Thank you. It's just a shame they didn't bother to explain that in their article discussing revenue streams, given that it was kind of important. All I could see as a casual browser was ads.
Maybe if by "your mom", you mean your mom, and by ass you mean "basement". One day you'll discover the outside world in person, and not simply via internet trolling....
Consumers are a subclass of users, and commenters is another subclass. I think you need to study OO and inheritance -- you appear to be stuck in an outdated procedural paradigm....
Go back to when people had web sites as a hobby and not this SEO, per click revenue blog spam shithole we have today.
Have people stopped having sites as hobbies? No -- there are probably more hobby sites now than there were at the height of Geocities' popularity. But the problem is that they come and go. I find myself showing people how to use the WayBackMachine because their favourite site has disappeared. New jobs, new kids, new hobbies distract people's attention from the site that was once their pride and joy. Sometimes tragedy strikes and the sole site maintainer dies. Eventually the site gets switched off.
Money stabilises sites. Semi-pro sites that bring in a reasonable monthly pocket-money keep people motivated to keep the site going, even if it's no longer the centre of their world.
One of the biggest problems on the internet is disappearing sites. All the really interesting ones are low interest, and run as hobbies, and they die off when the maintainers interest either wanes or is distracted by other things. New job, university course, marriage, babies -- these things kill useful sites.
When there's a passable side income stream, people will be able to justify continuing to work on it.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Techdirt needs the advertisers -- they're part of the business model. The ad-block users are leeches, freeloaders. I hate ads, but I've never blocked them because it's the only mechanism I have for paying for their work. Unfortunately it's an indiscriminate reward, and it encourages linkspam. But unline advertising is the business model, so I'm really confused as to why techdirt says blaming adblock is making excuses....
I enter into an implied contract with the property owner, and not with the other customers.
The sign isn't a contract; it's a warning/alert/notice.
If the sign says it's for customer safety, and you leak an embarrassing video of your customer, you'll have a good case for a law suit. Your implied consent is conditioned on what the information he gave you being true in the first place. That's pretty damned near a contract, if you ask me....
For every person who gets to be "Internet famous" through having their epic fail shared on YouTube there are thousands, maybe even millions, of others who are relegated to complete obscurity and I like those odds. But that's me.
You only like those 1000000:1 odds because you're on the right side of the colon. If you end up on the other side, you'll change your tune.
Most law-abiding citizens could carry a samurai sword through a town without decapitating someone, yet we ban the carrying of samurai swords to prevent the exceptions occurring....
It seems like a simple fix would be to put a red LED on the device and make it flash when recording. That way it can't be done secretly, which seems to be what bothers people.
Slight problem: people would use a software override. Your webcam can use a hard-wired light control, because it's either on or it's off. But the camera in Glass, like a camcorder, can be off, on-but-not-recording, or recording, and that's a software-managed state. On-but-not-recording allows all sorts of geeky context-specific trickery, which you'll be able to code your own apps for... and what's to stop someone coding a video recorder that doesn't tell the OS that it's actually recording?
So the LED would have to be always on when the camera is active (simultaneously annoying people and breeding indifference to the "meaningless" LED) or not worth having in the first place.
Restaurants know that putting a video of you picking your nose on YouTube is bad for business. The guy at the table next to you thinks it's a great laugh....
The notice that there is surveillance alone reduces expectation of privacy to zero.
No it doesn't. It tells me that I'm trading some of my privacy in exchange for a degree of protection against crime. It discourages pick-pockets and it makes it easier to prosecute someone who assaults you.
I enter into an implied contract with the property owner, and not with the other customers.
I think the term "spam the host" was pretty well chosen, actually.
He's identified a big problem in current infrastructure, which has him forked. Projects are standalone, and he wants to start multiple projects. Starting multiple projects will look like spamming to a great many people, but A) he doesn't want to spam; and B) he doesn't want to be seen to spam.
He wants something that doesn't seem to exist at the moment, and many of the denizens of/. seem to prefer to insult him for not just believing that the (inadequate) current structure is adequate. A decade ago, Slashdotters would have been saying "Jeez, why didn't we think of this before?" and someone would by now have forked the source for their favourite version control system and built in the ability to group independent software projects together. Within a couple of weeks, it would be running on an experimental server (a retired desktop PC salvaged from the geography department) on a university network, and someone else would be researching the possibility of setting up a permanent server running on a "freemium" model.
