I heard this 10 years ago - the death of the free
on
Are Newspapers Doomed?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
internet. Once micropayments came along (which back then was always real soon), everything on the internet was supposed to become pay-for. Every website you visit would deduct a fraction of a penny from your browser or something. This would be "necessary" to pay for inherent costs. What they didn't count on was that on the internet, oftentimes, if someone doesn't provide it free, someone else is willing to step in and grab that audience.
Also, since many newspapers are little more than repackaged AP and Reuters news, looking at the NY Times for guidance - I don't know what their value proposition is supposed to be. This past election cycle, because I paid attention to politics - I have seen how the old media doesn't even pretend to present the world as it is but just their packaged version of it - they do a bad job of reporting things of niche interest - 3rd parties, other people running other than the "top 2" candidates that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, etc.
Considering this, what value do they bring to the table? If they don't carry the most general of news, someone else will. And since they don't cover anything in depth (not every interest in audience, by nature), most easy to find forums, blogs, etc will cover a subject deeper and be more informative.
All I see is someone bickering that their pre-packaged, repackaged jack-of-all-subjects, master-of-none is becoming obsolete by the fact that it's not the pre-1980s anymore when people relied on print to stay informed.
Yes, but music files are relatively extremely small these day compared to video. You probably consume the same magnitude of bandwidth looking at your average webpage these days. Or more watching youtube.
It's just not on the same scale or torrenting videos.
Which leads me to ask - what would entice an ISP to follow the RIAA's 'suggestions'? Very few of them have anything to do with the entertainment industry directly. And I believe the DMCA renders immunity to anyone acting as an ISP/gateway IIRC. On the other hand, you have a paying customer.
It would help to know what weapon an opponent such as this is going to use.
the rise in "security questions" which are essentially weaker passwords. This personalized spam proves getting to much of that info is easy. But now, so often, when I register an account, in addition to a password, there is always a "security password" to null and void that password and get back in easier.
Some of the better services let you choose your own security password, but others only have a short list of really lame ones (1st car, pet, place of birth) which is not secure at all. I make sure to put in a nonsensical random string as an extra security measure. And this just proves it fallible.
Everytime I see a new Apple discussion - like before (and after) the iPhone introduction or now on various products - I see a big set of geeks just not GET IT. By it, I mean the popularity of Apple products, by doing a checklist feature comparison like the back of a software box - as if all checkmarks indicated the same quality. Not all checkmarks are created equal;)
Anyway, I would suggest that Apple look at how Fashion powerhouses handle succession, and not the typical technology company. Perhaps it would give them a better idea how to handle transistion in a creative enterprise and not just a purely technical one.
When you sell directly to the customer, you don't have to deal with Walmart/Target/etc who will take a cut of the action, and bend you over when they feel like it. Of course, in this case "you" being Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft who set up the central gateways - it's they who won't have to deal with Walmart/Target as much. The developer still will have to deal with those three. Reminds me of the high cost of cartridges, especially with Nintendo being the only one making them for their console.
ATM, only PCs and Flash games put the power in the developer's hands.
and just as good, if avaible. Or an eeePC if not. They can take the physical abuse.
Seriously, don't buy them Mac books. They just don't need that type of power and people don't take care of stuff they haven't paid for themselves anyway, especially kids. I'm not even close to convinced that all time access to a computer is all that helpful to students vs. a computer lab after school.
Please, take a look at your taxpayers, who are providing this to you: it's there money. Give it back to them. I love Macs, have one of my own, but it's not built for middle schoolers that are rough and tumble with it.
If you really need a gadget in the classroom, consider a livescribe pen. Probably also a waste of money for most student, but I can see it being a learning aid to some. But in this day and age, a computer just isn't yet. You have to have the maturity to use it for it's intended purpose. That comes in highschool for some, college for others, and some never have it.
Yes, but even if the source is provided, it does raise some questions:
-does the navy just accept the source, but not compile it as the final product, taking the binary as-is or compiled by Microsoft?, essentially nixing the open sourcing security benefts in the first place -do they have to compile it with Visual Studio? or any x86 compiler will do?
