As long as a company makes it clear that they are under no
obligation to compensate the people who are first to post each
component of an idea that profits the company, they
shouldn't rule out such compensation. Fair compensation generates
goodwill all round.
While some unrealised and unsuccessful good ideas have been imagined many times
before, and are just looking for someone with the nous, persistence,
and capital to make it work, other ideas are truly innovative.
Once these latter types of ideas are made known, thousands could
turn-the-handle and make it happen. But without the spark nothing happens.
It's these type of ideas that Google would be evil not to compensate,
as long as the idea is not already known to them.
They could at least make a charitable donation in the person's name.
People who offer to support the site by opting to see advertising
may tend to click on ads just to help the site out, which would
destroy the value of those ads to the advertiser.
So the ads would have to be impression charged.
And to avoid ruining Wikipedia's ambience, they would
also probably have to be text ads.
Even though consumers desperately want someone to help
guide them through the information overload of their many
options, retailers are being squeezed by discount and online
outlets as consumers go after better prices and range,
even after making use of the service provide by these retailers.
Retailers should be paid by product makers for the
help they give to consumers, allowing them to both provide
better service and get paid no matter where the
consumer ultimately buys.
That's interesting. I got a doc dir time that, while not quite as fast,
was still under a second.
I don't think I've got something fundamentally wrong.
This computer has a recent kernel, and 4GB of RAM.
One likely cause of the ls slowness I reported is
the large average size of the files in that directory,
which I think requires inode chains to be traversed.
Will ext4 speed this?
The other possible cause is the software RAID1 I've
got that ext3 fs (/dev/md0).
I'd be interested to see how long it takes for other systems
to delete a 10-20G file, and its effect on other processes.
I hope this fixes the two annoyances I have with Linux:
Doing an ls on a directory containing 1000 ext3 files
on my quite modern computer takes nearly 10 seconds.
Deleting a multi-gig file such as a TV recording locks up the
OS so badly that other apps freeze. If mencoder is recording TV
it will fail to keep up with the stream. AV sync is lost, ruining
the rest of the recording.
Everyone's talking about how the advertising model isn't working, well what this says is that the subscriber model isn't working either. That doesn't leave many funding models to try... let's see... government subsidy, pledge drives and tip jars, billionaire sponsorship, bake sales, criminal enterprise, and "... ????... Profit!"
Please, correct me if I'm wrong here, but aren't music videos basically just promotional tools used to sell albums?
Music on YouTube is:
The whole song,
In an audio quality that many find acceptable,
Accompanied by an often interesting visual scenario,
Available free on-demand,
Easily downloaded for on-demand playing and offline sharing, and is
In an environment that allows you to share comments and links with other users,
which must compete with higher-quality non-free DRMed soundfiles.
Given this reality, I can't blame Warner for what they've done.
What Warner should now do is:
Either place downgraded music on YouTube (lower audio quality, less
than the full song, voiceovers, etc.), or require YouTube to stream FLVs with DRM.
Keep a suitable affiliate-link deal with YouTube.
Either vigilantly police user uploads, or ensure that they come with DRM and purchase links.
Give those who purchase a song both a free HD download and shareable stream credits of the song's video. Album purchasers should get a voucher
for all album videos.
The GPL doesn't allow a software author to demand that
persons who receive and use his software pay him a fee,
because this effectively limits GPL's freedom-to-run condition.
However such a requirement to pay the original author
can be made compatible with licences that also permit unfettered
source redistribution (which is where most of the benefit
of Open Source Software lies).
I use such a system at Rails Wheels,
along with methods to make payments easy, affordable, and
honourable for all who receive a copy of a software package.
the cost of software is set according to the ability of the customer to pay
and how do you suppose that is determined? what about international boundaries? It is essentially depending on donations.
At Rails Wheels, authors can set software prices that vary
according to both the type of buyer (not-for-profit, government,
commercial, personal) and the number of employees the buyer has.
Prices are firm USD amounts (not suggested donations), but payments
only becomes due if and when the software is put into live use on a website.
Perhaps a solution for some projects lies in the middle, with a commercial source tiered licence system, where the source code is provided with all licences, the developers are receptive to improvements from customers, and the cost of software is set according to the ability of the customer to pay, a hobbyist who is using the software for fun would pay far less than someone using it in a high revenue business. This assures that the software does have a high degree of openness and accessibility to all, but also assures revenue can be raised to develop the software.
