Hence the fact that it's a thin client. In other words, virtually none of the processing (apart from some basic drawing to the screen functions) is done locally. It's all done on some big server the user never has to see.
Huh? That's a page about weblogs. I'm not talking about that kind of writing. If all that is left in online publishing is weblogs, the web is going to be a very boring place to be.
It isn't free to produce good content. No, most weblogs don't count as good content. A journalist might charge (say) $500+ for a decent size article. You have to add hosting and bandwidth costs to that - obviously, whatever Shirky says, it's not just as cheap to serve 200,000 pages as it is 1.
Good free content on the internet at the moment is supported basically by advertising. Either directly through banners or google ads, or indirectly, through advertising some offline publication or organisation. Newspapers reprint stuff online as they have already paid the cost to have it written, so they might as well get some advertising online.
At present CPM rates, without some other (offline) form of support, you need a lot of page impressions to break even. $8/CPM/page? Thats 70,000 page impressions or so to start making money, and you're squeezing the article in around 4 banners.
So, in order to make money the sites need alternatives. Split the article over five pages instead of one - sure, it annoys the reader, but we get more page impressions per reader. Add more intrusive advertising - pop-ups, salon.com style ads? Again, annoys the reader, but more money.
Annoying readers isn't a good long-term business plan.
So, charge subscriptions? This puts a huge mental barrier in the way of your customers- what if newspapers were only available in 6 month subscription editions? I'd be interested to know how much money Slashdot makes of its 'premium service' subscription system - I hope it works.
So that leaves micropayments as an alternative. I really think there is a chance that they could work, if properly implemented.
1) Providing reinforcement - "if you click now, you'll do this thing here, the one that's all magnified and obvious now" 2) Fitt's law - the button you're trying to click on gets bigger when you get near it, so it's easier to hit.
Being called a retard by an AC. Wow. Anyway, clearly the screensaver issue was contentious as it's been pulled from the page.
If you read my comment, I never said that this was 'wrong'. I just said that I doubt people will put up with it, and there are plenty of other distros out there for them to use instead. Mandrake can do whatever they want. Of course they can't stop you changing the screensaver. I never said they did. They could, however, make you jump through a lot of hoops to do so. Like removing all the controls to change screensaver settings (although that's a moot point now) in the installed version. Sure, you could remove the Mandrake packages and install your own, but that's hassle and I imagine could be made more difficult (dependencies for RPMs, online updates checking installed versions). Of course, this is all moot now that Mandrake have issued their statement. To me this looks like testing the waters for an idea to see what the response would be.
I read the article. I read the commments. I can't see any mention of how easy they are to remove. Just "A single message appears for two months (from October 10th to December 10th)" and so on.
Plus the screensaver has adverts. Plus the default start page in the web browser has adverts. If it is that easy to remove, then fine; if you have to install non-mandrake RPMs or from source in order to remove it because they hacked the source to prevent their removal, that's going to annoy a lot of people, especially as Mandrake is targeted at Linux newbies.
Windows users seem more prepared to accept this kind of thing (witness the adverts in Messenger, invasive programs like RealOne, lack of pop-up blocking in IE). I doubt your average Linux distro user (even a Mandrake user) is going to put up with this. Adverts during the install process I could just about stomach; after all, Mandrake has to make money somehow. But a major advantage of using Linux is that no one but you owns your desktop - this removes that advantage.
This should really be in the slashdot FAQ. It was settled way back in the day with 3DFX's demo comparing 30 and 60fps side by side.
1) The fps number is an average. If you average 25fps, then when things get busy on screen the rate can drop to 15 or something, which is very visible and ugly. I you run at 60, that doesn't happen. 2) 25fps looks bad for rapid movement and panning (ie, most games). Next time you watch a film, look at how blurry everything looks when the camera pans rapidly.
Yeah, I spent ages trying to kill the final boss. My room mate did it in no time at all - he figured out there was a rock up the top you could hide behind where you couldn't be hurt by the boss.
256mb of RAM should be fine. The difference in memory usage between a bare windowmaker desktop and a KDE one is about 60meg (~34meg -> ~90meg). That's worth about what, $20? Considering the vast amount of functionality that gives me, I think that's a worthwhile trade off. Back in the day, I was a major lightweight system zealot. I used Ratpoison or Ion at work (if you though fvwm was lightweight, you ain't seen nothing yet). Then I realised that saving 0.5 seconds on launching a terminal window didn't make me any more productive, but having excellent integrated apps like kmail and konqueror did.
Startup is bad, and it does use way too much memory. It used to be bad enough that I used WindowMaker instead, but 3.0 was good enough to convince me to come back. The KDE people have a whole mailing list dedicated to optimisation and areas for speedup are being identified and fixed.
