Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

You've heard of planning poker - but what about Planning Croquet? Via Squeak News, The Economist spoke to Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder, about that:

One area where he sees this happening is in real-time collaboration. E-mail is widely used as a collaborative tool, but has severe limitations. When a team, such as a group of software developers, wants to work together on something in real time, something more elaborate is needed. Mr Shuttleworth points to an open-source platform called Croquet, an immersive environment that is similar in many ways to Second Life, a popular online virtual world. “You can see your collaborators’ avatars looking at a spreadsheet in a virtual room,” he says. “People change things in different colours -- newer stuff glows. We’ve started to use this for planning and building Ubuntu.”

That could make planning fun :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, croquet

Those bright guys at Gartner are back with more conventional wisdom based analysis - this month, it's the death of the traditional workplace. Hey - they only lag the weekly news rags on this by a decade or two:

Gartner argues that three of the four traditional pillars of work -- the living wage, long-term relationships with loyal employers, and government- or company-provided pensions -- have already gone the way of the dinosaurs, leaving only the 40-hour workweek.

Here's what I'd like to know - when was the "golden age" when people had it so good? This kind of analysis usually ends up pointing at the 1950's and 1960's, which were economically good times for the US - you have to bear in mind that much of the rest of the world we compete with now was still recovering from the utter destruction of WWII though.

I wonder if they would select the 1930's as a golden age? Or the 1870's? Analysis is so easy when you don't know a thing about history.

This week we discussed native widgets vs. emulation - a general conversation on the state of play with widget sets ensued. During that conversation, episode 49 of the Software Engineering Radio podcast came up - "Dynamic Languages for Static Minds".

Cairo came up again, along with the work that Michael and Travis are doing with that in Cincom Smalltalk. Stick around at the end of the podcast for the jobs report and David's "Simberon Design Minute". As always, if you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com. Also, Podcast Alley clears votes at the end of each month - so head on over there and toss another vote our way!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, widgets

I just finished "Brave New War" - it's a quick read. I like the book, even if I don't agree with all of it. The main disagreement I have is this: I think the author (Robb) underplays the importance of ideology (and the funding sources for what he calls "4th Generation Warfare") in his thesis. Nevertheless, it's worth reading and pondering, and it comes in under 200 pages.

Andres Valloud sent me some photos from Smalltalk Solutions - here are a few of them. I'll get more posted on the main Cincom Smalltalk Site later today, as I get them processed. First, here are two from the coding contest:

In the top photo, that's Michael Lucas Smith on the left, and Mike Hales on the right - with Randy Coulman behind them. Below that, it's Niall Ross all the way to the right, and Travis Griggs getting up. Next, I have two Andres took of the "Industry Misinterpretations" podcast we did at the show:

From left to right, that's Michael Lucas-Smith, me (James Robertson), David Buck, and James Savidge. I'll have more later

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Thanks to Andres Valloud, I've got a photo gallery from StS 2007 posted. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: sts2007

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we start looking at the Dataset widget, and how to make use of it in a UI.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, gui

I love this story:

Courier-Journal sports reporter Brian Bennett had his media pass revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during a college baseball game Sunday because of what the NCAA said was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events. "It's clearly a First Amendment issue," says C-J executive editor Bennie Ivory. "This is part of the evolution of how we present the news to our readers."

As the author of that story noted, what are they going to do next? Stop people from using cell phones and blackberries? Start scanning them for electronics on entry? The NCAA has to get with the program and realize what century they live in, and take note of something even simpler: if someone gets a web update on a game, are they more likely to start watching it, or less? If the answer is less, then they have a problem with the excitement level of the sport, and electronics bans won't solve that.

