I like the analogy.
I've referred to the same effect in the past as the bad wine effect. The idea is that you pour bad wine into a wine glass and the dregs sink to the bottom. Periodically some of the good stuff is sipped off the top (or sloshed off during a corporate crisis). Then more wine with more dregs gets poured in. The dregs, unfortunately, have nowhere to go and just keep accumulating.
The media companies are playing a fine line between licencing and buying. When they want to restrict how we use it, they tell us we have only licenced the content. When our physical media is damaged, they tell us that we bought it and don't have any more rights to the content.
If we really have just licenced the content, that's fine. But were can I take my old audio tapes and have them replaced with CDs for only the cost of the media? After all, I have a licence for the content and should only have to pay for the replacement of the media (say $2).
We should coin a name for it. How about "applets"? Hmmm. Wait a second...
Strange that we on Slashdot go gaga for anything AJAX while deriding Java as a slow, bloated pig. Seriously, AJAX is great for making web pages more responsive but is ill-suited as an applet replacement. Give me ThinkFree anytime.
Note that he's still saying that filesharing is copyright infringement. First he says:
"File sharing is not theft."
Then in the next paragraph he states:
"If copyright infringement was theft then..."
The implication is that File Sharing == Copyright Infringement. What about public domain files? What about the Creative Commons? His apology is half-hearted at most.
True, but I was asking about RAID in regards to the person who does a fancy copy to backup directories on the same drives every night. That's why I noted that neither solution provides off-site backup. His solution doesn't support off-site backup or backups from last month, either. Granted, it does solve getting a yesterday's version of a file that was deleted today, but if he doesn't catch the erroneous deletion until tomorrow, he is SOL.
I'm more worried about backups from a hardware failure point-of-view than erroneous changes. In that situation RAID is better than once-a-day backups onto the same devices.
I'm interested. Why not just put your work files onto a RAID drive? That's what I do on my file server. That way, things are backed up instantaneously, not just once a day. It doesn't provide off-site backup, granted, but I don't see how your set up does this either...
What is real's feelings towards the open source community? Does it frustrate you that so many OSS supporters complain about the only popular streaming company that supports OSS? Is OSS just a bandwagon for you to get on to try to stem sagging sales? Do you just accept that any decentralized community is going to have some vocal complainers?
Finally, do you feel that the OSS community sometimes is so dogmatic that it actually ends up eating its own young?
Having access to Canada's far north is a real asset for the Son of Star Wars program, as it was for the DEWb line a generation ago, which has lead Washington to come calling on Canada. Generally the program is unpopular here, but the new Canadian PM wants to get on well with Bush and is considering it. To placate the home crowd Martin has said that Canada will not go along if it involves weapons in space...
Now the papers here have all picked up on the new Pentagon plans and our new PM, already embroiled in another scandal is backed into a corner of upsetting the electorate just before an election when his popularity is already falling, or upsetting the elephant living to the south of us.
The whole.NET / Java battle is not about what platform applications run on nearly as much as who is driving the car. Microsoft spent years dissing CORBA in order to advance it own win32-locked-in DCOM. When they finally realized that the back office was never going to go completely to win32, and that Java was gaining momentum there because it was a higher-level language and wasn't tied to an OS, they had to change gears.
.NET is simply MS's next attempt to cut out CORBA and Java. SOAP may be limited and inefficient but its simple and cross-platform. If they can get some OSS folk to write some versions of.NET, that only helps their cause, because it supports their open-platforms story. And since, for the forseeable future, any.NET clone is going to be lack some serious functionality, it won't really bite into their sales. In the meantime, they can start to take the enterprise platform ownership back from Java. Annd, even if the OSS projects start to catch up -- guess what, MS can add new features.
So, while I love and use Linux, and even lead an OSS project on sourceforge, I have to admit that Neil is right: the.NET clones are only helping to establish Microsoft in a leadership position in enterprise infrastruture (which will drive sales of their software). And that's precisely the place they want to be.
As much as we might complain about the intentions or biases of the article's author, I do think that we have to acknowledge the tradeoff between ego and usability.
