Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Apparently, Google is interested in the Enterprise space now; I stumbled on this second hand, via Scoble's blog. The interesting thing to me is his reaction to it. On the one hand, he says he doesn't like their stuff vis-a-vis MS Office:

The funny thing is that at PodTech we’re actually using most of the “Google Office Suite.”

I hate it. It isn’t even in the same ballpark yet as having an Exchange server.

On the other hand, he thinks MS is going to fall behind due to inattention to the rising Mac platform:

Please note: that doesn’t mean Microsoft should sit back and celebrate. They are gonna get their ass kicked in this space because of their lack of attention to the Macintosh. That’s the #1 reason I’ll probably be using Google’s stuff over the next year instead of Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, and Entourage.

So what's in this suite? Here's InformationWeek:

Google this week will launch Google Apps for Your Domain, a software bundle aimed at small and midsize companies. The free, ad-supported package combines Google's E-mail, calendar, and instant messaging with Web site creation software. It will be hosted in Google's data center, branded with customers' domain names, and packaged with management tools for IT pros.

That's the first step. Later this year, Google plans to add its Writely word processor and Google Spreadsheets to the suite, build online collaboration features that work across its applications, and market the whole package to large companies for a fee. Google will include IT-friendly features such as APIs, directory-server integration, guaranteed performance levels, and telephone tech support.

Now there's where I start to get skeptical. Take a walk through the blogosphere looking for "lost blog posts" for a minute, and you'll get an idea as to why. I like Google Calendar, and I use Gmail (with a caveat: I use the Pop3 interface to bring the mail to my client app). Why? Because I need offline access, that's why. Now, that's clearly not a showstopper - witness SalesForce.com. My skepticism may or may not be shared by most people.

Which means that this will be an interesting show to watch. The Google suite will be a big test of software as a service (as opposed to client software via license). That alone could provide a quake in the industry, given Google's size.

Update: Om Malik makes some very good points on the privacy and access based downsides:

Of course there was the whole issue of getting email on the go; many on our team wanted to use BlackBerries, while I wanted to use my Nokia E61 with Good (by far the best push mail offering on Symbian), so instead we decided to go the traditional route. Okay, perhaps I was being a bit too paranoid, but given the recent AOL DataGate, it is prudent to be wary of the big guys.

Technorati Tags: enterprise, office+suite

Dare Obasanjo calls BS on the difference in treatment of MS/Google announcements by bloggers:

As usual, the technology blogs are full of the Microsoft vs. Google double standard. When Microsoft announced Office Live earlier this year, the response was either muted or downright disappointed because it wasn't a Web-based version of Microsoft Office . An example of such responses is Mike Arrington's post entitled Microsoft Office Live goes into Beta . On the flip side, the announcement of Google Apps for your Domain which is basically a "me too" offering from Google is heralded by Mike Arrington in his post Google Makes Its Move: Office 2.0 as the second coming of the office suite. The difference in the responses to what are almost identical product announcements is an obvious indication at how both companies are perceived by the technology press and punditry.

Some of that is expectations. Sure, there's a double standard to some extent, but people expect more from MS, fairly or not. When you own properties like Office and Windows, that's just part of the game.

Technorati Tags: PR

One of the things I really, really liked about the "Lord of the Rings" movies was the music - I've popped the DVD's in just to listen to the closing music. This morning, I was waiting to have a new cell phone loaded with my address book, so I walked over to Best Buy to peruse CDs. In the soundtrack section, I came across "Music from The Lord of the Rings", by Mask. It's really quite good - I've been listening to the CDs directly, but I'll be ripping them so that I can carry this on my iPod. I especially like "Into the West", which is from the finale. For anyone who likes the story, it's a really touching piece.

Technorati Tags: movies, lotr

You hear a lot of complaints about the blogosphere being filled with fact free ranting and echo-chamberness. Well, the mainstream media looks a lot like that right now - witness the John Mark Karr circus. Over the last few weeks, the cable news outlets have been on a nearly 24x7 feeding frenzy on this one - today we learn that there's no DNA match, and that the local DA does not intend to press charges.

Boy, those editors and fact checkers are sure doing a world of good over in MSM-world...

Via David Weinberg, I ran across this post from Jeneane Sessum - who has a fair amount of cynicism built up on the whole attention/gesture thing:

Although this attention thing sounds a little good and a little creepy at the same time, it is essentially as it always has always been: anyone concerned with what you’re paying attention to is out to make money off of you. Trying to paint attention monitoring or tracking or trust or what have you as anything other than that is dishonest. You and I are not that important. No one, I mean no one, besides a suspicious mate cares what you pay attention to online unless they’re looking to divorce some bread from your wallet.

Pretty much, yeah. She goes on, and the rest of her post is worth reading - follow the link for it. The funny thing is, not only is attention/gesture a silly way to extract information worth selling - but, as I said the other day, the proposed business model for it flopped like a fish out of water back in the late 90's. It's an idea whose time tried to come, and wasn't worth waiting for.

The Red Sox are in an epic tailspin, and they just received even more bad news: Ortiz' irregular heartbeat is still bothering him, and he's out until they figure it out:

The massive slump the Red Sox are in seemed far less relevant by the end of Monday night, when the club revealed that David Ortiz, the team's star designated hitter, suffered a recurrence of the rapid heartbeat he was experiencing 10 days ago. Ortiz will fly back to Boston on Tuesday morning to undergo further medical exams.

