We've talked about this before but why do people in OSS community accept odd names? Guacamole? Would you consider this to be a serious product for home use even?
I don't understand how this is any worse from "Word", "Java", ".net", "skype", "ilife" etc.
Chrome has the best UI amongst all browsers, hands down.
I don't particularly like the UI personally. I hate it when applications don't follow the OS GUI scheme - This includes colors to interaction of editbars.
Free of rendering artifacts and glitches
I have experienced these on Chrome, particularly with font rendering.
The default Firefox theme is just huge.
Well, I loaded up Firefox and Chrome here - I'm not really seeing this "huge" thing at all? I mean, yes, there is two extra bars by default in Firefox, but huge? No idea.
I never stated h264 didn't have more, only showed the poster who replied to me initially that his point about Theora not having a chance because a fraction of pirates aren't using it is apparently wrong since it appears there is a fraction.
I don't really get your point? You provided a bunch of data with no real 'argument'. I'm going to have to take a guess at what you were trying to argue here...
H.264 has had a lot of commercial backing, Theora has only had recent backing and not with such a substantial amount so obviously there is going to be more stuff for H.264 at the moment.
It does not mean that Theora will not become a big contender, especially with the fact it's licensing is far more attractive than H.264's? I honestly don't know, but with big technology companies like Google and Nokia getting behind it, the second world's most popular browser supporting it - Firefox and then popular websites like Wikipedia using it...
It does not seem to be like much of a loser since it's presence appears to be growing more and more, not shrinking.
You have a bunch of people trying to push for hardware support for a codec that pretty much no content producer
Content creators don't create content for a specific content. You think a particular artist made music for apple's DRMed AAC format specifically?
Usually the media in question gets transformed into the target formats. Now that Google is pushing for support on this codec in their phones, webbrowsers and Mozilla & co etc. are doing the same, it is very likely content creators will make their media available in these forms. With large sites like wikipedia already moving to support Theora, it seems things are moving in motion to get widespread support.
but if you can't even get a fraction of the pirates on your side, then you simply don't stand a chance.
I did a quick search on the only pirate site I know:
Do you know what else isn't polished? A turd. Think about it.
So.. Following the thought process you have provided... Microsoft Office being a shiny turd, it's essentially got useless features that have no practicality.
In some ways, OpenOffice 2 was better than OpenOffice 3. At least it crashed less. Google "OpenOffice crashes". (764,000 hits.) It crashes on SUSE. It crashes on Ubuntu. It crashes on Windows. It crashes on launch. It crashes on exiting. And what's the support advice? "Delete your OpenOffice profile". "Clean the registry". None of that helps much.
You think that's bad? I just googled Microsoft Office Crashes and I got 3,190,000 hits!!!
It sounds as if the site that you ran (I note you use the past tense) was a roaring success, which would presumably be why you're not still doing it.
Actually it died because of leeches.
It is my contention (the one that you didn't understand) that the two sets of sites overlap to a large extent. There are other ways of trying to drive away customers, but it would seem from your example that using tools to prevent people blocking adverts is definitely one way of driving customers to other sites. Thank you for illustrating my point.
Actually, it did not illustrate your point at all since you're making a bunch of assumptions. See below.
The website in question was related to (legal) distribution of Amiga software, demos (every single piece of software had been ensured for licensing for redistribution) that wasn't generally available elsewhere. Ad impressions themselves made a difference in keeping the site running, as it required constant upgrades for the growing traffic and I did end up blocking people who blocked ads, as the ones who did generally block impressions tended to download a very large amount of files costing me more in bandwith bills. I never required people click the ads, only load them to support the site. I had also offered a donation system, which would let them disable the ads in exchange. I did not see much of a traffic increase from ads being blocked, just far, far, far less income to support the site.
After a while, a grease monkey script came out that essentially worked around the 'problem' and all 3TB of data was lost because said script spread very quickly among some heavy downloaders where the colo provider took the server as 'pay' since I couldn't afford it.
So far, I have not seen any other site providing the amount of software I had readily available and being that I still occasionally dabble in the Amiga community, I see many people not finding specific titles that were on the system.
