You may be correct, but how do you really know that google is making a significant amount of money from adverting? How much does it cost to put an ad on google anyway? In the case of google, there is no way they could be making a profit if all they did was sell ads. I am sure that they make most of their money selling their technology to companies like yahoo.
Because most content providers will not have any technology to sell, they must get money in other ways. This website is a very good example of why you are wrong. The sucess of this website is killing them financially because the bandwidth costs exceed the revenue. And IMHO, slashdot has some of the most effective advertisements I have ever seen on the web. The only reason that I heard of thinkgeek was because of the ads they ran here. And on a weekly basis I remember the products they are selling. I usually tune out banner ads also, but for some reason I usually find myself watching the thinkgeek ones...
The article discusses caps as an alternative for heavy users, and google would certainly qualify:). Under this system you would not directly pay the content provider a penny to view their page. All money is filtered through a central, non-profit organization. It is at that point in the system where special accounts could be created so that search engines do not die.
What if google and every other search engine provider pays X number of dollars to the org, and then the org distributes that money equally among all content providers? The only problem with that system might be that all content providers are not equal. Depending on how much money is involved a more complex system might need to be developed to distrubute the money fairly. Maybe google would have to report statistics on all searches to the org?
I would say in theory it sounds very good, and the theory says that _almost_all_ content providers move into this system. If you wake up one morning and can no longer access anything (for free) on the Internet because they have moved to this micropayment system, are you prepared to stop using the Internet?
The other issues about popup windows and other such forms of abuse are real, but the article already talks about building mechanisms into software so that popup windows, page reloads, etc could be removed from the bill. Whether or not it is technically possible to build such a system is a completely different topic, I do not think that http in its currerent state could do this.
That is a good point, but remember that the article does not even begin to address the huge technical issue of actually implementing such a system.
However, the writer does mention that a non-profit organization would have to oversee the operation and that all money would have to flow through one organization. That organization would be responsible for paying the correct websites. You are probably thinking along the lines of the website actually charging google per page which is not how it would work. A cap was mentioned in the article as a possible solution for heavy users. My guess is that special accounts for businesses providing Internet search engines would be needed so that they only pay X number of dollars per month, and that amount is divided amongst the participants.
The Q&A section already adressed that issue. It would be possible for a website to do that under this system, but who is going to read a website that splits their content like that? If tomshardware started to do that, I would simply stop reading their website and start reading Anandtech. And if Anandtech started the same practice, I would move over to sharkyextreme and so on until I found a website that I enjoyed reading.
It was also stated that people will return to a website on a regular basis that they like. I think most of us here understand that, I know that I read slashdot at least once a day. And so if Tomshardware makes the mistake of splitting up their content too much, they will lose money as people migrate to another hardware review website. If you were smart and trying to make money off of this system, you would strive try for a _massive_, loyal reader base. This means providing quality content in an accessible manner.
Well, you wouldn't know what was on the page before you paid the one cent. But then again you don't know what exactly will be in a book or a CD that you purchase. I think this system might have some potential (assuming that it was actually possible to implement it technically, see thread). If you take the article you just read on howstuffworks, that was probably 10 pages or so, and so you would pay them a dime for the information you received. The story was worth more than that to me.
Now you might go through ten pages on google to finally find the information that you were looking for, and that would bring the cost of the search to a dime as well. However, most of the time google returns the page you are looking for in the first ten matches or so. That is only one page and so your search would only cost one cent here. I guess the point is that the cost would eventually balance. Some searches would cost you more than what you think it is worth, and some will cost a lot less.
In the case of Toms hardware, if you look at
this story it's only about 11 pages long and so the review would cost $0.11 for a person to read. I don't find the story interesting, but someone who does would probably pay that much money to read it. Tomshardware also has a relatively large reader base I believe. I do not have any idea how many people actually read their articles per day, but say 10,000 people read that article about the Athlon XP. That's $100.00 for a story. And as the article pointed out, the websites will improve when there is a financial incentive to do so..
