Re:People in the Bay Area say there *was* a bubble
on
Dot-Com Bubble v2.0?
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· Score: 1
Your analysis seems sound, but I would add that VC's anxious to make a buck might push some of these companies public in the next six months to try to do damage control on their bad investments. Stay away...
People who did nothing AND people who did a lot
on
Dot-Com Bubble v2.0?
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· Score: 1
So what you are saying is that people who didn't do anything ended up with nothing?
Nope. I'm saying the good, the bad, and the ugly all got hit with it. People who were talented and people who weren't. People who worked their ass off and made fantastic things, and people who just pretended and got by for a while. It's not a shame that the fakers lost out, but a lot of really hardworking, bright people did too.
International treaties are just goddamned pieces of paper.
International financial and legal treaties are at work every day, managing everything from currency exchange to sale of goods to extradition. They're agreements. Sometimes agreements end swiftly, sometimes they last for a very long time.
People in the Bay Area say there *was* a bubble
on
Dot-Com Bubble v2.0?
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· Score: 2, Informative
There was no dotcom bubble and there won't be a new one.
There was a tremendous bubble. I was there. I did work for companies that were almost entirely virtual. There was no "there" there. It was all hot air. I know plenty of people who suddenly had fantastic jobs and were living a lavish lifestyle, only to be out on the street looking for a job when the boom dropped on the bubble. Bay Area traffic noticeably thinned for at least two or three years. It definitely was a bubble, and when it popped, the effect was very painful to a lot of people.
My guess is that while the average person on the street doesn't know the entire dotcom tale, they do know that there was a tremendous upsurge in the NASDAQ for a period of time, and that it was fueled by rampant speculation. This isn't the same thing as Starbucks overextending itself by opening 54 shops in Dubuque, rather than the 52 it can actually support. There was a huge outlay of capital, there were companies going public every day, and the stock market had lost all rationality. Even non-techies could see this. All they had to do was watch the news.
This time it is different, in the sense that all of the Web 2.0 companies aren't going public. As another poster has already mentioned, this time it's private capital chasing after some good and many bad investments. When the majority of these companies die, John Q Investor won't take it in the shorts this time. In that sense, the Web 2.0 investment phenomenon is a lot closer to the normal course of business events you describe.
Managers seem to confuse websites (which aer an information source) and advertising (which primarily has to grab people's attention).
Excellent point. There's also a helluva lot of "if our competitors are putting orange starbursts on their websites, we should be doing it too!" Further proof that most execs are faking it, just like the rest of us. They just get paid more and have golden parachutes in case they fail.;-)
This is probably an excellent resource, but at this point it is one of many. The persistent problem is not developers, but clients. Internal or external, it doesn't matter. When marketing managers and O-level executives have a resource that tells them that they need to stop making decisions based on what their favorite colors are, or what websites their kids like to visit, we'll all be better off. In the mean time, at least there's Don't Make Me Think. But if the decisionmakers who have the pursestrings don't know what they're doing, a lot of the best practices advocated by developers never sees the light of day.
I sincerely hope you're right, and that the safe harbor provision is as strong as you think it is. Personally I think it would be great if a big media player were to sue YouTube/Google for infringement, only to have the safe harbor save them. My primary point was that only very rarely is anything truly iron-clad in the law, particularly when you're dealing with tectonic shifts in the marketplace, and the huge amounts of money thereby involved. Big Media can bring enormous legal resources to bear, as we've already seen with Napster, Grokster, et al.
Google has been very successful in the courtroom. They have a crack legal team, and I think if anyone could defend the safe harbor provisions, it would be them. But I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that they'll succeed, either.
The only way that a copyright lawsuit will happen here is if youtube doesn't take down the episode.
That may not be true. The DMCA safe harbor for ISPs is not blanket protection. If more an more of the content provided on YouTube winds up being material posted without the copyright holder's approval, copyright holders could argue that there is *so much* unapproved material on YouTube that it is too much of a burden on copyright holders to monitor YouTube for violations. My guess is that if anyone does take YouTube/Google to court, they will use this theory. Sure, YouTube will act on DMCA takedown notices, but if more and more of YouTube content becomes saturated with copyright violations, and YouTube/Google starts to actually make money through Google advertising tools, the aggregate effect is arguably that Google is making money by showing vast quantities of unauthorized reproductions of copyrighted material.