Technorati Tags: media

WonderBranding notes that Revlon isn't paying attention to product and corporate mentions on the net, and that it's costing them some customers:

Since then, I’ve had a steady stream of comments from women across the U.S., increasingly desperate to find any remnants of the makeup they can find.  As of this writing, there are 93 comments on R.I.P. Vital Radiance, with one or two more added each day.  Let’s say they represent one-tenth of one percent of the audience that liked Vital Radiance enough to seek it out on the internet AND comment on this blog - that’s 90,000 women.  Multiply that by the number of women who are potential purchasers and non-commenters, and we’re probably talking about hundreds of thousands.

The sad thing is, I bet Revlon has a whole slew of overpaid, traditional Marcom folks who have no idea whatsoever that this is happening - they're too busy getting the next big spread in a glossy magazine or TV ad. It would do them some good to listen to the podcast I did on this topic awhile back...

Technorati Tags: PR

You have to love a headline like this:

Butts Charged With Stealing Toilet Paper

I'm not even sure how to classify that one...

I've posted another development build of BottomFeeder - as usual, send any bug reports here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, aggregator, RSS, Atom

James Governor asks a very good question about press releases:

Why should a press release be a static, text-based artifact anyway ? They are not legal contracts. More and more vendors are going to create their own release videos or work with media companies to do so.

You could do worse than read David Meerman Scott's "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" to start figuring this stuff out :)

Technorati Tags: marketing

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at Datasets again - using them for input as well as display

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I haven't downloaded Safari for Windows yet, but I've been thinking about what Apple is up to. All by itself, Safari for Windows makes little sense. However, as a port test for Cocoa and Apple's libraries, it makes a lot of sense. What if Apple is getting ready for a sideways attack on Windows? Make it easier to develop applications that run on Windows and Mac in a way that is more native to the Mac? I suspect that's the game that is afoot here.

Technorati Tags: windows, Apple

David Buck has been working with pywinauto to drive Windows applications - he's posted the work in progress to the public store repository under the name Windows Remote Control - check it out.

Technorati Tags: windows, sendkeys

Jeff Jarvis has a few unkind words for a Forbes reporter who puffs up Pay Per Post. You can go to Jeff's site for the takedown itself - it's all summarized quite well by this:

Pay Per Post isn’t advertising, marketing, branding, any of that. It’s an attempt to get around Google’s and Technorati’s splog filters.

Which is exactly right. Pay Per Post is a dark side "mechanical turk".

Technorati Tags: seo

Laura Ries doesn't like the iPhone idea (in general, she doesn't think much of converged devices) - and quotes a "Daily Show" segment on the idea:

John Hodgman refutes Jon’s statement with “So why combine a cellphone and a camera then?” Jon comes back with “Why? That’s my question. You just end up with a crappy phone and a crappy camera.” It receives big cheers from the audience and at this point Hodgman concedes that Jon wins the round.

Except... people like having Camera Phones. I use mine all the time, even though a digital camera will take a much better picture. Why? Two things:

• I don't need a cable for the camera phone - I just email the pictures to myself
• I'm far more likely to be carrying my phone than the camera

The camera phone takes pictures that are "good enough", so it's found widespread use. The iPhone may fail, but it won't necessarily be for reasons of "needless convergence". Even if single purpose devices are better, the barrier to reach is "good enough" - not "as good as".

Technorati Tags: iPhone, camera phone

Doc Searls saw where the web was taking us early.

Here's a great idea: when you have a failing product (The Evening News on CBS), blame the customers for the failure:

Leslie Moonves, CBS chief executive, on Tuesday suggested that sexist attitudes were partly to blame for the faltering performance of Katie Couric, the news anchor he recruited to the network with a $15m annual pay package.

Yeah, I'm highly motivated to go watch now that CBS has told me that I'm a bad person for not watching.

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

Urban Honking goes to great pains to explain why using syntax tricks in Ruby to get to something like this:

Hpricot(my_document)

Is a good thing. Here's a question - if you stumbled on that in code, would you have any idea what it did? That's why I left this comment over there:

In Smalltalk, methods can begin with capital letters; it's just not usually done. However, all messages do need a receiver, so in Smalltalk you would have to write something like:

Parser Hpricot: someXhtml.

