"free" newspapers are filled with advertisements. There isn't a newspaper around that relies on subscription costs for it's revenues. They keep subscriber costs lot to attract as many readers as possible, thereby raising circulation, which makes them more attractive to potential advertisers.
Why not just put a link to a torrent file right in the article, and save everyone some headaches? I always thought that was the real potential for BitTorrent- share large amounts of data without killing anyone's servers.
Advertising on the internet simply does not work, and micropayments are never going to fly. Newspapers need to adopt the NPR beg-a-thon method. They need to learn to live with lower overheads and lower revenues. Their sales forces need to convert into grant-writers and they need to focus on asking their readers and big corporate donors for money.
I still would like to use the service- it's not like cocaine where there is no benefit. This way I'm not tempted to keep a tab open when I'm at work, but I still have access if I need it.
I like to call myself a homeschooling survivor. My mother chose to educate my brother and I for reasons that I've never gotten a clear answer on- it was not for religious or political reasons. On the one hand, I actually had an interesting free-form education and I did learn some things better than I would have in a school setting (we did lots of science experiments).
The thing that I missed was the day to day social interaction with peers. I saw kids my own age just a couple times a week and it was normally at my house or theirs. They were always friends. I never had to deal with a conflict with peers because I simply never had them.
The social aspects of school are just as important as sitting in a classroom- you need to learn how to deal with others. I'm 30 and I still struggle when i have disagreements with co-workers.
We need serious school reform in this country, and although there are advantages to homeschooling or unschooling, I think there is still something to be said for classroom learning.
I've also worked in pharma, and I conquer with you.
The modern world runs on marketing- unfortunately, the internet makes that even more true. Now that anyone has the power to broadcast, you have to spend a lot of money getting our voice heard.
I remember my freshman English teacher (this was 1994). One day she was talking about the importance of knowing how to write, and she pointed to the Mac Classic in the corner and said 'Because the future is in that box!" She was really, really right. I spend most of my day writing emails to clarify ideas for other people, and that ultimatly is what pushes projects ahead. You simply need to have a descent understanding of how to write in order to function well online.
It was shot documentary-style... trying to pretend to be "real"...
Let's say you were exposed to something that was making you turn into an alien and then your government started torturing you and you had to run away. I'm preeeeetttyyy sure you'd swear that much, too.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about management and it's layers lately. It seems to me that if large companies looked at their management structure and pared it down to what it looked like years ago when they had their first successes that got them where they are, they could make projects like the Dreamliner actually work sooner.
Take this situation where some overpaid executives decided that it would be a good business decision to outsource the work to Italy. The flaws in the design might have happened if made in the US, but your communication lines would have been shorter (from worker to end decision maker), and problems would be identified and stamped out quicker. I'd like to see data on the number of people between top brass and actual laborers today and twenty years ago for the top 100 companies in the US, and see the difference. Something tells me the more management you have, the crappier your product.
The scientific community has enough to worry about with the term "design"... we should use these examples as proof that there is no design! Although they are logically not the best example of how to propagate a species, we should not confuse evolution with design.
you're being too simplistic... we don't know the context of the blocking of Opera. I'm sure every programmer out there would want to support it, but if you're 998 hours into a project and you have just discovered that the coding needed to make Opera work with the software is going to take at least another 25 hours, you do what this guy did... I'm not saying it's the best solution, but when you're trying to hit a deadline, you sometimes have to take shortcuts. From a business standpoint, it was probably the right thing to do, even though the coder hated having to do it. The team that built the software probably didn't even know the server was going to Opera anyway
Again, we don't have all the information, so there is no way to tell. While it's not rocket science, there are more factors involved than just the code.
Actually, he has a very valid point. In your Toyota example, you are forgetting that in order to support Toyota, you have increased development costs and time in order to support a very, very small percentage of users, compounded by the fact that supported browsers are free and can be installed in a matter of minutes.
If I'm working on a project with a limited budget and you were going to tell me that enabling support for Opera was going to add even 5% to my total costs, I'd cut it in a heartbeat, because anyone that is using Opera can just switch over to another browser to perform the task at hand*.
