Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Maybe Sony BMG shouldn't have gone after so many people with piracy accusations - I can only look at this report of Sony's piracy as karmic justice:

PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, received a call from a Sony BMG IT employee for support. After Sony BMG supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration, one of PointDev's products, the software maker was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG's assets. The subsequent raid revealed that software was illegally installed on four of Sony BMG's servers. The Business Software Alliance, however, believes that up to 47 percent of the software installed on Sony BMG's computers could be pirated.

Doh :)

Technorati Tags: stupidity

We had a small configuration error earlier in the day - the intention was to speed up the website and the FTP server, but along the way, the download pages ended up being made inaccessible. Due to some quick work by Pete Hatch (Thanks Pete!), everything is back to normal again.

More Seaside - the Toronto STUG is going to do a show and tell with it at their next meeting:

The next meeting is at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, room 202B, at 6:30. It will be a Seaside tutorial format, where we'll kick off our TSUG 'build & learn' Seaside project. Bring your laptop, with Seaside installed; don't count on Internet access. We'll have an LCD projector available for group work and demos.

Sounds like fun, and also a great way to get started with Seaside.

Update: Doh - as pointed out in the comments, I forgot to post the date: April 7.

Technorati Tags: seaside, TSUG, toronto

I love it when old style management runs into the buzzsaw of web enabled PR. Consider Creative, makers of sound cards for PCs. Their latest cards have problems on Vista (shocker, that), and they've been slow to push out updated drivers. Enter the community of Creative users - one of them created working drivers for the cards.

Now, this is a good thing for Creative, as it gives them a working solution for Vista. An intelligent response might be something like "we can't support this community driver, but people say it works. So long as you willing to take the risk, it might be a good solution for you until we have an official one". An even better response might be a call to the developer, so you could see whether he could help accelerate the efforts your staff is making.

That would assume cognizance of the way things work now though. Instead, Creative's VP of Corporate Communications decided that using legaleze would be a great way of dealing with this, so - on a Friday, figuring the issue would die over the weekend he pushed this out:

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Yeah, there's a brilliant response. Let's see: your stuff doesn't work on Vista now. There's a community solution that people seem to be using. If they use it, they might keep buying your product. On the other hand, if you decide to go all legal on the community, you end up shipping a useless brick to customers.

Hmm - I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing the complexity here. This VP might well be one of the dumbest PR types out there, and - with morons like this in the mix, that's saying a lot.

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we continue the tutorial by adding a post editor to the application. You can get up to date on the tutorial by grabbing this file.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Doc Searls (again) points out one of the ironies of travel: network connectivity seems to be related to how much you pay for the hotel and connectivity - but not in the way you might think:

I'm finally in my room, plugged into the hotel ethernet, watching it upload photos at a rate of one every few seconds. The bandwidth is 7.05Mbps down and 1.53Mbps up. The hotel, a Ramada Limited, is beat to crap and in a scary neighborhood. (The reception counter is behind bulletproof glass, with arrangements transacted through one of those bowls under the botttom edge.) But the Internet is free. And it works real well.

I've noticed the exact same thing. The better the class of the hotel, the worse the network service is (and, generally speaking, the more expensive it is). It's getting pretty tiresome to deal with that.

Charles Miller points out how many companies still get EULAS wrong, and what the upshot of it ends up being:

As more and more of our interactions with companies are governed by explicit legal agreements, companies need to realise that your legal terms are part of the public face of your company. The clauses in your EULAs are the most explicit evidence available of the regard in which you hold your customers, more than anything else because you know somebody has sweated over them word for word to give them a precise, legally binding interpretation.

As I've said before, your lawyers now engage in PR (however unwillingly). You can try to pretend that isn't the case (and end up looking stupid, as Charles makes clear) - or you can simply accept reality and move on.

This week, we spoke to Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented the Wiki. That's hardly his only contribution though; Ward was also one of the gang that came up with what we now know as XP.

It was a wide ranging conversation, covering Ward's Smalltalk background, his thoughts on software development and languages, as well as talk about Wikis and design. We also touched briefly on Ward's latest gig, aboutus.org.

