I'm wondering how the court's recent ruling against the RIAA will translate into (in)action against these newcomers?
They're hitting the bigtime in terms of usage, but I don't see them having the mindshare (feh on marketroid lingo, but it works) that Napster did. People know Napster and what it's all about: the rest of these are just stopgap solutions to find what they're after. I don't think people can ever be passionate about, say, Kazaa like they were about Napster, but maybe that's just me.
..."While many ISPs remain publicly adamant that broadband subscribers are rock-steady, some say privately that signs of cancellations are emerging. The impact is noticeable in the San Francisco Bay Area, where thousands of high-tech employees have lost their jobs."
And a paragraph or so later... "So far, cancellations haven't shown up in macro-level statistics such as earnings reports."
Hmm. So people who have lost their jos are trimming back on expenses in a tough job market? I'm not sure where the headlines are justified here. A bunch of laid-off workers representing a blip on the radar isn't exactly a trend that I'd bet my shirt on.
Slow news day in the tech market, I guess.
I don't know if you're using Java Script, but we'd run into problems with NS 6.1 (can't speak to Mozilla per se, but it's the same render engine, no?) if'n you ran onEvent handlers or had the JS reset form items for you.
Other times, even pages without event handlers would overlook any form element changes (checkboxes and radio buttons) that the user was making. Ugly stuff to debug.
Rob Malda wasn't exactly an old pro at masturbation (mortified to do it at home ever since his mom found his jitrag and almost had a heart attack) but was working his way up the amateur ranks out at college with not much else to do, having once again failed his saving throw vs. pathetic geekdom.
Even the embarassment that was getting his diminuitive penis lodged in an olive-oil filled beaker was a mere prelude to the incident that would give him his nickname forever. Perusing alt.sex.masturbation after he'd mauled himself one afternoon while his roommate was still out, he came upon a life-changing post: the most realistic sex sensation, ever, guaranteed. Dozens of replies verifying that this was indeed the best thing since sliced bread assuaged his fears that this would turn into another Beaker Incident. So for the first time ever, Rob set out to the hardware store, and then to the supermarket for some liver.
When he burst back into his room, visibly excited, his roommate began to cruelly inquire about why he had some piping and liver. Malda blurted out some half-assed explaination about "Maxwell's Demon" and "passive heating". He laughed and headed on out to "throw some brews back and nail some broads". Malda waited until he was convinced that he was gone, then snuck down to the microwave to heat up the liver. Sprinting with the foul organ in tow back to his room, he stuffed the liver into the PVC pipe and then stuffed his foul organ inside of it. The sensation of his homebrewed artificial vagina was so aazing that he did it four more times that evening, finally passing out with the semen-laced liver-stuffed pipe leaking all manner of horrible fluids leaking onto his sheets. With a start, he woke in the middle of the night, scrambling furiously to hide the pipe, dispose of the seed-covered liver, and then wash his sheets. His roommate and stumbled in while he was washing the sheets, and cruelly inquired if he'd shat the bed or what. He responded that he'd had a bit too much to drink and had puked on it. He shoved him aside and passed out.
So Malda's love affair with a pipe and some liver continued unabated, and things were going well: in one of his art classes, he'd even managed to tell a girl that he was a comp sci major and an art minor. After the 15 second talk, he returned to his room high on life and ready for a few rounds with the liverpipe, and so thought nothing of it when his roommate invited him over to dinner at his friend's place. He accepted, did his pipe, cleaned up and then took a shower before heading out.
He showed up at six prompt, and they began by cracking open a few Coronas and watching some TV. It was Mexican night, they informed him. Nachos and tacos: what would he like? Tacos, he responded.
At the dinner table (OK, huddled around the TV), Malda was talking with excitement in his voice about how he'd unearthed some of his old disks with shareware classics like Duke Nuke 'Em, Jumpman, Tapper and Commander Keen on them and had been playing them all afternoon. One of the guys snickered and he asked if they weren't into old games.
"*snicker* Hey, uh. Guys. Do these tacos taste a little funky to you?"
"*snicker* Yeah, a little bit."
Rob looked around, not quite getting the gist of it and responded "These taste fine. Why?"
As his roommate burst out laughing, one of the guys said "Yeah. I sort of... ran out of meat and I had to make your tacos with this piece of meat I found in the garbage near your roommate's room. But don't worry. It was all wrapped up and so it wasn't dirty... COMMANDER TACO!!"
It was then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that he realized that he'd been fed a piece of liver that he'd been intimate with only hours before. He ran out of the apartment crying and failed his classes for the rest of the semester, eventually finding the he managed to graduate in 4 1/2 years.
