One thing people miss is that paid content often contains ads, and advertisers are likely to pay more for those ads.
The logic is, if you're paying for content, then you must be really engaged with it. Say I charge 10c to visit my page about SCUBA diving. I can tell advertisers - look, I don't get as many visits as those free SCUBA sites, but I can demonstrate that every visitor is (a) really into SCUBA and (b) prepared to spend money.
That's the kind of eyeballs an advertiser wants to reach. In theory, they'll pay more to advertise on such a site than they would on a competing free page.
This is actually the reason print magazines and newspapers charge a cover price. The marginal cost of printing and distributing them is negligible. But showing advertisers that the readership is commited, that's priceless.
There is no going back. They did this to themselves.
I think most reputable sites know that obnoxious advertising is going to drive away readers. People who aren't technical or motivated enough to install a blocker, that is.
So that's the middle ground - sufficiently unintrusive advertising. I think a Google Ads sidebar is fine, for example.
All media have the same balance to make. Magazines have to balance content against ad space. TV has to work out how many ad breaks it can get away with before viewers switch over.
I feel that I have an unwritten contract with content providers: you provide me with content I want, and in exchange I'll tolerate the ads. That's the quid-pro-quo, and I'm very happy with it. It's better than paying money.
If the ads are so intrusive that they're intolerable, I'll go elsewhere. Effectively, I "can't afford" that content.
I reckon using an ad blocker is *directly* equivalent to circumventing a micropayment mechanism.
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works. Toss em out -you wont need masses of readers anymore to support ad revenue- and let us pay you a fair price for the service you tender. Why would someone even think that they would make their newspapers available for free?
There are plenty of free print newspapers. There's a good chapter in Chris Anderson's book 'Free' about the economics of this. The Village Voice couldn't sustain its business while it had a cover price, and had to go free.
He says there's hardly any periodical that makes money on cover price or subscription fees. Advertising is the primary revenue stream.
Cover prices are really only there to assure advertisers that the readership is focussed and engaged. That is to say, if I pay £3.15 for a copy of New Scientist, or £100 for a subscription, it hardly puts a dent in their production costs - but it shows potential advertisers that the circulation figures are made up of people committed enough to science and technology that they're willing to stump up cash.
Now, online, as Google has showed, it's easy to target advertising. If newspaper websites can't earn enough with ads, they're not doing smart enough targeting, or they're not charging enough. Of course, they're in a marketplace, so ad pricing gets forced down. I guess a few newspapers have to go out of business in order to push the ad prices back up.
Unless... unless... ad prices are low because people just don't want quality news that badly. In which case, if we think society needs quality news, charity or the public purse might have to come into play.
However, these will never appear in wikipedia precisely because they insist on them being licensed for commercial use. They never will be, they will only ever be licensed CC-NC.
Then it's proper that you don't contribute to Wikipedia, because your values don't coincide with Wikipedia's aims.
On top of Charbax's very valid points, there's the matter of your 11 year old already (presumably) being an English speaking WIMP user.
What's important is how Sugar is adopted by a child who has never used a computer of any kind before, and especially one who doesn't speak any language in common with the implementors. (I don't know how successful this would be / has been - but it is the key measurement)
That view, and the Sugar UI FWIW, stem from a completely flawed understanding of children. Kids are inherently quick at learning and highly adaptable. Give them a Linux or a Windows UI and they'll thrive, taking that knowledge with them and building on it to adulthood.
Is that true, or does it only apply to the kids who are going to grow up to be nerds?
(That's a serious question. I'm entirely open to the possiblity you've got some research to link to.)
OLPC needs to be useful to the future poets as well as the future engineers.
The quote in question, from a photographer who DOES distribute images, has been taking a bit out of context. What if wikipedia also allowed images that are *non-commercial* share alike? In those cases, the only folks denied the use of the images are magazines and newspapers and such that want to grab a photo without paying for it, and then charge money that doesn't benefit the photographer.
That's what he's saying wikipedia should consider.
And the point is that Wikipedia doesn't *want* to exclude commercial use of its media. WP is meant to be a free resource for *everyone*, commercial or not.