Or you could just get a cell phone/PalmOS-based PDA all-in-one. I saw one a couple of days ago and it was pretty cool. It's a fully functional PDA and acts just like any other palm pilot or visor. And it's actually about the size of a normal cell phone.. the only interface difference is that there are the four onetouch buttons for Agenda|Contacts|Todo|Memo.
I have to disagree about the dual-boot solution. The average user does not want to dual-boot a machine. Dual booting requires special care to keep files and applications synchronized between the operating systems. There is also an added cost with support, Dell (for example) is going to lose a lot of money if they have to install and support and maintain Linux/Windows dual-boot systems. There are only a few reasons that I can think of to dual-boot a system.
1. there is some application or hardware that you _really_ need and it is not available on your main operating system. You would prefer the main operating system over the alternative for whatever reason.
2. testing and development work. If you're too cheap to buy VMWare, you could always dual-boot a machine for testing or development.
3. you are interested in computing and want to try another operating system to play around with. Note the 'interested in computing' part, the average user, IMHO, isn't really interested in computing. They just use the computer as a means to an end and don't really care how it works or what company sells their operating system.
well actually, the browser ban seems to have been lifted from MSN.com. I haven't changed my useragent and now I can access the site without a problem from mozilla 0.9.5 or konqueror. Of course there is still no useful content on msn.com, but I thought it was interesting that Microsoft decided to ban mozilla for a few days.
they seem to have removed the browser check. It now works on at least mozilla.9.5 under linux or win32. You are correct though, it was inaccessible for a couple of days...
Re:Full Screen View!
on
Mozilla Bug Week
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· Score: 2, Informative
yeah, but in the mean time displaying a tab in fullscreen is probably close enough. There is a toolbar that comes with multizilla that allows for this. It acts just like the IE fullscreen view I would imagine (minus the tabs of course).
Re:Full Screen View!
on
Mozilla Bug Week
·
· Score: 2, Informative
you can download a plugin to get a fullscreen view in mozilla. try multizilla.
I like it as a server OS but as a desktop OS it is downright pathethic.
You'll have to define your definition of a desktop. People do different things with their workstations. Say I'm a c programmer, is linux a pathetic OS for me to use on my desktop?
the ie 2.0 look alikes competing for the web browser market
right.. maybe you were not aware that mozilla surpassed IE6 at about version 0.9.3 in terms of usability and features.
I would agree with you that linux is still a few applications away from putting a dent into the corporate desktop market. If you take the browser situtation in linux a year ago, there were really no _good_ browers available. Now the OS has at least three. There are currently no office suites (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, etc) that can compete with M$ Office. In another year or so, I expect that two free office suites will be very usable. This is what linux-based operating systems really need right now for the corporate desktop market.
And as those are being developed, development of KDE3 continues. Because application development has slowed somewhat, I believe that the future actually looks very good for linux desktops. Especially when you consider the direction that microsoft is going.. the restriction only grow with every new software release, and there will be a breaking point for consumers. When M$ hits this, consumers will look elsewhere.
the site is definitely broken on NS4.x. It took _forever_ to render but it did not crash for me (although when it finally did render it looked pretty bad). I'm sure mozilla will work fine, although I will not change my useragent string. If Microsoft would like me to visit their site they need to make it accessible. However I agree with most posters here in that Microsoft is most likely shooting themselves in the foot, good news for the Internet IMHO.
that doesn't mean anything.. employees turn their computers off for other reasons. A lot of people around here just turn off their computers on Friday before leaving. Some even turn it off at the end of each day! They don't do it because Windows has crashed, they just think of it as an appliance they won't be using for a day or so and decide to turn it off. They don't care about uptime.
Then you have people like me who try to keep their computer's uptime as high as possible. One time I managed to get my NT4 workstation's uptime to 134 days (windows started acting really weird around day 130 and I was forced to reboot). Anyway, averaging the uptime of a bunch of corporate boxes is going to come up with meaningless figures.