The safe harbor provision of the DMCA has limits. Expect Big Media to exploit those limits if at all possible.
But is the AC's attitude substantially different to a regular viewer of Fox News?
I take your point. The American man who gets all his news from Fox and the Chinese man who gets all his news from official media are not terribly far apart.
Watching TV to get your news is the first problem. It is an inherently emotional medium unsuited to disinterested analysis. Second, getting all of your news from one source is never a good idea. Third, Fox may be on the right and official Chinese media may be on the left, but neither is a stranger to jingoism.
It would be an interesting experiment to watch one month of only Fox news, then only one month of only official Chinese news. Of course, at the end of it all, you might be ready to drive a drill through your brain.
... so I'm able to make this post. I don't have much time though. He'll be back and cracking the whip again real soon.
The original Neocons were all Jews who abandoned the New Left.They were(and are) hated by their former comrades.
NeoCon is one of those terms whose meaning is little known by the sheep who bandy it about parrotting their Stalinist slavemasters.
Yes, Neoconservatism originated with Jewish intellectuals who wanted to break with the Left. My point is that arguing against Neoconservative policies doesn't make you an anti-Semite. It is also worth noting that there are plenty of people who buy into Neoconservative arguments who are not Jewish. The Vulcans (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and arguably Rice) aren't Jewish. Ronald Reagan wasn't Jewish. Neither was Jeane Kirkpatrick. They both, however, put Neoconservative principles to use during the Reagan Era. Then there's that Dubya guy.
Crap. The Stalinist slavemasters are back. Gotta run. I'm totally wishing the Americans will win this Cold War, so I can be released from the Gulag. Bahhhhh!
Just a few years ago we were talking about making sure Open Source software provided users alternatives to proprietary software. Forking has always been an issue, but the gestalt view seemed to be that ultimately even in a forking situation, the better software would "win" in the sense that it would continue to be developed. The focus was not on defeating proprietary software in the marketplace, but in making truly great software.
Now it's 2006. Linux is a huge force in the IT world. Firefox has stolen marketshare from IE. These nibbles of success have changed the dialogue, and now marketing is as important if not more important than diversity. Choice is good and all, but getting computer users to make "the correct choice" is perhaps now the ultimate goal. Consumers may become confused by so many browser choices! Ah yes, let's not confuse them. Let's market and package Firefox so the choice will be clear.
I understand the rationale for not forking Firefox. But that's a tactical issue in a small skirmish. The real war is about choice. I'm for it.
Just because you don't agree with the JEWS (that's what you mean by neocon, right - you totally give yourself away there), it doesn't mean there is anything corrupt about it.
Where in the hell did you find that in the original post?
Toward Tradition was mentioned right alongside the Heritage Foundation, which got its start from the Coors family, hardly a bastion of pro-Jewish advocacy. The fact that some of the leading lights of the Neoconservative movement are Jews doesn't mean that Neoconservatism is a Jewish movement, and it doesn't mean that pointing out financial connections between religious groups (Jewish or otherwise) and Neocons makes you an anti-Semite.
I agree with you that interest groups are part and parcel of democratic governance, but I don't like the Neonconservative movement any more than the original poster does. Neocon policies are wrong not because of who advocates them, but because they are harmful to America and to the rest of the world.
This is evidence to the contrary, Maxo-Texas
on
China Unblocks Wikipedia
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I haven't heavily studied T Square, but a lot of reporters say that it didn't happen anything like what western media likes to make out, perhaps you should go read up some more on it.
Of course, one AC does not all of China make, but if a lot of people in China feel this way, broad examination of China's history isn't likely to happen any time soon. The gist of AC's message seems to be:
I haven't really researched the Tienamen Square massacre (because, well, inside China, I can't)
I do, however, believe what my country's official media tells me
Since I can't read up on this subject (because my government won't let me), maybe you should read some of my country's official propaganda on the subject and get yourself up to my high standard of awareness.
See the problem here is that America has more lawyers than engineers.