As always, if you have feedback, please send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com. You can also subscribe with iTunes, visit us on Facebook or Ning, and - please head on over to Podcast Alley and cast a vote for us.

Technorati Tags: wiki, smalltalk, XP, agile

Spotted in Scripting News:

Google's search engine cost nothing to use and had no ads for the first few years, and look at how well that turned out. Flipped around, I don't see why Amazon charges me to use AWS. I think I produce as much value for them as I use just by writing about it, but they haven't been willing to bend (not that I've asked them to). If there was no cost to it, I'd use their services for new things that I'm not willing to try as long as I have to pay. I know that because there are projects I've not attempted because the cost was prohibitive.

I think Winer needs to read Heinlein, and ponder the idea of TANSTAAFL. Google pays for their "free" services with ads. If they offered the kind of service Amazon does, and decided not to charge for it, it would mean ads - that's how they pay the bills.

So how would Amazon provide their services if we didn't have to pay? It's simple - they wouldn't offer them. At first, the service was a simple matter of trying to monetize things they were already doing for themselves. Over time though, as it started to get more popular, they had to start adding scale based on growing demand. So how would they support that in Dave's world? Servers, backup capability, power - none of this stuff is free. Here's a thought for Winer - maybe he should build the web services stuff he wants to see available for free, and just give it away. I'll let him figure out the economics of that on his own.

Technorati Tags: free lunch

Doc Searls has the perfect analogy for paid internet on the road:

So here's a message to the aviation and hospitality industries: You're not in the pay toilet business. Quit trying to turn the Internet into one.

I find this article in the Times fascinating. Using a statistical approach, they determined that hitting streaks like Joe Dimaggio's 1941, 56 game one should be commonplace - even longer ones. However, the fact of the matter is, they aren't. Why is that? I'd guess the pshychology of it. I ran track in high school and college, and what the stats guys miss is this: your mental state plays heavily into individual performances.

In the case of something like a hitting streak, the pressure builds as the numbers mount. I can't pretend to know what that's like, but I can tell you this: I'm a duffer when it comes to golf. I've had rounds where I've been hitting really well for 3, 4, 5, maybe 6 holes - and then I start over-thinking stuff, and mess up shots. Sure, professionals are better at coping with that sort of thing than I am, but still - in the case of something like a hitting streak (especially after 1941), the mental pressure has got to be enormous.

So bottom line, such hitting streaks are theoretically common. The reality is very different, because the statistics miss the psychological aspect of the game.

Technorati Tags: baseball, hitting streak, dimaggio

Mark Evans is asking "Why is there so little original content?" on blogs - and his main thrust, that writing original content is hard, is true - so far as it goes. However, what he's missing is that there's value in link blogging. He says this:

Given Techmeme'€™s well-deserved reputation as being the place to quickly discover what'€™s going on in the tech world, Bott's assessment is blunt, critical, perhaps unfair but not entirely without merit. He's right; there is an awful lot of blog posts offering little or no insight other than referring to another blog. Rather than adding to the conversation, many of these posts come across as simply noise and bandwagon jumping.

There's more to it though. Consider news reporting. Does every news outlet maintain a bureau in every nation, or do they rely heavily on Reuters, AP (etc)? Back when TV and newspapers were the main interfaces for news, there was a lot of value in that - I grew up in suburban NY, and it was a heck of a lot easier to read a wire story relayed by the Poughkeepsie Journal than it was to get the data directly from the wire service.

So it is with Techmeme (et. al.) today. There are trusted sources for information now, just as there have always been. Techmeme serves as an aggregator for those top level sources, which makes it easier for the rest of us to find out what's going on.

Take this blog, for instance. My last post linked to something I found on Planet Squeak, which is fairly widely read in the Smalltalk community (more so by Squeakers). Should I assume that the information is "out there", and not link to things like that? Or, should I instead assume that my readership is a partially overlapping circle with theirs, and let my readers know about it? I picked the latter.