"perl +for +the web"it omits words like 'for' and 'the' by default because they slow down searches. if you really want to use those in your search you must explicitly tell it to include them.
Why not setup some kind of paypal tipping system? This topic has been discussed many times here, and it is something that I would consider putting money into. It seems to me that asking for money that way on a purely voluntary basis would increase revenue (relative to asking for a donation to remove advertising).
Otherwise, you risk making people angry at the forced, intrusive advertising and he or she will leave your site.. These types of sites remind me of Windows 'crippleware', where you have to register or give money to disable some annoying popup box or software limitation.
I have to disagree, check out the Help documentation in mozilla for example, it is quite good and easy to navigate. I have not used staroffice in a while, but I would imagine that the documentation is just as good. All major applications have very good, free online documentation in an HTML format and some (like samba) have o'reilly books available under some kind of open content license that are freely downloadable.
I have always liked O'Reilly books, and they have documentation for almost any major free/open source application (vi, emacs, samba, apache, mysql, etc). Even though most are not free, they are worth the money.
I do not agree with that, the author is pointing out that the defaults are very important and that most people will _never_ change the default player. So if XP ships with both Real player and Windows Media Player and WMP is the default player for all audio files, video files, etc., Real player would be ignored by _most_ people (read: Joe Blow user who just wants to 'play' his audio files).
Now does Joe care about all of this?? Probably not.. which I think is an important perspective that the author did not look at. The average user just wants something that 'works' and does not care about choices. Obviously the OS would have to be shipped with some kind of default set, otherwise the initial OEM screen would take hours to clear because of prompts like:
- please choose the app you would like to associate mp3 files with.
- please choose the app you would like to associate wav files with.
- please choose the app you would like to associate mpeg files with.
- please choose the app you would like to associate wmp files with.
- please choose the app you would like to associate txt files with.
-... etc
Of course, companies like Real care that their product will not be used, and this really does hurt the software market. I do not know what the solution to this problem is, but the default settings are critical and mean lots of $ to companies like Real.
I don't have any idea how accurate the original statement was regarding secure creditors getting all money, and then if there is anything left over the unsecured creditors get it.. but what if this really was reversed? Do you think that the system might be abused? It really sucks that employees have been screwed out of one or two months wage by some asshole at the top and the legal system really should correct this without a lot of hassles.
morals and ethics do not always follow the law, however stealing is not a moral action by _any_ means. It is impossible to justify stealing from an employer ethically. Morals do change in a society over time, but stealing will never be accepted under any circumstances. I would bet that no society on this entire planet accepts stealing. Layoffs are always difficult for any company to do, but someone believes that they are necessary to keep the business making money. Losing part of your business (see the gateway / AMD story today) is a lot better than losing the entire thing. If Gateway didn't lay off 1200 people and restructure, maybe they would lose their entire business. A lot more jobs will be lost that way.
I don't have any clue how big businesses make these decisions, but it makes sense to me that reputable businesses such as Gateway are laying off people out of necessity.
Because you are a moral and ethical person. Whoever did not treat you the same way is an asshole.. why would you want to sink to their level? Revenge is not the answer here, take the matter to the legal system.
haha, I subscribe to technet at work and M$ sends me three or four CDs per month. In the CDs last month there was a linux migration CD (don't remember the exact wording). So I was bored and decided to check it out, thinking that I would really like to migrate to linux anyway:D But of course it is the other way around, and it had a video, html, everything. M$ really spent a lot of time on that, couldn't the manpower be diverted to producing higher-quality products? When it comes to servers, security should always come before features.
Well, I think you have a good point here.. but the difference is that Dude#2 is legitimately playing the game and obtaining items and experience, etc the accepted (and fun) way. Dude#1 is not obtaining items and whatnot in an accepted way. At least I don't think that this is accepted in the Diablo II community, but since I only play the game once in a while I don't really know.
