkey, it was to deploy an architecture open enough to let other people extend the browser in unexpected directions. In my view this is by far the most revolutionary thing about Firefox, and what we see today is only the tip of the iceberg. Once more programmers become familiar with the Firefox model and better IDEs become available, we're going to see some really incredible stuff.
Yeah, our site is not prepared for this kind of abuse (the slashdotting, that is, not your charming comment).
Check back later... the script is worth it!
When I saw this story my initial reaction was to jump for joy. I'm an avid Google News user particularly because it's so "Googleized"; i.e. they use statistical methods to cluster stories together and figure out which ones to display where and in what order. Others may do this as well, but Google News does an exceptionally good job.
So when I saw that they had added personalization, I assumed it was going to be something along the same lines, something that does my thinking FOR me, thank you very much. For example, wouldn't it be cool for the news page to adapt organically in response to stories you click on? So it would realize that I'm a golf fan (yeah, yeah, I'm even dorkier than the average/. user) and stop displaying all those NFL and hockey stories in the Sports section that I couldn't care less about.
Instead, we get the same basic layout customization and keyword matching that Yahoo has had for years (as many others have pointed out). I scratched my head for a few minutes about keywords I could use, but frankly my tastes are a bit too subtle to sum up in this way.
This could be a real story, but only if Google works a little of their statistical magic instead of taking a me-too approach.
I totally agree with this view, in fact I recently wrote a whole essay on the topic of what media companies can learn from the open source movement (see my sig if you're interested).
The biggest lesson, in my view, is that people will take matters into their own hands if corporations don't play fair. This is what happened with open source: programmers got so sick of companies like Microsoft bullying them that they banded together and created a whole new IT infrastructure of their own.
What's to stop artists in the film, music, photography and print industries doing the same? Absolutely nothing, which is why sites like Commonbits are now springing up to facilite consumer-to-consumer-style interactions that cut corporations out of the loop. All that's missing is a payment system to finance more professional production and the media industry is going to be facing a very similar threat to what established software vendors have experienced as a result of the open source movement.
There are plenty of examples of non-technical managers who have successfully run large tech companies (yes, Lou Gerstner is perhaps the most prominent). All other things being equal, however, it's a big advantage to have a technically savvy CEO.
The reason is that one of the most important roles of a CEO is to be the guy who makes the final decision when lower-level managers can't agree. If the boss doesn't "get it", it can be a problem even if he's surrounded by technical genisues, since his underlings will tend engage in political battles centered around what should technical decisions. This is where only a figure with unambiguous authority AND knowledge of the matter at hand can resolve the issue quickly.
Does anyone know, by any chance, if there is a transcript available of the talk by Larry Page mentioned in the "revealing speech" linked from the new item? Apparently it was about the possibility of making television archives available online. I searched for it using... well, no prizes for guessing... but I didn't come up with anything.
I was struck during our search for a database for our product by the paucity of systems that fulfill our requirements:
Small and embeddable
Open source
Native C++ interface
It seems like practically all the databases that fill the first two requirements are written in Java and use it as their primary API. Finally we settled on Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, which meets these requirements and has a native XML interface to boot.
The one potential caveat is that they use a hybrid license that lets users "opt out" of the GPL by paying a fee, after which they can distribute their product as closed source. Personally I think this is a great thing (always nice to have more options and you don't have to pay anything if you product is also open source), but I'd be interested in the views of the/. crowd.
Not to beat a dead horse, but Cringely seems like he was in a bit of a hurry to reject the Gmail solution. Wouldn't simple encryption solve the privacy problem? The Gmail text analysis is based on the assumption that the data is some kind of natural language text, so it would be baffled by anything else. Huffman encoding (or some other compression) would do the trick and save space besides.
It's interesting that the article parrots conventional wisdom by presenting ubiquitous DRM as inevitable, rather than one possible future. Personally I think that DRM may end up a lot less widespread than most people expect.
