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End of the Free Internet
efedora writes: "The End of Free keeps a list of the various transitions to paid services from free net sites. The list is getting longer. When I think of an individual site that's really worthwhile I say to myself, "Sure, that site is worth $4.95 a month". The problem is there are going to be lots of sites at $$$ a month and it sure adds up." Of course even Slashdot is planning on rolling out subscriptions-for-no-banner-ads sometime soon, so I suppose we're not entirely immune to the subscription bug either.
Run a webserver on your local machine.
and put
<script>
window.close()
</script>
in the error page associated with 127.0.0.1
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
No shit. For good laughs, cut-and-paste the text of a news article into a text editor, then save the HTML and compare the difference.
I believe the current record for lowest S/N ratio (ignoring tomshardware.com's practice of putting one sentence per page ;-) for a mainstream news site is http://www.theglobeandmail.com.
Ad-laden CNN serves 22,700 bytes of HTML for a 1400-byte story.
The Globe and Mail delivers a staggering 90,587 bytes of HTML for a 3082-byte story.
Those numbers are for surfers who surf with images off, by the way. The bloat is Javashit, banners, towers, stock quotes, polls, and navigation to every section of the newspaper. I don't even want to think about what it'd be like with graphics on.
And these jerkwads wonder why their bandwidth bills are so high.
You can get a decent site with Perl/PHP and MySQL support for around $10 a month with enough space and bandwidth for a medium sized site if you keep things like graphics at a minimum. Programming a site is easy and there are even free packages available for most common types of sites for those that aren't good programmers. I think you'll find that as many of the big free sites turn to pay or die that more small sites will show up.
:)
If you remember a few years ago there were lots of small free sites that eventually got ate by the big portal sites or just gave up as they couldn't compete for users attention with so many big name companies giving away the same stuff. Those forces are disappearing so now is your chance to have your own little slice of the Net again.
On my projects page you can see that I'm beginning to work on providing easy to use plug-n-play style components to build sites from. If anyone cares to help please do. So far I've used this exact code in several commercial sites and it's working fine so I have no reason to think it won't work for free sites. You don't need to make a profit from a site if it's not costing you a lot of money.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The main point is the supposed disappearence of free services on the internet. There are many free services that are stable and around for the long haul. The trick is, to latch on to one that is NOT run by a for-profit corporation.
The original promise of the internet still exists ! It is possible to publish information to millions of people so cheaply that any noodle can do it ! Of course it doesn't cost exactly nothing, but it is cheap enough that it is conceivable that it will eventually be a commonly available utility like service. (It ain't there yet, but if the cost were to drop 50% every 18 months (seems plausible, especially once the recession finishes flushing out a lot of the dead weight) then in a decade we could be there.)
What this means is that a lot of companies trying to make business and justify fairly huge capital investments are just going to get blown out of the water by hobbiests doing it for fun. That's ok, in fact it's good. It's good because we need to invest a lot of money in various projects that will never be done by hobbiests -- getting into space, curing various diseases, physical infrastructure, etc. We need to chace a lot of these suits and corporate bureaucrats out of the internet feild and back into the kinds of big capital things they they necessary for -- like putting up multi-million dollar wind farms so we are not so dependant on oil.
So from the point of view of you, the little guy, the trick is to find the cheap free service that is being run by a non-profit club or other organization. One example is sdf.lonestar.org, non profit organization offering unix shells, web space, virtual hosting, and other services. It's not free, you have to give donations to get various levels of service. (The basic unix shell and email address is free.) These guys have been around since 1987, and I have a feeling that they will be around for a long time, especially as for-profit companies abandon the area and move to business pursuits that require and justify lots of capital.
Similarly, look at dyndns.org. Those guys are not free, they are running off of your donations. But Dyndns and SDF will be here when Yahoo and Geocities finally kick me off the free email and website, because while it is cheap (not free) to provide those services, there just isn't enough money in it to justify investing people's pensions in the stock to support it. And they are close enough to free that it doesn't matter if you have a job.
In summary, what I see happening here is exactly the opposite of what everyone else here seems to be observing. There is no "end of free." That's just an illusion you get by counting press announcements of bad businesses in their death throes. In reality, I believe more and more people are using non-business services on the net: the numbers of dyndns and SDF users are going up and up, and those organizations are much more permanent than the catalog of nonsense you see on that endoffree site.
The long term trend is that connection fees will come down; bandwidth fees will come down, even if more is not available, but that's ok because as people learn how to use the net they use less bandwidth; and in the end the net will be a collection of various non-profit organizations providing services, with a layer of for-profit high-end services still there, of course, but only for a pretty small percentage.
I think the major strategy on our part is to make sure the net remains a peer-to-peer and not a hierarchical structure. To do this we have two major tools: 1) bind together in organizations like dyndns and sdf to provide what services do need a centralized and large investment, and 2) make sure that cable companies, ISPs, and DSL companies are forced to keep their service symmetrical, i.e., that you can provide services for free from your own machine.
Also, OSDN will probably loose readership to /. due to it
While it could be argued that [ahem] certain OSDN sites lead to the formation of "hive mind"-like behavior, I don't believe OSDN has enough control to "let loose or release" its readership to do anything. On the other hand, OSDN could fail to retain readership. The word you were looking for is lose.
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