Good luck! That price point just won't work. Maybe at $30-$40 a year, people might sign on, but Ximian is simply not thinking with their current pricing scheme.
Added to which, whats to stop aggresive mirroring from getting software out to free sites within hours of it being available to Ximian subscribers??? I just don't see the benefit.
Others point to lackluster sales of hotly anticipated new releases from artists like Mariah Carey and Macy Gray, and the glut of look-alike, sound-alike boy bands.
There you have it, instead of letting true musical diversity create authentic, viable fan bases, the music industry has locked itself into the failing practice of top-down music manufacturing...reminiscent of a Soviet state capitalism that never worked either.
Maybe one day when a free market for music exists again, people will care.
Case in point - the wars in Yugoslavia in the 90s. European powers stood by and watched as one of their neighbors ripped itself apart and committed a fair number of atrocities in the process.
Sure, there is something to be said for being nonmilitaristic, but this was sheer impotence and cowardice, and countless innocents lost their lives because the powers of the EU refused to engage the situation.
So the US rightly disregarded European input on defense matters from that point forward.
The EU could be a powerful force for Western values (values that originated in Europe) and moderation, but instead their inaction has forced the US to oversee its defense and shape its foreign policy for it.
The Russians continue to develop interesting weaspons platforms in their navy and air force, but the problem is there isn't any money to produce any of it in meaningful quantities.
This is the core reason the United States no longer sees Russia as a key adversary and also why it won't let Russia into NATO - there is a clear realization that Russia continues to teeter on economic oblivion, and the US doesn't want to have to support Russia when the inevitable Sino-Russian war explodes (the Russians took Chinese territory decades back, and China has always contended that the property would once again be part of China).
Russia is an interesting place - it has interesting technology but teeters on the brink of becoming a third world nation.
Microsoft won this round. What you are hearing now is the death-rattle of the NOISE (Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun and Everyone but Microsoft) lobbying effort, the members of which have independently moved on even if their hot air continues to plod forward through the government.
The government isn't turning off Microsoft. Microsoft isn't turning off linux, and AOL owns everything else. There is your new reality. Lets move on.
Maybe, if during the HTTP NG proposals, the W3 was a bit more...motivated then this might be relevant...but at this point I don't think anyone really cares what the W3 thinks about "web architecture"....which I'm not even quite sure what they mean. Are they talking about XML? Plenty of W3 groups already address that. Privacy? Ditto. Markup? Ditto again.
This sounds like another circle jerk with the same professional committee-sitters as you'll find on half of the other W3 boards.
Please tell me why it is "anti-competitive" for DVD manufacturers to support Windows Media. Simply because MPEG-4 exists and is an open standard does not necessitate that manufacturers support it to the exclusion of other formats.
The UN is an international, democratic and very open organisation that is accountable
BS. The UN is a group of appointed officials accountable to no one but each other.
Democracy implies that the people make the decision who is in charge, not a committee.
And before you repsond, the UN Security Council, which is the real power in the UN, has permanent members whose membership and voting rights cannot be questioned.
Both the medecine and the chemistry prizes were awarded for proprietary research done in the interests of multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Although some of it is already being used in treatments, they are not affordable to the vast majority of the people in the world,
Balderdash. In a few years generic versions of these drugs will be available at low cost. Thats about as good as you are going to get - if you cut the money out of the commercial drug business, you won't get any drugs for rich or for poor, as the generics manufacturers simply don't spend the research dollars necessary to develop the drugs.
As for the economics award, the world has no use for a science dedicated to depriving people of freedom and controlling them.
Thats odd, Milton Freidman is renowned for his award winning thesis that political freedom and economic freedom are closely related.
The only awards that I can inequivocably agree with are the literature and peace awards. The United Nations has done a lot of good work, and it is a shame that the American government is blind to the advantages of supporting it completely.
Yes, how could Americans not see the value in a bloated bureaucracy that is not elected and is accountable to no one? I thought there was a revolution fought over those same principles...
Math has been shunted into other disciplines...
on
Nobel Prizes Awarded
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· Score: 2
chiefly economics, for consideration of the Nobel prize. Look throughout the history of the Nobel prize in economics and you will find a great deal of signficant mathematical research, partiuclarly in operations research.
