I recently got into video editing. Until now, I've never needed anything faster than a single CPU system.
Now I understand, completely, what those who do rendering gripe about when it comes to CPU speed never being fast enough.
2:57 of video takes my 1GHz w/ 1GB RAM machine nearly 2 HOURS to render. Just for 3 stinking minutes of video!
The fastest current single CPU would only decrease that number to about 40 minutes, which is still too slow.
A dual CPU solution would bring it down to 20 minutes, but again, if I ever wanted to render even 15 minutes of video, that would be 1 hr 40 mins of CPU time.
And forget doing anything else with the computer while it's rendering. It will start dropping frames like mad, and you have to start over.
Now a 4-way workstation is something that would work. With a 4-way 3GHz Opteron system, I could render in near real-time, and a regular sized MB, if not slightly oversized, could handle 4 procs.
SuperMicro is the only MB mfg. I know of that makes a 4-way board, but it's for Xeons and is insanely expensive ($1800 +/- $100) and that's before you add the overpriced CPUs.
If AMD came out with a moderately prices 4-way workstation, they could get the CAD/CAM, video editing, 3D modeling, rendering and compiling crowd all at once, in addition to the freak gamers and Gotta Have The Best Even Though I'll Never Use It crowds.
The 4-way system is a neglected niche. AMD should fill it.
"Which Americans do you think invented the computer?"
Eckert and Mauchly.
And I realize this is an argument that can stretch back to Pascal and Leibniz, if the the debaters so chose, but at some point one must give credit for the *current* state of computing, and that credit belongs mostly to the Yanks.
And I further realize that Americans themselves, for the most part, descended from Europeans. But at some point you have to say, "An American did this." If a person was born here, they are American. Furthermore, if a person immigrates and is naturalized here, they are American. That is where I draw my lines.
And if you choose to fault us for Microsoft, don't forget to give us credit for UNIX at the same time.
"We think European Students can build better OSes than US corporations" - Linus
Rrriigghhttt... And Linux copied UNIX, which was developed where? And by who?
"We think that the best things to come out of IBM were developed in Europe" - MQSeries
And IBM started where?
Not to mention the fact that Americans INVENTED THE COMPUTER, which started the entire industry for which Europeons are patting themselves on the back for excelling at.
Arrogant, indeed.
Now MOD me down for not being anti-American and telling the truth. Fucking Slashdot zombies.
They proposed that a nuke could be detonated in front of the craft, and a giant sail would capture the energy from the blast and rapidly accelerate the craft. Do that a few times, using nukes with small enough yields to not break the astronauts necks, and it should accelerate them nicely without having to lug around shitloads of fuel.
I don't think it's possible to overestimate the inspirational value this would have on young minds. All the ability in the world is worthless without motivation.
Seeing dreams come true is highly motivational, and as such, well worth the expense.
The EU is doing it primarily so that users can refill the ink/toner cartridges they already own in a effort to decrease the amount of crap going into landfills or incinerators.
They are not, at least on the surface, doing it to discourage competition in the marketplace.
If there has ever been a case where 'crying wolf' was appropriate, this is it.
Really, think of all the ridiculus bullshit non-threats that people go nuts about.
In the 80's we were warned about the dangers of salt. Later, we realized only about 2% of the population has to be concerned. Yet millions upon millions were spent developing and marketing salt substitutes (Mrs. Dash, Lemon Pepper, Potassium Chloride, etc.) all for what turned out to be a perceived threat.
If humans are willing to spend millions because they were afraid of salt, imagine what they will happily fork over to protect them from an asteroid/comet/meteor slamming into Earth.
Real threat, slim chance, whatever. Lots of good scientific research would come out of this.
Why you are curious about my nuts, I have no idea. But I'll answer, so you can sleep tonight.
Testicular atrophy is normal while taking steroids, but if you only are on for short periods of time, they swell back to normal once you stop the cycle.