Now you reporters know, so quit asking, and move on to questions about VA Li^H^H Software already.
Someone should have told them that when they were aiming for the (non-existant) "sub-notebook" market, their foot was directly in the line of their shot. It doesn't matter how sexy your technology is: if you don't give people what they want or do a job better than the other guy, you'll be out on your ass. CPUs don't whore enough power (compared to, say... a display?) that a low-power CPU makes that much of a difference. That and the fact that no one really wanted a "sub-notebook" as notebooks approached their form factor and the smaller Palm Pilots/Pocket PCs are just, well... sexier and more useful because of their increased portability.
Cool-running CPUs might have made sense for renderfarms and server rooms, but IT departments have already invested in cooling systems, and will the savings for building new hypothetically cooling-free server rooms offset the extra servers you have to purchase because of the Transmeta's sluggish performance?
Not to be all "been there, done that", but I know guys who were doing it in downtown NYC a year and a half ago. Amazing how many Wall Street corporations can be so freaking clueless about segmenting off the generically insecure portions of their network.
Sad to think that we'll have an entire generation of hackers growing up who have no idea what Tone Loc is just because wireless networks are so much of a sexier, easier target than open modem banks, isn't it?
Something about tanks being defeated by pikemen and cruise missiles being shot out of the sky... by archers.
I'll keep on keeping on with SMAC until they get a patch out to address these blindingly obvious issues.
I'm still waiting for net-playable Nethack.
Until then, I suppose MAngband will have to do. It's good and all, but I never got into Angband like I did Nethack.
Of course, there's the "state-sanctioned" version of how Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda got his most peculiar nickname ("'CmdrTaco' is a reference to a Dave Barry article where he lists places not to take a date. Among them is any place called 'The Commander Taco' or something like that.") and then there's the real reason for said nickname.
In order to explain it, we'll need to hop into the time machine and step back a few years to when Mr. Malda was still but a wee pup in college. So I'd like to take you back to the early 90's.
Rob was fresh out of Catholic high school, with dozens of years of Catholic guilt impressed upon and built up inside him. He'd snored his way through high school, tinkering around with nothing more than computers. Fact of the matter is that most girls don't like geeks and he was too repressed to figure out a way to approach those of the fairer sex. For that matter, he was even afraid to touch himself. Based on what little sex ed had been taught in school, he knew better than to engage in premarital copulation or let his seed touch the ground, lest he burn in hell or suffer the fate of Onan. It wasn't the bullying and the scornful glances that were the worst torture of high school, it was waking up in the middle of the night, his genitals throbbing, gritting his teeth, and clenching his perineum to abate the oncoming rush of verboten relief (after his mom found his stained underwear once, he had learned better).
But college represented the ultimate to a scrawny kid who wasn't quite sure how to play well with others. It was the chance to meet completely new people and to completely reinvent himself, a rebirth of sorts. And what kind of rebirth would it be? The kind that meant he would (finally) get chicks. Catholic guilt be damned! He'd heard that throbbing in his loins loud and clear and it was finally time to do something about it. But how? The answer was clear: in addition to the obvious major in computer science, he'd pick up a minor in art. Women would look at him and see not only the provider instincts that comp sci implied, but a sensitive heart and a mind with a flair for aesthetics as well, a heart with art in it. What lady could possibly resist such a formidable combination?
Unfortunately, all of them. A little scribble on paper saying you know art is no replacement for the ability to clearly communicate that you love it as he was finding out. Things at college were no different than in high school. The girls were still hung up on the football players, leaving him struggling to make a saving throw vs. pathetic geekdom. He discovered the concept of alcohol, figuring that cracking a sixer and his inhibitions meant that he'd be cracking their legs, but again, he turned into nothing but an incoherent mess.
A year went by and no luck, aside from ridding himself of some Catholic guilt: the liberal nature of campus and the wonders of the nascent world wide web meant that with a little (very little) peer interaction skirting around the subject and lonely hours in the dead of night on weekends when his roommates were out presumably dipping their wicks meant that he'd finally been able to overcome his irrational fear of masturbation. And boy, did he ever.
