Newspapers run similar ads (with a tiny "Paid Advertisment" banner on the top) and I've heard of TV stations doing the same thing with "Fake Newscasts" but that's usually more common during election years.
Mental maturity also has implications in the growth and development of the brain, neural pathways being formed, other changes. If those things never happen, BAM, infant forever.
Very interesting. I'd wager its a bunch of hormone triggers never triggering, which is usually the root cause of age/size related stuff. I knew a kid when I was younger who lacked certain hormones in the correct proportions, so while he was my age mentally, and in actual years, he was about 5 years behind me in physical development, and had to take hormone shots.
At it's heart, the idea is wide scale load balancing, so the bandwidth to any one site would be very hard to saturate, because that site could be served from multiple disparate locations at the same time. Likewise the processing power would be commodity driven, so no single node would be overwhelmed.
The problem occurs with widespread events. Load balancing works well when some systems have more load than others, but it's just crappy overhead when every system is getting hit.
I'm not sure in cases like this, that the "cloud" as it stands has the capacity to handle spikes like this.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Right now these sites have to spend a certain amount of cash to prepare for these types of events. If they were all "in the cloud" then they wouldn't bother with that extra capacity...The cloud can cover it, right?
As soon as some generalized event comes along that saturates a number of big "cloud" subscribers, then the whole system is going to be heavily taxed, not just a few individual sites, and by the very nature of the "cloud" thing, that will affect a wide number of sites outside the sites that would otherwise be affected.
You're going to have to sell me on redundancy before you can get me to buy into magical cloud land.
Uh yea. Blatantly rig an election, and people tend to get pissed off. It's about more than just lining up in front of the cute little box. They had substantially more votes than people in more than 10(?) districts, and the race which was predicted to be very close, turned out to be a complete landslide. Every observer called the election rigged, even some of the internal ones.
Lot of hardware retailers sell OEM versions at a discount. I got a version of Vista business for about 80 bucks less than retail from Newegg.
//Vista hates my soundcard with a burning passion, and gives me a nice bluescreen every day or so to show me how much it cares...Never under load though. I have no explanation for why it only fails when it's idle...Some system process writing to protected memory or something.
News delivery...Who gives a shit about that? Do you think that the magical news fairy goes out every night and writes up the news? Or are you another one of those people who thinks that Reuters and the AP are somehow detached from local newspapers, so they'll be producing the same amount of stuff even with no newspapers to feed them?
Newspapers create the actual text. They send people to the event, those people write things about it, and those written things...Thats the news. If no one goes, and no one writes about it, it'll still happen, but we'll know fuck-all about it.
Blogs are not the answer. Everyone says, "They'll all go start blogs!" and it makes me want to shake them until the stupid stops.
How many blogs actually make money? Now take all the ones that only do shock and schlock. Yea. I can't think of any either.
Journalism is a professional career. They go to school to learn to do all this crap, and then they go out and practically apply that knowledge. Some of it they do because they love it, but in the end, they're looking for a paycheck and health insurance.
Worse, in-depth stuff can take weeks and months (and, very occasionally years) to research. Who pays their salary during that time? How do their kids eat?
When they do break the next huge amazing story after 6 months of digging through public records on their own dime, how do they get compensated for their time? You going to buy a t-shirt?
Real journalism takes money. This wasn't traditionally a problem, because people were generally willing to fork a modest fee for reliable information. But now the internets have come and saved everyone from the burden of being able to make a living by generating information.
In my experience, journalists are a bit like lawyers. They all want to do the right thing when they're getting started, want to fight for truth, and expose corruption. But eventually, they get beaten down by people who think they're always lying, always dishonest...People who give a quote, and then sue because they end up looking bad.
And after enough of that, they say, "Fuck this low paying shit, I'm going to put this knowledge and experience to work for money." And then they go work for a politician, or a corporation, or a lobbying firm.
So don't worry about the journalists. They'll get paid.
Is it? Is it really? What town do you live in that the internet really gives a shit about your city council? New York City?
Almost all print news coverage on the internet comes originally from old school newspapers. So, yea, it's great for news...Right now. When those papers go bankrupt, it's going to suck.
The one place where internet coverage really really sucks is local coverage. Newspapers completely dominate that niche, even now. That's why small town newspapers are so pervasive: that news isn't available anywhere else, and even a weekly paper has far more actual content than the pathetic little 30 minute news spots the tv stations do...In my experience, the TV and radio stations tend to lift everything from the newspapers anyway (which is getting easier, now that the papers are putting things online so quickly.)