Had people been put off and simply not used the site instead of leeching, this website would likely be much larger and still be operating today. People blocking ads destroyed it.
sounds to me like your business model didn't work
The model it was under worked fine, it was mainly due to the fact I hadn't spent some god awful hours of my free time running this site writing a system that couldn't be fooled by pinging the advertisers' website to check for confirmation.
In summary, I don't see this mythical other site that replaced it even though there is still a good amount of demand for it and I don't see how the model I used failed. I also don't see the website having died if it was not for the fact that these people blocked ads thus removing any support received from impressions.
If the users migrate to another site, the content they create migrates as well.
So how exactly do I migrate some of the epic threads I've had on Slashdot to other sites? I don't really see an mechanism for doing so, never mind some kind of automated backup procedure. Even web.archive.org won't backup the comments in a useful manor due to the score point system hiding and unhiding comments on the web searchable pages.
Some unique content will probably be lost, but anything of significant value should be backed up by the users themselves.
I disagree here. A lot of people are quite terrible at backing up their data. Just take a look at deviantart's history, when they lost data, a lot of unique valuable content was lost, because the author did not have it themselves and their watchers did not save copies as they just used the 'favoriting' feature of DeviantArt rather than saving what they liked. I don't think only "some" will be lost, I think a percentage above 50% will end up lost. At least, that is what I have seen when it came it to failures on Slashdot, deviantart and furaffinity when I have seen them.
The theory that another website will take it's place is not always true, even when there is a large demand for it. I have seen the opposite happening, a lot of smaller sites crop up and dying over and over, never really taking the place of the old. I have seen competitor sites essentially die out when their competitor's died because of community clashes, unexpected demand of resources and there are even people like me, who for example, if Slashdot died, I wouldn't go to Digg. I probably wouldn't go to any sites like Slashdot and lose out a lot.
I honestly don't see this being much of a unique situation at all.
Hell, heres a fun question. Ignoring why spymac's website closing down, what happened to the entire user base? What happened to the unique content provided? People claim these communities move on to another site, well, I sit here wondering what other site?
I stand by my point, one you block enough of a website's revenue, those sites close down and usually a lot of unique content (many of which one could consider very valuable) will be lost
And since making revenue online is rather limited, since the concept of website subscriptions is often a foreign concept, people don't want to do so. Advertising is one of the 'best' methods that most sites can employ, I should know. I've ran more than one online service and tried to make them self sustainable. There are always exceptions though, wikimedia for example, it is one of the more lucky organizations since they get a large amount of donations from big businesses, schools and governments - most sites are unable to operate via these methods.
Your case is fairly unique; your content was fairly unique.
It's not really that unique in my opinion. Many websites operate on the same premise/system. Off the top of my head, Deviantart, Slashdot, Furaffinity, Vimeo, Yahoo, Google etc. all run on the same concepts when it comes to support for costs. A lot of their content being unique to their website - granted, a lot of it is user created unlike my old site, however, once enough people "block" their revenue streams, they will all die still remains true. I would even say profits made off these sites justify expansion, working full time on it, getting more people and thus introducing the value of the content.
If those sites are lost, a lot of content will be lost.
The problem is for the first time in history, there is a media form where the viewers actually have power. We need to be viewed like customers now, along with advertisers and people like you can't handle the fact that the viewers have power.
You may want to pay notice to the fact that I wrote that exactly the same way the previous poster did, only difference is that I reversed the argument. It's quite entertaining to see the response of people though trying to justify one end of the spectrum and suppress the other without seeing the entire picture.
I mean, seriously:
"I am going to block people who block ads, full stop. That's it" Fine. It's an incredible short view.
Is it? Because I can give you a little story here and you can tell me how this is a short view:
I have ran some large file repositories in the past - related to (legal) distribution of Amiga software, demos (every single piece of software had been ensured for licensing for redistribution) that wasn't generally available elsewhere. Ad impressions themselves made a difference in keeping the site running, as it required constant upgrades for the growing traffic and I did end up blocking people who blocked ads, as the ones who did generally block impressions tended to download a very large amount of files costing me more in bandwith bills. I never required people click the ads, only load them to support the site. I had also offered a donation system, which would let them disable the ads in exchange.
After a while, a grease monkey script came out that essentially worked around the 'problem' and all 3TB of data was lost because said script spread very quickly among some heavy downloaders where the colo provider took the server as 'pay' since I couldn't afford it.
