Since I purchased an iPad, I have started reading more and more of my newspapers and magazines on their apps. I find that the overall experience is just as enjoyable, and the convenience is great. For most of what I generally read there is complimentary digital access for their print subscribers. So, I get both versions and this is fine for weekly or monthly periodicals. However, for newspapers this can be annoying.
When it came to the NYTimes, after they started charging I called to find out about subscription options. While I don't mind the idea of paying $35-40 per month for something I read, what I found was that it was significantly cheaper if I ordered the print version which also includes digital access. The reason for this is that print ad rates remain significantly higher than digital, so therefore they make up for this by charging extra for digital only access. I suppose you could always donate the paper to the library or something, but that involves too much effort for me, and I for one didn't want to waste the paper by not reading it. So, I ended up using a print subscriber's digital access (which is surprisingly legal). I think many publications are in the same boat.
I think it is great that papers are starting to find a way to make money off of their efforts, and the NYTimes has been smart by easing into their pay model. However, the issue as I see it is that until they can find a way to level the playing field with their old-school paper offerings, the digital version is going to continue to be seen as a throwaway by advertisers who find little value in it - and then consequently by readers since it can be perceived as a ripoff. Hopefully, a successful pay model is a step towards this, but I think this may just be finding a way to make some extra money without getting to the root of the problem. I guess the alternative is that we move toward an economy where we recognize and pay for the actual value of something and not a heavily subsidized price.
That may be true. However, you can bet that if the news organizations start making more, the AP will start charging more for their content. I doubt that ad revenue will be sufficient to cover the costs if that happens. Sure tweeters and bloggers will continue to break the stories, and that serves a definite need and provides a check against the media - but they are not credentialed reporters, with the ability to go behind the scenes. I agree that the "what happened" summary is good for keeping up to date with a lot of news, but the unavailability to find further accurate details will lead to a lot of speculation and misinformation.
Also, the original comment mentioned that they pay for The Economist. I do as well, and I can tell you the magazine is definitely not cheap. In fact I know many people who pay for it, and I also know many people who subscribe to The NYTimes. I think people do this because they like the writing style, or because it gives them specific sections or certain authors. To me, it shows that, generally, if you give people what they want, they are usually willing to pay for it. The problem is that many organizations are looking to make people pay for what they want to give them, and that will never work.
After reading that speculative piece over at O'Reilly, I really have to wonder exactly how their business model works. I know the networks hate DVR, but they have more or less come to accept it as long as you watch the commercials. What I fail to see is why they would be against watching a lower quality version at a later point with current commercials as opposed to watching a DVR'd version at a later point with potentially outdated commercials.
I think Hulu is great for when I miss a show but if I am around I'd prefer to watch the HD version on TV. I am probably not your typical customer as I maybe watch an hour or two of TV a week - but those are shows I truely enjoy. I know this move will make a lot of people return to downloading the commercial-free torrent to watch on their TV, but for me I am just apt to not watch if I miss something. Torrents are not complicated, but take more forethought and time than I am usually willing to invest in finding a TV show. Hopefully someday they'll realize that there are many different types of consumers and markets out there that they could be attracting instead of repelling them.
I love my mac, and I use it mostly for business. Over the past several years I have had two problems that have made me have to send in my machine for repair. For all the servers, computers and even switches we buy from Dell, I almost always have the option for 4 hour on site response (and for servers we almost always spend the extra money on it), but with Apple it is always within 7 days (though they'll usually tell you it gets done faster, but can't guarantee it) and it is mailed off. I've often looked at some of their server equipment and thought it would be nice for certain applications. For example, their SAN is fairly inexpensive, but I couldn't imagine buying a piece equipment that would become indispensable to a business without a service plan that was comparable to 4 hour, or even NBD.
I might be missing something, and apple might have this. But every time I have inquired about it, the usual response is that I can buy Pro Care, which doesn't really help for this.
There are a couple of real problems with a scheme like this. I must assume that the main reason that Facebook would opt to use user's pictures is because there is a level of trust between the person being advertised to and the picture being displayed. Something akin to having friends be more likely to use a product based on my recommendation than some random person's. If I were to explicitly recommend a product and it did not live up to expectations, then my reputation suffers. By extension, I would assume that if someone bought a product because my face was associated with it in the ad and the product turned out to be a lemon - I would have to think that on some level my reputation would be affected, even if I never actually was involved in the transaction.
I would hope that Facebook would allow people to opt out of an advertising scheme like this, or at the very least allow me to profit off of their use of my face. I think the advertising scheme has a lot of potential for profit, but I am not about to allow someone to get richer off the upside of this scheme while I get nothing but the downside.
