Now, where did I say that? The whole point here is that no one misses newspapers because they have the web, and the benefit of the web for these people is that it contains everything that's in the newspapers!
If there are a million people out there who are willing to pay the absurd subscription price of the NYT, then there are bound to be some who'd be willing to pay for it online because they value the product, especially if that content is available nowhere else.
My idea (and I've actually cornered the CEO of the media company I work for in an elevator, and made him listen to it) is that all new news should be for-pay. You should have to subscribe or do a micro-transaction or something.
But after 2 weeks or a month, it should be free. That way you get your upfront revenue, but then you can take advantage of the long tail as well, and sell ads on that content.
The newspaper I work for is almost 200 years old (not a journalist, just a techie). Can you imagine the value of that much content if it were indexed and made available? This isn't wikipedia: this is primary source, research material. Stick an ad on it, and make your nickel off something that was written more than a hundred years ago.
The problem lies with intangibles like dwell time. Advertisers want you to spend a lot of time looking at their ad, building up that good old submliminal crap.
A newspaper ad is an ad placed in a product that someone desires so much that they've actually paid for it. A product that will lie around the home for a while thereafter, generating additional brain time.
Contrast that with a web page ad. Might not even see it, if you use ad blocking software. Even if you click through, you may immediately decide you don't want it, and move on. The mental dwell time is tiny, and the audience may or may not be interested in the site and its contents.
They charge to offset the hilariously expensive printing and delivery process. The "having paying customers to show to our advertisers" angle is just a bonus.
The problem with paper is paper itself. Paper costs have been doing up steadily for decades. Gas costs increase. Ink costs increase, and the demand for a high quality printed product increases.
It's too much. The physical print product has been getting more expensive, delivered to a smaller area, and at the same time, becoming a smaller product because the phbs have chosen to scrimp on content generation on top of everything else.
So yea, of course it's been shrinking. But that doesn't mean people aren't interested in the content. Doesn't mean people wouldn't be willing to pay for high quality content.
The best thing that could happen to the print industry is the death of the actual printed product. It is the source of at least 75% of their costs.
However a quality ad supported product is a pipe dream. And even if you could support a product on that tiny revenue stream, it'd be a crap product, utterly beholden to its advertisers.
They tried to do it...in 1995. Big deal. No one cared about the internet version then. It wasn't a viable delivery platform for 95% of the world.
Now, things have changed. People pay fees for internet sites all the time. It's that stupid 5 dollars a month to Pandora, or wherever, for "premium" content.
Shrug. I think we're already seeing plenty of papers folding. The mistake you're making is thinking that what pops up to take their place is going to keep generating free content. That model just doesn't work. Some kind of pay model is going to have to arise.
Frankly, it's about time. They spend millions a year to produce a product (written news stories) and they have two delivery formats for said product: One, a pay product printed on dead trees, which accounts for the vast majority of their revenue. And two, a free digital product that doesn't make shit, with the added bonus that it makes their paying product worthless.
Seems like a no-brainer. Now, the question becomes, will they charge a fair price, or will they pull a record company move, and try to charge the same for a physical and a digital product?
One thing is for sure. If it works out for them, you're going to see tons of print outlets following suit.
The whole cloud concept has been defined so poorly, that you're not given any sort of benchmarks for performance or scalability.
I'd require guarantees (as I require with my outsourced resources), and until they're going to provide them, then I'll keep doing it myself, or outsourcing it to someone who is willing to detail their services in more concrete terms.
The problem is scalability. It's not that you're not getting what you're paying for, it's that it's not scaling as it should be, as they tell you it will.
So something happens, and their system gets taxed and your hosted apps get choked for resources and look like crap. Sure, they're not billing you for what you're not using, but you're not getting a good product either.
For me, for my critical services, double redundancy is doable. I can even do double, and then have a third cluster which can take over for any one of the other four in a pinch.
I've got redundant data lines from different providers, I've got battery and generator backups, and I've got multiple physical locations. If I'm asked, I can say, without any doubts, that we have exercised diligence, and that we're prepared for any rational situation.
