Of course, this is the same Senator Torricelli who is being investigated for illegal donations to his campaign. One DOJ official called him the "most corrupt politician in America". And that's with some tough competition, I'm sure!
I'll readily concede several points in your article, because they are simply not relevant to the issue at hand. Is Britannica significantly more comprehensive than Nupedia? Yes!
But I dispute the scholarliness, clarity, and authority of Britannica in many cases, and the reason for the serious deficiencies in Britannica is precisely that they do not have a proper blind peer review process. Errors creep in, and they don't have the best mechanisms for keeping them out.
Is Britannica the best encyclopedia in existence? By a long shot. Can it be improved upon immeasurably? Certainly.
What we're about is having an open process, run by volunteers.
None-the-less, my primary point is this. Anyone who criticizes Nupedia by using the notion "How can I trust what some random jerk on the web says" should investigate our review process, and Britannica's review process. What you'll find is that the quality of Nupedia is unsurpassed.
The downside, for Nupedia, has been speed of production. But these things take time. And the important thing is that since this is all *free* (libre, GNU FDL), it will never go away and never die so long as one person cares to continue the work.
Moderators, please moderate this up so that people will stop asking the same questions over and over!:-)
1. Why should you trust the content in Nupedia, since it is a free encyclopedia? Because we have a staff of volunteer PhD peer reviewers who go over the content carefully! Our review process is vastly superior to that of Britannica.
2. Why doesn't Nupedia have the comprehensiveness of Britannica? Because we've just gotten started a year ago, that's why! Join us! Get involved!
3. Why should anyone care about "free content"? What's up with the GNU license? If you don't know the answers to these questions by now, why are you reading Slashdot?:-)
One might make the same argument about an open source operating system -- that no one will want to work on boring bits, so that it will never be really complete.
And that does seem to be true to a certain extent, doesn't it? Certainly, problems that are of great interest to programmers get attention first, and the dull bits (like writing a spreadsheet app) take longer.
You ask this question as if it is an unanswerable challenge.
Nupedia has a comprehensive system of peer review. We have review boards made up of people with PhDs in their fields. We also have an "open review" step where anyone may post their comments.
Even after an article is published, it's always open to revision. Spot an error? Fix it and send in a diff! The maintainers (the editors) of that section will review it and make the fix.
Asking who is going to pay these editors and quality controllers is like asking who is going to pay the maintainers of free software. If GNU/Linux and all the free BSD variants didn't exist, you'd be justified in your skepticism.
But we already know this will work.
What about wikipedia? Well, here you have to judge for yourself. The review process is open and eternally ongoing. Being less rigorous, the quality of the final product is lower than Nupedia. But if you look through it, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how good it really is.
If you want a real flashlight
on
LED Flashlights
·
· Score: 1
You really haven't experienced the stunning joy of holding a real flashlight in your hand until you've used the new Surefire Millenium M6 Magnum Assault Flashlight.
That's right, Assault Flashlight.
500 lumens of blinding power.
Of course, it runs through 6 Lithium batterys in 20 minutes, which makes it a bit expensive to run, but when you need to blind every last motherfucker in the room... accept no substitute.
Check it out
Something interesting to note
on
Republic.Com
·
· Score: 1
I have recently been studying the issue of gun rights, an area I had never really looked into in detail before.
What I found, interestingly enough, was exactly the opposite of what is hypothesized in this book. Pro gun rights websites tend, in general, to link to more anti-gun editoirials than to pro-gun editorials! Far from seeking to avoid controversial opinions, most people who are activists really love the argument and like to link to opposing views in order to have something to rant about!
The NRA likes to link to arguments against gun rights, but not necessarily because they are after a spirit of fairness and co-operation, of course. They like to link to that sort of thing because when their audience (pro gun rights people) read about gun control, they get mad and donate money.
I think that human nature is such that people do not act in the hypothesized manner. People don't like to read only things that they agree with. They like to read stuff that pisses them off.
Heck, I sometimes even read Jon Katz for that reason.
If you'd like to get in on the ground floor of something similar, but a lot more serious, Wikipedia (the free GNU FDL encyclopedia based on wiki software) is always looking for good contributors.
Since opening in January, we already have over 2000 articles, many of very good quality.
Everything2 is awesome. But many of the entries are more humor than anything else. An encyclopedia is a different beast.
It is very much worth noting that Everything2 is a strictly _proprietary_ project. The information contained there can not be freely modified and redistributed.