Re:Gnome development outpacing KDE?
on
Gnome 2.4 Release(d)
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Must...not...respond....to....troll...but can't help it
I lurk on the kde dev mailing lists and the number of changes upcoming in 3.2 is pretty impressive: A lot of new PIM features, the Safari changes to KHTML, speed improvements. KDE is at the stage where new releases are really adding polish rather than making major changes, but there are still a lot of good new things going in.
Maybe I let my anger at SCO get the better of me. I'm an engineer - I like things in plain English, and I don't normally do very well at parsing obfuscated PR-speak like this.
No, it's not true. He missed out the "and provided as open source software to the community" afer the "(owned by SCO)".
And what he continues on to say after my quote is definitely untrue. It wasn't licensed under "strict conditions of use" and stolen from SCO, it was licensed as "Redistribution and use, in source or binary forms, are permitted as long as the following conditions are met..." (goes on to say no warranty, keep copyright notice and don't use Caldera's name without permission) - from here: ftp://ftp.tribug.org/pub/tuhs/Caldera-license.pdf.
SCO doesn't have a point - Linus is on record as saying that the Linux team are extremely careful about IP issues and have had procedures in place to ensure they only use code they have rights to.
"... was an admission by Open Source leader Bruce Perens that UNIX System V code (owned by SCO) is, in fact, in Linux, and it shouldn't be there"
There is absolutely no way for SCO to spin this. This is a simple lie. Not a twist on a truth, not a half-truth, not something that they could ever show even the most tenuous evidence for. It's a straight lie.
It'll be interesting to see how Darl gets out of that one when the SEC knock on his door.
Is there anyone out there who has actually filled up a 20Gb Ipod and would want a 40Gb version?
I'm not trying to knock Ipods- I'd actually really like to know if anyone does have that many MP3s etc. I think my entire CD collection would fit several times over in that much space.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think they should use cold fusion. Or maybe a small antimatter reactor.
Hence the fact that it's a thin client. In other words, virtually none of the processing (apart from some basic drawing to the screen functions) is done locally. It's all done on some big server the user never has to see.
Why is it that all interviews online are posted as question, answer, question, answer...
It's such a boring, lazy way of writing. Why not do what grown up journalists do and actually write something?
Huh? That's a page about weblogs. I'm not talking about that kind of writing. If all that is left in online publishing is weblogs, the web is going to be a very boring place to be.
It isn't free to produce good content. No, most weblogs don't count as good content. A journalist might charge (say) $500+ for a decent size article. You have to add hosting and bandwidth costs to that - obviously, whatever Shirky says, it's not just as cheap to serve 200,000 pages as it is 1.
Good free content on the internet at the moment is supported basically by advertising. Either directly through banners or google ads, or indirectly, through advertising some offline publication or organisation. Newspapers reprint stuff online as they have already paid the cost to have it written, so they might as well get some advertising online.
At present CPM rates, without some other (offline) form of support, you need a lot of page impressions to break even. $8/CPM/page? Thats 70,000 page impressions or so to start making money, and you're squeezing the article in around 4 banners.
So, in order to make money the sites need alternatives. Split the article over five pages instead of one - sure, it annoys the reader, but we get more page impressions per reader. Add more intrusive advertising - pop-ups, salon.com style ads? Again, annoys the reader, but more money.
Annoying readers isn't a good long-term business plan.
So, charge subscriptions? This puts a huge mental barrier in the way of your customers- what if newspapers were only available in 6 month subscription editions? I'd be interested to know how much money Slashdot makes of its 'premium service' subscription system - I hope it works.
So that leaves micropayments as an alternative. I really think there is a chance that they could work, if properly implemented.
I think the magnification is meant to help by:
1) Providing reinforcement - "if you click now, you'll do this thing here, the one that's all magnified and obvious now"
2) Fitt's law - the button you're trying to click on gets bigger when you get near it, so it's easier to hit.
Being called a retard by an AC. Wow. Anyway, clearly the screensaver issue was contentious as it's been pulled from the page.
If you read my comment, I never said that this was 'wrong'. I just said that I doubt people will put up with it, and there are plenty of other distros out there for them to use instead. Mandrake can do whatever they want. Of course they can't stop you changing the screensaver. I never said they did. They could, however, make you jump through a lot of hoops to do so. Like removing all the controls to change screensaver settings (although that's a moot point now) in the installed version. Sure, you could remove the Mandrake packages and install your own, but that's hassle and I imagine could be made more difficult (dependencies for RPMs, online updates checking installed versions).