Saying that he took to it like a fish to water was an understatement: he masturbated as if he honestly believed that if he did it enough, he'd win a prize. Unfortunately discovering Usenet, he learned all manner of deviant masturbatory practices, of course convincing himself that it was all OK and that this was just practice for when he finally met Ms. Right, etc., etc. You can justify some things to yourself, but there shouldn't be any way to rationally justify getting your penis lodged in a beaker. Stupid stupid! What was he thinking? But the guy on alt.sex.masturbation had said that the sensation of a penis displacing a beaker full of warm olive oil was the most "realistic" feeling ever, so who was he to doubt? It was a heart pounding few minutes waiting to return to his normal, pitifully small flaccid state, hoping that his roommate wouldn't return to find him in such a grotesque state. His roommate was, of course, aware that Rob was wacking it like it was going out of style, but while that was mildly normal, there was something horribly wrong about having your member painfully lodged in a glass beaker. But things there all worked out and the beaker replaced his normal jitrag "hidden" underneath his bed. He even jokingly contemplated submitting the beaker half-full of swirled olive oil and rank seed as an art project, but thankfully thought better of it.
This was all foreplay to what would give him his nickname forever. Perusing alt.sex.masturbation after he'd mauled himself one afternoon while his roommate was still out, he came upon a life-changing post: the most realistic sex sensation, ever, guaranteed. Dozens of replies to the post over the next few days verifying that this was indeed the best thing since sliced bread assuaged his fears that this would turn into another Beaker Incident. So for the first time ever, Rob set out to the hardware store. Having picked up a small length of modestly gauged PVC piping, it was off to the supermarket to procure some liver.
When he burst back into his room, rosy-cheeked and visibly excited, his roommate and a few of his friends began to cruelly inquire about why he had some piping and liver. Malda, somewhere between stutter and a mumble, blurted out some half-assed explaination about "Maxwell's Demon" and "passive heating". They laughed and headed on out to "throw some brews back and nail some broads". Malda waited the longest five minutes of his life until he was convinced that they were gone, then snuck down to the microwave to heat up the liver for the longest 45 seconds of his life. Sprinting with the foul organ in tow back to his room, he stuffed the liver into the PVC pipe and then stuffed his foul organ inside of it. So amazing was the sensation that it provided that he copulated with the homebrewed artificial vagina multiple four more times that evening, finally passing out with the semen-laced liver-stuffed pipe leaking all manner of horrible fluids leaking onto his sheets. With a start, he woke in the middle of the night, scrambling furiously to hide the pipe, dispose of the pearly mistake-covered liver, and then wash his sheets. His roommate and his friends stumbled in while he was washing the sheets, and they cruelly inquired if he'd shat the bed or what. He responded that he'd had a bit too much to drink and had puked on it. They gave each other knowing glances, shoved him aside and went back to their respective rooms.
So Malda's love affair with a pipe and some liver continued unabated, and things were going well: in one of his art classes, he'd even managed to tell a (not even remotely attractive) girl that he was a comp sci major and an art minor, and was patting himself on the back for a job well done. He returned to his room high on life and ready for a few rounds with the liverpipe, and so thought nothing of it when his roommate invited him over to dinner at his friend's place. He accepted, thrusted to fruition in his unholy contraption, cleaned up after himself and then took a shower and a nap before getting up to head to dinner over at his roommate's friend's house.
He showed up at six prompt, and they began by cracking open a few Coronas and watching some TV. It was Mexican night, they informed him. Nachos and tacos: what would he like? Tacos, he responded.
At the dinner table (OK, huddled around the TV), Malda was talking with excitement in his voice about how he'd unearthed some of his old disks with shareware classics like Duke Nuke 'Em, Jumpman, Tapper and Commander Keen on them and had been playing them all afternoon. One of the guys snickered and he asked if they weren't into old games.
"*snicker* Hey, uh. Guys. Do these tacos taste a little funky to you?"
"*snicker* Yeah, a little bit."
Rob looked around, not quite getting the gist of it and responded "These taste fine. Why?"
As his roommate burst out laughing, one of the guys said "Yeah. I sort of... ran out of meat and I had to make your tacos with this piece of meat I found in the garbage near your roommate's room. But don't worry. It was all wrapped up and so it wasn't dirty... COMMANDER TACO!!"
It was then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that he realized that he'd been fed a piece of liver that he'd been intimate with only hours before. He ran out of the apartment crying and failed his classes for the rest of the semester, getting enough counseling and living in enough denial afterwords that he managed to graduate in 4 1/2 years like a real trooper.
So why would he choose such an embarassing nickname for a website he decided to run shortly thereafter, you ask? Who knows? Brainfart, Freudian slip, self-deprecation, therapy, anybody's guess, really. On the bright side, it's one less question that those pesky reporters will have to ask him about the meaning behind his name, right?
...not ending up on the E! True Hollywood Story.