It's just like 95% of people claim to be above-average drivers.
Tell a group that you're a below-average driver, and watch the
conversation die as everybody makes a mental note to never to get in
a car with you.
There's no kudos in parading your deficiencies,
but there is in claiming to be part of the elite.
It's also an important function of government to be a statesman and that's one of the things I think that's lacking in modern government these days is very rarely do you ever see a politician actually being a statesman anymore, being the middle ground that several different groups come to when they're diverging on topics to find a middle ground. One of the things I've been working on is tools to help enable that.
Often strong leadership is identified with a politician forcing through
what they think is best, despite opposition. However in a democracy
I see the role leadership as arguing strongly for you believe in,
but then letting the people have the final say.
I'm actually in favour of having each (lower-house) representative
run regular referenda within their electorates to determine their
vote in the legislature. In each referendum the representative is given one
proxy vote for each constituent who didn't cast a ballot, preventing
control by a vocal minority.
To allow constituents to debate and be informed about issues, without
the information overload talked about in the article, a system like
my Make the Case site could be used
to build and preserve a closely-argued community memory on important
topics.
Thanks, I wasn't familiar with such solar focus points. It looks like they're
about 14 times farther from the Sun than Pluto. That's one tough sentinel.
In terms of our present understanding of Physics, such a transporter's
more in the fantasy realm. AI envoys are more realistic.
Because there is likely to be such a small gap between a civilisation
able to receive radio signals from space, and one able to run a
properly described AI sim, one wouldn't have to transmit any info
about how to construct a simulator computer, only the mind itself.
Whoops, that'd be c/2, unless the computer blueprint
and the scientist binary were transmitted at the same time.
I'm trying to think of protocols that would assure
the aliens that we did not have an evil intent, and to
prevent empowering aliens who had evil intent.
It looks like we could therefore use SETI to spread through the galaxy at near c:
Build a massive array of spaced-based telescopes.
Detect a civilisation.
Communicate AI technology.
If get reply, transmit scientist.
Repeat.
If there's no suitable civilisation to leap through
you'd have to shoot massive numbers of self-constructing nanotech AI
particles in the desired direction, hoping that some impact
solid bodies.
On the other hand, if you can figure out the rotation time of the planet, you can image it for as long as you want, taking breaks while the face you're interested in is facing away.
Ah, good point. You'd just have to take (exo-)daily samples.
Does either the inter-stellar atmosphere or gravity waves
eventually impose resolution limits?
A back of the envelope calculation (which might be wrong) shows that a 50 km city at 50 light years would be about 2 x 10^-5 miliarcseconds. To get that kind of resolving power in the middle of the visible spectrum you'd need a telescope about 6000 kilometres across. That's not too insane.
Even with a telescope that's big enough and perfect enough to not be limited
by diffraction or aberration, would there be so few photons that the
required integration time would mean that it'd only be able to image
detail on slowly-rotating planets?
Much of the spam's gone away since Usenet became a backwater. This accelerated after Google removed the "Groups" link from their front page.
As well, Gmane gateways mailing lists to newsgroups, allowing both reading and posting with a nice interface, without the need to download every message.
I just launched Rbate, which also arranges cashback
payments, but the product maker can also survey the purchaser and find out
and reward the organizations that provided the purchaser with helpful advice.
Product makers can also survey those who bought a competing product, allowing
them to find out why they lost those sales. The survey taker also gets paid
for these answers.
In addition, consumers are given a search engine
dedicated to purchasing help.
The aim is that money that product makers now spend on advertising
instead funds better information for consumers, and better
feedback from purchasers to makers.
Implementations only have value to the extent of their unclonability.
If you come up with an idea for a new type of Web app, write it, and launch it,
the only thing stopping a competitor with greater resources from cloning it
and wiping you out is both a patent on the idea and the time it would take them
to clone it.
That is, only the idea has any significant value. The great bulk of work
done developing the idea into an nice implementation is a negative value in the
sense that it provides a ready template for cloning, and is a positive value only
in the difficulty of that cloning.
This positive value can be lost very quickly if a competitor has access to
huge resources.
yeah, i'm always hungry and i eat wenever i can... but i never get even a kg more...
It'd be interesting if you and an overweight friend ate exactly the same food for a month. We'd see if it's a case of you having a either higher metabolism
or a food absorption problem, or whether you think you're eating a lot, but you're appetite is really relatively low.
