Nick Carr tries to cite a very dense paper to make the case that the NY Times was actually succeeding with TimesSelect:
Even though news may, for better or worse, want to be free on the web, that doesn't mean that charging for online news is always wrong. Jarvis dismissed TimesSelect as "a cynical act doomed from the start." More likely, it was a wise business decision that made the Times, and its shareholders, more money than they would have earned without the paywall. Gentzcow's paper will serve as a profitable read for any manager struggling with setting strategy for an online operation that cannibalizes a traditional business line. What it underscores is that setting prices should be a rational act, not an ideological or sentimental one.
Here's the problem: the study and Carr both assume that my choices are limited to paying for TimesSelect or not getting the information. This ignores reality - there are more news sources available to me than I can shake a stick at. Much of what was behind the paywall was op/ed pieces; there's certainly no shortage of opinions available for free on the net. The problem with Carr's theory is that he assumes that I can't substitute for the stuff behind a paywall. I think the editors at the Times learned something over the last couple of years that Carr still hasn't figured out: it was all too easy to find substitutes for their supposed superstars.
We are recording this week's "Industry Misinterpretations" tonight - we have Stephen Travis Pope on as our guest. Stephen is a long time Smalltalker, going back to the early days at PARC and ParcPlace. I met Stephen about a decade ago, when I co-taught an "Intro to Smalltalk" class with him.
He's been doing musical work in Smalltalk for most of the last 2 decades - you can check out his Siren system here. We'll be talking about Smalltalk history and his musical work.
I'm still waiting for one of the main browsers for the Mac to stabilize. Safari is mostly ok, but periodically gets into a confused state - this morning, my wife's Mac stopped being able to deal with Javascript. It was enabled, but wouldn't work until we killed the application and restarted. Very odd.
I had switched to Firefox, but I switched back - it seems very unstable on the Mac, locking up for no good reason more than once per day. On Windows, Firefox is a pig (the developers really, really need to use a decent GC), but it seems mostly stable. On the Mac - not so much.
So I switch back and forth, waiting for stability...
One of the things that continues to boggle me about the long lines at airport security stations is the security risk created by those long lines. Think about it - if someone wanted to create an incident, isn't a huge line of immobile people a target? That's why the "tomato juice" story from yesterday caught my eye:
People were welcomed to Terminal D of LaGuardia Airport with a line so long, it was difficult to tell where it began, or where it ended - all because someone spilled tomato juice on an x-ray machine.
So in short, a team of two people could create havoc: the first one "accidentally" takes out a scanner. The second one waits for the line to get big, and uses a bomb. If and when something happens, I wonder if anyone will question the ruleset that created the problem.
I noticed a comment about the mp4 video files I have been posting - Safari wasn't picking them up. Well, it turns out that I didn't have the mime type set up properly on the server side, so proper handling in the browser was hit or miss. That's been fixed now - I just tested in Safari myself.
The Guardian may have the reason for the last round of spam attacks that I (and everyone else) have been seeing on the net: a growing botnet:
It gets worse. Storm's delivery mechanism changes regularly. It began as PDF spam, then morphed into e-cards and YouTube invites. It then started posting blog-comment spam, again trying to trick viewers into clicking infected links. Similarly, the Storm email changes all the time, with new, topical subject lines and text. And last month Storm began attacking anti-spam sites focused on identifying it. It has also attacked the personal website of a malware expert who published an analysis of how it worked.
I had been wondering about those waves (PDFs and e-cards) of spam. More recently (I mentioned this the other day), I've been seeing tons more comment spam than normal. I wonder if there's a specific plan, or whether someone is building a huge "rent a bot" (or heck, maybe they already have) network? Would I see a difference between spread attempts and spam campaigns that were paid for?
Yesterday, I spoke to Stephen Travis Pope. Stephen has been part of the Smalltalk community for a very long time, stretching back to the Xerox PARC days. I first met him back when I was a trainer at ParcPlace - he was doing consulting work at the time, and co-taught a class with me.
Stephen has been working on what is now Siren for about twenty years now - there's a lot of information about it - and its history - on his website. We talked about a number of things - Smalltalk design, his work with Siren, the state of Smalltalk - so this is a two part episode. I'll have part two out next week.