Source for obvious reasons. I know the Brits and Americans are friends, but still, running an OS that is doing Bill-knows-what doesn't sound very secure in many ways (Would you want the US military running a closed source Red Hat Linux sight unseen?). Even if there is no backdoors/spying, the ability to compile the source and see what it is doing at every step will have benefits in the future, to look for holes previously unknown, to see what it is doing every step of the way, or to graft new abilities into it.
Linux/BSD/whatever. In fact, I'm wondering why corporations run MS now, considering all this.
or it will never be used. When I download photos, I want my browser to tag where it came from (website) or perhaps which keywords I typed in to find it. I don't want to add this all manually.
The amount allowed per file needs to be limited (perhaps 100 keywords) and managed so the useless ones get weeded out. It will probably be an art to itself, but anything less than filesystem support just won't work.
And yes, in vista you can tag things. But it's tedious and the OS level tools for users aren't there. Something as trivial as tagging an entire set of pictures isn't simpy achieved with the default tools, as I take it.
Seems like a good excuse as any
on
Sleep Mailing
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· Score: 3, Interesting
most apps will run on most platforms without extra work. Or so I hope (desktop or notebook, don't see a way to make a destop app fit on a phone w/o work). They'll have an interpreted code, like lisp, which gets compiled (once, not at runtime) for whatever specific platform it's actually running on. It can be fast, doesn't have to be slow this way.
So it won't actually be like a script. Java tried to be this universal gateway, but it just never really took off for real apps like a language should. Various libraries like QT attempted to overcome the problem. Then there is the POSIX standard, which wouldn't be bad if it was really followed.
I just feel it's ridiculous in this day and age being tied to windows/unix/os x/some operating system because of an app made for it. It seems backwards. It's like being tied to route 66 because that's the only road your car will drive on.
Last year, I bought a medium level $800 Acer desktop for my aunt/uncle. I was tired of wrestling with their XP Home 500 mhz celeron. It wasn't just the slow speed, but the lack of UAC that made basic security with these two a nightmare. They wouldn't take Ubuntu because they absolutely had to have Quickbooks for the 3 invoices they wrote on it a year (I'm not joking, it's what they knew and didn't want alternatives to).
I will admit, with UAC, and putting them on non-administrative (just standard) accounts with Firefox on, Vista is much nicer than XP in this direction.
But when I got the computer, in addition to Acer's stupid and ultimately useless bloatware sucking up all the speed, Microsoft's Aero was set for maximum bling on integrated graphics. It took the computer minutes to start up. The entire time, out of the box, it sounded like it was grinding (and it was grinding to a halt with the hourglass every few minutes) as it was constantly swapping even with 2GB ram.
I stopped all that with over 15 tedious uninstalls of various components of Acer's pre-installed bloatware (why oh why can't MS have a synaptic type installer/uninstaller with multiple installs/uninstalls at once?) and stopping several services and setting all of the visual effects to minimize asides a few font/other smoothing settings. The machine felt several times faster.
But most of that is beyond the regular user. This computer, brand new, felt like a dog out of the box. Why Acer does this is beyond me, it can't look good for them. But more than that, why Microsoft lets them, will be the death of them one day. This is Apple's big win - their computers just work out of the box. And feel new and fast.
While the bloatware is not new, it's gets worse every reiteration. What is new is MS's own default settings are dragging the systems down. Not even uninstalls make it better. People have to muck with the systems.
I suppose that is part of the resistance to Vista. Security wise, and some other things (like icon/thumbnail browsing and editing - rotation) is much nicer. I like not seeing.db thumbnail files in every directory. Big win there. But the experience out of the box is abysmal.
