...Software that behaves well and doesn't act like it owns the computer and doesn't step on all the other software. I've been trying to do it for twenty years, and it's clear no company is interested in paying for that kind of development. Welcome to the world of low-quality everything.
True. But it's ironic that unpolished software ends up costing more in terms of fixes, support costs, and discouraged users.
Apple realises that polish is usually more important than time-to-market. If only the Asian manufacturers put as much effort into design and testing as they put into making things fast & cheap.
Then I learned a new term: polymath. Well, well, well. That fits me. Now how to make a living as a polymath without having to get a once in a century TV show on Discovery Channel (Adam Savage on Mythbusters is a polymath).
Yes, unfortunately this world most demands specialists. But if you find that boring, it's hard to find work as a generalist, or at least work with more variety.
My ideal would be several different part-time jobs that added up to at most one full-time job (instead of loading up above this in order to support a lifestyle).
See if you can turn one of your hobbies into paid work, and use the extra income to cut back on the hours in your main job.
Indeed, my complaint with advertising is that much of it is designed to make people want to buy things they would not have bought otherwise.
Yes, sales of things which don't add to our lives aren't really helping the economy. We'd be better off with less stuff, less work, and more free time.
But some people really enjoy shopping, particularly if they can be convinced that they're getting a "special" price. These are the people that advertising gives some benefit to. For every other occasion we'd be better off with need-driven research, as well as with independent news services that can tell us about new things. You can then use advertising to find a good price for something you're going to buy anyway.
Moreover, I really feel like it should be obvious at this point that banner ads are stupid. They fact that people go to such lengths to remove them should indicate how people feel about them. They're really no different then spam; except spam is free, so it can be profitable with abysmal response rates. Does anyone actually buy anything as result of banner ads? Sure people click them all the time, but how often is it done on purpose? The damn things are just in the way. I'm constantly accidentally tapping on ads on my iPhone, but I sure as hell have never bought anything as a result.
Yes, advertising is a pretty silly way to find out about new things, or to research a way to fill a need. The best form of advertising is search-driven ads, which is why Google is so profitable. But still, such ads come with strong agendas, unlike organic results from independent parties.
We should be finding improved ways of funding such independent help. Paywalls reduce use and visibility, while affiliate links turn content providers into salesmen. But affiliates can earn people's trust. Do you trust Slashdot not to skew book reviews to the positive, because it means extra Amazon income?
With real magazines ads, editors have some kind of control of the ad after they receive it. For example, they can decide if they accept an ad with a full page giant penis in it selling v14gr4.
However, with web ads, the editors have no control over it. The advertizer has complete control of how the ad looks. And even though at the time of "contracting" the ad the editors may like the types of ad, maybe after a month the ad will get changed to something really annoying.
3rd-party ad servers do have one benefit: There is no direct relationship between content makers and product makers. With magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, and direct online ad sales, there is a temptation to do secret editorial-for-content deals with their product-maker customers.
Advertising is most suitable for things like classifieds and job ads. But interruptions with agendas are a pretty silly way to learn about new products. It would be better if we paid people to help us select products.
Violations of freedom #6 do detract from the advantages of open software. Among other issues, it prevents you (and others) from porting such code to FOSS projects,
True, but only when integrating with viral GPL-licenced code.
or making use of GPL-only libraries.
Aren't most libraries MIT/BSD or LGPL?
It's also more difficult to get a company to even allow use, much less adaptation, of software under a non-OSI-approved license; they'll be forced to treat it as a unique case, the same as any proprietary software license, unlike FOSS licenses where use and verbatim distribution are never an issue.
Many companies prefer licences which involve them paying for
a concrete set of entitlements and guarantees, along with a relationship
with the vendor or developer, and shy away from software which
could virally contaminate their work. So I'd have no trouble
with customers treating the licence as a proprietary licence that
just happens to give them source access. The community development
aspects are just a bonus.
Remember, Copyleft was weird once.
If you're willing to accept all of that in exchange for—maybe—a few commercial licenses, fine; just don't underestimate what you're giving up relative to a fully Open Source license, or claim that your project is FOSS when it falls short of the definition of Open Source.
"A few" is not a very generous spin.
What am I giving up other than the marketing power of beer-wise free,
and infrastructure that is often only made freely available to software
issued under an OSI-approved licence?
