"Actually, I was referring more to the "what happened to part" than to the MP3.com business model. MP3.com was destroyed by the "music industry"
But is that true, verifiable, and significant? I often hear claims that MP3.com was killed, and I've no doubt that there were lots of people with the money and desire to do so. However, I'm not convinced.
Even being cynical and suspicious (which I am, definitely), that looks like CNET just paid them a lot of money to go away. And I don't recall there being anything fundamentally wrong with the business before they shut down either. OK, a few legal problems with "My.MP3.com", but that was a side-issue anyway, totally irrelevant to their main business.
Who knows, maybe it just needs someone with a longer attention-span than Michael Robertson. Again, nothing personal, it's not something I could do, but you have to wonder if that massive market is still there, waiting for someone to reopen the shop.
Do you know if this is an American thing? Pure-software patents should be invalid in Europe and the UK, and any that exist should be challengable by a simple application to the patent office.
Obviously that's not much help to anyone in the US, but it wouldn't be the first time that GIMP has different patent-related installation options for different countries...
"Did you notice that it's easier to click once than to type in a file name"
Ah, but is it easier to scroll right lots of times looking for the file, and then click once, or is it easier to type a filename?
Howabout if your hands are already on the keyboard? (anyone claiming to study HCI should know the answer to this one, as it was on on CHI-WEB a few weeks ago)
"Everyone seems to be suggesting to go with a Mac. Well, if I were you, I would take a half-way decent case and mod it. Chop off the back if it is too long, put some plexiglass on the side, stencil on the side, whatever floats your boat."
The problem always is, if you get a modded case, you still have a big messy pile of "technical crap" behind your desk, whereas if you get a Mac, you just have a shiny white thing.
Is it even possible to get a PC case whose back-panel doesn't look like some 1940's telephone exchange? The PC case itself may look cool (for various definitions), but when you add external modems, USB cables and hubs everywhere, "wireless" mouses that need a cable from the PC to their base-station, and enough power cords to start your own distribution company, the Mac will still have just the one power cable (and even the non-iMacs have just one lead to the monitor)
Thing is, there are all these people talking about "modified" PC cases, but all their creations are the same 17x7x19" box at the side of their desk, or a Mini-ATX case almost overbalanced by the weight of cables sprouting from it. Putting a window, neon-light, and hovercraft engine into your PC case isn't innovative in any sense of the word, nor is airbrushing some Doom3 screenshot onto it...
Nothing personal...;) just want to see a decent PC design sometime.
"Did Mindawn/theKompany not pay any attention to what happened to to mp3.com?"
Well obviously they did. My memory of MP3.com was that they did a shitload of record-selling, and made the purchase of music palatable to many people who would rather blockade a record store than buy things from it.
They sold to people who thought £17 ($35?) per CD was too much. They sold to people who'd never heard of the bands they played before. They sold to people who developed new tastes in music, as they could preview anything, from home, and keep it as an MP3 file. And they continued to sell stuff.
Like you said, they were making money, despite the frightening amount of IT spending, the oracle database licenses, the "internet boom" spending, the allowing free downloads, the lack of DRM, the absolute trust in their customers. If people didn't want to pay MP3.com for a CD, they could simply download it. Yet we still did buy CDs from them, time after time...
I just wish more people would learn the lessons from MP3.com.
"And that prevents me from placing a microphone in front of the speakers and recording it that way how?"
Because some companies with more lawyers than sense have proposed that recording equipment should fail to function if it detects a 'watermarked' signal being recorded.
Naturally, this would stop you making phone calls from somewhere where music is playing, and you could disable the recording equipment of everyone in the room (for example, during some political speech) by playing a soundtrack in the background. The only question is whether it can be used to defeat CIA bugs, or telephone wiretaps.
"Sorry sir, the suspect's daughter was whistling christmas carols in the background, and our recording kit failed to capture the evidence"
"What are your reasons for running the old standby suite over the Firefox/Thunderbird combo?"
Why should it be a standby suite? If something doesn't work on Firefox, it won't work on Mozilla navigator either. Most of us would interpret "standby browser" to mean Lynx, Links, emacs, or Internet Explorer, i.e. something which might work when the primary browser fails.
Why is it "old"? Mozilla just released a major version today, which makes it newer than Firefox 1.0
Why are the reasons for running Mozilla non-obvious? It has features that Firefox doesn't have. Many of us use those features.