-hard drives grew like crazy earlier this decade, but that growth has dramatically slowed lately, with 750GB being the largest in 2006, 1TB early in 2007, and 1.5 late in 2008
-looking up 256GB solid state disks now is like looking for 2TB regular drives, if you find any, they'll be crazy expensive as they aren't mass produced yet
-that said, on pricewatch, a 64GB and 128GB ssd is going for $136 and $328 respectively. Not so bad, eh? I suspect SSDs will take over within 5 years on notebooks and spinning platters will become more as a archive
Well, I'm not exactly sure Microsoft has gotten it right yet, with all the bot nets around. And unlike SP3, I'm pretty sure they'll be charging the Vista owers for it.
and not shipping it. Vista was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread and now it's only been 2 years since Vista. Typical to keep people to consider alternatives. With Vista, they set the bar so low, that almost any inevitable improvement in performance gets hailed. Who cares, wake me up when it's the final product and not just some build in the middle of product development cycle.
I think Microsoft will eventually be undone by their long development times unless Windows 7 starts becoming the trend rather than a frantic exception to counter the Vista stigma. Ubuntu and OS X is certainly improving much faster due to relatively short development cycles.
One developer said: "Both developers and designers cost somewhere between $150-200 per hour."
That's too much. I haven't used iTunes, but if it isn't based on simple popularity but has some kind of after-the-purchase rating system, there shouldn't be too many worries. If there isn't, they should implement one. With reviews and ratings like Amazon.
I also have a hard time believing that only the most simple apps will get made, there seems to be a "10 Most Useful" iPhone App list every other week popping up at some social sites like Digg.
Slashdot Mirror
internet. Once micropayments came along (which back then was always real soon), everything on the internet was supposed to become pay-for. Every website you visit would deduct a fraction of a penny from your browser or something. This would be "necessary" to pay for inherent costs. What they didn't count on was that on the internet, oftentimes, if someone doesn't provide it free, someone else is willing to step in and grab that audience.
Also, since many newspapers are little more than repackaged AP and Reuters news, looking at the NY Times for guidance - I don't know what their value proposition is supposed to be. This past election cycle, because I paid attention to politics - I have seen how the old media doesn't even pretend to present the world as it is but just their packaged version of it - they do a bad job of reporting things of niche interest - 3rd parties, other people running other than the "top 2" candidates that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, etc.
Considering this, what value do they bring to the table? If they don't carry the most general of news, someone else will. And since they don't cover anything in depth (not every interest in audience, by nature), most easy to find forums, blogs, etc will cover a subject deeper and be more informative.
All I see is someone bickering that their pre-packaged, repackaged jack-of-all-subjects, master-of-none is becoming obsolete by the fact that it's not the pre-1980s anymore when people relied on print to stay informed.
Yes, but music files are relatively extremely small these day compared to video. You probably consume the same magnitude of bandwidth looking at your average webpage these days. Or more watching youtube.
It's just not on the same scale or torrenting videos.
Which leads me to ask - what would entice an ISP to follow the RIAA's 'suggestions'? Very few of them have anything to do with the entertainment industry directly. And I believe the DMCA renders immunity to anyone acting as an ISP/gateway IIRC. On the other hand, you have a paying customer.
It would help to know what weapon an opponent such as this is going to use.
the rise in "security questions" which are essentially weaker passwords. This personalized spam proves getting to much of that info is easy. But now, so often, when I register an account, in addition to a password, there is always a "security password" to null and void that password and get back in easier.
Some of the better services let you choose your own security password, but others only have a short list of really lame ones (1st car, pet, place of birth) which is not secure at all. I make sure to put in a nonsensical random string as an extra security measure. And this just proves it fallible.
Everytime I see a new Apple discussion - like before (and after) the iPhone introduction or now on various products - I see a big set of geeks just not GET IT. By it, I mean the popularity of Apple products, by doing a checklist feature comparison like the back of a software box - as if all checkmarks indicated the same quality. Not all checkmarks are created equal;)
Anyway, I would suggest that Apple look at how Fashion powerhouses handle succession, and not the typical technology company. Perhaps it would give them a better idea how to handle transistion in a creative enterprise and not just a purely technical one.
It's not the physical waste, it's power.
