Here is my take on it, and this applies very specifically to the mobile area.
Over a period of time the patent disputes between Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, and the other big players will be settled. Whether through fees or you-use-ours-we-use-yours agreements, the battles will end. Then what we will have is a true cartel through which any outside party wishing to build and sell a legal mobile device must pass through. This could either mean very big per device license fees, obstructive licensing agreements, or outright market exclusion.
What I fear most is not the death of outside innovation in mobile but the Frankenstein chimera of a law that bought off lawmakers and lobbyists create to "reform" this problem.
If there was an article about me, it would be titled "X requires cable companies to put their shows online in order to watch."
I thought I was going to have to keep cable and HBO to watch Game of Thrones. But I thought about it more, and I can wait a year in order to avoid writing and mailing a damn check every 30 days.
Cable is dead. Avoid it for a month or two and when you return it feels like you are watching a video version of the spam inbox.
Perfect 10's little scheme had a similar effect. They bought copyright's to Hegre-Art nude photos for the purpose of suing Google Images. Guess who showed up in Google Images with those pictures, Hegre-Art affiliates.
I am reminded of a quote by James Lovelock in The Vanishing Face of Gaia - "..before we start geoengineering, we have to ask: Are we sufficiently talented to take on what might become the onerous permanent task of keeping the Earth in homeostasis? Consider what might happen if we start by using a stratospheric aerosol to ameliorate global heating—even if it succeeded it would not be long before we faced the additional problem of ocean acidification. This would need another medicine, and so on. We could find ourselves enslaved in a Kafkaesque world from which there was no escape."
but that is not all, Lovelock continues:
"The alternative is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself."
I used to order all my hardware from newegg. Then, my last order were marked as "successful" only for me to find out the following day it had been flagged. As a very busy adult that was a huge deal. I can't just assemble a new PC any day I feel like it. I cancelled the order, found all of the parts available on Amazon Prime for about the same price and overnighted them (would have been free shipping had I been able to wait an extra day.)
My brother went through an almost identical experience the last time he tried to build a machine.
The real question to me is, can newegg survive Amazon?
Or "Healthcare Reform" that makes it illegal not to buy the product your claiming to reform.
As soon as I hear "Reform" on the end of the bill I cringe. Its obvious it was written by the same people that the bill allegedly regulates.
I don't think the founding fathers of the United States ever would have imagined that an elected government could turn in to such a satirical farce of Edward Bernays' proportions.
I support it -- as long as a third party does it. It could be done browser side with GreaseMonkey. Someone can host a mirrored censored Wikipedia. Multiple people can host censored Wikipedia's. Different groups can censor whatever they don't want their members to see. For example a fundamentalist Christian/Muslim Wikipedia could remove all references to biological evolution and astrophysics (the whole big bang thing.)
A system whose purpose is to curate what amounts to a record of the entire record of knowledge of human civilization has absolutely no place in censoring itself, even if that censorship is a thin sheet. The mere addition of such a feature sends the message to children and the naive that there are things which we should pretend didn't happen if it makes us feel uncomfortable.
Hiding something such as pictures of war crimes should be embarrassing to anyone. In this case it is appalling. These are not pictures hanging up in your living room, this is content that people pursue when trying to learn specifically about the very subject.
This feature was requested by the Wikimedia board of trustees unanimously. In their resolution they specifically state: "We support the principle of user choice; readers should have control over their experience on the projects." Why is this addressing only images? If someone can hide a picture of a black man being lynched 100 years ago, why not also allow a reader to hide the statement that it ever happened in the first place? If the Wikimedia Foundation wants to do with Wikimedia Commons or whatever, fine, but Wikipedia too, then everyone one of them should be replaced.
Once someone has a day and a half of downtime they aren't going to care about getting half of their money back. Instead they will want a full refund and damages. I know in some situations, even for smaller businesses, that downtime could easily cost thousands of dollars.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, there may not be a lot of people using their software in the future even if they make it free.