I would recommend that people who care about software freedom not contribute to Everything2 for this reason.
A handful of readers _can_ correct mistakes, just as a handful of users of a program _can_ submit patches. Not all corrections (or patches) are accepted by the maintainers, for obvious reasons.
Nupedia has a open community of peer reviewers; anyone can join the community, but to actually get a change into the official distribution, you have to convince the maintainers -- just like with free software.
Of course, if you don't like what the community is doing, you can try to fork.:-) It's all about freedom.
Here at Nupedia, we feel that RMS has now done the right thing. The only thing unflattering about all this is perhaps that RMS is too busy and could use a better assistant to help him keep track of things.:-)
You wrote:
>Nupedia doesn't follow the exclusionary rule.
Actually, we follow an even stricter exclusionary rule at the moment -- the Nupedia FDL articles do not have outside links at all.
On the website, we do have outside links, as an interim measure to (hopefully) make the website useful as we increase the number of articles in our database. We have 150+ articles in the pipeline (I don't remember the exact number at the moment.)
It never occurred to me that we should have a rule of that type (i.e. no linking to non-free materials), but now that the idea has been raised,
the community will certainly consider it. (I don't really try to have the final say here -- we're an open community.)
At Nupedia, we don't have any problem with competition. Particularly so long as everyone uses the FDL, the projects will remain compatible, so that article sharing can take place, etc.
Our complaint was that (1) RMS had offered to make an announcement with us, (2) in our discussions of our switch to the FDL, RMS never told us about Hector's project, and (3) we woke up one morning to find an announcement of a competing project with almost the exact same name and mission!
Fortunately, as I have said, sanity is prevailing. RMS apologized for his mistake, and we're happy with that.
And were on/., which will really help us with what we need most -- exposure.
Here at Nupedia, Larry Sanger (PhD in philosophy, Ohio State University) is the editor in chief. He has done an astounding job of recruiting editors and peer reviewers, and he actually checks credentials.
It is a difficult job to balance inclusiveness and openness with quality control. There are constant internal discussions to see how we can best meet both goals, and our view is that there is room within the project for competing views.
No, we did most emphatically NOT know that this announcement was coming.
I would like to emphasize here that I have always had the deepest respect for Richard Stallman, and I most sincerely hope that this was just some kind of terrible misunderstanding.
I would like to refrain from saying anything further, because -- as I say -- I very much hope
that this is all just a misunderstanding, and I want to give Richard Stallman the chance to respond to my emails today about this. I have not heard from him yet, but this all just broke a few hours ago, and I'm sure he's very busy.
Richard Stallman certainly *is* aware of Nupedia. I have emailed back and forth with him about our decision at Nupedia to switch to the Gnu GFDL license.
I haven't got the least idea why he is doing this to us. We have not disagreed with him in any way
about licensing.
Those wishing to get involved in a serious effort to make open content happen in a real way should investigate Nupedia, the open content encyclopedia.
Nupedia has 2500 members and has worked really hard to put together an editorial/oversight framework that guarantees quality. Thus far, 5 short articles have worked their way through the system, and over 100 more are currently in process.
The main thing that is needed are volunteers ready and willing to make things happen. If you're like me, and not good enough of a programmer to contribute something back to the community in terms of software, here's your chance. Whatever you are an expert in, Nupedia needs your help.
Here's a systematic approach for valuing your website. Rather than talking about what you should ask (which is more a question of strategic negotiation), I will discuss what you should (privately) be willing to accept.
I'm assuming that this is a pure business decision, not personal. In other words, if you are attached to your site out of love, then you may not want to sell it at all. Or, if you are bored with your site and feel that you will probably just let it go to hell if you don't sell it, then now is the time to sell and you may want to be willing to accept a below-market price before you ruin the site.:-)
There are several factors to consider.
1. What kind of traffic do you have? This is an indirect way of asking 'What is a realistic CPM (cost per thousand) for the ad space on the site, if sold professionally?'
If you have 1.5 million pageviews per month, that's a page of 18 million a year. Revenue of $20,000 puts you at just over $1 per thousand. That's a fairly low rate, and if the reason for the low rate is that this is an adult site or bikini site or something advertiser-unfriendly of that type, then you can't fool yourself into thinking it will ever be much more than that.
On the other hand, if the reason for the low revenue is that you have done a poor job of selling the space, you should adjust your estimate upward.