For example, I use chatzilla all the time. It's not available except as part of Mozilla.
Another example: Mozilla composer is one of the best word-processors I've found. It's part of Mozilla, but not part of Firefox. You can download nvu separately of course, but why bother?
Of course, the other thing which makes Mozilla indispensable to web-authors is "Edit this page" which is not available in other browsers. I use it to quickly type pages, and then paste from the HTML source view into the SSH session that I actually edit the website on. Much quicker for some things than using emacs remotely.
A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.
Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent.
Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
Unsolicited non-bulk email is normal email, e.g. first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries
Bulk non-unsolicited email is normal email, e.g. subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists
Making that into a legal definition: An electronic message is "spam" if (a) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients, and (b) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.
"What about the Beagle? Largest man-created crater on the surface of Mars?"
Better than the Apollo? I can't find the quote, but it was something like "Apollo 11 stage 2 was crashed into the moon by venting fuel - the impact was measured by seisometers left by previous missions and used to map the internal state of the moon"
Arguably more useful than the other Apollo stage-2, which some people now consider to be a moon of the Earth...
"When those kiosks went in to the local Post Office, they had a greeter who explained their function and features. It was explicity part of the "script" that the transaction was accompanied by a photograph for security purposes."
So the same logic allows me to take photos of every post-office worker I deal with? (or indeed, anyone in public)
(yes serious question, might be quite useful to carry around a video camera. Let's see how people react to having their images displayed, sorted, classified and annotated on my website...)
What's needed to kill a lot of the worst software patents that you know about, is an attempt to challenge them at the patent office.
In the last few years, both the european and the US patent offices have gone through a "lax" period of granting stupid patents, which they've later regretted and tightened-up on those laws. My reference here is Lord Sainsbury, who admitted as much in last week's Computer Implemented Inventions meeting in London.
The interesting thing about this particular conversation is, that while those patents would not be valid under current rules, they cannot be reexamined until someone brings them to the attention of the relevant patent office and says "I believe this is wrong because..."
And as far as I can tell, this applies to everything that we'd call a dumb software patent. One-click shopping. IsNot. "x with a computer". Filename expansion. File structures. There's a pretty good chance that these are not valid under current rules, and that on request, they could be subject to a reexamination by the patent office.
Lookup your patent office's literature, and find out if there's a facility to report patents which you believe were erroneously issued.
(If anyone's installing acrobat reader, one useful tip is that you can delete it's Plugins directory after installation, to remove the unnecessary 30-second startup time)
Just noticed why all these sites with "your download should begin automatically" messages haven't been working recently -- they seem to use <body onload="sendfile()"> which seems to be [correctly?] detected as a popup in modern browsers...
"What I would like to see is some kind of encrypted, p2p, email/IM replacement that doesn't rely on centralized servers"
Well why not go looking for them then, rather than writing it on slashdot. Many exist. Even something like InvisibleNet's IIP (invisible IRC proxy) would do lots of what you want, Konspire2B would do more, there are more encrypted P2P and chat tools than you can shake a stick at, plus protocols that offer what you want with many different clients. Or go all the way and try GNUNet (replacement for freenet) and such like.
Slashdot Mirror
They have a whole page[http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004sp amside6.html] discussing this.
Bingo!
(10 instances of "enterprise class" in one article is bingo, isn't it?)
"Easy. A Postfix server running Postgrey and Anvil."
Ahh, greylisting. All the convenience of deleting mail indiscriminately, with none of the guilt...
"I've found that the old version 3.0.1 [of SpamAssassin] misclassifies all Outlook 2003 email as spam"
Presumably the old version is still available to download?
"Actually, I was referring more to the "what happened to part" than to the MP3.com business model. MP3.com was destroyed by the "music industry"
But is that true, verifiable, and significant? I often hear claims that MP3.com was killed, and I've no doubt that there were lots of people with the money and desire to do so. However, I'm not convinced.
"[MP3.com] was shut down on 2 December 2003 after being purchased by CNET"
Even being cynical and suspicious (which I am, definitely), that looks like CNET just paid them a lot of money to go away. And I don't recall there being anything fundamentally wrong with the business before they shut down either. OK, a few legal problems with "My.MP3.com", but that was a side-issue anyway, totally irrelevant to their main business.
Who knows, maybe it just needs someone with a longer attention-span than Michael Robertson. Again, nothing personal, it's not something I could do, but you have to wonder if that massive market is still there, waiting for someone to reopen the shop.
