'A brief history of time' is a good book (so is 'The universe in a nutshell') but they were kind of written for a wider audience.
QED is a series of lectures on quantum electrodynamics that is geared toward people with a strong interest in the nuts and bolts of the material. It's a core text, something you'd pick up if you were trying to improve your understanding of quantum electrodynamics...For it to be as readable as it is, is a huge accomplishment.
QED is fucking awesome. Feynman is about the most readable person you'll find on any of these lists (Darwin is dry as dust...100 pages of morphological bone changes in pigeons and you'll gnaw off your own limbs).
I have only an advanced laymans understanding of physics (4 classes at the undergrad level) and his explanations were concise, clear, and very easy to follow.
Did I say that? I don't think I did. The parent was talking about CO2, so I talked about CO2. A facile statement like, "Oh noes, teh goats are going to breath us to death" deserves ridicule.
I frankly don't have a anthropogenic climate change position; I don't think it's been discredited, and I don't think it's been proven. But if you're talking about CO2 production from a goat, vs CO2 production from an internal combustion engine, you're not making an apples to apples comparison. It's intellectually dishonest.
Well, from a pure revenue stream POV, they'd be better off charging a lot less, but charging monthly...It's a huge pain to have such a variable revenue source, and since ad revenue is already crazy erratic...It'd be hard to do any sort of budget.
My thought has always been to charge a fee for viewing anything more than the first few paragraphs for any news that's newer than 7 days, and making all the news older than 7 days available to everyone free of charge.
The problem is always about how to monetize it. Username and password is as good as it gets now, but as soon as some poor grandpa's account gets swiped and posted on "Bug Me Not" or similar, then you've got a buncha freeloaders and a pissed off customer.
I don't know. it's going to be interesting to see.
Stupid shit like this makes me homicidal. Do you really think that the ~.9kg of CO2 a goat exhales per day is going to cause an eco-catastrophe? Contrast that to the gas and energy that go into an industrial lawnmower, and there is no comparison.
Goats create CO2 as a waste product from their O2 burning lifestyles...Just like us. Where does that C come from? Goats may eat a chunk of coal every now and again, but that's not really their primary source of carbon. They get their carbon from plant matter. They eat it, digest it, and crap most of it out as fertilizer.
That's what they call "carbon-neutral": they use "free" carbon, that isn't buried in the earth, and they produce fertilizer that increases the growth of other carbon-absorbing plants.
As for methane, who gives a shit? It's got a short shelf-life. Methane drops out of the atmosphere in a mere decade, as opposed to C02, which can hang around forever.
You don't know what you're talking about. Papers have had digital format editions of the paper product for years (Knight Ridder did theirs corporate-wide in '05). Trying to push those (hilariously undersubscribed) editions using portable readers doesn't cost them anything.
It's a waste of time though. Bad pictures, no color...Hell, it'll look worse than the paper product.
And, as for going completely ad supported, it's not going to happen. The village voice can pull it off, and dinky little entertainment papers with 10,000 circ can pull it off, but they do it by having an extremely small permanent staff and practically zero physical plant.
I ran a weekly with 20,000 circ for a couple of years, and we were quite popular, but our margins were high enough to support more than 5 or 6 permanent staff, and we couldn't afford to pay our stringers more than a pittance. I work as a regional IT guy for two papers now (50,000 and 75,000 circ, respectively)
Each paper employs 30+ staff who do nothing but gather news, and that is down from the 50+ glory days when we could afford to send someone to every government meeting, and cover all our outlying coverage areas with their own reporters, and crap like that...Crap that makes a good product.
Without permanent employees, you lose all the benefits of working sources, you lose all the specialized knowledge of the area, and knowledge of the people who will and will not talk on the record...Hell, if you're not a full timer, you probably don't even know who to call.
And that's just reporters. Add in the ad people, the finance people, and, in your fantasy world, the production people (you won't even be able to pay for the paper edition on your ad revenue, so just give that one up), and you have a business that'll cost about 70% more than you can make with ads alone, even wicked expensive publication-of-record print ads.
