Before you post such a headline, perhaps it would be a good idea to check your facts. I RTFA'ed and checked those links and there is no mention of how many servers were attacked. There were 510,000 pages mentioned, but pages do not equal servers. This a sensationalistic headline based on a sensationalistic interpretation of a Google web search.
I've been a fan of Jabber for years now, and use it heavily. I was very happy to hear that Google Talk used the Jabber server, but completely disheartened to hear that server-to-server communications don't exist. Why do you choose to create yet another closed IM network? I don't want a gmail account, but I would like to talk to your gmail users with my existing jabber account. What you have created is NOT OPEN, and NOT JABBER but a bastardised subset of its protocols and ideals.
Yes, my friend does have an inability to buy decent hardware. So does that mean she should be priced out of the game? As an alternative, why not allow for access to the same auction house from multiple locations in the game world?
In order to progress through the game, its important to sell your goods at the auction house. Its practically a requirement. When I play, I generally leave my Hearthstone at Ironforge, because after I'm out running around I need to teleport back there to sell my stuff.
I'm lucky, a friend of mine cannot even step foot in Ironforge. Her computer is unable to withstand the heavy lag and number of players. We went once, it took 45 minutes to get back out. Now I just buy her equipment, and bring it to her.
What is the reason for your decision to limit the auction house to a couple geographical locations within the game? This not only excludes a vast number of players from improving their characters at the early stages because of proximity, but also requires extra travel time, and completely excludes people with lower end systems from being able to easily sell their stuff. Is the reason a technical bottleneck of some sort, or a design decision?
I'm glad to see that people are still interested in this animation after all these years:). When I first made this animation, I didn't think the popularity would be what it is today. I was just having fun. I made this in 2002, and got a surprise bandwidth bill of $500 because of it. Now I've got a great server farm ( plug: www.cachefly.com ) that handles the load, so slashdot away:).
At least it did until the server's bandwidth got exceeded.
#!/bin/bash # Quick script to grab a bunch of files off the web # Filetype is a search string (regex) # Examples: avi wmv images/*.jpg # Location is the url of the page you want to grab from # Example: foo.com/page.html tempHTML="somethingthatdoesntex ist"
echo "What kind of file do you want to grab?" read filetype echo Grabbing $filetype
I'd agree that flash is the way to go for video. Mpeg probably has the best compatibility, but for websites, where filesize and user experience are just as important as compatibility, Flash wins hands down. I'm not sure if the people on AIX and Amiga would agree tho.
Another great flash video option is the Sorenson Squeeze codec. http://www.sorenson.com/solutions/prod/mx_ win.php
More info on FLV: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/f dd/fdd 000131.shtml
I was actually emailed by a sco representative who wanted to link to one of my animations on their website. Here's most of it: ----------------- We are putting a site together that will go live on November 1 and have a link on the site called "Just for Fun."
We would like to link to your site to give people access to "Steve the Linux Super Villian." It's absolutely hilarious and we would love to profile that on this section of the site, just to show people that we have a sense of humor.
May we have your permission to link to your site from our site? ----------------- To which I replied:
ABSOLUTELY, WITHOUT A DOUBT, NO.
Obviously they didn't notice my Penguin Blood Ninja FiaSCO animation.
"in this day and age comparing 9 bytes with 40 is like comparing 0.0001 seconds with 0.00001 even on a mobile."
SWF is not a hack. Another attempt at fud. The format has stayed VERY lean of cruft.
Actually its like comparing.09 and.4. But really you've said a lot of valid things, but nothing that can sway me away from the XML being unneeded bloat. There's a lot of people who compare compressed file sizes and say they are roughly the same. If you compressed 40 bytes I bet you could get it down to 9...some of the time. I don't know though, all the SVG I've seen has been ungodly enormous.
Hey, I love XML. And for 99% of things XML is just fantastic. I use schemas, xslt, SAX, DOM, etc. all the time.
Using XML formats for what should be binary/bytecode data is a total waste. Sure you can compress it all you want(flash can also compress its bytecode) but it's not going to get smaller than Flash's (compressed) bytecode. Why don't we use XML for images?
