Are the writers for the current ad-supported media working for free? I don't think so. It's not at all simple to know which will work out more profitable - ad-supported sites or paid for sites.
One benefit of charging would be that it would end the nonsense - that papers like the Daily Mail so often love - of publishing inflammatory troll articles, in order to get loads of people looking at it online, thus increasing the ad revenue. It's unfortunate that the ad-revenue model doesn't reward journalism, or balanced insightful columns, it rewards people writing the most nonsensical and insulting batshittery that they can think of...
All in all, I'd gladly support the Daily Mail charging for content.
Indeed - and it's especially sickening when it's not just company press releases, but Government press releases complete with all the spin that entails. Even the BBC happily do this - only when they're aware of significant controversy will they note any opposing viewpoint.
And it's astonishing how many stories are copy and pasted around the news would, with trivial word changes to make it look original, and any misinformation in the original getting copied too.
The research often amounts to a quick Google at best. And sometimes not even that, in that you get mistakes that could be found out if they'd at least done that. Even with usually good sites like the BBC, I've had to correct them on misinformation that a trivial Google search would correct.
For online publications you typically get more journalism from the comments section.
Agreed. Similarly, blogs seem to have a bad reputation here on Slashdot, but actually I'd say that they, along with commenters, tend to do a far better job of "reporting on something in the news, and giving further information" than the news "journalists" do.
if they were to charge those outside of the UK then they would have to ensure that their GeoIP code works flawlessly
They already do this for serving adverts, and restricting Iplayer to UK only people. It doesn't work flawlessly (I get ads when I view from work), so as far as I can tell, if you're a licence payer who can't see it, tough. OTOH, non-licence payers who live in the UK can see it.
According to wikipedia their share of the device market was 38% in Q3 2009. Alluvasudden some upstart invades *their* mobile phone market, steals a big chunk of *their* share of the smartphone market
A few percent is big? Well, I suppose it is a loss to Nokia, even if it's only a few per cent - but why aren't they going after RIM, as they're a company gaining even higher share than Apple?
and to make matters worse no matter what they do Nokia can't seem to beat the Apple iPhone even when they practically copy it
What? Nokia were making phones long before Apple were around - who's copying who here? And by your own source, they still appear to be beating Apple massively in the market - or let me guess, are you redefining success to mean something else?
I love my 5800. Sure, there may be some things that the Iphone does better, but then there are things the Iphone does worse. Hell, even my 5 year old cheapo Motorola V980 had things that the Iphone models couldn't do, and in some cases still can't do.
And anyhow - the 5800 is a fraction of the price of the Apple phones (about half price on UK PAYG prices), so what do you expect? It's not going to have as fast a processor at that price. There are higher end Nokia models - and they've been making "iPhone-class devices" long before the first Iphone was even thought of.
You're right that Apple are behind RIM; but both Apple and RIM in turn are behind a whole load of other companies, with Nokia at number 1. Indeed the idea of this article discussing Google versus Apple in the phone market is rather laughable - they're both minor players, and it's of little consequence in the big picture. Yet Nokia are not even mentioned.
Ah yes, the Air. I remember how the Macbook Air was loved and praised here as Yet Another Apple First here on Slashdot, on the grounds that it was a mm smaller than the smallest laptop. Then they promptly went very quiet, as netbooks appeared on the market, offering much smaller devices at about 10% of the price, and we never heard about the Air again...
Indeed - it's the new Duke Nukem Forever. I suppose the Daily Iphone Story is getting old hat, so now it's moving on to vaporware. I could understand it if the point was to ridicule (as with DNF), but I get the feeling that these stories are serious...
I suspect many posters here are completely ignorant of the non-vaporware actual tablet devices that currently exist, due to the lack of coverage on them, and therefore claim the Apple tablet (if it's ever released) to be the another Apple "first". And then use that as an argument for why it should receive so much coverage! It's a circular self-fulfilling prophecy.
