I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.

risible
adjective

• causing or capable of causing laughter; laughable; ludicrous.
• having the ability, disposition, or readiness to laugh.
• pertaining to or connected with laughing.

The best thing about trolling APK? Sometimes I want to read an article a few days later when more discussion has occurred. If I put a reply in it, APK will helpfully respond to it. Next time I login, there is a convenient reminder in my message list.

Thanks Alex!

Thanks go out to Dr. Bob. Usually when I'm bored with mod points, I'll go and split them between marking Barbie 'Troll' and 'Insightful'. Or I'll go dump fifteen on pudge. But tonight, Dr. Bob gets five points of mod bombing. If only all quackopractors were modbombed out of business.

Well, it was easy to find the 'write in journal' link. Or is that from my slashbox? I dunno. I don't care. Second, it works better for me on IE 8.0 than it does on FF 3.6.

No FF compatibility, less readability than 2.0, inability to save preferences? Lame.

No wonder the number of comments to articles is down. Substantially by my seat of the pants estimation. Eighteen comments on a Android vs. Symbian troll article after 35 minutes? Anti-Apple troll article has 67 comments after three hours?!

They either wanted to drive down page views, will roll this back, or Netcraft will soon confirm it.

Yo, Tom Hudson, I'm real happy for you and I'ma let you finish, but Breitbart is the greatest troll of all TIME!

I'll never empty my list of freaks. First of all because Pudge is on there, and for him to un-freak me would require him to change his mind.

But of far more interest than that is my former brother-in-law. I hadn't forgotten that he showed up here when his crazy assed sister left me. Hadn't thought about him in a while. Was looking around some pages and saw his name on my freaks list. Then I remembered he was 'an hero'. And I laughed. I hope it hurt. It probably did, because for it to have been painless it would require him to do something right for once in his miserable life.

Cowardly chickenshit.

Everybody still having fun with APK? I notice that damned near every post I made last week has been responded to, questioning my educational bona fides. The hysterical thing is that some AC responded to his inquiries. Now, to about half of those, he responded, accusing me of being the AC. The really hysterical thing: I haven't visited /. since very early on Wednesday morning.

So APK spent a day or two running around and accusing people of sockpuppetry who had forgotten his existence hours before APK posted. Classic. How long until he goes all Hans Reiser?

A slashdot exchange about standard handling of updates to cell chip firmware got me thinking about the applicability of "the tragedy of the commons" to the economics of open source community projects.

From the Wikipedia article for the Tragedy of the Commons:

        Central to Hardin's article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd), of a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the carrying capacity of the common is exceeded and it is temporarily or permanently damaged for all as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed to the detriment of all.

Clearly a shared base of code and/or fixes is a commons and in fact one "open source"-ish licence, the Creative Commons licence, uses that very term. The point of the tragedy of the commons is that you have people extracting from the commons beyond sustainability because it's in their economic self-interest to do so. In this variant, the cell phone manufacturers are unwilling to contribute to building/improving a commons because doing so is not in their economic self-interest. There's a pretty clear parallel to me.

This is interesting because it has implications for the situations where open source-type communal projects are economically viable and where they are not. When computing systems were relatively rare, operating systems were part of systems that provided their users a first mover advantage and could be sold as products. However, as computing capacity becomes commoditized and ubiquitous, the proposition of setting up a commons appears to become more economically advantageous. If the above is true, it would seem to indicate that open source communal projects are viable for commodity components for infrastructure, but not for core mission critical functions that provide a competitive advantage. If that's the case, then in a mature software development industry, there will only be manufacturers of software for vertical markets because software for horizontal markets will be better supplied by community-supported projects. Which would mean that in the long term, the economics are against the sustainability of Microsoft, Oracle, and other giants of the horizontal intellectual product markets. In a mature industry the companies that will survive are companies that facilitate maintenance and use of the commons, like RedHat, Canonical, etc., and companies that focus on vertical markets and custom software development, like IBM, EDS, etc. And don't get me wrong, horizontal "software" market products initially can be very lucrative because they involve a naturally large customer base, however that profitability is time limited to the point where the product is commoditized and the cost distribution effects of an open source project is more economically rewarding for the customer/user.

