are we reaching a point where no one will buy an Apple because everyone's buying Apple?
No, because people also buy Apple computers to actually use, as computers, they don't only buy them 'to be cool', that's just a bonus. But they also happen to not be bad as computers (there is at least some truth to the 'easier to use' claim, it's not a blind mantra, if they were horrible to use people would realise they were horrible to use). So at some point 'network effects' kick in, e.g. more users = more apps get developed = more value to buying a Mac = more sales, and so on.
They can't be "very feature deficient" AND "work well" - if they were "very feature deficient" then by definition they did NOT work well AT ALL (unless you think customers SHOULD expect "very feature deficient" drivers to be acceptable), and that MS purposely released a major OS with "very feature deficient" drivers for the second-biggest graphics hardware vendor. Excusing this in any way is bizarro-world stuff. They then *in addition* certified crappy drivers. So actually they did at least two separate things very wrong. MS should have worked with NVIDIA to make sure things would work OK, or else if NVIDIA was impossible to work with, make it clear on release that Vista didn't work properly on an NVIDIA platform.
So after doing both of the above wrong things, they proceeded to do a third wrong thing and lie to all their customers by deliberately hiding known defects in order to sell more copies. When car manufacturers do things like this we say "that's disgusting" and stop buying their cars, when MS does it we make apologies on their behalf, soften the issue and try not to condemn the behaviour. WTF. This problem would've caused lots of people to lose valuable data, and they knowingly sold that saying "let's make money even though people will lose data". Hello, this is serious.
Yup, if this was some obscure hardware vendor, then maybe they'd have a blame claim... but this is NVIDIA, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, graphics hardware vendor. So this can only mean one of two things: Either (1) Microsoft did a major new OS release without even testing it properly on NVIDIA hardware (which would be unethical and absurd - impossible even), or (2) Microsoft did know about the problems and released anyway, knowing that a significant number of users would have major crash problems as a result (again unethical, but certainly not unusual for MS). Either way they did the wrong thing. I mean if the problems were really as common as that, they would have been exposed by even a moderate amount of testing, and then should either have been fixed, or the release of Vista should've been delayed.
Actually I often ask mechanics their opinions/thoughts 'in passing', and I must say there are very definite trends/patterns that you can easily/quickly pick up. You can call each one's preference "bias" if you want and you're free to believe that all cars really are equal and that any preference is completely arbitrary, and that nobody is really capable of detecting differences in quality (that sounds quite absurd to me though). I'll stick to gathering opinions from people who know what they're talking about, in all fields, it works for me.
Of course, there is some difference between 'cars that mechanics tend to prefer' and 'good cars', which you have to take into account, because most mechanics look after their own cars, and this makes a difference - they tend to look for cars that are easier to do work on (yourself) and easier/cheaper to find parts for... a mechanic can save money thanks to their expertise by investing extra time while at the same time using the opportunity to keep their skills sharp. This is somewhat analogous to techies who prefer Linux, it may work for them, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the best fit for the average user.
In this case though they're looking to hire a tech person to maintain the site, presumably.
From the article: "It pains me to have to spend money for features and functions most of my end users won't even begin to need."
With MS Office, all those $$$ are not going towards "paying for features you don't need". With 80% profit margins on Office, most of those $$$ are not paying for any features at all, they're paying for filling up Microsoft's coffers (i.e. their $50+ billion cash reserves that make them so 'virtually unsinkable' and allow them to pay huge fines for crimes they commit as 'part of doing business'. Those cash reserves are enough to theoretically run MS for five years with zero income, and allow them to sink huge losses on products like X-BOX to gain market lead.)
Microsoft could slash MS Office prices by a factor of 4 and still make far more profit than would be considered obscene at most normal companies - AND you'd still be able to get ALL those "unneeded features" for that much lower price.
Dude, just admit you were wrong already and move on.. Someone said that the US only seems to hav the most spammers because they have the most users. He/she showed that the US don't have the most users thus amount of spam from US is disproportionately large. You attacked that argument in a strikingly unconvincing way (most users of any country therefore it's normal for amount of spam to be more than all other countries put together??? I don't think so).