No, that's not the problem. The problem is one man. But he has tried this b.s. repeatedly in the past, and has a long history of failure. The "fascist" courts don't seem to have been very good the man, despite all his frothing at the mouth. Maybe they don't like the fact that he keeps suing the Florida bar.
As for the lawyers to engineers ratio, the reactionary, fearful, know-nothing mentality has been with humanity since long before there were lawyers and engineers. Based on history and current events, it seems to exist in nations where there are very few lawyers and comparatively many engineers just as much as it exists in lawyer-infested places like the United States. Come to think of it, in many of those places, the attacks aren't merely legal.
Hah! That takes me back, alright. One of my favorite Groening creations. I've alwasy thought his Life in Hell drawings are fun, but the writing has always been the best part. I mean, can't you just picture the ice weasels, their sharp little teeth glistening in the frigid night? Brr!
And now, life imitates art yet again...
Maybe, if we're lucky, IE 7 will be renamed MWM, after "Mistakes were made," another of my favorite Groeningisms.
Any time you build your business around someone else's products, you're always at least to some degree dependent on their not moving in a direction that disrupts your business.
If I were a Windows user, I'd be happy that Vista need not rely on third party security software in order to function properly. Of course, if I were Symantec, I'd go crying to the courts about abuse of monopoly power.
This is a website about technology, not politics (except when directly relevant to technology, of course).
There's an entire section in Slashdot called "Politics" and as much as we might like to conveniently cordon off "other" politics from "geek" politics, that's not the way the world works. Geeks profess to be more interested in competence and truth than the rest of the sheep in this world. If that is true, then geeks should be open to exploring issues that affect not just them, but everyone else as well.
Articles about electronic balloting, wiretapping, "homeland security", the American public's feelings about the Theory of Evolution, legislative processes, extradition of hackers, use of technology to repair bodies damaged in war, asssisting Chinese citizens in routing around the Great Firewall of China, and so on have abounded in Slashdot for years. To my mind, part of what makes Slashdot so great is that this is a site that recognizes that geeks are multidimensional. We're not defined by our love of technology alone.
It's a great read, and it gave me all kinds of nonlinear insights into How The World Works that I hadn't really thought about before. It also definitely made me want to bust out Sim City again.
I have never understood why the USA government is so against online gambling.
For the last 20 years or so there has been a massive movement toward local and state government sponsorship of gambling. It is often referred to as a "lottery." Sometimes it's "Indian Casino Gambling." No matter how you slice it, the state governments get revenues from these deals, either directly or indirectly. Given that during that same 20 year period, Americans have become increasingly opposed to taxes, the scramble for revenue makes sense. Of course, the governments don't spend any less, because they make up for tax revenue with gambling revenue.
State-sponsored gambling is a great way for governments to demonstrate that hard work, saving your money, investing wisely, and investing in education are actually not worthwhile persuits. Siphoning money from the poorest members of society to pay for budget shortfalls the rest of the public is unwilling to support makes much more sense. If online gambling is allowed to flourish, states won't be able to control that nifty revenue stream. See, it's all about family values!
I'm sure a mod will be made in no time which would allow copying of files between Zunes without DRM.
Doubtless a hack will quickly appear. However, nobody will use the hack unless they're already using the Zune and are excited about the sharing capability. With the DRM as an initial barrier, that's just one more reason not to even buy a Zune in the first place. Ostensibly the song sharing is the killer feature.
But it's born with a built-in ambiguity. Will I be able to share songs without limitations using some hack? Will MS plug the hack? Will I have to keep screwing around with my Zune to make this song-sharing thing work? Geeks may enjoy modding their Zunes, but regular consumers won't.
I avoid FM radio like the plague most of the time, but it's not quite as bad as you're painting it.
... all the FM radio stations in the country, except for those playing NPR (National Public Radio--like an extremely watered-down BBC), are owned by a single company: ClearChannel.>
ClearChannel is the biggest player in the radio market, and now that there are no FCC impediments, they usually own multiple channels in a given market. They arguably wield monopoly power in some markets, but they don't even control half the market.