When you sell directly to the customer, you don't have to deal with Walmart/Target/etc who will take a cut of the action, and bend you over when they feel like it. Of course, in this case "you" being Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft who set up the central gateways - it's they who won't have to deal with Walmart/Target as much. The developer still will have to deal with those three. Reminds me of the high cost of cartridges, especially with Nintendo being the only one making them for their console.
ATM, only PCs and Flash games put the power in the developer's hands.
and just as good, if avaible. Or an eeePC if not. They can take the physical abuse.
Seriously, don't buy them Mac books. They just don't need that type of power and people don't take care of stuff they haven't paid for themselves anyway, especially kids. I'm not even close to convinced that all time access to a computer is all that helpful to students vs. a computer lab after school.
Please, take a look at your taxpayers, who are providing this to you: it's there money. Give it back to them. I love Macs, have one of my own, but it's not built for middle schoolers that are rough and tumble with it.
If you really need a gadget in the classroom, consider a livescribe pen. Probably also a waste of money for most student, but I can see it being a learning aid to some. But in this day and age, a computer just isn't yet. You have to have the maturity to use it for it's intended purpose. That comes in highschool for some, college for others, and some never have it.
Yes, but even if the source is provided, it does raise some questions:
-does the navy just accept the source, but not compile it as the final product, taking the binary as-is or compiled by Microsoft?, essentially nixing the open sourcing security benefts in the first place
-do they have to compile it with Visual Studio? or any x86 compiler will do?
I believe Ken Thompson himself installed a compiler (relatively benign) trojan that survived many years without detection. And this:
http://books.google.com/books?id=bv2n6o_6LaQC&pg=PA378&lpg=PA378&dq=%22ken+thompson%22+compiler+trojan&source=bl&ots=c-sXYKAlKw&sig=nhoa4LVar3Y3j2aLmcqqtAoxjFo&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result
Source for obvious reasons. I know the Brits and Americans are friends, but still, running an OS that is doing Bill-knows-what doesn't sound very secure in many ways (Would you want the US military running a closed source Red Hat Linux sight unseen?). Even if there is no backdoors/spying, the ability to compile the source and see what it is doing at every step will have benefits in the future, to look for holes previously unknown, to see what it is doing every step of the way, or to graft new abilities into it.
Linux/BSD/whatever. In fact, I'm wondering why corporations run MS now, considering all this.
will it save while I view documents on my ereader?
Somehow, I find that suspect.
http://www.apttax.com/
That is all. Oh, and it's time for all government to tighten its fat belt.
or it will never be used. When I download photos, I want my browser to tag where it came from (website) or perhaps which keywords I typed in to find it. I don't want to add this all manually.
The amount allowed per file needs to be limited (perhaps 100 keywords) and managed so the useless ones get weeded out. It will probably be an art to itself, but anything less than filesystem support just won't work.
And yes, in vista you can tag things. But it's tedious and the OS level tools for users aren't there. Something as trivial as tagging an entire set of pictures isn't simpy achieved with the default tools, as I take it.
Recently, a guy sleepwalked to death from his hotel room balcony:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3727373/Briton-sleepwalks-to-his-death-off-hotel-balcony.html
and another guy was acquitted of rape because of sleepwalking:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1085927/How-man-raped-cleared-sleepwalking.html
most apps will run on most platforms without extra work. Or so I hope (desktop or notebook, don't see a way to make a destop app fit on a phone w/o work). They'll have an interpreted code, like lisp, which gets compiled (once, not at runtime) for whatever specific platform it's actually running on. It can be fast, doesn't have to be slow this way.
So it won't actually be like a script. Java tried to be this universal gateway, but it just never really took off for real apps like a language should. Various libraries like QT attempted to overcome the problem. Then there is the POSIX standard, which wouldn't be bad if it was really followed.
I just feel it's ridiculous in this day and age being tied to windows/unix/os x/some operating system because of an app made for it. It seems backwards. It's like being tied to route 66 because that's the only road your car will drive on.