Drop the print product, and your shortfall drops to about 20% (print is about 80% of your costs, but print ads are MUCH more lucrative than online ads, so ditching the print hurts your ad revenue as well). After that, you're cutting meat and bone. You need finance to collect your ad money and do your books, you need ad people to get your ads and deal with your ad customers, and you need journalists and designers to put up the actual product.
Basically, they need to find a way to make up those costs. Maybe ditching the office space. Maybe centralizing your finance people. Plenty of companies would love to do your ads for you (like Google) but they'll take their pound of flesh, and that's probably more than you'd lose if you did it yourself.
THAT, is how it can be done. Fucking armchair wanker. I can't believe all the people who think they have the answer.
You'd get a better product hitting their web page with your iPhone. The half-assed pdf-esque digital format papers aren't worth the subscription price.
That is exactly my point. There is a pie. The pie has a certain size. When that pie is split into very large slices, everyone who gets a piece, gets a very big piece indeed.
Today we have a pie that is not a lot larger than the pie of the past, but there are SO many people at the table...If you can score a piece at all, you still may only get a very thin one.
Costs have gone down, certainly, but have the costs gone down as much as the possible revenue? Eventually you will run up against pure administration costs: all the people who make it happen, and their salaries. It turns out that they're a non-trivial amount of the whole. The challenge is to make ends meet. If you can do that with pure ad revenue, you've probably got very low costs and a decent slice of the pie. Most people won't be able to do that, even people with great content won't be able to afford the time it'll take them to draw a following.
There is a little egoism in Slashdot that irritates me in discussions like this. We are the ultimate niche market. Nobody panders to us, because we don't spend any money on media anyway.
There are plenty of people who spend much much more, and while I'm sure that your media habits (which are similar to my own, as it happens) are of interest to niche marketing people, we are simply not the market that they are aiming for.
It's that "most" that gets you. How many of us would like to have some small say in what gets produced? If you like a show, wouldn't you like to be able to "subscribe" to it, to fund its continuation?
It's a hell of a lot better than leaving it up to chance, or the execs at Fox.
That'll still leave plenty of room for the American Idol's of the world...Hell that show is a pioneer: if they charged (more? I have no idea how it works) for voting, they could fund themselves indefinitely.
I think you're confusing niche with mainstream. There are a lot of places where small producers with niche products manage to pay for themselves. Homestar runner is cool, but that particular type of product doesn't have any significant costs associated with it, so they can be profitable with only a limited form of compensation.
I think music will definitely fall into that model: the production costs for music are very low now, and the opportunities for large scale self-promotion are much more accessible. A good band can make plenty on donations, t-shirts, and tours.
Mainstream tv products represent a much higher outlay of cash and expertise. Now some people may argue that all mainstream sucks, and should die, but the very definition of mainstream puts that to the lie. Lot of people like that content. Even niche mainstream draws a big audience, but often the startup costs are such that someone has to put up a big investment on the front end to bring in the talent, and produce the product.
I really think it's unlikely that people are going to just going to say, "Oh well, only amateur media from here on out." That just doesn't make sense. So a revenue model will have to arise to pay for it.
The problem that will come against Tivo is that, when all the content is available, on demand, at any time, what will be the point in a set top box? Tivo exists because the current TV model sucks. When the model ceases to suck (or goes away) they're not going to have a market.
This whole thing isn't about the distribution model. It's about monetizing content. Anything that can be distributed digitally can be distributed for free these days. But without any way to collect for it, there is no way to produce high-end content.
Agreed. I guess what I'm saying is, that you should transition whenever possible.
I do agree, however, that budgetary constraints often make it impossible to shift to something "new", and really, you can shift to the next best thing every 5 years, and it'll cost you a mint, and not necessarily provide you with any real benefits.
Well, my "monthly charge" theory is based on the same math as unlimited internet subscriptions: some people use like mad, and some people use very little, and, when you average it out, it pays for itself (unless you're Time Warner Cable).
Likewise a la carte...You may not be able to afford to keep a certain type of content based on the number of people who access it specifically, but if you charge everyone a flat fee, you make enough to support cool stuff that may not cater to the majority.
I definitely think the cable companies will lose out big time, but I really don't care. They're really just middlemen anyway; if there is a market for "exclusives" the content providers can make this available themselves...As many people have pointed out, there isn't anything that amazing about YouTube that isn't duplicated by any number of other services.