Personally I think the FCC screwed the pooch when it decided to do away with limitations on media ownership. That ship has long since sailed, though. Clear Channel wouldn't have achieved its dominance under the old FCC rules. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if they started losing marketshare once competitors start to figure out how to provide listeners something better (which really shouldn't be difficult, given the crap Clear Channel churns out). Dominance doesn't equal monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Your analysis seems sound, but I would add that VC's anxious to make a buck might push some of these companies public in the next six months to try to do damage control on their bad investments. Stay away...
Abso-fuckin-lutely right.
But this is a great way to generate comments.
So what you are saying is that people who didn't do anything ended up with nothing?
Nope. I'm saying the good, the bad, and the ugly all got hit with it. People who were talented and people who weren't. People who worked their ass off and made fantastic things, and people who just pretended and got by for a while. It's not a shame that the fakers lost out, but a lot of really hardworking, bright people did too.
International treaties are just goddamned pieces of paper.
International financial and legal treaties are at work every day, managing everything from currency exchange to sale of goods to extradition. They're agreements. Sometimes agreements end swiftly, sometimes they last for a very long time.
There was no dotcom bubble and there won't be a new one.
There was a tremendous bubble. I was there. I did work for companies that were almost entirely virtual. There was no "there" there. It was all hot air. I know plenty of people who suddenly had fantastic jobs and were living a lavish lifestyle, only to be out on the street looking for a job when the boom dropped on the bubble. Bay Area traffic noticeably thinned for at least two or three years. It definitely was a bubble, and when it popped, the effect was very painful to a lot of people.
My guess is that while the average person on the street doesn't know the entire dotcom tale, they do know that there was a tremendous upsurge in the NASDAQ for a period of time, and that it was fueled by rampant speculation. This isn't the same thing as Starbucks overextending itself by opening 54 shops in Dubuque, rather than the 52 it can actually support. There was a huge outlay of capital, there were companies going public every day, and the stock market had lost all rationality. Even non-techies could see this. All they had to do was watch the news.
This time it is different, in the sense that all of the Web 2.0 companies aren't going public. As another poster has already mentioned, this time it's private capital chasing after some good and many bad investments. When the majority of these companies die, John Q Investor won't take it in the shorts this time. In that sense, the Web 2.0 investment phenomenon is a lot closer to the normal course of business events you describe.
Managers seem to confuse websites (which aer an information source) and advertising (which primarily has to grab people's attention).
Excellent point. There's also a helluva lot of "if our competitors are putting orange starbursts on their websites, we should be doing it too!" Further proof that most execs are faking it, just like the rest of us. They just get paid more and have golden parachutes in case they fail. ;-)
This is probably an excellent resource, but at this point it is one of many. The persistent problem is not developers, but clients. Internal or external, it doesn't matter. When marketing managers and O-level executives have a resource that tells them that they need to stop making decisions based on what their favorite colors are, or what websites their kids like to visit, we'll all be better off. In the mean time, at least there's Don't Make Me Think. But if the decisionmakers who have the pursestrings don't know what they're doing, a lot of the best practices advocated by developers never sees the light of day.
I sincerely hope you're right, and that the safe harbor provision is as strong as you think it is. Personally I think it would be great if a big media player were to sue YouTube/Google for infringement, only to have the safe harbor save them. My primary point was that only very rarely is anything truly iron-clad in the law, particularly when you're dealing with tectonic shifts in the marketplace, and the huge amounts of money thereby involved. Big Media can bring enormous legal resources to bear, as we've already seen with Napster, Grokster, et al.
Google has been very successful in the courtroom. They have a crack legal team, and I think if anyone could defend the safe harbor provisions, it would be them. But I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that they'll succeed, either.
The only way that a copyright lawsuit will happen here is if youtube doesn't take down the episode.
That may not be true. The DMCA safe harbor for ISPs is not blanket protection. If more an more of the content provided on YouTube winds up being material posted without the copyright holder's approval, copyright holders could argue that there is *so much* unapproved material on YouTube that it is too much of a burden on copyright holders to monitor YouTube for violations. My guess is that if anyone does take YouTube/Google to court, they will use this theory. Sure, YouTube will act on DMCA takedown notices, but if more and more of YouTube content becomes saturated with copyright violations, and YouTube/Google starts to actually make money through Google advertising tools, the aggregate effect is arguably that Google is making money by showing vast quantities of unauthorized reproductions of copyrighted material.