Seeing as the method named Hpricot is badly named - it doesn't say anything about what the method does - I'd instead write something like:

Parser parseXhtml: someXhtml.

which is way, way more obvious for the poor follow on developer who has to read the code.

Which leaves me wondering why you think using clever syntax that obscures meaning is a good thing? I prefer to leave that the C programmers, myself...

I've out-clevered myself in Smalltalk many times; it's never a good idea.

Technorati Tags: ruby, smalltalk

The Yankees seem to have remembered (finally!) how to play baseball:

The New York Yankees have a seven-game winning streak after Chien-Ming Wang and Bobby Abreu led a 4-to-1 win over the visiting Arizona Diamondbacks.

It's still a long way back, but at least they seem to be pointed in the right direction now. The standings show them back at .500, which is a huge improvement over a few weeks ago:

A few more weeks of this, and things might look more normal :)

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Mathew Ingram points out that the Facebook Platform is, in fact, a platform - it's certainly enabling third parties to thrive in its ecosystem:

The next time I wrote about it the feature had more than two million users. Pretty amazing, right? Well, according to the company’s blog, it now has over six million users. That’s about 3,000 times more than it had a couple of weeks ago, and the application is adding about 300,000 users a day -- a rate of growth that is unlike almost any new application I can think of. In a chart at the iLike blog , the company compares its growth to Skype, Hotmail and ICQ, and I think those are probably pretty good comparisons. The big question, of course, is whether all of the people who have added the app to their Facebook profile will become regular users of iLike, and actually bring the company any revenues as the result of its stardom.

That level of growth is astonishing - with the caveat being, of course, that the proof will be in the revenue numbers. Still - no one is sneezing at that kind of viral adoption. There are plenty of people (myself included) who have mostly ignored the social application space, but that's looking more and more like a huge omission.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, facebook

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at dynamically adding columns to a dataset.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Janko Mivšek has ported Aida/Web to Squeak - so like Seaside, it's portable between multiple Smalltalk dialects - Cincom Smalltalk, Dolphin, and Squeak.

I just finished a port of AIDA/Web application server and web framework (http://www.aidaweb.si) to Squeak and a beta is now available on SqueakSource.

You are therefore invited to try Aida on Squeak - just follow the installation instructions, then start by evaluating SwazooServer demoStart, open http://localhost:8888 and login with username admin, password password.

Technorati Tags: web

Peter Fisk is doing some interesting things with Smalltalk on Silverlight - check out his progress.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight

Eventually, someone has to pay something for a service - it sounds like FaceBook is just starting to figure that out:

The owners of Facebook, the fast growing social network, were forced to sell a significant share in the company because they did not have enough computers to cope with the site's rapidly increasing number of users, Times Online has learnt.

Facebook's founders, who have always resisted a buyout, were forced to dilute their stock by as much as 10 per cent a year ago when it became apparent that they had not bought enough hardware to accommodate the growing subscriber base, a well-placed Silicon Valley source said.

It's not a huge surprise that people are flocking to a free service, especially after FaceBook opened things up for third party applications. The downside is simple: someone has to pay all the real costs for the physical infrastructure. You can bet that those investors are going to want an actual return on their investment, too - which points to one of a handful of possibilities, as I see it:

• Increased use of ads, assuming that ad revenue can float things
• Pressure to sell FaceBook to a large entity
• Pressure to start charging some kind of subscription fee for use, for premium use, for something
• Pressure to go public (although: Sarbanes-Oxley makes that a whole lot less friendly than it would have been a few years ago)

Something has to give though - no one invests money out of the goodness of their hearts. I suspect that Zuckerman is wishing that he'd taken Yahoo's offer right about now.

This is why I like having multiple Smalltalk implementations around - instead of the "one, true" version, there are implementations that attract the interest of different people.