The premise that we can't do without DRM is based on a couple of unfounded assumptions. One is that people will always avoid paying if they can. This has already been proven wrong by the success of iTunes Store (and to a lesser extent competiting offering), despite the fact that there are plenty of sources of free music on the internet (especially P2P software like Kazaa and eMule). The second is that DRM actually works; actually there have been
convincing arguments that this will never work, especially considering the fact that a D->A->D conversion will produce very good results (probably as good as 128 bit MP3) and is basically impossible to prevent.
Then consider how much of a turnoff DRM is for customers. I think a good analogy is the early software industry. It used to be that floppy disks were crippled with "copy protection" technology, and a lot of software required the use of a hardware dongle. Nowadays these approaches have gone the way of the dinosaur and software companies tend to rely on much, much lighter weight protection like a simple license code. The reason is that copy protection was more likely to deter well-meaning novice users than hardened hackers, resulting in reduced sales. The software industry eventually realized that the right price points and distribution mechanisms were going to raise their revenues and profits a lot more than these "protections".
To me it seems logical that the music industry will eventually go the same route, even if it means that today's leading players will be dethroned by more forward-looking challengers. They're only clinging to DRM now because they are terrified of cannibalizing their existing revenue streams. This might work for a while but history suggests that they can't hold back the tide of technology forever.
I don't think you're taking into account the effects of new technologies, some of which are already exploited by Gnomoradio (the internet, for example).
Why do music companies market inane girl and boy bands instead of good indy music? Because their business model is based on the idea of high marginal costs for distribution. If there are 10,000 people in the world who will like a song enough to pay $1 for it, and it takes me two days in the studio and other two on my Mac to make the song, at a total cost of say $2,000, then it's a profitable enterprise and I should do it (ignoring opportunity costs but you get the point). The hitch is the cost of actually distributing the music. I can't really send 10 copies to 100,000 different stores in the hope that a few stores will sell a copy.
Therefore it's more profitable for big music to concentrate on megabands that will justify the expense of creating a CD in X copies, shipping it to a bunch of stores and having to deal with unsold merchandise and returns. This is all changing now with the iTunes Store and the rest. Two things are still missing IMO:
A really good recommendation system that helps me find music that isn't backed by an enormous marketing budget.
A micropayment system.
(Notice that I didn't mention DRM.)
Personally I think the web, P2P technologies and micropayments are going to result in a renaissance of indy music.
Great post, I totally agree with the SCO analogy. The most significant similarity is how utterly devoid of valuable assets Altnet is. I tried it a while back, and it basically installed a little spyware program on my machine that sat in the background and did lord knows what. The interface to Kazaa was not changed at all, so the legal files were distinguishable from the illegal ones only by the color of the icon. No description, album cover, price information, ratings, reviews, etc. When you downloaded a legal file, you then had to struggle with the buggy DRM in order to make the payment and buy the file... i.e. no micropayment scheme or basically innovation of any type whatsoever.
Hmmm, I wonder why they're running out of money...
I'm surprised that nobody's pointed out that this could seriously call into question that survival of Gmail. A few people mentioned that Google might clamp down on the service if it is abused for purposes other than email. But how are they supposed to do this when monitoring people's mails would be a serious invasion of their privacy (although it is intriguing to note that their privacy policy doesn't state explicitly - AFAICS - that no one will do this)?
I think this could turn out to be a serious miscalculation on Google's part. It would be quite trivial to write a web app that front ends Gmail with a virtual file system to which you can upload and download hierarchically structured folders and files. The system could even seamlessly encapsulate more than one account so you could have multiple Gbs of storage available totally free, with huge bandwidth and no maintenance.
I imagine that Google's estimates of required storage assumed some relatively moderate average consumption for each user. This would make it really easy to eat up more space than they expected. This, combined with the fact that they won't get any advertising revenue from accounts using this trick, might make it difficult for them to continue the service.