If you take Clomiphene Citrate after a cycle, you can stay on for quite a while and still save your nads from perma-shrinkage.
If you want to bukkake your girl, pop a few Clomid tabs and wait a few days. You'll be spurting ounces at a time. Here's a pic of my pet squirrel after having Clomid mixed into his feed for a few days.
As for the phallus, steroids actually increase the size of it. Small balls, large crank. Who gives a shit about large nuts, anyway? Really, when was the last time you heard a bunch of chicks sitting around talking fondly of some guy's gigantic testes?
As you can see, there is no comic today - that's my fault, and involves many factors (the most significant of which is my complete and utter inability to draw tonight. once you go thru 10 sheets of paper its time to face facts and go to plan 'b') So, you get a new comic Thursday and Friday this week instead of Wednesday and Friday. What's a few more hate e-mail this week, i'll live.
I have a tendency to forget things sometimes. Like, for instance, Sweetest Day. Valentines day. Seraphim's Birthday. The fact that you buy gifts for people at Christmas. Things like that.
Even when i do remember these things, the execution of them often has tragic results. I don't send Seraphim flowers typically. Mostly because of one incident where i sent her this amazingly beautiful arrangement that had pollen so toxic that we had to lock the bouquet in the bathroom to keep it from killing her. This florist has subsequently gone out of business.
When it comes to gifts, i'm not big on 'oh, its a holiday, i gotta find something, anything' kind of gift giver. I'd rather come up with something REALLY nice, or really useful. This attitude towards gift giving makes it harder than normal to find things for the people in your life. More often than not, i tend to push off these shopping tasks until it is too late, resulting in the 'pick up anything you can find' method of shopping the day before you need it (i've purchased chirstmas presents on christmas day. Yes, i am that pathetic.)
Anyways, as you might expect, valentines day this year was even worse than usual. Seraphim told me without hesitation that she was more than happy with the botched shirt and candy box gift i attempted to give her days earlier (long story), but i still felt BAD for not having something to give her on valentines day itself. So, i think to myself, i'll send her an e-card! Yea! the ultimate loser geek thing to send to your girl.
For years, i've been sending out Blue Mountain Arts cards to Seraphim, often forgetting that i had already sent her that particular card (bear themed cards are popular between us) but even so, i don't do it THAT regularly. So imagine my surprise when i pulled up Blue Mountain Arts that day and discovered that this once free service was now something you had to pay for.
So, as a loving boyfriend, did i pony up the dough and send her a card? Hell no.
There's an inherent part of human nature that just makes you bristle at having to suddenly pay for something that you didn't have to pay for before. Have a great free service? Sure, people will use it and love it. The business model that says 'give it to them for a while for free so they fall in love with it, then start charging them?' - er, sorry guys. Nice business model, absolutely no understanding of human nature. Since a significant portion of the dot-com economy was based on this model, it should have been no surprise to anyone that the whole thing fell on it's collective ass.
I can totally understand why Blue Mountain Arts switched to a pay for use model. All that traffic has to use a LOT of bandwidth, and with companies no longer hosing advertising dollars around without any real worries as to whether it was effective or not, there's gotta be some way to pay the bills. So, the idea that you get a significant chunk of your users to pay a small fee makes a lot of sense - after all, you get a LOT of people to pay a LITTLE money, you're problems are over, right? Sadly, i don't think this is really the case. It goes against the very nature of the web.
Lets face it. One of the reasons people LIKE the internet is that it gives people access to a LOT of information and entertainment for very low cost. It's not free - most of us pay a reasonable amount of money for bandwidth and internet connections - but on the net we pretty much like to think that once we've paid admission, we're free to roam and do whatever we like. Transferring information on the net is CHEAP. its so cheap, you can pretty much give it away for free. If people like it, they keep coming back for more. The commodity of the internet isn't money, it's access. It's connections. You're wealth in net terms is defined by 'what you have access to'.
