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• Internet Overabundance Is The Problem
ZDNet's John Dvorak has some really sensible things to say about the issue of free content on the Internet in an era of severe revenue contraction. The essential problem, he contends, is overabundance. Says Dvorak:
"Unfortunately, the problem with the dot-com phenomenon was not a lack of good ideas but a surplus of them. In fact, when we look at the Internet we find a glut of everything -- from ideas to free music. Abundance. This is what the so-called new economy is really about, and until we understand it the downturn will stay with us....
"Worst of all, there is no real mechanism except the market itself to keep things from getting even worse. It's a new economy, all right, but the market is old. If we develop new concepts instead of continuing to swamp the already saturated market with more product, things will stabilize. Otherwise we are doomed. Micropayments, anyone?"
I agree. Of all the possible ways to make Internet business sustainable, micropayments seem to be the best idea I've heard so far. You can check out John Dvorak's article here:
CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland reports that Red Hat Chief Executive Matthew Szulik has exhorted Linux developers to take some of the time they now devote to programming and put it toward boosting open-source software in education in his closing keynote address at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo on Thursday. "What's really happening is money is taking over how our children are being educated," Szulik declared "The industry that has contributed so much to the GDP of this country is all of a sudden finding itself looking at education as a market opportunity and not as a fundamental responsibility." He cited Microsoft's putting the thumscrews to cash-strapped school boards with software copyright compliance audits. By contrast, the article reports that Red Hat is working on setting up a nonprofit organization, led by Chairman Bob Young, that would help push Linux and open-source software in education. You can check it out at:
A the-ibook.com reader named Matt has posted his impressions of his iBook 466 SE with DVD. He writes:
"This is how a computer should be. Having had the iMac, I now love the portability that the iBook affords me... I can honestly say that this lovely iBook does everything with style, and it’s never given me a problem."
For more, visit:
Copies of best-selling authors' novels are being traded on the Internet using Napster-like technology such as Gnutella, according to a report in the National Post, citing data from Envisional, a British Internet monitoring company. Among popular works being traded are books by Stephen King, William Gibson, Douglas Coupland, Tom Clancy, Douglas Adams, and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. A National Post reporter took 30 minutes to navigate Gnutella, find Stephen King's 1984 work Thinner, and download it. Printing the book required another 15 minutes. Envisional says there are as many as 7,500 pirated books available on the Internet. And while some publishers are ringing alarm bells about the potential threat to an industry that struggles at the best of times (unlike the recording industry), author Coupland suggests that the threat to his royalties posed by Internet file sharing of his works is a spit in the ocean compared with public libraries. Coupland is quited commenting:
"If you look at books purely from a revenue viewpoint, libraries are the big income killers for any writer -- but are libraries somehow more noble than file-sharing?" Uh-huh. Don't give the doofuses that brought us the DMCA ideas. They may be tempted to go after public libraries next! Read the National Post report at:
Two of my favorite writers, Low End Mac's Dan Knight and The New York Times' David Pogue, both weighed in yesterday on the Megahertz gap issue. Dan says that the great problem with MHz as a comparitive benchmark is that it doesn't predict performance between different processors. He recently looked over the various benchmarks for different models, trying to devise a scale that would help quantify the performance difference between the 8 MHz 68000 of the earliest Macs and the G3s and G4s used today, and came up with this:
• 1: 8 MHz 68000
"By this scale, says Dan "we see that a 500 MHz iMac or iBook is roughly 500 times more powerful than the original Macintosh, nearly 100 times as powerful as a Mac IIci, and 25 times more powerful than the Power Mac 6100. These are rough figures, but they'll get you into the ballpark. However,
"It gets messy when we throw the 603/604, G3/G4, Celeron/Pentium, Duron/Athlon, and Intel/AMD comparisons into the mix. Megahertz will tell you which G4 or Athlon is faster than another G4 or Athlon, but it gives no indication whatsoever how either of these compare with the Pentium III or Pentium 4.
"What the computing industry needs is some sort of cross-platform performance rating that indicates how well a particular processor performs inside a computer and under an operating system."
Yup. David Pogue says that "Apple Computer has long been the victim of a public perception problem: that megahertz (MHz) is the true measure of a computer’s speed." But... "As it turns out, megahertz is a bogus measure of comparative computer speed... the megahertz scale differs from chip to chip, so comparing the MHz ratings one of Apple’s chips with a Pentium is, ahem, apples and oranges. Apple’s megahertz are "worth more." As Apple demonstrated onstage at the July Macworld Expo, an 866-MHZ Macintosh easily blows past a 1.5-gigahertz Pentium 4." He goes on to discuss the virtues of multiprocession, and how that further muddies the Megahertz gap waters. Read about it here:
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