I work a full time job and enjoy playing Diablo II every once in a while. It would never even cross my mind to buy items or characters online for real money (through ebay or something). I play Diablo II because it's fun, getting items without having to spend time in the game for them is no fun. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's cheating, but it does hurt the game.
Even if you can only spare a few hours a week to play the game, there are a lot of other people online that are at the same level that you are. Just don't join a game with 1337-Dude#2, Level99 Amazon. Find a Dude#1 at Level 14 instead, there are _lots_ out there.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be correct, but how do you really know that google is making a significant amount of money from adverting? How much does it cost to put an ad on google anyway? In the case of google, there is no way they could be making a profit if all they did was sell ads. I am sure that they make most of their money selling their technology to companies like yahoo.
Because most content providers will not have any technology to sell, they must get money in other ways. This website is a very good example of why you are wrong. The sucess of this website is killing them financially because the bandwidth costs exceed the revenue. And IMHO, slashdot has some of the most effective advertisements I have ever seen on the web. The only reason that I heard of thinkgeek was because of the ads they ran here. And on a weekly basis I remember the products they are selling. I usually tune out banner ads also, but for some reason I usually find myself watching the thinkgeek ones...
The article discusses caps as an alternative for heavy users, and google would certainly qualify :). Under this system you would not directly pay the content provider a penny to view their page. All money is filtered through a central, non-profit organization. It is at that point in the system where special accounts could be created so that search engines do not die.
What if google and every other search engine provider pays X number of dollars to the org, and then the org distributes that money equally among all content providers? The only problem with that system might be that all content providers are not equal. Depending on how much money is involved a more complex system might need to be developed to distrubute the money fairly. Maybe google would have to report statistics on all searches to the org?
I would say in theory it sounds very good, and the theory says that _almost_all_ content providers move into this system. If you wake up one morning and can no longer access anything (for free) on the Internet because they have moved to this micropayment system, are you prepared to stop using the Internet?
The other issues about popup windows and other such forms of abuse are real, but the article already talks about building mechanisms into software so that popup windows, page reloads, etc could be removed from the bill. Whether or not it is technically possible to build such a system is a completely different topic, I do not think that http in its currerent state could do this.
That is a good point, but remember that the article does not even begin to address the huge technical issue of actually implementing such a system.
However, the writer does mention that a non-profit organization would have to oversee the operation and that all money would have to flow through one organization. That organization would be responsible for paying the correct websites. You are probably thinking along the lines of the website actually charging google per page which is not how it would work. A cap was mentioned in the article as a possible solution for heavy users. My guess is that special accounts for businesses providing Internet search engines would be needed so that they only pay X number of dollars per month, and that amount is divided amongst the participants.
It was also stated that people will return to a website on a regular basis that they like. I think most of us here understand that, I know that I read slashdot at least once a day. And so if Tomshardware makes the mistake of splitting up their content too much, they will lose money as people migrate to another hardware review website. If you were smart and trying to make money off of this system, you would strive try for a _massive_, loyal reader base. This means providing quality content in an accessible manner.
Now you might go through ten pages on google to finally find the information that you were looking for, and that would bring the cost of the search to a dime as well. However, most of the time google returns the page you are looking for in the first ten matches or so. That is only one page and so your search would only cost one cent here. I guess the point is that the cost would eventually balance. Some searches would cost you more than what you think it is worth, and some will cost a lot less.
In the case of Toms hardware, if you look at this story it's only about 11 pages long and so the review would cost $0.11 for a person to read. I don't find the story interesting, but someone who does would probably pay that much money to read it. Tomshardware also has a relatively large reader base I believe. I do not have any idea how many people actually read their articles per day, but say 10,000 people read that article about the Athlon XP. That's $100.00 for a story. And as the article pointed out, the websites will improve when there is a financial incentive to do so..
Or you could just get a cell phone/PalmOS-based PDA all-in-one. I saw one a couple of days ago and it was pretty cool. It's a fully functional PDA and acts just like any other palm pilot or visor. And it's actually about the size of a normal cell phone.. the only interface difference is that there are the four onetouch buttons for Agenda|Contacts|Todo|Memo.
