Syncing bookmarks is a product. As is connecting Evolution to an Exchange server. As is pretty much anything that makes people's lives easier. At the moment there is no other product doing the job, and as their pledge page shows there are tens of thousands of people prepared to pay for such a service.
Sure anybody can do the same thing, they've been able to for all the years Xmarks has been around. But they haven't.
Sure Google can do a Firefox version of their sync, or Firefox can do a Google version of their sync, but they haven't. Where is their incentive?
Patenting software is a stupid idea, and I'm glad they didn't. It wouldn't legal in Europe anyway. What they did instead is keep adding features. Support more browsers, start backing up passwords, then history. Harder work for them but fantastic for us.
If they go bust in a year, I haven't lost my $10. There will have been an additional year of development work and I will have had an additional year of usage at less that 3c a day. Bargain.
Best reply I've seen. I blame Apple for promoting stories about people knocking up apps in their bedroom and becoming millionaires overnight. We can run Gimp and OpenOffice for free, with millions of lines of code, yet somebody puts up a white GIF and calls it a "Night light" and expects everybody to cough up cash for it. Ridiculous.
The iPhones apps were a fad, I mean who wouldn't want to turn their brand new phone into a "light sabre" to show off to their mates down the pub? However, 99% of the apps are crap and under any other circumstances would be freeware. Even the games, the most labour intensive labour of love, what percentage of them are better than all the Flash games you can find for free littered all over the Internet?
The software I've purchased for Symbian have actually had some effort put into them, the last one being Chess Genius. Where I live, plenty of kids own iPhones and so courtarro's comment about many of the 'pirates' not being old enough to own a credit card may well be true.
[Obama] has ignored one of the biggest issues facing the Internet: the rapid depletion of IPv4 Internet addresses and the imminent need for carriers and content providers to adopt IPv6
Not only are we not really running out, but it's nowhere near one of the biggest issues facing the Internet. Bigger ones would include: * the 95%+ of email traffic being spam * all the phishing and malware exploits * net neutrality * the shift to video as a medium, and bandwidth * media companies prosecuting random citizens * governments starting to cut people off from the Internet (US, France, UK)
IP6 is good for the reasons kestasjk mentions, but hyping it up as such a crisis loses the author credibility.
Xmarks and Adblock are the two plugins I will instantly install on a new browser (well the latter for Firefox). Simple, reliable, cross-browser, does passwords as well as bookmarks, and over the years have shown they have no intention of misusing my personal information.
A fantastic plugin that has greatly improved my browsing enjoyment. It will be sorely missed.
As betterunixthanunix says above, we've already seen the abject failure of the Clipper chip in the US. In the UK they tried to pass a "key escrow" bill which would have made it illegal to send anything encrypted without lodging a copy of the key with the government first. Campaigning got this bill defeated several times, and so instead we got RIPA which means law enforcement can oblige you to hand over decryption keys (or you go straight to jail).
Person A has a great bachelor pad, drives a sports car, and has more money than he knows how to spend. Person B is happily married with two children. Who is the more successful? If you measure your happiness linearly with the amount of cash in the bank, then you know what you have to do to make yourself happy. Just be prepared to make a lot of sacrifices to get there.
It's perfectly easy to make plenty of money without screwing people over if you have good sales skills and have something people want. As skyride says, you just need to find that niche. I have a friend who set up an innocuous business which I didn't think would make much money, and was surprised to find it turned over 150k (mostly profit).
It's just the people on this forum being arseholes. Imagine you announced that you were going to learn French, and somebody told you that to speak successfully you would have to "speak early, and speak often". So you try a sentence shortly after beginning and everybody jumped down your throat and said "correct grammar must be learned from the beginning, it's not something you can learn afterwards" and that they are severely disappointed in you. Many people criticise you for announcing you can learn French, and are pretty sure you must be retarded as you can't already speak fluently after a few days. A number of people announce they can speak a dozen different foreign languages, and French is the easiest and they they didn't even have to learn it, it just comes to them naturally from nowhere.