My point is, any new tech like DX11, while great for all of us is never fast enough in the first implimentations, you'll see in 18 months time though, the DX12 cards will be bloody fantastic at DX11 features though, this is just how it is.
If that's true, you should be glad to get a DirectX 11 card, because it will be bloody fantastic at DirectX 10 features, which your current DirectX 10 card must surely not ever be fast enough at...
Indeed yes, for now (actually DirectX 9, judging by the number still on XP).
But the point is that releasing low end cards now that run the latest DirectX means that things will be easier in future, and will mean developers can sooner start focusing on only DirectX 11.
Helps with standardisation? I might be writing a game/application that doesn't need tonnes of graphics processing power to run, but it's still easier if I can simply write one DirectX 11 renderer, instead of having to write multiple renderers for people with low end cards that only support older APIs.
I don't know about Italy, but here in the UK, video/film producers have to pay for the privilege of being censored by the BBFC (thankfully it doesn't apply to Internet uploads though... yet). So they could easily get round that problem by charging a fee.
Even if it is free, swamping it would just leave a massive backlog, meaning that content would take ages to be approved. Although I can see the idea could work from a protest point of view of showing how bad the system is.
In which case he'd be wrong. Although the attractive force would be negative, since the mass is negative, the acceleration would still be in the same direction, towards the Earth - and indeed, exactly the same rate as any other object.
Someone got out of bed the wrong side today! Please, do us all a favor, and attempt to grasp my intent. This community, including myself, deserves better.
Yes, I'm sure you didn't mean that - but then what on earth did you mean? Ah, now you retreat to:
if you are intentionally using an insecure channel, considering the data which you send through that channel to be secure is folly.
Now let's look at what the person you replied to say:
If the site does not offer HTTPS, it is good practice to assume the information you store there is not secure.
In other words, the same bleeding thing as you're now saying! (Or if anything, the original statement was broader, as it doesn't require intent, and includes people who aren't aware of the differences.) So in that case, what were your additional two points about, if they (a) weren't what I read them as, and (b) they were stronger than what the OP was saying?
Does anyone, in any country use SMS for more than "meet in bar at 7"?
Yes.
It's 140 characters.
You still have an ancient phone that limits you to 140 characters? Any phone will automatically split them up for you, and join them at the other end, it's been that way for years.
It's expensive per tiny unit of information (UK).
Yes that sucks, but the key words are per unit of information. The absolute cost is not necessarily expensive, depending on your network/contract/etc. E.g., my texts are 10p each, whilst Internet access is 50p flat rate per day that I use it. The latter is far better value for money per MB, but if I only want to send some texts, a text costs 10p, whilst sending just one email will charge me 50p for that day. (Not to mention that not everyone will have their phones set up to check email, plus it costs the receiver to check email, where as receiving texts is free - so in practice emails are not a valid replacement for texts.)
It spawned a whole degenerate sub language
So did the Internet, but that doesn't make the technology bad. If you limit your choices by what some other people do with it, that's rather poor decision making.
and it's just about the lamest way that two humans can communicate.
Does it come above or below talking via Slashdot, as you and I do now, on the lame-ness scale?
Data which is not secure cannot have a security issue. It is already public.
I'm not sure you mean that, that's a circular definition - anything with a security hole means the data isn't secure, which by your definition means it's not a security issue. Therefore security issues can never exist?
Yes, just like happened in Japan too. The question is not "Will it be bad" but "Will it be the end of the world". See earlier point - did the world end when nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan?
A local lending library does not have and never has had the ability to reproduce a single book for as many people as want it at no significant cost to themselves.
I'm guessing that's meant to be sarcasm - so come on, I'll bite, let's have specific examples and citations of where things were only done because of Apple? And you also miss that companies copy some things off of each other all the time - for every case where Apple did something first, there are other cases where Apple do something similar to what another company's already done.