Sure, a fair bit of the conversation on sites like Techmeme is just echo chamber stuff - but over time, if you follow it, you learn which bloggers tend to add insight and which ones don't. I subscribe directly to the ones I like, and ignore the rest. This is a huge step forward from the pre-web era, where doing that kind of filtering was impossible for the average person.

Technorati Tags: communities, link blogging

Squeak is part of Google's "Summer of Code" again:

For the second year, the Squeak project has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code program.

This year we decided to reopen the blog a little earlier, while students applications are still open. So, if you're interested in proposing a project to Squeak, you're still in time! I

f you need more info, just head to the Summer of Squeak webpage!

Technorati Tags: squeak, google, summer of code

I thought Dave Winer said he'd stop blogging? Oh, wait - he has - he went into content-free mode a long time ago...

I've got most of the tutorial I mentioned the other day done - I'll be posting the screencasts and associated html pages over the course of the next week. In all, there will be ten sections (5 are posted now). So - by the end of next week, I should have a decent walk through of the basics of Seaside. Stay tuned!

Now this is funny stuff :)

I find it highly amusing that the C++ crowd has managed to say "yes" to closures while the Java community is still debating. Of course, like the rest of C++, the syntax is on the baroque side...

Technorati Tags: C , Java, Closures

Lukas and Philippe did some Seaside work, and they posted a fun picture with some amusing labels:

Look at the top - that's one of Georg Heeg's Smalltalk Balloons :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

We just finished recording a fun podcast with Ward Cunningham, the guy behind the Wiki. He's now the CTO of AboutUs, and we had a conversation that covered Ward's various works - wikis, design patterns, Smalltalk, open source, Microsoft. I should have it up by Monday.

Technorati Tags: wiki

Boy, am I glad the SPA 2008 conference wasn't this week - just look at the problems in Heathrow with the new terminal 5 opening. It sounds like they planned nothing, and just expected everything to somehow work. The results - passengers without bags, passengers waiting for 6 (or more) hours to get bags, 1/5th of BA's flights at Heathrow cancelled. Meanwhile, the guy running BA says this:

'It's going to be a difficult day and we have got to put the problems we had yesterday behind us. We clearly learnt some lessons from yesterday. We have just got to be focused.'

You can read the article for the basic mistakes, but some of them seem really stupid, like not having enough parking for the T5 staff. How do you not know how much parking you'll need? Is the size of the staff a mystery?

This kind of mistake requires some simple PR: the head of BA has to take ownership of the problems, and either resign or issue a simple "mea culpa" - along with a commitment to get things fixed. For starters, they might want to move to a small number of flights in and out of T5 and use that to debug the problems - and only scale it up as they fix them. Based on what I read, that doesn't sound like the approach they are taking though.

Technorati Tags: marketing, pr

David Weinberger is suffering from some fairly nasty sounding heisenbug on his MacBook - which goes to show that this kind of odd behavior, while far more common on Windows, is not unknown to Macs.

The Java world loves baroqueness. How else to explain this, which I had to read three times before admitting to myself that it still didn't make any sense.

Meanwhile, there's this really cool Seaside thing that will get you building your web applications really, really fast....

Andres Valloud announces Smalltalks 2008:

So my friend, here is a brief advisory: Smalltalks 2007 was not just one of a kind. In fact, this year's Smalltalks conference in Buenos Aires is ramping up. Start preparing those papers for when the call for participation comes out!

Glenn Reynolds tosses out some reader feedback on the latest newspaper misery: ad revenues are in "dive, dive, dive!" mode:

Reader Johann Erickson emails: "Last time I put a 'help wanted' ad in my local paper, it cost me about $500. I got 6 faxes, 5 were unqualified for the job. I put an ad on Craigslist for free and got about 40 resumes. About 10 qualified for the job. Why would I ever use a newspaper again? Classified ads were the biggest drop, 16.5% or so. Just another dinosaur dying." As I said, ouch.

That sound you hear is a lot of media guys crying in their coffee...

Technorati Tags: news, media

I've been putting up a series of screencasts that can serve as a basic introduction to Seaside 2.8 in Cincom Smalltalk - I'm now putting together an associated set of web pages that will follow the same "script", but without requiring the flash movies. I'm hoping to have the first five parts (matching the screencast progress) out by the end of the day, but we'll see how that goes.