I'm reading this piece from Deadline Hollywood, and it's telling me that both the writers and the owners are ok with a strike - because they both think they'll win. I wonder if there's anyone sane enough to consider how long it took baseball to recover from the 1994 strike - or how hockey is dealing with the aftermath of the lockout?
Somehow, I'm thinking that a schedule full of reality shows isn't going to cut it - and I don't know that Hollywood has a Cal Ripken around to bring the shine back, either.
This post from Shelley Powers looked like it had promise - pondering the notion of flawed but popular languages - but then I saw that she filed Java under "Perfect", but barely used.
*cough*
Filing Java under either 'perfect' or 'barely used' is just odd. And C++ as simple and approachable?
Last week, the folks at cable giant Comcast asked for more time to give a nuanced response to a report that the company was blocking some peer-to-peer traffic on its network. The public relations staff at the Philadelphia company seemed genuinely baffled by accusations that it was interfering with file-sharing applications like BitTorrent and Gnutella. They stubbornly insisted that they did not monitor or block any Internet traffic despite strong evidence to the contrary.
...
Speaking on background in a phone interview earlier today, a Comcast Internet executive admitted that reality was a little more complex. The company uses data management technologies to conserve bandwidth and allow customers to experience the Internet without delays. As part of that management process, he said, the company occasionally but not always delays some peer-to-peer file transfers that eat into Internet speeds for other users on the network.
This is the kind of thing that might not even look bad if Comcast were being open about it. Instead, it's been discovered by people digging. It's not as if BitTorrent is exclusively pirate-ware, either - Linux distros use it to ship files, as do others who have lots of content to push.
Heck, it ends up looking even dumber than that - Gizmodo is reporting that Comcast is also blocking Lotus Notes:
The EFF found that not just Gnutella -- another file sharing app -- was being blocked, but Lotus Notes, an app businesses use to share calendars, emails and files over the net had its traffic interfered with as well.
Yeah, all those pirate Notes users are a problem. Sounds like they've got a brain dead monitor that looks for two way synch traffic, period. I wonder if they'll end up accidentally killing Feed readers and iTunes next. What Comcast needs here is a little transparency. I understand the idea of limiting bandwidth hogs - what irritates me is having no idea what counts as "bandwidth hogging". I download new builds of our product from the engineering group about once a week. If I changed that to daily, would I end up falling into the "evil" bucket?
Besides, what's wrong with simply telling people what the limitations are and then going after the violators for terms of service breaches? In being so secretive and misleading about it, all it's doing is causing many more people to get upset with Comcast and think that they're being targeted (even if they're not). It's a ridiculous PR situation for Comcast to be in -- and it could be solved easily enough if Comcast stopped beating around the bush, stopped giving gobbledy-gook doublespeak responses that don't actually answer the questions people are asking and simply told people what they're doing and why.
Search engine system supporting inclusion of unformatted search string after domain name portion of URL
I have a question for the three people who are listed as the *cough* inventors *cough* - Andrew Jassy,Udi Manber, and Jonathan Leblang (and the moron of a patent examiner who let this through): do you feel any shame at all for having your names associated with a clearly bogus patent? Here, let me show you the term I have in mind for this "invention": obvious.
I was just telling people (last weekend at our Halloween party) that I saw no reason to switch my internet service to Verizon's FIOS - and then this story comes along:
Some residents of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey who live inside the boundaries of Verizon's FiOS network will be the first to be able to take advantage of Verizon's new 20/20 FiOS service. As the name implies, 20/20 FiOS is a symmetrical 20Mbps connection (same speed in both directions), and it's one of the first symmetrical services to target the consumer market.
If they extend that to my area, I have a reason to switch. All I can say is, wow.
Mathew Ingram asks the obvious question about the Facebook acquisition rumors: $15 Billion? If that amount bears any resemblance to reality, then perhaps the bidders should look back at the Skype deal for instructive second thoughts.