Free papers are an exception to the rule: they really are supported almost entirely by ad revenue, so they can afford to give away personal ads or classifieds just to draw the extra eyes for their paid ads. They don't own their own presses, they usually don't do home delivery, and they tend to have a very small staff, so their costs are very low.
On the other hand, they make very little money, and generally can't afford to do much in-depth journalism.
Shrug. Right now it's hard to believe that the non-print revenue is going to stabilize at a level that will support even one decent sized paper. If you want more than one, people are going to have to keep paying some form of subscription fee.
When we started looking for cost cutting measures, we discovered we'd been paying 250,000 a year for phones at a distribution center we'd closed 5 years prior. Nobody'd noticed, because that was pocket change. That's a whole buncha reporters they could have been paying, and that sort of waste was endemic just a few decades ago.
And forced? I don't think so. They ignored the internet, and tried to charge regular subscription prices for online content, and took it in the ass. Then they went too far the other way. They're still lunging around without a real direction, outsourcing ads cutting their own throats by putting up projects that take months to produce, online before the print product is even on the stands.
They try to sell these "online editions" which are basically pdf versions of the paper, and much less useful than the website itself. What a joke.
Classifieds? Classifieds are gone. The revenue is down to 10% of what it used to be, and it's never coming back. Free online classifieds are superior to 15 columns of unsearchable text so small you need a fricking magnifying glass.
No one gives a damn if the crappy newspaper comics page is going to go out of business. No one cares if the extremely scanty gig guide or the cooking/gardening crap that's all available online is gone. Editorial content, somewhat, but that's on the fringe of the regular news content.
Frankly, you sound like you're about 60, and more power to you, you're our core demographic. But trust me when I tell you, that we can't survive if we can't get some subscribers under 30, and they're rare as rare.
Bad analogy, because the death of reel to reel wasn't the death of (for example) symphonic music. It was just a transition from one format to another.
The problem with the possible death of the print media industry, is that they're the only ones who do real, in-depth, reliable, reporting these days...They're the only ones who can afford to, because it's fricking expensive to do it right. So far, it's too expensive to support with online ad revenue as well, hence the problem.
TV doesn't give a damn: they can fill the same amount of time by giving air time for some fringe moron to sit and spout his own uninformed opinions. And they hardly ever own up to errors of fact in their broadcasts. Can't rely on them for anything but pretty pictures.
Bloggers don't have any real money, and they are completely compromised by a 100% dependence on ad revenue. Newspapers have always cared about ad revenue, but subscriber revenue and numbers were important enough to allow larger papers to effectively ignore the complaints of their advertisers...What were they going to do? Print pamphlets?
Some people think the loss of that in depth reporting is a bad thing. It's going to be worst in local markets: when was the last time you saw your local TV station cover a city council meeting? If someone is zoning the land across the street from your house for heavy industry, you'd probably like to know, but chances are you won't find out about it without newspaper coverage.
Not really true. It's just that the vast majority who are reading anything from them, are reading it online.
The trickle of ad revenue from the online sites (assuming the story doesn't get picked up by the AP) doesn't cover the costs of a massive brick and mortar printing and distribution operation.
In half the 2 paper towns these days, both papers are owned by the same goddamn company!
I think multiple competing news sources are a good thing, but I also think, in this country, that the ability to sort and judge good information from bad information is a skill that we are intentionally not teaching our children. On top of that, we are rewarding news sources (Faux News, I'm looking at you) for providing biased and substandard coverage.
That being the case, I'd really prefer to see one decent source rather than a half dozen crap sources.
Beginning Disclaimer: I work for a print newspaper.
This sounds like about the worst idea I've ever heard. We've been living on the gravy train for decades, and as a consequence, we piss away money like it's water. Now things have gotten tight, and we're cutting and cutting deep, and a lot of outlets may go under, but so be it.
This whole "the print media industry needs government help!" crap is making me nuts. First off, there are very few independent papers left, so you're really talking about bailing out another industry with overpaid CEOs who can't make a decent business decision to save their lives. The same people who really really thought the solution to their industrys internet problem was to give away their product for free. Right. Second, the news media has only one real legitmate function: to inform you about the actions the government is taking in your name. Having the government bail them out is a little bit problematic for that reason.
