Archive for the ‘Tech Industry’ Category

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Facebook and the Online Economy

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

I’m not a fan of Facebook. But I can see what they’re doing, and why their current advertising revenue is irrelevant to their long-term profitability. And it seems someone else (at TechCrunch of all places) seems to get it:

Facebook has won the identity wars. So their advertising income is relatively speaking peanuts. Who cares? They don’t need to invent a new form of monetization. They have one already: Facebook Credits. Right now their income from it is a rounding error. But as years go by, and people slowly get accustomed to buying and using and transferring them, and as Facebook grows more and more intertwined with every online action we take–which is to say, nearly every action we take–it could well become the first global virtual currency … and then ultimately lose that “virtual” disclaimer.

via Bashing Facebook For All The Wrong Reasons | TechCrunch.

What Linden Lab did with their virtual currency within Second Life, Facebook is doing on the broader internet (and so, essentially, to the developed world as a whole): they are solving the micro-transaction problem. And they intend to take a little slice of the action — a tiny, tiny slice, percentage wise — and it will make them a mint. They will in fact become a mint, literally making the new currency for the online world.

Given how cavalier they have been with privacy, this frankly scares the pee out of me. If it had to be someone in that position, I’d prefer it was Google; not that Google is all that saintly, “Don’t be evil” notwithstanding, but they do seem to be the least-bad of the major powers on the ‘net.

An even better solution would be competing currencies: Facebucks, Amazon Credits, iDollars, Googold, and of course Microsoft Live Currency Units for Mobile Windows. (I kid.) (A little.) (No seriously, whatever the official name was, we’d have to call it Microsoft X-Bucks. I insist.)

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Stross on DRM

Monday, April 30th, 2012

Charlie Stross makes a strong practical case for eliminating DRM from ebooks:

Finally, if going DRM-free is a trend, it may be to Macmillan’s advantage to be seen to be a front-runner. Removing the requirement for DRM from specialist imprints marketing primarily to the voracious genre readers would be a useful experimental step: I will confess to a personal bias here, but I’d love it if Tor was allowed to sell my novels unencumbered by DRM — I could personally use that as a strong marketing angle.

via More on DRM and ebooks – Charlie's Diary.

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The Revenge of the Angry Nerds

Sunday, January 29th, 2012

I got into a Twitter-fight with @paulcarr earlier today. (Yes, someone was wrong on the Internet!) The topic developed into an editorial piece on Pando Daily.

I’ll admit I did a poor job of defending my point on Twitter, within the 140-character limit. I started a less-constrained reply on the PandoDaily article, but decided it would work better as a blog post; and frankly, my blog could use some love.

So. Read the original article first; it won’t make sense otherwise. I apologize for the length of my response, as I did not have time to write a shorter one.

On the one hand, the entertainment industry, citing a grossly overstated estimate of piracy damages, brazenly tried to buy a law that would cripple another industry (one that they are to some degree in competition with), throwing due process out the window as they did, and they came scandalously close to succeeding.

On the other hand, the tech community responded to an act of plagiarism with a public naming-and-shaming. No cops, no lawyers, no bribing of Congresscritters, no subversion of the Constitution.

Obviously, these two are exactly morally equivalent.

And of course, everyone who opposed SOPA/PIPA, or who wants to prevent future SOPA-ish nonsense by making Hollywood’s current business model obsolete, is also a hypocritical advocate or apologist for piracy of Hollywood content. Obviously.

You are so full of it.

Piracy is wrong. It’s also inevitable, a cost of doing business. And saying so is not a pro-piracy sentiment, any more than saying “Some politicians will always be corrupt” is a pro-corruption statement.

Believe me, the software industry already knows about piracy. It also learned, the hard way, that there is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to anti-piracy measures. It sucks up resources, depletes customer goodwill, and produces negligible results. It distracts you from making a better product and better serving your paying customers.

Again, pointing this out is not a pro-piracy position. It’s hard-won wisdom from fellow content-owners.

The tech industry has also proven that it’s possible to build a profitable business in the face of piracy. Apple proved that it’s possible in music too. If they can do it, why can’t Hollywood? And if they can’t or won’t, and insist on trying to throw the Bill of Rights under the bus again, maybe it’s worth trying to invent their replacement.