Ok, this is interesting in a "inside Google" sort of way. TechCrunch reports that Google has launched a de-ranking offensive against blog link farms. This is a good thing, because search results will often take you to these bogus sites rather than the original content source.
However - as with any such battle, it looks like there's been some collateral damage:
The AOL owned Weblogs Inc was not immune, with leading Gadget blog Engadget dropping from PR 7 to PR5, Autoblog (6 to 4) and DownloadSquad (5 to 4).
That caught my attention, because the PageRank of this site is a decent 7 (scale of 10). It's just weird for my blog to have better PageRank than a site as popular as Engadget. I suspect that this move is going to create an awful lot of tooth grinding.
I've mentioned this before, but we formally announced the change today in the Cincom Smalltalk Digest for October: Arden Thomas is now the Product Manager, and I'm now the Product Evangelist. Which is really just a formalization of what we were each doing anyway. Arden is a great guy who's been around Smalltalk a long time - he gives some of that background over on his blog.
Interestingly enough, Arden and I go back a ways. We both worked at ParcPlace and its successors in the 90's - and in 1995 we switched jobs - I moved from training and consulting to Sales Engineering, and he went the other way. We each had it in our heads that it would drop our travel requirements :) Even further back, we attended the same high school at the same time - Arden even had my dad as a math teacher. We didn't know each other back then - which is too bad, because I could have written him hall passes :)
Anyway, this is a good move for everyone, and it should help us keep the Smalltalk ball moving forward. Why don't you go ahead and subscribe to Arden's blog now?
This (from Michael Geist) is the kind of thing I find worrisome: A Canadian website offering public domain music has been shutdown due to a complaint that some of the stuff available there is not public domain everywhere the site can be accessed. If this became the norm, imagine the consequences: speech as free as the least open place on the planet, copyrights as long as the longest on the planet - the list of damage goes on and on. Ultimately, this kind of thing promotes a race to the bottom where the craziest man in the room wins.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at MessageNotUnderstood - and how to intercept it without exception handling. As I say in the screencast, implementing #doesNotUnderstand: in your own class is not something to be done lightly - but it's worth knowing about.
Comcast Corp (NasdaqGS:CMCSA - News), the largest U.S. cable TV operator, posted on Thursday a 2 percent rise in quarterly profit excluding one-time items but lost more basic video subscribers than analysts had expected.
I'm shocked, shocked. As soon as Verizon has the 20/20 service locally, I'll likely skip on Comcast as well.
I was talking to Arden yesterday, and he suggested that I redo some of the introductory screencasts I did last year as full motion videos, as opposed to the screen grab technique. I've done the first one now - which tries to answer the "what now?" question that many people have when they first install Cincom Smalltalk non-commercial and start it up. I'll be doing a few of these videos over the next few days and weeks - my plan is to keep them in the 2-5 minute timeframe.
Arden pointed out that many of the OOPSLA sessions are available as podcasts - you can subscribe to the podcast feed here. Looks like I have a full set of audio for the next week's worth of exercise :)
Update: As noted in the comments, the feed is botched. The items don't have all the necessary iTunes tag information, so iTunes doesn't see them. The enclosures are in the feed though - BottomFeeder finds them just fine :)
I ran across an argument against the "all objects, all the time" theory that Smalltalk uses - Reg Braithwaite tries to make an argument against complexity, using Magnitudes to illustrate - say you want to add a new Magnitude subclass to the system. He argues:
Well, there is a huge problem with this arrangement: Addition is commutative. 1.0 + 2 must give the same result as 2 + 1.0. Using a simple message to implement addition means that you must be excruciatingly careful to handle all of the possible cases so that you do not accidentally violate this property. Now of course, the designers of system classes like Integer and Float went to this trouble. But if you want to add another magnitude class—say CurrencytwoPlaceDecimal—you have to open up all of the system classes and modify them so that 1 + ThirtyCents gives the same result as ThirtyCents + 1.