I am co-leader of an open-source project that has been going for about two years. Just after the code was released someone else started a very similar parallel effort. Our project had a more robust, extendable architecture while the other project supported more "devices". I even wrote a "bridge" to allow service providers from the other project to be plugged into ours. Then I sent an email to the other project leader suggesting we merge our efforts. Best of both worlds. While we remain on friendly terms, he wasn't interested, and I think it was fear of losing his role as sole lead developer/architect/leader. Of course, the "space" has suffered since developers have to choose between two frameworks each with strengths and weaknesses and often get confused. And it also dilutes the talent pool available to both projects.
But the real question is, what can you do? To be fair, the problem space is one that no commercial entity has decided it is worth entering, so in that regard you have to chalk one up for open-source.
If RFID tags become common in every product, as some seem to be suggesting, does this mean that cardboard boxes will no longer be recylable since there are electronics hidden in the paper layers? Has anyone considered this angle or am I really out of it?
Seriously, if you are worried more about a hard disk crash than a machine blowing up, why not set up a linux box with a RAID drive and use Samba to make it viewable on the network. You need to buy one more disk drive and it helps to have a second IDE controller, but it will save you tons of time and money compared with some distributed RAID setup.
This is the same fellow who was ridiculed up here in Canada a few years ago, perhaps unfairly, for predicting Y2K calamity that never materialized.
With this short article, however, he's earned more respect from me. His thesis is relatively simple, but not one I'd ever thought of in quite so broad terms. We've talked about nanotechnology and abundance but this line of thinking really brings things home. Thought provoking...
The Preferences API has one fatal flaw, it binds persistence to a JVM implementation. That is, if you store preferences using the Sun SDK and then run your application later using the IBM JVM, your Preferences are not available. This coupling of persistence to the JVM should never have taken place and breaks the tacit assumption that applications are decoupled from the JVM they run on. For enterprise applications, this could be devastating during a JVM upgrade.
For the record, I did object during the JCP process, and even offered a modification to the architecture, but was dismissed.
I wrote a more extensive criticism of this API in the Java Developer's Journal back in March of 2002. An on-line version (with some of the preamble truncated) is available here.
I think what Haystack is trying to solve is the data management issue. For thirty years we have been living with application-centric computers. So much so that we think in terms of best-of-bread point-tools. Do we know where Mozilla stores our email folders? No, its hidden by the application. (Okay, I do, but that is because I'm a bit geeky and share my Mozilla email folders from a File Server across my intranet...) How about Outlook, Netscape, Eclipse, etc.
In my inbox I have folders for home, each client project I am working on, future leads, charitable organizations I am involved in. A similar parallel hierarchy is repeated in my file system for documents. My IM tools have their own way of tracking contacts that is unrelated to my email or projects. I store my Eclipse projects in yet another place. Mozilla organizes my bookmarks in yet another hierarchy. It's all a real mess and makes working on a project a job of mentally mapping all the pieces together.
Now, what would be real nice would be if Haystack could define a plugin API (a la Eclipse) so that my email client could be wrapped and plugged in to Haystack. Same for IM clients, web browsers, etc. The point tool then only has to worry about its job and hands off data persistence to haystack. Then I can choose the best app and let Haystack worry about tying the data together. As someone else mentioned, this sounds more like a replacement for the file system. But it could be more, if each plugin could define how it interacts with other plugins and defines its own responsibilities.
I'm sure there is a lot of refinement needed, but it is an interesting new paradigm. Activity-centred desktop insteaed of a tool-centred desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the analogy. I've referred to the same effect in the past as the bad wine effect. The idea is that you pour bad wine into a wine glass and the dregs sink to the bottom. Periodically some of the good stuff is sipped off the top (or sloshed off during a corporate crisis). Then more wine with more dregs gets poured in. The dregs, unfortunately, have nowhere to go and just keep accumulating.
The media companies are playing a fine line between licencing and buying. When they want to restrict how we use it, they tell us we have only licenced the content. When our physical media is damaged, they tell us that we bought it and don't have any more rights to the content.
If we really have just licenced the content, that's fine. But were can I take my old audio tapes and have them replaced with CDs for only the cost of the media? After all, I have a licence for the content and should only have to pay for the replacement of the media (say $2).