"Anyway, tabbed menus are patented by Adobe"
Do you know if this is an American thing? Pure-software patents should be invalid in Europe and the UK, and any that exist should be challengable by a simple application to the patent office.
Obviously that's not much help to anyone in the US, but it wouldn't be the first time that GIMP has different patent-related installation options for different countries...
"Did you notice that it's easier to click once than to type in a file name"
Ah, but is it easier to scroll right lots of times looking for the file, and then click once, or is it easier to type a filename?
Howabout if your hands are already on the keyboard? (anyone claiming to study HCI should know the answer to this one, as it was on on CHI-WEB a few weeks ago)
"you probably don't know the first thing about HCI"
Apparently, neither do any of the users who have to put-up with GTK/gnome weirdness.
goneme
"Everyone seems to be suggesting to go with a Mac. Well, if I were you, I would take a half-way decent case and mod it. Chop off the back if it is too long, put some plexiglass on the side, stencil on the side, whatever floats your boat."
;) just want to see a decent PC design sometime.
The problem always is, if you get a modded case, you still have a big messy pile of "technical crap" behind your desk, whereas if you get a Mac, you just have a shiny white thing.
Is it even possible to get a PC case whose back-panel doesn't look like some 1940's telephone exchange? The PC case itself may look cool (for various definitions), but when you add external modems, USB cables and hubs everywhere, "wireless" mouses that need a cable from the PC to their base-station, and enough power cords to start your own distribution company, the Mac will still have just the one power cable (and even the non-iMacs have just one lead to the monitor)
Thing is, there are all these people talking about "modified" PC cases, but all their creations are the same 17x7x19" box at the side of their desk, or a Mini-ATX case almost overbalanced by the weight of cables sprouting from it. Putting a window, neon-light, and hovercraft engine into your PC case isn't innovative in any sense of the word, nor is airbrushing some Doom3 screenshot onto it...
Nothing personal...
"He claims to be a "system administrator and have a degree in computer science", and he lets his wife run as admin."
Maybe they're both system administrators?
"Did Mindawn/theKompany not pay any attention to what happened to to mp3.com?"
Well obviously they did. My memory of MP3.com was that they did a shitload of record-selling, and made the purchase of music palatable to many people who would rather blockade a record store than buy things from it.
They sold to people who thought £17 ($35?) per CD was too much. They sold to people who'd never heard of the bands they played before. They sold to people who developed new tastes in music, as they could preview anything, from home, and keep it as an MP3 file. And they continued to sell stuff.
Like you said, they were making money, despite the frightening amount of IT spending, the oracle database licenses, the "internet boom" spending, the allowing free downloads, the lack of DRM, the absolute trust in their customers. If people didn't want to pay MP3.com for a CD, they could simply download it. Yet we still did buy CDs from them, time after time...
I just wish more people would learn the lessons from MP3.com.
Of course, we'll be happy to support anything from theKom...
what, no previews?!?
"And that prevents me from placing a microphone in front of the speakers and recording it that way how?"
Because some companies with more lawyers than sense have proposed that recording equipment should fail to function if it detects a 'watermarked' signal being recorded.
Naturally, this would stop you making phone calls from somewhere where music is playing, and you could disable the recording equipment of everyone in the room (for example, during some political speech) by playing a soundtrack in the background. The only question is whether it can be used to defeat CIA bugs, or telephone wiretaps.
"Sorry sir, the suspect's daughter was whistling christmas carols in the background, and our recording kit failed to capture the evidence"
"An example is that I coulnd't find a preference in Firefox to turn off gif-animations"
Set image.animation_mode to "none" if you do ever want to change that.
(and set thip, crinkle, and spoit to off while you're there. "It makes copies too?")
"What are your reasons for running the old standby suite over the Firefox/Thunderbird combo?"
Why should it be a standby suite? If something doesn't work on Firefox, it won't work on Mozilla navigator either. Most of us would interpret "standby browser" to mean Lynx, Links, emacs, or Internet Explorer, i.e. something which might work when the primary browser fails.
Why is it "old"? Mozilla just released a major version today, which makes it newer than Firefox 1.0
Why are the reasons for running Mozilla non-obvious? It has features that Firefox doesn't have. Many of us use those features.
For example, I use chatzilla all the time. It's not available except as part of Mozilla.