But I guess there's time enough for him to knock over liquor stores, get into crack and make a porno, right?
Granted, it's the freshest big outrage in our mind, but if you can hop in the Way Back Machine and head back a couple of years to when Netscape was still a viable contender, there most certainly were "Best Viewed With Netscape" sites to go with the "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" ones. I remember this well because IE had a hard time working with JS 1.1 and I railed for us to make our site a Netscape-only one then much as I rail for my company to make our site an Internet Explorer-only site now. IE may extend the standards, but at least it supports them.
The dream of a fully open web is a beautiful one, but as long as people use GIFs, PDFs, Flash/Shockwave/Real Player/etc., don't bullshit yourself into believing that Microsoft is the company committing the most egregious offenses when it comes to balkanizing the web.
It's where it's at.
The blitz works so-so, but nothing compares to customizing out units and whatnot. As long as you're stuck with locked types, it necessarily cuts down on the strategy of the game.
So it goes.
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
To port this to FORTRAN.Net!
I mean, uh. Well. It is pretty nifty: I'm always interested to take a look at old programs and see what dirty tricks old-school programmers used to cram as much code as they could into the tiny amount of space that they had to work with.
Lunar Lander, please?
Dear god. I'm pretty sure that feeding that post into Office XP would cause it to BSOD. I can't tell if you were being snarky when you typed that or if you really have no idea how foolish that looked.
Oh well.
> For most of it, they rely on proprietary, often incompletely documented APIs in Windows.
Are you talking the parts of.Net that let you talk with what could only be addressed by the MFCs before? Or is it something else?
> Java and its libraries are much more open than C# or.NET.
Ah, of course. Not that C# is an ECMA pending standard and.Net is being implemented by the Gnome group as MONO or anything, right? Because Java is standardized as, uh. By, uh. Exactly where?
And how many hoops did Kaffe, gcj and the other 3rd party implementations of Java have to jump through to get it right?
Not saying that they should flat-out ban other browsers, but working as a web developer, I've had some dreams that roughly approximate that. An increasingly tiny minority of the world uses anything other than IE and, no offense but NS and Opera don't exactly render pages like they should.
Netscape 6.X: why do you insist on reading cascading stylesheets case-sensitively when the spec speficially says you shouldn't? Wonderful.
That said, yes. It is harsh. They should let anyone in that wants to come in, but if it's a matter of being slammed by e-mails screaming for them to make every page render perfectly in a browser that maybe 0.5% of their readership uses, well... what do you want?
Open-source and Linux-friendly, Media Box looks to be about the keenest solution that I can think of for this sort of thing. Aside from the fact that it requires at least a Book PC-sized form factor in your entertainment center and all the heat and noise that comes with it.
Unfortunately, web design? With the advent of WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver and the lot and the decline and fall of startup "civilization", the ability to put together a web page won't get these kids too far (the article doesn't mention anything about programming or administration skills above and beyond simple web design being taught).
Slapping a cheap band-aid on a failing educational system ("The city has a 60% high-school dropout rate") won't fix anything permanently. It's nice that he's helped 72 lost youth find gainful employment, but what of the tens of thousands who haven't receieved aftermarket intervention?
...A&E was running a Biography-type show on Sesame Street, and it got me to thinking: when did (children's) television lose its sense of wonderment and education? Teletubbies and Barney are what passes for kid-friendly "educational" TV these days? No wonder we have to pump our rugrats full of prozac 5 years after they watch that tripe.
ClearType (anti-aliasing fonts; actually looks really swank) is the only good reason I can think of to buy XP.
I suspect that MS is running into the same glass ceiling that it has with Office 97: they've already put out a product that works as well as people expect and the add-ons that they're stuffing in there just aren't exciting enough to motivate people to go out and buy. Thankfully, they can artificially expire the licenses on old software, so they can thank their lawyers more than their R&D for the sales of XP.
Hmm. A crippled toy that's good for a couple things for $350 or a baseline computer that's good for those couple things and everything else for maybe $50 more? It's simple economics: you're going to fail if you don't give the customer what they don't want.
Make this same toy a $99 purchase and now you're looking at something that perhaps not consumers but VARs might be interested in: can it be hacked into a car easily? A train? A plane? If it sells cheaply enough that this desirable, functional piece of equipment can be integrated easily enough, it'll sell. If you're trying to sell a crippled computer for a few bucks less than a real one (even if real means "crappy Compaq" or "E-Machine" (no offense to those of you who own one)) then get ready to take a bath in your investment.
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm wondering how the court's recent ruling against the RIAA will translate into (in)action against these newcomers?