The safe harbor provision of the DMCA has limits. Expect Big Media to exploit those limits if at all possible.
But is the AC's attitude substantially different to a regular viewer of Fox News?
I take your point. The American man who gets all his news from Fox and the Chinese man who gets all his news from official media are not terribly far apart.
Watching TV to get your news is the first problem. It is an inherently emotional medium unsuited to disinterested analysis. Second, getting all of your news from one source is never a good idea. Third, Fox may be on the right and official Chinese media may be on the left, but neither is a stranger to jingoism.
It would be an interesting experiment to watch one month of only Fox news, then only one month of only official Chinese news. Of course, at the end of it all, you might be ready to drive a drill through your brain.
... so I'm able to make this post. I don't have much time though. He'll be back and cracking the whip again real soon.
The original Neocons were all Jews who abandoned the New Left.They were(and are) hated by their former comrades.
NeoCon is one of those terms whose meaning is little known by the sheep who bandy it about parrotting their Stalinist slavemasters.
Yes, Neoconservatism originated with Jewish intellectuals who wanted to break with the Left. My point is that arguing against Neoconservative policies doesn't make you an anti-Semite. It is also worth noting that there are plenty of people who buy into Neoconservative arguments who are not Jewish. The Vulcans (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and arguably Rice) aren't Jewish. Ronald Reagan wasn't Jewish. Neither was Jeane Kirkpatrick. They both, however, put Neoconservative principles to use during the Reagan Era. Then there's that Dubya guy.
Crap. The Stalinist slavemasters are back. Gotta run. I'm totally wishing the Americans will win this Cold War, so I can be released from the Gulag. Bahhhhh!
Just a few years ago we were talking about making sure Open Source software provided users alternatives to proprietary software. Forking has always been an issue, but the gestalt view seemed to be that ultimately even in a forking situation, the better software would "win" in the sense that it would continue to be developed. The focus was not on defeating proprietary software in the marketplace, but in making truly great software.
Now it's 2006. Linux is a huge force in the IT world. Firefox has stolen marketshare from IE. These nibbles of success have changed the dialogue, and now marketing is as important if not more important than diversity. Choice is good and all, but getting computer users to make "the correct choice" is perhaps now the ultimate goal. Consumers may become confused by so many browser choices! Ah yes, let's not confuse them. Let's market and package Firefox so the choice will be clear.
I understand the rationale for not forking Firefox. But that's a tactical issue in a small skirmish. The real war is about choice. I'm for it.
Just because you don't agree with the JEWS (that's what you mean by neocon, right - you totally give yourself away there), it doesn't mean there is anything corrupt about it.
Where in the hell did you find that in the original post?
Toward Tradition was mentioned right alongside the Heritage Foundation, which got its start from the Coors family, hardly a bastion of pro-Jewish advocacy. The fact that some of the leading lights of the Neoconservative movement are Jews doesn't mean that Neoconservatism is a Jewish movement, and it doesn't mean that pointing out financial connections between religious groups (Jewish or otherwise) and Neocons makes you an anti-Semite.
I agree with you that interest groups are part and parcel of democratic governance, but I don't like the Neonconservative movement any more than the original poster does. Neocon policies are wrong not because of who advocates them, but because they are harmful to America and to the rest of the world.
I haven't heavily studied T Square, but a lot of reporters say that it didn't happen anything like what western media likes to make out, perhaps you should go read up some more on it.
Of course, one AC does not all of China make, but if a lot of people in China feel this way, broad examination of China's history isn't likely to happen any time soon. The gist of AC's message seems to be:
See the problem here is that America has more lawyers than engineers.
No, that's not the problem. The problem is one man. But he has tried this b.s. repeatedly in the past, and has a long history of failure. The "fascist" courts don't seem to have been very good the man, despite all his frothing at the mouth. Maybe they don't like the fact that he keeps suing the Florida bar.
As for the lawyers to engineers ratio, the reactionary, fearful, know-nothing mentality has been with humanity since long before there were lawyers and engineers. Based on history and current events, it seems to exist in nations where there are very few lawyers and comparatively many engineers just as much as it exists in lawyer-infested places like the United States. Come to think of it, in many of those places, the attacks aren't merely legal.