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The Go Programming Language

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

The Go Programming Language.

I’m glad to see this; there has been too little innovation on the system programming language front. I do like C, though I’ve become more conscious of its faults since I learned it (*mumble*) years ago.

I’m a little disappointed that Google didn’t throw its weight behind the other major contender in this category, The D Programming Language. They have to have considered it; I wonder if their decision not to use it involved technical considerations, licensing considerations, or a little of both.

The write-up on TechCrunch is light on technical details, and the comments are hilariously clueless: paranoiacs spluttering that Google is taking over the world, people who’ve never written a line of code in their lives declaring it an instant failure, and Johnny One-Note programmers insisting that this will never take the place of PHP, or C#, or JavaScript, or whatever their One True Language is, shrieking with terror at the thought of learning something new.

For myself, I like what I’ve read so far about Go. It looks not much more complex than C (and waaaay less complex than C++), with a more modern, more streamlined feel. I like the idea of trying to head off the formatting wars by including a canonical pretty-printer in the core tool set (though I wish they had standardized on spaces instead of tabs for indentation). Requiring braces around blocks is good: it heads off a common error in C/C++ coding, and there shouldn’t be any ‘friction’ in changing a one-line block into a multi-line block. I liked structural equivalence of types when I first encountered it in Modula-3, and the Go concept of interfaces is nicely reminiscent of that. I don’t miss the whole object oriented feature list (encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance, and dynamic binding), so long as modularity and information hiding are supported. And garbage collection is a huge win, so long as it can be done efficiently and without causing the program to stutter.

All in all, very interesting, and a worthy challenger to D as a 21st-century systems programming language.

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Go vs Go!

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

Go! is a concurrent programming language, first publicly documented by Keith Clark and Francis McCabe in 2003 [1]. It is oriented to the needs of programming secure, production quality, agent based applications. It is multi-threaded, strongly typed and higher order (in the functional programming sense).

via en.wikipedia.org

Google’s new ‘Go’ programming language, the very day it is announced, is already embroiled in a naming controversy.

Personally, I think they should contact the makers of LabVIEW, and see if they can acquire the naming rights for the G programming language.

Posted via web from Kevination

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The One Where I Say Something Nice About .NET

Friday, October 9th, 2009

I’m working my way through  Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, by Steven Sanderson, published by Apress. So far, I like it, for values of ‘it’ of both the book and the framework.

The book — well, the reviews on Amazon were glowing, and they’re basically right: clear prose style, ideas well expressed, and enough critique of other Microsoft technologies that you can tell it’s not a Microsoft Press title.

The framework … is interesting. It mostly abandons the ASP.NET model of server-side controls, postbacks, and viewstate in favor of plain HTML and CSS. (Though there are still advantages to using their HTML helper functions rather than coding up raw HTML yourself.) For pity’s sake, they even make jQuery available for your AJAX hacking pleasure.

What has always bothered me about “classic” ASP.NET was that it seemed to be an attempt to transplant the VB/WebForms style of development — drag-and-drop controls, a low-level event loop — onto the web. It’s a layer of abstraction over the web in an attempt to hide that fact that it is the web.

And it shows in terms of performance. Outside of low-latency intranets, the underlying architecture doesn’t support the chatty postback/viewstate implementation needed to emulate a desktop GUI event loop.

ASP.NET MVC, in contrast, feels like a web-native architecture. It’s designed around the strengths and limitations of HTTP, rather than fighting against it.

On top of that, it encourages the strong separation of concerns implied by ‘MVC’; it nudges the developer towards unit testing and test-driven development; and with the source code placed under an OSI-approved license, it represents a step by Microsoft into the world of Open Source.

All in all, I think ASP.NET MVC is quite cool.

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Whimsley: Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.

Whenever I make these claims someone says “Well I use Netflix and it’s shown me all kinds of films I didn’t know about before. It’s broadened my experience, so that’s an increase in diversity.” And someone else points to the latest viral home video on YouTube as evidence of niche success.

So this post explains why your gut feel is wrong.

via Whimsley: Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche.

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Too Many Gadgets?

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

There’s no such thing, right? Well, if you have to carry them all around all day, maybe there is such a thing as too many.

