Worldwide every year, millions of drug users die from consuming tobacco. Only thousands die from consuming coca. Why are herbicide planes flying over Colombia, and not North Carolina?
once you have a few hundred thousand hits a month, there is a formula to making money at web comics: serve one new GIF/JPG a day, and banners always pay much more than bandwidth costs.
after the bandwidth bill is paid, sluggy makes a few thousand dollars a month. i know because i used to be in charge of the banners for sluggy.
this is not charity; it's business.
what bothers me is that there are less than ten people worldwide who can make a living from banners this way; a few thousand dollars a month is just enough to keep one person alive if you live near new york.
i don't know how small payments can realistically get, but i hope that artists begin to charge small amounts of money for their work. i would probably pay $0.25 a week for a "bag of hell" from lowtax. charge me $1.00 a month and paypal keeps only $0.30.
it's an oversimplification to say that you can't micropay for comics because the first comic to "go micropay" would lose readership to free comics.
of course the 640x240 image-of-the-day will remain free (beer). otherwise there is no way to grow readership.
but people already gladly pay ~$10 for paper collections of 200 images at 1200dpi.
could there be middle ground worth exploring? what about a PDF collection of 30 images at 300dpi?
i'd pay 30 cents for something like that.
30 cents is much smaller than the two dollar monthly subscription that was planned for "homer". it may even seem pitifully small. but not when you compare it to banner revenue.
for each rabid fan who visits a site every day without fail, the cartoonist probably makes 1.5 cents *per month* from banner advertising.
i didn't pull that number from a hat - the banners for sluggy.com pulled in twice that in late 1999, before the great revenue crash last summer (i was in charge of banners for sluggy in late 1999).
unfortunately, paypal deducts 30 cents from every transaction; in more ways than one, paypal is the real remaining problem with micropays.
as for copy control, certainly circles of friends will share copies without paying extra, but i think this is how books work today, to nobody's great loss.
if the files are big enough, they are cumbersome to email, and that is probably all the copy control most people need.
for a living example of micropayments that work, check out bill gates' "corbis.com". they sell 640x480 JPEG files for $3.00 each.
one problem not addressed by this new wavelet technique is the fact that the mesh is not a good primitive. the ubiquitousness of the mesh in interactive applications tends to conceal this fact. the rendering languages used in movies, however, build a new mesh for each frame, and throw it away immediately. why? because it is not easy to perform interesting operations on a mesh. a mesh is simple enough to render, but nearly impossible to work with as a design primitive. higher-order primitives are needed by human operators and their design software. it's possible to compare this to the difference between low-level computer languages and high-level computer languages. nowadays, we even have a CPU that dynamically reoptimizes the assembly language generated by compilers (transmeta's crusoe). but all the significant optimizations happen at the highest levels, far away from the level of individual assembly language instructions. an On^3 routine will eventually lose to an On^2 routine, no matter how diligently the assembly is tuned afterwards, by man or machine. this same futility will strike the mesh - all significant operations - like compression - will eventually take place at a far higher level. attempting to compress a mesh will seem as quaint as attempting to hand-optimize assembly language seems today.
i think the guy mentioned that the z coordinate of the hilt is assumed to be fixed (he claims two degrees of translational and rotational freedom, remember). the guy explained it like this: figure out which point is the hilt and which is the tip. then, visualize (in your head) a sphere where the hilt is the center and the tip is the surface. because it's a sphere, a 2D point on the screen maps to exactly two 3D points on its surface. inverse trig functions do the work of moving from 2D to 3D. and because we assume that the tip is on the hemisphere facing the monitor, we can throw away the case where the tip is pointing away from the monitor. i guess that the problems would be that maintaining a constant z position for the hilt may take a little away from the simulation. and, webcams are not designed for the kind of latencies that games have. webcams are cool for uploading a texture of one's face, though. if this isn't the first popular application we see in games, i'll be pretty surprised.
just tried netscape 6 on my win98 box. it wasn't immediately obvious how its controls work. they don't resemble win98, mac, X, or even previous versions of netscape.
i would need either a manual or lots of free time to learn how to use this app. and i'm a programmer by trade. so i give up.
i understand the political edge to the netscape saga. mozilla is free software, after all. but netscape is not really free. so i don't feel too guilty.
unless there's some "killer" feature i can't get anywhere else (unlikely), i doubt i'll be using netscape 6 ever again.
no sense in my recommending netscape 6 to friends and family, as they would come to depend on me for help with an app i don't plan to learn myself. and that's minus one unpaid techie for netscape.
don't know about others, but i just can't deal with "wacky" interfaces in productivity apps. recent versions of "office" skirt the line enough that i tend to avoid them when doing serious work.
i don't need interfaces to look like real objects. i don't need truecolor buttons to glow or make noises at me. no talking paperclips, please. what i need is to accomplish work quickly. give me features that increase my ability to get stuff done.
the 50% of americans who don't have computers could care less about spreadsheets. these are not office workers. they want to get on the internet for cheap. who cares about excel?
watermarking also fails. i can rip a watermarked song, run it through a filter, and poof! the watermark is gone. if the watermark survives that, then it is aurally significant enough to reduce the quality of the track.