Another example: Mozilla composer is one of the best word-processors I've found. It's part of Mozilla, but not part of Firefox. You can download nvu separately of course, but why bother?
Of course, the other thing which makes Mozilla indispensable to web-authors is "Edit this page" which is not available in other browsers. I use it to quickly type pages, and then paste from the HTML source view into the SSH session that I actually edit the website on. Much quicker for some things than using emacs remotely.
"I'm sure with modern technology, we could design a much more powerful motor that would spin the restaurant at 15,000 rpm."
And mount everything horizontally, so that you "stand" on the outer surface?
"The Seattle Space Needle uses a one-horsepower motor to rotate its restaraunt once per hour"
That's 750 watts in electrical units, but we're all engineers here and knew that anyway...
Definition taken from SpamHaus:
A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.
Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent.
Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
Unsolicited non-bulk email is normal email, e.g. first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries
Bulk non-unsolicited email is normal email, e.g. subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists
Making that into a legal definition:
An electronic message is "spam" if (a) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients, and (b) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.
""It isn't perfect, therefore it's no good." That's basically what you're saying."
He also knows that it will become the single legal definition of spam in many places
"This is a first effort at banning spam"
No, it replaces better attempts at banning spam, and those state laws won't have been the first either (UDP anyone?)
"it isn't going to catch everything"
If I got a dollar for every time I heard this phrase from vendors of absolutely useless spam-filters...
"Let's see how it works, and expect it to be extended as time goes on."
Why not make suggestions that would help it to work better now?
"Better than the Apollo?"
And nobody reply about they being different planets, I know.
"What about the Beagle? Largest man-created crater on the surface of Mars?"
Better than the Apollo? I can't find the quote, but it was something like "Apollo 11 stage 2 was crashed into the moon by venting fuel - the impact was measured by seisometers left by previous missions and used to map the internal state of the moon"
Arguably more useful than the other Apollo stage-2, which some people now consider to be a moon of the Earth...
"When those kiosks went in to the local Post Office, they had a greeter who explained their function and features. It was explicity part of the "script" that the transaction was accompanied by a photograph for security purposes."
So the same logic allows me to take photos of every post-office worker I deal with? (or indeed, anyone in public)
(yes serious question, might be quite useful to carry around a video camera. Let's see how people react to having their images displayed, sorted, classified and annotated on my website...)
"Your attitude is messed up because cameras in post offices gets your heckles up more than terrorists killing thousands of civilians."
So we're allowed to call them terrorists now?
"This is what is needed to kill software patents"
What's needed to kill a lot of the worst software patents that you know about, is an attempt to challenge them at the patent office.
In the last few years, both the european and the US patent offices have gone through a "lax" period of granting stupid patents, which they've later regretted and tightened-up on those laws. My reference here is Lord Sainsbury, who admitted as much in last week's Computer Implemented Inventions meeting in London.
The interesting thing about this particular conversation is, that while those patents would not be valid under current rules, they cannot be reexamined until someone brings them to the attention of the relevant patent office and says "I believe this is wrong because..."
And as far as I can tell, this applies to everything that we'd call a dumb software patent. One-click shopping. IsNot. "x with a computer". Filename expansion. File structures. There's a pretty good chance that these are not valid under current rules, and that on request, they could be subject to a reexamination by the patent office.
Lookup your patent office's literature, and find out if there's a facility to report patents which you believe were erroneously issued.
(link to acrobat 5 on OldVersion)
Many thanks
(If anyone's installing acrobat reader, one useful tip is that you can delete it's Plugins directory after installation, to remove the unnecessary 30-second startup time)
Just noticed why all these sites with "your download should begin automatically" messages haven't been working recently -- they seem to use <body onload="sendfile()"> which seems to be [correctly?] detected as a popup in modern browsers...
"What I would like to see is some kind of encrypted, p2p, email/IM replacement that doesn't rely on centralized servers"
Well why not go looking for them then, rather than writing it on slashdot. Many exist. Even something like InvisibleNet's IIP (invisible IRC proxy) would do lots of what you want, Konspire2B would do more, there are more encrypted P2P and chat tools than you can shake a stick at, plus protocols that offer what you want with many different clients. Or go all the way and try GNUNet (replacement for freenet) and such like.
People are always posting "oh if only there was a distributed deniable torrented video blogging system with a pseudononymous web-of-trust" or something, yet I never see you on my Konspire2B client. Just download the damn things and see what they do, some of the apps are really quite cool.