Because text and text processing isn't anywhere NEAR the same thing as vector and image processing. Sure I could xslt transform some xml/html into an svg compatible format, and put it on a web page. It has its applications. I could do the same thing via jgenerator into flash(via XML might I add).
But why would I? If I was coding that would be a rather useful trick. But this isn't code, it's also visual. I'm not going to code a flash animation in Flash. I'm going to draw it in Flash. I'm not going to make an SVG animation by hand, I'm going to draw it in an SVG program. You can't XSLT transform the mona lisa. You could try, but you'd probably just end up with a conceptual piece of fine art garbage.
I guess where I'm going with this, as I originally stated, is that SVG is a great idea, but I don't really care if my illustration is in XML. It's just going to get in the way.
Sure there are applications where XML could be useful, but none of those applications are really visual. The applications are things like maps, and online shops maybe, where you'd want to put together text and image. But you will be very hard pressed to create an application that can create SVG output, compress it, and send it out faster than a pre-compiled binary. And I'm not talking out of my ass. Look at the jgenerator and see if you can create and compress svgs faster than it can spit out a processed swf template binary.
Bah. I usually agree that the open source format is the preferred format. But having worked with the flash swf file format and having seen SVG in action, I'll go with flash. Its not even worth trying SVG, SVG Tiny, or any variant.
The 'interactivity' aspect of SVG is laughable. It's on par with Flash v2, which basically gives it just enough interactivity to make it positively annoying, but not at all useful. Give SVG forms(XForms would be nice) and it might be more approachable. It sickens me to think that everyone likes to complain about Flash being annoying, but then support an even more annoying format just because its open source.
There's too much XML bloat within SVG to make it of much use. A flash rectangle is 9 bytes. SVG's is about 40. A flash matrix record is about 5 bytes, SVG's is at least 5 times that. These are basic atomic units used hundreds if not thousands of times throughout a file.
Plus the SVG parser has to compile to an internal vector engine. Flash is already compiled to HIGHLY optimized bytecode.
There's no way I'm going to use hundreds of bytes to describe just one shape. And then waste precious cell phone processing power to parse the xml into an internal format.
If anything, there should be an intermediate bytecode format determined by the W3C to allow for compiled SVGTiny.
Joel mainly pits the MSDN crowd vs. the Chen crowd as a struggle over 'which API is better'. The Chen crowd seems less interested about which API is better(although they are probably very interested), and more interested in protecting coders from themselves.
Joel's comparisons of MSDN and Chen camps is also divided by auto-managed vs. coder-managed memory. With newer versions of MS products, there is much less of a need for the Chen camp, because their main focus is fixing coder errors to keep apis stable with newer versions. Something that isn't important when programmers can't accidentally bog up a chunk of memory.
I would hazard a guess that memory managed code is what is the demise of the Chen crowd because.NET is automating protecting coders from themselves, which is exactly what the Chen crowd wants anyway.
Alas this is all theoretical to me, since I'm a java guy. I guess that places me in the MSDN camp. But this is all theoretical anyway because MS is doomed to bankruptcy by the end of next week.
Umm....THIS is what the 'furor' is over. If you're going to use open source software, it has to be, like, open. This does not in any way, shape or form mention WINE, that they use open source, but only states that they've found the magic elixir that gives +10 to windows emulation.
Of course it doesn't give them pointy horns either, but it does destroy their credibility. And what's up with 50 simultaneous developers? Can anyone verify if that number's at ALL realistic?
This is one of those times where I really love linux's libre. I wasn't really taken with Redhat on the desktop, but it works great on the server. Upgrading using a different distro is very straight-forward, and I'm much happier now with Mandrake.
I've been using RH 7.3 and 8 forever, and just last week upgraded to Mandrake 10 for my desktops, and RHEL2.1 for my server. I was using 7.3 for a long time, was very happy with it, and I would've just gone ahead and kept using it if my hard drive didn't start giving errors a couple days ago.
Redhat's server line is really solid, well supported, and migration from 7.3 took about an hour tops(with cp-ing everything!). I've never used Fedora, because I'm really happy, ecstatic really, with Mandrake on the desktop. All the weird hardware that I had to compile and figure out how it works, and write wiki entries about just worked flawlessly in Mandrake 10.