But no, now everyone just insults him instead. >sigh< Why do I even come here these days...?
More importantly, why SELL a new copy for $10 when an identical copy is worth $0.00?!?!
It's more apparent now than ever that granting exclusive right to sell a product that has no value is a rapidly obsolescing business model. "Publisher advances money to author, author produces work, publisher produces copies of work and tries to sell them to recoup costs" DOES NOT WORK when the value of any individual copy of the work approaches zero.
Here's a thought experiment. You live in a tribe of 10 people. Your tribe is attacked by a tribe of 100. They want to kill you all. Do you fight back?
Of course you do. Even though fighting back means that more people will die than if you took no action, you value the lives of your tribe over the lives of strangers.
Value is subjective, and value is not the same as "cost".
"Audience advances money to author, author produces work, audience produces copies of work" is the way of the future, people should start getting used to it.
But that doesn't work either, because you don't know if you want a product before it exists. Only the most ardent fans buy sight-unseen. We buy magazines with demos of games, or download demos from the internet before we put our money on the counter. And we want instant gratification: pay now, get now. Kickstarter doesn't disprove this as a general rule -- it's still got a restricted audience, and as people start to see delays and failures in more and more projects, people will lose enthusiasm for it...
Secondly the secondary market has not hurt book authors to the extent that we no longer have authors, why would this be any different?
Because the number of physical books sold as new items is significantly higher than the number of books that recirculate on the second-hand market. Books are variously: retained, temporarily mislaid, lost, destroyed, binned, burned and recycled. Some are used in art projects, or cut up to write old-fashioned ransom notes. Many are even used as ornaments in pubs that want to look classy.
This loss of stock simply doesn't happen if your copy is virtual and linked to an Amazon user account, replicated redundantly multiple times across the world. To the reader/viewer/listener, it's pretty much a no-brainer if you can buy an item for £5, use it as long as you want, and sell it back at £3.50 -- £1.50's not a lot to pay for an unlimited rental.
And in the end, that's what Amazon are attempting to offer: a rental service without having to pay a cut to the copyright owners every time. The original video-rental services bought stock and rented it out without paying, and in the end, there was a settlement on rental fees. There are plenty of players in the online rental market, and they're more or less sticking to the same rules as every rental outfit for the last 3 decades. Amazon's trying to change the rules to get themselves more cash at the cost of the content producers and giving them an unfair advantage over companies that are playing it straight.
An anachronism? Yes, I suppose it is. But the odd thing is that those who profess a desire to "abolish" DST, don't really want to abolish DST -- they want to make it permanent. Winter time is the natural timezone for most places, with winter 1200 being approximately solar noon.
If we abolish DST, we really need to peg to the sun. If that means opening schools at 8am instead of 9am, go ahead. But ye cannae change the laws of solar physics Jim.
A year ago, Motherboard's Kelly Bourdet reported on a health study that concluded DST might actually kill you. Chances of heart-attack were stated to increase by 10 percent on the days following the spring change, and to decrease by 10% after gaining the hour in the fall."
That sounds like it leaves your chances of dying in any given year pretty much unchanged. Not exactly the swarm of killer bees you want us to think it is, is it?
The situation is changing very rapidly. Everyone wants the whizz-bang of video-rich "interactive" environments, and the CMSs that they're using are build on increasingly bloaty architectures.
Higher education (college, university, whatever you want to call it) has never that I know of been considered a "right" to be enjoyed by all. It has always been reserved for the financially well-off (those who can afford it), the financially stupid (those willing to take on loads of debt for something not guaranteed to provide a return on investment), and the financially gifted (those given scholarships for any number of reasons).
... which is something that MOOCs are supposed to be changing. The author's point is that if MOOCs are supposed to democratise and open education, why are they such godawful bandwidth hogs? I'm on 56k at home (I went cheapskate as I work in a university and can download anything I need for lessons at work) and I need to pause my Coursera videos and do something for a few minutes while they load, or I get a retro 2003-style juddering, stalling, buffering, stopping experience.
The international openness of Coursera et al is very poorly thought through....
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. It's just a shame they didn't bother to explain that in their article discussing revenue streams, given that it was kind of important. All I could see as a casual browser was ads.
...to maximise ad impressions.