That's how many Web sites make their money (p0rn, anyone?)
And who would KNOW about their sites if they didn't, uh, advertise?:)
OK, sure, popups suck (especially those that open new ones when you close them). But then, we all used to say banners sucked until popups came along. Now most people seems OK with banner ads. If it wasn't for popups though, we'd all still be bitching about banner ads.
If companies and individuals go out of business because of blocking ads, that will lead to fewer, higher-quality companies like google that can come up with ways to make ads *work*, or sites that actually.. wait for it.. CHARGE MONEY.
So I'm saving them bandwidth costs by not loading their ads which I would ignore anyway.
This isn't a terribly logical argument. Since you are still using more bandwidth than you would have had you not visited the site at all, you haven't "saved" them bandwidth. Their total bandwidth costs will be higher, and they will still be getting nothing from you in return. Except the satisfaction that you visited their website, but most people in the real world don't actually think that thats the greatest goal a website developer can hope to achieve.
A side note, most popup ads are usually anyway delivered via the affiliate programs servers, e.g. doubleclick, so you actually usually aren't using ANY less bandwidth of the website owner. You are just using less bandwidth of the affiliate company.
I agree that using Mozilla is not "stealing", and calling someone a thief for circumventing a popup is bullshit.
Sure, I agree. This blocker is idiotic, and calling people "thieves" because they want to block popups is wrong. But the "Bad Business Model" post is very naive, in terms of the reality of the economics of the web. Which basically boil down to the fact that so many people are putting up stuff purely out of their own generosity, which commoditizes everything on the internet, driving down costs to "web consumers" to effectively zero. But there are some very useful sites that would not survive as "generosity efforts", e.g. webmd.com.
Someone in this thread said that sites put up by people in their spare time are usually worthless anyway. I think the problem is really the opposite, that almost everything we use on the web is the result of someone just being generous. Almost every website I use is created by generosity.
1: most websites produced in peoples' spare time are not worthwhile
Think about that statement carefully. I suggest you seriously re-think that statement. Think about the websites you use, and consider how many of them really have just been put up out of the generosity of people.
Isn't philanthropism strange
Don't lecture me about philanthropism. I give away everything I write under GPL, have written a number of informative articles, and currently spend almost every moment of my available time, about 100 hours a month, writing software to help education in developing countries.
I hate most website designs now. Everyone thinks that cramming as much information onto a 17 inch monitor will solve all design woes. But that's not it at all. I want your information, and I don't care how you give it to me, as long as it's done efficiently and well.
I agree. For me, a "decent website" either is (a) informative, or (b) entertaining, or (c) utilitarian.
By (a) I mean information such as network sockets programming articles, or information on the history of the Bantu people of Africa, or information on how to do functors in C++ with templates or member pointers, or information on medical problems such as rotator cuff injuries, or information and pictures of specific poisonous spiders, etc. There are many such sites on the internet, but lets face it, the MAJORITY of them, people would NOT pay anything for. Mostly this is because it is usually information that you need "once off".
By "entertaining" I mean things like humor sites, e.g. reading the latest Dave Barry column, or reading SatireWire or The Onion etc.
by "utilitarian" I mean something useful, e.g. a piece of downloadable software, e.g. "Duplic8", a simple shareware utility for finding duplicate files on your hard disk.
I want websites to be simple, text where possible, stick to the information I want, and I can't stand Flash, because less than 1% of its users use it for anything worthwhile. I optimize all the images and HTML on my site to make it as quick as possible to download, and I try to make the information as accessible as possible.
It's called good will. Look it up someday. That's what the web was founded on
Screw you, I've spent many years producing things which I give away for free on my website. Don't lecture me about good will.
I've written various game programming articles, Linux tutorials, various articles on other topics, and written several utility applications and small GPL games.
The thing about good will is that its so one-sided. You have 1% of people who are producers, and the other 99% are consumers. Same problem as you see in P2P filesharing.
Its not really the money, which isn't that much. Its the time. When I was at school and when I was still studying at University, I had plenty of time to work on stuff like that. Now that I'm working, I have very little available time, and doing any non-negligible work on the site means making VERY real sacrifices in terms of time spent with friends, time spent with the gf, time spent relaxing, time spent with family etc.