The only thing I miss from my RH8 with KDE3.2 is the keyboard shortcuts. Why was that removed from the Mandrake KDE build?
I agree. Just this weekend I authored my first dvd in linux after much fuss. It is a clunky world of command lines at the moment, but I must stress that if you stick with it, there is a method to it. DVD Authoring in Linux is young, give it some time and a couple GUIs should improve things.
But really, my needs were simple, one movie, no chapters and no menus. What took me a while wasn't dvdauthor, but working out the dependencies for everything, compiling it all, and then getting it to burn.
Too much to get into here, but here's a partial list of unusual dependencies for the above programs before you can even compile and open them:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6953 http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue83/stoddard.htm l http://www.dahnielson.com/primer.txt
One last note. dvdrtools no longer exists, and the mkisofs from cdrtools 2.0 supports the -dvd-video switch, although this is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the man or help files.
And if you've gotten this far, I hope you bought brand name DVD media, otherwise you're just making coasters...
I did a lot of research a while back before I bought mine.
Toshiba: Heavy, expensive, and not very well designed. Car simile: Late Model Ford.
Sager: I've owned Sager laptops before, and they are the BEST workhorses BUT they don't survive long on a battery and very heavy. Car simile: Hummer
Compaq: Expensive and pretty, and no stand-out features. Car simile: Plymouth Prowler
Acer: This is the one I went for. The C102 is one of the smallest notebooks around, with a decent battery life and a fast recharge. You can get 2-3 hours on a charge, and it recharges in 50 minutes. Not very powerful, but gets the job done. Car simile: Honda Civic
Perhaps I've been wrong all these years, but I was under the assumption Winamp wasn't "Windows Amplifier" but WinAMP Windows Another Music Player.
I remember a lot of different AMPS, ModAMP, YAMP(Yet Another Music Player),etc. and WinAMP was one of the first AMPs made for windows along with MOD4WIN which wasn't free. Winamp was also among the first that was able to play mods within Windows. It was a testament to the quality of Justin's code that he was able to scrimp together enough cycles to play music with windows' overhead.
Granted, it's a barrier, in the same sense that a cash register is a barrier. But if you've used Bitpass, you'll see that once you've set up an account, the artificial barrier is the one in your head. As people figure this out, just like they did with Amazon and eBay, people will use it.
Who's going to make Matrix grade movies for free? Who's going to draw an X-Men Unlimited comic series for free? If 100 people look at a 10MB animation on my site, that's a gig of bandwidth. Who's going to be able to give that away for free?
Sure, a 100 other people might come along and blog better for free, but beyond text the ability to create quality work for free becomes phenomenally more expensive.
Even if you were to cultivate a loyal throng of patrons, there's no way they can financially support larger scale quality work. Besides the hard part of finding such loyal super-nice people, you'd have to keep them interested while you are working. Say you are working on a short work that spans 2-3 months. How are you supposed to hold interest and keep people donating?
Additionally, you are quickly digging yourself into a hole because you are essentially being paid for your time instead of your work and operational costs. Say you release a short comic a month, for free, relying on your close circle. Each comic you create increases traffic to your site, but the amount of money you recieve isn't necessarily proportional to the amount of money you are making. And so the more work you make, the higher your costs become.
People donate sitewide. The kind and generous people who do donate(did i mention these people are earthbound angels, too?), will generally pay you for all your work, not individual work. It's a perceptional thing. So if you suddenly do an Oscar-winning short film, and your site's back catalogue is suddenly getting a million hits a day, you aren't going to see enough donations to cover costs.
I don't really have enough time to get into the whole 'micropayments suck' flamewars, but since I have BitPass content I figure I should say something.
Will people pay with micropayments? The word 'micropayment' itself is so stupid, that I can't believe it really exists. People will inevitably buy stuff on the internet for less than a $1. Everyone will laugh that people even bothered arguing about 'micropayments'.
Do I need statistics? Do I need statistics to notice that my atypical 12-year old sister uses the net more than watches TV? She's primed to buy off the net casually like its the corner shop. Just wait till she's old enough to get a credit card.