You're going to have to pay for that complexity somewhere. You can pay for it the Smalltalk way, by adding new methods to each Magnitude subclass, or you can pay for it his way. The funny thing is, his solution for Java-like languages is to build a double dispatching Visitor (I find this amusing because the Smalltalk solution for Magnitudes is double dispatch). Hmm - this results in harder to understand code (and lots of it). I think his quest for purity in what an object understands has led him down the path to harder to read code.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at #subclassResponsibility and #shouldNotImplement - using examples that demonstrate how they are used to specify behaviors that subclasses should (or should not) implement.
James Governor passes on some real wisdom from David Stewart (via the Australian Daily Telegraph) - who had something of an epiphany about shutting off access to social media at work:
“It got closed down because there was this fear in the market that it was going to destroy the whole world. Yet, they let people talk on their phones, and let them go out and have a cigarette and talk on their mobile phones, but they closed down what is a fundamental communication tool to probably more than half of our workforce.”
Contrast that with the attitude James quotes from one of his colleague's blog, that social media, web mail, IM (etc) are distractions that workers don't need. This is a fairly common attitude, and one that James rightly throws cold water on. His point is made via people who went to college recently, but heck - some of the rest of us use tools like IM, IRC, and social media to stay connected as well. Here at Cincom, a large proportion of our Smalltalk group (across development and beyond it) uses an IRC channel to stay connected - both internally and externally. Many of us also use various IM clients for individual conversations - there's often more than one "back channel" going when there are group conference calls.
If you want forward progress, you have to trust the people you hire. That doesn't mean you should be blind to mistakes (or worse) - but it does mean that you need to respond to problems rather than trying to completely prevent them - cast the block widely enough, and you block productivity - and end up with a set of employees that looks at the corporate network as more of a jail than anything else. Sure, there are places where such blocks are appropriate - national defense sector stuff, for instance - but elsewhere? Not so much. If your company is blocking such access, you have to wonder just how engaged the decision makers are.
I've decided to put together a short video series on the Cincom Smalltalk browser - for people who aren't familiar with Smalltalk, downloading the non-commercial environment can lead to a "what now?" kind of reaction. With this series, I hope to plow through some of that. The mp4 for the video is here; I've also uploaded it to YouTube.
This is a very basic introduction - in this segment, I explain what the various panes of the browser are for.
Slowly but surely, our applications are moving to a world where they persist state automatically, and can skip over a crash as a normal event. Not just because the application crashes, but because laptops live an unstable life. Continuous Autosave should not just be a feature of things like IntelliJ idea or server-side documents.
Yeah, like a Smalltalk image :) Hat tip Patrick Logan
My wife has relatives from Australia coming in today, so I expect posting will be light. However, part two of the podcast is almost ready - as soon as I get the last piece of extra audio. I should have that out today or tomorrow.
Next week's podcast should be interesting - we don't have the guest completely nailed down, but if it comes through, it should be a lot of fun.
Just in case you think I've completely gone to the Apple kool-aid, I did find a negative Leopard review that has me wondering. I haven't upgraded yet - I figured I'd give it a few weeks to sort itself out, and give it a shot once the initial set of patches have come out.
Vorlath takes hundreds of words to not understand something very, very basic - in software development, even the best advances are stymied by human factors. Mediocre developers trump technology; bad management trumps good developers; changing market conditions can kill good software. What he tries to do is "prove" that Brooks was wrong - all the while failing to understand what Brooks was actually getting at:
This topic still comes up today even though people should know better. I will discuss the topics in the No Silver Bullet paper and point out why they are incorrect. Only minimal critical thinking is required. My annoyance is simply how pervasive this paper has become and how people believe it without analysing what is actually said.
Most of us know perfectly well what Brooks was saying - and it didn't really involve formal logic.
My cousin's wife just had a baby boy, and we have relatives in town from Australia - so I'll be away from the keyboard most of the day. The podcast will be out as soon as I can get it out.
Here's part II of last week's talk with Stephen Travis Pope - and this week, I've included music produced with Siren as part of the podcast. We continued our talk about Siren and Smalltalk history, including some interesting bits about the early development of the current VW UI framework.
Seaside 2.8 has been released - the official page is here. Once we ship the next release of Cincom Smalltalk in January, the load instructions will be extremely simple: load the Seaside parcel. In the meantime, you can track the 2.8 ports in the public store repository.