They're hitting the bigtime in terms of usage, but I don't see them having the mindshare (feh on marketroid lingo, but it works) that Napster did. People know Napster and what it's all about: the rest of these are just stopgap solutions to find what they're after. I don't think people can ever be passionate about, say, Kazaa like they were about Napster, but maybe that's just me.
..."While many ISPs remain publicly adamant that broadband subscribers are rock-steady, some say privately that signs of cancellations are emerging. The impact is noticeable in the San Francisco Bay Area, where thousands of high-tech employees have lost their jobs."
And a paragraph or so later... "So far, cancellations haven't shown up in macro-level statistics such as earnings reports."
Hmm. So people who have lost their jos are trimming back on expenses in a tough job market? I'm not sure where the headlines are justified here. A bunch of laid-off workers representing a blip on the radar isn't exactly a trend that I'd bet my shirt on.
Slow news day in the tech market, I guess.
I don't know if you're using Java Script, but we'd run into problems with NS 6.1 (can't speak to Mozilla per se, but it's the same render engine, no?) if'n you ran onEvent handlers or had the JS reset form items for you.
Other times, even pages without event handlers would overlook any form element changes (checkboxes and radio buttons) that the user was making. Ugly stuff to debug.
Rob Malda wasn't exactly an old pro at masturbation (mortified to do it at home ever since his mom found his jitrag and almost had a heart attack) but was working his way up the amateur ranks out at college with not much else to do, having once again failed his saving throw vs. pathetic geekdom.
Even the embarassment that was getting his diminuitive penis lodged in an olive-oil filled beaker was a mere prelude to the incident that would give him his nickname forever. Perusing alt.sex.masturbation after he'd mauled himself one afternoon while his roommate was still out, he came upon a life-changing post: the most realistic sex sensation, ever, guaranteed. Dozens of replies verifying that this was indeed the best thing since sliced bread assuaged his fears that this would turn into another Beaker Incident. So for the first time ever, Rob set out to the hardware store, and then to the supermarket for some liver.
When he burst back into his room, visibly excited, his roommate began to cruelly inquire about why he had some piping and liver. Malda blurted out some half-assed explaination about "Maxwell's Demon" and "passive heating". He laughed and headed on out to "throw some brews back and nail some broads". Malda waited until he was convinced that he was gone, then snuck down to the microwave to heat up the liver. Sprinting with the foul organ in tow back to his room, he stuffed the liver into the PVC pipe and then stuffed his foul organ inside of it. The sensation of his homebrewed artificial vagina was so aazing that he did it four more times that evening, finally passing out with the semen-laced liver-stuffed pipe leaking all manner of horrible fluids leaking onto his sheets. With a start, he woke in the middle of the night, scrambling furiously to hide the pipe, dispose of the seed-covered liver, and then wash his sheets. His roommate and stumbled in while he was washing the sheets, and cruelly inquired if he'd shat the bed or what. He responded that he'd had a bit too much to drink and had puked on it. He shoved him aside and passed out.
So Malda's love affair with a pipe and some liver continued unabated, and things were going well: in one of his art classes, he'd even managed to tell a girl that he was a comp sci major and an art minor. After the 15 second talk, he returned to his room high on life and ready for a few rounds with the liverpipe, and so thought nothing of it when his roommate invited him over to dinner at his friend's place. He accepted, did his pipe, cleaned up and then took a shower before heading out.
He showed up at six prompt, and they began by cracking open a few Coronas and watching some TV. It was Mexican night, they informed him. Nachos and tacos: what would he like? Tacos, he responded.
At the dinner table (OK, huddled around the TV), Malda was talking with excitement in his voice about how he'd unearthed some of his old disks with shareware classics like Duke Nuke 'Em, Jumpman, Tapper and Commander Keen on them and had been playing them all afternoon. One of the guys snickered and he asked if they weren't into old games.
"*snicker* Hey, uh. Guys. Do these tacos taste a little funky to you?"
"*snicker* Yeah, a little bit."
Rob looked around, not quite getting the gist of it and responded "These taste fine. Why?"
As his roommate burst out laughing, one of the guys said "Yeah. I sort of... ran out of meat and I had to make your tacos with this piece of meat I found in the garbage near your roommate's room. But don't worry. It was all wrapped up and so it wasn't dirty... COMMANDER TACO!!"
It was then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that he realized that he'd been fed a piece of liver that he'd been intimate with only hours before. He ran out of the apartment crying and failed his classes for the rest of the semester, eventually finding the he managed to graduate in 4 1/2 years.