The thing is, if I make Good content, and the customer pool is big enough(its not but its getting bigger) making a living as an independent artist is feasible. Arguing over HOW I get paid is a waste. And, unlike being an 'independent' animator selling my animations to a distributor, I really am independent. I'm not recieving a trickle-down perentage. I'm not making royalties off a distributor, Bitpass is getting a percentage off me.
The big questions for me are "What are the benefits for early adoption?" and "What is BitPass' killer app?". Every month, from now on until I die, I'll profit off animations I've made. And so as I add my own non-free content to my site, when micropayments finally hit, my back catalogue should sell, and hopefully recoup being in the red. For me early adoption is critical to having enough sustainable content for when smaller payments become mainstream.
Paypal had eBay, but BitPass needs something like iTunes, to increase the pool of content creators and customers. It's a typical network economy model, faxes need other faxes. Hopefully something like this should happen soon.
So just shut up, sign up for BitPass and buy my stuff!!!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Before you post such a headline, perhaps it would be a good idea to check your facts. I RTFA'ed and checked those links and there is no mention of how many servers were attacked. There were 510,000 pages mentioned, but pages do not equal servers. This a sensationalistic headline based on a sensationalistic interpretation of a Google web search.
I've been a fan of Jabber for years now, and use it heavily. I was very happy to hear that Google Talk used the Jabber server, but completely disheartened to hear that server-to-server communications don't exist. Why do you choose to create yet another closed IM network? I don't want a gmail account, but I would like to talk to your gmail users with my existing jabber account. What you have created is NOT OPEN, and NOT JABBER but a bastardised subset of its protocols and ideals.
Open up your servers!!!
Yes, my friend does have an inability to buy decent hardware. So does that mean she should be priced out of the game? As an alternative, why not allow for access to the same auction house from multiple locations in the game world?
In order to progress through the game, its important to sell your goods at the auction house. Its practically a requirement. When I play, I generally leave my Hearthstone at Ironforge, because after I'm out running around I need to teleport back there to sell my stuff.
I'm lucky, a friend of mine cannot even step foot in Ironforge. Her computer is unable to withstand the heavy lag and number of players. We went once, it took 45 minutes to get back out. Now I just buy her equipment, and bring it to her.
What is the reason for your decision to limit the auction house to a couple geographical locations within the game? This not only excludes a vast number of players from improving their characters at the early stages because of proximity, but also requires extra travel time, and completely excludes people with lower end systems from being able to easily sell their stuff. Is the reason a technical bottleneck of some sort, or a design decision?
I'm glad to see that people are still interested in this animation after all these years :). When I first made this animation, I didn't think the popularity would be what it is today. I was just having fun. I made this in 2002, and got a surprise bandwidth bill of $500 because of it. Now I've got a great server farm ( plug: www.cachefly.com ) that handles the load, so slashdot away :).
Man, I've got to make a sequel some day!
This book is also available online at O'Reilly's Safari site.
Also, although Ant is used mainly to build Java, it is NOT java-centric. It can be used to compile any language.
At least it did until the server's bandwidth got exceeded.
x ist"
#!/bin/bash
# Quick script to grab a bunch of files off the web
# Filetype is a search string (regex)
# Examples: avi wmv images/*.jpg
# Location is the url of the page you want to grab from
# Example: foo.com/page.html
tempHTML="somethingthatdoesnte
echo "What kind of file do you want to grab?"
read filetype
echo Grabbing $filetype
echo "From what location?"
read location
echo "Retrieving file $location"
wget $location -O $tempHTML
for name in $(grep $filetype $tempHTML | sed -e 's|.*href="\([^"]*\)".*|\1|')
do
wget $name
done
rm -fr $tempHTML
~
I'd agree that flash is the way to go for video. Mpeg probably has the best compatibility, but for websites, where filesize and user experience are just as important as compatibility, Flash wins hands down. I'm not sure if the people on AIX and Amiga would agree tho.