2. What will the costs of maintenance be to a buyer?
If this is a content site for which they will have to hire a writer on an ongoing basis, then just maintaining the site's popularity will be expensive for them. On the other hand, if this is an automated or semi-automated site that can be run with just an hour of attention per week, then it will be fairly cheap for them to keep running it.
Remember that valuing based on revenues is only a rough rule of thumb. The real value is from profit, excess of revenues over costs. If the costs are low, then so much the better, from a valuation perspective.
You will want to think about two components of cost -- fixed and variable. Fixed costs are those which stay the same no matter how much traffic you have. Variable costs are those that increase with traffic. For example, it costs pretty much the same to create content, no matter how many people read it. But bandwidth costs go up directly with traffic. Other costs may be partly fixed, partly variable. Use your judgement.
State the variable costs in terms of a CPM.
3. Is the site growing quickly, or does it have stable traffic? Also, how big realistically do you think it can get?
Remember to answer this question honestly, and remember that since you are calculating the bottom price you should be willing to accept, the right number to use is the number you honestly think you can achieve with your current resources. It is best to be ruthless with yourself here, because if you love your site (don't we all?), it is easy to overestimate its potential.
---------------
Now you have three things in hand. A realistic CPM. A realistic estimate of costs, both fixed and variable. And a realistic growth rate.
I'll make up some numbers for you to illustrate the next step in the calculation. $2 CPM. Costs of $15,000 per year fixed, and 25 cents CPM on the variable costs.
Therefore, your rate of profit for the coming year is:
PROFIT = (TRAFFIC * ($2 - $.025)) - $15,000.
(TRAFFIC stated in thousands!) If your traffic is stable, then you have for the upcoming year, a projected profit of:
PROFIT = (18000 * $1.75) - $15,000 = $16,500.
Now we look at this in the context of a growth rate and a discount factor. (We are implicitly making many simplifying assumptions!)
PRICE = EARNINGS / (R-G)
If your growth rate is 20% a year, and the investor wishes to get a 40% return on their money, then substituting, we get
PRICE = $16,500 / (.40 -.20) = $82,500.
But please notice how sensitive this formula is to changes in R and G! If your traffic is growing at the same rate as their desired rate of return, then the price should be infinite.:-) Don't make that mistake...
A better rule-of-thumb approach, then, is probably to assume a reasonable P/E ratio and multiply that. Keep in mind that you will not likely be able to ask for a stock-market-sized multiple for such a small business.
I would use a rule of thumb of 10-20 as a P/E ratio.
Therefore your price should be in the range of $165,000 to $330,000.
--------
Notice that the number I come up with above is strictly dependent on the particular example I gave, particularly with respect to costs and traffic and CPM. You should run through these numbers for yourself.
The general principle that we are getting at here is this: how much money can you make from the site if you keep it? You should be willing to sell if that amount of money is more than you can get by selling today. The difficult part is relating the value of future cash flows to the value of cash flows today, and in making realistic projects of those future cash flows.
This story should not surprise anyone, and provides a very good argument against any proprietary, distribution-specific certification for Linux.
People may find it easy to use this as another excuse to beat up on Microsoft (like we really need one!), but the reality of the situation is that any company in a similar situation will find it necessary to use their certification program as a marketing tool. This means that decisions will eventually made, not based on what is best for the certificate holders, but on what is best for the company.
O.k., fine. Nothing wrong with that. But we have a prime opportunity to not play that game. Savvy employers should display a bias towards a vendor-neutral certification. Savvy Linux professionals should avoid the RHCE in favor of a neutral alternative. By keeping certification separated from software sales and distribution, we help ensure that the incentives are skewed in favor of the needs of the certificate holders and their employers, rather than in favor of the vendor.
So check out LPI and help promote a non-proprietary alternative!
I saw a television new segment the other day about VisX, the company that makes the laser equipment. They are just now coming out with a new diagnostic device that more accurately measures your eye. They are already able to hit 20/20 most of the time, but with the new technology that is coming out, you'll be able to have "better than perfect" vision -- 20/10 in many cases. This is perhaps the first time in history that there has been surgery available to improve human functionality beyond what is "natural". If you don't think that's cool, you have no business calling yourself a geek, I say. Should be out by the end of next year....
If "lock-in" were a powerful and pervasive phenomenon, so that it is commonly impossible to switch from an inferior standard to a superior standard, then it is not likely that Linux could ever unseat Microsoft Windows products, no matter how much better.