I think also, that TV ads are...habit...in some ways, left over from the 3 channels and the "have to get up to change the channel" days.
Certainly their numbers are falling due to the proliferation of channels. I mean, the TV show watched by the most simultaneous viewers in history, was the M.A.S.H final episode in 1983...It had 106 million viewers. Imagine what an ad during that show cost.
Now? American Idol has been topping the charts in the last few years with numbers under 40 million on the final episodes...Way under in most cases: their best episode ever only had 36.4 million viewers.
Ad revenue is nice, but too many people making too much content, and a widely fractured audience, make it less and less profitable.
There isn't much content worth paying for, because there is no mechanism for making people pay for the content. If they create a mechanism for making people pay for content, then content worth paying for on YouTube becomes economically feasible.
I actually think the upload fee is genius. Makes perfect sense, and is a way to inoffensively monetize "free" content.
AIDS is both descriptive and catchy: why would anyone mess with that? If they did rename it "Gay Flu" then the problem would be that the name is hilariously incorrect, AIDS being neither a flu, nor restricted to homosexuals.
Swine flu isn't descriptive...Or rather, it is, but it's descriptive of an influenza strain that effects pigs(SIV), one that has been around for a long time. Using it to describe H1N1 variant A is stupid.
I don't see it working like that, except maybe for movies. It'd be much easier to set up "premium" channels, and charge a monthly for access to those.
Lot of people seem to be looking at this as "we're going to monetize our current content" when I think what they're saying is, they're going to start offering content that is already being monetized in other forums. The one thing YouTube really lacks (besides a revenue stream, hah) is traditional, copyrighted, media.
I work in a media corp that is currently in a long-term transition to all ad-supported, and, from experience, I'll tell you it's not going to work.
The problem with ad supported on the internet is that you can't charge what you charge for a TV spot or a newspaper ad...There are too many people vying for a slice of the internet ad revenue pie. But the majority of the costs for producing your high-end product remain.
So what's the alternative to charging for it? I mean, I've been thinking about this for (literally) a decade, and I really used to think that we could be self-supporting by ad revenue, and it's just not happening.
We've been riding the "free" gravy train for a long time. Lot of companies have been using their web presence as a loss leader, or justifying their losses on the potential for future monitization. This is going to end. It simply has to.
I can very easily see YouTube transitioning to what is effectively an a la carte cable TV provider...You pay a buck a month to the ESPN channel on YouTube, or whatever. The current configuration becomes effectively a massive public access cable channel, supported by subscription-based premium channels.
And, when it comes down to it, I see nothing wrong with that. I'd cancel my cable service in favor of something like that, in a heartbeat. It'd kill Tivo, and traditional cable.
The real issue is that "Swine Flu" could describe any number of flu epidemics over the course of human history. It's not a specific term.
"Mexican Swine Flu" would be better, if you were really wedded to the pig part.
I think the real issue with this one, is that it leapt into the public consciousness before the powers that be had gotten around to giving it an "official" name, and now the one we have isn't really satisfying for anyone.
In my experience, the legacy stuff should mostly be overhauled, and thrown out...Very rarely have I seen legacy code from 20-30 years ago that is appropriate to modern systems, and worse, it requires hardware or virtual environments that are extremely wasteful of resources.
I'm not particularly young, I've got more than a decade in the field, and a good chunk of that has been taken up with various legacy applications, from Y2K all the way up to the crap I have to support now.
By and large, it's not good code. Things are hard coded that should never, in a million years, be hard coded. It's a maintenance disaster. I'm slowly replacing what I can, and the response has been very positive. Most people appreciate the difference in speed and just simply being able to do things that are extremely difficult in a legacy cobol environment.
Slashdot Mirror
'A brief history of time' is a good book (so is 'The universe in a nutshell') but they were kind of written for a wider audience.
QED is a series of lectures on quantum electrodynamics that is geared toward people with a strong interest in the nuts and bolts of the material. It's a core text, something you'd pick up if you were trying to improve your understanding of quantum electrodynamics...For it to be as readable as it is, is a huge accomplishment.