Its true that "if you have something people truly care about, they'll pay for it". But in practice, there is a lot of gray area, you can't just lump websites into one of two specific categories. The majority of websites don't fall into the "people would actually pay for it", but are still websites that most people do want around, and derive some use from. The internet would be a pretty dismal place if all these sites, that can't pay for their running costs financially, were to disappear. There are some really amazing resources out there, but that would never make enough money to pay for their running costs.
I don't expect to be able to give up my full-time job, any website income is extremely marginal. But its still better than nothing.
Just to clarify, I am not condoning this silly little blocker, I think its idiotic. I also block popups. I just want to know how you think people *should* be making money off their website, if you're not outright just using your website directly to sell a product. There are many really worthwhile sites on the internet that a lot of people have worked really hard at. But the idea that those people should just make that sacrifice "for the love of it" isn't really fair, is it. Ultimately, the people who run websites are doing YOU a favour, not the other way round, so if they want to block you because you don't want to look at the popups, then you can't really complain about it.
I think the problem is basically that people *have* become "spoilt". There has been so much free content online (especially during the internet boom years before it collapsed, as so much of it was funded by investor money), that we now all *expect* free content, and we get in a huff if we don't get what we went, when we want, in the way we want it. Some of us act like our rights have been violated if somebody decides they no longer want to give us stuff for free. Its a bit like if you feed a beggar or (other) animal every day, it starts to expect that you're going to feed it, and then it gets angry if one day you decide not to feed it anymore.
So how should websites generate income, at the very least, enough income to cover the costs? Apart from the direct financial costs of hosting, to make a decent website requires a LOT of work. Should website creators just sacrifice hundreds of hours of their spare time, often almost ALL of their spare time, so that people can get stuff for nothing, and then still bitch about it like a bunch of spoilt brats if its not quite what they expected?
I run a modest website with a few banner ads, no popups. I get maybe 200 to 400 visitors per day. The hosting costs me $12/month. I don't think I even make half that back from the banner ads. And that doesn't say anything about just what a huge amount of work it is to provide content for the website and keep it up to date. Basically spending many evenings and weekends producing stuff and giving it away for free. And then people still have the gall to bitch and whine about some little aspect of a freeware game of mine that sucked, or how much something else on the site sucked, or going ballistic if there is one small factual error in a free article I spent days writing. Yes its a minority of people, but god, what a bunch of spoilt brats.
The vast majority of people don't even bother to write a small 'thank you' even when they've found the site useful. Some do though, which is much appreciated.
Anyway, back to my question though, how SHOULD people make money from their websites? Or should thousands of people in the world just work their butts off to give YOU stuff for free?
Anyone who has ever tried to produce something worthwhile, such as a website, in their spare time, in addition to having a full-time job, will probably understand these sentiments.
:) Perhaps I should. For now though, I've just gone back to using Win2K at home. These problems in Windows Explorer are actually pretty serious issues for me, as I am working on a program that requires me to often work with large HTML files (i.e. up to about 16 MB). So what happens is, if I view a directory with a few of these in, XP starts parsing these things.. I can watch the memusage in process viewer of explorer.exe, and the thing requires about 50MB of RAM for *each* of these. Since I 'only' have 128 MB RAM, my damn computer starts swapping after a while, sometimes so badly that my computer is left "dead in the water" for five to ten minutes while I wait for my poor hard disk to stop grinding away. This is a lot of "productivity time" that I've lost.
It doesn't even DO anything with the parsed file. Thumbnails are disabled. I've got a detail list view, preview turned off. It doesn't even use the info to change the icon. In other words, XP sits using up tens of megs of RAM for minutes at a time FOR NOTHING.
It takes a few minutes to parse these files, and while it is busy, you can't do anything with them, like delete them if you want to. It tells you that "another application" is using the file. Yeah right, it itself is using the file, for nothing.
If it was just Windows Explorer that bothered me, then I might have just gotten Windows Commander and carried on. But everything is slow and uses lots of RAM. My taskbar in Win2K needs just over 3MB of RAM. In Windows XP, the exact same thing seems to need 10 - 15 MB of RAM. Eye candy / themes disabled, set up with Win2K 'look and feel'.
I swear, I'm starting to believe those 'conspiracy theories' that they deliberately make the software so resource-hungry so that you have to buy new hardware, that MS gets bribed by the hardware manufacturers to do this. Because as a programmer, I don't think I could ever even dream up ways to consume such ridiculous amounts of memory even if I was trying. Honestly, parsing every HTML file in the current directory for no reason at all?
*sigh*
I wish that I could say the new Linux versions are better, but I boot into KDE on RH8 and the X process alone seems to need 40 MB of memory, and I don't have a single application open except top. It galls me because my first system back in '96 had 16 MB RAM, and that could fit in everything *including* X, I think it was with fvwm95 at that time.
I've heard that the new Macs are also memory hogs too. Todays programmers seem to need 256MB of RAM to do what yesterdays programmers could do with 32MB. I fail to see a proportional, corresponding improvement in the quality/functionality of applications.
THE "MOUNT" THING WAS A JOKE PEOPLE!! Of course I know there is no "mount" command in Win2K. I was really just plain asking how it is done, I don't care at this stage if there is a cmdline for it.
Anyway, seriously, thanks for the info. It looks like you can right+click/"Manage" in 2K, just tried it. Looks very similar to the XP one. And looks like the option is there. BUT, it only seems to be available on local drives, which is a bit pointless to me. My mapped network drives don't seem to have this option. How do I do it with a network drive, NFS style?
As far as I can tell it is not possible. Would you be so kind as to point to an information source explaining how to do this?
I needed to do this once and could not figure out how. Please explain. (Actually, I wanted to "mount" a Windows share into a subdirectory on the hard disk).
C:\>mount
'mount' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
I can make XP look like Windows 2000 anytime by selecting the Windows Classic theme (which actually disables part of the theme system of XP so it consume less memory).
Even with all the redundant eye candy turned off and all unnecessary services disabled, XP still requires MUCH more memory to do basically the same thing than Win2K. I've slowly started to dislike XP more and more, and am back on Win2K at home. Never thought I'd actually want to compliment Win2K, but now that I've used XP, I really like it. Windows Explorer is probably the worst thing in XP, horribly slow and unresponsive, doing strange things like parsing (in entirety) all HTML files in the current directory, even if thumbnails etc are all disabled. Scroll up over a directory filled with.URL files and the whole thing just *stops* for five or ten seconds before continuing.
Hmm.. a little research, and I'm not so sure any more.
According to http://www.impossible.com/clients/ent-trav/ent-tra v_tetris.cfm:
"Tetris, the world's most popular video game, is owned by The Tetris Company, LLC. Henk Rogers, the entrepreneur responsible for bringing this game to Nintendo's SNES and Game Boy systems, initiated the Tetris company."
"To insure Tetris remains a gaming icon, The Tetris Company has engaged the services of Blue Planet Software to oversee licensing, new product development and marketing"
According to this site, which tells an interesting story about this: http://atarihq.com/tsr/special/tetrishist.html, the original creator of tetris is now behind "The Tetris Company".
I find it a rather strange concept that some kid in Russia can invent a computer game, and a decade or two later, some arbitrary American corporation, nobody at which EVER played even a miniscule part in the invention of the game, can literally own the copyright to it.
I'm speaking about Tetris, of course. "The Tetris Company" seems to exist purely out of "licensing" their "technology" to other companies, such as Microsoft, Nintendo and Palm.
I know that this is how the system works, and it all appears to be legal, but it seems pretty bizarre to me on the face of it. "Hey, some kid in Russia that I've never met invented this many years ago, but if you want to use it, you have to give ME money".
Slashdot Mirror
No, because people also buy Apple computers to actually use, as computers, they don't only buy them 'to be cool', that's just a bonus. But they also happen to not be bad as computers (there is at least some truth to the 'easier to use' claim, it's not a blind mantra, if they were horrible to use people would realise they were horrible to use). So at some point 'network effects' kick in, e.g. more users = more apps get developed = more value to buying a Mac = more sales, and so on.
They can't be "very feature deficient" AND "work well" - if they were "very feature deficient" then by definition they did NOT work well AT ALL (unless you think customers SHOULD expect "very feature deficient" drivers to be acceptable), and that MS purposely released a major OS with "very feature deficient" drivers for the second-biggest graphics hardware vendor. Excusing this in any way is bizarro-world stuff. They then *in addition* certified crappy drivers. So actually they did at least two separate things very wrong. MS should have worked with NVIDIA to make sure things would work OK, or else if NVIDIA was impossible to work with, make it clear on release that Vista didn't work properly on an NVIDIA platform.
So after doing both of the above wrong things, they proceeded to do a third wrong thing and lie to all their customers by deliberately hiding known defects in order to sell more copies. When car manufacturers do things like this we say "that's disgusting" and stop buying their cars, when MS does it we make apologies on their behalf, soften the issue and try not to condemn the behaviour. WTF. This problem would've caused lots of people to lose valuable data, and they knowingly sold that saying "let's make money even though people will lose data". Hello, this is serious.
Yup, if this was some obscure hardware vendor, then maybe they'd have a blame claim ... but this is NVIDIA, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, graphics hardware vendor. So this can only mean one of two things: Either (1) Microsoft did a major new OS release without even testing it properly on NVIDIA hardware (which would be unethical and absurd - impossible even), or (2) Microsoft did know about the problems and released anyway, knowing that a significant number of users would have major crash problems as a result (again unethical, but certainly not unusual for MS). Either way they did the wrong thing. I mean if the problems were really as common as that, they would have been exposed by even a moderate amount of testing, and then should either have been fixed, or the release of Vista should've been delayed.
And (Diebold jokes aside) presumably they can't vote either (although that doesn't mean they don't often heavily influence politics).
Actually I often ask mechanics their opinions/thoughts 'in passing', and I must say there are very definite trends/patterns that you can easily/quickly pick up. You can call each one's preference "bias" if you want and you're free to believe that all cars really are equal and that any preference is completely arbitrary, and that nobody is really capable of detecting differences in quality (that sounds quite absurd to me though). I'll stick to gathering opinions from people who know what they're talking about, in all fields, it works for me.
... a mechanic can save money thanks to their expertise by investing extra time while at the same time using the opportunity to keep their skills sharp. This is somewhat analogous to techies who prefer Linux, it may work for them, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the best fit for the average user.
Of course, there is some difference between 'cars that mechanics tend to prefer' and 'good cars', which you have to take into account, because most mechanics look after their own cars, and this makes a difference - they tend to look for cars that are easier to do work on (yourself) and easier/cheaper to find parts for
In this case though they're looking to hire a tech person to maintain the site, presumably.
Uh, yeah, great, except that he keeps coming back. But thanks anyway.
From the article: "It pains me to have to spend money for features and functions most of my end users won't even begin to need."
With MS Office, all those $$$ are not going towards "paying for features you don't need". With 80% profit margins on Office, most of those $$$ are not paying for any features at all, they're paying for filling up Microsoft's coffers (i.e. their $50+ billion cash reserves that make them so 'virtually unsinkable' and allow them to pay huge fines for crimes they commit as 'part of doing business'. Those cash reserves are enough to theoretically run MS for five years with zero income, and allow them to sink huge losses on products like X-BOX to gain market lead.)
Microsoft could slash MS Office prices by a factor of 4 and still make far more profit than would be considered obscene at most normal companies - AND you'd still be able to get ALL those "unneeded features" for that much lower price.
Dude, just admit you were wrong already and move on .. Someone said that the US only seems to hav the most spammers because they have the most users. He/she showed that the US don't have the most users thus amount of spam from US is disproportionately large. You attacked that argument in a strikingly unconvincing way (most users of any country therefore it's normal for amount of spam to be more than all other countries put together??? I don't think so).
That's how many Web sites make their money (p0rn, anyone?)
And who would KNOW about their sites if they didn't, uh, advertise? :)
OK, sure, popups suck (especially those that open new ones when you close them). But then, we all used to say banners sucked until popups came along. Now most people seems OK with banner ads. If it wasn't for popups though, we'd all still be bitching about banner ads.
If companies and individuals go out of business because of blocking ads, that will lead to fewer, higher-quality companies like google that can come up with ways to make ads *work*, or sites that actually .. wait for it .. CHARGE MONEY.
So you think that useful sites like http://www.libsdl.org/ or http://www.wxwindows.org/ should start charging, or disappear?
No thanks, I'd rather they used a few ads. For what I get in exchange from sites like that, its nothing.
So I'm saving them bandwidth costs by not loading their ads which I would ignore anyway.
This isn't a terribly logical argument. Since you are still using more bandwidth than you would have had you not visited the site at all, you haven't "saved" them bandwidth. Their total bandwidth costs will be higher, and they will still be getting nothing from you in return. Except the satisfaction that you visited their website, but most people in the real world don't actually think that thats the greatest goal a website developer can hope to achieve.
A side note, most popup ads are usually anyway delivered via the affiliate programs servers, e.g. doubleclick, so you actually usually aren't using ANY less bandwidth of the website owner. You are just using less bandwidth of the affiliate company.
I agree that using Mozilla is not "stealing", and calling someone a thief for circumventing a popup is bullshit.
Sure, I agree. This blocker is idiotic, and calling people "thieves" because they want to block popups is wrong. But the "Bad Business Model" post is very naive, in terms of the reality of the economics of the web. Which basically boil down to the fact that so many people are putting up stuff purely out of their own generosity, which commoditizes everything on the internet, driving down costs to "web consumers" to effectively zero. But there are some very useful sites that would not survive as "generosity efforts", e.g. webmd.com.
Someone in this thread said that sites put up by people in their spare time are usually worthless anyway. I think the problem is really the opposite, that almost everything we use on the web is the result of someone just being generous. Almost every website I use is created by generosity.
1: most websites produced in peoples' spare time are not worthwhile
Think about that statement carefully. I suggest you seriously re-think that statement. Think about the websites you use, and consider how many of them really have just been put up out of the generosity of people.
Isn't philanthropism strange
Don't lecture me about philanthropism. I give away everything I write under GPL, have written a number of informative articles, and currently spend almost every moment of my available time, about 100 hours a month, writing software to help education in developing countries.
I hate most website designs now. Everyone thinks that cramming as much information onto a 17 inch monitor will solve all design woes. But that's not it at all. I want your information, and I don't care how you give it to me, as long as it's done efficiently and well.
I agree. For me, a "decent website" either is (a) informative, or (b) entertaining, or (c) utilitarian.
By (a) I mean information such as network sockets programming articles, or information on the history of the Bantu people of Africa, or information on how to do functors in C++ with templates or member pointers, or information on medical problems such as rotator cuff injuries, or information and pictures of specific poisonous spiders, etc. There are many such sites on the internet, but lets face it, the MAJORITY of them, people would NOT pay anything for. Mostly this is because it is usually information that you need "once off".
By "entertaining" I mean things like humor sites, e.g. reading the latest Dave Barry column, or reading SatireWire or The Onion etc.
by "utilitarian" I mean something useful, e.g. a piece of downloadable software, e.g. "Duplic8", a simple shareware utility for finding duplicate files on your hard disk.
I want websites to be simple, text where possible, stick to the information I want, and I can't stand Flash, because less than 1% of its users use it for anything worthwhile. I optimize all the images and HTML on my site to make it as quick as possible to download, and I try to make the information as accessible as possible.
It's called good will. Look it up someday. That's what the web was founded on
Screw you, I've spent many years producing things which I give away for free on my website. Don't lecture me about good will.
I've written various game programming articles, Linux tutorials, various articles on other topics, and written several utility applications and small GPL games.
The thing about good will is that its so one-sided. You have 1% of people who are producers, and the other 99% are consumers. Same problem as you see in P2P filesharing.
Its not really the money, which isn't that much. Its the time. When I was at school and when I was still studying at University, I had plenty of time to work on stuff like that. Now that I'm working, I have very little available time, and doing any non-negligible work on the site means making VERY real sacrifices in terms of time spent with friends, time spent with the gf, time spent relaxing, time spent with family etc.
Its true that "if you have something people truly care about, they'll pay for it". But in practice, there is a lot of gray area, you can't just lump websites into one of two specific categories. The majority of websites don't fall into the "people would actually pay for it", but are still websites that most people do want around, and derive some use from. The internet would be a pretty dismal place if all these sites, that can't pay for their running costs financially, were to disappear. There are some really amazing resources out there, but that would never make enough money to pay for their running costs.
I don't expect to be able to give up my full-time job, any website income is extremely marginal. But its still better than nothing.
Just to clarify, I am not condoning this silly little blocker, I think its idiotic. I also block popups. I just want to know how you think people *should* be making money off their website, if you're not outright just using your website directly to sell a product. There are many really worthwhile sites on the internet that a lot of people have worked really hard at. But the idea that those people should just make that sacrifice "for the love of it" isn't really fair, is it. Ultimately, the people who run websites are doing YOU a favour, not the other way round, so if they want to block you because you don't want to look at the popups, then you can't really complain about it.
I think the problem is basically that people *have* become "spoilt". There has been so much free content online (especially during the internet boom years before it collapsed, as so much of it was funded by investor money), that we now all *expect* free content, and we get in a huff if we don't get what we went, when we want, in the way we want it. Some of us act like our rights have been violated if somebody decides they no longer want to give us stuff for free. Its a bit like if you feed a beggar or (other) animal every day, it starts to expect that you're going to feed it, and then it gets angry if one day you decide not to feed it anymore.
So how should websites generate income, at the very least, enough income to cover the costs? Apart from the direct financial costs of hosting, to make a decent website requires a LOT of work. Should website creators just sacrifice hundreds of hours of their spare time, often almost ALL of their spare time, so that people can get stuff for nothing, and then still bitch about it like a bunch of spoilt brats if its not quite what they expected?
I run a modest website with a few banner ads, no popups. I get maybe 200 to 400 visitors per day. The hosting costs me $12/month. I don't think I even make half that back from the banner ads. And that doesn't say anything about just what a huge amount of work it is to provide content for the website and keep it up to date. Basically spending many evenings and weekends producing stuff and giving it away for free. And then people still have the gall to bitch and whine about some little aspect of a freeware game of mine that sucked, or how much something else on the site sucked, or going ballistic if there is one small factual error in a free article I spent days writing. Yes its a minority of people, but god, what a bunch of spoilt brats.
The vast majority of people don't even bother to write a small 'thank you' even when they've found the site useful. Some do though, which is much appreciated.
Anyway, back to my question though, how SHOULD people make money from their websites? Or should thousands of people in the world just work their butts off to give YOU stuff for free?
Anyone who has ever tried to produce something worthwhile, such as a website, in their spare time, in addition to having a full-time job, will probably understand these sentiments.
I'd suggest you try Windows Commander
:) Perhaps I should. For now though, I've just gone back to using Win2K at home. These problems in Windows Explorer are actually pretty serious issues for me, as I am working on a program that requires me to often work with large HTML files (i.e. up to about 16 MB). So what happens is, if I view a directory with a few of these in, XP starts parsing these things .. I can watch the memusage in process viewer of explorer.exe, and the thing requires about 50MB of RAM for *each* of these. Since I 'only' have 128 MB RAM, my damn computer starts swapping after a while, sometimes so badly that my computer is left "dead in the water" for five to ten minutes while I wait for my poor hard disk to stop grinding away. This is a lot of "productivity time" that I've lost.
It doesn't even DO anything with the parsed file. Thumbnails are disabled. I've got a detail list view, preview turned off. It doesn't even use the info to change the icon. In other words, XP sits using up tens of megs of RAM for minutes at a time FOR NOTHING.
It takes a few minutes to parse these files, and while it is busy, you can't do anything with them, like delete them if you want to. It tells you that "another application" is using the file. Yeah right, it itself is using the file, for nothing.
If it was just Windows Explorer that bothered me, then I might have just gotten Windows Commander and carried on. But everything is slow and uses lots of RAM. My taskbar in Win2K needs just over 3MB of RAM. In Windows XP, the exact same thing seems to need 10 - 15 MB of RAM. Eye candy / themes disabled, set up with Win2K 'look and feel'.
I swear, I'm starting to believe those 'conspiracy theories' that they deliberately make the software so resource-hungry so that you have to buy new hardware, that MS gets bribed by the hardware manufacturers to do this. Because as a programmer, I don't think I could ever even dream up ways to consume such ridiculous amounts of memory even if I was trying. Honestly, parsing every HTML file in the current directory for no reason at all?
*sigh*
I wish that I could say the new Linux versions are better, but I boot into KDE on RH8 and the X process alone seems to need 40 MB of memory, and I don't have a single application open except top. It galls me because my first system back in '96 had 16 MB RAM, and that could fit in everything *including* X, I think it was with fvwm95 at that time.
I've heard that the new Macs are also memory hogs too. Todays programmers seem to need 256MB of RAM to do what yesterdays programmers could do with 32MB. I fail to see a proportional, corresponding improvement in the quality/functionality of applications.
Nope. I have a mapped drive letter, the option isn't there. This is precisely what I want to do though.
There is no mount command.
THE "MOUNT" THING WAS A JOKE PEOPLE!! Of course I know there is no "mount" command in Win2K. I was really just plain asking how it is done, I don't care at this stage if there is a cmdline for it.
Anyway, seriously, thanks for the info. It looks like you can right+click/"Manage" in 2K, just tried it. Looks very similar to the XP one. And looks like the option is there. BUT, it only seems to be available on local drives, which is a bit pointless to me. My mapped network drives don't seem to have this option. How do I do it with a network drive, NFS style?
As far as I can tell it is not possible. Would you be so kind as to point to an information source explaining how to do this?
I needed to do this once and could not figure out how. Please explain. (Actually, I wanted to "mount" a Windows share into a subdirectory on the hard disk).
C:\>mount
'mount' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
I can make XP look like Windows 2000 anytime by selecting the Windows Classic theme (which actually disables part of the theme system of XP so it consume less memory).
Even with all the redundant eye candy turned off and all unnecessary services disabled, XP still requires MUCH more memory to do basically the same thing than Win2K. I've slowly started to dislike XP more and more, and am back on Win2K at home. Never thought I'd actually want to compliment Win2K, but now that I've used XP, I really like it. Windows Explorer is probably the worst thing in XP, horribly slow and unresponsive, doing strange things like parsing (in entirety) all HTML files in the current directory, even if thumbnails etc are all disabled. Scroll up over a directory filled with .URL files and the whole thing just *stops* for five or ten seconds before continuing.
Funny, it's fast as hell on my A4000 + Toaster
Ripping or editing? These are two very different things.
Hmm .. a little research, and I'm not so sure any more.
According to http://www.impossible.com/clients/ent-trav/ent-tra v_tetris.cfm:
"Tetris, the world's most popular video game, is owned by The Tetris Company, LLC. Henk Rogers, the entrepreneur responsible for bringing this game to Nintendo's SNES and Game Boy systems, initiated the Tetris company."
"To insure Tetris remains a gaming icon, The Tetris Company has engaged the services of Blue Planet Software to oversee licensing, new product development and marketing"
According to this site, which tells an interesting story about this: http://atarihq.com/tsr/special/tetrishist.html, the original creator of tetris is now behind "The Tetris Company".
I find it a rather strange concept that some kid in Russia can invent a computer game, and a decade or two later, some arbitrary American corporation, nobody at which EVER played even a miniscule part in the invention of the game, can literally own the copyright to it.
I'm speaking about Tetris, of course. "The Tetris Company" seems to exist purely out of "licensing" their "technology" to other companies, such as Microsoft, Nintendo and Palm.
I know that this is how the system works, and it all appears to be legal, but it seems pretty bizarre to me on the face of it. "Hey, some kid in Russia that I've never met invented this many years ago, but if you want to use it, you have to give ME money".