There's an awful lot of CC photographs on Flickr that look perfectly good to me. I may not be an expert, but I know what's good enough for Wikipedia.
The problem is, amateurs can get close enough to bridges, mountains, plant specimens, zoo animals etc. to take decent pictures. Celebrities don't make it so easy.
I think we can agree there. I have no insight into how Sugar is architected. Fairly obviously, there are right ways and wrong ways it could have been done.
I have to admit, I was convinced, and continue to be convinced by the logic behind Sugar.
The key to it all is that kids own their machine, so all the admin stuff (networking, power management, etc.) *needs* to work within a consistent, simple GUI.
More than just an eBook conduit, the device is supposed to be a collaborative learning aid - allowing kids to create and share over the network, conceivably creating learning communities beyond their own village.
Microsoft and Nintendo virtually stopped developing and approving new software for their older consoles (Xbox and GameCube) once their replacements (Xbox 360 and Wii) hit the market. So I take it you're talking about Sony.
How else do you expect people to access the graphics card? They're cheating if they don't write their own GPU driver and OpenGL implementation? Should they even be allowed to run on an existing OS, or should they have to write their own?
To be fair, the old C64 demos probably overwrote a lot of the OS with their own code. DOS demos wrote directly to the graphics hardware (and hence often had very specific hardware requirements).
However, I think it's entirely fair to set competition rules that allow you to use OpenGL / DirectX etc.
One killer app for dual analogue controllers is the arena shooter. Geometry Wars.
Robotron and Smash TV had two 8 way joysticks. They were good. Try them in MAME with just a keyboard and you won't have much fun.
Jeff Minter had to find a way to let you control Llamatron with a keyboard or a single joystick. He found a decent compromise (it shoots in the direction you move, unless you hold down a button to lock the firing direction) - but it's not at all as good as having two joysticks.
Geometry Wars is perfect - move with one analogue stick, fire with the other.
If you can find a copy of Grid Wars for the PC (free-as-in-beer, but taken down due to legal challenges from Bizarre Games), there are many control schemes, including keyboard only, keyboard+mouse, analogue joypad, dual analogue joypad. I guarantee, if you have an Xbox 360 controller, you wouldn't go back to the keyboard.
I'm not a huge gamer, but I have this terrible prejudice that a mouse provides excessive precision -- that is, the level of hand eye coordination required to use a thumb-stick style controller is a lot more comparable to the level of hand eye coordination required to actually shoot a gun.
The only kind of gun I've fired is a shotgun. I have this terrible prejudice that to aim anything else would require an awful lot of precision.
The nice thing about an input device having too much precision is that you can compensate in software, if you want to. So it's the developer's job to decide how good your mouse (or joypad) skills need to be.
Wikipedia might be content with a vaguely 320x240 pixel image of some celebrity.
Wikipedia is already fairly content with what it has - amateur photos snapped from a crowd. Wikipedia would certainly be satisfied by a clear medium resolution head and shoulder shot, no matter how unflattering. You don't need a talented photographer, a studio, assistants, lights, makeup artist for a shot like this.
Again though, it's the celebrity's publicity machine that wants a better shot up there on WP. So they're the ones who should pay for it.
To clarify, publicists don't actually want CC images of their client out there. They want images they control,
But they do want pictures they like on Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia isn't going to change its policy just for them, they've got a choice. Relinquish control on some pictures, and have them on WP. Or don't and don't.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy that.
My social contract with the site is merely to *see* the ad.
If I don't click on it, that's fine. If I don't even see it, that's breach of contract.
Some ads are not about click through, after all: some are about brand building. Just reminding you of a logo.
One thing people miss is that paid content often contains ads, and advertisers are likely to pay more for those ads.
The logic is, if you're paying for content, then you must be really engaged with it. Say I charge 10c to visit my page about SCUBA diving. I can tell advertisers - look, I don't get as many visits as those free SCUBA sites, but I can demonstrate that every visitor is (a) really into SCUBA and (b) prepared to spend money.
That's the kind of eyeballs an advertiser wants to reach. In theory, they'll pay more to advertise on such a site than they would on a competing free page.