Ramirez is also out, with a hamstring injury. Those two were the only punch that ballclub had left. It's all over in Boston, except for the recriminations.

Technorati Tags: baseball, redsox

Wired News thinks that Sony is in fairly deep trouble - the electronics division is on a decade long slide, and they are hoping that the PS3 will reverse that. The trouble is, the $600 price tag (as I've mentioned many times before) is not the way there.

Based on this article, I think Sony has a positioning problem: they are marketing a game system, but they have far larger (and mostly invisible) plans for the PS3:

The PS3 is much more than a game box. Kutaragi likes to say it's actually a computer, one that's designed to lie at the center of the networked home, serving up films, navigating the Internet, doing nearly everything a PC can do, and delivering jaw-dropping videogames besides. The new console relies on two extremely ambitious yet untested technologies. At its core is a highly sophisticated microchip that can cruise at teraflop speeds (equal to the fastest supercomputers of less than a decade ago) and that might someday revolutionize home electronics. Also built into the machine is Sony's new Blu-ray hi-def disc player, which is proudly incompatible with a rival format from Toshiba and which represents a bold, some would say reckless, attempt to control the multibillion-dollar market in next-generation video discs.

Well, that might explain why Sony thinks that the $600 price tag is reasonable. The problem here is one of branding: Sony, whether it likes it or not, is selling game consoles, not home media centers. The market for home media centers of this sort isn't even proven - Microsoft thought they could sell Media Center PCs into the living room, and it hasn't worked. People like well made, single purpose devices (like Tivo). They don't want their DVR to crash because the latest IE patch failed.

I documented the exciting process of setting up a Media Center PC (and that didn't even cover HD - I'm sure that adds to the fun) awhile back, and it wasn't easy. When people buy a game system, they aren't really expecting to have configuration issues. Maybe Sony has something that will solve that, but they sure haven't told anyone. The PS3 is being pushed as a next gen console, not as a multi-purpose device. As a multi-purpose device, the $600 tag might work. As a game console, it's just laughable.

Update: Scoble makes a point involving HD TVs:

I guess it depends how many people will buy $4,000 TVs over the next year. If you get one of those you’ll probably open a credit account. Then $600 more isn’t really that big a deal since that’ll probably cost you another $20 a month. At least that’s how I bought my Xbox and my HD-DVD. Best Buy gave me $10,000 worth of credit by filling out a simple form. Oh, yeah, sorry to pop everyone’s bubble that I’m one rich dude. It’s the American way: go into debt for your toys.

Well, I still say this: At $600, you hit "conversation with the spouse" territory in a lot of households. I'm also not sure how many people will spend $4k on a TV. We bought an HD capable TV (i.e., no tuner) 2 years ago for less than $2k. There is simply no way I'd spend $4k on a TV - especially when only a small fraction of the available channels are HD.

Just when I thought patents couldn't get dumber, I ran across the asinine patent that Blackboard was granted. Did they patent any software or hardware? Heck no - they patented an idea:

Blackboard's patent doesn't refer to any device or even specific software code. Rather, it describes the basic framework of an LMS. In short, Blackboard says what it invented isn't learning tools like drop boxes, but the idea of putting such tools together in one big, scalable system across a university.

How can you tell when a company is busy being a patent troll? Why, when they feel forced to issue statements like this one:

"Blackboard is not a troll," he said, referring to the term for companies that establish a patent but don't use it except to exact royalties from others. "We're not trying to put anyone out of business. We're not trying to hinder innovation. We're seeking a reasonable royalty."

I think I'll create a flowchart of the "stupid patent process", and apply. Then, whenever a set of morons like Blackboard tries to patent an idea, I'll sue for infringement. The sad thing is, given the clear stupidity of the US PTO, I'd probably stand a decent chance of getting the patent...

Technorati Tags: patents, stupidity

I've added some more caching to the Silt server, just in time for my ESUG talk on running a Smalltalk server. The new code is in the Public Store, Silt 2.62.

Technorati Tags: blog, cst, smalltalk

First, Windows DRM was cracked with FairUse4WM. Today we learn that Apple's fairPlay has been cracked by QTFairUse6. A rational RIAA would realize that this is a bad replay of the floppy disk protection wars of the 80's - but I don't expect that. No, I expect more raw stupidity. Where the RIAA is concerned, there's no such thing as a bridge too far...

Technorati Tags: RIAA, DRM

Hmm. Dave Winer goes off an yet another rant about how invite only events are evil (unless, of course, he's invited - then they're cool). This is the part of his comment I want to focus on:

And I've heard from people that open standards work *was* done at Foo Camp this year, and David, that's a problem for EVERYONE including the people who were invited. Tim should really make that clear up front, this is a party, a social event, and you should not try to do open standards work at such an event.

As opposed to the way Dave deals with work on clarifying RSS? Where he's willing to call employers and threaten with lawsuits? How is there room in California for anyone else, with Winer's ego there?

Update: Oh, this is rich. I had no idea Winer had been invited to Davos (2000). Talk about your exclusive events where "matters of consequence" are discussed. I'd call him hypocritical, but that would be an insult to hypocrites everywhere.