With the "cloud" you have to trust that some third party, whose business is making money, is going to spend for the capacity to cover those contingencies. I flat do not trust them.
It misses the point of the magical cloud! If the phbs learn that the magical cloud can run out of capacity, then they might have to start planning again.
If they do that then EC2 and other similar services which sell the same capacity to 100 different people on the principle that they won't all get taxed at the same time, are going to have some explaining to do.
Well, I'm not excusing people who miss deadlines and produce crap, but there isn't enough information to pass judgment.
I got stuck with a huge project last year, I had two weeks to make it work, had to design the whole thing from the ground up, and figure out all the requirements, and implement it. Fucking management gave me the mushroom treatment because it was an outsourcing project and they didn't want anyone to know it was coming. So the whole thing just appeared one Monday morning.
So I got...something...working by the deadline, but it wasn't what you'd call "complete", and I got reamed out for missing the deadline. Then I got reamed because what there was was buggy and unstable.
So we're on the conference call with corporate, and all the other people who are working on the same project (yea, massive duplication of effort. Nice.) are reporting in, and when the smoke clears, I was the only person who'd managed to get anything working at all. Of course, management took credit, I guess for having assigned it, which was all they did. My crap application is now deployed all over the country (though I did debug it first).
So missing deadlines and delivering crap is bad...unless the deadlines are so unrealistic that crap is all that's possible.
It's not that bad. Processor and memory utilization effect your score in a measurable way, and enough people use it that the basis for comparison is broad.
It's no worse than their obscene markup on peripherals, and their insistence on pushing their crappy store warranties.
I once bought a fricking SATA cable there (9 bucks), and they tried to sell me a warranty. I loudly pointed out that the cable they were selling was marked up 400% over an equivalent cable bought online, or at the Radio Shack 5 miles up the road, and that the odds of there being any failure in the cable in the time covered by the warranty. The guy behind me in line actually put his stuff down, and walked out.
I still bought the cable. Good old corporate card.
My company isn't even that big, and we have 3/16 blocks.
That doesn't even count regular statics that come with things like T1/T3 lines, and stuff like that. No, these are blocks we bought in the 90's because the interwebs were becoming popular and we thought we might need 2^19 ip addresses.
We're migrating off of our block this year, actually. Completely abandoning it. Why? No need for it. Just the little piddly/28 blocks that come with our networking (per site) are vastly more than enough.
The ipv4-is-running-out-any-day-now argument is as pointless as its ever been.
If people like the revisions, they'll happily translate it again. If they don't they'll accuse you of being untrue to your own ideas and refuse to translate it.
Either way, you don't have to feel bad about making other people do the work.
That's just what I was thinking. I use Stack Overflow, and my username is (predictably) Satanicpuppy. 5 seconds of googling will give you my email address, because I treat all information on public forums as public information.
This is only a problem for people who think that they can really be sure of their privacy because some website takes a half-assed precaution.
I'd just file this under "networking". That's really the reason people go to conferences: to meet other people in the same field, and share business cards and bs anecdotes.
Free stuff (or at least stuff that'll fit on the T&E card) is just gravy.
You're just not likely to get back even as much energy as you're putting in; "feeding" the meat with proteins, etc, has a high cost in terms of mass to energy.
You'd probably actually lose energy over just burning the same stuff in a power plant, and using that energy for the electro-stim bit.
Yes and no...It's absolutely right and fair to demand that fair compensation for on call work be included in your compensation package.
It's not, however, a right. If you choose to accept a job with a heavy OT burden, without any extra compensation, you need to get your contract re-negotiated.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, where did I say that? The whole point here is that no one misses newspapers because they have the web, and the benefit of the web for these people is that it contains everything that's in the newspapers!
If there are a million people out there who are willing to pay the absurd subscription price of the NYT, then there are bound to be some who'd be willing to pay for it online because they value the product, especially if that content is available nowhere else.