I never claim my software is either Free Software or Open Source Software, but I have no trouble calling it "open software".
Yes, such a licence doesn't fulfil all the Open Source criteria.
But such software is open in all of the respects that give
open software its advantages, other than being non-gratis.
This is often a better revenue-generating alternative than
closing part of the software or documentation, selling support
to the wealthy, pan-handling, or integrating advertising or
product placement.
Let's not get hung up on Open Source dogma when some tweaking
can yield some practical alternatives.
It's a strategy that makes open source profitable. Either you sell support, or you sell a value added proprietary version.
...or you actually sell the software.
Sure, standard FOSS licences like GPL and BSD make this hard, but there are others that make it feasible to charge for software that is entirely source-available, freely-re-distributable, and freely-forkable.
It isn't so much the amount involved, which is the same as buying the dead tree version, it is the fact that it is quicker to find another newspaper on the internet than it is to find your credit card and type all the details in, whereas in a newsagent, it is pretty easy to find a pound coin in your pocket and hand it over.
Only a fraction of a paper's content covers widely-reported current events. Instead, much of a paper's most interesting material consists of original investigations of issues, as well as analysis and opinion pieces, neither of which can be found in another paper (except through syndication). The critical question is what fraction of people will pay to keep reading these, rather than choosing to find some other but different source of brain food.
What has triggered this crisis is not just the huge reduction in the cost of publishing and distribution that the Web has wrought, which has greatly increased competition in the market for information, but also the better ways product makers now have to get their message out — their own websites and through search marketing — which along with a viscous cycle of advertising overexposure is permanently sickening the display advertising industry, of which newspapers are a part.
One solution is for the papers to earn income directly from help they give their readers, rather than by giving over a large chunk of their readers' experience to flashing lights.
Only the proprietary driver supports a separate X-Server on each monitor, which allows you to have two independent sets of virtual desktops: You can choose what appears on both the left and right for the task at hand.
The problem is that a large amount of money on the internet is made through advertisements. If Firefox gains marketshare, and starts with adblocking, thats tons of revenue stream being cut off. Google makes a lot of money through advertising, and they seem to be the only ones pushing for progress right now. I don't know if I'd want to go and reduce their income.
Particularly as Firefox is funded by a Google product placement deal.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever come across an open source product that had barest minimum of documentation. What does exist is typically out of date (and observations of such are met with "read the changelog!" - lame).
Sometimes this is the case because they believe they owe their users nothing, and don't think or care about the risk to their reputation.
But sometimes it's deliberate to better sell their book, which properly documents the project. Thus it's ironic that FOSS is often paired with documentation that is both proprietary and not open for community editing,
If only more source-available, freely-redistributible projects both charged for their software and offered cuts to contributors, we'd see more high-quality software that can be easily and cheaply maintained.
Advertising only really works for search engines
on
Power To the Pop-Ups
·
· Score: 1
Ads, in particular text ads, only really work for search engines, because that is where people are searching for information sources to visit, including for their shopping research. Once users are on individual websites, ads are more often a distraction from the actual content.
So given that search marketing is destroying display advertising because it is so much more useful to users, I see four alternatives for content providers:
A greater use of charging users directly (including subscriptions and micro-payments). This will be hard to swing with the global competition delivered by the Internet.
A greater use of affiliate sales. However even though their material may be helping people choose the most suitable product, publishers don't benefit from the vast majority of sales that are not made through their links (both online and offline). As well, they compromise their independence by becoming part of the sales process.
Accepting payment for content (sponsored articles, or editorial-for-advertising wink-wink deals). This is becoming more and more common, even though it's the easiest way for a source to erode its quality and trust.
Getting paid by both users and product makers only when they help someone choose the best product. I'm involved in a solution along these lines.
Content without bias, or with a small but declared bias, is what people want, not ads which are paid placements with specific agendas, and which cause publishers to lose control of their users' experience.
In fact, I have more faith in articles that allow for comments.
That's unmoderated comments. (Not moderated by publishers. User ratings are OK.)
Try leaving a less than enthusiastic comment in a lot of places, and your comment never appears or gets deleted.
This often provides a needed balance on what is being written in the article (especially since most articles seemed to be more editorials as of late. ). And the insightful posts usually provide sources for their comments
Journalism is all about the story, which must be provocative. Balanced accounts are "boring".