I have to disagree about the dual-boot solution. The average user does not want to dual-boot a machine. Dual booting requires special care to keep files and applications synchronized between the operating systems. There is also an added cost with support, Dell (for example) is going to lose a lot of money if they have to install and support and maintain Linux/Windows dual-boot systems. There are only a few reasons that I can think of to dual-boot a system.
1. there is some application or hardware that you _really_ need and it is not available on your main operating system. You would prefer the main operating system over the alternative for whatever reason.
2. testing and development work. If you're too cheap to buy VMWare, you could always dual-boot a machine for testing or development.
3. you are interested in computing and want to try another operating system to play around with. Note the 'interested in computing' part, the average user, IMHO, isn't really interested in computing. They just use the computer as a means to an end and don't really care how it works or what company sells their operating system.
well actually, the browser ban seems to have been lifted from MSN.com. I haven't changed my useragent and now I can access the site without a problem from mozilla 0.9.5 or konqueror. Of course there is still no useful content on msn.com, but I thought it was interesting that Microsoft decided to ban mozilla for a few days.
they seem to have removed the browser check. It now works on at least mozilla .9.5 under linux or win32. You are correct though, it was inaccessible for a couple of days...
yeah, but in the mean time displaying a tab in fullscreen is probably close enough. There is a toolbar that comes with multizilla that allows for this. It acts just like the IE fullscreen view I would imagine (minus the tabs of course).
you can download a plugin to get a fullscreen view in mozilla. try multizilla.
You'll have to define your definition of a desktop. People do different things with their workstations. Say I'm a c programmer, is linux a pathetic OS for me to use on my desktop?
the ie 2.0 look alikes competing for the web browser market
right.. maybe you were not aware that mozilla surpassed IE6 at about version 0.9.3 in terms of usability and features.
I would agree with you that linux is still a few applications away from putting a dent into the corporate desktop market. If you take the browser situtation in linux a year ago, there were really no _good_ browers available. Now the OS has at least three. There are currently no office suites (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, etc) that can compete with M$ Office. In another year or so, I expect that two free office suites will be very usable. This is what linux-based operating systems really need right now for the corporate desktop market.
And as those are being developed, development of KDE3 continues. Because application development has slowed somewhat, I believe that the future actually looks very good for linux desktops. Especially when you consider the direction that microsoft is going.. the restriction only grow with every new software release, and there will be a breaking point for consumers. When M$ hits this, consumers will look elsewhere.
the site is definitely broken on NS4.x. It took _forever_ to render but it did not crash for me (although when it finally did render it looked pretty bad). I'm sure mozilla will work fine, although I will not change my useragent string. If Microsoft would like me to visit their site they need to make it accessible. However I agree with most posters here in that Microsoft is most likely shooting themselves in the foot, good news for the Internet IMHO.
that doesn't mean anything.. employees turn their computers off for other reasons. A lot of people around here just turn off their computers on Friday before leaving. Some even turn it off at the end of each day! They don't do it because Windows has crashed, they just think of it as an appliance they won't be using for a day or so and decide to turn it off. They don't care about uptime.
Then you have people like me who try to keep their computer's uptime as high as possible. One time I managed to get my NT4 workstation's uptime to 134 days (windows started acting really weird around day 130 and I was forced to reboot). Anyway, averaging the uptime of a bunch of corporate boxes is going to come up with meaningless figures.
doesn't this do what you want in google?:
"perl +for +the web"it omits words like 'for' and 'the' by default because they slow down searches. if you really want to use those in your search you must explicitly tell it to include them.
Why not setup some kind of paypal tipping system? This topic has been discussed many times here, and it is something that I would consider putting money into. It seems to me that asking for money that way on a purely voluntary basis would increase revenue (relative to asking for a donation to remove advertising).
Otherwise, you risk making people angry at the forced, intrusive advertising and he or she will leave your site.. These types of sites remind me of Windows 'crippleware', where you have to register or give money to disable some annoying popup box or software limitation.