There are always people that want to drag you down. See the Linus vs Tanenbaum threads, and if Linus had listen to this lot we wouldn't be having this conversation now.
If it's a prototype why not? It's a Rails app for goodness sake, nobody is going to run that in real life. Once it is fully featured then others will rewrite other versions. They just have to keep knocking it about and get a version that has all the features people need. Sod security for now. It's only a demo. And it's touted as having privacy and control over your own data, not the OpenBSD equivalent of Facebook.
They may lack experience, but they've got something out of the door unlike you so if you want something like Disapora then give them useful feedback or STFU and ignore the app. All this negativity is really annoying.
His point is wrong then. Security is NOT the major feature of Diaspora, it is privacy. The fact you host your own data, and can change it and delete it when you want to. That your personal data cannot be harvested and used for advertising or other purposes without your permission.
It shouldn't be there in the beginning, in the core architecture, get something working and keep knocking it about until it is something people want to use. Then worry about polishing it. It should be totally secure for the 1.0 release, not the 0.01 release.
Also completely confused by the weird feedback on Slashdot. Once the model has stabilised, an API will be fixed and loads of Diaspora clients and servers will come about written in all different languages. The current implementation is irrelevant, it will be trashed and rewritten at some point anyway.
Wow, that is SO wrong. What you are saying is that one company got a right technique wrong, so you should use a wrong technique to get it right?
It's a brand new concept, the prototype is going to RAPIDLY evolve, get trashed and rewritten, features changed. You treat the pre-alpha like a production release and focus on bug fixing every little thing when you will probably rewrite it a month down the line, then the project is dead.
There are some flaws in your argument. For instance, there will be a lead time in X launching, and Y being able to reverse engineer and then launch the product. You would gear your marketing and sales forecasting to take this into account. By the time Y is launched, X then announces a new feature only available for X.
What will happen is that instead of Company X using their money to pursue legal battles, they will instead create the iPod2 to get a steal over their competitor Y. Company Y will then have to develop an even better iPod3. The public would then be forced to choose between ever improving versions of the iPod.
I would agree that having the data accessible in a known format is the primary target. If the government standardises on ODT for instance, then a council can choose between MS Word and Open Office. Or the council can just standardise on Open Office but individual workers could install their own copy of MS Word if they feel more comfortable with it. Or Abiword (and a hundred other word-processors) can add full support for ODT and suddenly a new OS alternative becomes available as a government standard. Same with all other government data, a standard well-defined XML format can be published.
Controlling the data means defining the format, and the access and authentication mechanisms. There are plenty of IETF standards for the latter. Eg Webdav, Caldav. This way, the government could put out to tender a back-up solution, and it could be written completely independently of any knowledge of their internal systems outside of the published XML format and allowed access mechanisms.
I was thinking same. If I had IE8 I would automatically want to download IE9 as I would assume it was a bug-fix version of IE8 (bit like each previous version, which has nothing new but lots of critical flaws fixes rolled into one release).
As much as I dislike religion. I've come to accept that probably for a long time to come, we are going to be stuck with it.
Where is your entrepreneurial spirit? Don't just accept it, embrace it and start your own religion! You don't need to be a Pope, a Rupert Murdoch, or Ron Hubbard to have the unwashed masses following you. Remember, prey on people's fears and the best recruits are the most vulnerable ones (widows, alcoholics, etc). Not only is it a good money spinner but you get laid more too.
Eh? I would have voted for them if they had a candidate in my area, and I'm nearly 37. I'm also very smart. Hmmm I've just looked at your comment history, and you have a long history of calling everybody but yourself an idiot. From now on I'll just ignore you.