That is true, but a captcha is already impossible for a screen reader. The hidden field is nice because if you explain that a certain field needs to be left blank, then the user will just not fill it it - whether you read it, or it is read to you. And, you could use the same stylesheet rule to hide that text from the user only if the field is also hidden.
I use CodeTek's Virtual Desktop for OSX. It works well and allows you to choose the number of desktops available. It also works pretty well with multiple monitors - you switch desktops on monitors independently of the other. It's the next best thing to having it built into the os.
of course it's a publicity stunt, but that's usually what advertising is. judging from the amount of attention it is getting it's probably worth it. i mean, it's free to the users so why should anyone complain. and besides, all things being equal, if you had a choice of two cafes - one with a much faster free connection, and one with normal dsl - most people would tend towards the faster one (assuming the coffee is the same price and quality and that it's not 100x more crowded).
It's a little offtopic, but what I'd rather see a smartphone powered by a liteweight OSX. I just recently got a windows mobile phone and like it, but there are so many things that it limits or makes overly complicated. If Apple could do what it does best and simplify and polish the interface, the phone could pick up a lot of marketshare and yet again drive people towards purchising their machines. Blackberry is alright, but if I am going to carry something that big around in my pocket - I'd like it to be a little more than a corporate email client. Flexible email client, Address Book and a BASH shell would be a good start.
That's a good point. When it comes to these kind of things, there's really no way to win. Every product that gets released is going to have bugs that just show up. Some companies, like google, label everything beta until they are production quality. That approach seems to generate as many complaints though. Short of releasing perfect software every time, Apple's approach isn't horrible. The 1.0 is like a public beta - even if it's not labeled as such. The early adopters and power users will test it out, Apple fixes the problems and their software becomes production ready. Most people are exceptionally happy with their 2.0 and later products.
I feel like I must be missing something here. My company does a lot of work hosting and managing machines for other companies. For machines that utilize a lot of traffic, our ISP charges us more for the extra bandwidth. This makes sense, use more - pay for more. Same on the end-user side of things, the faster your connection the more the cost.
Here's where I am confused. There already seems to be graduated pricing. Home users pay more to get faster connections, and content providers pay more as their site gets more traffic so that their users will always have an optimal experience. Those that don't have enough bandwidth (for whatever reason) feel the pain as too many users hit their site - getting slashdotted is a perfect example. So, and I'm legitimately wondering, is this a case of the telco's feeling like they are not charging enough or, wanting to ride on the success of the successful companies. If it's the former, then I don't think there's anything other than competition and customer's desire (or lack thereof) to pay keeping
them from charging more. If, however, it's the latter - well then everyone would be right to be outraged.
If someone could shed a little more light on this, it would be appreciated.
One of the greatest things I've found when looking at mobile phones is bluetooth. I was actually at Cingular the other day looking at the iPod phone and, while it doesn't let me do much of anything with anything, it seemed like a decent idea. So, now the original post got me thinking about what could be done with seperate devices to help transition into the mobile market - maybe in addition to the iPod phone.
Why don't they have a bluetooth enabled iPod? This way it could pair with your mobile phone and download songs that way. Seems like it would open the market to a lot more people. I almost always have my ipod and my phone with me. Sometimes, when I really want to hear a song - it would be nice to be able to just pull it down.
I'm no expert on bluetooth, so this may not even be technically feasible. But it seems that it would also create the option for the iPod to pair with the car's radio, creating a way to use your iPod without having to remember to have the requisite adapters in the car (or anywhere else).
all things being equal, you would be correct. however, assuming they've held their common stock since the ipo, it has probably been long enough (although i can't remember when they went public) that they would collect long term capital gains which is taxed at a much lower rate than wages. even if they haven't held the stock for that long, short term capital gains are still less than income earned as salary.
I think I would be inclined to accept DRM if it didn't impede my ability to use the media how I saw fit. Perhaps something that would code my name and/or account info to each media file so that if I were to make it available for redistribution they could tie it back to me.
Personally, one of the the things I hate about FairPlay is that if I put a song on my iPod that is DRM'd and try to play it while my iPod is hooked up to someone else's iTunes, it asks me for my account information. Having multiple machines, I already have three machines registered, so I have to unregister those and it is generally a pain. Yet, the odd part is, I can use my iTunes to put songs on as many iPods as I want and their owners could listen normally, they just won't be able to play it through iTunes. The whole thing seems slightly flawed.
I also am unimpressed with iTMS's 128kbps encoding rate, but that's another story.