In addition to comments, I'd like to see rebuttals placed paragraph for paragraph alongside the original article, like my Make The Case site.
Push advertising has been severely weakened by both search engines and
search advertising. Increasing intrusiveness has also added to advertising's
death spiral.
I'd suggest (1), charge for material in the most a la carte way (e.g.
micropayments for individual articles, plus discounted subscriptions
to particular sections or columnists), and (2), up-front or deferred
charges for helping people choose the right product.
I've seen huge performance leaps for large files and directories after reinstalling my system on an ext4 partition. Ext3 was very slow to list directories containing large numbers of files, and deleting very large files took tens of seconds, during which the filesystem was hung. I couldn't remove large files while recording TV, otherwise the recording would hang and skip several seconds. No longer the case now I'm on ext4.
If Verlinde has made gravity and the Equivalence Principle derivative, is he still using a property of entropy as a given? That is what axioms does his theory still rest on?
I haven't yet used Twitter either, but it seems like Tweets can be useful when they contain links.
Thus a Twitter feed is like an RSS feed that is carried in links rather than content, and which is filtered by trusted sources rather than your own pre-selections.
And then they claim that instant messaging results in an instant reply. But SMS is NOT instant, voice is. So, if they want an instant reply, why do they send an SMS?
I suppose a voice call requires a greater time commitment, as well as synchronous interaction, which impedes multi-tasking.
Voice also requires one to listen, unlike the talk-without-listening nature of SMS and Twitter.
Product information and advice doesn't have to come in the form of a review. It could be a "What's New" newsletter, a consultant, an automated advisor, or a product demonstrator (who is currently also a salesperson).
And these "helpers" don't need to be (and often can't be) ad-funded. They are often funded by sales, direct or affiliate, which does create a huge conflict of interest. An alternative is funding consumer assistance from cashback money, and more arms-length manufacturer incentives.
Makes me wonder if there wouldn't be a way to set up some kind of freelance exchange? Give content distributors a chance to bid on stories for something like a 2 week exclusive before it shows up anywhere else. It would create a competitive content market and give distributors access to a deeper bench without being saddled with the payroll.
With some filtering system in place, it could work.
With the glut of content, the world is moving from on salary to on spec.
Slashdot Mirror
...Software that behaves well and doesn't act like it owns the computer and doesn't step on all the other software. I've been trying to do it for twenty years, and it's clear no company is interested in paying for that kind of development. Welcome to the world of low-quality everything.
True. But it's ironic that unpolished software ends up costing more in terms of fixes, support costs, and discouraged users.
Apple realises that polish is usually more important than time-to-market. If only the Asian manufacturers put as much effort into design and testing as they put into making things fast & cheap.
Then I learned a new term: polymath. Well, well, well. That fits me. Now how to make a living as a polymath without having to get a once in a century TV show on Discovery Channel (Adam Savage on Mythbusters is a polymath).
Yes, unfortunately this world most demands specialists. But if you find that boring, it's hard to find work as a generalist, or at least work with more variety.
My ideal would be several different part-time jobs that added up to at most one full-time job (instead of loading up above this in order to support a lifestyle).
See if you can turn one of your hobbies into paid work, and use the extra income to cut back on the hours in your main job.
Indeed, my complaint with advertising is that much of it is designed to make people want to buy things they would not have bought otherwise.
Yes, sales of things which don't add to our lives aren't really helping the economy. We'd be better off with less stuff, less work, and more free time.
But some people really enjoy shopping, particularly if they can be convinced that they're getting a "special" price. These are the people that advertising gives some benefit to. For every other occasion we'd be better off with need-driven research, as well as with independent news services that can tell us about new things. You can then use advertising to find a good price for something you're going to buy anyway.
Moreover, I really feel like it should be obvious at this point that banner ads are stupid. They fact that people go to such lengths to remove them should indicate how people feel about them. They're really no different then spam; except spam is free, so it can be profitable with abysmal response rates. Does anyone actually buy anything as result of banner ads? Sure people click them all the time, but how often is it done on purpose? The damn things are just in the way. I'm constantly accidentally tapping on ads on my iPhone, but I sure as hell have never bought anything as a result.
Yes, advertising is a pretty silly way to find out about new things, or to research a way to fill a need. The best form of advertising is search-driven ads, which is why Google is so profitable. But still, such ads come with strong agendas, unlike organic results from independent parties.
