Has anyone who holds a tech position and who can write well ever been hired because of that ability, or gotten a better starting salary because of it? I haven't. I write like Samuel Johnson as restrained by Strunk and White. I do not misspell or make punctuation errors. Compound-complex sentences and the subjunctive hold no terrors for me. This has all been useful to me in my work in various ways but I have never been specifically rewarded for it, as I have for being a long-term *nix admin, or having an MCSE, or being able to run a Fluke meter. If companies are distraught because their staff is illiterate let them pay a premium for literate new hires, or quit pissing and moaning. If the day ever comes when teachers can say "Kids, if you pay attention in English class your starting salary at Oracle goes up $5000," that might have some effect.
I and others was using GNU utilities compiled for System V r.3.2 - and no doubt others were using GNU utils on BSD - before there WAS a Linux, and the closest thing to a free *nix was Minix and Coherent. So why weren't we being gnagged to call our systems GNU/Unix rather than just Unix? It seems to me the FSF let their complaining rights about GNU/Linux lapse by permitting the clear precedent of saying plain Unix (with unmentioned GNU emacs, gcc, GNU grep, etc.) instead of trying to get such systems called GNU/Unix.
Tomorrow's stock market results. Locations of buried treasure. How to build an FTL drive. How antigravity works. Names and phone numbers of willing women (with pictures.)
Standard economics: where any commodity is in essentially infinite supply, the price drops to zero. Paying for web content is like paying for sunshine in Texas.
Well then, is content a commodity? Is it, as they say, fungible? Well, no. BUT -- so far there haven't been many (if any) for-pay sites that have been able to differentiate their content from the mass well enough to make theirs worth money. Differentiation based on subject doesn't exist: there are free sites with content on any conceivable subject. So how about differentiation based on quality? Whenever I do a search for a particular type of content there are always some free sites put up by enthusiasts up there at the top of the quality list.
Under those circumstances why on earth would anyone go to for-pay sites? There may be a sucker born every minute but that's apparently not often enough to make selling web content into a working business plan.
Jason McCabe Calacanis writes in the linked article:
> You pay with your eyes
Webwasher. Junkbuster. Guidescope. Adsubtract. Or just your ad server's URL in my hosts file, folded back to 127.0.0.1. It may interest you to know that not only do I scrub ads, so does my grandmother (I showed her how) and all the members of her bridge club (she showed them how.)
> or you pay for a subscription.
Heh heh heh. You *are* joking, right?
> If not, we shut the doors.
Way cool. What you guys don't understand is that you have no power of coercion because option 3 is no threat.
Shut your site down and go away, fine, that's OK, there are trillions of other sites to visit and more new ones popping up every day than I could look at in three lifetimes. In ten years of web browsing I have never found material that interested me on a commercial site that wasn't also available in more concentrated, tightly-edited and faster-loading form on a free hobbyist or academic or government site. This was also true of the Internet proper before the www appeared, and true of dialup BBSs and FidoNet before that.
You can't force me to look ads *or* charge for content because you have nothing to withhold that can't be immediately replaced from an alternative free source. Get over it and get a real job. P.S. The NYT is soooooo middlebrow...
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Has anyone who holds a tech position and who can write well ever been hired because of that ability, or gotten a better starting salary because of it? I haven't. I write like Samuel Johnson as restrained by Strunk and White. I do not misspell or make punctuation errors. Compound-complex sentences and the subjunctive hold no terrors for me. This has all been useful to me in my work in various ways but I have never been specifically rewarded for it, as I have for being a long-term *nix admin, or having an MCSE, or being able to run a Fluke meter. If companies are distraught because their staff is illiterate let them pay a premium for literate new hires, or quit pissing and moaning. If the day ever comes when teachers can say "Kids, if you pay attention in English class your starting salary at Oracle goes up $5000," that might have some effect.
I and others was using GNU utilities compiled for System V r.3.2 - and no doubt others were using GNU utils on BSD - before there WAS a Linux, and the closest thing to a free *nix was Minix and Coherent. So why weren't we being gnagged to call our systems GNU/Unix rather than just Unix? It seems to me the FSF let their complaining rights about GNU/Linux lapse by permitting the clear precedent of saying plain Unix (with unmentioned GNU emacs, gcc, GNU grep, etc.) instead of trying to get such systems called GNU/Unix.
Tomorrow's stock market results. Locations of buried treasure. How to build an FTL drive. How antigravity works. Names and phone numbers of willing women (with pictures.)
Standard economics: where any commodity is in essentially infinite supply, the price drops to zero. Paying for web content is like paying for sunshine in Texas.
Well then, is content a commodity? Is it, as they say, fungible? Well, no. BUT -- so far there haven't been many (if any) for-pay sites that have been able to differentiate their content from the mass well enough to make theirs worth money. Differentiation based on subject doesn't exist: there are free sites with content on any conceivable subject. So how about differentiation based on quality? Whenever I do a search for a particular type of content there are always some free sites put up by enthusiasts up there at the top of the quality list.
Under those circumstances why on earth would anyone go to for-pay sites? There may be a sucker born every minute but that's apparently not often enough to make selling web content into a working business plan.
Jason McCabe Calacanis writes in the linked article:
> You pay with your eyes
Webwasher. Junkbuster. Guidescope. Adsubtract. Or just your ad server's URL in my hosts file, folded back to 127.0.0.1. It may interest you to know that not only do I scrub ads, so does my grandmother (I showed her how) and all the members of her bridge club (she showed them how.)
> or you pay for a subscription.
Heh heh heh. You *are* joking, right?
> If not, we shut the doors.
Way cool. What you guys don't understand is that you have no power of coercion because option 3 is no threat.
Shut your site down and go away, fine, that's OK, there are trillions of other sites to visit and more new ones popping up every day than I could look at in three lifetimes. In ten years of web browsing I have never found material that interested me on a commercial site that wasn't also available in more concentrated, tightly-edited and faster-loading form on a free hobbyist or academic or government site. This was also true of the Internet proper before the www appeared, and true of dialup BBSs and FidoNet before that.
You can't force me to look ads *or* charge for content because you have nothing to withhold that can't be immediately replaced from an alternative free source. Get over it and get a real job. P.S. The NYT is soooooo middlebrow...