Of course, this is all moot now that Mandrake have issued their statement. To me this looks like testing the waters for an idea to see what the response would be.
I read the article. I read the commments. I can't see any mention of how easy they are to remove. Just "A single message appears for two months (from October 10th to December 10th)" and so on.
Plus the screensaver has adverts. Plus the default start page in the web browser has adverts. If it is that easy to remove, then fine; if you have to install non-mandrake RPMs or from source in order to remove it because they hacked the source to prevent their removal, that's going to annoy a lot of people, especially as Mandrake is targeted at Linux newbies.
Windows users seem more prepared to accept this kind of thing (witness the adverts in Messenger, invasive programs like RealOne, lack of pop-up blocking in IE).
I doubt your average Linux distro user (even a Mandrake user) is going to put up with this. Adverts during the install process I could just about stomach; after all, Mandrake has to make money somehow. But a major advantage of using Linux is that no one but you owns your desktop - this removes that advantage.
You're new round here, right?
No more than a few snippets of code! That whirring noise is my 128K +2 spinning in its grave. You could do a darn site more than that with a Sinclair.
This should really be in the slashdot FAQ. It was settled way back in the day with 3DFX's demo comparing 30 and 60fps side by side.
1) The fps number is an average. If you average 25fps, then when things get busy on screen the rate can drop to 15 or something, which is very visible and ugly. I you run at 60, that doesn't happen.
2) 25fps looks bad for rapid movement and panning (ie, most games). Next time you watch a film, look at how blurry everything looks when the camera pans rapidly.
Yeah, I spent ages trying to kill the final boss. My room mate did it in no time at all - he figured out there was a rock up the top you could hide behind where you couldn't be hurt by the boss.
256mb of RAM should be fine. The difference in memory usage between a bare windowmaker desktop and a KDE one is about 60meg (~34meg -> ~90meg). That's worth about what, $20? Considering the vast amount of functionality that gives me, I think that's a worthwhile trade off.
Back in the day, I was a major lightweight system zealot. I used Ratpoison or Ion at work (if you though fvwm was lightweight, you ain't seen nothing yet). Then I realised that saving 0.5 seconds on launching a terminal window didn't make me any more productive, but having excellent integrated apps like kmail and konqueror did.
Startup is bad, and it does use way too much memory. It used to be bad enough that I used WindowMaker instead, but 3.0 was good enough to convince me to come back. The KDE people have a whole mailing list dedicated to optimisation and areas for speedup are being identified and fixed.
Must...not...respond....to....troll...but can't help it
I lurk on the kde dev mailing lists and the number of changes upcoming in 3.2 is pretty impressive: A lot of new PIM features, the Safari changes to KHTML, speed improvements. KDE is at the stage where new releases are really adding polish rather than making major changes, but there are still a lot of good new things going in.
Dammit, stop letting the truth get in the way of a good story.
Next you'll be saying Slashdotters should read the article before posting.
>The future could include eBook re-releases of
>books long out of print
The future is here already (well, for Palm users anyway):
http://dave.pluckerbooks.com:81/
Maybe I let my anger at SCO get the better of me. I'm an engineer - I like things in plain English, and I don't normally do very well at parsing obfuscated PR-speak like this.
No, it's not true. He missed out the "and provided as open source software to the community" afer the "(owned by SCO)".
.
And what he continues on to say after my quote is definitely untrue. It wasn't licensed under "strict conditions of use" and stolen from SCO, it was licensed as "Redistribution and use, in source or binary forms, are permitted as long as the following conditions are met..." (goes on to say no warranty, keep copyright notice and don't use Caldera's name without permission) - from here: ftp://ftp.tribug.org/pub/tuhs/Caldera-license.pdf
SCO doesn't have a point - Linus is on record as saying that the Linux team are extremely careful about IP issues and have had procedures in place to ensure they only use code they have rights to.
"... was an admission by Open Source leader Bruce Perens that UNIX System V code (owned by SCO) is, in fact, in Linux, and it shouldn't be there"
There is absolutely no way for SCO to spin this. This is a simple lie. Not a twist on a truth, not a half-truth, not something that they could ever show even the most tenuous evidence for. It's a straight lie.
It'll be interesting to see how Darl gets out of that one when the SEC knock on his door.
4LL J00 C$ W3EN1E5 c@n $UCk mY 4S$! DAY 0f D3fE@T 0wn5 Y0U!
Is there anyone out there who has actually filled up a 20Gb Ipod and would want a 40Gb version?
I'm not trying to knock Ipods- I'd actually really like to know if anyone does have that many MP3s etc. I think my entire CD collection would fit several times over in that much space.