Michael Gorman is reliable - I can always count on him for a long winded, uninformed rant about the evils of the internet. Here's his lede today:

The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers, in many ways, from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called “citizen journalists”; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernable “citizen surgeon” movement; millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy -- the belief that every word in the Bible is both true and the literal word of God, something that, among other things, pits faith against carbon dating; and, scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics.

Here's the problem - none of the problems he raises are due to bad information on the net. Every single one of the information gaps he cites as worrisome is old - I remember reading about each and every one of them in "Time" and "Newsweek" as a teenager.

Gorman seems to believe that pre-web, there was a "golden age" of journalism, when facts didn't get distorted, and reporters got things right with unerring accuracy. Hmm - Back in the 70's, I remember the big climate scare being "the coming ice age". Now, it's "global warming". Without wading into that debate, I'll note that they can't both be correct - and I'll also note that both are memes that were (or in the latter case, are) heavily pushed by the media.

Gorman is writing on the Britannica site, so I understand why he's trying very hard to make his case without bringing up Wikipedia. I've written about Wikipedia and encyclopedias before - to summarize, Wikipedia is edited every single day by a self selected group of editors. Things like Britannica are edited periodically by a paid staff of editors. Does one group have biases while the other is magically objective? I don't think so. Depending on the topic being written about, "experts" can be hard to find, or extremely biased by the surrounding culture. For instance - how would an encyclopedia written by a group of recognized experts have dealt with Africa circa 1900? How would the text differ from one written - again, by a set of recognized experts - a year ago?

The splendid, objective expertise that Gorman imagines in the world of editors and professional writes doesn't exist now, and it's never existed. Biases - conscious and unconscious - have crept in consistently. Scientific errors (due to incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the underlying science) have always been around, and will always be around.

I read a fair amount of history, and I like to get a start on topics that may be of interest to me on Wikipedia. I find that the articles there range from good to excellent on the area I'm interested in (European history, mostly). Gorman would probably tell me to visit a "real" encyclopedia; I'd advise him to read this, which I addressed to him 18 months ago. Gorman was in "gatekeeper" mode then, and he's still there now.

Oh, and do read Clay Shirkey's response to Gorman.

Technorati Tags: hubris

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at dynamically removing a column from a dataset widget at runtime. This is the flip side of yesterday's cast, where we looked at dynamically adding a column.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I've been using Windows as my working system since the early 90's - I moved from Apple II to DOS before that. Having said that, I've gotten increasingly tired of playing sys-admin for Windows boxes - it's bad enough dealing with my system - but dealing with my wife and daughter's systems is not making anyone happy. So... here's what I just got my wife:

She'll want the fun of opening it, which is why that's a photo of the box :) As I replace existing systems around here, I intend to just say no to Windows. The sys-admin tax is just too high.

Technorati Tags: Windows

Andres seems to have been having similar thoughts on PC purchases today :)

I had to make a decision... would I buy PC hardware to keep running Windows, and thus invest a sizable portion of my expenditures in running (eventually) Vista, which is well known to be an abomination? I concluded that doing so would be to throw money away. Thus, my answer to that was to get a Mac, which will mean using roughly the same hardware to run a serious operating system built on serious foundations instead.

Alan Kay is receiving an honorary degree at the University of Pisa tomorrow - looks like it'll be a live webcast, but it starts at 5 AM EDT. Anyway - here's the link. The links for the live webcast are on the site, so if you plan to be awake then, head on over.

Torsten points out another one of the nice things about Smalltalk - your ability to dive right in and fix any code you want:

In Smalltalk fixing bugs in old versions has never been a problem: anything is open and changeable. If the vendor doesn fix it you are able to modify the code yourself. This is what makes customers and developers happy

Note that this doesn't have anything to do with open source (in license terms) - in terms of access, Smalltalk has always been open source.

