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| Thursday, June 7, 2001 |
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Terminal service 
| | Somewhere around here (shoot, I was looking at it yesterday...) is the receipt and service contract for the Motorola StarTac cell phone I bought Joyce for Christmas at Radio Shack in December 1999. Normally I don't buy extended warranties because they're pure margin and tend to be scammy on other grounds. but I bought the three-year extended warranty with this phone, because if there's one thing that'll get a lot of use, this is it. And the warranty did include a free battery replacement, which we've used once, I believe. |
| | Well, the phone is wearing out. Falling apart, literally. It developed a crack around the hinge a few months ago, then pieces began to fall off. Now it's starting to look like Terminator after the truck fire. |
| | Today Joyce went into a Radio Shack in the town where I bought it. They offered to "send it in," but not to replace it (which is obviously required) or to loan or lease one while it's being "fixed." Instead they said she should "upgrade" to a new identical phone for $99, or to some kind of Nokia knockoff for $29. Nothing wrong with that except the new StarTac is also priced at $59 while the $29 unit is free — but only for new customers. She interrogated the sales people on the subject (I eavesdropped on the dying phone while she was doing this), and it appeared that the policy was firm. No exceptions. New customers get the discount. Old custompers pay an "upgrade" fee. Obviously, Radio Shack is more interested in customer "acquisition" than retention. |
| | What's more, they're also holding her phone number hostage. If she wants to transfer it to another phone with somebody else, she can't. |
| | Now the phone is dead (it died outright in the store), but there is no way she'll sign up for another year of service through Radio Shack. FWIW, the actual provider is Verizon. With the luck we've had on that channel in the past, it doesn't look good. But she'll try stopping at one of Verizon's own outlets tomorrow morning. |
| | When she gets back to Santa Barbara we'll acquire a new cell phone supplier. Recommendations are welcome. Meanwhile, I encourage ya'll to avoid having your patronage acquired by Radio Shack. |
Must-see doesn't cover it
| | Check out the Internet Movie Archive collection, starting here. They're humongous, but hey: burn 'em onto CDs and watch 'em later. (Thanks to J.D. for the link.) |
So far the answer is no
| | Amy Wohl asks, Is There a Profitable Open Source Model? She's been a software business insider since Linus was grade school, and her sensibility is closer to the mainstream of business than to the hacker culture that has, until lately, set most of the open source conversational agenda. |
| | She astutely locates the main thrust of Linux In Business with IBM — the only big-ass company that has unambiguously embraced both Linux and its various (and sometimes contentious) communities. And while she doesn't suggest a final answer to her title question, she does bring up some interesting possibilities, such as IBM giving away (presumably open sourcing) its middleware, which would be a non-trivial matter, and very "strategic," as they say. |
| | I think if you have to ask what something's business model is, it doesn't have one. But this isn't a bad thing, if we're talking about common infrastructure. Does the Net have a business model? Does air? Space? The periodic table? |
| | Linux groes on trees. It occurs in nature. So do SOAP, Jabber, HTTP and XML/RPC. Software's nature happens to be human. Infrastructural software is produced out of both human need and human generosity. It answers the question, "What can we do for everybody, rather than just for me and my company?" |
| | By embracing Linux and open source, IBM has put itself in a position where it has to constantly ask that question. I think lots of other software companies do too. Does Microsoft? I think so. But I also think they believe the best ubiquitous infrastructure is private. Is the net result of .Net a private Net where every software developer writes for some kind of Windows? That's the way it looks to me. What could be more telling than this line from The Hailstorm Business section of Microsoft's Hailstorm White Paper: |
| | HailStorm will help move the Internet to end-user subscriptions, where users pay for value received. |
| | And that's why I think it won't work. Even though there's a good chance you're already signed up for it. |
We blog to please
| | Just read your "Fortune" story, and about bust a gut. Some engineering manager over there is in for a serious reaming. |
| | First, the error you're getting tells us quite a bit about how Fortune is serving their pages: it specifically mentions ATG's Dynamo application server, which is one in a crowd of Java-based application servers these days. |
| | Second, it specifically points out that they're doing their compilation with "javac," the Java compiler that comes with the Java Developer Kit (JDK). javac is itself written in Java. That's an admirable eating of one's own dogfood, but, well, it's slow. Most people who care about compiling Java quickly are using IBM's highly-regarded Jikes compiler, which is an Open Source Java compiler written in C++, is blazingly fast, and extremely conformant. The "blazingly fast" part is important when you're running an application server that is, in effect, compiling Java code every time it serves a page (in practice, it's not that simple--some pages are totally static, and even the ones that are dynamic get cached for a while after they're compiled, but for the moment, assume Java compilation every time a page is served). You can see, given this scenario, why you'd want a compiler that can compile a page in 0.25 seconds vs., e.g. 1 second. |
| | Finally, the detailed error message spells it out in just enough gory detail: Fortune's server ran out of disk space. My wife came running, I was laughing so hard. |
| | Thanks for an even better chuckle than the last one, |
| | I don't know what the hell he's talking about either, but I'm glad he got a chuckle out of it. He isn't the only one. Anybody here from Fortune, I wonder? |
Active flogs
| | Here's another positive review in the Monitor for Buzz Bruggeman's Active Words. If you have Windows, give it a try. I'm curious to know what ya'll think. |
| | I also note with interest a Monitor story about how humans are crowding out Bonobo monkeys, which are best known in hacker circles as the component system in GNOME. The name was inspired by the Bonobos' aggressive sexuality. They'll fuck anything, I believe. |
We're trusting you can manage this knowledge
| | Yesterday's item about blogs & knowledge and stuff brought a pointer this morning to a long and deep piece about blogs and KM, which is what insiders to the field call Knowledge Management. The discussion starts with a flattering pointer to Yours Blogly. |
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