...already do this...
Many news sites
Maybe if by "your mom", you mean your mom, and by ass you mean "basement". One day you'll discover the outside world in person, and not simply via internet trolling....
Consumers are a subclass of users, and commenters is another subclass. I think you need to study OO and inheritance -- you appear to be stuck in an outdated procedural paradigm....
Go back to when people had web sites as a hobby and not this SEO, per click revenue blog spam shithole we have today.
Have people stopped having sites as hobbies? No -- there are probably more hobby sites now than there were at the height of Geocities' popularity. But the problem is that they come and go. I find myself showing people how to use the WayBackMachine because their favourite site has disappeared. New jobs, new kids, new hobbies distract people's attention from the site that was once their pride and joy. Sometimes tragedy strikes and the sole site maintainer dies. Eventually the site gets switched off.
Money stabilises sites. Semi-pro sites that bring in a reasonable monthly pocket-money keep people motivated to keep the site going, even if it's no longer the centre of their world.
One of the biggest problems on the internet is disappearing sites. All the really interesting ones are low interest, and run as hobbies, and they die off when the maintainers interest either wanes or is distracted by other things. New job, university course, marriage, babies -- these things kill useful sites.
When there's a passable side income stream, people will be able to justify continuing to work on it.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Techdirt needs the advertisers -- they're part of the business model. The ad-block users are leeches, freeloaders. I hate ads, but I've never blocked them because it's the only mechanism I have for paying for their work. Unfortunately it's an indiscriminate reward, and it encourages linkspam. But unline advertising is the business model, so I'm really confused as to why techdirt says blaming adblock is making excuses....
No thanks, I already pay for my tyres... I don't want to pay for the road too.
...to paraphrase.
I enter into an implied contract with the property owner, and not with the other customers.
The sign isn't a contract; it's a warning/alert/notice.
If the sign says it's for customer safety, and you leak an embarrassing video of your customer, you'll have a good case for a law suit. Your implied consent is conditioned on what the information he gave you being true in the first place. That's pretty damned near a contract, if you ask me....
For every person who gets to be "Internet famous" through having their epic fail shared on YouTube there are thousands, maybe even millions, of others who are relegated to complete obscurity and I like those odds. But that's me.
You only like those 1000000:1 odds because you're on the right side of the colon. If you end up on the other side, you'll change your tune.
Most law-abiding citizens could carry a samurai sword through a town without decapitating someone, yet we ban the carrying of samurai swords to prevent the exceptions occurring....
It seems like a simple fix would be to put a red LED on the device and make it flash when recording. That way it can't be done secretly, which seems to be what bothers people.
Slight problem: people would use a software override. Your webcam can use a hard-wired light control, because it's either on or it's off. But the camera in Glass, like a camcorder, can be off, on-but-not-recording, or recording, and that's a software-managed state. On-but-not-recording allows all sorts of geeky context-specific trickery, which you'll be able to code your own apps for... and what's to stop someone coding a video recorder that doesn't tell the OS that it's actually recording?
So the LED would have to be always on when the camera is active (simultaneously annoying people and breeding indifference to the "meaningless" LED) or not worth having in the first place.
Restaurants know that putting a video of you picking your nose on YouTube is bad for business. The guy at the table next to you thinks it's a great laugh....
The notice that there is surveillance alone reduces expectation of privacy to zero.
No it doesn't. It tells me that I'm trading some of my privacy in exchange for a degree of protection against crime. It discourages pick-pockets and it makes it easier to prosecute someone who assaults you.
I enter into an implied contract with the property owner, and not with the other customers.
I think the term "spam the host" was pretty well chosen, actually.
He's identified a big problem in current infrastructure, which has him forked. Projects are standalone, and he wants to start multiple projects. Starting multiple projects will look like spamming to a great many people, but A) he doesn't want to spam; and B) he doesn't want to be seen to spam.
He wants something that doesn't seem to exist at the moment, and many of the denizens of /. seem to prefer to insult him for not just believing that the (inadequate) current structure is adequate. A decade ago, Slashdotters would have been saying "Jeez, why didn't we think of this before?" and someone would by now have forked the source for their favourite version control system and built in the ability to group independent software projects together. Within a couple of weeks, it would be running on an experimental server (a retired desktop PC salvaged from the geography department) on a university network, and someone else would be researching the possibility of setting up a permanent server running on a "freemium" model.