Although I couldn't RTFA (slashdotted already) I feel compelled to comment on this. We are considering deploying a multiplatform version of our product developed on top of Mozilla, so I downloaded Firefox a few weeks ago to check it out. My intention was to download it, play with it and then go back to IE which I was perfectly happy with on my 2 XP boxes.
Well guess what, I'm still using the damn thing and have become a huge evangelist for it. And 99.9% of the reason is the great extension mechanism and growing library of how-did-I-live-without-this extensions. If the browser wars really do take off, I think that XUL might have a bigger impact long term, but definitely for now extensions are the killer app that is pulling people onto the Mozilla platform.
To me this is just another example of the "antihype" that anything popular and successful is exposed to (and not just in technology). Wikipedia is amazingly good compared to what I (and probably most people) would have expected. Is it perfect? Of course not, but the nice thing about an internet-based encyclopedia is that it's easy to double check stuff (and most important articles have plenty of external links).
Wikipedia has proven the concept, and I'm sure we'll see more and more advanced community-managed information sharing projects in the future. For example, adding a moderation system like/.'s would already be a huge step forward.
Nope, this got posted on slashdot. The page is hosted on Microsoft servers which tend to hold up fairly well under a slashdot beating. (some might add, unfortunately so). Of course I already knew the difference 15 years ago.
I stand corrected. I'm a relative newbie here...
No offense man, but then you go on calling people sticklers in a later post. Could you please read the first few lines of your comment? Don't you agree they may sound a little arrogant? Is that perhaps why geeks aren't popular?
Honestly, no. Opinionated yes, arrogant... not so much.
It's somewhat ironic that you even managed to work in a fairly obvious grammar error. And that's recognized by someone who's first language isn't English.
More of a typo, don't you think? What is ironic is that this absolutely supported my argument (as several people pointed out), although it wasn't intentional. I often make typos and don't see them cause I see what I expect to see. Case in point: no one (including me) noticed that I misspelled "redundancy" in the subject of the very first post. That's so embarrassing that I am going to claim it was intentional.;-)
The most ironic thing though is that you only seem to talk about the conclusion, so even though this paper is about reading, did you actually read it???:-)
Ok, ok! Sticklers are we? So this is why geeks are unpopular...;-)
My point was probably clear but perhaps a better example would have been "hamb___er". Didn't know there were so many hammer/hamster eaters out there...
This got slashdotted!? The idea of recognizing words by "word shape" seems so silly to me that I almost feel as if the author is attacking a straw man rather than a widely accepted linguistic theory.
The final conclusions are similar to what I learned in my college linguistics classes 15 years ago. Language contains a lot of redundancy. The reason is that we often encounter situations of so-called "reduced redundancy". For example, someone might have sloppy handwriting so you can't make out all of the letters. Or you might be talking to someone while they brush their teeth. If language were highly optimized, we wouldn't understand a thing in these situations, but because of redundancy we can usually communicate very effectively.
The same applies to reading. The conclusions of the paper seem trivial to me. Of course, reading exploits "visual" and "contextual" information. How else would be understand a sentence like "The boy ate a ham___er" (with a few letters obscured)?
The fact that the brain's neural net adds up the weighted lexicographic, syntactic, semantic (and even pragmatic) information available to it in order to interpret language should be familiar to anyone who's read Goedel, Escher, Bach. And that was published in 1979...
I find it ironic that Gartner came up with this concept (it's been around for years, incidentally), since analysts and journalists are the ones who propagate this system.
It goes something like this: some new technology starts to look like the next big thing. Journalists hype it to the moon since it gives them something "truly revolutionary" to talk about. As a result, expectations get all blown out of proportion.
Then when the technology inevitably fails to live up to the hype within some ridiculously short timeframe, they have yet another big story to promote: "Is XYZ a hopeless failure?". Two stories for the price of one!