The exception to this rule is my wife's office, which mandates Opera use... but it's only because they manage classical musicians and they like the name... it causes them all kinds of problems.
Last year I helped a 20 person company transition from Exchange to Google Apps. Technically everything went fine, but once the transition was done, everyone refused to use the Google's web interface even though some of them used gmail for personal use! We wound up using IMAP through Outlook to bring everyone back to where they had been before.
I was sitting down with one woman who just flat out refused to do anything different. I was in the middle of setting up Outlook for her, and we had the following conversation:
Her: Outlook is so slow- the messages take forever to load!
Me: Well, you don't get that with a web-based system, because it is much more efficient at getting to your messages faster than your single hard drive
Her: Oh. Now, is there a way I can put the same message in multiple folders without making a duplcate?
Me: Actually, with Gmail you can use labels to assign one message to multiple labels, making organization much easier
Her: Oh.
It went on like this for awhile, and at the end of the day, gmail clearly did everything she wanted outlook to do, but she still refused to use anything different.
Google's biggest challenge is not a technical one- it's a marketing one. Google has to convince everyone that they have a product that really is better. It's not impossible, but it will take longer than it should:)
I completely agree... it's been ten years since a Star Wars simulation was released, and that's just too long! There's been a fair amount of homebrew work at updating the models for X-Wing: Alliance, but I think it's time to see another game built from the ground up taking advantage of newer hardware and internet play. And there is a ton of unexplored room with the first three episode's.
I think there's a lot of room for a MMORPG that is just around a Star Wars space sim.
YouTube has never really answered step 2- they thought it was advertising, but they have failed to demonstrate the Return on Investment for advertisers against free video... because no one is going to YouTube with an interest in being advertised to.
The assumption is that advertising is the way to make money on the internet, which follows a broadcast model. However, because there is such a wide number of websites compared even to a premium cable package, and because it's harder to do a media buy that targets specific demos effectively (also part of the broadcast model), online advertising is going to be limited to the Search model, where contextual ads based on your search keywords pop up.
The model that is going to have to be implemented is going to be the National Public Radio / TV model... a donation-based system with regular funding drives. People are not going to give up the free content they have become accustomed to, and advertisers are not going to see the same ROI to justify ad spends online. a donation-based system should still be able to drive major organizations... the NYTimes would probably not pull in as much money through a digital-only donation system as they do with their current system, but their production costs are so drastically reduced that they would be able to continue to print, although there would be a lot of layoffs.
I used to do tech support for a guy that I'm pretty sure lost everything to Madoff... he was a really, really wonderful guy. I would go to his house, work for about an hour on his home servers, then we'd stand around and talk for another hour. He gave me books, lots of advice and was in general a great person.
You can't begrudge a person just because they have more money than you do. While I agree a lot of rich people can be annoying and rude, there are also a lot of really great people as well... not to mention a lot of retired people who WERE normal people invested their retirements with Madoff that are now screwed for the rest of their lives.
Playing a game of "Who's got the most money?" isn't exactly something I would consider an enjoyable hobby activity, even if many hobbies somewhat boil down to that already.
Sad to say, but a lot of American society boils down to this.
Does the game have vehicle support? It seems stupid to charge for customizations that give no tactical advantage. However, and maybe they thought of this, what if they charged for certificates or licences to use vehicles? In other Battlefield games I have never been one for flying around, but some people loved it... if you charge just to have access to an entirely different dimension to the game, it would keep people from just paying for the best characters, while still generating some money for the company
Open Fire is a wonderful Open Source server for jabber. I used it in a similar situation a few years back. There are many jabber clients- I'm sure you can find one that meets your needs.
Slashdot Mirror
"free" newspapers are filled with advertisements. There isn't a newspaper around that relies on subscription costs for it's revenues. They keep subscriber costs lot to attract as many readers as possible, thereby raising circulation, which makes them more attractive to potential advertisers.
Why not just put a link to a torrent file right in the article, and save everyone some headaches? I always thought that was the real potential for BitTorrent- share large amounts of data without killing anyone's servers.