We're not going to try and base our business model on WINE.
Much better to have native apps.
QED is fucking awesome. Feynman is about the most readable person you'll find on any of these lists (Darwin is dry as dust...100 pages of morphological bone changes in pigeons and you'll gnaw off your own limbs).
I have only an advanced laymans understanding of physics (4 classes at the undergrad level) and his explanations were concise, clear, and very easy to follow.
Did I say that? I don't think I did. The parent was talking about CO2, so I talked about CO2. A facile statement like, "Oh noes, teh goats are going to breath us to death" deserves ridicule.
I frankly don't have a anthropogenic climate change position; I don't think it's been discredited, and I don't think it's been proven. But if you're talking about CO2 production from a goat, vs CO2 production from an internal combustion engine, you're not making an apples to apples comparison. It's intellectually dishonest.
Well, from a pure revenue stream POV, they'd be better off charging a lot less, but charging monthly...It's a huge pain to have such a variable revenue source, and since ad revenue is already crazy erratic...It'd be hard to do any sort of budget.
My thought has always been to charge a fee for viewing anything more than the first few paragraphs for any news that's newer than 7 days, and making all the news older than 7 days available to everyone free of charge.
The problem is always about how to monetize it. Username and password is as good as it gets now, but as soon as some poor grandpa's account gets swiped and posted on "Bug Me Not" or similar, then you've got a buncha freeloaders and a pissed off customer.
I don't know. it's going to be interesting to see.
Stupid shit like this makes me homicidal. Do you really think that the ~.9kg of CO2 a goat exhales per day is going to cause an eco-catastrophe? Contrast that to the gas and energy that go into an industrial lawnmower, and there is no comparison.
Goats create CO2 as a waste product from their O2 burning lifestyles...Just like us. Where does that C come from? Goats may eat a chunk of coal every now and again, but that's not really their primary source of carbon. They get their carbon from plant matter. They eat it, digest it, and crap most of it out as fertilizer.
That's what they call "carbon-neutral": they use "free" carbon, that isn't buried in the earth, and they produce fertilizer that increases the growth of other carbon-absorbing plants.
As for methane, who gives a shit? It's got a short shelf-life. Methane drops out of the atmosphere in a mere decade, as opposed to C02, which can hang around forever.
You don't know what you're talking about. Papers have had digital format editions of the paper product for years (Knight Ridder did theirs corporate-wide in '05). Trying to push those (hilariously undersubscribed) editions using portable readers doesn't cost them anything.
It's a waste of time though. Bad pictures, no color...Hell, it'll look worse than the paper product.
And, as for going completely ad supported, it's not going to happen. The village voice can pull it off, and dinky little entertainment papers with 10,000 circ can pull it off, but they do it by having an extremely small permanent staff and practically zero physical plant.
I ran a weekly with 20,000 circ for a couple of years, and we were quite popular, but our margins were high enough to support more than 5 or 6 permanent staff, and we couldn't afford to pay our stringers more than a pittance. I work as a regional IT guy for two papers now (50,000 and 75,000 circ, respectively)
Each paper employs 30+ staff who do nothing but gather news, and that is down from the 50+ glory days when we could afford to send someone to every government meeting, and cover all our outlying coverage areas with their own reporters, and crap like that...Crap that makes a good product.
Without permanent employees, you lose all the benefits of working sources, you lose all the specialized knowledge of the area, and knowledge of the people who will and will not talk on the record...Hell, if you're not a full timer, you probably don't even know who to call.
And that's just reporters. Add in the ad people, the finance people, and, in your fantasy world, the production people (you won't even be able to pay for the paper edition on your ad revenue, so just give that one up), and you have a business that'll cost about 70% more than you can make with ads alone, even wicked expensive publication-of-record print ads.
Drop the print product, and your shortfall drops to about 20% (print is about 80% of your costs, but print ads are MUCH more lucrative than online ads, so ditching the print hurts your ad revenue as well). After that, you're cutting meat and bone. You need finance to collect your ad money and do your books, you need ad people to get your ads and deal with your ad customers, and you need journalists and designers to put up the actual product.