The industry is changing. It's evolving. It will become something else. Trying to persist the current model is bound to fail, and propping them up with public cash does nothing but compromise their mission and prevent them from figuring out how to accurately make their transition. Jesus, just look at GM if you want to know what public money does to a private company.
We screwed the Afgans. We promised them the world if they'd fight the Soviets, and when they won, we pulled out and left them with more unexploded landmines than people, and a hardass government that we'd put in power because we wanted evil bastards to fight the Soviets.
Pretty much the same story in Iraq. Saddam was one of ours, a secular dictator that we sustained in power as a foil against the religious extremists.
Turns out, if you put hardasses in power, they can turn around on you. If we just offered actual aid rather than screwing with their governance, we'd be much better regarded in that part of the world.
I don't think offering national wifi would be too much of a problem as far as our image is concerned. We could bill it as being humanitarian, e.g. to help the red cross volunteers that are undoubtably already there.
The point is moot however. Satellite wifi is only 1 way...Hand held devices don't have the transmission power to hit an orbital target. The only way we could set up some kind of wireless broadband would be with big honkin towers, serving local nodes, etc, and that ain't happening. And if we sent basically a 1-way "information" broadcast, we would (rightly) be accused of interference.
I don't think anyone inside Iran knows the truth either. You may not "trust journalism" whatever that means, but our journalism, with all of its flaws is far better at disseminating accurate information than anything they have inside Iran at the best of times, and these aren't the best of times.
The people in Iran are hearing little besides rumor, propaganda, and sermons.
They'll claim it's interference by Western Powers regardless, because some people will believe it, and it's a nice bogeyman to justify their harsh repression.
I think Obama is doing the right thing by staying out of it...Given our reputation over there any overt involvement could only make things worse...And, frankly, whoever wins, it's not going to change a lot for us.
Slashdot Mirror
Newspapers run similar ads (with a tiny "Paid Advertisment" banner on the top) and I've heard of TV stations doing the same thing with "Fake Newscasts" but that's usually more common during election years.
Mental maturity also has implications in the growth and development of the brain, neural pathways being formed, other changes. If those things never happen, BAM, infant forever.
Very interesting. I'd wager its a bunch of hormone triggers never triggering, which is usually the root cause of age/size related stuff. I knew a kid when I was younger who lacked certain hormones in the correct proportions, so while he was my age mentally, and in actual years, he was about 5 years behind me in physical development, and had to take hormone shots.
[citation needed]
At it's heart, the idea is wide scale load balancing, so the bandwidth to any one site would be very hard to saturate, because that site could be served from multiple disparate locations at the same time. Likewise the processing power would be commodity driven, so no single node would be overwhelmed.
The problem occurs with widespread events. Load balancing works well when some systems have more load than others, but it's just crappy overhead when every system is getting hit.
I'm not sure in cases like this, that the "cloud" as it stands has the capacity to handle spikes like this.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Right now these sites have to spend a certain amount of cash to prepare for these types of events. If they were all "in the cloud" then they wouldn't bother with that extra capacity...The cloud can cover it, right?
As soon as some generalized event comes along that saturates a number of big "cloud" subscribers, then the whole system is going to be heavily taxed, not just a few individual sites, and by the very nature of the "cloud" thing, that will affect a wide number of sites outside the sites that would otherwise be affected.
You're going to have to sell me on redundancy before you can get me to buy into magical cloud land.
Sadly, I always try and get away from Creative, so I bought an HT-Omega. I've got no complaints, other than the obvious.
Uh yea. Blatantly rig an election, and people tend to get pissed off. It's about more than just lining up in front of the cute little box. They had substantially more votes than people in more than 10(?) districts, and the race which was predicted to be very close, turned out to be a complete landslide. Every observer called the election rigged, even some of the internal ones.
And you're wondering why they're pissed?
Well, speaking for myself, I wanted to kill people on the exit from 2 out 3 of those movies, so this may not achieve the intended effect.
Lot of hardware retailers sell OEM versions at a discount. I got a version of Vista business for about 80 bucks less than retail from Newegg.
//Vista hates my soundcard with a burning passion, and gives me a nice bluescreen every day or so to show me how much it cares...Never under load though. I have no explanation for why it only fails when it's idle...Some system process writing to protected memory or something.