_ win.php
f dd/fdd 000131.shtml
Another great flash video option is the Sorenson Squeeze codec.
http://www.sorenson.com/solutions/prod/mx
More info on FLV:
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/
This might also look familiar to people because parts of this are on Robert Cringeley's 'Triumph of the Nerds'.
I was actually emailed by a sco representative who wanted to link to one of my animations on their website. Here's most of it:
-----------------
We are putting a site together that will go live on November 1 and have a link on the site called "Just for Fun."
We would like to link to your site to give people access to "Steve the Linux Super Villian." It's absolutely hilarious and we would love to profile that on this section of the site, just to show people that we have a sense of humor.
May we have your permission to link to your site from our site?
-----------------
To which I replied:
ABSOLUTELY, WITHOUT A DOUBT, NO.
Obviously they didn't notice my Penguin Blood Ninja FiaSCO animation.
I'm not too surprised by today's news!
A parody doesn't allow for unlicensed playback of copyrighted works. LucasArts are perfectly within their rights to request this!
Your anti-fud is fud:
.09 and .4. But really you've said a lot of valid things, but nothing that can sway me away from the XML being unneeded bloat. There's a lot of people who compare compressed file sizes and say they are roughly the same. If you compressed 40 bytes I bet you could get it down to 9...some of the time. I don't know though, all the SVG I've seen has been ungodly enormous.
"in this day and age comparing 9 bytes with 40 is like comparing 0.0001 seconds with 0.00001 even on a mobile."
SWF is not a hack. Another attempt at fud. The format has stayed VERY lean of cruft.
Actually its like comparing
Hey, I love XML. And for 99% of things XML is just fantastic. I use schemas, xslt, SAX, DOM, etc. all the time.
Using XML formats for what should be binary/bytecode data is a total waste. Sure you can compress it all you want(flash can also compress its bytecode) but it's not going to get smaller than Flash's (compressed) bytecode. Why don't we use XML for images?
Because text and text processing isn't anywhere NEAR the same thing as vector and image processing. Sure I could xslt transform some xml/html into an svg compatible format, and put it on a web page. It has its applications. I could do the same thing via jgenerator into flash(via XML might I add).
But why would I? If I was coding that would be a rather useful trick. But this isn't code, it's also visual. I'm not going to code a flash animation in Flash. I'm going to draw it in Flash. I'm not going to make an SVG animation by hand, I'm going to draw it in an SVG program. You can't XSLT transform the mona lisa. You could try, but you'd probably just end up with a conceptual piece of fine art garbage.
I guess where I'm going with this, as I originally stated, is that SVG is a great idea, but I don't really care if my illustration is in XML. It's just going to get in the way.
Sure there are applications where XML could be useful, but none of those applications are really visual. The applications are things like maps, and online shops maybe, where you'd want to put together text and image. But you will be very hard pressed to create an application that can create SVG output, compress it, and send it out faster than a pre-compiled binary. And I'm not talking out of my ass. Look at the jgenerator and see if you can create and compress svgs faster than it can spit out a processed swf template binary.
And don't get me started on the alpha support.
Bah. I usually agree that the open source format is the preferred format. But having worked with the flash swf file format and having seen SVG in action, I'll go with flash. Its not even worth trying SVG, SVG Tiny, or any variant.
The 'interactivity' aspect of SVG is laughable. It's on par with Flash v2, which basically gives it just enough interactivity to make it positively annoying, but not at all useful. Give SVG forms(XForms would be nice) and it might be more approachable. It sickens me to think that everyone likes to complain about Flash being annoying, but then support an even more annoying format just because its open source.
There's too much XML bloat within SVG to make it of much use. A flash rectangle is 9 bytes. SVG's is about 40. A flash matrix record is about 5 bytes, SVG's is at least 5 times that. These are basic atomic units used hundreds if not thousands of times throughout a file.
Plus the SVG parser has to compile to an internal vector engine. Flash is already compiled to HIGHLY optimized bytecode.
There's no way I'm going to use hundreds of bytes to describe just one shape. And then waste precious cell phone processing power to parse the xml into an internal format.
If anything, there should be an intermediate bytecode format determined by the W3C to allow for compiled SVGTiny.
Haha, yes, I'm a lazy slashdot poster. But nice link! Just installed it.