It seems I am now “on call”. Which means I have to tote around the one and only IT-approved model of smartphone, the Blackberry. Which means I am now saddled with two slightly-too-big devices, being already the proud owner of T-Mobile G1 “GooglePhone”.

If this had happened half a year ago, when I was toting around the T-Mobile SDA stupidphone, I’d have counted the Blackberry as a blessing; that thing was an abomination. But now I’m feeling just a little too connected.

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You Say Netbook, I Say Smartphone

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

According to CNET, HP is diving headfirst into the Netbook market. The interesting part of the article, though, is not so much about HP, as about netbooks in general, and how they are being marketed in Europe and Asia:

It’s a dramatic increase, and the difference is all coming out of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), where Asus and Acer have been incredibly aggressive about their Netbooks, the Eee PC and Aspire One, respectively. Of the 10.9 million units that are estimated to ship worldwide by the end of 2008, 8.1 million will go to EMEA, says IDC.

Acer and Asus have done well in the region, as evidenced by Acer’s quick rise to the top of the portable PC market there. But they’ve been aided by local telecom companies, who are subsidizing Netbooks in exchange for a signed wireless service contract. It’s a model that in the past few months has thrived in Europe.

Dell signed up Vodafone for this kind of deal on its Netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9 in September, but HP’s mostly been on the sidelines in this regard, and representatives for the company haven’t indicated if a similar deal with wireless providers are in the works.

Wireless service contract to subsidize a Linux-based device optimized for mobile Internet access. Other than the physical size of the device, how is this different from Android (and, Linux notwithstanding, the iPhone)?

At some point in the near future, somebody is going to put Android on a netbook-class device, and the shape of the future of client computing will become clearly visible. And the day that happens is the day that Microsoft’s desktop monopoly will be truly broken.

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Yahoo! (Powered by Microsoft)

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

What do you get when you cross Microsoft and Yahoo?

Microsoft.

Over at TechCrunch, Duncan Riley makes the case that people leery of the coming Microsoft/Yahoo merger are being unreasonable, and need to start thinking of Google, not Microsoft, as the Evil Empire.

The Microsoft is evil meme is alive and well this week as many digest Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover offer for Yahoo. There’s Flickr users protesting, talk of Yahoo teaming up with Google to block Microsoft’s bid, and general Microsoft is bad sentiment everywhere, even from Google itself. While Microsoft acquiring Yahoo may not provide the ultimate in happy endings to many, it’s really not as bad as some would have you believe.

My own objection is not so much because Microsoft is evil (and we’ll set aside for the moment whether Microsoft is evil). Rather, it’s over the fact that Microsoft is a desktop software company. Up to now, Yahoo has been a pure Internet company, like Google. They have not had any reason to care what platform its users run; they simply don’t have a horse in that race.

But a combined ‘MicroHoo’ has a vested interest in what software is running at the other end of the pipe. Even if the people running the ‘Yahoo Division’ say all the right things, there will always be a temptation for the Microsoft brass to use the Yahoo properties as instruments with which to promote Microsoft desktop software. That should be a concern for anyone who uses non-Microsoft alternatives to Microsoft products — not just Mac and Linux users, but users of Firefox and Opera, iTunes and Winamp.

Will you have to use IE to access del.icio.us or Yahoo Finanace? Will you have to use Windows Media Player to access Yahoo’s streaming media? Will you have to use Visual Studio to develop Yahoo plug-ins? Even if the answer to all of these questions is ‘No’ now, can anyone promise it will stay that way in the future? Even if Microsoft goes into debt with this deal, and has to justify its purchase to the stockholders, can we be sure that management won’t see this as a way to monetize their new properties?

And I don’t buy the parallel being drawn by some between Google’s domination of the net and Microsoft’s domination of the desktop. Microsoft gained its position by leveraging its relationship with IBM, and muscling PC vendors into exclusive deals, precluding them from offering pre-installed alternatives to Windows. Google, by contrast, is a textbook example of a natural monopoly, exactly the kind of company we should want to see more of: they built a better mousetrap, and the world beat a path to their door.

In practical terms, the only real stumbling block to this deal may be EU intervention, and even there, Microsoft can make a compelling case that the merger will increase rather than decrease competition, so I don’t see that as likely. So the deal is likely to go ahead. I just don’t see it as cause to celebrate.

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