But the lesson of the article (and much academic research in the same vein) is that path-dependence is much overblown and much overestimated as a force in the economy. If Linux is better (it is!) then we should see exactly what we are seeing now -- development, both technical and business-systems, on many simultaneous fronts to facilitate the conversion of the world.
Far from being a pro-Microsoft article, the conclusion here is more that the Right Thing _can_ win out.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if only we can catch Osama Bin Laden in time to launch him into space to catch this thing in the face...
Of course, this is the same Senator Torricelli who is being investigated for illegal donations to his campaign. One DOJ official called him the "most corrupt politician in America". And that's with some tough competition, I'm sure!
What a delight this guy is.
You misunderstand me.
I'll readily concede several points in your article, because they are simply not relevant to the issue at hand. Is Britannica significantly more comprehensive than Nupedia? Yes!
But I dispute the scholarliness, clarity, and authority of Britannica in many cases, and the reason for the serious deficiencies in Britannica is precisely that they do not have a proper blind peer review process. Errors creep in, and they don't have the best mechanisms for keeping them out.
Is Britannica the best encyclopedia in existence? By a long shot. Can it be improved upon immeasurably? Certainly.
What we're about is having an open process, run by volunteers. None-the-less, my primary point is this. Anyone who criticizes Nupedia by using the notion "How can I trust what some random jerk on the web says" should investigate our review process, and Britannica's review process. What you'll find is that the quality of Nupedia is unsurpassed.
The downside, for Nupedia, has been speed of production. But these things take time. And the important thing is that since this is all *free* (libre, GNU FDL), it will never go away and never die so long as one person cares to continue the work.
Moderators, please moderate this up so that people will stop asking the same questions over and over! :-)
1. Why should you trust the content in Nupedia, since it is a free encyclopedia? Because we have a staff of volunteer PhD peer reviewers who go over the content carefully! Our review process is vastly superior to that of Britannica.
2. Why doesn't Nupedia have the comprehensiveness of Britannica? Because we've just gotten started a year ago, that's why! Join us! Get involved!
3. Why should anyone care about "free content"? What's up with the GNU license? If you don't know the answers to these questions by now, why are you reading Slashdot? :-)
One might make the same argument about an open source operating system -- that no one will want to work on boring bits, so that it will never be really complete. And that does seem to be true to a certain extent, doesn't it? Certainly, problems that are of great interest to programmers get attention first, and the dull bits (like writing a spreadsheet app) take longer.
Asking who is going to pay these editors and quality controllers is like asking who is going to pay the maintainers of free software. If GNU/Linux and all the free BSD variants didn't exist, you'd be justified in your skepticism.
But we already know this will work.
What about wikipedia? Well, here you have to judge for yourself. The review process is open and eternally ongoing. Being less rigorous, the quality of the final product is lower than Nupedia. But if you look through it, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how good it really is.
That's right, Assault Flashlight.
500 lumens of blinding power.
Of course, it runs through 6 Lithium batterys in 20 minutes, which makes it a bit expensive to run, but when you need to blind every last motherfucker in the room... accept no substitute. Check it out
I have recently been studying the issue of gun rights, an area I had never really looked into in detail before.
What I found, interestingly enough, was exactly the opposite of what is hypothesized in this book. Pro gun rights websites tend, in general, to link to more anti-gun editoirials than to pro-gun editorials! Far from seeking to avoid controversial opinions, most people who are activists really love the argument and like to link to opposing views in order to have something to rant about!
The NRA likes to link to arguments against gun rights, but not necessarily because they are after a spirit of fairness and co-operation, of course. They like to link to that sort of thing because when their audience (pro gun rights people) read about gun control, they get mad and donate money.
I think that human nature is such that people do not act in the hypothesized manner. People don't like to read only things that they agree with. They like to read stuff that pisses them off.
Heck, I sometimes even read Jon Katz for that reason.
Since opening in January, we already have over 2000 articles, many of very good quality.
Everything2 is awesome. But many of the entries are more humor than anything else. An encyclopedia is a different beast.
http://www.wikipedia.com/
Clickable link to the parody!
http://www.bomis.com/tipjar/
(So now you'll know about my other life, when I'm not fighting for content freedom. :-) )
--Jimmy Wales
It is very much worth noting that Everything2 is a strictly _proprietary_ project. The information contained there can not be freely modified and redistributed. I would recommend that people who care about software freedom not contribute to Everything2 for this reason.