Strange that we on Slashdot go gaga for anything AJAX while deriding Java as a slow, bloated pig. Seriously, AJAX is great for making web pages more responsive but is ill-suited as an applet replacement. Give me ThinkFree anytime.
Flame shields up...
"File sharing is not theft."
Then in the next paragraph he states:
"If copyright infringement was theft then..."
The implication is that File Sharing == Copyright Infringement. What about public domain files? What about the Creative Commons? His apology is half-hearted at most.
Google's motto is "Do no evil", but Microsoft is already 2/3 of the way there. The first third and the last third
I'm more worried about backups from a hardware failure point-of-view than erroneous changes. In that situation RAID is better than once-a-day backups onto the same devices.
I'm interested. Why not just put your work files onto a RAID drive? That's what I do on my file server. That way, things are backed up instantaneously, not just once a day. It doesn't provide off-site backup, granted, but I don't see how your set up does this either...
Finally, do you feel that the OSS community sometimes is so dogmatic that it actually ends up eating its own young?
Now the papers here have all picked up on the new Pentagon plans and our new PM, already embroiled in another scandal is backed into a corner of upsetting the electorate just before an election when his popularity is already falling, or upsetting the elephant living to the south of us.
So, while I love and use Linux, and even lead an OSS project on sourceforge, I have to admit that Neil is right: the .NET clones are only helping to establish Microsoft in a leadership position in enterprise infrastruture (which will drive sales of their software). And that's precisely the place they want to be.
I am co-leader of an open-source project that has been going for about two years. Just after the code was released someone else started a very similar parallel effort. Our project had a more robust, extendable architecture while the other project supported more "devices". I even wrote a "bridge" to allow service providers from the other project to be plugged into ours. Then I sent an email to the other project leader suggesting we merge our efforts. Best of both worlds. While we remain on friendly terms, he wasn't interested, and I think it was fear of losing his role as sole lead developer/architect/leader. Of course, the "space" has suffered since developers have to choose between two frameworks each with strengths and weaknesses and often get confused. And it also dilutes the talent pool available to both projects.
But the real question is, what can you do? To be fair, the problem space is one that no commercial entity has decided it is worth entering, so in that regard you have to chalk one up for open-source.
If RFID tags become common in every product, as some seem to be suggesting, does this mean that cardboard boxes will no longer be recylable since there are electronics hidden in the paper layers? Has anyone considered this angle or am I really out of it?
At least, that's what I do.
With this short article, however, he's earned more respect from me. His thesis is relatively simple, but not one I'd ever thought of in quite so broad terms. We've talked about nanotechnology and abundance but this line of thinking really brings things home. Thought provoking...
For the record, I did object during the JCP process, and even offered a modification to the architecture, but was dismissed.
I wrote a more extensive criticism of this API in the Java Developer's Journal back in March of 2002. An on-line version (with some of the preamble truncated) is available here.
I think what Haystack is trying to solve is the data management issue. For thirty years we have been living with application-centric computers. So much so that we think in terms of best-of-bread point-tools. Do we know where Mozilla stores our email folders? No, its hidden by the application. (Okay, I do, but that is because I'm a bit geeky and share my Mozilla email folders from a File Server across my intranet...) How about Outlook, Netscape, Eclipse, etc.
In my inbox I have folders for home, each client project I am working on, future leads, charitable organizations I am involved in. A similar parallel hierarchy is repeated in my file system for documents. My IM tools have their own way of tracking contacts that is unrelated to my email or projects. I store my Eclipse projects in yet another place. Mozilla organizes my bookmarks in yet another hierarchy. It's all a real mess and makes working on a project a job of mentally mapping all the pieces together.
Now, what would be real nice would be if Haystack could define a plugin API (a la Eclipse) so that my email client could be wrapped and plugged in to Haystack. Same for IM clients, web browsers, etc. The point tool then only has to worry about its job and hands off data persistence to haystack. Then I can choose the best app and let Haystack worry about tying the data together. As someone else mentioned, this sounds more like a replacement for the file system. But it could be more, if each plugin could define how it interacts with other plugins and defines its own responsibilities.
I'm sure there is a lot of refinement needed, but it is an interesting new paradigm. Activity-centred desktop insteaed of a tool-centred desktop.