I might as well say that Apple copied 3G off of other companies, or only started making phones because Nokia did before them. They stole the ability to access the Internet and run apps off of other companies too.
Applications for phones existed long before Apple, and the only "innovation" was locking it down so that you can't run an application unless you have Apple's permission, and download it only from their site.
I have no idea whether Google entered the market only because of Apple - that sounds rather like a Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Why hasn't Google also entered the mp3 market, if they do what Apple do? Either way, Google and Apple together are still a minority of the market.
Also, imagine how many people could have been saved using $0.50 cholera medicine, if we, the cocky, egotastic western world, wouldn't have overreacted on this disease that might even kill people in developed countries, and spent the hundreds of millions of dollars on cheap medicine for actual acute health risks around the world.
Firstly, it's not an either-or situation. If you want to argue that money should be diverted from national healthcare to be given overseas, or that more Government money should be spent on this, then feel free to do that. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I bet that the majority of people screaming "OMG it was just hype, stupid scientists" would never support their money being spent on other countries.
Secondly, let's imagine you did that. You spent money on medicine, and saved people's lives.
I'm now going to sit here and say: Oh look, these people didn't die from cholera after all. What a waste of money, and load of sensationalism, that was!
the problem is when we have a real serious threat,
Wrong - this could well have been a "real serious threat" - just because it doesn't happen doesn't imply it wasn't a threat. What you mean is "the problem is when we have a real serious epidemic".
So to answer that question, indeed - but the problem is how do we distinguish the threats, from the ones which turns into real serious epidemics?
The answer is not to say that the scientists shouldn't report threats - they most certainly should. The media shouldn't overhype them - but equally, it's bad for people here to be screaming "OMG it was just hype" after the fact. The risks existed. Just because we were safe this time doesn't mean the risks didn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, its pretty simple.
Are the writers for the current ad-supported media working for free? I don't think so. It's not at all simple to know which will work out more profitable - ad-supported sites or paid for sites.
One benefit of charging would be that it would end the nonsense - that papers like the Daily Mail so often love - of publishing inflammatory troll articles, in order to get loads of people looking at it online, thus increasing the ad revenue. It's unfortunate that the ad-revenue model doesn't reward journalism, or balanced insightful columns, it rewards people writing the most nonsensical and insulting batshittery that they can think of...
All in all, I'd gladly support the Daily Mail charging for content.
Indeed - and it's especially sickening when it's not just company press releases, but Government press releases complete with all the spin that entails. Even the BBC happily do this - only when they're aware of significant controversy will they note any opposing viewpoint.
And it's astonishing how many stories are copy and pasted around the news would, with trivial word changes to make it look original, and any misinformation in the original getting copied too.
The research often amounts to a quick Google at best. And sometimes not even that, in that you get mistakes that could be found out if they'd at least done that. Even with usually good sites like the BBC, I've had to correct them on misinformation that a trivial Google search would correct.
For online publications you typically get more journalism from the comments section.
Agreed. Similarly, blogs seem to have a bad reputation here on Slashdot, but actually I'd say that they, along with commenters, tend to do a far better job of "reporting on something in the news, and giving further information" than the news "journalists" do.
if they were to charge those outside of the UK then they would have to ensure that their GeoIP code works flawlessly
They already do this for serving adverts, and restricting Iplayer to UK only people. It doesn't work flawlessly (I get ads when I view from work), so as far as I can tell, if you're a licence payer who can't see it, tough. OTOH, non-licence payers who live in the UK can see it.
According to wikipedia their share of the device market was 38% in Q3 2009. Alluvasudden some upstart invades *their* mobile phone market, steals a big chunk of *their* share of the smartphone market
A few percent is big? Well, I suppose it is a loss to Nokia, even if it's only a few per cent - but why aren't they going after RIM, as they're a company gaining even higher share than Apple?
and to make matters worse no matter what they do Nokia can't seem to beat the Apple iPhone even when they practically copy it
What? Nokia were making phones long before Apple were around - who's copying who here? And by your own source, they still appear to be beating Apple massively in the market - or let me guess, are you redefining success to mean something else?