Yet it is closely interlinked because Google Offers is just the kind of thing that Google is using the search engine to drive traffic to, traffic that would otherwise go to competitors. This is just demonstrating that no one at Google is taking the anti competitive business practice stuff seriously.
Ben Edelman has done a truly exceptional job documenting the anti-trust issues involving Google's advertising.
NBC is not a monopoly, Google is. Google makes Microsoft's old monopoly look like a walk in the park. Google not only has the most used search engine but controls or has a majority chunk of the online advertising market flow through it (at least in the US, I'm sure there are exceptions on a country by country basis.) Additionally they now have what is likely to be come the #1 mobile phone operating system and potentially what could become the #1 web browser.
People go to Google to look for stuff. Lets say your business advertises on Google (mine does), and Google wants to do the same thing as your business does. Thanks to either their existing infrastructure or that you are advertising on their platform they know everything about how your business gets traffic. With the wave of a magic wand all of those search keywords and display ad placements are now directly to Google's new competitive service. I have seen Google do this in multiple markets, including my own. How do you compete against Google? You can't. Virtually every user wanting something specific comes from search.
That is an incredibly powerful monopoly, much more so than Microsoft's was.
Areas Google has already used this to their advantage: Google News (vs multiple news sites), Google Finance (Yahoo Finance and others), Google Shopping (infinite shopping sites), Google Health (WebMD etc), Google Places (remember the whole Yelp review jacking thing), and so on.
Unlike Microsoft, Google is actually putting out exceptional products and I am very thankful for that. But, a monopoly is a monopoly, and if anti-competitive practices are involved (strongly likely) US law has something to say about that. Thus any disagreement with this issue lays with US law rather than Google or the FTC.
By the way, I strongly recommend what Ben Endelman has written about this subject. I would take a guess he figured this out first.
First, I think that individual personalities are what make and break stories. The reason this story is about Julian Assange is the same reason that Snooki from MTV's reality TV show was in the New York Post almost every other day this summer. The guy has put himself in front of television cameras during press conferences and now with some alleged sex crime he is front page news. And the fact that he is part of an incredibly polarizing story makes it media gold.
Julian is certainly smart enough to understand how the media works. To some degree I imagine it was very intentional; what those underlying intentions are I don't know.
What makes this story fascinating is that you can see an individuals comprehension of how the world works and how radically altering the new paradigm of information is by their reactions to Wikileaks and to a lesser degree Julian Assange and what "to do" about him.
6 years ago on the most popular message board for pornographers everyone loved to boast about downloading MP3s, movies, and pirated software. Of course anyone who pointed out the irony was trolled out of the thread. You could say that some members of the porn industry are now on the receiving end.
Are you kidding? Have you been watching what halfway decent domain names have been going for these days? $1000 is a bargain, unless you want your-domain-name.com for $9.
How about webmasters getting paid double, triple, or more to run Google ads instead of pop-ups?
Website owners usedpop-ups becuase, at the time, they paid out far better than nearly any other advertising. Internet advertising was in a bit of a slump back in 2000/2001 follow the dot com "boom." Thanks to Google, webmasters can think about website profits instead of barely being able to cover hosting costs.
Just because some are legit doesn't mean they are all. Come on, Moscow is home to 30+ billionaires and something like 33,000 millionaires. Its not all poor town over there.
I'm suprised Yahoo and Match are doing this. Its no secret that a lot of other big "adult" dating sites do this -- which I would have expected to land in legal trouble well before this. Not to mention the thousands of dating sites out there filled with fake profiles, or hundreds of foreign bride sites populated by flat out con artists (if you think losing $10 a month is a big deal, try getting conned out of thousands.) I know all of this, and I've never even used an online dating service or site once.
There is no doubt Yahoo and Match have the money, and thats were the lawsuits go. Great, another case of "here is your $15 settlement payment and one free month of service, while we collect our $5 million lawyer fee from the defendent."