Technorati Tags: invite+only, stupidity

Lee Gomes of the WSJ has dug into YouTube, and come up with some fascinating statistics - head on over there for them, or check Steve Rubel's post for a quick summary. Here's the part that still makes me wonder:

YouTube videos take up an estimated 45 terabytes of storage -- about 5,000 home computers' worth -- and require several million dollars' worth of bandwidth a month to transmit.

Those costs are one reason that some predict YouTube will collapse under the sheer weight of providing a haven for every teenager with a cellphone camera eager to be famous for 15 minutes of video.

I've been wondering about those costs for awhile - it seems to me that unless they start charging a subscription fee, or start selling ads on the TV model (i.e., patched into every uploaded video), there's simply no way they can stay afloat for the long haul. Am I wrong? What am I missing here?

Technorati Tags: business

This is kind of neat: STIC has decided to make [ | ] an official logo for Smalltalk. In Smalltalk geek circles, people sometimes refer to themselves as "Knights of the Square Bracket" :)

As part of the Smalltalk Central initiative, the Smalltalk Industry Council now advocates for the use of [|] (bracket, vertical bar, bracket), as in: '[|] Powered by Smalltalk'. [|] represents a unique aspect of Smalltalk syntax, it's easy to include in both graphic and text based content, and, over time, will become a recognized logo.

Count me in!

Technorati Tags: stic

InfoWorld reports InfoWorld's Tom Yager on the rise of Apple:

Apple's UNIX (who knows what it'll be called by then) will overtake commercial Linux in rate of revenue growth by the end of 2007. By mid-2008, Apple's sales of systems with factory-installed Apple UNIX will exceed the total combined sales of x86 systems factory-shipped with commercial Linux. At the end of the decade, we'll find that Apple UNIX has overtaken commercial Linux as the second most popular general client and server computing platform behind Windows.

This is a good thing. Microsoft has desperately needed competition to wake them up from their somnolence, and it looks like they're going to get it.

Technorati Tags: apple

There's an interesting bug in the VW menu editor that crops up if you have Pollock loaded and want to add message catalog information to a menu item. Here's a screen shot of the tool I'm talking about:

There's a lookup key and catalog specified for that item, but they don't show (and, if you try to enter them, they don't stick. Again, this only happens if you have Pollock loaded. As it happens, there's a method added to class UserMessage that looks like this:

evaluate
	^self asString

That interferes with showing the catalog data. The fix? Simply comment out the code, which makes the method return self. In the next build of Pollock, this method will be going away - it turns out to be legacy code (ironic, given that Pollock is still in development).

I expect that most people won't run into this, but if you have Pollock loaded, you will.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Markus Denker has announced a Smalltalk gathering in Bern, Switzerland on October 28th:

SSUG is organizing a Smalltalk Gathering. We invite all Smalltalkers to join this event to share their enthusiasm and knowledge about Smalltalk.

What?
Smalltalk Event

Where ?
University of Bern - IAM Bern, Switzerland

Here is some information on how to get there:

http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Resources/Maps/index.html

When ?
Sat 28h of October 2006 -- 9:30am until ...

Contact ?

email : denker@iam.unibe.ch

If you plan to attend, please register on the Wiki

Send Markus an email in order to get the Wiki password.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

This is the vision that keeps the RIAA up at night:

Imagine a world where musicians keep the copyright to their music and make $5 or $6 per album sold instead the current $1 or $2. This is a model being proposed by Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music Group. With sales of CDs continuing a downward spiral, he realizes that the music industry needs to make some changes.

Right now, there are a gazillion middle men (most of whom subtract value) in the music business, and the upshot is that artists collect virtually nothing from CD sales. Here's what could change that:

McBride’s model calls for artists to record under their own labels. They retain ownership of their music. Companies like Nettwerk take the place of all of the different players who are typically involved in selling CDs. This means any profit has a much smaller split, with all involved able to take more home. In addition, keeping the copyright in one place makes it easier to sell songs to advertising agencies, to approve free downloads for promotion, or to do whatever it takes to market the music. Every move doesn’t require multiple approvals.

That would be like a breath of fresh air in the industry, and it's exactly what the RIAA doesn't want. They want the status quo, so that they and all their middle men can continue to subtract value and rake in profits.

Technorati Tags: DRM

John Dvorak thinks that the move of Google's CEO to Apple's board could signal a Sun/Apple merger:

As soon as Google CEO Eric Schmidt was named to the board of directors at Apple some mild speculation ensued suggesting that he'd eventually become CEO of Apple. After all, Schmidt, unlike many other high-profile CEOs, is not one to join every board that has an opening.

In fact Schmidt may have been brought in as the set-up pitcher for what may finally be the often rumored merger between Apple and Sun. Schmidt would quietly be Sun's inside man on the negotiations although technically he's be a neutral party since he doesn't actually work for Sun.

I'll believe that when I see it - and I think it would be a cluster you know what of absolutely epic proportions. If it happened, the first thing you would see would be savage cuts on the Sun side of the house, in order to stop the bleeding. That would lead to the all too common (in merger situations) middle management warfare. I've lived through a smaller version of that, and believe me - no one wins.

Here's my prediction: if such a merger does take place, the combined company will be smaller than either one within 5 years.