So far, I have not seen any other site providing the amount of software I had readily available and being that I still occasionally dabble in the Amiga community, I see many people not finding specific titles that were on the system.
So yes, I could have done 100% without the freeloaders.
With regards to short sightedness. Perhaps it was making an assumption that my little javascript would not get circumvented, I should have used some internal verification that involved pinging the advertiser's website?
Or was it the fact that I should have never bothered trying to provide a useful service at all? After all, no good deed goes unpunished, right?
Viewers, even ad blocking viewer, increase the value of your website.
I guess this statement is true, since.. After all, the value of the site has gone up, since now it's gone and the content that it had is gone for the most part. But I get the feeling this wasn't what you meant. Also, what is the point of this value now? It's gone.
IF your ads annoy me, I will block them, and you have no way to know that. So maybe you should find out why people block advertising, and find a way to reach them? Or , you know, be a hostile fuck. In which case you can go and die(or be driven out of business)
People simply did not want to see them. They weren't flash based, they were not animated, they were not destroying content to be displayed, they were not distorting anything. It was a large leaderboard banner on the right side of the page where it did not interfere with content. If your screen resolution was below 1024x768, you could still read all the content on the page just fine, but need to scroll to the right to see the ad.
There was also a donators option available where people could donate and get access with ads.
I ran a website that gave the option to subscribe to get rid of ads, if you blocked ads, you were sent to that page.
Site that thinks time-waste-removal tools are "Verboten" for the customer-sheeple?
The site in question knew that without enforcing this policy, it would collapse under the growing bandwith bills from leeches and would not be able to keep up with new hardware demands for newly added content.
Two identical sets?
No idea what this means.
There are people who don't AdBlock? Why not??
I don't, I believe in supporting websites that I use.
And this is somebody else's site. This is where people go for information, and part of that information is that you can get banned from a site for mentioning ad-block. So, if they can censor their site, then we can go to "our site" and discuss how that's a shitty thing to do
It's a shame software isn't more simple, where by webhosts could tick a box saying "block people who block ads" while people could click "block websites that use ads", but unfortunately that was never built into the HTTP spec.
I mean, it's a perfect win-win situation if it were. Webhosts don't pay for visitors using up resources and visitors don't have to deal with a website that has ads if they don't want and leeches don't exist.
And if you keep that up, what users will you have left to block?
In my scenario, because I was not able to block these freeloaders, the website in question died due to the increase in bandwith bills from leechers. If they never accessed content to begin with if they were not accessing ads, the website in question would have never died. I could have afforded to keep the website running for just 10 users who were not viewing ads, but not for over a hundred doing mass leeching, where each single one was intentionally blocking ads via grease monkey scripts.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how age have to do with any of this, The developers don't consider it done/ready since it isn't version 1 yet.
[citation needed]
Indeed, if it were considered ready by the developers, then the developers would have made it version 1.
I have stable releases of pre-version 1 software too, doesn't mean it's ready for conventional use.
You had problems on pre-version 1 software - Is that meant to be a big surprise to us or something?
It's more likely that the signature would get computed after you upload it to youtube, then compared against known 'bad' signatures.
Evidence it works!
I don't understand how this is any worse from "Word", "Java", ".net", "skype", "ilife" etc.
I don't particularly like the UI personally. I hate it when applications don't follow the OS GUI scheme - This includes colors to interaction of editbars.
I have experienced these on Chrome, particularly with font rendering.
Well, I loaded up Firefox and Chrome here - I'm not really seeing this "huge" thing at all? I mean, yes, there is two extra bars by default in Firefox, but huge? No idea.
The point was not to say the majority were using it, only to show there was a fraction using it and I did so.
Something over the hyper text transfer protocol would be best. If you could provide a uniform resource locator to it, that would be grand.
I never stated h264 didn't have more, only showed the poster who replied to me initially that his point about Theora not having a chance because a fraction of pirates aren't using it is apparently wrong since it appears there is a fraction.
I don't really get your point? You provided a bunch of data with no real 'argument'. I'm going to have to take a guess at what you were trying to argue here...
H.264 has had a lot of commercial backing, Theora has only had recent backing and not with such a substantial amount so obviously there is going to be more stuff for H.264 at the moment.