I love my 5800. Sure, there may be some things that the Iphone does better, but then there are things the Iphone does worse. Hell, even my 5 year old cheapo Motorola V980 had things that the Iphone models couldn't do, and in some cases still can't do.
And anyhow - the 5800 is a fraction of the price of the Apple phones (about half price on UK PAYG prices), so what do you expect? It's not going to have as fast a processor at that price. There are higher end Nokia models - and they've been making "iPhone-class devices" long before the first Iphone was even thought of.
Did I mention that it hangs, occasionally?
Never had a hang, mine just works.
You're right that Apple are behind RIM; but both Apple and RIM in turn are behind a whole load of other companies, with Nokia at number 1. Indeed the idea of this article discussing Google versus Apple in the phone market is rather laughable - they're both minor players, and it's of little consequence in the big picture. Yet Nokia are not even mentioned.
Ah yes, the Air. I remember how the Macbook Air was loved and praised here as Yet Another Apple First here on Slashdot, on the grounds that it was a mm smaller than the smallest laptop. Then they promptly went very quiet, as netbooks appeared on the market, offering much smaller devices at about 10% of the price, and we never heard about the Air again...
Indeed - it's the new Duke Nukem Forever. I suppose the Daily Iphone Story is getting old hat, so now it's moving on to vaporware. I could understand it if the point was to ridicule (as with DNF), but I get the feeling that these stories are serious...
I suspect many posters here are completely ignorant of the non-vaporware actual tablet devices that currently exist, due to the lack of coverage on them, and therefore claim the Apple tablet (if it's ever released) to be the another Apple "first". And then use that as an argument for why it should receive so much coverage! It's a circular self-fulfilling prophecy.
My point is, any new tech like DX11, while great for all of us is never fast enough in the first implimentations, you'll see in 18 months time though, the DX12 cards will be bloody fantastic at DX11 features though, this is just how it is.
If that's true, you should be glad to get a DirectX 11 card, because it will be bloody fantastic at DirectX 10 features, which your current DirectX 10 card must surely not ever be fast enough at...
Indeed yes, for now (actually DirectX 9, judging by the number still on XP).
But the point is that releasing low end cards now that run the latest DirectX means that things will be easier in future, and will mean developers can sooner start focusing on only DirectX 11.
Helps with standardisation? I might be writing a game/application that doesn't need tonnes of graphics processing power to run, but it's still easier if I can simply write one DirectX 11 renderer, instead of having to write multiple renderers for people with low end cards that only support older APIs.
I don't know about Italy, but here in the UK, video/film producers have to pay for the privilege of being censored by the BBFC (thankfully it doesn't apply to Internet uploads though ... yet). So they could easily get round that problem by charging a fee.
Even if it is free, swamping it would just leave a massive backlog, meaning that content would take ages to be approved. Although I can see the idea could work from a protest point of view of showing how bad the system is.
In which case he'd be wrong. Although the attractive force would be negative, since the mass is negative, the acceleration would still be in the same direction, towards the Earth - and indeed, exactly the same rate as any other object.
Someone got out of bed the wrong side today! Please, do us all a favor, and attempt to grasp my intent. This community, including myself, deserves better.
Yes, I'm sure you didn't mean that - but then what on earth did you mean? Ah, now you retreat to:
if you are intentionally using an insecure channel, considering the data which you send through that channel to be secure is folly.
Now let's look at what the person you replied to say:
If the site does not offer HTTPS, it is good practice to assume the information you store there is not secure.
In other words, the same bleeding thing as you're now saying! (Or if anything, the original statement was broader, as it doesn't require intent, and includes people who aren't aware of the differences.) So in that case, what were your additional two points about, if they (a) weren't what I read them as, and (b) they were stronger than what the OP was saying?