It's amazing to me how many things are becoming more reliant on the gps system. just searching slashdot for gps reveals so many articles about the subject. I mean, what would parents do (Using GPS to Track Teens ) if they shut down the system?
Well, I'd think that if this passed here in America, the law would attach the death penalty (or something equally unappropriate) to any software company that would allow users to cicumvent this. Hopefully, Australia is not that backwards yet.
No, I'm not upset at all. It's actually applaudable for Microsoft to spotlight that. And even more so that Microsoft let's people modify their software - that is after all what makes firefox so good. Rather, I was pointing out that while the article has them denying that tabbed browsing and the like were features their user would want, they spotlight on a fairly prominent page those very features.
They claim that tabbed browsing is not a feature that their clients want, yet if you go to the windows page at microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/windows/default.mspx they have an option there that says "Want Tabbed Browsing, Search Toolbars, and More?". All those options suspiciously being features incorporated into firefox. Maybe they do see it as a threat after all.
I disagree. Going after individuals/corporations/entities that violate the laws as defined by the legislature is exactly what he was elected to do. Unfortunately, some of the laws do not make sense and for those we should criticize the assembly. A judge couldn't decide that we should have software patents, but he could decide that existing patent laws apply to software. The legislature makes the laws, the judiciaries just make sure they are upheld (hopefully correctly).
I think if you read section ii (extracted from the text of the bill), that cookies established for tracking logins would be clearly exempt.
(B) EXCEPTION FOR COOKIES- Such term does not include--
(i) a cookie or other text or data file that is placed on the computer system of a user by an Internet service provider, interactive computer service, or Internet website to return information to such provider, service, or website; or
(ii) computer software that is placed on the computer system of a user by an Internet service provider, interactive computer service, or Internet website solely to enable the user subsequently to use such provider or service or to access such website.
So, I see that the system will navigate through 5 "BMW" playlists or every song on the ipod. But, what about the ipod's on-the-go playlist? The article doesn't mention that it can play from that. Seems that every so often you may want a little more control over the thousands of songs than predefined playlists or random. Could make for a boring road trip without the ability to change it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Since I purchased an iPad, I have started reading more and more of my newspapers and magazines on their apps. I find that the overall experience is just as enjoyable, and the convenience is great. For most of what I generally read there is complimentary digital access for their print subscribers. So, I get both versions and this is fine for weekly or monthly periodicals. However, for newspapers this can be annoying.
When it came to the NYTimes, after they started charging I called to find out about subscription options. While I don't mind the idea of paying $35-40 per month for something I read, what I found was that it was significantly cheaper if I ordered the print version which also includes digital access. The reason for this is that print ad rates remain significantly higher than digital, so therefore they make up for this by charging extra for digital only access. I suppose you could always donate the paper to the library or something, but that involves too much effort for me, and I for one didn't want to waste the paper by not reading it. So, I ended up using a print subscriber's digital access (which is surprisingly legal). I think many publications are in the same boat.
I think it is great that papers are starting to find a way to make money off of their efforts, and the NYTimes has been smart by easing into their pay model. However, the issue as I see it is that until they can find a way to level the playing field with their old-school paper offerings, the digital version is going to continue to be seen as a throwaway by advertisers who find little value in it - and then consequently by readers since it can be perceived as a ripoff. Hopefully, a successful pay model is a step towards this, but I think this may just be finding a way to make some extra money without getting to the root of the problem. I guess the alternative is that we move toward an economy where we recognize and pay for the actual value of something and not a heavily subsidized price.
That may be true. However, you can bet that if the news organizations start making more, the AP will start charging more for their content. I doubt that ad revenue will be sufficient to cover the costs if that happens. Sure tweeters and bloggers will continue to break the stories, and that serves a definite need and provides a check against the media - but they are not credentialed reporters, with the ability to go behind the scenes. I agree that the "what happened" summary is good for keeping up to date with a lot of news, but the unavailability to find further accurate details will lead to a lot of speculation and misinformation.
Also, the original comment mentioned that they pay for The Economist. I do as well, and I can tell you the magazine is definitely not cheap. In fact I know many people who pay for it, and I also know many people who subscribe to The NYTimes. I think people do this because they like the writing style, or because it gives them specific sections or certain authors. To me, it shows that, generally, if you give people what they want, they are usually willing to pay for it. The problem is that many organizations are looking to make people pay for what they want to give them, and that will never work.
After reading that speculative piece over at O'Reilly, I really have to wonder exactly how their business model works. I know the networks hate DVR, but they have more or less come to accept it as long as you watch the commercials. What I fail to see is why they would be against watching a lower quality version at a later point with current commercials as opposed to watching a DVR'd version at a later point with potentially outdated commercials.