Advertising on the internet simply does not work, and micropayments are never going to fly. Newspapers need to adopt the NPR beg-a-thon method. They need to learn to live with lower overheads and lower revenues. Their sales forces need to convert into grant-writers and they need to focus on asking their readers and big corporate donors for money.
I still would like to use the service- it's not like cocaine where there is no benefit. This way I'm not tempted to keep a tab open when I'm at work, but I still have access if I need it.
SOME criminals are stupid... obviously, you never hear about the smart ones.
I know what that is like.. I actually made my wife change my password for me, and she logs me in a couple times a week so i can check messages.
I don't think anyone predicted that the internet would give us infinite narcissism.
-and that's where the house analogy breaks down: Of course the landlord wants you take your stuff: he gets to keep it, too.
I have yet to see any company really come out and say "we'll get rid of your data when you leave".
I like to call myself a homeschooling survivor. My mother chose to educate my brother and I for reasons that I've never gotten a clear answer on- it was not for religious or political reasons. On the one hand, I actually had an interesting free-form education and I did learn some things better than I would have in a school setting (we did lots of science experiments).
The thing that I missed was the day to day social interaction with peers. I saw kids my own age just a couple times a week and it was normally at my house or theirs. They were always friends. I never had to deal with a conflict with peers because I simply never had them.
The social aspects of school are just as important as sitting in a classroom- you need to learn how to deal with others. I'm 30 and I still struggle when i have disagreements with co-workers.
We need serious school reform in this country, and although there are advantages to homeschooling or unschooling, I think there is still something to be said for classroom learning.
I've also worked in pharma, and I conquer with you.
The modern world runs on marketing- unfortunately, the internet makes that even more true. Now that anyone has the power to broadcast, you have to spend a lot of money getting our voice heard.
I remember my freshman English teacher (this was 1994). One day she was talking about the importance of knowing how to write, and she pointed to the Mac Classic in the corner and said 'Because the future is in that box!" She was really, really right. I spend most of my day writing emails to clarify ideas for other people, and that ultimatly is what pushes projects ahead. You simply need to have a descent understanding of how to write in order to function well online.
It was shot documentary-style... trying to pretend to be "real"...
Let's say you were exposed to something that was making you turn into an alien and then your government started torturing you and you had to run away. I'm preeeeetttyyy sure you'd swear that much, too.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about management and it's layers lately. It seems to me that if large companies looked at their management structure and pared it down to what it looked like years ago when they had their first successes that got them where they are, they could make projects like the Dreamliner actually work sooner.
Take this situation where some overpaid executives decided that it would be a good business decision to outsource the work to Italy. The flaws in the design might have happened if made in the US, but your communication lines would have been shorter (from worker to end decision maker), and problems would be identified and stamped out quicker. I'd like to see data on the number of people between top brass and actual laborers today and twenty years ago for the top 100 companies in the US, and see the difference. Something tells me the more management you have, the crappier your product.
The scientific community has enough to worry about with the term "design"... we should use these examples as proof that there is no design! Although they are logically not the best example of how to propagate a species, we should not confuse evolution with design.
causing a minor annoyance to users wouldn't do anything for Palm, so why would they bother? It's probably some poor detection on the part of AVG.
you're being too simplistic... we don't know the context of the blocking of Opera. I'm sure every programmer out there would want to support it, but if you're 998 hours into a project and you have just discovered that the coding needed to make Opera work with the software is going to take at least another 25 hours, you do what this guy did... I'm not saying it's the best solution, but when you're trying to hit a deadline, you sometimes have to take shortcuts. From a business standpoint, it was probably the right thing to do, even though the coder hated having to do it. The team that built the software probably didn't even know the server was going to Opera anyway
Again, we don't have all the information, so there is no way to tell. While it's not rocket science, there are more factors involved than just the code.
Actually, he has a very valid point. In your Toyota example, you are forgetting that in order to support Toyota, you have increased development costs and time in order to support a very, very small percentage of users, compounded by the fact that supported browsers are free and can be installed in a matter of minutes.