The moral is not to believe what you read in the papers. Sure, there are plenty of revolutionary technologies emerging, but these things take much, much longer than the press would have us believe.
It really depends on where you place the emphasis. Historical trends are definitely strong evidence of the influence of environment on political beliefs. At the same time, political leanings still tend to form a bell curve around an equilibrium point (albeit a shifting one).
The interesting question is, what made one German shopkeeper during WWII a card-carrying member of the National Socialist party, while another was a liberal shocked at what was going on? And in the same vein, what causes one Yale-educated blue blood to be conservative and another to be liberal? The scientic evidence (the article presents one example) increasing indicates that genetics has a lot more to do with it than we might intuitively expect.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm mainly kidding, although we were certainly not oblivious to the fact that Firefox users are an early adopter oriented crowd who would likely be more interested in what we are doing than the average web user. Another major consideration was the fact that we wanted to be multiplatform, but didn't want the bloat of Java, the licensing complexity of Qt, etc.
At the same time, someone was speculating here (I think) that we only based this on FF because XULRunner is not yet available. This isn't true. First of all, we probably could have used XULRunner in its existing form. Secondly, we feel that there are huge synergies between AllPeers functionality and FF. In essence, we've felt for a while that we are building a new generation web browser, and it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel. FF is an amazingly extensible platform that enabled us to save a huge amount of time by leveraging their existing functionality. I hope that the synergies between FF and AllPeers will be obvious once you use it.
Personally I leave FF running all the time, but the problem of memory bloat is a real one. We've discussed having a lightweight daemon running when FF isn't, and we'll probably do this sooner or later. I'm curious to find out how big a problem it will be for people to leave FF running. I'm suspecting it won't be as large as you suggest, but we'll see.
Yes, it's a bit silly to speculate about whether AllPeers will or won't be the killer app for Firefox when you can't even see it yet. That said, Michael is making an important point, and I'm afraid that a lot of people aren't grokking it because they attach too much baggage to the term "P2P".
We're not making a Kazaa clone. We're giving people the possibility to share files with their friends and family inside Firefox. This *could* be a killer app because it gives people a real motivation to switch their non-technical contacts (especially family) to Firefox so that they can share with them. In other words, we're adding network effects to Firefox.
Does this mean that AllPeers will be the killer app for Firefox? Who knows. But the idea itself isn't patently ridiculous. If you want to make your own judgement, please register for our beta and check it out when it's available. Also, read my blog if you want more technical nitty-gritty about what we're up to.
Yeah, that's exactly what I thought. Actually what I thought was "so how can I spin some appealing-sounding Slashdot story so they willingly link to my company's homepage?"
It should be pointed out that the people who created Greasemonkey are in no way connected to Firefox. The really brilliant thing that the Mozilla folks did was not to think of ideas like Greasemonkey, it was to deploy an architecture open enough to let other people extend the browser in unexpected directions. In my view this is by far the most revolutionary thing about Firefox, and what we see today is only the tip of the iceberg. Once more programmers become familiar with the Firefox model and better IDEs become available, we're going to see some really incredible stuff.
Yeah, our site is not prepared for this kind of abuse (the slashdotting, that is, not your charming comment). Check back later... the script is worth it!
So when I saw that they had added personalization, I assumed it was going to be something along the same lines, something that does my thinking FOR me, thank you very much. For example, wouldn't it be cool for the news page to adapt organically in response to stories you click on? So it would realize that I'm a golf fan (yeah, yeah, I'm even dorkier than the average /. user) and stop displaying all those NFL and hockey stories in the Sports section that I couldn't care less about.
Instead, we get the same basic layout customization and keyword matching that Yahoo has had for years (as many others have pointed out). I scratched my head for a few minutes about keywords I could use, but frankly my tastes are a bit too subtle to sum up in this way.
This could be a real story, but only if Google works a little of their statistical magic instead of taking a me-too approach.