Does anyone, in any country use SMS for more than "meet in bar at 7"?
Yes.
It's 140 characters.
You still have an ancient phone that limits you to 140 characters? Any phone will automatically split them up for you, and join them at the other end, it's been that way for years.
It's expensive per tiny unit of information (UK).
Yes that sucks, but the key words are per unit of information. The absolute cost is not necessarily expensive, depending on your network/contract/etc. E.g., my texts are 10p each, whilst Internet access is 50p flat rate per day that I use it. The latter is far better value for money per MB, but if I only want to send some texts, a text costs 10p, whilst sending just one email will charge me 50p for that day. (Not to mention that not everyone will have their phones set up to check email, plus it costs the receiver to check email, where as receiving texts is free - so in practice emails are not a valid replacement for texts.)
It spawned a whole degenerate sub language
So did the Internet, but that doesn't make the technology bad. If you limit your choices by what some other people do with it, that's rather poor decision making.
and it's just about the lamest way that two humans can communicate.
Does it come above or below talking via Slashdot, as you and I do now, on the lame-ness scale?
Data which is not secure cannot have a security issue. It is already public.
I'm not sure you mean that, that's a circular definition - anything with a security hole means the data isn't secure, which by your definition means it's not a security issue. Therefore security issues can never exist?
Do you have an example of a Government funded project that was privately patented? (Usually it's private companies we hear about.)
Yes, just like happened in Japan too. The question is not "Will it be bad" but "Will it be the end of the world". See earlier point - did the world end when nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan?
A local lending library does not have and never has had the ability to reproduce a single book for as many people as want it at no significant cost to themselves.
And his website didn't reproduce mp3s. Next.
I'm guessing that's meant to be sarcasm - so come on, I'll bite, let's have specific examples and citations of where things were only done because of Apple? And you also miss that companies copy some things off of each other all the time - for every case where Apple did something first, there are other cases where Apple do something similar to what another company's already done.
I might as well say that Apple copied 3G off of other companies, or only started making phones because Nokia did before them. They stole the ability to access the Internet and run apps off of other companies too.
Applications for phones existed long before Apple, and the only "innovation" was locking it down so that you can't run an application unless you have Apple's permission, and download it only from their site.
I have no idea whether Google entered the market only because of Apple - that sounds rather like a Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Why hasn't Google also entered the mp3 market, if they do what Apple do? Either way, Google and Apple together are still a minority of the market.
Also, imagine how many people could have been saved using $0.50 cholera medicine, if we, the cocky, egotastic western world, wouldn't have overreacted on this disease that might even kill people in developed countries, and spent the hundreds of millions of dollars on cheap medicine for actual acute health risks around the world.
Firstly, it's not an either-or situation. If you want to argue that money should be diverted from national healthcare to be given overseas, or that more Government money should be spent on this, then feel free to do that. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I bet that the majority of people screaming "OMG it was just hype, stupid scientists" would never support their money being spent on other countries.
Secondly, let's imagine you did that. You spent money on medicine, and saved people's lives.
I'm now going to sit here and say: Oh look, these people didn't die from cholera after all. What a waste of money, and load of sensationalism, that was!
Well, I'm glad we have a single anecdote from someone posting on an Internet forum to counter all that nonsense in the media.
the problem is when we have a real serious threat,
Wrong - this could well have been a "real serious threat" - just because it doesn't happen doesn't imply it wasn't a threat. What you mean is "the problem is when we have a real serious epidemic".
So to answer that question, indeed - but the problem is how do we distinguish the threats, from the ones which turns into real serious epidemics?
The answer is not to say that the scientists shouldn't report threats - they most certainly should. The media shouldn't overhype them - but equally, it's bad for people here to be screaming "OMG it was just hype" after the fact. The risks existed. Just because we were safe this time doesn't mean the risks didn't exist.
Is that the other company that also sells tin-foil hats?