This is actually the reason print magazines and newspapers charge a cover price. The marginal cost of printing and distributing them is negligible. But showing advertisers that the readership is commited, that's priceless.
buy a paper (which also costs money b.t.w.)
That's the second time I've seen this said on /. today. Don't they have free papers where you're from?
(Admittedly, they can be crappy... you get what you pay for, whether you pay with your cash or with your ad attention)
There is no going back. They did this to themselves.
I think most reputable sites know that obnoxious advertising is going to drive away readers. People who aren't technical or motivated enough to install a blocker, that is.
So that's the middle ground - sufficiently unintrusive advertising. I think a Google Ads sidebar is fine, for example.
All media have the same balance to make. Magazines have to balance content against ad space. TV has to work out how many ad breaks it can get away with before viewers switch over.
I feel that I have an unwritten contract with content providers: you provide me with content I want, and in exchange I'll tolerate the ads. That's the quid-pro-quo, and I'm very happy with it. It's better than paying money.
If the ads are so intrusive that they're intolerable, I'll go elsewhere. Effectively, I "can't afford" that content.
I reckon using an ad blocker is *directly* equivalent to circumventing a micropayment mechanism.
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works. Toss em out -you wont need masses of readers anymore to support ad revenue- and let us pay you a fair price for the service you tender. Why would someone even think that they would make their newspapers available for free?
There are plenty of free print newspapers. There's a good chapter in Chris Anderson's book 'Free' about the economics of this. The Village Voice couldn't sustain its business while it had a cover price, and had to go free.
He says there's hardly any periodical that makes money on cover price or subscription fees. Advertising is the primary revenue stream.
Cover prices are really only there to assure advertisers that the readership is focussed and engaged. That is to say, if I pay £3.15 for a copy of New Scientist, or £100 for a subscription, it hardly puts a dent in their production costs - but it shows potential advertisers that the circulation figures are made up of people committed enough to science and technology that they're willing to stump up cash.
Now, online, as Google has showed, it's easy to target advertising. If newspaper websites can't earn enough with ads, they're not doing smart enough targeting, or they're not charging enough. Of course, they're in a marketplace, so ad pricing gets forced down. I guess a few newspapers have to go out of business in order to push the ad prices back up.
Unless... unless... ad prices are low because people just don't want quality news that badly. In which case, if we think society needs quality news, charity or the public purse might have to come into play.
I initially read the question as being about real time remote collaboration.
If that's the case, there's Eclipse's DocShare plugin: http://wiki.eclipse.org/DocShare_Plugin
I haven't tried it, and I don't know how mature it is. But I watched a video presentation on it a while ago and it looked very promising.
However, these will never appear in wikipedia precisely because they insist on them being licensed for commercial use. They never will be, they will only ever be licensed CC-NC.
Then it's proper that you don't contribute to Wikipedia, because your values don't coincide with Wikipedia's aims.
On top of Charbax's very valid points, there's the matter of your 11 year old already (presumably) being an English speaking WIMP user.
What's important is how Sugar is adopted by a child who has never used a computer of any kind before, and especially one who doesn't speak any language in common with the implementors. (I don't know how successful this would be / has been - but it is the key measurement)
The biggest drawback for me was actually physical, namely its little keyboard.
... which (as I'm sure a G1G1er knows) is a feature not a bug. It's intended to make the laptop less tempting for adult thieves.
That view, and the Sugar UI FWIW, stem from a completely flawed understanding of children. Kids are inherently quick at learning and highly adaptable. Give them a Linux or a Windows UI and they'll thrive, taking that knowledge with them and building on it to adulthood.
Is that true, or does it only apply to the kids who are going to grow up to be nerds?
(That's a serious question. I'm entirely open to the possiblity you've got some research to link to.)
OLPC needs to be useful to the future poets as well as the future engineers.
The quote in question, from a photographer who DOES distribute images, has been taking a bit out of context. What if wikipedia also allowed images that are *non-commercial* share alike? In those cases, the only folks denied the use of the images are magazines and newspapers and such that want to grab a photo without paying for it, and then charge money that doesn't benefit the photographer.
That's what he's saying wikipedia should consider.
