brentashley

Kevin Lindsey has a great Javascript Object Inheritance tutorial [via Eric Costello]

Chris Pirillo’s setting up a paypal fund for Doc who it seems got his (ouch – unbacked-up) laptop stolen from a downtown-parked car.

Same thing happened when lost his camera some time back.

Didn’t someone come up with a new AirPort Base Station for him when he left his at a conference?

Now, don’t get me wrong. Doc is a major stand-up guy, and he’s not digging for these handouts – others offer them up freely. But why do you and I waste dough on insurance?

Hey, Chris! Whaddya know, I happened to leave my new uninsured 17″ Powerbook on a city bus. Gosh, whatever will I do?

I’m trying to find where I can get a Canadian price for Funk Software’s Steel-Belted Radius authentication server software. There’s no “Where to Buy” link on their site. The closest I can get is the reseller area of their site, where they say:

Funk Software actively encourages fulfillment of our products through the reseller channel.

Geez, what a load of tripe. What’s wrong with “We don’t sell directly to the public – contact one of our resellers”.

Then they say:

In this area of the site, you’ll find a list of our authorized distributors, how to contact them, and how to order.

Ain’t no such list. Or if there is, it’s FAR from obvious where it is. Finally, after going through their Site Map, I reach their reseller search form. It returns me the names and phone numbers of resellers in my area. No web links – I have to find them myself.

These guys need to read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think book.

Do they really want me to buy their product, or are they only interested in business from the resellers and are relying on them to sell it? Those distinctions mean nothing to the consumer. Nonexistent customer relations from the manufacturer will turn end users off just as quickly.

Patrick Murphy recalls some lessons in economics:

Classic public goods display two characteristics:

1) Inexhaustible – Non-rival in consumption; i.e. my consumption doesn’t reduce others’ consumption.

2) Non-excludable – Difficult (costly) or impossible to exclude non-payers from consuming.

This definition has not been applicable to intellectual property — until recently.

He offers “Light from a Lighthouse” as an analog to the difficulty that copyright holders have in controlling the use of their works.

Light from a lighthouse, though, is received passively. It does not require an act of “taking”. Downloading files requires action on the part of the recipient. It requires intent. Once the lighthouse is turned off, you can’t go home and light up your back yard with it at your own leisure.

It’s not as though the copyright owner wants you not to have her work. It’s on the radio for all to hear. It’s played in concert. It’s in a movie. She released it for the express purpose of having as many people as possible hear it as often as possible.

Not all publishing industries are facing the same challenges – or at least their reactions are different.

Why is it that art and photography, while just as copyable and distributable as music, doesn’t have the same problems? Why is there not a print publishing industry wooing and pressuring congress to outlaw high speed quality laser and inkjet printers and to require printers to report our social security numbers back to them before printing each page? Why is the industry association not urging universities to storm dorm rooms looking on hard drives for scanned pages of textbooks? Why is nobody trying to fill the “personal darkroom” analog hole and call for a levy on all paper and ink to compensate authors for the piracy of their works?

Let’s all analyse this deeper and try to understand what it is about the music and film industries that makes them different.

Is it that the other media are harder or more expensive to replicate faithfully but that technology has evolved to Music and Film’s detriment? What’s next on the technology timeline? When holographic concerts become widely available, live performance won’t even be exclusive. What can we look back at that was once easy to control but now is so freely usable without permission that the industries surrounding it have crumbled?

No answers today, just more questions.

Doc Searls comments on my recent piece on Exclusivity and Ownership and quotes Ernie the Attorney talking about the media industry’s long history of greed-based maneuvering.

A good start against these sorts of abuses of financial (and therefore political) power would be legislation like the proposed Canadian laws limiting political contributions.

My west-coast friend, erstwhile colleague and semantic sparring partner Ian Marsman has been quite astute about the impending Iraq Attack. Just watch and see if he isn’t right on the money.

Last year I had a bit of a rant at my hosting provider due to some service issues. I moved my main project at the time off of them but kept some other stuff with them. Since then I’ve seen them become what I consider the best value in hosting.

For $9.95US per month,PHPWebHosting.com provides me with:

• 125Mbytes of disk space and more if I ask
• PHP4, Perl, Python, Ruby
• as many MySQL databases as I want with phpMyAdmin
• HTTP,FTP,SSL
• SSH access, my own crontab
• unlimited unmetered POP3 addresses
• autoresponders
• ezmlm mailing lists
• dns management, subdomains, subdomain web roots

Unbeatable value. I’ve recommended it to a few friends who are also very happy with it.

Who names these viruses? The MS-SQL Server virus from this past weekend seems to be called “Slammer” or “Sapphire” or “SQ Hell”. I’m sure the author is wearing that like a badge of honour (although not too openly, one should think, if they want to remain anonymous). Maybe it would be useful to provide some disincentive by naming viruses differently – how keen would a haxx0r be to be known as the guy who wrote the “Author has a Tiny Dick” virus?