My idea (and I've actually cornered the CEO of the media company I work for in an elevator, and made him listen to it) is that all new news should be for-pay. You should have to subscribe or do a micro-transaction or something.
But after 2 weeks or a month, it should be free. That way you get your upfront revenue, but then you can take advantage of the long tail as well, and sell ads on that content.
The newspaper I work for is almost 200 years old (not a journalist, just a techie). Can you imagine the value of that much content if it were indexed and made available? This isn't wikipedia: this is primary source, research material. Stick an ad on it, and make your nickel off something that was written more than a hundred years ago.
The problem lies with intangibles like dwell time. Advertisers want you to spend a lot of time looking at their ad, building up that good old submliminal crap.
A newspaper ad is an ad placed in a product that someone desires so much that they've actually paid for it. A product that will lie around the home for a while thereafter, generating additional brain time.
Contrast that with a web page ad. Might not even see it, if you use ad blocking software. Even if you click through, you may immediately decide you don't want it, and move on. The mental dwell time is tiny, and the audience may or may not be interested in the site and its contents.
The 1,000,665 people who pay for it every weekday, and the 1,438,585 people who pay for it every sunday probably would disagree with your assertion.
They charge to offset the hilariously expensive printing and delivery process. The "having paying customers to show to our advertisers" angle is just a bonus.
The problem with paper is paper itself. Paper costs have been doing up steadily for decades. Gas costs increase. Ink costs increase, and the demand for a high quality printed product increases.
It's too much. The physical print product has been getting more expensive, delivered to a smaller area, and at the same time, becoming a smaller product because the phbs have chosen to scrimp on content generation on top of everything else.
So yea, of course it's been shrinking. But that doesn't mean people aren't interested in the content. Doesn't mean people wouldn't be willing to pay for high quality content.
The best thing that could happen to the print industry is the death of the actual printed product. It is the source of at least 75% of their costs.
However a quality ad supported product is a pipe dream. And even if you could support a product on that tiny revenue stream, it'd be a crap product, utterly beholden to its advertisers.
They tried to do it...in 1995. Big deal. No one cared about the internet version then. It wasn't a viable delivery platform for 95% of the world.
Now, things have changed. People pay fees for internet sites all the time. It's that stupid 5 dollars a month to Pandora, or wherever, for "premium" content.
Shrug. I think we're already seeing plenty of papers folding. The mistake you're making is thinking that what pops up to take their place is going to keep generating free content. That model just doesn't work. Some kind of pay model is going to have to arise.
Cue "OMFG They're so irrelevant!" whiners.
Frankly, it's about time. They spend millions a year to produce a product (written news stories) and they have two delivery formats for said product: One, a pay product printed on dead trees, which accounts for the vast majority of their revenue. And two, a free digital product that doesn't make shit, with the added bonus that it makes their paying product worthless.
Seems like a no-brainer. Now, the question becomes, will they charge a fair price, or will they pull a record company move, and try to charge the same for a physical and a digital product?
One thing is for sure. If it works out for them, you're going to see tons of print outlets following suit.
Yes, but no.
The whole cloud concept has been defined so poorly, that you're not given any sort of benchmarks for performance or scalability.
I'd require guarantees (as I require with my outsourced resources), and until they're going to provide them, then I'll keep doing it myself, or outsourcing it to someone who is willing to detail their services in more concrete terms.
The problem is scalability. It's not that you're not getting what you're paying for, it's that it's not scaling as it should be, as they tell you it will.
So something happens, and their system gets taxed and your hosted apps get choked for resources and look like crap. Sure, they're not billing you for what you're not using, but you're not getting a good product either.
For me, for my critical services, double redundancy is doable. I can even do double, and then have a third cluster which can take over for any one of the other four in a pinch.
I've got redundant data lines from different providers, I've got battery and generator backups, and I've got multiple physical locations. If I'm asked, I can say, without any doubts, that we have exercised diligence, and that we're prepared for any rational situation.