We all have friends or people we know who can find just about anything, legal or otherwise, on the net with little or no effort. MP3 files are a good model to look at for this. A lot of great music is pretty much free for the asking at sites like mp3.com but most of the files traded around aren't really 'legal'. Are people really willing to pay for Mp3 files? Not really, because we already have it in our minds that mp3s are a 'free' resource. We don't feel we get any value buy paying for it. If we DO slap down money for music, we want the tangible piece of circular plastic where we can say 'this is mine'.
Then there is this rather interesting phenomenon that often occurs. Once you have the CD, you burn MP3 files and make them available for others over the net. Why would someone do that? Because it adds value to their purchase. We get not only the music, but the added benefit of having added something to the collective pool of information. You've added access to this music, you've increased your own online 'wealth'.
One of the reasons i started Fredart years and years ago was that i found that i wanted to provide my own thing to the 'pool'. For anime fans, especially back then, there was this whole world of japanese anime and manga where entire series lay waiting to be discovered. If nothing else, you could take all the information available on them, collect it together into a webpage, and make it more easily available for people seeking info on a particular series. At the time, I remember noticing that there were no web pages on 3x3 Eyes, so i decided that i would make one. Pai's Page was, really, the first web page on the series, and i did a fairly good job on it. Once making it, however, i had little interest in working any further on it. There was something that just wasn't satisfying about just re-arranging what was, in effect, someone elses work.
Around that time i started to explore japanese websites that revolved around anime and manga. In japan, it was considered bad form to just scan and post copywrited images, so japanese fans found that the best way they could express their loyalty and love for a series and its characters was to do their own fan works. I really liked this model, and Fredart was direct derivative of those style of pages. I wanted to provide NEW material to the web, not just stuff i had found surfing around, or even stuff scanned out of magazines. I was adding something original to the pool, not just reorganizing and recollecting.
I think that one of the things you get when you add to the pool, so to speak, is a certain amount of respect. you don't just take, you give as well. The net lends itself well to new ways that people can provide things to the collective pool. You don't need to be sponsored and paid for by some big media company to get your work in front of millions of people. The old model was that you had to be able to convince a bunch of people with lots of money that you were worth promoting before you even had a chance to see if people would respond to your work on a grand scale. This lead, for the longest time, to the sad state where only a small number of people decided what the public was going to see. Also, since these same people convinced all of us over the years that ONLY people that they felt were good enough to promote were worthy of entertaining us, that we should not waste our time entertaining ourselves - only paid for entertainment was worthy entertainment. Worked great till the net came along.
The net shatters some of the basic structures that people have used for ages to control the dissemination of information. Easy to send, easy to duplicate. The Dot com economy was doomed from the onset because it was formed on the basis of the idea that by just getting out there and capturing the attention of a big chunk of the internet population, the money would just start flowing in. Heh. Some hard lessons have been learned. It doesn't really work that way.
If you think about it, the real currency on the net isn't money. It's respect. Either as an individual or as an entity you gain respect by providing either new material to the net pool, or you provide effective and useful ways for people to access information that is already out there. A lot of big sites that do this started out small (even yahoo. i remember when it was just a link list over at Stanford run by two guys). Of course, respect doesn't pay the bills, so there always comes a time where you have to start looking at how to not only survive, but maybe even prosper a little on all this.
It's in this armature where the real economic viability of the net rests. There is no direct relationship between turning respect into dollars, but that doesn't mean to say that there isn't some relationship between the two. In my opinion, i feel there is a trade off - when you start charging for what you provide, you loose some of the respect you've earned, because now people have traded cash for it. The nature of the relationship has changed. When you move to a pay-for-services model, it completely changes the nature of the interaction between a site and its users. It's especially bad if people suddenly have to pay for something that was, for the longest time, free. Honestly, i think that it's human nature to almost feel 'betrayed' - which, of course, leads to a real loss of hit points in the respect column. ^_^;; The paradox here is that once people loose respect for a site, won't they be less willing to pay for it?