Slashdot Mirror
Worldwide every year, millions of drug users die from consuming tobacco. Only thousands die from consuming coca. Why are herbicide planes flying over Colombia, and not North Carolina?
once you have a few hundred thousand hits a month, there is a formula to making money at web comics: serve one new GIF/JPG a day, and banners always pay much more than bandwidth costs.
after the bandwidth bill is paid, sluggy makes a few thousand dollars a month. i know because i used to be in charge of the banners for sluggy.
this is not charity; it's business.
what bothers me is that there are less than ten people worldwide who can make a living from banners this way; a few thousand dollars a month is just enough to keep one person alive if you live near new york.
i don't know how small payments can realistically get, but i hope that artists begin to charge small amounts of money for their work. i would probably pay $0.25 a week for a "bag of hell" from lowtax. charge me $1.00 a month and paypal keeps only $0.30.
it's an oversimplification to say that you can't micropay for comics because the first comic to "go micropay" would lose readership to free comics.
of course the 640x240 image-of-the-day will remain free (beer). otherwise there is no way to grow readership.
but people already gladly pay ~$10 for paper collections of 200 images at 1200dpi.
could there be middle ground worth exploring? what about a PDF collection of 30 images at 300dpi?
i'd pay 30 cents for something like that.
30 cents is much smaller than the two dollar monthly subscription that was planned for "homer". it may even seem pitifully small. but not when you compare it to banner revenue.
for each rabid fan who visits a site every day without fail, the cartoonist probably makes 1.5 cents *per month* from banner advertising.
i didn't pull that number from a hat - the banners for sluggy.com pulled in twice that in late 1999, before the great revenue crash last summer (i was in charge of banners for sluggy in late 1999).
unfortunately, paypal deducts 30 cents from every transaction; in more ways than one, paypal is the real remaining problem with micropays.
as for copy control, certainly circles of friends will share copies without paying extra, but i think this is how books work today, to nobody's great loss.
if the files are big enough, they are cumbersome to email, and that is probably all the copy control most people need.
for a living example of micropayments that work, check out bill gates' "corbis.com". they sell 640x480 JPEG files for $3.00 each.
bryan mcnett
MODMAN NEW MUSIC ERA
now that's what i call copyright! =)
one problem not addressed by this new wavelet technique is the fact that the mesh is not a good primitive. the ubiquitousness of the mesh in interactive applications tends to conceal this fact. the rendering languages used in movies, however, build a new mesh for each frame, and throw it away immediately. why? because it is not easy to perform interesting operations on a mesh. a mesh is simple enough to render, but nearly impossible to work with as a design primitive. higher-order primitives are needed by human operators and their design software. it's possible to compare this to the difference between low-level computer languages and high-level computer languages. nowadays, we even have a CPU that dynamically reoptimizes the assembly language generated by compilers (transmeta's crusoe). but all the significant optimizations happen at the highest levels, far away from the level of individual assembly language instructions. an On^3 routine will eventually lose to an On^2 routine, no matter how diligently the assembly is tuned afterwards, by man or machine. this same futility will strike the mesh - all significant operations - like compression - will eventually take place at a far higher level. attempting to compress a mesh will seem as quaint as attempting to hand-optimize assembly language seems today.
i think the guy mentioned that the z coordinate of the hilt is assumed to be fixed (he claims two degrees of translational and rotational freedom, remember). the guy explained it like this: figure out which point is the hilt and which is the tip. then, visualize (in your head) a sphere where the hilt is the center and the tip is the surface. because it's a sphere, a 2D point on the screen maps to exactly two 3D points on its surface. inverse trig functions do the work of moving from 2D to 3D. and because we assume that the tip is on the hemisphere facing the monitor, we can throw away the case where the tip is pointing away from the monitor. i guess that the problems would be that maintaining a constant z position for the hilt may take a little away from the simulation. and, webcams are not designed for the kind of latencies that games have. webcams are cool for uploading a texture of one's face, though. if this isn't the first popular application we see in games, i'll be pretty surprised.
just tried netscape 6 on my win98 box. it wasn't immediately obvious how its controls work. they don't resemble win98, mac, X, or even previous versions of netscape.
i would need either a manual or lots of free time to learn how to use this app. and i'm a programmer by trade. so i give up.
i understand the political edge to the netscape saga. mozilla is free software, after all. but netscape is not really free. so i don't feel too guilty.
unless there's some "killer" feature i can't
get anywhere else (unlikely), i doubt i'll be
using netscape 6 ever again.
no sense in my recommending netscape 6 to friends
and family, as they would come to depend on me for help with an app i don't plan to learn myself. and that's minus one unpaid techie for netscape.
don't know about others, but i just can't deal with "wacky" interfaces in productivity apps. recent versions of "office" skirt the line enough that i tend to avoid them when doing serious work.
i don't need interfaces to look like real objects. i don't need truecolor buttons to glow or make noises at me. no talking paperclips, please. what i need is to accomplish work quickly. give me features that increase my ability to get stuff done.
the 50% of americans who don't have computers could care less about spreadsheets. these are not office workers. they want to get on the internet for cheap. who cares about excel?
watermarking also fails. i can rip a watermarked song, run it through a filter, and poof! the watermark is gone. if the watermark survives that, then it is aurally significant enough to reduce the quality of the track.
who will pay for low-quality tracks?