Technorati Tags: apple, sun

Scoble has corrected a post where he got on someone's case for copying his content:

UPDATE: Looked like Elliott Back was the author of that site, but now I learn he just wrote the software (Elliott just called me and says he’s not involved). This guy John Comokaz (stickybuns@gmail.com) is bothering Elliott too, by dragging his Elliott’s name through the mud. I just did a whois lookup and found the guy who does the crazyfactor site is John Comokaz.

Looking through Scoble's comments, a bunch of people praise this Back guy (I wonder if any of them are sock puppets). Here's the thing: the software he wrote serves one purpose - to create splogs that steal other people's content. That makes him just as low as the sploggers in my book. I'm with Doc Searls on this one.

Technorati Tags: splog

Here's a problem for the upcoming PS3 that Sony can't do much about: manufacturing problems with the laser components:

Things are looking dicey for both HD DVD and Blu-ray, because a key component has suddenly become scarce: blue laser diode yield rates are only 30% according to Nichia, a company responsible for 80% of the blue laser diode supply. The diodes are used in both HD DVD and Blu-ray players, and the shortfall will severely limit the number of players that can be shipped.

It could be even worse: if this rumor is true, then the PS3 will be delayed (at least in quantity) past Christmas:

Sources said only Pioneer and Plextor are currently able to maintain shipments of products using the blue diodes, with Toshiba soon joining them. Another source says any new models using those diodes might be postponed until 2007.

Hat tip Scoble.

Technorati Tags: ps3, games

Ed Foster classifies Comcast's inability to properly handle blacklists as a preview of non-neutrality. The problem:

A reader who is a Comcast broadband customer had a disturbing experience recently. "I'm at a total loss about how to handle this situation," the reader wrote. "An e-mail to me from a friend got bounced apparently by Comcast. He resent it to my G-Mail account so I could see it. It said that his message was "Blocked for abuse. Please send blacklist removal requests to blacklist_comcastnet@cable.comcast.com ' among other stuff. So apparently there exists a Comcast blacklist that I cannot control that stops e-mails and that requires my correspondents to ask to be permitted to send me messages."

I like his summary better than his introduction - there, he figures that this is almost certainly incompetence. I wouldn't be surprised if it's fear of a lawsuit. Say customer A gets a message (or more than one) from someone, and he complains to Comcast that the message is "hate mail". I can definitely see scared management talking to overly excitable lawyers first, and blocking an entire domain. I can see the same thing happening with overly aggressive spam filters.

Heck, here at Cincom, the spam filters have been improperly tuned - they were junking all mails that had snippets of Smalltalk code in them. That made things real easy for support, I can assure you.

The root of this problem has very little to do with neutrality, and everything to do with an over-reliance on automation. Spam detection tools are just that: tools. I think too many shops just crank up the settings and never bother to look at the results - they never realize what the false positive rate looks like. That's a management issue, not a technical one.

Technorati Tags: net+neutrality

Nick Carr quotes Ryan Carson on social software:

I just don’t have time to use all of these amazing apps, and I’m guessing you might not too. I’m a fairly typical web citizen. I’m 28, married, make a reasonable wage, own a house and I have a few close friends. You’d think I’d be a web app company’s dream, but I’m not. How come? I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either.

I think I have to agree with that. I started using del.icio.us about a year ago; I stopped after a few weeks, because the extra effort didn't seem worth it. Heck, I only just started using technorati tags in my blog posts recently, and I've had support for it in my posting tool for awhile.

The current mix of social software seems to me a lot like the last big fad, which centered around services like LinkedIn. Other than responding to other people's requests for a link, I haven't had anything to do with it. The bottom line is, these things take effort to use. Not tons, but effort. It's simpler to just not bother.

I'm sure that some people find these apps useful and compelling. I'm not one of them though, and I'd guess that most people aren't.

Technorati Tags: social+software, tagging

I went through the style sheets, and changed all the absolute font sizes to percentages - which makes the text resize option in IE work for the blogs here. I may not have the various sizes perfect yet; I'll have to systematically go through and eyeball it

Update: I restored the original themes for water, air, impact, fire, and plastics - they just looked wrong. I'll have to do a lot more testing. So, if you use IE and want to resize text, I'd recommend using the Cincom, Cst, or Stic themes.

I have to admit: watching the Red Sox meltdown has been a real pleasure. As a Yankee fan, it's especially enjoyable (even more so after 2004). It seems that this guilty pleasure is not limited to Yankee fans though:

But the Red Sox losing five straight to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Kansas City Royals, then following that with two six-game losing streaks, the first including that five-act meltdown against the New York Yankees, the second still going as this is written -- and if I type fast enough the losing streak will still only be six when I finish: It's not a Yankees swan dive but we'll take it around here as the next best thing, the fall of the Evil Empire Mini-Me.

This is fun because, aside from watching your own team win and luxuriating in the schadenfreude of witnessing a Yankees loss, nothing is more fun than watching the Red Sox disintegrate.

Well, except for that part about the Yankees, yeah :)

Technorati Tags: baseball, redsox, yankees

It used to be that companies could quietly bury costs in a contract, secure in the knowledge that few would notice - and that the only pressure they would face would be a few cranky (snail) mails.