Now Microsoft and Oracle do have the advantage of network effects working in their favour (interoperability/training investment for users) and those forces work against the advantages of a shared commons despite the horizontal markets for their products. However, contrary to Wikipedia, I would call these weak network effects because the barrier to entry is distributed instead of internalized. A "strong" network effect would be a telecommunications infrastructure where the key resource behind the effect is owned by the beneficiary. A would-be competitor must invest enough to replicate the resource (i.e. lay cable or buy spectrum and set up cell towers across the region) to be able to compete, in addition to convincing users to switch. However with a "weak" network effect the primary barrier to entry is associated with a non-owned resource or a time-limited government monopoly (i.e. patents). In Microsoft's case they've decided to strengthen their network effects (user/admin training investments, proprietary document exchange formats, developer mindshare), by strongly supporting ISVs and by combating attempts to commoditize Windows' features through the web. However the most used core of Windows has limited room for improvement and, as users become more aware of the issues with vendor locking, demand for open document standards has increased.Thus Microsoft's network effects are continuing to weaken, with their strongest remaining asset being developer support. As the growth of Microsoft's user base flattens and investor expectations demand continued revenue growth which can only be achieved by price increases, the relative cost proposition of open source becomes more attractive in the long run.

Oracle seems to have a mixed model where they use vertical market products to help promote sales of their horizontal product. However at some point, their horizontal product market will be sufficient commoditized that tying their vertical market products to it will put their vertical market products at a disadvantage with any competitors in those vertical markets using a commons-based infrastructure.

All right, you're a bachelor (or DINKs) and you love bacon. but you know it's bad for you and you don't want to have too much too often. The stuff comes in these packs of 20 or more slices soaked in water and if you don't freeze the bacon and just keep it in the fridge, then it starts to go bad long before you've worked through the pack. However if you freeze the pack when you buy it, then it might as well be welded together. You can't get the slices apart when you need them unless you thaw the whole pack, which defeats the point of freezing it in the first place. What to do?

Here's the solution I came up with years ago. You take a plate and cover it in plastic food wrap, then you lay down a layer of bacon strips side by side. Cover that with a sheet of plastic wrap and lay down another layer of bacon strips crosswise from the first. Repeat until you've used up the bacon. Now take that plate and stick it in the freezer for a couple of hours.

The result is a plate of frozen bacon strips that separate from each other easily. Take them apart and put them in a freezer bag. You now have bacon in your freezer that will last for months and you can take out a few strips at a time as you need them.

I don't actually have anything to say. Kathleen is due any day, and I'm looking forward to a few weeks of staying home, getting poor sleep, and changing diapers.
But mostly I'm testing to see if journal saving works properly.

Anyone have any preferences for a b/g/n router? I'd like one so that I can put my nice, modern Apple stuff on the N side of things, and the shitty, legacy crap over on the b/g side. Already have an older Time Capsule that isn't full, so I'm not going that route. (Oh, and I'll probably not give my brother access to the N, cause he pisses me off too much).

Thinking to bridge the connection from that to the Time Capsule, and let the Time Capsule handle the rest of it.

I don't care about off the wall firmware. That doesn't interest me in any way, shape or form. Unless I have to deal with that kind of malarkey to get either my Time Capsule or my tons of BT stuff to work nicely.

We've made some significant updates to the submission/journal system. Visiting Submissions and Journals yields a new form that allows stuff like tags to the data types. There are a number of annoying bugs, but for the most part the dust is starting to settle. More notes will be coming, but this journal entry is really just me putting the final test on the new Journal form.

I've lurked at /. without posting for ages, mostly because I just don't have the time to interact like I used to.

But I've been clicking through the old RSS feed more and more lately, and when I saw the PAX Plague thread today, I came over to comment, since I'm kind of affected by the whole damn thing. I thought I'd take a look around since I haven't been here in awhile, and I saw that there are freaking ACHIEVEMENTS associated with our accounts. It's silly, and I'm sure it's been here forever, but I thought it was awesome and I was delighted when I read it.

I didn't realize how much I missed Slashdot until I spent some time here today, and I bet that anyone who joined in the last 2 years doesn't even give a shit about my stupid comments or anything, but it felt good to come back here, and feel safely among my people again.

Modpoints for sale. If you have a good one tomorrow (TT) that isn't getting the love, let me know.