We should be finding improved ways of funding such independent help. Paywalls reduce use and visibility, while affiliate links turn content providers into salesmen. But affiliates can earn people's trust. Do you trust Slashdot not to skew book reviews to the positive, because it means extra Amazon income?
The problem I see with ads is editorial control.
With real magazines ads, editors have some kind of control of the ad after they receive it. For example, they can decide if they accept an ad with a full page giant penis in it selling v14gr4.
However, with web ads, the editors have no control over it. The advertizer has complete control of how the ad looks. And even though at the time of "contracting" the ad the editors may like the types of ad, maybe after a month the ad will get changed to something really annoying.
3rd-party ad servers do have one benefit: There is no direct relationship between content makers and product makers. With magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, and direct online ad sales, there is a temptation to do secret editorial-for-content deals with their product-maker customers.
Advertising is most suitable for things like classifieds and job ads. But interruptions with agendas are a pretty silly way to learn about new products. It would be better if we paid people to help us select products.
AutoPager also prevents ads from displaying, so it may become the next unmentionable. Eventually any system which messes with the HTML or scripts.
Violations of freedom #6 do detract from the advantages of open software. Among other issues, it prevents you (and others) from porting such code to FOSS projects,
True, but only when integrating with viral GPL-licenced code.
or making use of GPL-only libraries.
Aren't most libraries MIT/BSD or LGPL?
It's also more difficult to get a company to even allow use, much less adaptation, of software under a non-OSI-approved license; they'll be forced to treat it as a unique case, the same as any proprietary software license, unlike FOSS licenses where use and verbatim distribution are never an issue.
Many companies prefer licences which involve them paying for a concrete set of entitlements and guarantees, along with a relationship with the vendor or developer, and shy away from software which could virally contaminate their work. So I'd have no trouble with customers treating the licence as a proprietary licence that just happens to give them source access. The community development aspects are just a bonus.
Remember, Copyleft was weird once.
If you're willing to accept all of that in exchange for—maybe—a few commercial licenses, fine; just don't underestimate what you're giving up relative to a fully Open Source license, or claim that your project is FOSS when it falls short of the definition of Open Source.
"A few" is not a very generous spin.
What am I giving up other than the marketing power of beer-wise free, and infrastructure that is often only made freely available to software issued under an OSI-approved licence?
I never claim my software is either Free Software or Open Source Software, but I have no trouble calling it "open software".
Yes, such a licence doesn't fulfil all the Open Source criteria. But such software is open in all of the respects that give open software its advantages, other than being non-gratis.
This is often a better revenue-generating alternative than closing part of the software or documentation, selling support to the wealthy, pan-handling, or integrating advertising or product placement.
Let's not get hung up on Open Source dogma when some tweaking can yield some practical alternatives.
It's a strategy that makes open source profitable. Either you sell support, or you sell a value added proprietary version.
Sure, standard FOSS licences like GPL and BSD make this hard, but there are others that make it feasible to charge for software that is entirely source-available, freely-re-distributable, and freely-forkable.
It isn't so much the amount involved, which is the same as buying the dead tree version, it is the fact that it is quicker to find another newspaper on the internet than it is to find your credit card and type all the details in, whereas in a newsagent, it is pretty easy to find a pound coin in your pocket and hand it over.
Only a fraction of a paper's content covers widely-reported current events. Instead, much of a paper's most interesting material consists of original investigations of issues, as well as analysis and opinion pieces, neither of which can be found in another paper (except through syndication). The critical question is what fraction of people will pay to keep reading these, rather than choosing to find some other but different source of brain food.
What has triggered this crisis is not just the huge reduction in the cost of publishing and distribution that the Web has wrought, which has greatly increased competition in the market for information, but also the better ways product makers now have to get their message out — their own websites and through search marketing — which along with a viscous cycle of advertising overexposure is permanently sickening the display advertising industry, of which newspapers are a part.
One solution is for the papers to earn income directly from help they give their readers, rather than by giving over a large chunk of their readers' experience to flashing lights.
Only the proprietary driver supports a separate X-Server on each monitor, which allows you to have two independent sets of virtual desktops: You can choose what appears on both the left and right for the task at hand.