Jeff Jarvis listened to a radio conversation that talks up writers and editors, and talks down blogs. It's kind of amazing to be able to watch a mindset live on even as the business around it morphs.

If this keeps up, the AL East might get interesting:

The Yanks are still a ways back, but the direction and momentum are very positive.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

How does MetaCase keep up with the big guys?

Juha-Pekka beat me to it, so most of you probably already know that MetaCase has been honored by SD Times in their list of 100 companies in the industry. More specifically, they list MetaCase as one of 5 companies that are shaping the modeling arena (the others are IBM, Ravenflow, SysML Partners and Telelogic).

Why, they use Cincom Smalltalk :)

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we go back to the simple DataSet example, and look at two features: runtime sorting of contents, and dynamic reordering of columns.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

This week, we got Travis Griggs to join the show - he and Michael have been working together for the last few weeks in Walla Walla. We discussed development tools work in Cincom Smalltalk, and the ideas Travis has for taking things forward.

It was a fun podcast - as usual, send feedback to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com, or head on over to Podcast Alley and cast a vote.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, development

Mathew Ingram notes the rise of libel suits associated with blogging - which is to be expected, I suppose, as public figures attempt to deal with blogs the way they've always tried to deal with media: bask in the positive, lash out at the negative.

The difference being that most (not all, certainly) media outlets have a legal arm that handles that stuff, while individual bloggers just go broke. I suspect that we would see even more of these kinds of suits if it weren't for the kind of blowback that tends to happen when these cases get publicity.

Technorati Tags: PR

Is the music industry filled with people with room temperature IQs? Last night I flagged this post from Mathew Ingram, and this morning I found the whole story here, on Download Squad. Here's what happened, via Download Squad:

Our editorializing [ed: about an RIAA suit] seems to have ruffled the feathers of an IFPI executive who is now threatening action, not against us, but against another blog who simply linked to our piece. In an effort to quell what Paul Birch of Revolver Records calls, "malicious statements and blogs on the internet" he has threatened Andrew Dubber of the blog New Music Strategies with veiled words about lawsuits, and by directly threatening to file a formal complaint against him with the University of Central England, Dubber's employer. All because in the course of discussion on the topic Andrew Dubber's blog follows exclusively he felt it relevant to link to something we wrote.

That's a SLAPP suit if I ever saw one. But wait - there's more! Again from Mathew Ingram, we find out just how deep the vast well of stupidity in the music industry runs. Here's Jay Rosenthal, who runs SoundExchange - they collect royalties from internet radio (et. al.):

“I sincerely am starting to hate the Internet. I know you see the Internet as some incredible invention that has opened the door to unlimited distribution of music -- and your lofty goal is to bring music to as many as possible. But all I see is a tidal wave of artist abuse.”

I think I can summarize Rosenthal's idea: "Stop the world, I want to get off!". Can someone page Professor Peabody? We have a ticket for one, one way to 1978.

Technorati Tags: marketing

It's Saturday, so it must be log time again. 189 BottomFeeder downloads per day last week; the details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	538
Update	214
Linux x86	120
Mac X	71
Solaris	59
HPUX	57
CE ARM	49
Linux Sparc	48
Mac 8/9	39
Sources	36
AIX	24
SGI	19
Windows98/ME	17
Linux PPC	17
ADUX	9
CE x86	8

Next up: the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	51%
Internet Explorer	39.4%
MSN Bot	4.5%
Other	3.2%
Opera	1.9%

And finally, the Syndication stats:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	34.2%
Mozilla	22.3%
BottomFeeder	10.4%
Other	6.7%
Net News Wire	3.7%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.4%
Vienna	3%
FeedOnFeeds	2.5%
Safari RSS	2.4%
BlogLines	2.4%
JetBrains	2.2%
NewsGator	1.5%
XML-FeedPP	1.2%
Liferea	1.1%
Akregator	1%
Python	1%
Jakarta	1%

Looks like IE has stopped "racing ahead" in the syndication numbers, and things are settling down to look more like the HTML stats - two main tools, and a smaller number of other tools in their wake.