Hah! That takes me back, alright. One of my favorite Groening creations. I've alwasy thought his Life in Hell drawings are fun, but the writing has always been the best part. I mean, can't you just picture the ice weasels, their sharp little teeth glistening in the frigid night? Brr!
And now, life imitates art yet again...
Maybe, if we're lucky, IE 7 will be renamed MWM, after "Mistakes were made," another of my favorite Groeningisms.
we'll get to be as forward-thinking as the South Koreans. Don't hold your breath on that one.
Pass the chips, Payton Manning is playing!
die by the sword.
Any time you build your business around someone else's products, you're always at least to some degree dependent on their not moving in a direction that disrupts your business.
If I were a Windows user, I'd be happy that Vista need not rely on third party security software in order to function properly. Of course, if I were Symantec, I'd go crying to the courts about abuse of monopoly power.
Anyone that thinks Apple is consumer friendly is an idiot.
It's about time someone in this discussion made a reasonable, well-articulated statement, rather than an inflammatory blanket statement.
This is a website about technology, not politics (except when directly relevant to technology, of course).
There's an entire section in Slashdot called "Politics" and as much as we might like to conveniently cordon off "other" politics from "geek" politics, that's not the way the world works. Geeks profess to be more interested in competence and truth than the rest of the sheep in this world. If that is true, then geeks should be open to exploring issues that affect not just them, but everyone else as well.
Articles about electronic balloting, wiretapping, "homeland security", the American public's feelings about the Theory of Evolution, legislative processes, extradition of hackers, use of technology to repair bodies damaged in war, asssisting Chinese citizens in routing around the Great Firewall of China, and so on have abounded in Slashdot for years. To my mind, part of what makes Slashdot so great is that this is a site that recognizes that geeks are multidimensional. We're not defined by our love of technology alone.
Indian casinos do not pay taxes and are not regulated like other casinos.
State governments still receive all kinds of indirect revenue from these arrangements.
There's an intriguing discussion of geographic distribution of commerce in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Stephen Johnson.
It's a great read, and it gave me all kinds of nonlinear insights into How The World Works that I hadn't really thought about before. It also definitely made me want to bust out Sim City again.
I have never understood why the USA government is so against online gambling.
For the last 20 years or so there has been a massive movement toward local and state government sponsorship of gambling. It is often referred to as a "lottery." Sometimes it's "Indian Casino Gambling." No matter how you slice it, the state governments get revenues from these deals, either directly or indirectly. Given that during that same 20 year period, Americans have become increasingly opposed to taxes, the scramble for revenue makes sense. Of course, the governments don't spend any less, because they make up for tax revenue with gambling revenue.
State-sponsored gambling is a great way for governments to demonstrate that hard work, saving your money, investing wisely, and investing in education are actually not worthwhile persuits. Siphoning money from the poorest members of society to pay for budget shortfalls the rest of the public is unwilling to support makes much more sense. If online gambling is allowed to flourish, states won't be able to control that nifty revenue stream. See, it's all about family values!
I'm sure a mod will be made in no time which would allow copying of files between Zunes without DRM.
Doubtless a hack will quickly appear. However, nobody will use the hack unless they're already using the Zune and are excited about the sharing capability. With the DRM as an initial barrier, that's just one more reason not to even buy a Zune in the first place. Ostensibly the song sharing is the killer feature.
But it's born with a built-in ambiguity. Will I be able to share songs without limitations using some hack? Will MS plug the hack? Will I have to keep screwing around with my Zune to make this song-sharing thing work? Geeks may enjoy modding their Zunes, but regular consumers won't.
I avoid FM radio like the plague most of the time, but it's not quite as bad as you're painting it.
ClearChannel is the biggest player in the radio market, and now that there are no FCC impediments, they usually own multiple channels in a given market. They arguably wield monopoly power in some markets, but they don't even control half the market.
Personally I think the FCC screwed the pooch when it decided to do away with limitations on media ownership. That ship has long since sailed, though. Clear Channel wouldn't have achieved its dominance under the old FCC rules. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if they started losing marketshare once competitors start to figure out how to provide listeners something better (which really shouldn't be difficult, given the crap Clear Channel churns out). Dominance doesn't equal monopoly.