Those days are gone, thanks to the net - blogs and podcasts in particular. I heard about Verizon and BellSouth deciding to keep bozo charges on their DSL bills after a regulatory change - and there was plenty of other noise about it - Engadget fills us in:

In case you haven't been following the exciting world of telecom regulation lately (and really, why would you?), the FCC recently mandated that DSL providers no longer have to pay into the Universal Service Fund that's meant to subsidize rural and low-income phone service (and that may induce all kinds of pork-barrel spending, but that's a whole other story right there). Anyway, the elimination of this surcharge was supposed to be passed along to consumers in the form of lower monthly bills -- and many companies, including AT&T and Qwest, did just that -- but the sneaky suits over at Verizon and BellSouth decided to keep charging customers almost the exact same fee, though for different reasons. Verizon claimed that it had "developed new operating costs" in the previous year, justifying this so-called "supplier surcharge," while BellSouth began calling theirs a "regulatory cost recovery fee" -- even though the USF contribution regulation no longer existed.

These are the kinds of stupid vendor tricks that used to work, and don't work any longer. There are still plenty of suits out there that haven't caught up yet though.

Technorati Tags: PR, marketing

Joel Spolsky gives development advice that boils down to this: whatever you do, don't try anything different - you wouldn't want a competitive advantage or anything:

Last summer when we had a group of interns build Copilot , we had to decide what language to use for new code. I know that typically on new projects there's a long evaluation period where you decide what technology to use, along with lots of debates that include some crazy person actually wasting quite a lot of time evaluating Squeak and Lisp and  OCaml  and lots of other languages which are totally, truly brilliant programming languages worthy of great praise, but just don't have the gigantic ecosystem you need around them if you want to develop web software. These debates are enormously fun and a total and utter waste of time, because the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything (Lisp, ISAPI DLLs written in C, Perl), and a handful of platforms where The Jury Is Not In, So Why Take The Risk When Your Job Is On The Line? (Ruby on Rails).

Yep, be like everyone else, building on exactly the same frameworks - there's the ticket.

Alternatively, you could try the route Avi's taken with DabbleDB...

Ironically, it seems that in his own shop, he doesn't exactly follow his own advice:

Finally -- as to what we use -- Copilot is C# and ASP.Net, as I mentioned, although the Windows client is written in C++. Our older in-house code is VBScript and our newer in-house code is C#. FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.

Hmmm - a custom development language that is specifically designed to solve their problems. Hmmm.

Well, I guess you can file this report from Techcrunch under "what do I know, anyway":

New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That’s big news, as it’s tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking is a market driver of serious proportions.

The Hitwise report puts Yahoo! as the source of 4.69 percent of traffic to online retail sites, MySpace as 2.53 percent and MSN search at 2.33 percent for the week ending August 26th. Google leads the pack at 14.93 percent.

I guess the commenters under my earlier post on this were on to something :)

Technorati Tags: social+software

Well, I wonder about this: Tom Foremski passes on a tidbit from Waggner Edstrom, the PR firm that works with Microsft (and has for quite awhile):

Paul Abrahams works very closely with Microsoft and is in Seattle on a regular basis, advising the software giant on many strategic aspects of its operations. I haven't heard from Paul in a while, so it was a delightful surprise when he called me just an hour ago.

What he wanted to tell me was that he had written a column for the UK PR Week trade publication on blogging. "I've mentioned you in it," he said. "But I've basically said, regarding all this stuff about blogs, I just don't get it..."

Either Waggoner is trying to be cute, or there's some delicious irony there, given how open Microsoft has been with blogging.

Update: Waggener Edstrom responds

Technorati Tags: marketing, PR

Stories like this are just fascinating to me. The studios are getting nervous, because Apple wants to offer movies for download, and Wal-Mart is unhappy with what that will do to the wholesale prices (Wal-Mart is the major retail vendor for DVDs in the US).

The Elephants can dance on this one, and the prices should fall for consumers either way. That's a good thing.

Technorati Tags: marketing, movies, iTunes

Via Less is Better, David Heinemeir Hansson gets the Board of Education out for Joel Spolsky - read the whole thing, it's well worth it. I love his summary:

So Joel and friends invented their own language, which has to reasonably compile to three and a half different ones. Yes, they're building their Serious Business Stuff application on a 1-off, closed language. So please do as I say, not as I do, dammit. And pick something mainstream and "safe".

I swear I couldn't make this stuff up even if I tried. Joel, you're my new hero of irony. And as soon as you start selling those t-shirts with "Serious Business Stuff", I got green ready to flow. Short of that, I'd take a red teddy bear with the embroidering "Someone is Going to Get Fired".

Oh, and let me address something that I wasn't specific about in my post on this - his FUD on Smalltalk (and Lisp, Ruby, etc)

Last summer when we had a group of interns build Copilot, we had to decide what language to use for new code. I know that typically on new projects there's a long evaluation period where you decide what technology to use, along with lots of debates that include some crazy person actually wasting quite a lot of time evaluating Squeak and Lisp and OCaml and lots of other languages which are totally, truly brilliant programming languages worthy of great praise, but just don't have the gigantic ecosystem you need around them if you want to develop web software.

So let me get this straight, Joel: having one of your developers build a custom language (bus count: 1) is a better idea (with a bigger "ecosystem") than using Smalltalk? Or Lisp? Or Ruby? Sheesh, I'd call that stupid, but I'd be insulting all the stupid people that way. This goes down from stupid, straight into stoooopid.

Let me know how things work out on that when your Wasabi guy moves on to the next great opportunity.