Odd train of thought, huh? I've had to think a lot about stuff like this lately. Running a site like MT is expensive - we've crested 10 million page views this month already, but at the same time the site is almost no different than it was when it was a non-working html template that i had pieced together over a weekend a year and a half ago. Largo and I really do, i think, have a little bit of an understanding of what makes MT what it is - tho i do have to tell you the mind boggles at why so MANY people seem to find the site worth visiting - and with that understanding comes a responsibility to make sure that whatever we do to help keep the site alive NEVER messes with those things. To me, the respect people have shown me over the years for all the hard work and dedication we've put into the site is something i never want to trade in on - because its worth more than any amount of money to me.
I suppose that its the post-dotcom economy sites that now bear the burden of figuring out how to survive in the wired. How DO you survive, pay hosting bills, make enough money to support yourself and others who help run the site? Traditional business model ways of looking at things has already proven that we all know less than we thought we did. Largo and i do it the hard way - we both work full time jobs AND do this silly site. This is not, of course, ideal, and speaks more about our lack of useful brain cells than any kind of success as a website.
I think that an understanding of human nature is almost more important here on the web than in any other business environment. Why? because unlike in the real world we are used to, we've been trained to an 'us and them' mentality in regards to our entertainment and things that we purchase in stores - we are consumers, they are providers. On the net, its different. We are all one in the same - fredart.com was just as accessible as ibm.com. We all can make websites. We all KNOW we have the ability to reach millions of people. Many sites, even Megatokyo itself, has proven that individuals can do this. You dont need to be a big corporation. We all have the same basic presence on the net - its how we use it that makes us who we are here.
Oh, and Seraphim's reaction to me being so cheap that i wasn't willing to pay for a subscription to Blue Mountain Arts to send her a valentines day e-card? Her answer was, if you think about it, not surprising: "The hell with that. you're little ASCII heart was so cute."
It's not the money you spend, its the thought that goes into it. You can't buy respect, you can only earn it.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently got into video editing. Until now, I've never needed anything faster than a single CPU system.
Now I understand, completely, what those who do rendering gripe about when it comes to CPU speed never being fast enough.
2:57 of video takes my 1GHz w/ 1GB RAM machine nearly 2 HOURS to render. Just for 3 stinking minutes of video!
The fastest current single CPU would only decrease that number to about 40 minutes, which is still too slow.
A dual CPU solution would bring it down to 20 minutes, but again, if I ever wanted to render even 15 minutes of video, that would be 1 hr 40 mins of CPU time.
And forget doing anything else with the computer while it's rendering. It will start dropping frames like mad, and you have to start over.
Now a 4-way workstation is something that would work. With a 4-way 3GHz Opteron system, I could render in near real-time, and a regular sized MB, if not slightly oversized, could handle 4 procs.
SuperMicro is the only MB mfg. I know of that makes a 4-way board, but it's for Xeons and is insanely expensive ($1800 +/- $100) and that's before you add the overpriced CPUs.
If AMD came out with a moderately prices 4-way workstation, they could get the CAD/CAM, video editing, 3D modeling, rendering and compiling crowd all at once, in addition to the freak gamers and Gotta Have The Best Even Though I'll Never Use It crowds.
The 4-way system is a neglected niche. AMD should fill it.
Talisman
"...a little-known vulnerability in many locks..."
Yeah, until now.
Talisman
"Which Americans do you think invented the computer?"
Eckert and Mauchly.
And I realize this is an argument that can stretch back to Pascal and Leibniz, if the the debaters so chose, but at some point one must give credit for the *current* state of computing, and that credit belongs mostly to the Yanks.
And I further realize that Americans themselves, for the most part, descended from Europeans. But at some point you have to say, "An American did this." If a person was born here, they are American. Furthermore, if a person immigrates and is naturalized here, they are American. That is where I draw my lines.