Update: Follow the link to the screencast tutorial page - the more traditional tutorial pages are accessible from there as well.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside tutorial

Today's Smalltalk Daily picks up where we left off in part 4, and carries the tutorial forward with a custom session and login screen.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Mathew Ingram is skeptical about the notion of a mandatory ISP tax to cover music. The industry backers say it's akin to the radio situation, but it's not:

Griffin says that “eventually” advertising might cover the charges, and those who wanted to surf without ads would have the choice to pay the fee. But it sounds like in the beginning the fee would be mandatory -- even for those who don’t do any downloading at all. Does that sound fair? No. We have mandatory fees for things like education and road-building, but I don’t think music licensing falls into the same category. What about people who pay for songs legally through iTunes -- do they get a free pass, or do they have to pay twice? Maybe Warner sees this as a way to put Apple out of business.

With radio, anyone listening to a station that plays music is getting the music. With an ISP, that's simply not the case, so there's a basic equity problem here. The industry is still casting around for a way to retain their current level of bloat, and it's just not going to work out.

Technorati Tags: copyright, law

Boy, I feel safer knowing that the TSA is on the job, protecting me from body piercings. Every time I think they can't get dumber, they prove that anything is possible.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, tsa

A startup using Seaside has been bought out for real money - looks like Smalltalk is a safer choice for getting started than the enterprisey types seem to believe.

Technorati Tags: seaside

Mathew Ingram pulls the best quote from this story on how people are getting the news (at least, younger people):

“If the news is that important, it will find me.”

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tags: news, social media

In the context of this post, "Web 2.0" means what David Pogue uses it for here - a mechanism that allows sunlight into a company, and also allows feedback from people outside the firm:

When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, it makes contact with its public in a more casual, less sanitized way that, as a result, is accepted with much less cynicism. Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.

It's not just blogging, either. It could be podcasts. Or videos. (One blender company has quintupled its sales by posting hilarious amateur videos at WillItBlend.com.) Permit the public to make mash-ups using your company's characters, logos, music or products. Let's have some more inside looks: at your product design cycles, your focus groups, your rejected designs, your employee cubicle videos.

Yes, you'll have to moderate this stuff. Yes, it means spending money with no immediately visible return on investment. Yes, it's more work for everyone.

But you'll gain trust, goodwill and positive attention. You'll put a human face on your company. And you'll learn stuff about your customers that you wouldn't have discovered any other way.

Which is exactly right. The old closed style works for a very small number of firms (only Apple comes to mind) - and most likely, your firm doesn't have a Steve Jobs clone running the ship. Given that, it's a good idea to let people in and show them that you aren't a "big, faceless company".

Take us, for example - head over here. We have a lot of people blogging on our site, many of them not Cincom employees. We like the idea of getting the Smalltalk community involved and engaged, and this is one of the ways we're doing that. While that particular approach might not work for you, it's a good idea to find something that will.

Technorati Tags: social media, marketing, web2.0

I love those Java guys at Sun - they're kind of cute when they try to talk smack:

Java also enjoys a 10-times performance advantage over interpreted scripting languages like JavaScript, Perl and Python, he said. "The scripting languages aren't JIT-ted yet," he said.

Scripting languages are ideal for smaller programs but Java is the choice for larger programs, he said. "As your program grows in size, the lack of strong typing basically kills your ability to handle a very large program and so you don't find the million-line Perl program," he said. One-million-line Java programs are plentiful, Click said. Strong typing refers to the capability of knowing the type of memory objects.

First, most million line programs are a mistake. The fact that Java has lots of them says nothing good about the language; the fact that it takes that much code to achieve something useful says something else entirely. Second, most of the large applications they are talking about are database bound - meaning that the raw execution speed of the code is mostly irrelevant.