I've heard plenty of reasons why e-books "don't work."
Me, I don't think the e-book is a good format for fiction. If I want to read Lord of The Rings I don't want to be sitting at a PC or holding some device.
How about the positives:
-They can be published very fast. I wrote an e-book, made the first sale within a week. In the traditional publishing world that doesn't happen.
-They have high profit margins for the writers: The only middleman is the billing processor. Whats that, 3% or 4%? High profit margins for writers mean you can write a book that has a small audience and still pay your bills at the end of the month -- and maybe even write another.
-The can be easily updated Forget 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions being measured in years. In the e-book world it can be a matter of days.
-Easier to make an interactive experience In the e-book world the author can personally work with readers. For example, he or she could charge a price that would sound outrageous on Amazon or in Borders, but makes sense for a reader who needs in-depth and personal support. The author can tie the e-book into a premium/subscription website.
When I hear "e-book" I think positive. Very positive.
I think you missed the point of the post.. Slashdot traffic isn't worth much. I have other sites that will do over $100 per thousand hits -- because its valuable targetted traffic.
A website of mine was linked to on the front page of Slashdot last year and I had Google Adsense on it. After 30,000 pageviews that day I made a little over $1;)
What really makes Adsense great isn't just that the ads are targetted but that they are much more efficient than untargetted banner ads. Even a low-traffic website (maybe 3,000 pageviews a month) can easily pay for its domain registration and web hosting if the webmaster is using adsense. There is a good reason why free webshosting isn't as big of a deal as it used to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is my take on it, and this applies very specifically to the mobile area.
Over a period of time the patent disputes between Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, and the other big players will be settled. Whether through fees or you-use-ours-we-use-yours agreements, the battles will end. Then what we will have is a true cartel through which any outside party wishing to build and sell a legal mobile device must pass through. This could either mean very big per device license fees, obstructive licensing agreements, or outright market exclusion.
What I fear most is not the death of outside innovation in mobile but the Frankenstein chimera of a law that bought off lawmakers and lobbyists create to "reform" this problem.
If there was an article about me, it would be titled "X requires cable companies to put their shows online in order to watch."
I thought I was going to have to keep cable and HBO to watch Game of Thrones. But I thought about it more, and I can wait a year in order to avoid writing and mailing a damn check every 30 days.
Cable is dead. Avoid it for a month or two and when you return it feels like you are watching a video version of the spam inbox.
Correction, suing Google over Google Images results.
Perfect 10's little scheme had a similar effect. They bought copyright's to Hegre-Art nude photos for the purpose of suing Google Images. Guess who showed up in Google Images with those pictures, Hegre-Art affiliates.
I am reminded of a quote by James Lovelock in The Vanishing Face of Gaia - "..before we start geoengineering, we have to ask: Are we sufficiently talented to take on what might become the onerous permanent task of keeping the Earth in homeostasis? Consider what might happen if we start by using a stratospheric aerosol to ameliorate global heating—even if it succeeded it would not be long before we faced the additional problem of ocean acidification. This would need another medicine, and so on. We could find ourselves enslaved in a Kafkaesque world from which there was no escape."
but that is not all, Lovelock continues:
"The alternative is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself."
Two very grim images of the future.
I used to order all my hardware from newegg. Then, my last order were marked as "successful" only for me to find out the following day it had been flagged. As a very busy adult that was a huge deal. I can't just assemble a new PC any day I feel like it. I cancelled the order, found all of the parts available on Amazon Prime for about the same price and overnighted them (would have been free shipping had I been able to wait an extra day.)
My brother went through an almost identical experience the last time he tried to build a machine.
The real question to me is, can newegg survive Amazon?
Or "Healthcare Reform" that makes it illegal not to buy the product your claiming to reform.