Now you reporters know, so quit asking, and move on to questions about VA Li^H^H Software already.
Someone should have told them that when they were aiming for the (non-existant) "sub-notebook" market, their foot was directly in the line of their shot. It doesn't matter how sexy your technology is: if you don't give people what they want or do a job better than the other guy, you'll be out on your ass. CPUs don't whore enough power (compared to, say... a display?) that a low-power CPU makes that much of a difference. That and the fact that no one really wanted a "sub-notebook" as notebooks approached their form factor and the smaller Palm Pilots/Pocket PCs are just, well... sexier and more useful because of their increased portability.
Cool-running CPUs might have made sense for renderfarms and server rooms, but IT departments have already invested in cooling systems, and will the savings for building new hypothetically cooling-free server rooms offset the extra servers you have to purchase because of the Transmeta's sluggish performance?
Not to be all "been there, done that", but I know guys who were doing it in downtown NYC a year and a half ago. Amazing how many Wall Street corporations can be so freaking clueless about segmenting off the generically insecure portions of their network.
Sad to think that we'll have an entire generation of hackers growing up who have no idea what Tone Loc is just because wireless networks are so much of a sexier, easier target than open modem banks, isn't it?
So I'm not the only one who remembers Oberon.
Oh, Niklas Wirth, where are you when we need you?
Something about tanks being defeated by pikemen and cruise missiles being shot out of the sky... by archers.
I'll keep on keeping on with SMAC until they get a patch out to address these blindingly obvious issues.
I'm still waiting for net-playable Nethack.
Until then, I suppose MAngband will have to do. It's good and all, but I never got into Angband like I did Nethack.
Of course, there's the "state-sanctioned" version of how Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda got his most peculiar nickname ("'CmdrTaco' is a reference to a Dave Barry article where he lists places not to take a date. Among them is any place called 'The Commander Taco' or something like that.") and then there's the real reason for said nickname.
In order to explain it, we'll need to hop into the time machine and step back a few years to when Mr. Malda was still but a wee pup in college. So I'd like to take you back to the early 90's.
Rob was fresh out of Catholic high school, with dozens of years of Catholic guilt impressed upon and built up inside him. He'd snored his way through high school, tinkering around with nothing more than computers. Fact of the matter is that most girls don't like geeks and he was too repressed to figure out a way to approach those of the fairer sex. For that matter, he was even afraid to touch himself. Based on what little sex ed had been taught in school, he knew better than to engage in premarital copulation or let his seed touch the ground, lest he burn in hell or suffer the fate of Onan. It wasn't the bullying and the scornful glances that were the worst torture of high school, it was waking up in the middle of the night, his genitals throbbing, gritting his teeth, and clenching his perineum to abate the oncoming rush of verboten relief (after his mom found his stained underwear once, he had learned better).
But college represented the ultimate to a scrawny kid who wasn't quite sure how to play well with others. It was the chance to meet completely new people and to completely reinvent himself, a rebirth of sorts. And what kind of rebirth would it be? The kind that meant he would (finally) get chicks. Catholic guilt be damned! He'd heard that throbbing in his loins loud and clear and it was finally time to do something about it. But how? The answer was clear: in addition to the obvious major in computer science, he'd pick up a minor in art. Women would look at him and see not only the provider instincts that comp sci implied, but a sensitive heart and a mind with a flair for aesthetics as well, a heart with art in it. What lady could possibly resist such a formidable combination?
Unfortunately, all of them. A little scribble on paper saying you know art is no replacement for the ability to clearly communicate that you love it as he was finding out. Things at college were no different than in high school. The girls were still hung up on the football players, leaving him struggling to make a saving throw vs. pathetic geekdom. He discovered the concept of alcohol, figuring that cracking a sixer and his inhibitions meant that he'd be cracking their legs, but again, he turned into nothing but an incoherent mess.
A year went by and no luck, aside from ridding himself of some Catholic guilt: the liberal nature of campus and the wonders of the nascent world wide web meant that with a little (very little) peer interaction skirting around the subject and lonely hours in the dead of night on weekends when his roommates were out presumably dipping their wicks meant that he'd finally been able to overcome his irrational fear of masturbation. And boy, did he ever.