Dare Obasanjo links out to Yaron Goland, who explains some of the things Dare had alluded to here - whereupon the Atom community, led by Tim Bray and Joe Gregario broke out their ceremonial Dave Winer suits and proceeded to act like jerks.

Note also the opprobrium tossed at Rogers Cadenhead for having the temerity to work on the feed spec that is used by the vast majority of feed enabled sites. The syndication space has turned into a parody of itself.

Technorati Tags: APP, atom

I'm reading two different books about two very different sorts of empires - "Osman's Dream", a history of the Ottoman Empire, and "Empire Express", which covers the building of the transcontinental railroad in the US.

"Osman's Dream" covers the span of the Ottoman Empire (and a few years after it's fall) - a very long sweep of history. I'm only a little way into that book - some of the events are already familiar to me from my reading about Tamerland and the Baghdad based Islamic Caliphate.

"Empire Express" covers the much shorter span of time from the late 1850's, when the idea of the transcontinental railroad got seriously floated, through to it's completion in 1869. The amazing thing is that construction got started during the civil war - the author notes the incongruity of crucial business meetings happening at the same time as the Batlle of Gettysburg. This is also a huge book, and since I'm reading it in snatches before bed, I'll be at it for awhile.

Those two should keep me busy for a bit :)

One of the things that drove me nuts about the show "Jericho" was that they got so many little things wrong. The people didn't look dirty or hungry enough, for one thing - and illnesses that we no longer think about would come back with a vengeance - things like Cholera and Dysentery, for instance, and Scurvy.

In any event, I was listening to a podcast that hit on that yesterday - Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" talked about the Black Death as a way of understanding what a post apocalyptic time would look like. It's really hard to conceive of just how bad things were - England's population dropped from 6-7 million down to 2 million between 1348-1400, for instance. Just imagine what modern life would look like under such a death toll - we might even do worse than they did, since medieval people fed themselves from local supplies.

To get a feel for it, consider this chronicle passage by John Clyne, who lived through the plague in Ireland (from Wikipedia):

That disease entirely stripped vills, cities, castles and towns of inhabitaints of men, so that scarcely anyone would be able to live in them. The plague was so contagious that thous touching the dead or even the sick were immediately infected and died, and the one confessing and the confessor were together led to the grave ... many died from carbuncles and from ulcers and pustles that could be seen on shins and under the armpits; some died, as if in a frenzy, from pain of the head, others from spitting blood ... In the convent of Minors of Drogheda, twenty five, and in Dublin in the same order, twenty three died ... These cities of Dublin and Drogheda were almost destroyed and wasted of inhabitants and men so that in Dublin alone, from the beginning of August right up to Christmas, fourteen thousand men (i.e., people) died ... The pestilence gathered strength in Kilkenny during Lent, for between Christmas day and 6 March, eight Friars Preachers died. There was scarcely a house in which only one died but commonly man and wife with their children and family going one way, namely, crossing to death."

The plague had so many far reaching effects, including a number of peasant revolts after the first wave had passed. There were also large population movements - throughout Europe, people blamed Jews for the plague (people always love a scapegoat) - and many Jews resettled in Poland (across what is now Poland, the Baltics, Eastern Russia, and other parts of Eastern Europe). That community is now gone, due to the Holocaust - but the original movement there was an echo of the Black Death. I'm sure that none of the people who fled there in the 1400's could possibly have conceived of something worse.

Here's what I take away from all this - we have it pretty good now. The next time someone complains to you about how hard they have it, ponder the 14th century for a moment.

Sometimes, the copyright commandos go so far over the top that they amaze even me. Consider NBC/Universal General Counsel Rick Cotton (via Ars Technica):

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."