As soon as I hear "Reform" on the end of the bill I cringe. Its obvious it was written by the same people that the bill allegedly regulates.
I don't think the founding fathers of the United States ever would have imagined that an elected government could turn in to such a satirical farce of Edward Bernays' proportions.
Try $6+ per install Bing is paying out to publishers.
This is a multi billion dollar market.
I support it -- as long as a third party does it. It could be done browser side with GreaseMonkey. Someone can host a mirrored censored Wikipedia. Multiple people can host censored Wikipedia's. Different groups can censor whatever they don't want their members to see. For example a fundamentalist Christian/Muslim Wikipedia could remove all references to biological evolution and astrophysics (the whole big bang thing.)
A system whose purpose is to curate what amounts to a record of the entire record of knowledge of human civilization has absolutely no place in censoring itself, even if that censorship is a thin sheet. The mere addition of such a feature sends the message to children and the naive that there are things which we should pretend didn't happen if it makes us feel uncomfortable.
Hiding something such as pictures of war crimes should be embarrassing to anyone. In this case it is appalling. These are not pictures hanging up in your living room, this is content that people pursue when trying to learn specifically about the very subject.
This feature was requested by the Wikimedia board of trustees unanimously. In their resolution they specifically state: "We support the principle of user choice; readers should have control over their experience on the projects." Why is this addressing only images? If someone can hide a picture of a black man being lynched 100 years ago, why not also allow a reader to hide the statement that it ever happened in the first place? If the Wikimedia Foundation wants to do with Wikimedia Commons or whatever, fine, but Wikipedia too, then everyone one of them should be replaced.
Once someone has a day and a half of downtime they aren't going to care about getting half of their money back. Instead they will want a full refund and damages. I know in some situations, even for smaller businesses, that downtime could easily cost thousands of dollars. Unfortunately for Microsoft, there may not be a lot of people using their software in the future even if they make it free.
Yet it is closely interlinked because Google Offers is just the kind of thing that Google is using the search engine to drive traffic to, traffic that would otherwise go to competitors. This is just demonstrating that no one at Google is taking the anti competitive business practice stuff seriously.
Ben Edelman has done a truly exceptional job documenting the anti-trust issues involving Google's advertising.
NBC is not a monopoly, Google is. Google makes Microsoft's old monopoly look like a walk in the park. Google not only has the most used search engine but controls or has a majority chunk of the online advertising market flow through it (at least in the US, I'm sure there are exceptions on a country by country basis.) Additionally they now have what is likely to be come the #1 mobile phone operating system and potentially what could become the #1 web browser.
People go to Google to look for stuff. Lets say your business advertises on Google (mine does), and Google wants to do the same thing as your business does. Thanks to either their existing infrastructure or that you are advertising on their platform they know everything about how your business gets traffic. With the wave of a magic wand all of those search keywords and display ad placements are now directly to Google's new competitive service. I have seen Google do this in multiple markets, including my own. How do you compete against Google? You can't. Virtually every user wanting something specific comes from search.
That is an incredibly powerful monopoly, much more so than Microsoft's was.
Areas Google has already used this to their advantage: Google News (vs multiple news sites), Google Finance (Yahoo Finance and others), Google Shopping (infinite shopping sites), Google Health (WebMD etc), Google Places (remember the whole Yelp review jacking thing), and so on.
Unlike Microsoft, Google is actually putting out exceptional products and I am very thankful for that. But, a monopoly is a monopoly, and if anti-competitive practices are involved (strongly likely) US law has something to say about that. Thus any disagreement with this issue lays with US law rather than Google or the FTC.
By the way, I strongly recommend what Ben Endelman has written about this subject. I would take a guess he figured this out first.
http://www.benedelman.org/searchbias/
http://www.benedelman.org/hardcoding/ (If I recall correctly Google was caught here telling lies)
http://www.benedelman.org/news/092810-1.html
First, I think that individual personalities are what make and break stories. The reason this story is about Julian Assange is the same reason that Snooki from MTV's reality TV show was in the New York Post almost every other day this summer. The guy has put himself in front of television cameras during press conferences and now with some alleged sex crime he is front page news. And the fact that he is part of an incredibly polarizing story makes it media gold.