And if you choose to fault us for Microsoft, don't forget to give us credit for UNIX at the same time.
Talisman
"We think European Students can build better OSes than US corporations" - Linus
Rrriigghhttt... And Linux copied UNIX, which was developed where? And by who?
"We think that the best things to come out of IBM were developed in Europe" - MQSeries
And IBM started where?
Not to mention the fact that Americans INVENTED THE COMPUTER, which started the entire industry for which Europeons are patting themselves on the back for excelling at.
Arrogant, indeed.
Now MOD me down for not being anti-American and telling the truth. Fucking Slashdot zombies.
Talisman
I watched a Discovery Channel special on this.
They proposed that a nuke could be detonated in front of the craft, and a giant sail would capture the energy from the blast and rapidly accelerate the craft. Do that a few times, using nukes with small enough yields to not break the astronauts necks, and it should accelerate them nicely without having to lug around shitloads of fuel.
Talisman
I don't think it's possible to overestimate the inspirational value this would have on young minds. All the ability in the world is worthless without motivation.
Seeing dreams come true is highly motivational, and as such, well worth the expense.
Talisman
Assuming you aren't grossly misinformed about Brazil's voting system (which you probably are), they have much bigger problems to deal with.
For example, what good is a technologically sound voting system when all the candidates are shit?
I guess if you don't mind your savings account being frozen by the president (de Mello), or a 35% currency devaluation (Cardoso), or a president without a high school diploma (da Silva), it's not so bad...
And I won't even start on the rampant corruption in Brazil. Slashdot's database wouldn't be able to hold so much information.
We'll put our pride away when Brazil puts away its complete joke of a government and stops forcing its masses to live in abject poverty.
You can lecture us on technology when Brazil stops doing asinine things like blowing up its own oil platforms.
Verdade?
Talisman
Wanna get pissed?
The EU is doing it primarily so that users can refill the ink/toner cartridges they already own in a effort to decrease the amount of crap going into landfills or incinerators.
They are not, at least on the surface, doing it to discourage competition in the marketplace.
Talisman
Wanna get pissed?
Now OpenBSD will have to change their tagline, again.
Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 7 years! Oh yeah, and 1 hole embedded in the Ethernet dri...
"Shit. We ran out of space on the CD cover."
Talisman
Wanna get pissed?
"82% believe they should be allowed to make personal backup copies of CD's."
I'm hoping the other 18% checked the 3) I don't understand this question option.
If 18% of the public believes they shouldn't have the right to back-up their own software, we should begin to panic.
Then again, 18% of the public probably believes in Santa Clause, including G. W. Bush, the Lesser.
Talisman
Earth: "MOMMMMMMM! AA29 won't leave me alone! Please tell him to play on the other side of the solar system?!?"
Tal
"What will i do with a printed image on the media side?!?"
You must be new here.
The answer is: pr0n
Talisman
Actually, 'sabre-toothed tiger' is a bit of a misnomer. You are referring to the Smilodon, which is not closely related to tigers at all.
:)
Sabre teeth were actually a relatively common evolutionary phenomenon during the Cenozoic period, and not only in cats.
Too much to write about. Go read
Talisman
It should be from the butt-butt-butt dept.
I expect that bad things happen in Aussie jails...
"G'day, mate! Wouldya like jelly or syrup?"
(((shudder)))
Talisman
They just figured out that purposely interrupting a user's reading/viewing is annoying?!?
I suppose their next revelation will be that users don't like swift kicks to their nuts, either.
I hate AOL more than I can express in words. I would have to compose a song or paint something to adequately show my loathing for them.
Talisman
If there has ever been a case where 'crying wolf' was appropriate, this is it.
Really, think of all the ridiculus bullshit non-threats that people go nuts about.
