listen to the new superstars talking about the new, new thing.
well, alllllriiiiiiiiiighty! i know what i’m doing this weekend – installing a physical home network. what more could a guy [or girl] want? power tools >and< ethernet cable.
with any luck it will be as exciting as my so-called plumbing adventure.
i’m going to try to stop posting articles about the client as server thing. i’m getting burned-out on the whole issue – but i still can’t help myself. from the washington post we get a piece that predicts big changes afoot [and gives a good overview of the development of gnutella]:
“Both the beauty and danger of Gnutella are that it is a more sophisticated version of Napster, the infamous and popular program that college students have been using to swap music files over the Web. Napster’s developers have recently been hit with a flurry of copyright-infringement lawsuits. But unlike users of Napster, Gnutella aficionados can trade files without going through a storage center, making it impossible to shut down the system without unplugging every computer on the network and difficult to control by laws because there’s no central authority.”
“Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a “revolutionary” program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer.”
the gate continues the festival with an article on scour
“Napster’s huge underground success has unleashed the maverick concept of creating a shared online library of free songs.
Now, a new program called Scour Exchange takes the Napster concept and extends it to photos, videos and feature-length films.”
i’m not sure why they chose to highlight scour, when there are plenty of alternatives.
can’t remember where i found this comparison of rippers, but it points out an interesting tidbit or two:
“Programs we forbid:
Anything, which uses the Xing codec to compress so AudioCatalyst is definitely out for compressing WAVs. Also Virtuoso Gold tends to make the MP3s screwy (?!?) or Real Player
Real Jukebox (uses the Xing codec). Why is this? Simple, because Xing has a nasty habit of killing off the ambiance of your source recording, therefore making the end MP3s
horrible to listen to. In a sense, it makes your high/low ends washed or warble, thereby it doesn’t sound as clean on a typical high-end stereo system. Also, apparently MusicMatch
Jukebox does use a form of the Fraunhoffer codec, but it also tends to ruin the MP3s when it compresses. User beware! ”
with impeccable timing dave links to the ‘growth’ article mentioned in the previous post and adds a link to this response to the article from a ‘netscapee’ :
> I was delighted to read this article by Joel Brodsky
> (http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$113). It had some
> great stuff about what kind of business you want to be in.
>
> It definitely captured a lot of things that have been true of O’Reilly.It also captured a lot of things that were true of Netscape as well (which was definitely a company on the Amazon.com model):
“When you are growing faster than about 100% per year, it is simply impossible for mentors to transmit corporate values to new hires. …Netscape is the most egregious example of this, growing from 5 to about
2000 programmers in one year. As a result, their culture was a mishmash of different people with different values about the company, all tugging in different directions.”“I’m a firm believer in the importance of corporate culture as promoted in books like “Built to Last” (which is why I was one of the instigators of the values stuff at Netscape), so it’s interesting to speculate how
this dynamic would play out in the current era. At first glance it seems as if no one has any time anymore to wait around for a business to grow organically, so it’s difficult to see how any “dot-com” today could in fact build a coherent and enduring culture.”
as usual, joel spolsky has some interesting thoughts, this time it’s business growth models:
“Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’re in, and gear everything you do accordingly, or you’re going to have a disaster on your hands.
The decision? Whether to grow slowly, organically, and profitably, or whether to have a big bang with very fast growth and lots of capital.”
“With the Ben and Jerry’s model, if you’re even reasonably smart, you’re going to succeed. It may be a bit of a struggle, there may be good years and bad years, but unless we have another depression, you’re certainly not going to lost too much money, because you didn’t put in too much to begin with.
The trouble with the Amazon model is that all anybody thinks about is Amazon. And there’s only one Amazon. You have to think of the other 95% of companies which spend an astonishing amount of venture capital and then simply fail because nobody wants to buy their product. At least, if you follow the Ben and Jerry’s model, you’ll know that nobody wants your product long before you spend more than one MasterCard’s worth of credit limit on it.