BitZtream is obviously a little retarded himself. At the moment some Swedish residents have trouble going around and beating up people that are gay/black/muslim/etc, it's not the kind of thing people turn a blind eye to. So those that wish to are obliged to vote for a suitable candidate that will help them. On the other hand the whole country is quite happily pirating digital material to their heart's content, so there is less impetus to vote Pirate. Personally I think the Pirate Party is an excellent idea, and their members quite well reasoned, however trying to get a single-issue party into any national parliament is incredibly difficult.
I don't think judgecorp can count. The idea of the 2 step authentication is that there are two steps. This means that just having your password is not enough. It also means that just having your mobile phone is not enough either.
This means that if somebody steals your phone, they still can't get in as they don't have your password.
Valve and ID have pretty much redefined copyright law in their own way, much to the benefit of consumers and society as a whole. I can buy my ID games through Steam, and I know the moment I buy a new computer I can be running all my games again in a couple of mouse clicks. No complicated DRM, limited number of installs, needing my CD in the drive, or any other BS. It IS DRM but Valve have slowly earned the trust of users over the years.
Then after a number of years, when sales have long since peaked and dropped, ID release the source code. This fulfills the social contract whereupon we give copyright for a number of years on the software after which it drops into the public domain. A DRM-ridden binary blob from a long-defunct software house is hardly fulfilling their end of the bargain. Looking at the source code also gets people interested in writing graphics code or games, can be used for educational purposes, some of the useful algorithms can be re-purposed (and not necessarily in the same domain, it could be anywhere), and it can give a new lease of life to the game through enthusiasts.
I know if I was a games programmer who I would want to work for. As it is, I'll just be a satisfied customer.
Slashdot Mirror
Syncing bookmarks is a product. As is connecting Evolution to an Exchange server. As is pretty much anything that makes people's lives easier. At the moment there is no other product doing the job, and as their pledge page shows there are tens of thousands of people prepared to pay for such a service.
Sure anybody can do the same thing, they've been able to for all the years Xmarks has been around. But they haven't.
Sure Google can do a Firefox version of their sync, or Firefox can do a Google version of their sync, but they haven't. Where is their incentive?
Patenting software is a stupid idea, and I'm glad they didn't. It wouldn't legal in Europe anyway. What they did instead is keep adding features. Support more browsers, start backing up passwords, then history. Harder work for them but fantastic for us.
If they go bust in a year, I haven't lost my $10. There will have been an additional year of development work and I will have had an additional year of usage at less that 3c a day. Bargain.
Phillip.
Best reply I've seen. I blame Apple for promoting stories about people knocking up apps in their bedroom and becoming millionaires overnight. We can run Gimp and OpenOffice for free, with millions of lines of code, yet somebody puts up a white GIF and calls it a "Night light" and expects everybody to cough up cash for it. Ridiculous.
The iPhones apps were a fad, I mean who wouldn't want to turn their brand new phone into a "light sabre" to show off to their mates down the pub? However, 99% of the apps are crap and under any other circumstances would be freeware. Even the games, the most labour intensive labour of love, what percentage of them are better than all the Flash games you can find for free littered all over the Internet?
The software I've purchased for Symbian have actually had some effort put into them, the last one being Chess Genius. Where I live, plenty of kids own iPhones and so courtarro's comment about many of the 'pirates' not being old enough to own a credit card may well be true.
Phillip.
Neither is IPv6 infinite.
Phillip.
[Obama] has ignored one of the biggest issues facing the Internet: the rapid depletion of IPv4 Internet addresses and the imminent need for carriers and content providers to adopt IPv6
Not only are we not really running out, but it's nowhere near one of the biggest issues facing the Internet. Bigger ones would include:
* the 95%+ of email traffic being spam
* all the phishing and malware exploits
* net neutrality
* the shift to video as a medium, and bandwidth
* media companies prosecuting random citizens
* governments starting to cut people off from the Internet (US, France, UK)
IP6 is good for the reasons kestasjk mentions, but hyping it up as such a crisis loses the author credibility.
Phillip.