A handful of readers _can_ correct mistakes, just as a handful of users of a program _can_ submit patches. Not all corrections (or patches) are accepted by the maintainers, for obvious reasons. Nupedia has a open community of peer reviewers; anyone can join the community, but to actually get a change into the official distribution, you have to convince the maintainers -- just like with free software. Of course, if you don't like what the community is doing, you can try to fork. :-) It's all about freedom.
Here at Nupedia, we feel that RMS has now done the right thing. The only thing unflattering about all this is perhaps that RMS is too busy and could use a better assistant to help him keep track of things. :-)
Actually, we follow an even stricter exclusionary rule at the moment -- the Nupedia FDL articles do not have outside links at all.
On the website, we do have outside links, as an interim measure to (hopefully) make the website useful as we increase the number of articles in our database. We have 150+ articles in the pipeline (I don't remember the exact number at the moment.)
It never occurred to me that we should have a rule of that type (i.e. no linking to non-free materials), but now that the idea has been raised, the community will certainly consider it. (I don't really try to have the final say here -- we're an open community.)
I'll donate $50 to the FSF.
Our complaint was that (1) RMS had offered to make an announcement with us, (2) in our discussions of our switch to the FDL, RMS never told us about Hector's project, and (3) we woke up one morning to find an announcement of a competing project with almost the exact same name and mission!
Fortunately, as I have said, sanity is prevailing. RMS apologized for his mistake, and we're happy with that.
And were on /., which will really help us with what we need most -- exposure.
Here at Nupedia, Larry Sanger (PhD in philosophy, Ohio State University) is the editor in chief. He has done an astounding job of recruiting editors and peer reviewers, and he actually checks credentials. It is a difficult job to balance inclusiveness and openness with quality control. There are constant internal discussions to see how we can best meet both goals, and our view is that there is room within the project for competing views.
No, we did most emphatically NOT know that this announcement was coming. I would like to emphasize here that I have always had the deepest respect for Richard Stallman, and I most sincerely hope that this was just some kind of terrible misunderstanding. I would like to refrain from saying anything further, because -- as I say -- I very much hope that this is all just a misunderstanding, and I want to give Richard Stallman the chance to respond to my emails today about this. I have not heard from him yet, but this all just broke a few hours ago, and I'm sure he's very busy.
Richard Stallman certainly *is* aware of Nupedia. I have emailed back and forth with him about our decision at Nupedia to switch to the Gnu GFDL license. I haven't got the least idea why he is doing this to us. We have not disagreed with him in any way about licensing.
Nupedia has 2500 members and has worked really hard to put together an editorial/oversight framework that guarantees quality. Thus far, 5 short articles have worked their way through the system, and over 100 more are currently in process.
The main thing that is needed are volunteers ready and willing to make things happen. If you're like me, and not good enough of a programmer to contribute something back to the community in terms of software, here's your chance. Whatever you are an expert in, Nupedia needs your help.
Here's a systematic approach for valuing your website. Rather than talking about what you should ask (which is more a question of strategic negotiation), I will discuss what you should (privately) be willing to accept.
I'm assuming that this is a pure business decision, not personal. In other words, if you are attached to your site out of love, then you may not want to sell it at all. Or, if you are bored with your site and feel that you will probably just let it go to hell if you don't sell it, then now is the time to sell and you may want to be willing to accept a below-market price before you ruin the site. :-)
There are several factors to consider.
1. What kind of traffic do you have? This is an indirect way of asking 'What is a realistic CPM (cost per thousand) for the ad space on the site, if sold professionally?'
If you have 1.5 million pageviews per month, that's a page of 18 million a year. Revenue of $20,000 puts you at just over $1 per thousand. That's a fairly low rate, and if the reason for the low rate is that this is an adult site or bikini site or something advertiser-unfriendly of that type, then you can't fool yourself into thinking it will ever be much more than that.
On the other hand, if the reason for the low revenue is that you have done a poor job of selling the space, you should adjust your estimate upward.
2. What will the costs of maintenance be to a buyer?
If this is a content site for which they will have to hire a writer on an ongoing basis, then just maintaining the site's popularity will be expensive for them. On the other hand, if this is an automated or semi-automated site that can be run with just an hour of attention per week, then it will be fairly cheap for them to keep running it.
Remember that valuing based on revenues is only a rough rule of thumb. The real value is from profit, excess of revenues over costs. If the costs are low, then so much the better, from a valuation perspective.