Bookmarklets are an underrated way to extend the usability of Mozilla, Firefox and even IE.
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
I have 'zap plugins' and 'zap images' in my personal toolbar to stop strobing ads and flash on a page-by-page basis. Works great!
Joel mainly pits the MSDN crowd vs. the Chen crowd as a struggle over 'which API is better'. The Chen crowd seems less interested about which API is better(although they are probably very interested), and more interested in protecting coders from themselves.
.NET is automating protecting coders from themselves, which is exactly what the Chen crowd wants anyway.
Joel's comparisons of MSDN and Chen camps is also divided by auto-managed vs. coder-managed memory. With newer versions of MS products, there is much less of a need for the Chen camp, because their main focus is fixing coder errors to keep apis stable with newer versions. Something that isn't important when programmers can't accidentally bog up a chunk of memory.
I would hazard a guess that memory managed code is what is the demise of the Chen crowd because
Alas this is all theoretical to me, since I'm a java guy. I guess that places me in the MSDN camp. But this is all theoretical anyway because MS is doomed to bankruptcy by the end of next week.
Gotta love the google cache:
Project David Overview
Project David Architecture
Project David Technology
Umm....THIS is what the 'furor' is over. If you're going to use open source software, it has to be, like, open. This does not in any way, shape or form mention WINE, that they use open source, but only states that they've found the magic elixir that gives +10 to windows emulation.
Of course it doesn't give them pointy horns either, but it does destroy their credibility. And what's up with 50 simultaneous developers? Can anyone verify if that number's at ALL realistic?
This is one of those times where I really love linux's libre. I wasn't really taken with Redhat on the desktop, but it works great on the server. Upgrading using a different distro is very straight-forward, and I'm much happier now with Mandrake.
I've been using RH 7.3 and 8 forever, and just last week upgraded to Mandrake 10 for my desktops, and RHEL2.1 for my server. I was using 7.3 for a long time, was very happy with it, and I would've just gone ahead and kept using it if my hard drive didn't start giving errors a couple days ago.
Redhat's server line is really solid, well supported, and migration from 7.3 took about an hour tops(with cp-ing everything!). I've never used Fedora, because I'm really happy, ecstatic really, with Mandrake on the desktop. All the weird hardware that I had to compile and figure out how it works, and write wiki entries about just worked flawlessly in Mandrake 10.
The only thing I miss from my RH8 with KDE3.2 is the keyboard shortcuts. Why was that removed from the Mandrake KDE build?
I agree. Just this weekend I authored my first dvd in linux after much fuss. It is a clunky world of command lines at the moment, but I must stress that if you stick with it, there is a method to it. DVD Authoring in Linux is young, give it some time and a couple GUIs should improve things.
d read-0.9.4-fr2.i386.rpmr 2.i386.rpm6 .tar.gzt ar.gz
3 m l
But really, my needs were simple, one movie, no chapters and no menus. What took me a while wasn't dvdauthor, but working out the dependencies for everything, compiling it all, and then getting it to burn.
Too much to get into here, but here's a partial list of unusual dependencies for the above programs before you can even compile and open them:
libdv-0.101.tar.gz
cdrtools-2.00.tar.gz
libdv
libdvdread-devel-0.9.4-f
dvdauthor-0.6.9.tar.gz libquicktime-0.9.2.tar.gz
dvd+rw-tools-5.17.4.8.
mjpegtools-1.6.2.tar.gz
jpeg-mmx-0.1.5.
nasm-0.98.38.tar.gz
k3b-0.11.6.tar
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=695
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue83/stoddard.ht
http://www.dahnielson.com/primer.txt
One last note. dvdrtools no longer exists, and the mkisofs from cdrtools 2.0 supports the -dvd-video switch, although this is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the man or help files.
And if you've gotten this far, I hope you bought brand name DVD media, otherwise you're just making coasters...
I did a lot of research a while back before I bought mine.
Toshiba: Heavy, expensive, and not very well designed. Car simile: Late Model Ford.