I think Hulu is great for when I miss a show but if I am around I'd prefer to watch the HD version on TV. I am probably not your typical customer as I maybe watch an hour or two of TV a week - but those are shows I truely enjoy. I know this move will make a lot of people return to downloading the commercial-free torrent to watch on their TV, but for me I am just apt to not watch if I miss something. Torrents are not complicated, but take more forethought and time than I am usually willing to invest in finding a TV show. Hopefully someday they'll realize that there are many different types of consumers and markets out there that they could be attracting instead of repelling them.
I love my mac, and I use it mostly for business. Over the past several years I have had two problems that have made me have to send in my machine for repair. For all the servers, computers and even switches we buy from Dell, I almost always have the option for 4 hour on site response (and for servers we almost always spend the extra money on it), but with Apple it is always within 7 days (though they'll usually tell you it gets done faster, but can't guarantee it) and it is mailed off. I've often looked at some of their server equipment and thought it would be nice for certain applications. For example, their SAN is fairly inexpensive, but I couldn't imagine buying a piece equipment that would become indispensable to a business without a service plan that was comparable to 4 hour, or even NBD.
I might be missing something, and apple might have this. But every time I have inquired about it, the usual response is that I can buy Pro Care, which doesn't really help for this.
Unless I am mistaken, it's there for to allow parents to restrict their children from playing the DVD. Although I suppose other uses may arise.
There are a couple of real problems with a scheme like this. I must assume that the main reason that Facebook would opt to use user's pictures is because there is a level of trust between the person being advertised to and the picture being displayed. Something akin to having friends be more likely to use a product based on my recommendation than some random person's. If I were to explicitly recommend a product and it did not live up to expectations, then my reputation suffers. By extension, I would assume that if someone bought a product because my face was associated with it in the ad and the product turned out to be a lemon - I would have to think that on some level my reputation would be affected, even if I never actually was involved in the transaction.
I would hope that Facebook would allow people to opt out of an advertising scheme like this, or at the very least allow me to profit off of their use of my face. I think the advertising scheme has a lot of potential for profit, but I am not about to allow someone to get richer off the upside of this scheme while I get nothing but the downside.
That is true, but a captcha is already impossible for a screen reader. The hidden field is nice because if you explain that a certain field needs to be left blank, then the user will just not fill it it - whether you read it, or it is read to you. And, you could use the same stylesheet rule to hide that text from the user only if the field is also hidden.
those are just the smartphones. there are also the pocket pc phones which run windows as well.
c ketpc/phone/americas.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/devices/po
I use CodeTek's Virtual Desktop for OSX. It works well and allows you to choose the number of desktops available. It also works pretty well with multiple monitors - you switch desktops on monitors independently of the other. It's the next best thing to having it built into the os.
of course it's a publicity stunt, but that's usually what advertising is. judging from the amount of attention it is getting it's probably worth it. i mean, it's free to the users so why should anyone complain. and besides, all things being equal, if you had a choice of two cafes - one with a much faster free connection, and one with normal dsl - most people would tend towards the faster one (assuming the coffee is the same price and quality and that it's not 100x more crowded).
It's a little offtopic, but what I'd rather see a smartphone powered by a liteweight OSX. I just recently got a windows mobile phone and like it, but there are so many things that it limits or makes overly complicated. If Apple could do what it does best and simplify and polish the interface, the phone could pick up a lot of marketshare and yet again drive people towards purchising their machines. Blackberry is alright, but if I am going to carry something that big around in my pocket - I'd like it to be a little more than a corporate email client. Flexible email client, Address Book and a BASH shell would be a good start.
That's a good point. When it comes to these kind of things, there's really no way to win. Every product that gets released is going to have bugs that just show up. Some companies, like google, label everything beta until they are production quality. That approach seems to generate as many complaints though. Short of releasing perfect software every time, Apple's approach isn't horrible. The 1.0 is like a public beta - even if it's not labeled as such. The early adopters and power users will test it out, Apple fixes the problems and their software becomes production ready. Most people are exceptionally happy with their 2.0 and later products.
and don't forget those embedded systems. tivo, routers, etc... those have linux running too.
I feel like I must be missing something here. My company does a lot of work hosting and managing machines for other companies. For machines that utilize a lot of traffic, our ISP charges us more for the extra bandwidth. This makes sense, use more - pay for more. Same on the end-user side of things, the faster your connection the more the cost.