I disagree. The TableTalk posters were providing marginal benefit to most Salon users - most of them never bothered with it. The TableTalk posters were mainly providing a service to each other.
Frankly Salon never had a compelling forum community on its own, and in that sense it was smart to merge with The Well.
Going forward it would behoove/. to bring more talented writers generating original content to the site.
While I agree that there is something odd about users paying for a site where the users generate the content (via posts), its the network of users that one is paying for access to, not a particular user or set of posts.
but from a moral standpoint i think they were dead wrong. information should be free, especially when that information is news coverage of events that could change every aspect of the world we live in.
But Salon isn't a news site, its a commentary site. They make no claim to bringing you the latest news.
I agree with your complaints about TableTalk on Salon. Regardless of what people were saying, the message board system itself was always quite weak, even compared to early versions of slashcode.
Now I believe they have merged with the Well, but unfortunately it doesn't appear that they have a community message board worth paying for. They would really benefit from using slashcode or another engine. What they have no is pitiful.
IT seems that most of the stationary wireless vendors have packed it in. While I applaud the new standard, it doesn't appear that anyone is interested in setting up the networks.
however, i'm still not convinced that paying for content is the way to go....
Do you subscribe to magazines? Watch cable TV? You likely already pay for content in other mediums. Don't be fooled by the "freeness" of the web to date - most of the large web companies are already thinking beyond free content models. The biggest inhibitor to paid content so far in my opinion is the payment models. While I wouldn't pay for the NY Times on line on its own, I might pay to be a part of a network that includes the NY Times, Forbes, Atlantic Monthly, etc. (I am trying to list publications with similar demographics as an example).
my biggest point of annoyance with the site was when they took their news coverage out of the free portion of the site. they chose a moment when everyone around the world needed good, accurate reporting of the developing events after 9/11, and exploited that moment to expand their subscriber base.
At some point any subscriber site is going to have to yank to family jewels from free users. You can't build a subscription seriice when your most valuable assets are free. The ymade the right move.
I think Salon has done the right thing. They were doomed otherwise - their stock was getting throttled (why they ever went public is beyond me) and advertising was flopping. Salon has good content - in the past critics could rightly claim that it was simply a shill for the Democratic party, but it has taken on a much more even tone. The sex content and the other bonus material is worthless, so don't subscribe if you think you are going to see nude hotties.
In terms of their technology, I think managing two page management technologies (JSP and Perl/Mason) would get a little tired, and is likely unnecessary. While JSP might not be fast enough to handle the Mason-generated pages, you can certainly use Perl to transact credit cards if you want.
From previous postings on this site, it seems that Slashdot will be going to subscription route as well. I think its a good idea. The quality of posts will probably improve (the best posters appear to be the/. addicts who would likely subscribe), and there would be capital in place to provide extensive services on top of what is already here.
Yes, but for businesses, there are ways around it
on
Why ADCo?
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· Score: 2
You can use the Cisco net phone for starts. As soon as you take the clients off of the circuit and on to the net, the telcos have to play ball.
That said, you are right, and it will be a long long time before packet switched networks carry a majority of voice traffic.
Unfortunately, as Business Week pointed out a few months ago, the telco/government apparatus simply doesn't favro change or progress and likely it will take substantial public sector wrangling to open up this market again.
In most homes the line should be embedded in an accessible location, often easy to snag from under the concrete or just under the top soil itself.
Or, they could simply lay a new cable and leave the old one buried.
Please, SOMEONE solve the last mile
on
Why ADCo?
·
· Score: 2
I don't care if its stationary wireless, dedicated fiber digging, or sewer cable, just someone get the lead out and solve this problem.
Simply put, a huge amount of talent, infrastructure, and capacity on the backbone is just waiting for someone to open up the pipes and start getting massive quantities of data to consumers. Interactive TV, P2P that actually works, telepresences, etc etc, none of it can bring us out of the 1996 web until bandwidth to each dwelling increases vastly.