Saying that he took to it like a fish to water was an understatement: he masturbated as if he honestly believed that if he did it enough, he'd win a prize. Unfortunately discovering Usenet, he learned all manner of deviant masturbatory practices, of course convincing himself that it was all OK and that this was just practice for when he finally met Ms. Right, etc., etc. You can justify some things to yourself, but there shouldn't be any way to rationally justify getting your penis lodged in a beaker. Stupid stupid! What was he thinking? But the guy on alt.sex.masturbation had said that the sensation of a penis displacing a beaker full of warm olive oil was the most "realistic" feeling ever, so who was he to doubt? It was a heart pounding few minutes waiting to return to his normal, pitifully small flaccid state, hoping that his roommate wouldn't return to find him in such a grotesque state. His roommate was, of course, aware that Rob was wacking it like it was going out of style, but while that was mildly normal, there was something horribly wrong about having your member painfully lodged in a glass beaker. But things there all worked out and the beaker replaced his normal jitrag "hidden" underneath his bed. He even jokingly contemplated submitting the beaker half-full of swirled olive oil and rank seed as an art project, but thankfully thought better of it.
This was all foreplay to what would give him his nickname forever. Perusing alt.sex.masturbation after he'd mauled himself one afternoon while his roommate was still out, he came upon a life-changing post: the most realistic sex sensation, ever, guaranteed. Dozens of replies to the post over the next few days verifying that this was indeed the best thing since sliced bread assuaged his fears that this would turn into another Beaker Incident. So for the first time ever, Rob set out to the hardware store. Having picked up a small length of modestly gauged PVC piping, it was off to the supermarket to procure some liver.
When he burst back into his room, rosy-cheeked and visibly excited, his roommate and a few of his friends began to cruelly inquire about why he had some piping and liver. Malda, somewhere between stutter and a mumble, blurted out some half-assed explaination about "Maxwell's Demon" and "passive heating". They laughed and headed on out to "throw some brews back and nail some broads". Malda waited the longest five minutes of his life until he was convinced that they were gone, then snuck down to the microwave to heat up the liver for the longest 45 seconds of his life. Sprinting with the foul organ in tow back to his room, he stuffed the liver into the PVC pipe and then stuffed his foul organ inside of it. So amazing was the sensation that it provided that he copulated with the homebrewed artificial vagina multiple four more times that evening, finally passing out with the semen-laced liver-stuffed pipe leaking all manner of horrible fluids leaking onto his sheets. With a start, he woke in the middle of the night, scrambling furiously to hide the pipe, dispose of the pearly mistake-covered liver, and then wash his sheets. His roommate and his friends stumbled in while he was washing the sheets, and they cruelly inquired if he'd shat the bed or what. He responded that he'd had a bit too much to drink and had puked on it. They gave each other knowing glances, shoved him aside and went back to their respective rooms.
So Malda's love affair with a pipe and some liver continued unabated, and things were going well: in one of his art classes, he'd even managed to tell a (not even remotely attractive) girl that he was a comp sci major and an art minor, and was patting himself on the back for a job well done. He returned to his room high on life and ready for a few rounds with the liverpipe, and so thought nothing of it when his roommate invited him over to dinner at his friend's place. He accepted, thrusted to fruition in his unholy contraption, cleaned up after himself and then took a shower and a nap before getting up to head to dinner over at his roommate's friend's house.
He showed up at six prompt, and they began by cracking open a few Coronas and watching some TV. It was Mexican night, they informed him. Nachos and tacos: what would he like? Tacos, he responded.
At the dinner table (OK, huddled around the TV), Malda was talking with excitement in his voice about how he'd unearthed some of his old disks with shareware classics like Duke Nuke 'Em, Jumpman, Tapper and Commander Keen on them and had been playing them all afternoon. One of the guys snickered and he asked if they weren't into old games.
"*snicker* Hey, uh. Guys. Do these tacos taste a little funky to you?"
"*snicker* Yeah, a little bit."
Rob looked around, not quite getting the gist of it and responded "These taste fine. Why?"
As his roommate burst out laughing, one of the guys said "Yeah. I sort of... ran out of meat and I had to make your tacos with this piece of meat I found in the garbage near your roommate's room. But don't worry. It was all wrapped up and so it wasn't dirty... COMMANDER TACO!!"
It was then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that he realized that he'd been fed a piece of liver that he'd been intimate with only hours before. He ran out of the apartment crying and failed his classes for the rest of the semester, getting enough counseling and living in enough denial afterwords that he managed to graduate in 4 1/2 years like a real trooper.
So why would he choose such an embarassing nickname for a website he decided to run shortly thereafter, you ask? Who knows? Brainfart, Freudian slip, self-deprecation, therapy, anybody's guess, really. On the bright side, it's one less question that those pesky reporters will have to ask him about the meaning behind his name, right?