Here's where I am confused. There already seems to be graduated pricing. Home users pay more to get faster connections, and content providers pay more as their site gets more traffic so that their users will always have an optimal experience. Those that don't have enough bandwidth (for whatever reason) feel the pain as too many users hit their site - getting slashdotted is a perfect example. So, and I'm legitimately wondering, is this a case of the telco's feeling like they are not charging enough or, wanting to ride on the success of the successful companies. If it's the former, then I don't think there's anything other than competition and customer's desire (or lack thereof) to pay keeping them from charging more. If, however, it's the latter - well then everyone would be right to be outraged.
If someone could shed a little more light on this, it would be appreciated.
One of the greatest things I've found when looking at mobile phones is bluetooth. I was actually at Cingular the other day looking at the iPod phone and, while it doesn't let me do much of anything with anything, it seemed like a decent idea. So, now the original post got me thinking about what could be done with seperate devices to help transition into the mobile market - maybe in addition to the iPod phone.
Why don't they have a bluetooth enabled iPod? This way it could pair with your mobile phone and download songs that way. Seems like it would open the market to a lot more people. I almost always have my ipod and my phone with me. Sometimes, when I really want to hear a song - it would be nice to be able to just pull it down.
I'm no expert on bluetooth, so this may not even be technically feasible. But it seems that it would also create the option for the iPod to pair with the car's radio, creating a way to use your iPod without having to remember to have the requisite adapters in the car (or anywhere else).
all things being equal, you would be correct. however, assuming they've held their common stock since the ipo, it has probably been long enough (although i can't remember when they went public) that they would collect long term capital gains which is taxed at a much lower rate than wages. even if they haven't held the stock for that long, short term capital gains are still less than income earned as salary.
I think I would be inclined to accept DRM if it didn't impede my ability to use the media how I saw fit. Perhaps something that would code my name and/or account info to each media file so that if I were to make it available for redistribution they could tie it back to me.
Personally, one of the the things I hate about FairPlay is that if I put a song on my iPod that is DRM'd and try to play it while my iPod is hooked up to someone else's iTunes, it asks me for my account information. Having multiple machines, I already have three machines registered, so I have to unregister those and it is generally a pain. Yet, the odd part is, I can use my iTunes to put songs on as many iPods as I want and their owners could listen normally, they just won't be able to play it through iTunes. The whole thing seems slightly flawed.
I also am unimpressed with iTMS's 128kbps encoding rate, but that's another story.
how concepts like this: Will Our Cars Become Our Chauffeurs? would fare with the gps system shutdown.
It's amazing to me how many things are becoming more reliant on the gps system. just searching slashdot for gps reveals so many articles about the subject. I mean, what would parents do (Using GPS to Track Teens ) if they shut down the system?
Well, I'd think that if this passed here in America, the law would attach the death penalty (or something equally unappropriate) to any software company that would allow users to cicumvent this. Hopefully, Australia is not that backwards yet.
No, I'm not upset at all. It's actually applaudable for Microsoft to spotlight that. And even more so that Microsoft let's people modify their software - that is after all what makes firefox so good. Rather, I was pointing out that while the article has them denying that tabbed browsing and the like were features their user would want, they spotlight on a fairly prominent page those very features.
They claim that tabbed browsing is not a feature that their clients want, yet if you go to the windows page at microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/windows/default.mspx they have an option there that says "Want Tabbed Browsing, Search Toolbars, and More?". All those options suspiciously being features incorporated into firefox. Maybe they do see it as a threat after all.
I disagree. Going after individuals/corporations/entities that violate the laws as defined by the legislature is exactly what he was elected to do. Unfortunately, some of the laws do not make sense and for those we should criticize the assembly. A judge couldn't decide that we should have software patents, but he could decide that existing patent laws apply to software. The legislature makes the laws, the judiciaries just make sure they are upheld (hopefully correctly).
well that would be three wrongs and then, maybe, the world might end.
I think if you read section ii (extracted from the text of the bill), that cookies established for tracking logins would be clearly exempt.
(B) EXCEPTION FOR COOKIES- Such term does not include--
(i) a cookie or other text or data file that is placed on the computer system of a user by an Internet service provider, interactive computer service, or Internet website to return information to such provider, service, or website; or
(ii) computer software that is placed on the computer system of a user by an Internet service provider, interactive computer service, or Internet website solely to enable the user subsequently to use such provider or service or to access such website.
So, I see that the system will navigate through 5 "BMW" playlists or every song on the ipod. But, what about the ipod's on-the-go playlist? The article doesn't mention that it can play from that. Seems that every so often you may want a little more control over the thousands of songs than predefined playlists or random. Could make for a boring road trip without the ability to change it up.