The biggest lesson, in my view, is that people will take matters into their own hands if corporations don't play fair. This is what happened with open source: programmers got so sick of companies like Microsoft bullying them that they banded together and created a whole new IT infrastructure of their own.
What's to stop artists in the film, music, photography and print industries doing the same? Absolutely nothing, which is why sites like Commonbits are now springing up to facilite consumer-to-consumer-style interactions that cut corporations out of the loop. All that's missing is a payment system to finance more professional production and the media industry is going to be facing a very similar threat to what established software vendors have experienced as a result of the open source movement.
The reason is that one of the most important roles of a CEO is to be the guy who makes the final decision when lower-level managers can't agree. If the boss doesn't "get it", it can be a problem even if he's surrounded by technical genisues, since his underlings will tend engage in political battles centered around what should technical decisions. This is where only a figure with unambiguous authority AND knowledge of the matter at hand can resolve the issue quickly.
Does anyone know, by any chance, if there is a transcript available of the talk by Larry Page mentioned in the "revealing speech" linked from the new item? Apparently it was about the possibility of making television archives available online. I searched for it using... well, no prizes for guessing... but I didn't come up with anything.
If I may ask, did you look at SQLite and, if so, what were the main reasons that led you to opt for BDB?
You say "potato", I say "po-TAH-to"... :-)
Yeah but you misspelled "misspelled."
- Small and embeddable
- Open source
- Native C++ interface
It seems like practically all the databases that fill the first two requirements are written in Java and use it as their primary API. Finally we settled on Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, which meets these requirements and has a native XML interface to boot. The one potential caveat is that they use a hybrid license that lets users "opt out" of the GPL by paying a fee, after which they can distribute their product as closed source. Personally I think this is a great thing (always nice to have more options and you don't have to pay anything if you product is also open source), but I'd be interested in the views of theThe premise that we can't do without DRM is based on a couple of unfounded assumptions. One is that people will always avoid paying if they can. This has already been proven wrong by the success of iTunes Store (and to a lesser extent competiting offering), despite the fact that there are plenty of sources of free music on the internet (especially P2P software like Kazaa and eMule). The second is that DRM actually works; actually there have been convincing arguments that this will never work, especially considering the fact that a D->A->D conversion will produce very good results (probably as good as 128 bit MP3) and is basically impossible to prevent.
Then consider how much of a turnoff DRM is for customers. I think a good analogy is the early software industry. It used to be that floppy disks were crippled with "copy protection" technology, and a lot of software required the use of a hardware dongle. Nowadays these approaches have gone the way of the dinosaur and software companies tend to rely on much, much lighter weight protection like a simple license code. The reason is that copy protection was more likely to deter well-meaning novice users than hardened hackers, resulting in reduced sales. The software industry eventually realized that the right price points and distribution mechanisms were going to raise their revenues and profits a lot more than these "protections".
To me it seems logical that the music industry will eventually go the same route, even if it means that today's leading players will be dethroned by more forward-looking challengers. They're only clinging to DRM now because they are terrified of cannibalizing their existing revenue streams. This might work for a while but history suggests that they can't hold back the tide of technology forever.
Why do music companies market inane girl and boy bands instead of good indy music? Because their business model is based on the idea of high marginal costs for distribution. If there are 10,000 people in the world who will like a song enough to pay $1 for it, and it takes me two days in the studio and other two on my Mac to make the song, at a total cost of say $2,000, then it's a profitable enterprise and I should do it (ignoring opportunity costs but you get the point). The hitch is the cost of actually distributing the music. I can't really send 10 copies to 100,000 different stores in the hope that a few stores will sell a copy.
Therefore it's more profitable for big music to concentrate on megabands that will justify the expense of creating a CD in X copies, shipping it to a bunch of stores and having to deal with unsold merchandise and returns. This is all changing now with the iTunes Store and the rest. Two things are still missing IMO:
- A really good recommendation system that helps me find music that isn't backed by an enormous marketing budget.