I have to disagree, check out the Help documentation in mozilla for example, it is quite good and easy to navigate. I have not used staroffice in a while, but I would imagine that the documentation is just as good. All major applications have very good, free online documentation in an HTML format and some (like samba) have o'reilly books available under some kind of open content license that are freely downloadable. I have always liked O'Reilly books, and they have documentation for almost any major free/open source application (vi, emacs, samba, apache, mysql, etc). Even though most are not free, they are worth the money.
I do not agree with that, the author is pointing out that the defaults are very important and that most people will _never_ change the default player. So if XP ships with both Real player and Windows Media Player and WMP is the default player for all audio files, video files, etc., Real player would be ignored by _most_ people (read: Joe Blow user who just wants to 'play' his audio files).
... etc
Now does Joe care about all of this?? Probably not.. which I think is an important perspective that the author did not look at. The average user just wants something that 'works' and does not care about choices. Obviously the OS would have to be shipped with some kind of default set, otherwise the initial OEM screen would take hours to clear because of prompts like:
- please choose the app you would like to associate mp3 files with.
- please choose the app you would like to associate wav files with.
- please choose the app you would like to associate mpeg files with.
- please choose the app you would like to associate wmp files with.
- please choose the app you would like to associate txt files with.
-
Of course, companies like Real care that their product will not be used, and this really does hurt the software market. I do not know what the solution to this problem is, but the default settings are critical and mean lots of $ to companies like Real.
I don't have any idea how accurate the original statement was regarding secure creditors getting all money, and then if there is anything left over the unsecured creditors get it.. but what if this really was reversed? Do you think that the system might be abused? It really sucks that employees have been screwed out of one or two months wage by some asshole at the top and the legal system really should correct this without a lot of hassles.
morals and ethics do not always follow the law, however stealing is not a moral action by _any_ means. It is impossible to justify stealing from an employer ethically. Morals do change in a society over time, but stealing will never be accepted under any circumstances. I would bet that no society on this entire planet accepts stealing. Layoffs are always difficult for any company to do, but someone believes that they are necessary to keep the business making money. Losing part of your business (see the gateway / AMD story today) is a lot better than losing the entire thing. If Gateway didn't lay off 1200 people and restructure, maybe they would lose their entire business. A lot more jobs will be lost that way.
I don't have any clue how big businesses make these decisions, but it makes sense to me that reputable businesses such as Gateway are laying off people out of necessity.
Because you are a moral and ethical person. Whoever did not treat you the same way is an asshole.. why would you want to sink to their level? Revenge is not the answer here, take the matter to the legal system.
haha, I subscribe to technet at work and M$ sends me three or four CDs per month. In the CDs last month there was a linux migration CD (don't remember the exact wording). So I was bored and decided to check it out, thinking that I would really like to migrate to linux anyway :D But of course it is the other way around, and it had a video, html, everything. M$ really spent a lot of time on that, couldn't the manpower be diverted to producing higher-quality products? When it comes to servers, security should always come before features.
Well, I think you have a good point here.. but the difference is that Dude#2 is legitimately playing the game and obtaining items and experience, etc the accepted (and fun) way. Dude#1 is not obtaining items and whatnot in an accepted way. At least I don't think that this is accepted in the Diablo II community, but since I only play the game once in a while I don't really know.
I work a full time job and enjoy playing Diablo II every once in a while. It would never even cross my mind to buy items or characters online for real money (through ebay or something). I play Diablo II because it's fun, getting items without having to spend time in the game for them is no fun. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's cheating, but it does hurt the game.
Even if you can only spare a few hours a week to play the game, there are a lot of other people online that are at the same level that you are. Just don't join a game with 1337-Dude#2, Level99 Amazon. Find a Dude#1 at Level 14 instead, there are _lots_ out there.
I remember that game! I think I still have it on 5.25" floppy discs, but I don't have the apple hardware anymore :(