Technorati Tags: FUD

The second worldwide Cincom Smalltalk User Conference is approaching. The conference will be held in Frankfurt, Germany, December 5-7:

December 05-07, 2006
Frankfurt, Germany
Moevenpick Hotel Frankfurt City

More details can be found here.

If you want to ensure you’ll be on the mailing list for further details on the user conference and/or the workshop, please e-mail infode@cincom.com

Click here to register.

Technorati Tags: cincom, smalltalk, cst

Joel Spolsky follows up on yesterday's FUD, and immediately steps into the quicksand:

Since we are not blub programmers, we like closures, active records, lambdas, embedded SQL a la LINQ, etc. etc. and so those are the kinds of features we put into Wasabi.

You have to love that - "we are not blub programmers". As opposed to everyone else who reads his blog, apparently. From yesterday:

These debates are enormously fun and a total and utter waste of time, because the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything (Lisp, ISAPI DLLs written in C, Perl), and a handful of platforms where The Jury Is Not In, So Why Take The Risk When Your Job Is On The Line? (Ruby on Rails).

He spends the rest of the post trying to backpedal from yesterday's silliness, and trying to explain why the approach they use is a good one. For instance:

Should you write your own compiler? Maybe, if you're doing something that's different enough from the mainstream and if there's no good off-the-shelf technology for your problem. There's a good chance that the domain you're working in could really use a domain-specific language.

Sure Joel, bug tracking systems are so very, very far outside the mainstream of development. No one else has ever thought to write such an application. At the end of the day, he's really saying this: he and his team are just soooo brilliant that they can handle this extra complexity. The rest of you? Nah, you can't handle it (or worse, you might be able to compete with him, especially if you set up shop somewhere less expensive than NYC) - so you dummies better stick with Java (et. al.).

To quote Bugs Bunny: What a Maroon.

Update: Chris Petrilli piles on with some good points.

Technorati Tags: FUD

It's the end of another week, and the effective end of summer here in the US. School has either started (or is starting Tuesday), which is it - you can tell by the way all the community pools close or sharply reduce hours. Anyway: the logs for last week. BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a decent clip, 214 per day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	602
Update	225
Linux x86	160
Mac X	96
CE ARM	86
HPUX	73
Mac 8/9	63
Solaris	52
Windows98/ME	47
Sources	43
AIX	18
Linux Sparc	14
Linux PPC	11
SGI	8
ADUX	3

Those look mostly normal, slight uptick for Windows. On to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	44.6%
Internet Explorer	36.6%
Planet Smalltalk	6.3%
Other	6.3%
MSN Bot	3.8%
Opera	1.3%
Megite	1.1%

Those look the same as usual. With IE slowly creeping up, I guess it's a good thing that some of the templates here support IE better. Finally, the RSS accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	26%%
Mozilla	16.2%
Other	11.6%
Net News Wire	7.9%
Internet Explorer	5.9%
BlogLines	5.8%
Safari RSS	5.8%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.9%
NewsGator	3.6%
Planet Smalltalk	1.6%
RSS Bandit	1.4%
Opera	1.2%
SharpReader	1.1%
MSN Bot	1%
News Fire	1%
Liferea	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
JetBrains	1%
BlogSearch	1%
Java	1%
Reddit	1%

And that's a wrap on another week. I'm heading to Esug tomorrow, and to a party this afternoon - posting will be fairly light

When I saw the headlines - Myspace selling unprotected mp3s - I thought that maybe we had a game changing event happening:

In a direct challenge to Apple’s iTunes, MySpace has announced its intention to sell songs from the 3 million unsigned bands on MySpace.com. Even more surprising: the songs will be sold as unprotected MP3s, free from DRM. MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe told Reuters: “Everyone we’ve spoken to definitely wants an alternative to iTunes and the iPod. MySpace could be that alternative.”

That sounds interesting, and it definitely looks like a way for unknown bands to get a leg up - which is something I posted on the other day. However, reality set in by paragraph 2:

Mashable readers won’t be surprised to learn that the new feature will be powered by Snocap, the music distribution service from Napster founder Shawn Fanning. Snocap only recently launched a MySpace music player, which allows users to buy unprotected songs via Paypal. Snocap charges the artists a small distribution fee, and most of the tracks are DRM-free. Unlike the fixed-price model of iTunes, artists on Snocap set their own price. Once the service is live, DeWolfe wants to add copyright-protected songs from major record companies, and it’s rumored that MySpace has spoken to EMI regarding the move.

The pricing model looks interesting - a real market will open up that way, if Myspace goes through with that model. My cynicism kicked in with the major label bit - and copyright protection. That will mean yet another DRM scheme, and who knows what devices it will and won't work with.

Even with that, this is interesting news. If nothing else, it's punching some holes through the current layer of value subtracting middle men in the music industry.

Technorati Tags: DRM

Via Chris Petrilli, who found it at Andy Hunt's place:

Ralph Johnson talks about architecture, design, and implementation

This may be the dumbest negative PR thing I've seen yet: A UK senior citizen was told that she was too old for internet service:

After walking the Great Wall of China and making plans for a trip to Russia, Shirley Greening-Jackson thought signing up for a new internet service would be a doddle.

But the young man behind the counter had other ideas. He said she was barred - because she was too old.

The 75-year-old would only be allowed to sign the forms for the Carphone Warehouse's TalkTalk phone and broadband package if she was accompanied by a younger member of her family who could explain the small print to her.