Largely agreed, though I'd say, "Subscriber revenues paid for the printing, and the delivery, and a good sized chunk of the physical plant."
It was still enough to give them some independence.
News delivery...Who gives a shit about that? Do you think that the magical news fairy goes out every night and writes up the news? Or are you another one of those people who thinks that Reuters and the AP are somehow detached from local newspapers, so they'll be producing the same amount of stuff even with no newspapers to feed them?
Newspapers create the actual text. They send people to the event, those people write things about it, and those written things...Thats the news. If no one goes, and no one writes about it, it'll still happen, but we'll know fuck-all about it.
Blogs are not the answer. Everyone says, "They'll all go start blogs!" and it makes me want to shake them until the stupid stops.
How many blogs actually make money? Now take all the ones that only do shock and schlock. Yea. I can't think of any either.
Journalism is a professional career. They go to school to learn to do all this crap, and then they go out and practically apply that knowledge. Some of it they do because they love it, but in the end, they're looking for a paycheck and health insurance.
Worse, in-depth stuff can take weeks and months (and, very occasionally years) to research. Who pays their salary during that time? How do their kids eat?
When they do break the next huge amazing story after 6 months of digging through public records on their own dime, how do they get compensated for their time? You going to buy a t-shirt?
Real journalism takes money. This wasn't traditionally a problem, because people were generally willing to fork a modest fee for reliable information. But now the internets have come and saved everyone from the burden of being able to make a living by generating information.
In my experience, journalists are a bit like lawyers. They all want to do the right thing when they're getting started, want to fight for truth, and expose corruption. But eventually, they get beaten down by people who think they're always lying, always dishonest...People who give a quote, and then sue because they end up looking bad.
And after enough of that, they say, "Fuck this low paying shit, I'm going to put this knowledge and experience to work for money." And then they go work for a politician, or a corporation, or a lobbying firm.
So don't worry about the journalists. They'll get paid.
Is it? Is it really? What town do you live in that the internet really gives a shit about your city council? New York City?
Almost all print news coverage on the internet comes originally from old school newspapers. So, yea, it's great for news...Right now. When those papers go bankrupt, it's going to suck.
The one place where internet coverage really really sucks is local coverage. Newspapers completely dominate that niche, even now. That's why small town newspapers are so pervasive: that news isn't available anywhere else, and even a weekly paper has far more actual content than the pathetic little 30 minute news spots the tv stations do...In my experience, the TV and radio stations tend to lift everything from the newspapers anyway (which is getting easier, now that the papers are putting things online so quickly.)
Free papers are an exception to the rule: they really are supported almost entirely by ad revenue, so they can afford to give away personal ads or classifieds just to draw the extra eyes for their paid ads. They don't own their own presses, they usually don't do home delivery, and they tend to have a very small staff, so their costs are very low.
On the other hand, they make very little money, and generally can't afford to do much in-depth journalism.
Shrug. Right now it's hard to believe that the non-print revenue is going to stabilize at a level that will support even one decent sized paper. If you want more than one, people are going to have to keep paying some form of subscription fee.
When we started looking for cost cutting measures, we discovered we'd been paying 250,000 a year for phones at a distribution center we'd closed 5 years prior. Nobody'd noticed, because that was pocket change. That's a whole buncha reporters they could have been paying, and that sort of waste was endemic just a few decades ago.
And forced? I don't think so. They ignored the internet, and tried to charge regular subscription prices for online content, and took it in the ass. Then they went too far the other way. They're still lunging around without a real direction, outsourcing ads cutting their own throats by putting up projects that take months to produce, online before the print product is even on the stands.
They try to sell these "online editions" which are basically pdf versions of the paper, and much less useful than the website itself. What a joke.
Classifieds? Classifieds are gone. The revenue is down to 10% of what it used to be, and it's never coming back. Free online classifieds are superior to 15 columns of unsearchable text so small you need a fricking magnifying glass.
No one gives a damn if the crappy newspaper comics page is going to go out of business. No one cares if the extremely scanty gig guide or the cooking/gardening crap that's all available online is gone. Editorial content, somewhat, but that's on the fringe of the regular news content.
Frankly, you sound like you're about 60, and more power to you, you're our core demographic. But trust me when I tell you, that we can't survive if we can't get some subscribers under 30, and they're rare as rare.
Bad analogy, because the death of reel to reel wasn't the death of (for example) symphonic music. It was just a transition from one format to another.