Sager: I've owned Sager laptops before, and they are the BEST workhorses BUT they don't survive long on a battery and very heavy. Car simile: Hummer
Compaq: Expensive and pretty, and no stand-out features. Car simile: Plymouth Prowler
Acer: This is the one I went for. The C102 is one of the smallest notebooks around, with a decent battery life and a fast recharge. You can get 2-3 hours on a charge, and it recharges in 50 minutes. Not very powerful, but gets the job done.
Car simile: Honda Civic
Perhaps I've been wrong all these years, but I was under the assumption Winamp wasn't "Windows Amplifier" but WinAMP Windows Another Music Player.
I remember a lot of different AMPS, ModAMP, YAMP(Yet Another Music Player),etc. and WinAMP was one of the first AMPs made for windows along with MOD4WIN which wasn't free. Winamp was also among the first that was able to play mods within Windows. It was a testament to the quality of Justin's code that he was able to scrimp together enough cycles to play music with windows' overhead.
Hopefully this can help you understand the situation:
Penguin Blood Ninja Fiasco!!
Shameless self plug....
He could be the first presidential astronaut!
Maybe we can get him to stay there and leave us alone...
"And that's one small step for us folks, and... hey guys, where are you going? Wait! What about my tortillaaaaaaaas!!!!"
Granted, it's a barrier, in the same sense that a cash register is a barrier. But if you've used Bitpass, you'll see that once you've set up an account, the artificial barrier is the one in your head. As people figure this out, just like they did with Amazon and eBay, people will use it.
Who's going to make Matrix grade movies for free? Who's going to draw an X-Men Unlimited comic series for free? If 100 people look at a 10MB animation on my site, that's a gig of bandwidth. Who's going to be able to give that away for free?
Sure, a 100 other people might come along and blog better for free, but beyond text the ability to create quality work for free becomes phenomenally more expensive.
Even if you were to cultivate a loyal throng of patrons, there's no way they can financially support larger scale quality work. Besides the hard part of finding such loyal super-nice people, you'd have to keep them interested while you are working. Say you are working on a short work that spans 2-3 months. How are you supposed to hold interest and keep people donating?
Additionally, you are quickly digging yourself into a hole because you are essentially being paid for your time instead of your work and operational costs. Say you release a short comic a month, for free, relying on your close circle. Each comic you create increases traffic to your site, but the amount of money you recieve isn't necessarily proportional to the amount of money you are making. And so the more work you make, the higher your costs become.
People donate sitewide. The kind and generous people who do donate(did i mention these people are earthbound angels, too?), will generally pay you for all your work, not individual work. It's a perceptional thing. So if you suddenly do an Oscar-winning short film, and your site's back catalogue is suddenly getting a million hits a day, you aren't going to see enough donations to cover costs.
I don't really have enough time to get into the whole 'micropayments suck' flamewars, but since I have BitPass content I figure I should say something.
:)
Will people pay with micropayments? The word 'micropayment' itself is so stupid, that I can't believe it really exists. People will inevitably buy stuff on the internet for less than a $1. Everyone will laugh that people even bothered arguing about 'micropayments'.
Do I need statistics? Do I need statistics to notice that my atypical 12-year old sister uses the net more than watches TV? She's primed to buy off the net casually like its the corner shop. Just wait till she's old enough to get a credit card.
The thing is, if I make Good content, and the customer pool is big enough(its not but its getting bigger) making a living as an independent artist is feasible. Arguing over HOW I get paid is a waste. And, unlike being an 'independent' animator selling my animations to a distributor, I really am independent. I'm not recieving a trickle-down perentage. I'm not making royalties off a distributor, Bitpass is getting a percentage off me.
The big questions for me are "What are the benefits for early adoption?" and "What is BitPass' killer app?". Every month, from now on until I die, I'll profit off animations I've made. And so as I add my own non-free content to my site, when micropayments finally hit, my back catalogue should sell, and hopefully recoup being in the red. For me early adoption is critical to having enough sustainable content for when smaller payments become mainstream.
Paypal had eBay, but BitPass needs something like iTunes, to increase the pool of content creators and customers. It's a typical network economy model, faxes need other faxes. Hopefully something like this should happen soon.
So just shut up, sign up for BitPass and buy my stuff!!!