Can you imagine being in the meeting at corporate where they came up with that policy? They weren't even smart enough to start backpedaling once they started getting media inquiries:

When her case came to light on Radio 4's You And Yours last week, Carphone Warehouse admitted it had adopted an over-70 rule.

But the firm insisted it was not a blanket policy and claimed the guidance was to protect the elderly. A spokeswoman said: "It is not our policy to refuse business from adult customers of any age group. However, we do ask our agents to use their discretion when dealing with older customers."

She added that the discretionary rule had been introduced in response to complaints that staff had mis-sold products last year.

I hope they're looking for a new set of PR people, because the ones they have are too stupid to live.

Technorati Tags: management, marketing

I like the Mac a whole lot better than my PC, but there are still a few areas of wonkiness. This morning, I killed the Finder by double clicking on the 2 GB USB icon on the desktop.

Now, that seemed odd to me - the first thing I thought was "oh crap, what now?" However, I recalled that I had ejected a "phantom" CD yesterday, and then it clicked. After rebooting the machine (thank you, ssh access!), I plugged the USB stick back in. Sure enough, it came up as both a drive icon and a CD icon. The trouble comes if I eject the "phantom" CD. That turns off the USB stick, but it still looks like it's on.

Some kinds of wonkiness are not limited to Windows...

I'm about to head out the door to ESUG 2006 - and it's going to be a long flight. I leave here (Baltimore) at 2PM. Then I get to sit in New York for 3 hours, while I wait for my 6PM flight. That arrives in Brussels at 7:30 AM tomorrow - and then I have 2 hours to wait for the final leg, the Prague.

I finally arrive at 11:20 AM tomorrow. Ugh. On the return next week, I go back through London (and boy, I hope that doesn't get ugly).

Other than the travel, it should be a good trip. I've never been to Prague before, and I'm actually taking a good camera with me. I'm looking forward to some site seeing, and to a good conference. See you there!

The airport security experience: the illusion of security and the complete absence of judgement. I forget to clear my bag of things like toothpaste, as I've had those kinds of toiletries in there for years. Well, that was a mistake. Just out of orneriness, I asked the supervisor if he could show me, in writing, where liquids are banned (yes, I knew ahead of time about the ban. I had forgotten to clear my bag). That generated two responses:

• No, the list is classified
• A local cop was called, who told me to keep my opinions to myself

Now, I tend to get irritated when I'm told to shut up (this has gotten me in trouble more than once). Still, having state and federal agents tell me what I can and cannot say truly torques me off. It's not like I was making threats, or claiming to have bad things - all I wanted was written proof of the ban. I understand security people getting jumpy about "jokes" at the checkpoint - it's like yelling fire in a theater. I get that. What torques me off is being told that the list of banned substances is classified, and being told that I'm not allowed to express an opinion about that.

The thing is, this isn't limited to airports. My daughter's school has a blanket ban on drugs. That sounds reasonable, until you realize that it includes things like Midol (which a teenage girl might need from time to time), and cough drops. Why do they do that? Well, it's simpler than asking teachers and administrators to actually engage their brains and make judgement calls. Girl with Midol? Ok. Person out back with narcotics? Not ok. Sadly, they are unwilling to make that kind of judgement call, so they just ban everything. Which means this: If my daughter has a cough, I have to go to my doctor and get a written note before I can send her in with a few Ricolas. I can't just send a parent's note, and the Ricola's would have to sit in the nurse's office. Sudden coughing fit? No longer a simple thing to fix, because the school system is unable or unwilling to apply judgement.

It's a societal problem, and the application of it at airports is just a noticeable symptom.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, security

Jeff Jarvis hopes that the real estate cartel is getting disintermediated:

The Times story focuses on Redfin, a new brokerage in California and Washington only, unfortunately, that will list sellers’ homes for $2,000 flat and will rebate two thirds of its commission (thus usually 2 percent of the selling price) to buyers. Redfin does all this -- how else? -- by taking advantage of the internet and of the monopolistic pricing of multiple listing service members.

The Times reports that some sellers’ agents refuse to show homes to people coming from Redfin. I’d call that anticompetitive and perhaps even antitrust behavior. Watch and I’ll bet that MLSes will get opened up and then, once any of us can list and find homes on our own, the whole game is over. Bye-bye overpriced agents.

I won't be selling (or buying) a home anytime soon, but I like the sound of this. Just like the music business, real estate is a field that is ripe for some cleanup.

I'm not a fan of government regulation - either for or against net neutrality - but I am opposed to unadulterated BS. That's exactly what the telcos are spewing with this ad (unintentionally hilarious if you know anything about the subject). Click the link here to watch it (you need Flash installed).

What I love most is the notion that net neutrality is mumbo jumbo intended to allow rich silicon valley tech firms to bilk us. Umm, yeah - I live in constant fear of those outfits. What's Google going to do, beyond throw too many ads my way? I'm not even sure who this ad is intended to convince. Everyone who's ever had a phone bill to pay knows about "interesting" fees the telcos come up with.

Bah.

Technorati Tags: net+neutrality

I'd call this report on the abundance of obesity progress, actually - having more obese people than malnourished ones is a huge step forward in historical terms:

The world now has more fat people than hungry ones, according to World Health Organisation figures, with more than a billion overweight people compared to 800 million who are undernourished.