Last year, I bought a medium level $800 Acer desktop for my aunt/uncle. I was tired of wrestling with their XP Home 500 mhz celeron. It wasn't just the slow speed, but the lack of UAC that made basic security with these two a nightmare. They wouldn't take Ubuntu because they absolutely had to have Quickbooks for the 3 invoices they wrote on it a year (I'm not joking, it's what they knew and didn't want alternatives to).
I will admit, with UAC, and putting them on non-administrative (just standard) accounts with Firefox on, Vista is much nicer than XP in this direction.
But when I got the computer, in addition to Acer's stupid and ultimately useless bloatware sucking up all the speed, Microsoft's Aero was set for maximum bling on integrated graphics. It took the computer minutes to start up. The entire time, out of the box, it sounded like it was grinding (and it was grinding to a halt with the hourglass every few minutes) as it was constantly swapping even with 2GB ram.
I stopped all that with over 15 tedious uninstalls of various components of Acer's pre-installed bloatware (why oh why can't MS have a synaptic type installer/uninstaller with multiple installs/uninstalls at once?) and stopping several services and setting all of the visual effects to minimize asides a few font/other smoothing settings. The machine felt several times faster.
But most of that is beyond the regular user. This computer, brand new, felt like a dog out of the box. Why Acer does this is beyond me, it can't look good for them. But more than that, why Microsoft lets them, will be the death of them one day. This is Apple's big win - their computers just work out of the box. And feel new and fast.
While the bloatware is not new, it's gets worse every reiteration. What is new is MS's own default settings are dragging the systems down. Not even uninstalls make it better. People have to muck with the systems.
I suppose that is part of the resistance to Vista. Security wise, and some other things (like icon/thumbnail browsing and editing - rotation) is much nicer. I like not seeing .db thumbnail files in every directory. Big win there. But the experience out of the box is abysmal.
Um, you can get a 1TB drive for around $90, your prices are off.
http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/sata_1tb.htm
But the analysis also ignoring general trends in SSD.
Wow, they lost a lot of weight. I remember when Microsoft used to be an 800 or 900 pound gorilla.
Should make their doctors happy.
That's unfair for two reasons:
-hard drives grew like crazy earlier this decade, but that growth has dramatically slowed lately, with 750GB being the largest in 2006, 1TB early in 2007, and 1.5 late in 2008
-looking up 256GB solid state disks now is like looking for 2TB regular drives, if you find any, they'll be crazy expensive as they aren't mass produced yet
-that said, on pricewatch, a 64GB and 128GB ssd is going for $136 and $328 respectively. Not so bad, eh? I suspect SSDs will take over within 5 years on notebooks and spinning platters will become more as a archive
Well, I'm not exactly sure Microsoft has gotten it right yet, with all the bot nets around. And unlike SP3, I'm pretty sure they'll be charging the Vista owers for it.
and not shipping it. Vista was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread and now it's only been 2 years since Vista. Typical to keep people to consider alternatives. With Vista, they set the bar so low, that almost any inevitable improvement in performance gets hailed. Who cares, wake me up when it's the final product and not just some build in the middle of product development cycle.
I think Microsoft will eventually be undone by their long development times unless Windows 7 starts becoming the trend rather than a frantic exception to counter the Vista stigma. Ubuntu and OS X is certainly improving much faster due to relatively short development cycles.
But it starts with the premise that dumb people breed... a LOT. While the smart people, well, this here is one extreme.
Giving us the resulting societies we are in.
One developer said:
"Both developers and designers cost somewhere between $150-200 per hour."
That's too much. I haven't used iTunes, but if it isn't based on simple popularity but has some kind of after-the-purchase rating system, there shouldn't be too many worries. If there isn't, they should implement one. With reviews and ratings like Amazon.
I also have a hard time believing that only the most simple apps will get made, there seems to be a "10 Most Useful" iPhone App list every other week popping up at some social sites like Digg.
"Functional programming is making a comeback- it's going to be to the 2010s what OOPs was to the 1990s."
That's rather unkind. I don't think Functional Languages are going to screw up an entire generation;)
I second this. If you want an actual programming language, as a lisp fan I can only put forth scheme or perhaps better, LOGO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)