Xmarks and Adblock are the two plugins I will instantly install on a new browser (well the latter for Firefox). Simple, reliable, cross-browser, does passwords as well as bookmarks, and over the years have shown they have no intention of misusing my personal information.
A fantastic plugin that has greatly improved my browsing enjoyment. It will be sorely missed.
Phillip.
How many normal ATM machines have you seen hacked and spitting out USD remotely?
Phillip.
As betterunixthanunix says above, we've already seen the abject failure of the Clipper chip in the US. In the UK they tried to pass a "key escrow" bill which would have made it illegal to send anything encrypted without lodging a copy of the key with the government first. Campaigning got this bill defeated several times, and so instead we got RIPA which means law enforcement can oblige you to hand over decryption keys (or you go straight to jail).
Huge amount of material here:
http://www.fipr.org/rip/
Phillip.
Person A has a great bachelor pad, drives a sports car, and has more money than he knows how to spend. Person B is happily married with two children. Who is the more successful? If you measure your happiness linearly with the amount of cash in the bank, then you know what you have to do to make yourself happy. Just be prepared to make a lot of sacrifices to get there.
It's perfectly easy to make plenty of money without screwing people over if you have good sales skills and have something people want. As skyride says, you just need to find that niche. I have a friend who set up an innocuous business which I didn't think would make much money, and was surprised to find it turned over 150k (mostly profit).
Phillip
Why Trident Media Guard? Read my blog post here:
http://www.rivierareview.com/articles/france-starts-persecuting-internet-users/
Phillip.
It's just the people on this forum being arseholes. Imagine you announced that you were going to learn French, and somebody told you that to speak successfully you would have to "speak early, and speak often". So you try a sentence shortly after beginning and everybody jumped down your throat and said "correct grammar must be learned from the beginning, it's not something you can learn afterwards" and that they are severely disappointed in you. Many people criticise you for announcing you can learn French, and are pretty sure you must be retarded as you can't already speak fluently after a few days. A number of people announce they can speak a dozen different foreign languages, and French is the easiest and they they didn't even have to learn it, it just comes to them naturally from nowhere.
There are always people that want to drag you down. See the Linus vs Tanenbaum threads, and if Linus had listen to this lot we wouldn't be having this conversation now.
Phillip.
If it's a prototype why not? It's a Rails app for goodness sake, nobody is going to run that in real life. Once it is fully featured then others will rewrite other versions. They just have to keep knocking it about and get a version that has all the features people need. Sod security for now. It's only a demo. And it's touted as having privacy and control over your own data, not the OpenBSD equivalent of Facebook.
They may lack experience, but they've got something out of the door unlike you so if you want something like Disapora then give them useful feedback or STFU and ignore the app. All this negativity is really annoying.
Phillip.
His point is wrong then. Security is NOT the major feature of Diaspora, it is privacy. The fact you host your own data, and can change it and delete it when you want to. That your personal data cannot be harvested and used for advertising or other purposes without your permission.
It shouldn't be there in the beginning, in the core architecture, get something working and keep knocking it about until it is something people want to use. Then worry about polishing it. It should be totally secure for the 1.0 release, not the 0.01 release.
Phillip.
Also completely confused by the weird feedback on Slashdot. Once the model has stabilised, an API will be fixed and loads of Diaspora clients and servers will come about written in all different languages. The current implementation is irrelevant, it will be trashed and rewritten at some point anyway.
Phillip.
I thought the main feature was privacy, not security? It fails in your opinion, but you are obviously not the target audience.
Phillip.
Wow, that is SO wrong. What you are saying is that one company got a right technique wrong, so you should use a wrong technique to get it right?
It's a brand new concept, the prototype is going to RAPIDLY evolve, get trashed and rewritten, features changed. You treat the pre-alpha like a production release and focus on bug fixing every little thing when you will probably rewrite it a month down the line, then the project is dead.
Phillip.