But no, now everyone just insults him instead. >sigh< Why do I even come here these days...?
More importantly, why SELL a new copy for $10 when an identical copy is worth $0.00?!?!
It's more apparent now than ever that granting exclusive right to sell a product that has no value is a rapidly obsolescing business model. "Publisher advances money to author, author produces work, publisher produces copies of work and tries to sell them to recoup costs" DOES NOT WORK when the value of any individual copy of the work approaches zero.
Here's a thought experiment. You live in a tribe of 10 people. Your tribe is attacked by a tribe of 100. They want to kill you all. Do you fight back?
Of course you do. Even though fighting back means that more people will die than if you took no action, you value the lives of your tribe over the lives of strangers.
Value is subjective, and value is not the same as "cost".
"Audience advances money to author, author produces work, audience produces copies of work" is the way of the future, people should start getting used to it.
But that doesn't work either, because you don't know if you want a product before it exists. Only the most ardent fans buy sight-unseen. We buy magazines with demos of games, or download demos from the internet before we put our money on the counter. And we want instant gratification: pay now, get now. Kickstarter doesn't disprove this as a general rule -- it's still got a restricted audience, and as people start to see delays and failures in more and more projects, people will lose enthusiasm for it...
Secondly the secondary market has not hurt book authors to the extent that we no longer have authors, why would this be any different?
Because the number of physical books sold as new items is significantly higher than the number of books that recirculate on the second-hand market. Books are variously: retained, temporarily mislaid, lost, destroyed, binned, burned and recycled. Some are used in art projects, or cut up to write old-fashioned ransom notes. Many are even used as ornaments in pubs that want to look classy.
This loss of stock simply doesn't happen if your copy is virtual and linked to an Amazon user account, replicated redundantly multiple times across the world. To the reader/viewer/listener, it's pretty much a no-brainer if you can buy an item for £5, use it as long as you want, and sell it back at £3.50 -- £1.50's not a lot to pay for an unlimited rental.
And in the end, that's what Amazon are attempting to offer: a rental service without having to pay a cut to the copyright owners every time. The original video-rental services bought stock and rented it out without paying, and in the end, there was a settlement on rental fees. There are plenty of players in the online rental market, and they're more or less sticking to the same rules as every rental outfit for the last 3 decades. Amazon's trying to change the rules to get themselves more cash at the cost of the content producers and giving them an unfair advantage over companies that are playing it straight.
An anachronism? Yes, I suppose it is. But the odd thing is that those who profess a desire to "abolish" DST, don't really want to abolish DST -- they want to make it permanent. Winter time is the natural timezone for most places, with winter 1200 being approximately solar noon.
If we abolish DST, we really need to peg to the sun. If that means opening schools at 8am instead of 9am, go ahead. But ye cannae change the laws of solar physics Jim.
A year ago, Motherboard's Kelly Bourdet reported on a health study that concluded DST might actually kill you. Chances of heart-attack were stated to increase by 10 percent on the days following the spring change, and to decrease by 10% after gaining the hour in the fall."
That sounds like it leaves your chances of dying in any given year pretty much unchanged. Not exactly the swarm of killer bees you want us to think it is, is it?
Yes, but the thing is, if it's just a matter of best practice, why does it need a name...?
Yup, but your average cable company does multicast pretty well on the same pipe you're getting your internet feed from....
The situation is changing very rapidly. Everyone wants the whizz-bang of video-rich "interactive" environments, and the CMSs that they're using are build on increasingly bloaty architectures.
Higher education (college, university, whatever you want to call it) has never that I know of been considered a "right" to be enjoyed by all. It has always been reserved for the financially well-off (those who can afford it), the financially stupid (those willing to take on loads of debt for something not guaranteed to provide a return on investment), and the financially gifted (those given scholarships for any number of reasons).
... which is something that MOOCs are supposed to be changing. The author's point is that if MOOCs are supposed to democratise and open education, why are they such godawful bandwidth hogs? I'm on 56k at home (I went cheapskate as I work in a university and can download anything I need for lessons at work) and I need to pause my Coursera videos and do something for a few minutes while they load, or I get a retro 2003-style juddering, stalling, buffering, stopping experience.
The international openness of Coursera et al is very poorly thought through....