The problem is that a large amount of money on the internet is made through advertisements. If Firefox gains marketshare, and starts with adblocking, thats tons of revenue stream being cut off. Google makes a lot of money through advertising, and they seem to be the only ones pushing for progress right now. I don't know if I'd want to go and reduce their income.
Particularly as Firefox is funded by a Google product placement deal.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever come across an open source product that had barest minimum of documentation. What does exist is typically out of date (and observations of such are met with "read the changelog!" - lame).
Sometimes this is the case because they believe they owe their users nothing, and don't think or care about the risk to their reputation.
But sometimes it's deliberate to better sell their book, which properly documents the project. Thus it's ironic that FOSS is often paired with documentation that is both proprietary and not open for community editing,
If only more source-available, freely-redistributible projects both charged for their software and offered cuts to contributors, we'd see more high-quality software that can be easily and cheaply maintained.
Ads, in particular text ads, only really work for search engines, because that is where people are searching for information sources to visit, including for their shopping research. Once users are on individual websites, ads are more often a distraction from the actual content.
So given that search marketing is destroying display advertising because it is so much more useful to users, I see four alternatives for content providers:
Content without bias, or with a small but declared bias, is what people want, not ads which are paid placements with specific agendas, and which cause publishers to lose control of their users' experience.
In fact, I have more faith in articles that allow for comments.
That's unmoderated comments. (Not moderated by publishers. User ratings are OK.)
Try leaving a less than enthusiastic comment in a lot of places, and your comment never appears or gets deleted.
This often provides a needed balance on what is being written in the article (especially since most articles seemed to be more editorials as of late. ). And the insightful posts usually provide sources for their comments
Journalism is all about the story, which must be provocative. Balanced accounts are "boring".
In addition to comments, I'd like to see rebuttals placed paragraph for paragraph alongside the original article, like my Make The Case site.
Push advertising has been severely weakened by both search engines and search advertising. Increasing intrusiveness has also added to advertising's death spiral.
I'd suggest (1), charge for material in the most a la carte way (e.g. micropayments for individual articles, plus discounted subscriptions to particular sections or columnists), and (2), up-front or deferred charges for helping people choose the right product.
It could simply be taken as a form of compliment - specifically, by way of self-deprecation.
"Self-criticism is in fact self-praise. It shows how much one can spare."
In this light, political correctness can be seen as just a reflection of the victim's continuing powerlessness.
I've seen huge performance leaps for large files and directories after reinstalling my system on an ext4 partition. Ext3 was very slow to list directories containing large numbers of files, and deleting very large files took tens of seconds, during which the filesystem was hung. I couldn't remove large files while recording TV, otherwise the recording would hang and skip several seconds. No longer the case now I'm on ext4.
If Verlinde has made gravity and the Equivalence Principle derivative, is he still using a property of entropy as a given? That is what axioms does his theory still rest on?
I haven't yet used Twitter either, but it seems like Tweets can be useful when they contain links.
Thus a Twitter feed is like an RSS feed that is carried in links rather than content, and which is filtered by trusted sources rather than your own pre-selections.
And then they claim that instant messaging results in an instant reply. But SMS is NOT instant, voice is. So, if they want an instant reply, why do they send an SMS?
I suppose a voice call requires a greater time commitment, as well as synchronous interaction, which impedes multi-tasking.
Voice also requires one to listen, unlike the talk-without-listening nature of SMS and Twitter.
Product information and advice doesn't have to come in the form of a review. It could be a "What's New" newsletter, a consultant, an automated advisor, or a product demonstrator (who is currently also a salesperson).
And these "helpers" don't need to be (and often can't be) ad-funded. They are often funded by sales, direct or affiliate, which does create a huge conflict of interest. An alternative is funding consumer assistance from cashback money, and more arms-length manufacturer incentives.
I'm not talking about leaving the room. I'm talking about doing something in the same room where you're too preoccupied to be bothered with buttons.
In that case, are these non-ad-skipping DVR users worth much to advertisers?
At least sound goes round corners.
Makes me wonder if there wouldn't be a way to set up some kind of freelance exchange? Give content distributors a chance to bid on stories for something like a 2 week exclusive before it shows up anywhere else. It would create a competitive content market and give distributors access to a deeper bench without being saddled with the payroll.
With some filtering system in place, it could work.
With the glut of content, the world is moving from on salary to on spec.