...not ending up on the E! True Hollywood Story.
But I guess there's time enough for him to knock over liquor stores, get into crack and make a porno, right?
Granted, it's the freshest big outrage in our mind, but if you can hop in the Way Back Machine and head back a couple of years to when Netscape was still a viable contender, there most certainly were "Best Viewed With Netscape" sites to go with the "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" ones. I remember this well because IE had a hard time working with JS 1.1 and I railed for us to make our site a Netscape-only one then much as I rail for my company to make our site an Internet Explorer-only site now. IE may extend the standards, but at least it supports them.
The dream of a fully open web is a beautiful one, but as long as people use GIFs, PDFs, Flash/Shockwave/Real Player/etc., don't bullshit yourself into believing that Microsoft is the company committing the most egregious offenses when it comes to balkanizing the web.
It's where it's at.
The blitz works so-so, but nothing compares to customizing out units and whatnot. As long as you're stuck with locked types, it necessarily cuts down on the strategy of the game.
So it goes.
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
To port this to FORTRAN.Net!
I mean, uh. Well. It is pretty nifty: I'm always interested to take a look at old programs and see what dirty tricks old-school programmers used to cram as much code as they could into the tiny amount of space that they had to work with.
Lunar Lander, please?
Dear god. I'm pretty sure that feeding that post into Office XP would cause it to BSOD. I can't tell if you were being snarky when you typed that or if you really have no idea how foolish that looked.
Oh well.
> For most of it, they rely on proprietary, often incompletely documented APIs in Windows.
.Net that let you talk with what could only be addressed by the MFCs before? Or is it something else?
.NET.
.Net is being implemented by the Gnome group as MONO or anything, right? Because Java is standardized as, uh. By, uh. Exactly where?
Are you talking the parts of
> Java and its libraries are much more open than C# or
Ah, of course. Not that C# is an ECMA pending standard and
And how many hoops did Kaffe, gcj and the other 3rd party implementations of Java have to jump through to get it right?
Not saying that they should flat-out ban other browsers, but working as a web developer, I've had some dreams that roughly approximate that. An increasingly tiny minority of the world uses anything other than IE and, no offense but NS and Opera don't exactly render pages like they should.
Netscape 6.X: why do you insist on reading cascading stylesheets case-sensitively when the spec speficially says you shouldn't? Wonderful.
That said, yes. It is harsh. They should let anyone in that wants to come in, but if it's a matter of being slammed by e-mails screaming for them to make every page render perfectly in a browser that maybe 0.5% of their readership uses, well... what do you want?
Open-source and Linux-friendly, Media Box looks to be about the keenest solution that I can think of for this sort of thing. Aside from the fact that it requires at least a Book PC-sized form factor in your entertainment center and all the heat and noise that comes with it.
Unfortunately, web design? With the advent of WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver and the lot and the decline and fall of startup "civilization", the ability to put together a web page won't get these kids too far (the article doesn't mention anything about programming or administration skills above and beyond simple web design being taught).
Slapping a cheap band-aid on a failing educational system ("The city has a 60% high-school dropout rate") won't fix anything permanently. It's nice that he's helped 72 lost youth find gainful employment, but what of the tens of thousands who haven't receieved aftermarket intervention?
...A&E was running a Biography-type show on Sesame Street, and it got me to thinking: when did (children's) television lose its sense of wonderment and education? Teletubbies and Barney are what passes for kid-friendly "educational" TV these days? No wonder we have to pump our rugrats full of prozac 5 years after they watch that tripe.
ClearType (anti-aliasing fonts; actually looks really swank) is the only good reason I can think of to buy XP.
I suspect that MS is running into the same glass ceiling that it has with Office 97: they've already put out a product that works as well as people expect and the add-ons that they're stuffing in there just aren't exciting enough to motivate people to go out and buy. Thankfully, they can artificially expire the licenses on old software, so they can thank their lawyers more than their R&D for the sales of XP.
Hmm. A crippled toy that's good for a couple things for $350 or a baseline computer that's good for those couple things and everything else for maybe $50 more? It's simple economics: you're going to fail if you don't give the customer what they don't want.
Make this same toy a $99 purchase and now you're looking at something that perhaps not consumers but VARs might be interested in: can it be hacked into a car easily? A train? A plane? If it sells cheaply enough that this desirable, functional piece of equipment can be integrated easily enough, it'll sell. If you're trying to sell a crippled computer for a few bucks less than a real one (even if real means "crappy Compaq" or "E-Machine" (no offense to those of you who own one)) then get ready to take a bath in your investment.
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.