Yeah, those violent crimes are minor league stuff - we should be focusing on the entirely overblown issue of piracy instead. Follow the link to Ars Technica for the details on how overblown it is - they claim "hundreds of billions" in losses, which is just so much crap.

The main problem is that the music and studio industries have worked very, very hard to ensure that their products are not available in forms that are easy to consume. DVDs that have unskippable ads, CDs with malware, digital content with DRM - it's all set up to hinder use, not encourage it. Remember that these are the same bozos who wanted to ban VCRs - they simply can't wrap their head around the idea that people will pay for convenience. There are always going to be Torrent sites, but given a choice between a convenient, legal (and not onerous) system and the illegal bypass system, most people will stay legal - just like most people stop for red lights.

People like Cotton do enormous damage to the industry they claim to protect.

Technorati Tags: DRM, piracy, RIAA, MPAA

Looks like Dell's lawyers haven't quite figured out that any takedown request they issue is actually a PR move (and not a positive one). On June 14th, the Consumerist pushed out a letter they got from a former Dell sales guy. On the 15th, one of Dell's lawyers tried to get them to take it down - after a brief exchange, she said this:

Dell will not regard any such immediate action as an agreement regarding the merits of the request, or as an admission of any liability on the part of consumerist.com or any related person or entity.

If after any necessary discussion between counsel we cannot agree that this was indeed the appropriate course of action, you can always re-post the item.

That's a comment that is utterly oblivious to the nature of the net, and - even more striking - oblivious to what the Consumerist mentioned in the (for now) final comment on the matter:

Of course, it is your decision whether you want to pursue this matter, but I advise you to talk to the team that had to deal with the falllout from the Jeff Jarvis affair before you decide to try and silence your critics. Work for the customer, not against them.

This may sound like a crazy idea, but I think companies need to do two things:

• Fire their "legacy" PR people, and get a team that actually understands the net, social media, blogs, podcasts (etc)
• Rearrange the org chart such that the legal department reports through PR

Why? Well, a law department acting under "the old rules" can do enormous damage to a firm's reputation - I've talked about these sorts of things before. Any legal action aimed in the takedown direction needs competent oversight, and it's likely not going to come out of the legal department.

Technorati Tags: law, marketing

While perusing iTunes today, I ran across a very nice podcast - "The Stack Trace" with Norman Richards and Sam Griffith. I was searching for Smalltalk, and there was the first episode, covering image based development. Sam Griffith did a really nice job of covering this topic - we've talked that up on "Industry Misinterpretations" too, but Sam covered the ground very well - especially for people who just don't know much about the topic. I've subscribed, and so should you.

Technorati Tags: development

Ramon Leon explains that Smalltalk - like Ruby on Rails - is "opinionated software". Consider the browser:

Smalltalk’s browser is rather opinionated, luckily, thanks to Rails, opinionated software seems to be having somewhat of a revival. When it comes to writing code, the browser forces you into a certain mindset, one that other languages don’t force you into. When I create a method in Java/C#/Ruby, I have to choose little more than what file and class it belongs in. I *can* organize the code well, but there’s little incentive to do so and my unit of work is rather undefined, I could be slicing and dicing methods, classes, namespaces, etc., usually with the full screen devoted to code across various files or even god forbid in one giant file. This encourages a code now and organize later approach. Sadly, later often never comes, and the code is left functional but messy.

Smalltalk on the other hand, defines my unit of work as *the method* and by doing so forces me at every turn, to continually organize my code in semantically meaningful ways. When I create a method, I have to choose a class category, a class, and a method category to put the method in. If I don’t, Smalltalk kindly categorizes the method for me in a protocol called “as yet unclassified”. It’s almost an insult, but it’s also a not so subtle reminder than I’m writing code sloppily, faster than I’m thinking. It reminds me to slow down, think for a second, where does this thing belong.

Read the whole thing - explains a lot of the reasons that people taking a first look at Smalltalk have difficulty. Smalltalk's tools work in their own ways for their own reasons.

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