It does not mean that Theora will not become a big contender, especially with the fact it's licensing is far more attractive than H.264's? I honestly don't know, but with big technology companies like Google and Nokia getting behind it, the second world's most popular browser supporting it - Firefox and then popular websites like Wikipedia using it...
It does not seem to be like much of a loser since it's presence appears to be growing more and more, not shrinking.
Content creators don't create content for a specific content. You think a particular artist made music for apple's DRMed AAC format specifically?
Usually the media in question gets transformed into the target formats. Now that Google is pushing for support on this codec in their phones, webbrowsers and Mozilla & co etc. are doing the same, it is very likely content creators will make their media available in these forms. With large sites like wikipedia already moving to support Theora, it seems things are moving in motion to get widespread support.
I did a quick search on the only pirate site I know:
http://thepiratebay.org/search/ogg/0/99/200
http://thepiratebay.org/search/vorbis/0/99/200
http://thepiratebay.org/search/theora/0/99/200
Seems like they do to me *shrugs*.
http://www.neowin.net/news/google-investing-in-theora-for-mobile-devices
http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/07/native-ogg-vorbis-and-theora-support-added-for-firefox-31/
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/167167
Please provide sources to backup your statements. Thanks.
So.. Following the thought process you have provided... Microsoft Office being a shiny turd, it's essentially got useless features that have no practicality.
I see.
You think that's bad? I just googled Microsoft Office Crashes and I got 3,190,000 hits!!!
Don't know where you got that statistic from. But it wasn't from me.
Actually it died because of leeches.
Actually, it did not illustrate your point at all since you're making a bunch of assumptions. See below.
The website in question was related to (legal) distribution of Amiga software, demos (every single piece of software had been ensured for licensing for redistribution) that wasn't generally available elsewhere. Ad impressions themselves made a difference in keeping the site running, as it required constant upgrades for the growing traffic and I did end up blocking people who blocked ads, as the ones who did generally block impressions tended to download a very large amount of files costing me more in bandwith bills. I never required people click the ads, only load them to support the site. I had also offered a donation system, which would let them disable the ads in exchange. I did not see much of a traffic increase from ads being blocked, just far, far, far less income to support the site.
After a while, a grease monkey script came out that essentially worked around the 'problem' and all 3TB of data was lost because said script spread very quickly among some heavy downloaders where the colo provider took the server as 'pay' since I couldn't afford it.
So far, I have not seen any other site providing the amount of software I had readily available and being that I still occasionally dabble in the Amiga community, I see many people not finding specific titles that were on the system.
Had people been put off and simply not used the site instead of leeching, this website would likely be much larger and still be operating today. People blocking ads destroyed it.
The model it was under worked fine, it was mainly due to the fact I hadn't spent some god awful hours of my free time running this site writing a system that couldn't be fooled by pinging the advertisers' website to check for confirmation.
In summary, I don't see this mythical other site that replaced it even though there is still a good amount of demand for it and I don't see how the model I used failed. I also don't see the website having died if it was not for the fact that these people blocked ads thus removing any support received from impressions.
So how exactly do I migrate some of the epic threads I've had on Slashdot to other sites? I don't really see an mechanism for doing so, never mind some kind of automated backup procedure. Even web.archive.org won't backup the comments in a useful manor due to the score point system hiding and unhiding comments on the web searchable pages.
I disagree here. A lot of people are quite terrible at backing up their data. Just take a look at deviantart's history, when they lost data, a lot of unique valuable content was lost, because the author did not have it themselves and their watchers did not save copies as they just used the 'favoriting' feature of DeviantArt rather than saving what they liked. I don't think only "some" will be lost, I think a percentage above 50% will end up lost. At least, that is what I have seen when it came it to failures on Slashdot, deviantart and furaffinity when I have seen them.
The theory that another website will take it's place is not always true, even when there is a large demand for it. I have seen the opposite happening, a lot of smaller sites crop up and dying over and over, never really taking the place of the old. I have seen competitor sites essentially die out when their competitor's died because of community clashes, unexpected demand of resources and there are even people like me, who for example, if Slashdot died, I wouldn't go to Digg. I probably wouldn't go to any sites like Slashdot and lose out a lot.
I honestly don't see this being much of a unique situation at all.
Hell, heres a fun question. Ignoring why spymac's website closing down, what happened to the entire user base? What happened to the unique content provided? People claim these communities move on to another site, well, I sit here wondering what other site?