With the "cloud" you have to trust that some third party, whose business is making money, is going to spend for the capacity to cover those contingencies. I flat do not trust them.
It misses the point of the magical cloud! If the phbs learn that the magical cloud can run out of capacity, then they might have to start planning again.
If they do that then EC2 and other similar services which sell the same capacity to 100 different people on the principle that they won't all get taxed at the same time, are going to have some explaining to do.
Well, I'm not excusing people who miss deadlines and produce crap, but there isn't enough information to pass judgment.
I got stuck with a huge project last year, I had two weeks to make it work, had to design the whole thing from the ground up, and figure out all the requirements, and implement it. Fucking management gave me the mushroom treatment because it was an outsourcing project and they didn't want anyone to know it was coming. So the whole thing just appeared one Monday morning.
So I got...something...working by the deadline, but it wasn't what you'd call "complete", and I got reamed out for missing the deadline. Then I got reamed because what there was was buggy and unstable.
So we're on the conference call with corporate, and all the other people who are working on the same project (yea, massive duplication of effort. Nice.) are reporting in, and when the smoke clears, I was the only person who'd managed to get anything working at all. Of course, management took credit, I guess for having assigned it, which was all they did. My crap application is now deployed all over the country (though I did debug it first).
So missing deadlines and delivering crap is bad...unless the deadlines are so unrealistic that crap is all that's possible.
It's not that bad. Processor and memory utilization effect your score in a measurable way, and enough people use it that the basis for comparison is broad.
It's no worse than their obscene markup on peripherals, and their insistence on pushing their crappy store warranties.
I once bought a fricking SATA cable there (9 bucks), and they tried to sell me a warranty. I loudly pointed out that the cable they were selling was marked up 400% over an equivalent cable bought online, or at the Radio Shack 5 miles up the road, and that the odds of there being any failure in the cable in the time covered by the warranty. The guy behind me in line actually put his stuff down, and walked out.
I still bought the cable. Good old corporate card.
My company isn't even that big, and we have 3 /16 blocks.
That doesn't even count regular statics that come with things like T1/T3 lines, and stuff like that. No, these are blocks we bought in the 90's because the interwebs were becoming popular and we thought we might need 2^19 ip addresses.
We're migrating off of our block this year, actually. Completely abandoning it. Why? No need for it. Just the little piddly /28 blocks that come with our networking (per site) are vastly more than enough.
The ipv4-is-running-out-any-day-now argument is as pointless as its ever been.
If people like the revisions, they'll happily translate it again. If they don't they'll accuse you of being untrue to your own ideas and refuse to translate it.
Either way, you don't have to feel bad about making other people do the work.
Assuming panspermia is pretty big leap.
I agree, and yet I don't. Unlimited means unlimited, it doesn't mean "Within reason."
AT&T needs to get it's shit together.
That's just what I was thinking. I use Stack Overflow, and my username is (predictably) Satanicpuppy. 5 seconds of googling will give you my email address, because I treat all information on public forums as public information.
This is only a problem for people who think that they can really be sure of their privacy because some website takes a half-assed precaution.
Confusing pay media with free media is a mistake. If you pay them, you have actual pull.
I'd just file this under "networking". That's really the reason people go to conferences: to meet other people in the same field, and share business cards and bs anecdotes.
Free stuff (or at least stuff that'll fit on the T&E card) is just gravy.
They'll move on to the next thing. Where did all the EQ people go? They didn't all just magically lose interest.
Wow is nice and all, but it's not the end-all be-all.
You're just not likely to get back even as much energy as you're putting in; "feeding" the meat with proteins, etc, has a high cost in terms of mass to energy.
You'd probably actually lose energy over just burning the same stuff in a power plant, and using that energy for the electro-stim bit.
Yes and no...It's absolutely right and fair to demand that fair compensation for on call work be included in your compensation package.
It's not, however, a right. If you choose to accept a job with a heavy OT burden, without any extra compensation, you need to get your contract re-negotiated.