Julian is certainly smart enough to understand how the media works. To some degree I imagine it was very intentional; what those underlying intentions are I don't know.
What makes this story fascinating is that you can see an individuals comprehension of how the world works and how radically altering the new paradigm of information is by their reactions to Wikileaks and to a lesser degree Julian Assange and what "to do" about him.
6 years ago on the most popular message board for pornographers everyone loved to boast about downloading MP3s, movies, and pirated software. Of course anyone who pointed out the irony was trolled out of the thread. You could say that some members of the porn industry are now on the receiving end.
Are you kidding? Have you been watching what halfway decent domain names have been going for these days? $1000 is a bargain, unless you want your-domain-name.com for $9.
How about webmasters getting paid double, triple, or more to run Google ads instead of pop-ups?
Website owners usedpop-ups becuase, at the time, they paid out far better than nearly any other advertising. Internet advertising was in a bit of a slump back in 2000/2001 follow the dot com "boom." Thanks to Google, webmasters can think about website profits instead of barely being able to cover hosting costs.
Just because some are legit doesn't mean they are all. Come on, Moscow is home to 30+ billionaires and something like 33,000 millionaires. Its not all poor town over there.
I'm suprised Yahoo and Match are doing this. Its no secret that a lot of other big "adult" dating sites do this -- which I would have expected to land in legal trouble well before this. Not to mention the thousands of dating sites out there filled with fake profiles, or hundreds of foreign bride sites populated by flat out con artists (if you think losing $10 a month is a big deal, try getting conned out of thousands.) I know all of this, and I've never even used an online dating service or site once.
There is no doubt Yahoo and Match have the money, and thats were the lawsuits go. Great, another case of "here is your $15 settlement payment and one free month of service, while we collect our $5 million lawyer fee from the defendent."
I've heard plenty of reasons why e-books "don't work."
Me, I don't think the e-book is a good format for fiction. If I want to read Lord of The Rings I don't want to be sitting at a PC or holding some device.
How about the positives:
-They can be published very fast.
I wrote an e-book, made the first sale within a week. In the traditional publishing world that doesn't happen.
-They have high profit margins for the writers:
The only middleman is the billing processor. Whats that, 3% or 4%? High profit margins for writers mean you can write a book that has a small audience and still pay your bills at the end of the month -- and maybe even write another.
-The can be easily updated
Forget 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions being measured in years. In the e-book world it can be a matter of days.
-Easier to make an interactive experience
In the e-book world the author can personally work with readers. For example, he or she could charge a price that would sound outrageous on Amazon or in Borders, but makes sense for a reader who needs in-depth and personal support. The author can tie the e-book into a premium/subscription website.
When I hear "e-book" I think positive. Very positive.
I think you missed the point of the post.. Slashdot traffic isn't worth much. I have other sites that will do over $100 per thousand hits -- because its valuable targetted traffic.
A website of mine was linked to on the front page of Slashdot last year and I had Google Adsense on it. After 30,000 pageviews that day I made a little over $1 ;)
OS/2 is still around? Thats news to me! I guess I'm not a real geek, but that last time I heard anyone used that operating system was in 1995.
This guy obviously hasn't heard of Will Wright's new game, Spore.
What really makes Adsense great isn't just that the ads are targetted but that they are much more efficient than untargetted banner ads. Even a low-traffic website (maybe 3,000 pageviews a month) can easily pay for its domain registration and web hosting if the webmaster is using adsense. There is a good reason why free webshosting isn't as big of a deal as it used to be.
When non-gamers look at video games they think "kids." When you look at the statistics its mostly adults 18-35.