- A micropayment system.
(Notice that I didn't mention DRM.)Personally I think the web, P2P technologies and micropayments are going to result in a renaissance of indy music.
Hmmm, I wonder why they're running out of money...
I think this could turn out to be a serious miscalculation on Google's part. It would be quite trivial to write a web app that front ends Gmail with a virtual file system to which you can upload and download hierarchically structured folders and files. The system could even seamlessly encapsulate more than one account so you could have multiple Gbs of storage available totally free, with huge bandwidth and no maintenance.
I imagine that Google's estimates of required storage assumed some relatively moderate average consumption for each user. This would make it really easy to eat up more space than they expected. This, combined with the fact that they won't get any advertising revenue from accounts using this trick, might make it difficult for them to continue the service.
Well guess what, I'm still using the damn thing and have become a huge evangelist for it. And 99.9% of the reason is the great extension mechanism and growing library of how-did-I-live-without-this extensions. If the browser wars really do take off, I think that XUL might have a bigger impact long term, but definitely for now extensions are the killer app that is pulling people onto the Mozilla platform.
Wikipedia has proven the concept, and I'm sure we'll see more and more advanced community-managed information sharing projects in the future. For example, adding a moderation system like /.'s would already be a huge step forward.
I stand corrected. I'm a relative newbie here...
No offense man, but then you go on calling people sticklers in a later post. Could you please read the first few lines of your comment? Don't you agree they may sound a little arrogant? Is that perhaps why geeks aren't popular?
Honestly, no. Opinionated yes, arrogant... not so much.
It's somewhat ironic that you even managed to work in a fairly obvious grammar error. And that's recognized by someone who's first language isn't English.
More of a typo, don't you think? What is ironic is that this absolutely supported my argument (as several people pointed out), although it wasn't intentional. I often make typos and don't see them cause I see what I expect to see. Case in point: no one (including me) noticed that I misspelled "redundancy" in the subject of the very first post. That's so embarrassing that I am going to claim it was intentional. ;-)
The most ironic thing though is that you only seem to talk about the conclusion, so even though this paper is about reading, did you actually read it??? :-)
Yep.
My point was probably clear but perhaps a better example would have been "hamb___er". Didn't know there were so many hammer/hamster eaters out there...
The final conclusions are similar to what I learned in my college linguistics classes 15 years ago. Language contains a lot of redundancy. The reason is that we often encounter situations of so-called "reduced redundancy". For example, someone might have sloppy handwriting so you can't make out all of the letters. Or you might be talking to someone while they brush their teeth. If language were highly optimized, we wouldn't understand a thing in these situations, but because of redundancy we can usually communicate very effectively.
The same applies to reading. The conclusions of the paper seem trivial to me. Of course, reading exploits "visual" and "contextual" information. How else would be understand a sentence like "The boy ate a ham___er" (with a few letters obscured)?
The fact that the brain's neural net adds up the weighted lexicographic, syntactic, semantic (and even pragmatic) information available to it in order to interpret language should be familiar to anyone who's read Goedel, Escher, Bach. And that was published in 1979...
It goes something like this: some new technology starts to look like the next big thing. Journalists hype it to the moon since it gives them something "truly revolutionary" to talk about. As a result, expectations get all blown out of proportion.
Then when the technology inevitably fails to live up to the hype within some ridiculously short timeframe, they have yet another big story to promote: "Is XYZ a hopeless failure?". Two stories for the price of one!
The moral is not to believe what you read in the papers. Sure, there are plenty of revolutionary technologies emerging, but these things take much, much longer than the press would have us believe.
The interesting question is, what made one German shopkeeper during WWII a card-carrying member of the National Socialist party, while another was a liberal shocked at what was going on? And in the same vein, what causes one Yale-educated blue blood to be conservative and another to be liberal? The scientic evidence (the article presents one example) increasing indicates that genetics has a lot more to do with it than we might intuitively expect.