In the 80's we were warned about the dangers of salt. Later, we realized only about 2% of the population has to be concerned. Yet millions upon millions were spent developing and marketing salt substitutes (Mrs. Dash, Lemon Pepper, Potassium Chloride, etc.) all for what turned out to be a perceived threat.
If humans are willing to spend millions because they were afraid of salt, imagine what they will happily fork over to protect them from an asteroid/comet/meteor slamming into Earth.
Real threat, slim chance, whatever. Lots of good scientific research would come out of this.
Money well spent, faux fear or not.
Talisman
"That is, if one can ignore latency of 12 hours..."
You must not be an American. I start climbing the walls if my pizza takes longer than 20 minutes.
Talisman
""The first plans for the new alloy are to be used in golf clubs, baseball bats, skis, and cell phone covers.""
"What a great country!"
Yeah, it would be best used to feed the poor...
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
Talisman
No offense to Mr. Silverstein, but I'm much more interested in Cindy! Beautiful, highly successful nerds are terribly rare!
Just so I'm not off-topic:
Mr. Silverstein, how does Cindy look in tight sweaters?
Drool...
Talisman
Your post may have been the only time in history where the tag would have made something cooler.
"did you lose anything else with the steroids?"
Why you are curious about my nuts, I have no idea. But I'll answer, so you can sleep tonight.
Testicular atrophy is normal while taking steroids, but if you only are on for short periods of time, they swell back to normal once you stop the cycle.
If you take Clomiphene Citrate after a cycle, you can stay on for quite a while and still save your nads from perma-shrinkage.
If you want to bukkake your girl, pop a few Clomid tabs and wait a few days. You'll be spurting ounces at a time. Here's a pic of my pet squirrel after having Clomid mixed into his feed for a few days.
As for the phallus, steroids actually increase the size of it. Small balls, large crank. Who gives a shit about large nuts, anyway? Really, when was the last time you heard a bunch of chicks sitting around talking fondly of some guy's gigantic testes?
This is me at a convention in San Diego a few years ago. Before making any smartass comments, yes, I'm the one in the middle.
I am a former Marine, 225 lbs. @ 7% BF, who works as a real network engineer (not a lame-dick MCSE) who runs Linux and FreeBSD at home.
There are two points to this post.
1) I am the meanest geek, ever.
2) Just because you're smart, doesn't mean you have to play the role of the skinny, unathletic nerd.
I knew it would get /.'d, so here it is:
As you can see, there is no comic today - that's my fault, and involves many factors (the most significant of which is my complete and utter inability to draw tonight. once you go thru 10 sheets of paper its time to face facts and go to plan 'b') So, you get a new comic Thursday and Friday this week instead of Wednesday and Friday. What's a few more hate e-mail this week, i'll live.
I have a tendency to forget things sometimes. Like, for instance, Sweetest Day. Valentines day. Seraphim's Birthday. The fact that you buy gifts for people at Christmas. Things like that.
Even when i do remember these things, the execution of them often has tragic results. I don't send Seraphim flowers typically. Mostly because of one incident where i sent her this amazingly beautiful arrangement that had pollen so toxic that we had to lock the bouquet in the bathroom to keep it from killing her. This florist has subsequently gone out of business.
When it comes to gifts, i'm not big on 'oh, its a holiday, i gotta find something, anything' kind of gift giver. I'd rather come up with something REALLY nice, or really useful. This attitude towards gift giving makes it harder than normal to find things for the people in your life. More often than not, i tend to push off these shopping tasks until it is too late, resulting in the 'pick up anything you can find' method of shopping the day before you need it (i've purchased chirstmas presents on christmas day. Yes, i am that pathetic.)
Anyways, as you might expect, valentines day this year was even worse than usual. Seraphim told me without hesitation that she was more than happy with the botched shirt and candy box gift i attempted to give her days earlier (long story), but i still felt BAD for not having something to give her on valentines day itself. So, i think to myself, i'll send her an e-card! Yea! the ultimate loser geek thing to send to your girl.