The problem with the possible death of the print media industry, is that they're the only ones who do real, in-depth, reliable, reporting these days...They're the only ones who can afford to, because it's fricking expensive to do it right. So far, it's too expensive to support with online ad revenue as well, hence the problem.
TV doesn't give a damn: they can fill the same amount of time by giving air time for some fringe moron to sit and spout his own uninformed opinions. And they hardly ever own up to errors of fact in their broadcasts. Can't rely on them for anything but pretty pictures.
Bloggers don't have any real money, and they are completely compromised by a 100% dependence on ad revenue. Newspapers have always cared about ad revenue, but subscriber revenue and numbers were important enough to allow larger papers to effectively ignore the complaints of their advertisers...What were they going to do? Print pamphlets?
Some people think the loss of that in depth reporting is a bad thing. It's going to be worst in local markets: when was the last time you saw your local TV station cover a city council meeting? If someone is zoning the land across the street from your house for heavy industry, you'd probably like to know, but chances are you won't find out about it without newspaper coverage.
Not really true. It's just that the vast majority who are reading anything from them, are reading it online.
The trickle of ad revenue from the online sites (assuming the story doesn't get picked up by the AP) doesn't cover the costs of a massive brick and mortar printing and distribution operation.
In half the 2 paper towns these days, both papers are owned by the same goddamn company!
I think multiple competing news sources are a good thing, but I also think, in this country, that the ability to sort and judge good information from bad information is a skill that we are intentionally not teaching our children. On top of that, we are rewarding news sources (Faux News, I'm looking at you) for providing biased and substandard coverage.
That being the case, I'd really prefer to see one decent source rather than a half dozen crap sources.
Beginning Disclaimer: I work for a print newspaper.
This sounds like about the worst idea I've ever heard. We've been living on the gravy train for decades, and as a consequence, we piss away money like it's water. Now things have gotten tight, and we're cutting and cutting deep, and a lot of outlets may go under, but so be it.
This whole "the print media industry needs government help!" crap is making me nuts. First off, there are very few independent papers left, so you're really talking about bailing out another industry with overpaid CEOs who can't make a decent business decision to save their lives. The same people who really really thought the solution to their industrys internet problem was to give away their product for free. Right. Second, the news media has only one real legitmate function: to inform you about the actions the government is taking in your name. Having the government bail them out is a little bit problematic for that reason.
The industry is changing. It's evolving. It will become something else. Trying to persist the current model is bound to fail, and propping them up with public cash does nothing but compromise their mission and prevent them from figuring out how to accurately make their transition. Jesus, just look at GM if you want to know what public money does to a private company.
Last time I saw "consumer grade" satellite internet, you sent the outbound packets via dial-up. =P
I know there are actual ground to satellite services, but they're probably not practical for wide-scale communication in this sort of situation.
We screwed the Afgans. We promised them the world if they'd fight the Soviets, and when they won, we pulled out and left them with more unexploded landmines than people, and a hardass government that we'd put in power because we wanted evil bastards to fight the Soviets.
Pretty much the same story in Iraq. Saddam was one of ours, a secular dictator that we sustained in power as a foil against the religious extremists.
Turns out, if you put hardasses in power, they can turn around on you. If we just offered actual aid rather than screwing with their governance, we'd be much better regarded in that part of the world.
I don't think offering national wifi would be too much of a problem as far as our image is concerned. We could bill it as being humanitarian, e.g. to help the red cross volunteers that are undoubtably already there.
The point is moot however. Satellite wifi is only 1 way...Hand held devices don't have the transmission power to hit an orbital target. The only way we could set up some kind of wireless broadband would be with big honkin towers, serving local nodes, etc, and that ain't happening. And if we sent basically a 1-way "information" broadcast, we would (rightly) be accused of interference.
I don't think anyone inside Iran knows the truth either. You may not "trust journalism" whatever that means, but our journalism, with all of its flaws is far better at disseminating accurate information than anything they have inside Iran at the best of times, and these aren't the best of times.
The people in Iran are hearing little besides rumor, propaganda, and sermons.
They'll claim it's interference by Western Powers regardless, because some people will believe it, and it's a nice bogeyman to justify their harsh repression.
I think Obama is doing the right thing by staying out of it...Given our reputation over there any overt involvement could only make things worse...And, frankly, whoever wins, it's not going to change a lot for us.