You will want to think about two components of cost -- fixed and variable. Fixed costs are those which stay the same no matter how much traffic you have. Variable costs are those that increase with traffic. For example, it costs pretty much the same to create content, no matter how many people read it. But bandwidth costs go up directly with traffic. Other costs may be partly fixed, partly variable. Use your judgement.
State the variable costs in terms of a CPM.
3. Is the site growing quickly, or does it have stable traffic? Also, how big realistically do you think it can get?
Remember to answer this question honestly, and remember that since you are calculating the bottom price you should be willing to accept, the right number to use is the number you honestly think you can achieve with your current resources. It is best to be ruthless with yourself here, because if you love your site (don't we all?), it is easy to overestimate its potential.
---------------
Now you have three things in hand. A realistic CPM. A realistic estimate of costs, both fixed and variable. And a realistic growth rate.
I'll make up some numbers for you to illustrate the next step in the calculation. $2 CPM. Costs of $15,000 per year fixed, and 25 cents CPM on the variable costs.
Therefore, your rate of profit for the coming year is:
PROFIT = (TRAFFIC * ($2 - $.025)) - $15,000.
(TRAFFIC stated in thousands!) If your traffic is stable, then you have for the upcoming year, a projected profit of:
PROFIT = (18000 * $1.75) - $15,000 = $16,500.
Now we look at this in the context of a growth rate and a discount factor. (We are implicitly making many simplifying assumptions!)
PRICE = EARNINGS / (R-G)
If your growth rate is 20% a year, and the investor wishes to get a 40% return on their money, then substituting, we get
PRICE = $16,500 / (.40 - .20) = $82,500.
But please notice how sensitive this formula is to changes in R and G! If your traffic is growing at the same rate as their desired rate of return, then the price should be infinite. :-) Don't make that mistake...
A better rule-of-thumb approach, then, is probably to assume a reasonable P/E ratio and multiply that. Keep in mind that you will not likely be able to ask for a stock-market-sized multiple for such a small business.
I would use a rule of thumb of 10-20 as a P/E ratio.
Therefore your price should be in the range of $165,000 to $330,000.
--------
Notice that the number I come up with above is strictly dependent on the particular example I gave, particularly with respect to costs and traffic and CPM. You should run through these numbers for yourself.
The general principle that we are getting at here is this: how much money can you make from the site if you keep it? You should be willing to sell if that amount of money is more than you can get by selling today. The difficult part is relating the value of future cash flows to the value of cash flows today, and in making realistic projects of those future cash flows.
--Jimbo
This story should not surprise anyone, and provides a very good argument against any proprietary, distribution-specific certification for Linux.
People may find it easy to use this as another excuse to beat up on Microsoft (like we really need one!), but the reality of the situation is that any company in a similar situation will find it necessary to use their certification program as a marketing tool. This means that decisions will eventually made, not based on what is best for the certificate holders, but on what is best for the company.
O.k., fine. Nothing wrong with that. But we have a prime opportunity to not play that game. Savvy employers should display a bias towards a vendor-neutral certification. Savvy Linux professionals should avoid the RHCE in favor of a neutral alternative. By keeping certification separated from software sales and distribution, we help ensure that the incentives are skewed in favor of the needs of the certificate holders and their employers, rather than in favor of the vendor.
So check out LPI and help promote a non-proprietary alternative!
I saw a television new segment the other day about VisX, the company that makes the laser equipment. They are just now coming out with a new diagnostic device that more accurately measures your eye. They are already able to hit 20/20 most of the time, but with the new technology that is coming out, you'll be able to have "better than perfect" vision -- 20/10 in many cases. This is perhaps the first time in history that there has been surgery available to improve human functionality beyond what is "natural". If you don't think that's cool, you have no business calling yourself a geek, I say. Should be out by the end of next year....
If "lock-in" were a powerful and pervasive phenomenon, so that it is commonly impossible to switch from an inferior standard to a superior
standard, then it is not likely that Linux could
ever unseat Microsoft Windows products, no matter
how much better.
But the lesson of the article (and much academic
research in the same vein) is that path-dependence
is much overblown and much overestimated as a force in the economy. If Linux is better (it is!)
then we should see exactly what we are seeing now -- development, both technical and business-systems, on many simultaneous fronts to
facilitate the conversion of the world.
Far from being a pro-Microsoft article, the conclusion here is more that the Right Thing
_can_ win out.