If I'm working on a project with a limited budget and you were going to tell me that enabling support for Opera was going to add even 5% to my total costs, I'd cut it in a heartbeat, because anyone that is using Opera can just switch over to another browser to perform the task at hand*.
The exception to this rule is my wife's office, which mandates Opera use... but it's only because they manage classical musicians and they like the name... it causes them all kinds of problems.
Last year I helped a 20 person company transition from Exchange to Google Apps. Technically everything went fine, but once the transition was done, everyone refused to use the Google's web interface even though some of them used gmail for personal use! We wound up using IMAP through Outlook to bring everyone back to where they had been before.
:)
I was sitting down with one woman who just flat out refused to do anything different. I was in the middle of setting up Outlook for her, and we had the following conversation:
Her: Outlook is so slow- the messages take forever to load!
Me: Well, you don't get that with a web-based system, because it is much more efficient at getting to your messages faster than your single hard drive
Her: Oh. Now, is there a way I can put the same message in multiple folders without making a duplcate?
Me: Actually, with Gmail you can use labels to assign one message to multiple labels, making organization much easier
Her: Oh.
It went on like this for awhile, and at the end of the day, gmail clearly did everything she wanted outlook to do, but she still refused to use anything different.
Google's biggest challenge is not a technical one- it's a marketing one. Google has to convince everyone that they have a product that really is better. It's not impossible, but it will take longer than it should
At some point, the system evolves to the point where it makes more sense to be a smithy than to be a baker, or whatever.
Welcome to real life
I completely agree... it's been ten years since a Star Wars simulation was released, and that's just too long! There's been a fair amount of homebrew work at updating the models for X-Wing: Alliance, but I think it's time to see another game built from the ground up taking advantage of newer hardware and internet play. And there is a ton of unexplored room with the first three episode's.
I think there's a lot of room for a MMORPG that is just around a Star Wars space sim.
A little piece of freedom just died.
Post-peak perhaps, but his arguements against Free are quite valid. It really does come down to the meme:
Step 1: Make content "free"
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!
YouTube has never really answered step 2- they thought it was advertising, but they have failed to demonstrate the Return on Investment for advertisers against free video... because no one is going to YouTube with an interest in being advertised to.
The assumption is that advertising is the way to make money on the internet, which follows a broadcast model. However, because there is such a wide number of websites compared even to a premium cable package, and because it's harder to do a media buy that targets specific demos effectively (also part of the broadcast model), online advertising is going to be limited to the Search model, where contextual ads based on your search keywords pop up.
The model that is going to have to be implemented is going to be the National Public Radio / TV model... a donation-based system with regular funding drives. People are not going to give up the free content they have become accustomed to, and advertisers are not going to see the same ROI to justify ad spends online. a donation-based system should still be able to drive major organizations... the NYTimes would probably not pull in as much money through a digital-only donation system as they do with their current system, but their production costs are so drastically reduced that they would be able to continue to print, although there would be a lot of layoffs.
I used to do tech support for a guy that I'm pretty sure lost everything to Madoff... he was a really, really wonderful guy. I would go to his house, work for about an hour on his home servers, then we'd stand around and talk for another hour. He gave me books, lots of advice and was in general a great person.
You can't begrudge a person just because they have more money than you do. While I agree a lot of rich people can be annoying and rude, there are also a lot of really great people as well... not to mention a lot of retired people who WERE normal people invested their retirements with Madoff that are now screwed for the rest of their lives.
Playing a game of "Who's got the most money?" isn't exactly something I would consider an enjoyable hobby activity, even if many hobbies somewhat boil down to that already.
Sad to say, but a lot of American society boils down to this.
Does the game have vehicle support? It seems stupid to charge for customizations that give no tactical advantage. However, and maybe they thought of this, what if they charged for certificates or licences to use vehicles? In other Battlefield games I have never been one for flying around, but some people loved it... if you charge just to have access to an entirely different dimension to the game, it would keep people from just paying for the best characters, while still generating some money for the company
Another idea: Charge for new maps.
Open Fire is a wonderful Open Source server for jabber. I used it in a similar situation a few years back. There are many jabber clients- I'm sure you can find one that meets your needs.