I don't. Perhaps you'd like an adjective to go with that sentence?
It's a generalization they believe to be valid based on the statistics. Without such generalizations writing gets bogged down with words, footnotes, and disclaimers, reading more like a legal or scientific document than an easy to read summary of an upcoming book.
Virtually every study, whether ad industry, anti-ad industry or third party neutral has found that the average consumer has no problem what-so-ever with ads and commercials. In fact, they love them.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as a company makes it clear that they are under no obligation to compensate the people who are first to post each component of an idea that profits the company, they shouldn't rule out such compensation. Fair compensation generates goodwill all round.
While some unrealised and unsuccessful good ideas have been imagined many times before, and are just looking for someone with the nous, persistence, and capital to make it work, other ideas are truly innovative. Once these latter types of ideas are made known, thousands could turn-the-handle and make it happen. But without the spark nothing happens.
It's these type of ideas that Google would be evil not to compensate, as long as the idea is not already known to them. They could at least make a charitable donation in the person's name.
People who offer to support the site by opting to see advertising may tend to click on ads just to help the site out, which would destroy the value of those ads to the advertiser.
So the ads would have to be impression charged. And to avoid ruining Wikipedia's ambience, they would also probably have to be text ads.
Even though consumers desperately want someone to help guide them through the information overload of their many options, retailers are being squeezed by discount and online outlets as consumers go after better prices and range, even after making use of the service provide by these retailers.
Retailers should be paid by product makers for the help they give to consumers, allowing them to both provide better service and get paid no matter where the consumer ultimately buys.
I ran dumpe2fs /dev/md0 | grep features,
and the dir_index option is enabled.
Is this for a first fetch or for a cached fetch? I certainly get very quick directory listings while they remain cached.
That's interesting. I got a doc dir time that, while not quite as fast, was still under a second.
I don't think I've got something fundamentally wrong. This computer has a recent kernel, and 4GB of RAM.
One likely cause of the ls slowness I reported is the large average size of the files in that directory, which I think requires inode chains to be traversed. Will ext4 speed this?
The other possible cause is the software RAID1 I've got that ext3 fs (/dev/md0).
I'd be interested to see how long it takes for other systems to delete a 10-20G file, and its effect on other processes.
I hope this fixes the two annoyances I have with Linux:
Deleting a multi-gig file such as a TV recording locks up the OS so badly that other apps freeze. If mencoder is recording TV it will fail to keep up with the stream. AV sync is lost, ruining the rest of the recording.
Everyone's talking about how the advertising model isn't working, well what this says is that the subscriber model isn't working either. That doesn't leave many funding models to try... let's see... government subsidy, pledge drives and tip jars, billionaire sponsorship, bake sales, criminal enterprise, and "... ???? ... Profit!"
...helper?
Please, correct me if I'm wrong here, but aren't music videos basically just promotional tools used to sell albums?
Music on YouTube is:
which must compete with higher-quality non-free DRMed soundfiles.
Given this reality, I can't blame Warner for what they've done.
What Warner should now do is:
The GPL doesn't allow a software author to demand that persons who receive and use his software pay him a fee, because this effectively limits GPL's freedom-to-run condition.
However such a requirement to pay the original author can be made compatible with licences that also permit unfettered source redistribution (which is where most of the benefit of Open Source Software lies).
I use such a system at Rails Wheels, along with methods to make payments easy, affordable, and honourable for all who receive a copy of a software package.
the cost of software is set according to the ability of the customer to pay
and how do you suppose that is determined? what about international boundaries? It is essentially depending on donations.
At Rails Wheels, authors can set software prices that vary according to both the type of buyer (not-for-profit, government, commercial, personal) and the number of employees the buyer has.
Prices are firm USD amounts (not suggested donations), but payments only becomes due if and when the software is put into live use on a website.
Perhaps a solution for some projects lies in the middle, with a commercial source tiered licence system, where the source code is provided with all licences, the developers are receptive to improvements from customers, and the cost of software is set according to the ability of the customer to pay, a hobbyist who is using the software for fun would pay far less than someone using it in a high revenue business. This assures that the software does have a high degree of openness and accessibility to all, but also assures revenue can be raised to develop the software.
That's exactly what I've done at Rails Wheels.