For years, i've been sending out Blue Mountain Arts cards to Seraphim, often forgetting that i had already sent her that particular card (bear themed cards are popular between us) but even so, i don't do it THAT regularly. So imagine my surprise when i pulled up Blue Mountain Arts that day and discovered that this once free service was now something you had to pay for.
So, as a loving boyfriend, did i pony up the dough and send her a card? Hell no.
There's an inherent part of human nature that just makes you bristle at having to suddenly pay for something that you didn't have to pay for before. Have a great free service? Sure, people will use it and love it. The business model that says 'give it to them for a while for free so they fall in love with it, then start charging them?' - er, sorry guys. Nice business model, absolutely no understanding of human nature. Since a significant portion of the dot-com economy was based on this model, it should have been no surprise to anyone that the whole thing fell on it's collective ass.
I can totally understand why Blue Mountain Arts switched to a pay for use model. All that traffic has to use a LOT of bandwidth, and with companies no longer hosing advertising dollars around without any real worries as to whether it was effective or not, there's gotta be some way to pay the bills. So, the idea that you get a significant chunk of your users to pay a small fee makes a lot of sense - after all, you get a LOT of people to pay a LITTLE money, you're problems are over, right? Sadly, i don't think this is really the case. It goes against the very nature of the web.
Lets face it. One of the reasons people LIKE the internet is that it gives people access to a LOT of information and entertainment for very low cost. It's not free - most of us pay a reasonable amount of money for bandwidth and internet connections - but on the net we pretty much like to think that once we've paid admission, we're free to roam and do whatever we like. Transferring information on the net is CHEAP. its so cheap, you can pretty much give it away for free. If people like it, they keep coming back for more. The commodity of the internet isn't money, it's access. It's connections. You're wealth in net terms is defined by 'what you have access to'.
We all have friends or people we know who can find just about anything, legal or otherwise, on the net with little or no effort. MP3 files are a good model to look at for this. A lot of great music is pretty much free for the asking at sites like mp3.com but most of the files traded around aren't really 'legal'. Are people really willing to pay for Mp3 files? Not really, because we already have it in our minds that mp3s are a 'free' resource. We don't feel we get any value buy paying for it. If we DO slap down money for music, we want the tangible piece of circular plastic where we can say 'this is mine'.
Then there is this rather interesting phenomenon that often occurs. Once you have the CD, you burn MP3 files and make them available for others over the net. Why would someone do that? Because it adds value to their purchase. We get not only the music, but the added benefit of having added something to the collective pool of information. You've added access to this music, you've increased your own online 'wealth'.
One of the reasons i started Fredart years and years ago was that i found that i wanted to provide my own thing to the 'pool'. For anime fans, especially back then, there was this whole world of japanese anime and manga where entire series lay waiting to be discovered. If nothing else, you could take all the information available on them, collect it together into a webpage, and make it more easily available for people seeking info on a particular series. At the time, I remember noticing that there were no web pages on 3x3 Eyes, so i decided that i would make one. Pai's Page was, really, the first web page on the series, and i did a fairly good job on it. Once making it, however, i had little interest in working any further on it. There was something that just wasn't satisfying about just re-arranging what was, in effect, someone elses work.
Around that time i started to explore japanese websites that revolved around anime and manga. In japan, it was considered bad form to just scan and post copywrited images, so japanese fans found that the best way they could express their loyalty and love for a series and its characters was to do their own fan works. I really liked this model, and Fredart was direct derivative of those style of pages. I wanted to provide NEW material to the web, not just stuff i had found surfing around, or even stuff scanned out of magazines. I was adding something original to the pool, not just reorganizing and recollecting.