There are some flaws in your argument. For instance, there will be a lead time in X launching, and Y being able to reverse engineer and then launch the product. You would gear your marketing and sales forecasting to take this into account. By the time Y is launched, X then announces a new feature only available for X.
What will happen is that instead of Company X using their money to pursue legal battles, they will instead create the iPod2 to get a steal over their competitor Y. Company Y will then have to develop an even better iPod3. The public would then be forced to choose between ever improving versions of the iPod.
Phillip.
I would agree that having the data accessible in a known format is the primary target. If the government standardises on ODT for instance, then a council can choose between MS Word and Open Office. Or the council can just standardise on Open Office but individual workers could install their own copy of MS Word if they feel more comfortable with it. Or Abiword (and a hundred other word-processors) can add full support for ODT and suddenly a new OS alternative becomes available as a government standard. Same with all other government data, a standard well-defined XML format can be published.
Controlling the data means defining the format, and the access and authentication mechanisms. There are plenty of IETF standards for the latter. Eg Webdav, Caldav. This way, the government could put out to tender a back-up solution, and it could be written completely independently of any knowledge of their internal systems outside of the published XML format and allowed access mechanisms.
Phillip.
I was thinking same. If I had IE8 I would automatically want to download IE9 as I would assume it was a bug-fix version of IE8 (bit like each previous version, which has nothing new but lots of critical flaws fixes rolled into one release).
Phillip.
As much as I dislike religion. I've come to accept that probably for a long time to come, we are going to be stuck with it.
Where is your entrepreneurial spirit? Don't just accept it, embrace it and start your own religion! You don't need to be a Pope, a Rupert Murdoch, or Ron Hubbard to have the unwashed masses following you. Remember, prey on people's fears and the best recruits are the most vulnerable ones (widows, alcoholics, etc). Not only is it a good money spinner but you get laid more too.
Phillip.
It brings up some interesting thoughts on science and how it interacts with religion.
That's all well and dandy. It's how religion interacts with science that is the problem.
Phillip.
Eh? I would have voted for them if they had a candidate in my area, and I'm nearly 37. I'm also very smart. Hmmm I've just looked at your comment history, and you have a long history of calling everybody but yourself an idiot. From now on I'll just ignore you.
Phillip.
BitZtream is obviously a little retarded himself. At the moment some Swedish residents have trouble going around and beating up people that are gay/black/muslim/etc, it's not the kind of thing people turn a blind eye to. So those that wish to are obliged to vote for a suitable candidate that will help them. On the other hand the whole country is quite happily pirating digital material to their heart's content, so there is less impetus to vote Pirate. Personally I think the Pirate Party is an excellent idea, and their members quite well reasoned, however trying to get a single-issue party into any national parliament is incredibly difficult.
Phillip.
I don't think judgecorp can count. The idea of the 2 step authentication is that there are two steps. This means that just having your password is not enough. It also means that just having your mobile phone is not enough either.
This means that if somebody steals your phone, they still can't get in as they don't have your password.
Phillip.
Valve and ID have pretty much redefined copyright law in their own way, much to the benefit of consumers and society as a whole. I can buy my ID games through Steam, and I know the moment I buy a new computer I can be running all my games again in a couple of mouse clicks. No complicated DRM, limited number of installs, needing my CD in the drive, or any other BS. It IS DRM but Valve have slowly earned the trust of users over the years.
Then after a number of years, when sales have long since peaked and dropped, ID release the source code. This fulfills the social contract whereupon we give copyright for a number of years on the software after which it drops into the public domain. A DRM-ridden binary blob from a long-defunct software house is hardly fulfilling their end of the bargain. Looking at the source code also gets people interested in writing graphics code or games, can be used for educational purposes, some of the useful algorithms can be re-purposed (and not necessarily in the same domain, it could be anywhere), and it can give a new lease of life to the game through enthusiasts.
I know if I was a games programmer who I would want to work for. As it is, I'll just be a satisfied customer.
Phillip.
Why is his reputation scarred?
Phillip.