Basically, they need to find a way to make up those costs. Maybe ditching the office space. Maybe centralizing your finance people. Plenty of companies would love to do your ads for you (like Google) but they'll take their pound of flesh, and that's probably more than you'd lose if you did it yourself.
THAT, is how it can be done. Fucking armchair wanker. I can't believe all the people who think they have the answer.
You'd get a better product hitting their web page with your iPhone. The half-assed pdf-esque digital format papers aren't worth the subscription price.
That is exactly my point. There is a pie. The pie has a certain size. When that pie is split into very large slices, everyone who gets a piece, gets a very big piece indeed.
Today we have a pie that is not a lot larger than the pie of the past, but there are SO many people at the table...If you can score a piece at all, you still may only get a very thin one.
Costs have gone down, certainly, but have the costs gone down as much as the possible revenue? Eventually you will run up against pure administration costs: all the people who make it happen, and their salaries. It turns out that they're a non-trivial amount of the whole. The challenge is to make ends meet. If you can do that with pure ad revenue, you've probably got very low costs and a decent slice of the pie. Most people won't be able to do that, even people with great content won't be able to afford the time it'll take them to draw a following.
Just not a very likely one. 30 years ago, you'd have been the guy who said that cable tv would never work...Who'd pay for TV?
There is a little egoism in Slashdot that irritates me in discussions like this. We are the ultimate niche market. Nobody panders to us, because we don't spend any money on media anyway.
There are plenty of people who spend much much more, and while I'm sure that your media habits (which are similar to my own, as it happens) are of interest to niche marketing people, we are simply not the market that they are aiming for.
It's that "most" that gets you. How many of us would like to have some small say in what gets produced? If you like a show, wouldn't you like to be able to "subscribe" to it, to fund its continuation?
It's a hell of a lot better than leaving it up to chance, or the execs at Fox.
That'll still leave plenty of room for the American Idol's of the world...Hell that show is a pioneer: if they charged (more? I have no idea how it works) for voting, they could fund themselves indefinitely.
I think you're confusing niche with mainstream. There are a lot of places where small producers with niche products manage to pay for themselves. Homestar runner is cool, but that particular type of product doesn't have any significant costs associated with it, so they can be profitable with only a limited form of compensation.
I think music will definitely fall into that model: the production costs for music are very low now, and the opportunities for large scale self-promotion are much more accessible. A good band can make plenty on donations, t-shirts, and tours.
Mainstream tv products represent a much higher outlay of cash and expertise. Now some people may argue that all mainstream sucks, and should die, but the very definition of mainstream puts that to the lie. Lot of people like that content. Even niche mainstream draws a big audience, but often the startup costs are such that someone has to put up a big investment on the front end to bring in the talent, and produce the product.
I really think it's unlikely that people are going to just going to say, "Oh well, only amateur media from here on out." That just doesn't make sense. So a revenue model will have to arise to pay for it.
The problem that will come against Tivo is that, when all the content is available, on demand, at any time, what will be the point in a set top box? Tivo exists because the current TV model sucks. When the model ceases to suck (or goes away) they're not going to have a market.
This whole thing isn't about the distribution model. It's about monetizing content. Anything that can be distributed digitally can be distributed for free these days. But without any way to collect for it, there is no way to produce high-end content.
Agreed. I guess what I'm saying is, that you should transition whenever possible.
I do agree, however, that budgetary constraints often make it impossible to shift to something "new", and really, you can shift to the next best thing every 5 years, and it'll cost you a mint, and not necessarily provide you with any real benefits.
Well, my "monthly charge" theory is based on the same math as unlimited internet subscriptions: some people use like mad, and some people use very little, and, when you average it out, it pays for itself (unless you're Time Warner Cable).
Likewise a la carte...You may not be able to afford to keep a certain type of content based on the number of people who access it specifically, but if you charge everyone a flat fee, you make enough to support cool stuff that may not cater to the majority.
I definitely think the cable companies will lose out big time, but I really don't care. They're really just middlemen anyway; if there is a market for "exclusives" the content providers can make this available themselves...As many people have pointed out, there isn't anything that amazing about YouTube that isn't duplicated by any number of other services.