I stand by my point, one you block enough of a website's revenue, those sites close down and usually a lot of unique content (many of which one could consider very valuable) will be lost
And since making revenue online is rather limited, since the concept of website subscriptions is often a foreign concept, people don't want to do so. Advertising is one of the 'best' methods that most sites can employ, I should know. I've ran more than one online service and tried to make them self sustainable. There are always exceptions though, wikimedia for example, it is one of the more lucky organizations since they get a large amount of donations from big businesses, schools and governments - most sites are unable to operate via these methods.
It's not really that unique in my opinion. Many websites operate on the same premise/system. Off the top of my head, Deviantart, Slashdot, Furaffinity, Vimeo, Yahoo, Google etc. all run on the same concepts when it comes to support for costs. A lot of their content being unique to their website - granted, a lot of it is user created unlike my old site, however, once enough people "block" their revenue streams, they will all die still remains true. I would even say profits made off these sites justify expansion, working full time on it, getting more people and thus introducing the value of the content.
If those sites are lost, a lot of content will be lost.
You may want to pay notice to the fact that I wrote that exactly the same way the previous poster did, only difference is that I reversed the argument. It's quite entertaining to see the response of people though trying to justify one end of the spectrum and suppress the other without seeing the entire picture.
I mean, seriously:
Is it? Because I can give you a little story here and you can tell me how this is a short view:
I have ran some large file repositories in the past - related to (legal) distribution of Amiga software, demos (every single piece of software had been ensured for licensing for redistribution) that wasn't generally available elsewhere. Ad impressions themselves made a difference in keeping the site running, as it required constant upgrades for the growing traffic and I did end up blocking people who blocked ads, as the ones who did generally block impressions tended to download a very large amount of files costing me more in bandwith bills. I never required people click the ads, only load them to support the site. I had also offered a donation system, which would let them disable the ads in exchange.
After a while, a grease monkey script came out that essentially worked around the 'problem' and all 3TB of data was lost because said script spread very quickly among some heavy downloaders where the colo provider took the server as 'pay' since I couldn't afford it.
So far, I have not seen any other site providing the amount of software I had readily available and being that I still occasionally dabble in the Amiga community, I see many people not finding specific titles that were on the system.
So yes, I could have done 100% without the freeloaders.
With regards to short sightedness. Perhaps it was making an assumption that my little javascript would not get circumvented, I should have used some internal verification that involved pinging the advertiser's website?
Or was it the fact that I should have never bothered trying to provide a useful service at all? After all, no good deed goes unpunished, right?
I guess this statement is true, since.. After all, the value of the site has gone up, since now it's gone and the content that it had is gone for the most part. But I get the feeling this wasn't what you meant. Also, what is the point of this value now? It's gone.
People simply did not want to see them. They weren't flash based, they were not animated, they were not destroying content to be displayed, they were not distorting anything. It was a large leaderboard banner on the right side of the page where it did not interfere with content. If your screen resolution was below 1024x768, you could still read all the content on the page just fine, but need to scroll to the right to see the ad.
There was also a donators option available where people could donate and get access with ads.
I look forward to reading your reply.
Sounds like a story. How were you paying them before? Got any data to share?
Let's apply this to one of my old websites...
I ran a website that gave the option to subscribe to get rid of ads, if you blocked ads, you were sent to that page.
The site in question knew that without enforcing this policy, it would collapse under the growing bandwith bills from leeches and would not be able to keep up with new hardware demands for newly added content.
No idea what this means.
I don't, I believe in supporting websites that I use.
It's a shame software isn't more simple, where by webhosts could tick a box saying "block people who block ads" while people could click "block websites that use ads", but unfortunately that was never built into the HTTP spec.
I mean, it's a perfect win-win situation if it were. Webhosts don't pay for visitors using up resources and visitors don't have to deal with a website that has ads if they don't want and leeches don't exist.
In my scenario, because I was not able to block these freeloaders, the website in question died due to the increase in bandwith bills from leechers. If they never accessed content to begin with if they were not accessing ads, the website in question would have never died. I could have afforded to keep the website running for just 10 users who were not viewing ads, but not for over a hundred doing mass leeching, where each single one was intentionally blocking ads via grease monkey scripts.