It's just like 95% of people claim to be above-average drivers. Tell a group that you're a below-average driver, and watch the conversation die as everybody makes a mental note to never to get in a car with you.
There's no kudos in parading your deficiencies, but there is in claiming to be part of the elite.
The article has a definition of statesman I like:
It's also an important function of government to be a statesman and that's one of the things I think that's lacking in modern government these days is very rarely do you ever see a politician actually being a statesman anymore, being the middle ground that several different groups come to when they're diverging on topics to find a middle ground. One of the things I've been working on is tools to help enable that.
Often strong leadership is identified with a politician forcing through what they think is best, despite opposition. However in a democracy I see the role leadership as arguing strongly for you believe in, but then letting the people have the final say.
I'm actually in favour of having each (lower-house) representative run regular referenda within their electorates to determine their vote in the legislature. In each referendum the representative is given one proxy vote for each constituent who didn't cast a ballot, preventing control by a vocal minority.
To allow constituents to debate and be informed about issues, without the information overload talked about in the article, a system like my Make the Case site could be used to build and preserve a closely-argued community memory on important topics.
Thanks, I wasn't familiar with such solar focus points. It looks like they're about 14 times farther from the Sun than Pluto. That's one tough sentinel.
In terms of our present understanding of Physics, such a transporter's more in the fantasy realm. AI envoys are more realistic.
Because there is likely to be such a small gap between a civilisation able to receive radio signals from space, and one able to run a properly described AI sim, one wouldn't have to transmit any info about how to construct a simulator computer, only the mind itself.
Would we care if one was captured and "tortured"?
Whoops, that'd be c/2, unless the computer blueprint and the scientist binary were transmitted at the same time.
I'm trying to think of protocols that would assure the aliens that we did not have an evil intent, and to prevent empowering aliens who had evil intent.
OK, thanks.
It looks like we could therefore use SETI to spread through the galaxy at near c:
If there's no suitable civilisation to leap through you'd have to shoot massive numbers of self-constructing nanotech AI particles in the desired direction, hoping that some impact solid bodies.
On the other hand, if you can figure out the rotation time of the planet, you can image it for as long as you want, taking breaks while the face you're interested in is facing away.
Ah, good point. You'd just have to take (exo-)daily samples.
Does either the inter-stellar atmosphere or gravity waves eventually impose resolution limits?
A back of the envelope calculation (which might be wrong) shows that a 50 km city at 50 light years would be about 2 x 10^-5 miliarcseconds. To get that kind of resolving power in the middle of the visible spectrum you'd need a telescope about 6000 kilometres across. That's not too insane.
Even with a telescope that's big enough and perfect enough to not be limited by diffraction or aberration, would there be so few photons that the required integration time would mean that it'd only be able to image detail on slowly-rotating planets?
Much of the spam's gone away since Usenet became a backwater. This accelerated after Google removed the "Groups" link from their front page.
As well, Gmane gateways mailing lists to newsgroups, allowing both reading and posting with a nice interface, without the need to download every message.
I just launched Rbate, which also arranges cashback payments, but the product maker can also survey the purchaser and find out and reward the organizations that provided the purchaser with helpful advice.
Product makers can also survey those who bought a competing product, allowing them to find out why they lost those sales. The survey taker also gets paid for these answers.
In addition, consumers are given a search engine dedicated to purchasing help.
The aim is that money that product makers now spend on advertising instead funds better information for consumers, and better feedback from purchasers to makers.
Implementations only have value to the extent of their unclonability.
If you come up with an idea for a new type of Web app, write it, and launch it, the only thing stopping a competitor with greater resources from cloning it and wiping you out is both a patent on the idea and the time it would take them to clone it.
That is, only the idea has any significant value. The great bulk of work done developing the idea into an nice implementation is a negative value in the sense that it provides a ready template for cloning, and is a positive value only in the difficulty of that cloning.
This positive value can be lost very quickly if a competitor has access to huge resources.
It'd be interesting if you and an overweight friend ate exactly the same food for a month. We'd see if it's a case of you having a either higher metabolism or a food absorption problem, or whether you think you're eating a lot, but you're appetite is really relatively low.
It's a generalization they believe to be valid based on the statistics. Without such generalizations writing gets bogged down with words, footnotes, and disclaimers, reading more like a legal or scientific document than an easy to read summary of an upcoming book.
I'd be interested to see a link to such a study.