Take a live example of a big app written in one of the languages these guys are throwing rocks at - Twitter. Everyone knows they had initial scaling problems, but those have gone away - and the app is still written in Ruby. Gee, why do you suppose that is? Could it be that they went and tuned the database layer, and got their load balancing situation under control? I Rather suspect that a Twitter on J2EE wouldn't exist yet, because some of the million lines of code required would still be being written.

Here's another small clue for those guys - most of the containers floating around the planet are shipped with Smalltalk code. A large proportion (possibly a majority) of the chips being built are in factories controlled in large measure by Smalltalk systems. A ton of the more profitable trading on Wall Street, by one of the most prestigious (and successful) firms there is done in Smalltalk. The firms that haven't been able to catch them? Yeah, those guys use J2EE, mores the pity.

Micro-benchmarks are pretty irrelevant, and you would think Sun's big honchos would know that. However, when you realize that J2EE is a huge pile of steaming manure weighing down the people unfortunate enough to be using it, I guess it makes sense to shout "but our arithmetic is really fast!".

Technorati Tags: java, j2ee, smalltalk, scripting languages, ruby

Smalltalk Solutions is coming up in June - Registration has been open for awhile now (yes, we are aware that you might be surprised by our efficiency this year :). Interested in sponsoring the show? You can sign up as a sponsor here. Bear in mind that STIC members get a discount - sign up for STIC as an individual member here Participants in the Coding Contest - the finalists attending the conference will be eligible for a discount. You can sign up now, and STIC will reimburse you after the conference. See you in Reno!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Today's Smalltalk Daily picks up where we left off yesterday, and adds in the menu component (which will display our post filtering options with url links). This involves adding the filtering code, and the rendering code for the menu UI. If you want to access a different part of the tutorial, go here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Tim Bray picked up on an Avi Bryant post from earlier this moneth, where Avi describes Gemstone (and, at the end, ponders the idea of what it would mean if it ran Ruby as well):

Ruby and other gems describes a fascinating framework built by Gemstone, a New York outfit you probably never heard of. I personally think that something like this might be huge in terms of making Rails scale effortlessly to really big problems.

Interestingly enough, Gemstone is located in Portland, OR (not NY) - not terribly far from Tim, as it happens. Also, it already takes an OO language into some really huge places - like container shipping and financial trading. That OO language would be Smalltalk though :)

Technorati Tags: Seaside, ruby

I just finished one of the most melancholy books I've ever read: "The Proud Tower", by Barbara Tuchman. It's a study of society in the West during the time from 1890-1914 (i.e., the run up to WWI). It's not a history of the politics of that era, although it does touch on that in a few areas - notably, the rise of the anarchists, the rise of the socialists, and the decline (relative to the lower classes) of the British aristocracy.

However, that's not all that gets talked about. German music, in the person of Richard Strauss, gets a chapter. The evolution of the US in the post-frontier era comes out, through the eyes of an unreconstructed 19th century conservative, Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed. The peace movement and the two major peace conferences that took place - and the forces that arrayed against them.

I found the last chapter, titled "The Death of Jaures", the saddest section. Here you have the rising tide of working class power, coming up politically through the socialist parties in Europe. Some of the leaders of that movement had starry-eyed notions of an end to nationalism, and - via the unified action of labor across borders - the prevention of war. As Tuchman points out, French labor was French first, German labor was German first (and so on) - the dream of unified action without regard to borders was just that, a dream.

It's a great book, and I came away from it with a much better feel for that era. I also came away with a lot of skepticism about claims (regardless of where they come from) about how the world is "worse than ever". That notion seems to be a constant across all eras.

Technorati Tags: history

I've had support in BottomFeeder for downloading files via HTTP for quite some time, but it's always involved some hacking. In VW 7.6, it still requires some coding, but - with a hat tip to Martin Kobetic - a lot less hacking. First, you'll want to download this small parcel, which contains one class - DownloadBuildHandler (A subclass of HttpBuildHandler).

Once you have that, all you need is something like this:

'http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/2008/industry_misinterpretations80.mp3' asURI
	envelopeReadStreamDo: [ :stream || target |
		target := 'industry_misinterpretations80.mp3' asFilename writeStream binary.
		[	DownloadBuildHandler readFrom: stream to: target.
		] ensure: [ target close ] ].