And the point is that Wikipedia doesn't *want* to exclude commercial use of its media. WP is meant to be a free resource for *everyone*, commercial or not.
CC permits a non-commercial copyright.
True, but not useful in this case, as the non-commercial version of CC is not sufficiently free for Wikipedia's needs.
There's an awful lot of CC photographs on Flickr that look perfectly good to me. I may not be an expert, but I know what's good enough for Wikipedia.
The problem is, amateurs can get close enough to bridges, mountains, plant specimens, zoo animals etc. to take decent pictures. Celebrities don't make it so easy.
I think we can agree there. I have no insight into how Sugar is architected. Fairly obviously, there are right ways and wrong ways it could have been done.
I have to admit, I was convinced, and continue to be convinced by the logic behind Sugar.
The key to it all is that kids own their machine, so all the admin stuff (networking, power management, etc.) *needs* to work within a consistent, simple GUI.
More than just an eBook conduit, the device is supposed to be a collaborative learning aid - allowing kids to create and share over the network, conceivably creating learning communities beyond their own village.
Microsoft and Nintendo virtually stopped developing and approving new software for their older consoles (Xbox and GameCube) once their replacements (Xbox 360 and Wii) hit the market. So I take it you're talking about Sony.
That would be *past* the end of their lifecycle.
How else do you expect people to access the graphics card? They're cheating if they don't write their own GPU driver and OpenGL implementation? Should they even be allowed to run on an existing OS, or should they have to write their own?
To be fair, the old C64 demos probably overwrote a lot of the OS with their own code. DOS demos wrote directly to the graphics hardware (and hence often had very specific hardware requirements).
However, I think it's entirely fair to set competition rules that allow you to use OpenGL / DirectX etc.
Try Left 4K Dead
The fact is that cramming a lot of game into a small space is still worth doing.
I strongly suspect my video card won't be up to this, so I seeked out a capture of it on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE
One killer app for dual analogue controllers is the arena shooter. Geometry Wars.
Robotron and Smash TV had two 8 way joysticks. They were good. Try them in MAME with just a keyboard and you won't have much fun.
Jeff Minter had to find a way to let you control Llamatron with a keyboard or a single joystick. He found a decent compromise (it shoots in the direction you move, unless you hold down a button to lock the firing direction) - but it's not at all as good as having two joysticks.
Geometry Wars is perfect - move with one analogue stick, fire with the other.
If you can find a copy of Grid Wars for the PC (free-as-in-beer, but taken down due to legal challenges from Bizarre Games), there are many control schemes, including keyboard only, keyboard+mouse, analogue joypad, dual analogue joypad. I guarantee, if you have an Xbox 360 controller, you wouldn't go back to the keyboard.
See also: Virtual On.
I'm not a huge gamer, but I have this terrible prejudice that a mouse provides excessive precision -- that is, the level of hand eye coordination required to use a thumb-stick style controller is a lot more comparable to the level of hand eye coordination required to actually shoot a gun.
The only kind of gun I've fired is a shotgun. I have this terrible prejudice that to aim anything else would require an awful lot of precision.
The nice thing about an input device having too much precision is that you can compensate in software, if you want to. So it's the developer's job to decide how good your mouse (or joypad) skills need to be.
why couldn't game consoles support the regular keyboard and mouse in addition to the controller?
Extra coding, extra testing, extra writing for the manual - all for something most console users aren't going to use.
I bought a Dreamcast keyboard. It just wasn't ergonomic. Keyboards are compatible with desks, and incompatible with sofas.
Wikipedia might be content with a vaguely 320x240 pixel image of some celebrity.
Wikipedia is already fairly content with what it has - amateur photos snapped from a crowd. Wikipedia would certainly be satisfied by a clear medium resolution head and shoulder shot, no matter how unflattering. You don't need a talented photographer, a studio, assistants, lights, makeup artist for a shot like this.
Again though, it's the celebrity's publicity machine that wants a better shot up there on WP. So they're the ones who should pay for it.
To clarify, publicists don't actually want CC images of their client out there. They want images they control,
But they do want pictures they like on Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia isn't going to change its policy just for them, they've got a choice. Relinquish control on some pictures, and have them on WP. Or don't and don't.