There are plenty of places on the net that you can find halfway interesting discourse between normal everyday folks. This is one of them.
As for useful discourse from "professioanl" editorial sites, sure there has been a bloodbath in the online content market, but sites like Salon are still limping along with useful original writing, and most print magazines have expanded online with interactive publishing.
With the rise of the web, usenet has actually become more intelligent and useful and the true wankers have moved on.
Re:fax will never die... at least not yet.
on
Email Turns Thirty
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· Score: 3
as email is not a reliable means of communications yet.
This is a crock. Don't paint email with the brush of Exchange. Plenty of us use servers that are reliable and clients that don't execute attachments.
Where is the reliablilty of fax? I've stood around the fax machine for hours waiting for my brokers' perenially busy line to open up. Is that progress?
besides, not all companies have happily embraced broadband in the offices. home users can get broadband for cheap in the form of cable or DSL, these options are not offered to businesses because of the "fear" that the company will use it more than the home user,
Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
Look out for the ersatz intelligentsia
on
Email Turns Thirty
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Here we go with all of the so-called insightful posters extolling the virtues of fax and the uselessness of email.
Well, my office has one thousand machines capable of sending and receiving email and one machine capable of sending and receiving faxes.
How many emails did you send this week? How many faxes?
How many of you give out your fax number to people you meet?
Emails sent daily outnumber faxes by at least a factor of one hundred thousand (conservatively estimating, likely as high as ten million). The conclusion is pretty simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Added to which, whats to stop aggresive mirroring from getting software out to free sites within hours of it being available to Ximian subscribers??? I just don't see the benefit.
There you have it, instead of letting true musical diversity create authentic, viable fan bases, the music industry has locked itself into the failing practice of top-down music manufacturing...reminiscent of a Soviet state capitalism that never worked either.
Maybe one day when a free market for music exists again, people will care.
While the...rest of the United States declares that almost all of the low gravity research to be done on the ISS has already been done on the ground.
-US takes the initiative to throw off the chains of an obsolete and oppressive monarchy.
Choosing instead to worship Topm Cruise, Gwyneth Paltrow and George Clooney.
Sure, there is something to be said for being nonmilitaristic, but this was sheer impotence and cowardice, and countless innocents lost their lives because the powers of the EU refused to engage the situation.
So the US rightly disregarded European input on defense matters from that point forward.
The EU could be a powerful force for Western values (values that originated in Europe) and moderation, but instead their inaction has forced the US to oversee its defense and shape its foreign policy for it.
This is the core reason the United States no longer sees Russia as a key adversary and also why it won't let Russia into NATO - there is a clear realization that Russia continues to teeter on economic oblivion, and the US doesn't want to have to support Russia when the inevitable Sino-Russian war explodes (the Russians took Chinese territory decades back, and China has always contended that the property would once again be part of China).
Russia is an interesting place - it has interesting technology but teeters on the brink of becoming a third world nation.
The government isn't turning off Microsoft. Microsoft isn't turning off linux, and AOL owns everything else. There is your new reality. Lets move on.
This sounds like another circle jerk with the same professional committee-sitters as you'll find on half of the other W3 boards.
Please tell me why it is "anti-competitive" for DVD manufacturers to support Windows Media. Simply because MPEG-4 exists and is an open standard does not necessitate that manufacturers support it to the exclusion of other formats.
BS. The UN is a group of appointed officials accountable to no one but each other.
Democracy implies that the people make the decision who is in charge, not a committee.
And before you repsond, the UN Security Council, which is the real power in the UN, has permanent members whose membership and voting rights cannot be questioned.
Thats democracy?????
Balderdash. In a few years generic versions of these drugs will be available at low cost. Thats about as good as you are going to get - if you cut the money out of the commercial drug business, you won't get any drugs for rich or for poor, as the generics manufacturers simply don't spend the research dollars necessary to develop the drugs.
As for the economics award, the world has no use for a science dedicated to depriving people of freedom and controlling them.
Thats odd, Milton Freidman is renowned for his award winning thesis that political freedom and economic freedom are closely related.