Obviously, you might want some more prettiness, like a progress bar, or, at the very least, a "wait while..." dialog. However, that's polish - the basic technique is above, and it's pretty easy.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, http

Professional media would do well to listen to Doc Searls - he's got his finger on the pulse of where media should be going:

So now comes news from Michael O'Connor Clarke that the CBC is quietly releasing one of their most popular shows on BitTorrent. And that it's DRM free. As it ought to be.

As Doc says, major media here in the US is still mentally bound to the airwave and frequency idea (even as the analog spectrum is about to be reordered). They need to figure out that their current audience, which is bound by time and position is much, much smaller than their potential audience - which would be happy to watch them at times of their own choosing.

Technorati Tags: tv, radio

Randal Schwartz and Dave Buck will be collaborating on a new website for the IRTC (International Ray Tracing Competition), and that website will be Seaside/Glorp based:

When I interviewed Dave for a recent FLOSS Weekly, I discovered that the IRTC had fallen into limbo, and was saddened by that.  But apparently, my wish to have it revive was enough of a nudge for Dave to look in to it, and a few weeks later he announced that the IRTC was going to be revived. Even better, the new website would be written in Seaside, and that I had volunteered to help him with it. (No, he didn't ambush me... we had discussed this in email the previous day.)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

As it happens, I ran across a situation requiring a "monkey patch" just this morning. A BottomFeeder user reported an issue reading this feed:

http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/alansplace/rss.aspx

I fired up an image, and tried this code, to make sure that the problem wasn't some silly thing I was doing in my own code:

HttpClient new get: 'http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/alansplace/rss.aspx'

Sure enough, there was a problem in the base network code in the system - something about parsing headers. Now, the correct answer here would be to go to the root of the problem, figure out the parsing error, and fix that. I could also just decide this - in the world of feed readers, cookies simply aren't that critical. So, I overrode the inherited method and did this (and yes, it's a hack):

parse: rfc822Stream
"Override to handle errors"

	self source: rfc822Stream asStream.
	value := [self doParse: rfc822Stream]
		on: Error
		do: [:ex | nil].

However, from a patching perspective, even a full fix by me would still be a patch on library code. Either way, I have to deliver a work-around to deployed clients. So what would the purist suggest in this case? Tell people in the field that they have to wait? Derive a secondary network library in order to avoid patching system code? My solution seems more pragmatic, especially since it's versioned in its own package, and - like other such patches in the past - will disappear as soon as a proper update comes from Cincom engineering.

Technorati Tags: code overrides, smalltalk, dynamic language, monkey patching

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we continue with the simple blog tutorial. You'll need this zip file, which contains a workspace and the beginning domain model code.

Technorati Tags: seaside, tutorial

Spotted in YOUR INNER CEO:

Communications has evolved more in the last 10 years than it has in the previous 100

I see that assertion a lot, but I don't think it holds up. Why? Well, I was thinking about this last night before bed. Let's ponder the communications field 30 years ago, when I was in high school. Sure, there's more person-to-person going on now, but the spread of information hasn't changed that much since 1978 - at least, not if you compare it to the changes between 1878-1908.

People like to say that "change is accelerating", but they're simply wrong. There's nothing going on now that compares to the wrenching changes that took place at the close of the 19th century. That was the time when the industrial revolution really caught hold, and great masses of people left the farm (and centuries of nearly identical manual labor) for urban life.

We like to think our era is uniquely changing, but it's simply not true. Compared to the time 100 years ago, things now are incremental in nature. Pick up nearly any book on the late 19th century and you'll see what I mean.

Technorati Tags: change, history

The network installer has been updated - thanks to some quick work from Bob Westergaard (Thanks Bob!), things are working again. The problem was as I expected it: I had an out of synch installer map and installer executable. You can head on over there now and get going!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, non commercial, cincom smalltalk

The music industry is getting more reality delivered to them, from Wal-Mart: the retailer is telling the industry that $15.99 for a CD is ridiculous, and that a price cut will be coming - or else they can kiss shelf space goodbye. Why do they need to care? Rolling Stone has this:

In the past decade, Wal-Mart has quietly emerged as the nation's biggest record store. Wal-Mart now sells an estimated one out of every five major-label albums. It has so much power, industry insiders say, that what it chooses to stock can basically determine what becomes a hit. "If you don't have a Wal-Mart account, you probably won't have a major pop artist," says one label executive.

