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UpFront

Issue 91

From Issue #91
November 2001

Nov 01, 2001  By Doc Searls
 in
Stop the Presses, LJ Index and more.
LJ Index—November 2001

  1. Percentage of early-adopting PVR (personal video recorder, like the Linux-platformed TiVo) owners who are watching more TV than before they owned the device: 63

  2. Percentage of current PVR owners who have “no idea” which channels the shows being watched were originally on: 12

  3. Percentage of current PVR and VCR owners who like to scan past ads: 25

  4. Number of channels on Dish Network's $31.95-per-month Dish 150 plan: 215

  5. Number of open-source licenses on the Open Source Initiative's approved list: 22

  6. Percentage of 74 leading brands that have lost brand value over the last ten years: 55

  7. Percentage drop in value for all 74 leading brands over the same period: 5

  8. Number of new products introduced last year: 31,432

  9. Royalty charge paid by recording equipment manufacturers, according to the American Home Recording Act (AHRA), as a percentage of the manufacturer's revenue: 2

  10. The Sound Recordings Fund's share of AHRA royalty payments: 2/3

  11. Percentage of that fund allocated for “non-featured musicians and vocalists”: 4

  12. Percentage of remaining royalties allocated for “featured recording artists”: 40

  13. Percentage of remaining royalties allocated to “owners of the exclusive right to reproduce sound recordings distributed during the relevant year”: 60

  14. Red Hat percentage on machines surveyed by Linux Counter: 28.39

  15. Slackware percentage on machines surveyed by Linux Counter: 22.40

  16. Debian percentage on machines surveyed by Linux Counter: 19.30

Sources

1-3: Electronic Media, from NextResearch

3: The Wall Street Journal

4: Dish Network

5: Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org)

6-8: Financial Times

9-13: RIAA

New Software Project

Jan Schaumann has begun a new software project that will serve a dual purpose: 1) to produce MakeMan, a project that will provide several GUI and non-GUI front ends to an XML interface for writing man pages and 2) to document the steps of an open-source project, from registering at SourceForge to releasing packages in great detail. See mama.sourceforge.net for details.

They Said It

Show me a web app that can't be served from a Pentium 100 and I'll show you a dead dot-com.

—Kevin Jamieson

If you want to be a platform vendor, and you want developers to invest alongside of you, your platform needs to be open source. This in fact has been true for the last few years.

—Dave Winer

All power is derived from the barrel of a gnu.

—Mao Tse Stallman (from the .sig of Alan Olson)

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

—Albert Einstein

They're the next dead thing.

—Grady Hannah of Linuxcare on a company other than his own that he'd rather leave nameless.

The operating system wars are over, and operating systems lost. What we are now witnessing is the growth of environments where applications span multiple operating systems, rather than vice versa. Individual computers are the new object, with a handful of exposed interfaces and complicated internals hidden from the caller by standard protocols.

—Clay Shirky

The real problem we face with the Web is not understanding the anomalies, it's facing how deeply weird the ordinary is.

—David Weinberger

This is an era when nonsense has become acceptable and sanity is controversial. Too many people fail to see a distinction between “the rule of law” and the edicts of judges. Unfortunately, these people include many judges.

—Thomas Sowell, in 1996

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

—Helen Keller

Today we turn our dagger around and point it at ourselves. As goes the Internet Economy, so goes the magazine founded to cover it.

—Jimmy Guterman, uttering the parting words of Media Grok, the e-mail newsletter of The Industry Standard on the day it went out of business.

What lever did the invisible hand have to throw to start up the ghost in the machine?

—Christopher Locke

______________________

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal

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