The only awards that I can inequivocably agree with are the literature and peace awards. The United Nations has done a lot of good work, and it is a shame that the American government is blind to the advantages of supporting it completely.
Yes, how could Americans not see the value in a bloated bureaucracy that is not elected and is accountable to no one? I thought there was a revolution fought over those same principles...
chiefly economics, for consideration of the Nobel prize. Look throughout the history of the Nobel prize in economics and you will find a great deal of signficant mathematical research, partiuclarly in operations research.
Even with some of their more unfortunate antics, they have still been a more user-oriented network than either AOL or MSN.
Frankly Salon never had a compelling forum community on its own, and in that sense it was smart to merge with The Well.
While I agree that there is something odd about users paying for a site where the users generate the content (via posts), its the network of users that one is paying for access to, not a particular user or set of posts.
But Salon isn't a news site, its a commentary site. They make no claim to bringing you the latest news.
Now I believe they have merged with the Well, but unfortunately it doesn't appear that they have a community message board worth paying for. They would really benefit from using slashcode or another engine. What they have no is pitiful.
IT seems that most of the stationary wireless vendors have packed it in. While I applaud the new standard, it doesn't appear that anyone is interested in setting up the networks.
Do you subscribe to magazines? Watch cable TV? You likely already pay for content in other mediums. Don't be fooled by the "freeness" of the web to date - most of the large web companies are already thinking beyond free content models. The biggest inhibitor to paid content so far in my opinion is the payment models. While I wouldn't pay for the NY Times on line on its own, I might pay to be a part of a network that includes the NY Times, Forbes, Atlantic Monthly, etc. (I am trying to list publications with similar demographics as an example).
my biggest point of annoyance with the site was when they took their news coverage out of the free portion of the site. they chose a moment when everyone around the world needed good, accurate reporting of the developing events after 9/11, and exploited that moment to expand their subscriber base.
At some point any subscriber site is going to have to yank to family jewels from free users. You can't build a subscription seriice when your most valuable assets are free. The ymade the right move.
In terms of their technology, I think managing two page management technologies (JSP and Perl/Mason) would get a little tired, and is likely unnecessary. While JSP might not be fast enough to handle the Mason-generated pages, you can certainly use Perl to transact credit cards if you want.
From previous postings on this site, it seems that Slashdot will be going to subscription route as well. I think its a good idea. The quality of posts will probably improve (the best posters appear to be the /. addicts who would likely subscribe), and there would be capital in place to provide extensive services on top of what is already here.
That said, you are right, and it will be a long long time before packet switched networks carry a majority of voice traffic.
Unfortunately, as Business Week pointed out a few months ago, the telco/government apparatus simply doesn't favro change or progress and likely it will take substantial public sector wrangling to open up this market again.
Or, they could simply lay a new cable and leave the old one buried.
Simply put, a huge amount of talent, infrastructure, and capacity on the backbone is just waiting for someone to open up the pipes and start getting massive quantities of data to consumers. Interactive TV, P2P that actually works, telepresences, etc etc, none of it can bring us out of the 1996 web until bandwidth to each dwelling increases vastly.
As for useful discourse from "professioanl" editorial sites, sure there has been a bloodbath in the online content market, but sites like Salon are still limping along with useful original writing, and most print magazines have expanded online with interactive publishing.
With the rise of the web, usenet has actually become more intelligent and useful and the true wankers have moved on.
This is a crock. Don't paint email with the brush of Exchange. Plenty of us use servers that are reliable and clients that don't execute attachments.
Where is the reliablilty of fax? I've stood around the fax machine for hours waiting for my brokers' perenially busy line to open up. Is that progress?
besides, not all companies have happily embraced broadband in the offices. home users can get broadband for cheap in the form of cable or DSL, these options are not offered to businesses because of the "fear" that the company will use it more than the home user,
Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
Well, my office has one thousand machines capable of sending and receiving email and one machine capable of sending and receiving faxes.
How many emails did you send this week? How many faxes?
How many of you give out your fax number to people you meet?
Emails sent daily outnumber faxes by at least a factor of one hundred thousand (conservatively estimating, likely as high as ten million). The conclusion is pretty simple.