I think the labels are in the "meeting people on their way back down" phase. They didn't make any friends on the way up, either.

I'm in the process of putting together a screencast based Seaside tutorial (as part of Smalltalk Daily). Parts 1 and 2 are online now; most or all of it will be done by the end of the week. It's a pretty simple thing, all Seaside 2.8 in the latest release of Cincom Smalltalk. No database work, and a very simple domain (blog server), so as to allow a complete focus on the Seaside aspect.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside tutorial

Today's Smalltalk Daily picks up where we left off yesterday, and gets started on the actual Seaside UI. The domain model code we start with may be downloaded from here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Engadget reports that Sony seems to have (finally) learned from their mistakes:

Sony BMG boss, Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, was just quoted in an interview saying that Sony BMG is "working on an online music subscription service." The service would cost between €6 to €8 per month (about $9 to $12) when launching later in the year and provide full access to its entire music catalog. He goes on to say that customers could own "some songs" even after the subscription was canceled. Interesting on it's own, right? Now the kicker: it will work "for all digital players, including Apple's iPod." That means DRM-free unless Apple agrees to license its FairPlay DRM... which it won't.

You have to meet the customer where he is, not where you think he ought to be. Sony spent years doing the latter.

Technorati Tags: PR, music

I have to apologize: either the network installer is broken, or - far more likely - I've made a mistake in copying files around on the server. In the interim, I've pulled the Network Installer option from the download page - you'll need to grab the entire ISO or the individual files.

Again, I apologize for this, and I'll have things fixed up as soon as possible!

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, non-commercial

When your management theory starts with denial:

But the key thing, Watkins argues, is that SSDs are just too expensive, and will be for a long time. Just look at the MacBook Air. There are two versions of the Apple laptop, one with an 80 GB hard drive for $1,800, and one with a 64 GB SSD for $3,100. Why pay so much more for less storage? It's not a difficult choice.

"Realistically, I just don't see the flash notebook sell," Watkins says. "We just don't see the proposition."

Certainly. For the frequent flying executive, that extra battery life afforded by an SSD is meaningless. Right. It's even better when denial is followed up with patent trolling:

But in case flash prices continue to plummet and the flash drives really do catch on, Watkins has something else up his sleeve. He’s convinced, he confides, that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel (INTC) are violating Seagate'€™s patents. (An Intel spokeswoman says the company doesn'€™t comment on speculation.) Seagate and Western Digital (WDC), two of the major hard drive makers, have patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer, Watkins says. It stands to reason that sooner or later, Seagate will sue -€“ particularly if it looks like SSDs could become a real threat.

And the translation: "We aren't smart enough to try and compete in that market - we believe a strategy of suing all and sundry will benefit consumers a lot more".

Sheesh - is Watkins taking dance lessons from the RIAA? Remind me to avoid Seagate products from here on out.

Update: Speaking of SSDs, look what I stumbled on within minutes: A Toshiba announcement of a laptop with a 128 GB SSD (Japan only at first, but still). I think Seagate is starting to quiver over the foreseeable end of the spinning HD era.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

It's coming up sooner than you think - why not register now? There's going to be a ton of great stuff, including lots of information on Seaside. See us all there!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

With the first product release out that supports Seaside, I thought it might be useful to do a set of introductory screencasts on Seaside. So for the next few days, I'll be doing a small example application that covers just Seaside - not the Active Record work that is still ongoing, not wizards and database, just Seaside.

So, today we get started with that - and you'll want this zip file to follow along. It includes a parcel with the minimal domain model that's used throughout this series of screencasts. The topic? The same thing I covered at SPA2008 in my tutorial there: a simple blog server. Grab part one of the screencast series here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside