Internal numbering... major number goes up for each suite release.
From my blog dated a month ago:
" Microsoft have been using internal numbers for their major Office release for some time: Office 9 = Microsoft Office 2000 Office 10 = Microsoft Office XP Office 11 = Microsoft Office 2003
And right now they are in pre-beta with Office 12... yet to be assigned a product name (or yet to be announced depending on whether you believe what you hear).
A curiosity though, I've just been conversing with a product manager in the globalisation team over a feature that the company I work for would dearly like, during this conversation she mentioned that the feature in question would not be in Office 12, but some part of it will be considered for Office 14.
Office 14? So what happened to Office 13?
Could it be that Microsoft are superstitious enough to not want to number a feature version of Office as Office 13? Or am I reading too much into this, and did they just use Excel to do the numbering?
Maybe someone should point out to them that missing 13 doesn't make it any less Office 13. "
The link in the article is wrong. Fixed link here.
on
Google WiFi+VPN Confirmed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Basically any 404 Not Found gets redirected to your local Google page... so get the link right and it works:)
And can people please RTFA. It's not free wi-fi, they don't have to roll out tons of gear... it's a VPN. It's to secure your connection from third party sniffers, and to give Google more info, ad insertion capabilities, etc... not a physical hardware network of wi-fi points.
I agree... the MS app will never be on my laptop, desktop or handheld.
However I would not be surprised if my mother installed it on her laptop.
And that is where it will get weird. Skype isn't going to inter-operate, nor will MS. Both will protect their own walled gardens.
Strangely, I foresee that traditional landlines and the ability to call and receive over them may actually remain the bridge between them.
My mother would dial my SkypeIn number (whichever of mine is closest to her) and I will receive on Skype. I would dial her MS number and she would receive on MS.
The crazy thing, is that all this VOIP would at some point get routed via traditional networks, and instead of being free will incur low charges which helps protects the business models of those telecoms companies.
Low charges are not much in comparison to traditional costs, but it seems that there isn't room for multiple vendors in a VOIP market if free or almost free is the goal of the users using it. Not unless the clients from both sides can call each other natively (as if!).
As a customer I will be urging anyone who asks to go Skype to ensure my costs remain low.
Some people are bound to abuse TOR by simply being dickheads over it, comment spamming, flaming, trolling, etc.
But the benefits of a system that protects your right to free speech totally outweighs the negative.
If those dickheads negatively tarnish the Tor servers such that they become less valuable due to being second class citizens on the internet... then it is a really really bad idea.
Protect firstly that which you have, then see what you need to do to stop spammers, dickheads in general, etc.
It's a terrible name because it says nothing about what it is, only what it is made of. Even then it poorly describes what it is made of, as it can be made of other things too.
So from this CBL (Carbon Based Lifeform) to another, I say, "Goodnight".
Which is strange, because in 1999 I was making web applications that utilised hidden frames to post information to the server and return JavaScript arrays which I would then use to modify the limited parts of the DOM I had access to at that time. It worked in Netscape 3, Netscape 4, and IE 3 and IE 4.
So the techniques in question have been around for ages, and the use of Xml and the XmlHttp objects appeared several years ago with Outlook Web Access.
The ONLY thing that has been around for approx' a year is the utterly stupid name for it, "AJAX".
I'm glad other people are picking up on it and using it, it's very powerful, but let's not credit Adaptive Path with creating a technology or method that many people have been using for a long time.
If you have to use a name, then RIA (Rich Interactive Applications) is far more suitable and doesn't restrict the developer to asynchronous work only for it to be included in that.
IIRC we're all plugged into the same internet. A potentially mid to high level set of Windows exploits raises the *Internet* Storm Center's alert level to yellow.
This should tell you something. Ideally it should tell you that when X million Windows boxes are exploited, that there will be a noticeable degradation of quality or service on the internet. That the resultant poor quality traffic and noise created by a large scale (poorly written) worm will degrade the connection your PowerBook is enjoying.
Don't ever forget that we're all in the same boat, and it does little good to sit at the stern and laugh at the suckers at the bow as they dip gently under the water for the Nth time.
Not a loose set of assumptions or generlisation at all.
The majority of those I know working at financial institutions in the city of London and Canary Wharf work with VB6, with means Windows.
I've seen a little of what they do when I get sent client site, and it's not pretty at all.
There may be a few people in there that are as brilliant as you suggest, but I would say that it is more likely that Linux has been chosen as a cheap alternative to some of the UNIX distros and that this is mostly a licensing saving rather than a conscious choice by developers to have Linux.
Don't underestimate the power of a CTO who is fearful of losing his job (they all are) to make decisions to save money... be that a switch to Linux or to outsource your job.
You could've guessed it! http://www.playboy.co.uk/
Of course, it's a paid for subscription product. And no, I'm not giving out free passes or anything... but I know the guys that work there still, and if enough of you want it I could ask them about a load of free trial accounts or something.
I used to work for Premium TV and was the poor bugger largely responsible for creating their searchable video archive which included the ability to create videos from clips of soccer games.
Basically video arrived in and was edited down to highlights, and meta data applied to describe each clip within that highlight. The video and meta data is then uploaded, and the end user can search it to watch a specific clip or construct their own highlights packages (want to build a movie of your 20 favourite goals ever? sure thing, etc).
Anyway... this was all designed for the web. The problem that we encountered that I think will be encountered here is the usefulness of the web to display content that has been created for a different medium.
Film of soccer games was specifically created to be viewed on a television. With various presumptions about the size of a viewers TV set.
When reduced in size to fit within a 320x240 area on a web page, and then encoded to be streamable and downloadable with convenience, what do you think happens?
Well firstly, that player who looked huge is only an inch high. Next that white ball he was kicking has become a dot. The ball disappears occasionally. The picture is mostly green.
What needed to be done is that the video should have been reshot with the destination in mind. Wide shots of the pitch do not work when you have a few inches of available on the viewable device. Fast action moments (when most of the skill and elegance of a player is executed) blurs and is not clear when encoded too much.
The same thing applies to almost any other sport.
And importantly... it applies to music videos.
Most music videos are designed for TV playback, a large viewing area. They will not instantly work when transferred to a very small screen. Though they do have a better chance than films which were designed for even larger viewing areas.
On a tangent, Premium TV now work with Playboy TV and the searchable archive I created has been refactored to accomodate porn. Now that is true recognition of the value of the tool I built;)
On another tangent, imagine video podcasts. Especially when combined with the "build your own highlights" type thing that I mentioned above. iPods would be good devices for talking heads, and to construct documentaries and news from multiple sources and catch up on the latest on the way to work would be cool.
So not all great, but there are some silver linings to such a product.
Thanks for the education, you'll find my name on various records by Belle & Sebastian and Elastica and as part of the history of Jeepster Records. Did I mention I have a Silver disk, Gold disk, and that we won a Brit Award for B&S? I sat on the Association of Independent Music's internet committee, and have spoken at a couple of In The City conferences. My work has been nominated for NME website of the year. And hey... I do know this stuff, and unless you turn out to be Pete Waterman, I'm probably safe in saying that the 5 years in the industry gives me the edge in this debate.
Anyhow, labels do pay for manufacturing (30p in the UK (usually manufactured in mainland europe though) including an 8 page colour booklet and jewel case), and for distribution (80p in the UK, via Vital). Oh, and MCPS (mechanical copyrights) 30p... to the band.
So there's £1.50 to take off the price.
That doesn't seem much, but that £1.50 is almost half of the UK dealer price. The dealer price being what the shops pay for it.
Did I say half? Surely not... no, you all believe that the labels get more... but let's go from the experience we had: £6 is what you say you're going to sell it to record shops at, £4.50 is what you are prepared to deal down to to get it into all shops. £3.30 is what the big few retailers bully you down to (they have market share, you're an indie, what are you going to do?).
So the manufacturing and distribution is almost half the amount that labels charge retailers. Which means that the label is only getting £1.80 per CD, to split with the band and to cover overheads of office, marketing, etc.
Yup, you pay for marketing, the first week shelves across the UK would be £10,000. Street posters can add £30,000 easily, and adverts in major music weeklies and monthlies can rack up another £10,000.
But that comes out of that money the label got.. maybe with deductions and charge-backs to the artist... it depends on the contract.
In the physical world, the real winners are not labels... it's retailers. Retailers take the bulk of the money, not the label.
Anyhow... move online.
Suddenly the labels have a chance to get the retailers out of the way. They're ALL sniffing that £12 of money that they weren't making due to middlemen... and all of the labels want it.
What's happening is a process of disintermediation whereby each part of the supply chain is being squeezed out one by one.
What we're not seeing though, is the price benefit of disintermediation being passed on to the end consumer.
The distribution has been taken out... the cost of the product didn't decline.
The manufacturing has been taken out... the cost of the product didn't decline.
The retailers are being squeezed out... the cost of the product isn't declining.
Actually... we're seeing the opposite. The labels like this new world of little effort and great profits, and they're driving prices higher (see iTunes and Apples revenues from the music not the hardware for this).
Then there's you and I. We paid for the bandwidth via our internet connections. We paid for the storage via our hardware. We're paying twice... because we're not seeing the price come down, and we are bearing the cost burden for distribution and marketing.
This is the way to go... but it's unrealistic to suggest that the consumers should pay more, and get less. The cost has to drop dramatically. And the key point is... it can. Take out those middlemen, remove the need for massive infracstructure, and drop the prices inline.
I outlined above how a label only got £1.80 to share with the artist after costs and retailer splits. Now imagine a £5 album via download... they've almost tripled their real income, yet you and I pay less.
That's where we should be.
Strangely, many people in the industry know this very well, they just haven't been forced to do it yet, and quite like the idea that they get all the money and control:)
So... we pay for the distribution now... the manufacturing has vanished... and still they'll try and DRM it (making less useful than a plain CD) and will probably will charge it at the same or higher rate than CD's.
This isn't a win... it's a lose.
If they drop the prices to reflect that manufacturing and distribution have now been removed... and also to reflect that now we just want the good stuff and not the padded albums... then they might have something.
"Other than adds, what else could fund 'free' services online?"
I know not many people get donations to work, but with a good level of transparency some people who care deeply about a site or service will pay for it.
The assumption people make is that the service is part of a company offering, that it's being paid for implicitly when other products or services are purchased. People assume that *someone* must be paying for it.
By giving transparency, and translating the accounts into what it means for the users, I've found on the forum I run that users have been willing to fund our server fully, with enough money in the kitty for the next 6 months.
In return we publish a full record to all of our members of every transaction that is made, and commit ourselves to only using donations to fund the service offering.
We did this because adverts never raised enough money for our medium-sized site anyway... and the cashflow was far too erratic (Adsense clickthrough revenues can vary quite wildly). Most users became de-sensitised to adverts and we spent a lot of time tweaking the adverts so that they would remain in the consciousness of the users.
It was dire.
Donations have worked for us though. So much so that we now have an abudance of bandwidth, CPU and RAM, so are looking to start an online radio service too:)
In essence, users aren't stupid and do appreciate the need for the site to have a revenue stream. If you respect the users, and are up front with them about the costs, cashflow, etc... and can communicate that X amount of money = Y amount of time in existence, then the part of your audience who value what you do will step in and help fund you.
However, this puts a pressure on making sure that what you do has value. Generic low value sites without rich content of their own, will likely not find that the above model works for them. Some users have to really be passionate for it to work.
"I think some european countries have a lot stronger privacy rules, including rules saying that companies doing business there need to delete almost all records on someone if they request it."
I signed up for the Napster trial and it asked for my credit card... fair enough I though... "if I use the service I'll be paying for it, and if not I can remove it".
When the trial ended I decided not to keep it... I wasn't impressed, not least with the gaping holes in their catalogue (EMI).
So I cancelled that, and discovered that I couldn't clear my credit card details!
Napster.co.uk is a UK site, the company are registered here too and have a VAT number, etc.
Yet upon contacting their customer services, I was told that because the servers are in the US, that this falls under US law, and then told that I was not covered by the UK Data Protection Act, EU Data Protection measures... and finally, that they couldn't delete the credit card data as "it is needed for US tax returns".
Quite how the US govt' needs details on a credit card that has not been involved in a monetary transaction is beyond.
I call bullshit... but this is when you discover that Data Protection laws are worth shit unless there are ways to easily activate them.
I still don't know the next step in nuking my credit card details and having my data deleted.
How about create a community based nomination and voting system for key pieces of functionality/usability that users require/desire and are unlikely to be fulfilled by the corporations who have their own interests in Linux and OSS.
Once a list of desired functionality/usability is drawn up and prioritised, geeks could assess the complexity level and through another community based system agree on a suitable bounty for it to be done.
Bounties should only ever be allocated out of the money that is there... never on what may/might come in in the future.
The money should sit in Escrow and be given to any entity/entities that fulfil the deliverables for a given bounty.
Any bounty unclaimed after X amount of time should be reassessed as to whether it is still needed, and the money increased or the bounty removed as applicable.
" If you work around a problem, it hides from the user that the problem exists."
This is VERY true.
Which is why on my site I purposefully avoid giving a hoot that IE can't display PNG's properly.
When I tell people to use Firefox, it's an added sense of wonder when they do and see that suddenly the images don't have grey backgrounds after all. It also helps hammer home just how cruddy the software (IE + Windows... it is an integral part of the OS afterall) that they were using actually is.
It's the same with bugs. Providing that the bug doesn't lose me a user or breach security, I will leave the nagging ones there and let the user see it.
Dev teams (esp. MS ones) are far proactive about fixing bugs when hordes of dumb users are complaining on their forums and community sites, than when a few geeks speak out... if we do the covering up for them, then all we're doing is prolonging the life of the bug.
I've always found it amusing that the 'international' morse code alphabet (linked to in the parent) lacks äöåéíáóú.
I can understand that yes it wouldn't encapsulate all languages... but hey guys, it could at least try and encapsulate the Latin, Romantic and Germanic languages a tad better.
And something like would be very useful in Morse, as you could truncate the length of a question simply by indicating in advance that a statement was a question.
This is all irrelevant of course... what kind of idiot is going to morse over skype! - Purely rhetorical, I don't want to know the answer!
Webcams and video conferencing have been around for a while and are pretty damn easy.
What I needed was an out of the box simple to use VOIP that I could give my mother and she could understand.
Skype filled that perfectly.
That it then went and replaced my home phone, gave me numbers in Manhattan, London and Stockholm are all benefits.
What I didn't need was video conferencing though... didn't then, still don't.
Sound is vastly more important than vision on these things.
What do you think you'll benefit from when one or the other fails? Sound or vision?
What I really need, and what I shall be arsed to code very soon, is an Outlook plugin so that my girlfriend can easily call people from within Outlook without it playing up on her.
Plugins should offer small fine tuning and niche functionality... not fundamental changes and bloat.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been running it for 3 minutes, and I must say... it's VERY stable. Probably more so than ever!
(please understand this is a joke)
Internal numbering... major number goes up for each suite release.
From my blog dated a month ago:
"
Microsoft have been using internal numbers for their major Office release for some time:
Office 9 = Microsoft Office 2000
Office 10 = Microsoft Office XP
Office 11 = Microsoft Office 2003
And right now they are in pre-beta with Office 12... yet to be assigned a product name (or yet to be announced depending on whether you believe what you hear).
A curiosity though, I've just been conversing with a product manager in the globalisation team over a feature that the company I work for would dearly like, during this conversation she mentioned that the feature in question would not be in Office 12, but some part of it will be considered for Office 14.
Office 14? So what happened to Office 13?
Could it be that Microsoft are superstitious enough to not want to number a feature version of Office as Office 13?
Or am I reading too much into this, and did they just use Excel to do the numbering?
Maybe someone should point out to them that missing 13 doesn't make it any less Office 13.
"
Note the trailing 'l':
http://wifi.google.com/download.html
Basically any 404 Not Found gets redirected to your local Google page... so get the link right and it works :)
And can people please RTFA. It's not free wi-fi, they don't have to roll out tons of gear... it's a VPN. It's to secure your connection from third party sniffers, and to give Google more info, ad insertion capabilities, etc... not a physical hardware network of wi-fi points.
I agree... the MS app will never be on my laptop, desktop or handheld.
However I would not be surprised if my mother installed it on her laptop.
And that is where it will get weird. Skype isn't going to inter-operate, nor will MS. Both will protect their own walled gardens.
Strangely, I foresee that traditional landlines and the ability to call and receive over them may actually remain the bridge between them.
My mother would dial my SkypeIn number (whichever of mine is closest to her) and I will receive on Skype. I would dial her MS number and she would receive on MS.
The crazy thing, is that all this VOIP would at some point get routed via traditional networks, and instead of being free will incur low charges which helps protects the business models of those telecoms companies.
Low charges are not much in comparison to traditional costs, but it seems that there isn't room for multiple vendors in a VOIP market if free or almost free is the goal of the users using it. Not unless the clients from both sides can call each other natively (as if!).
As a customer I will be urging anyone who asks to go Skype to ensure my costs remain low.
A list of Tor server IP's:
http://proxy.org/tor.shtml
Some people are bound to abuse TOR by simply being dickheads over it, comment spamming, flaming, trolling, etc.
But the benefits of a system that protects your right to free speech totally outweighs the negative.
If those dickheads negatively tarnish the Tor servers such that they become less valuable due to being second class citizens on the internet... then it is a really really bad idea.
Protect firstly that which you have, then see what you need to do to stop spammers, dickheads in general, etc.
Macromedia have a page that allows you to modify what sites can do on your computer in regards to Flash:n /flashplayer/help/settings_manager02.html#118539
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/e
AJAX = Asynchronous Javascript And Xml
It's a terrible name because it says nothing about what it is, only what it is made of. Even then it poorly describes what it is made of, as it can be made of other things too.
So from this CBL (Carbon Based Lifeform) to another, I say, "Goodnight".
"Ajax hasn't even been around a year yet"
Which is strange, because in 1999 I was making web applications that utilised hidden frames to post information to the server and return JavaScript arrays which I would then use to modify the limited parts of the DOM I had access to at that time. It worked in Netscape 3, Netscape 4, and IE 3 and IE 4.
So the techniques in question have been around for ages, and the use of Xml and the XmlHttp objects appeared several years ago with Outlook Web Access.
The ONLY thing that has been around for approx' a year is the utterly stupid name for it, "AJAX".
I'm glad other people are picking up on it and using it, it's very powerful, but let's not credit Adaptive Path with creating a technology or method that many people have been using for a long time.
If you have to use a name, then RIA (Rich Interactive Applications) is far more suitable and doesn't restrict the developer to asynchronous work only for it to be included in that.
Erm, it DOES affect your powerbook.
IIRC we're all plugged into the same internet. A potentially mid to high level set of Windows exploits raises the *Internet* Storm Center's alert level to yellow.
This should tell you something. Ideally it should tell you that when X million Windows boxes are exploited, that there will be a noticeable degradation of quality or service on the internet. That the resultant poor quality traffic and noise created by a large scale (poorly written) worm will degrade the connection your PowerBook is enjoying.
Don't ever forget that we're all in the same boat, and it does little good to sit at the stern and laugh at the suckers at the bow as they dip gently under the water for the Nth time.
Damn, I posted, and I had mod points to burn too.
I suffer ADD only have the patience to read headlines you insensitive clod!
Not a loose set of assumptions or generlisation at all.
The majority of those I know working at financial institutions in the city of London and Canary Wharf work with VB6, with means Windows.
I've seen a little of what they do when I get sent client site, and it's not pretty at all.
There may be a few people in there that are as brilliant as you suggest, but I would say that it is more likely that Linux has been chosen as a cheap alternative to some of the UNIX distros and that this is mostly a licensing saving rather than a conscious choice by developers to have Linux.
Don't underestimate the power of a CTO who is fearful of losing his job (they all are) to make decisions to save money... be that a switch to Linux or to outsource your job.
Okay, stop holding out on us... Link please?
You could've guessed it!
http://www.playboy.co.uk/
Of course, it's a paid for subscription product. And no, I'm not giving out free passes or anything... but I know the guys that work there still, and if enough of you want it I could ask them about a load of free trial accounts or something.
I used to work for Premium TV and was the poor bugger largely responsible for creating their searchable video archive which included the ability to create videos from clips of soccer games.
;)
Basically video arrived in and was edited down to highlights, and meta data applied to describe each clip within that highlight. The video and meta data is then uploaded, and the end user can search it to watch a specific clip or construct their own highlights packages (want to build a movie of your 20 favourite goals ever? sure thing, etc).
Anyway... this was all designed for the web. The problem that we encountered that I think will be encountered here is the usefulness of the web to display content that has been created for a different medium.
Film of soccer games was specifically created to be viewed on a television. With various presumptions about the size of a viewers TV set.
When reduced in size to fit within a 320x240 area on a web page, and then encoded to be streamable and downloadable with convenience, what do you think happens?
Well firstly, that player who looked huge is only an inch high. Next that white ball he was kicking has become a dot. The ball disappears occasionally. The picture is mostly green.
What needed to be done is that the video should have been reshot with the destination in mind. Wide shots of the pitch do not work when you have a few inches of available on the viewable device. Fast action moments (when most of the skill and elegance of a player is executed) blurs and is not clear when encoded too much.
The same thing applies to almost any other sport.
And importantly... it applies to music videos.
Most music videos are designed for TV playback, a large viewing area. They will not instantly work when transferred to a very small screen. Though they do have a better chance than films which were designed for even larger viewing areas.
On a tangent, Premium TV now work with Playboy TV and the searchable archive I created has been refactored to accomodate porn. Now that is true recognition of the value of the tool I built
On another tangent, imagine video podcasts. Especially when combined with the "build your own highlights" type thing that I mentioned above. iPods would be good devices for talking heads, and to construct documentaries and news from multiple sources and catch up on the latest on the way to work would be cool.
So not all great, but there are some silver linings to such a product.
tripe?
You can search Google maps by typing in the longitude and latitude.
4 4%C2%B011'54%22E&spn=0.006416,0.007907&t=k&hl=en
Abu Ghurayb is 3318'58"N 04411'54"E
So you can see that here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=33%C2%B018'58%22N+0
On re-reading, I'll concede maths aren't my strong point ;)
Thanks for the education, you'll find my name on various records by Belle & Sebastian and Elastica and as part of the history of Jeepster Records. Did I mention I have a Silver disk, Gold disk, and that we won a Brit Award for B&S? I sat on the Association of Independent Music's internet committee, and have spoken at a couple of In The City conferences. My work has been nominated for NME website of the year. And hey... I do know this stuff, and unless you turn out to be Pete Waterman, I'm probably safe in saying that the 5 years in the industry gives me the edge in this debate.
:)
Anyhow, labels do pay for manufacturing (30p in the UK (usually manufactured in mainland europe though) including an 8 page colour booklet and jewel case), and for distribution (80p in the UK, via Vital). Oh, and MCPS (mechanical copyrights) 30p... to the band.
So there's £1.50 to take off the price.
That doesn't seem much, but that £1.50 is almost half of the UK dealer price. The dealer price being what the shops pay for it.
Did I say half? Surely not... no, you all believe that the labels get more... but let's go from the experience we had: £6 is what you say you're going to sell it to record shops at, £4.50 is what you are prepared to deal down to to get it into all shops. £3.30 is what the big few retailers bully you down to (they have market share, you're an indie, what are you going to do?).
So the manufacturing and distribution is almost half the amount that labels charge retailers. Which means that the label is only getting £1.80 per CD, to split with the band and to cover overheads of office, marketing, etc.
Yup, you pay for marketing, the first week shelves across the UK would be £10,000. Street posters can add £30,000 easily, and adverts in major music weeklies and monthlies can rack up another £10,000.
But that comes out of that money the label got.. maybe with deductions and charge-backs to the artist... it depends on the contract.
In the physical world, the real winners are not labels... it's retailers. Retailers take the bulk of the money, not the label.
Anyhow... move online.
Suddenly the labels have a chance to get the retailers out of the way. They're ALL sniffing that £12 of money that they weren't making due to middlemen... and all of the labels want it.
What's happening is a process of disintermediation whereby each part of the supply chain is being squeezed out one by one.
What we're not seeing though, is the price benefit of disintermediation being passed on to the end consumer.
The distribution has been taken out... the cost of the product didn't decline.
The manufacturing has been taken out... the cost of the product didn't decline.
The retailers are being squeezed out... the cost of the product isn't declining.
Actually... we're seeing the opposite. The labels like this new world of little effort and great profits, and they're driving prices higher (see iTunes and Apples revenues from the music not the hardware for this).
Then there's you and I. We paid for the bandwidth via our internet connections. We paid for the storage via our hardware. We're paying twice... because we're not seeing the price come down, and we are bearing the cost burden for distribution and marketing.
This is the way to go... but it's unrealistic to suggest that the consumers should pay more, and get less. The cost has to drop dramatically. And the key point is... it can. Take out those middlemen, remove the need for massive infracstructure, and drop the prices inline.
I outlined above how a label only got £1.80 to share with the artist after costs and retailer splits. Now imagine a £5 album via download... they've almost tripled their real income, yet you and I pay less.
That's where we should be.
Strangely, many people in the industry know this very well, they just haven't been forced to do it yet, and quite like the idea that they get all the money and control
So... we pay for the distribution now... the manufacturing has vanished... and still they'll try and DRM it (making less useful than a plain CD) and will probably will charge it at the same or higher rate than CD's.
This isn't a win... it's a lose.
If they drop the prices to reflect that manufacturing and distribution have now been removed... and also to reflect that now we just want the good stuff and not the padded albums... then they might have something.
"Other than adds, what else could fund 'free' services online?"
:)
I know not many people get donations to work, but with a good level of transparency some people who care deeply about a site or service will pay for it.
The assumption people make is that the service is part of a company offering, that it's being paid for implicitly when other products or services are purchased. People assume that *someone* must be paying for it.
By giving transparency, and translating the accounts into what it means for the users, I've found on the forum I run that users have been willing to fund our server fully, with enough money in the kitty for the next 6 months.
In return we publish a full record to all of our members of every transaction that is made, and commit ourselves to only using donations to fund the service offering.
We did this because adverts never raised enough money for our medium-sized site anyway... and the cashflow was far too erratic (Adsense clickthrough revenues can vary quite wildly). Most users became de-sensitised to adverts and we spent a lot of time tweaking the adverts so that they would remain in the consciousness of the users.
It was dire.
Donations have worked for us though. So much so that we now have an abudance of bandwidth, CPU and RAM, so are looking to start an online radio service too
You can see the accounts that we publish on our front page here: http://www.bowlie.com/forum/ and registered members can view our entire cashflow over the years here: http://www.bowlie.com/accounts/
In essence, users aren't stupid and do appreciate the need for the site to have a revenue stream. If you respect the users, and are up front with them about the costs, cashflow, etc... and can communicate that X amount of money = Y amount of time in existence, then the part of your audience who value what you do will step in and help fund you.
However, this puts a pressure on making sure that what you do has value. Generic low value sites without rich content of their own, will likely not find that the above model works for them. Some users have to really be passionate for it to work.
If Proxy Firewalls offer a comparable level of security to a Yale lock, then we are seriously in trouble!
From my own forum: How to defeat a Yale lock using nothing but a plastic bottle
"I think some european countries have a lot stronger privacy rules, including rules saying that companies doing business there need to delete almost all records on someone if they request it."
I signed up for the Napster trial and it asked for my credit card... fair enough I though... "if I use the service I'll be paying for it, and if not I can remove it".
When the trial ended I decided not to keep it... I wasn't impressed, not least with the gaping holes in their catalogue (EMI).
So I cancelled that, and discovered that I couldn't clear my credit card details!
Napster.co.uk is a UK site, the company are registered here too and have a VAT number, etc.
Yet upon contacting their customer services, I was told that because the servers are in the US, that this falls under US law, and then told that I was not covered by the UK Data Protection Act, EU Data Protection measures... and finally, that they couldn't delete the credit card data as "it is needed for US tax returns".
Quite how the US govt' needs details on a credit card that has not been involved in a monetary transaction is beyond.
I call bullshit... but this is when you discover that Data Protection laws are worth shit unless there are ways to easily activate them.
I still don't know the next step in nuking my credit card details and having my data deleted.
How about create a community based nomination and voting system for key pieces of functionality/usability that users require/desire and are unlikely to be fulfilled by the corporations who have their own interests in Linux and OSS.
Once a list of desired functionality/usability is drawn up and prioritised, geeks could assess the complexity level and through another community based system agree on a suitable bounty for it to be done.
Bounties should only ever be allocated out of the money that is there... never on what may/might come in in the future.
The money should sit in Escrow and be given to any entity/entities that fulfil the deliverables for a given bounty.
Any bounty unclaimed after X amount of time should be reassessed as to whether it is still needed, and the money increased or the bounty removed as applicable.
Just an idea.
" If you work around a problem, it hides from the user that the problem exists."
This is VERY true.
Which is why on my site I purposefully avoid giving a hoot that IE can't display PNG's properly.
When I tell people to use Firefox, it's an added sense of wonder when they do and see that suddenly the images don't have grey backgrounds after all. It also helps hammer home just how cruddy the software (IE + Windows... it is an integral part of the OS afterall) that they were using actually is.
It's the same with bugs. Providing that the bug doesn't lose me a user or breach security, I will leave the nagging ones there and let the user see it.
Dev teams (esp. MS ones) are far proactive about fixing bugs when hordes of dumb users are complaining on their forums and community sites, than when a few geeks speak out... if we do the covering up for them, then all we're doing is prolonging the life of the bug.
I've always found it amusing that the 'international' morse code alphabet (linked to in the parent) lacks äöåéíáóú.
I can understand that yes it wouldn't encapsulate all languages... but hey guys, it could at least try and encapsulate the Latin, Romantic and Germanic languages a tad better.
And something like would be very useful in Morse, as you could truncate the length of a question simply by indicating in advance that a statement was a question.
This is all irrelevant of course... what kind of idiot is going to morse over skype! - Purely rhetorical, I don't want to know the answer!
Good point, well made.
Webcams and video conferencing have been around for a while and are pretty damn easy.
What I needed was an out of the box simple to use VOIP that I could give my mother and she could understand.
Skype filled that perfectly.
That it then went and replaced my home phone, gave me numbers in Manhattan, London and Stockholm are all benefits.
What I didn't need was video conferencing though... didn't then, still don't.
Sound is vastly more important than vision on these things.
What do you think you'll benefit from when one or the other fails? Sound or vision?
What I really need, and what I shall be arsed to code very soon, is an Outlook plugin so that my girlfriend can easily call people from within Outlook without it playing up on her.
Plugins should offer small fine tuning and niche functionality... not fundamental changes and bloat.
PS: Slashdot does not like TOR