I think also, that TV ads are...habit...in some ways, left over from the 3 channels and the "have to get up to change the channel" days.
Certainly their numbers are falling due to the proliferation of channels. I mean, the TV show watched by the most simultaneous viewers in history, was the M.A.S.H final episode in 1983...It had 106 million viewers. Imagine what an ad during that show cost.
Now? American Idol has been topping the charts in the last few years with numbers under 40 million on the final episodes...Way under in most cases: their best episode ever only had 36.4 million viewers.
Ad revenue is nice, but too many people making too much content, and a widely fractured audience, make it less and less profitable.
There isn't much content worth paying for, because there is no mechanism for making people pay for the content. If they create a mechanism for making people pay for content, then content worth paying for on YouTube becomes economically feasible.
I actually think the upload fee is genius. Makes perfect sense, and is a way to inoffensively monetize "free" content.
AIDS is both descriptive and catchy: why would anyone mess with that? If they did rename it "Gay Flu" then the problem would be that the name is hilariously incorrect, AIDS being neither a flu, nor restricted to homosexuals.
Swine flu isn't descriptive...Or rather, it is, but it's descriptive of an influenza strain that effects pigs(SIV), one that has been around for a long time. Using it to describe H1N1 variant A is stupid.
I don't see it working like that, except maybe for movies. It'd be much easier to set up "premium" channels, and charge a monthly for access to those.
Lot of people seem to be looking at this as "we're going to monetize our current content" when I think what they're saying is, they're going to start offering content that is already being monetized in other forums. The one thing YouTube really lacks (besides a revenue stream, hah) is traditional, copyrighted, media.
I work in a media corp that is currently in a long-term transition to all ad-supported, and, from experience, I'll tell you it's not going to work.
The problem with ad supported on the internet is that you can't charge what you charge for a TV spot or a newspaper ad...There are too many people vying for a slice of the internet ad revenue pie. But the majority of the costs for producing your high-end product remain.
So what's the alternative to charging for it? I mean, I've been thinking about this for (literally) a decade, and I really used to think that we could be self-supporting by ad revenue, and it's just not happening.
We've been riding the "free" gravy train for a long time. Lot of companies have been using their web presence as a loss leader, or justifying their losses on the potential for future monitization. This is going to end. It simply has to.
I can very easily see YouTube transitioning to what is effectively an a la carte cable TV provider...You pay a buck a month to the ESPN channel on YouTube, or whatever. The current configuration becomes effectively a massive public access cable channel, supported by subscription-based premium channels.
And, when it comes down to it, I see nothing wrong with that. I'd cancel my cable service in favor of something like that, in a heartbeat. It'd kill Tivo, and traditional cable.
Mexico isn't a race. It's a country. If I said, "The Hispanic Influenza" or "The Mexican Influenza" then that might be a valid criticism.
Though, if it makes you happy, we could call it the "Cancun Flu" though, the Cancun tourism board probably wouldn't thank us.
The real issue is that "Swine Flu" could describe any number of flu epidemics over the course of human history. It's not a specific term.
"Mexican Swine Flu" would be better, if you were really wedded to the pig part.
I think the real issue with this one, is that it leapt into the public consciousness before the powers that be had gotten around to giving it an "official" name, and now the one we have isn't really satisfying for anyone.
+1 vote for Bacon Lung. That's awesome.
Heh, Colbert might go for it though...The whole massively self-aggrandizing nature of his stage personality would eat it up.
Be a lot easier to just call it the "Mexico Influenza" though. That's pretty much the standard for these things.
In my experience, the legacy stuff should mostly be overhauled, and thrown out...Very rarely have I seen legacy code from 20-30 years ago that is appropriate to modern systems, and worse, it requires hardware or virtual environments that are extremely wasteful of resources.
I'm not particularly young, I've got more than a decade in the field, and a good chunk of that has been taken up with various legacy applications, from Y2K all the way up to the crap I have to support now.
By and large, it's not good code. Things are hard coded that should never, in a million years, be hard coded. It's a maintenance disaster. I'm slowly replacing what I can, and the response has been very positive. Most people appreciate the difference in speed and just simply being able to do things that are extremely difficult in a legacy cobol environment.