Which is not to say that widespread obesity is a good thing - simply better than the historical norm.

Peter Fisk has some screenshots of his Vista Smalltalk running on Vista RC1. Head on over to take a look, or just click here for the image.

I'm reading a post from the head lemur, on the general topic of communication, online communities, and splogs - it's pretty good stuff, but I do have a small, technically oriented nit:

It is about the lost opportunity to engage in dialogue. You cannot comment from a news reader, aggregator, social links page, you have to come here. This is where engagement and dialogue takes place. That is at the end of the day, what it is all about. The internet is the one place where it is easier to ask permission that ask forgiveness.

That's not entirely true. There aren't a ton of blogs that support the CommentAPI, but they do exist (this is one of them). Heck, I follow the comment trail (on the Smalltalk blogs) in my aggregator, and I do nearly all of my commenting from the aggregator. In fact, of the 280 feeds that I subscribe to, 48 support the CommentAPI (meaning, I can comment directly from my aggregator). I discovered that via a simple script in my BottomFeeder runtime:

supportingFeeds := RSSFeedManager default getAllMyFeeds select: [:each |
	| items allows |
	items := each allItems.
	allows := items detect: [:eachItem | eachItem commentAPIUrl notNil] ifNone: [nil].
	allows notNil]

So in fact, if your blogging software and aggregator software line up on features, you can comment without punching through to the HTML page.

Which is truly a side point in the context of the entire post, which I encourage you to read. It's great stuff about the damage done by sploggers:

Because of the ease of creation, open formats, and the astonishing number of applications written to capture RSS, splogs were born. Their whole purpose is to game the system, by creating sites that people will go to, click on ads, and make money for sploggers on other peoples work. These people are not adding to the great conversation or contributing to the web. They are stealing content, setting up self referring networks, all to steal money from advertisers, and breed anger and mistrust.

Go ahead, read the whole thing :)

Technorati Tags: community

Technorati Tags: social+software

I've finally gotten to my hotel - I'm at the Crowne Plaza in Prague. I have no idea how to get from here to the conference hotel, so I'll have to work that out. It's always a long trip when you fly overnight...

Well, I'm finally here at the conference. The room has a bit too much of an echo - it's kind of hard to pick up speakers with an accent (and, I expect that means that non-English speakers will have trouble picking up people like me. Oh well).

Anyway, the current talk is from Dr. Michael Prasse, on modularizing the ObjectLens. It could certainly stand some of that; I recall my first stint as a consultant, trying to use the Lens programmatically (instead of via the Forms Editor). Not only was it not fun, but support (this was back in the PPS days) told me that such usage wasn't supported.

You can imagine my reaction :)

Anyway - the lens is a fairly simplistic O/R layer, in that it maps a single class to a table - you can't store objects of different classes in the same table (polymorphism comes via foreign key mapping). Instance variable map straight to columns. Usage is fairly straightforward:

aLensSession add: anObject

aLensSession remove: anOBject

You can write queries using Smalltalk #select:. You get transaction support and proxies. You save the db mapping information declaratively in a spec (like a window spec). The dataSpec is too monolithic - what Michael is doing is creating a more modular set of specs, which allows for easier reuse across similar applications. Back in my SE demo days, this would have been highly useful (and, I can recall a number of Lens projects I consulted on that would have been a lot easier).

He's got modified tools that support these changes as well - pretty cool stuff.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, esug

Aaron Swartz has done some yeoman's work on how Wikipedia has gotten written. First, he presents Jimbo Wales' view - which is that 20% of the people on the site have done 80% of the work:

So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. "I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from "people who [are] contributing ... a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix ... or something like that."

Aaron was skeptical, so he decided to take a few samples and investigate. He chose the Alan Alda page first:

To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version. † Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article. If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales's methods, you get Wales's results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.

But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit -- this one! With the more reasonable metric -- indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study -- the result completely reverses.

I don't have the resources to run this calculation across all of Wikipedia (there are over 60 billion edits!), but I ran it on several more randomly-selected articles and the results were much the same. For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all deleting things and moving things around).

The upshot: An "Army of Davids" (to steal a metaphor :) ) creates the content, while a small cadre of editors cleans it up and does follow on work. That's pretty much how I always thought of it, and it's cool to see that someone has gone out and investigated. I hope Wales is listening, because the current ideas about locking the site down more run counter to this reality.

Technorati Tags: media, wiki, Wikipedia

Alexandre Bergel (with help from other people like Stephanne Ducasse, and Colin Putney, who isn't here), is up to talk about the OmniBrowser framework - which he describes as a meta framework for building browsers. The examples are all in Squeak, but there is code for this in VW.

Here's Alexandre starting the talk:

The OmniBrowser consists of three main notions:

• Nodes - what my domain is
• MetaGraph - how do I navigate my domain?
• Actors - how do I interact with my domain?

Along with Filters and Definitions for describing and filtering nodes. There are some limitations:

• Navigation has to follow the left to right flow
• Would be difficult to implement Whiskers (Squeak) or the RB (VW, et. al)

On the other hand, lots of current Squeak tools have been built using this: changes, implementors, senders, variables, version... and a number of others.

Technorati Tags: esug, smalltalk

Niall Ross just handed me the PDF reports he did for ESUG 2005 and for StS 2006. They are both PDF files.

Technorati Tags: StS, esug, smalltalk