I think that one of the things you get when you add to the pool, so to speak, is a certain amount of respect. you don't just take, you give as well. The net lends itself well to new ways that people can provide things to the collective pool. You don't need to be sponsored and paid for by some big media company to get your work in front of millions of people. The old model was that you had to be able to convince a bunch of people with lots of money that you were worth promoting before you even had a chance to see if people would respond to your work on a grand scale. This lead, for the longest time, to the sad state where only a small number of people decided what the public was going to see. Also, since these same people convinced all of us over the years that ONLY people that they felt were good enough to promote were worthy of entertaining us, that we should not waste our time entertaining ourselves - only paid for entertainment was worthy entertainment. Worked great till the net came along.
The net shatters some of the basic structures that people have used for ages to control the dissemination of information. Easy to send, easy to duplicate. The Dot com economy was doomed from the onset because it was formed on the basis of the idea that by just getting out there and capturing the attention of a big chunk of the internet population, the money would just start flowing in. Heh. Some hard lessons have been learned. It doesn't really work that way.
If you think about it, the real currency on the net isn't money. It's respect. Either as an individual or as an entity you gain respect by providing either new material to the net pool, or you provide effective and useful ways for people to access information that is already out there. A lot of big sites that do this started out small (even yahoo. i remember when it was just a link list over at Stanford run by two guys). Of course, respect doesn't pay the bills, so there always comes a time where you have to start looking at how to not only survive, but maybe even prosper a little on all this.
It's in this armature where the real economic viability of the net rests. There is no direct relationship between turning respect into dollars, but that doesn't mean to say that there isn't some relationship between the two. In my opinion, i feel there is a trade off - when you start charging for what you provide, you loose some of the respect you've earned, because now people have traded cash for it. The nature of the relationship has changed. When you move to a pay-for-services model, it completely changes the nature of the interaction between a site and its users. It's especially bad if people suddenly have to pay for something that was, for the longest time, free. Honestly, i think that it's human nature to almost feel 'betrayed' - which, of course, leads to a real loss of hit points in the respect column. ^_^;; The paradox here is that once people loose respect for a site, won't they be less willing to pay for it?
Odd train of thought, huh? I've had to think a lot about stuff like this lately. Running a site like MT is expensive - we've crested 10 million page views this month already, but at the same time the site is almost no different than it was when it was a non-working html template that i had pieced together over a weekend a year and a half ago. Largo and I really do, i think, have a little bit of an understanding of what makes MT what it is - tho i do have to tell you the mind boggles at why so MANY people seem to find the site worth visiting - and with that understanding comes a responsibility to make sure that whatever we do to help keep the site alive NEVER messes with those things. To me, the respect people have shown me over the years for all the hard work and dedication we've put into the site is something i never want to trade in on - because its worth more than any amount of money to me.
I suppose that its the post-dotcom economy sites that now bear the burden of figuring out how to survive in the wired. How DO you survive, pay hosting bills, make enough money to support yourself and others who help run the site? Traditional business model ways of looking at things has already proven that we all know less than we thought we did. Largo and i do it the hard way - we both work full time jobs AND do this silly site. This is not, of course, ideal, and speaks more about our lack of useful brain cells than any kind of success as a website.
I think that an understanding of human nature is almost more important here on the web than in any other business environment. Why? because unlike in the real world we are used to, we've been trained to an 'us and them' mentality in regards to our entertainment and things that we purchase in stores - we are consumers, they are providers. On the net, its different. We are all one in the same - fredart.com was just as accessible as ibm.com. We all can make websites. We all KNOW we have the ability to reach millions of people. Many sites, even Megatokyo itself, has proven that individuals can do this. You dont need to be a big corporation. We all have the same basic presence on the net - its how we use it that makes us who we are here.
Oh, and Seraphim's reaction to me being so cheap that i wasn't willing to pay for a subscription to Blue Mountain Arts to send her a valentines day e-card? Her answer was, if you think about it, not surprising: "The hell with that. you're little ASCII heart was so cute."
It's not the money you spend, its the thought that goes into it. You can't buy respect, you can only earn it.
You can't touch this!
Talisman