They said the same about the Kinect. It lasted... what, 3 months?
What interests me is how Microsoft seems to have again missed the boat after being a pioneer in augmented reality with their HoloLens. A replay of earlier failures to press home their market-leader status in pocket and larger touch-screen devices, in gestural interfaces, and in web browsers.
They seem to have a fixation on big lost battles like search and their own phone ecosystem, rather than exploiting and continuing to perfect their innovations. They develop exciting things, but move on while they're still primitive.
Is there really any advantage over 16 bit integer, which would be faster and less complex?
Yes, artificial (and real) neurons deliver a weighted average of positive and negative inputs. So you usually have large positive and negative inputs which subtractively cancel to a moderate output. Integer doesn't handle this subtractive cancellation nearly as well as floating point, which can keep the same precision over large changes in scale.
If they lose they get a liberal who will change the court profoundly.
I think a Democrat POTUS would avoid kicking Garland to the kerb in favour of a revenge uber-liberal. The poor guy gets his hopes built up, then dashed. It doesn't matter that politics was probably a factor in his choosing over others. Once chosen, and given no relevant skeletons in the closet, he should no longer be treated as a political football.
UL certification is a good analogy up to a point. Ad classification is however a less expert and less capital-intensive task. Most advertising block lists are maintained by volunteers. (I don't know whether ABP donates to support any of these.) The main reason acceptable ad whitelists are not similarly created by volunteers is that there's not enough people committed to the idea that making good ads visible makes the world a better place. But though unattractive, creating such a list is lucrative when it's enabled by default. So that's why it now exists.
Yes, the raison d'être of an ad is to attract attention.
I only have so much money though. I'd liken it to a game of shuffleboard - or perhaps a race to a cliff. The faster/closer to the cliff you get, the more points you earn. However, go over and you lose all the points.
The most aggressive capitalist usually wins. If they go too far, they can either back-off to the point of profit maximization, or re-open under a new identity.
As others have mentioned - Ad blocking wouldn't be such a big deal if the advertisers hadn't shat in their own pool and poisoned the viewing of it's audience.
Yes, it's been a death spiral as ad volume has been made to compensate for diminishing ad effectiveness. TV is adapting though, through a rise in subscription services. Subscriptions aren't the entire solution for news and information, but there is the option here of them getting compensated for helping their users make smart choices.
As Jerry mentioned, the choice is 'acceptable ads' for me, or NO ads. My policy is simple. You put up a 'I won't let you access the content without allowing ads' notice and I'll go elsewhere.
Global, ubiquitous, neutral, and cheap Internet connectivity has certainly put the power back in the consumers' hands. But unless alternative revenue sources are developed, there is a risk that the loss of ad revenue will result in a tragedy of the commons, where you either pay or get junk.
Since the option is 'acceptable but less effective' or 'no ads, no effect' it's not really a choice.
While there are still sufficient people who will cop (or don't know how to block) "unacceptable" ads, showing them will be what most sites choose, though sites could accommodate the ad-sensitive by allowing an acceptable-ad mode to be turned on (this would work because those who don't care are unlikely to turn it on).
Still, acceptable ads by virtue of their invisibility, or by virtue of being targeted at the ad-shy, don't pay well. So no ads, by making a site more attractive and more independent, may be a worthwhile choice if an alternative source of revenue is found. And there are alternatives.
No, the acceptable ads option is a paid whitelist, which is what this news story is lamenting. You could be distributing driveby-download malware to create a bot army and so long as the danegeld is given to ABP, your software will be on the acceptable ads list.
Adblock Pro claim, and I believe them, that no one can buy their way on to the acceptable ads list. Ads have to meet their guidelines to get on there.
What ABP do do however, is to refuse to put ads they deem acceptable on the list if payment is demanded but refused. Somewhat distasteful, but they wouldn't have a business without it.
Hell, I'll assert that I think that it's less the fee, because most companies would be willing to accept less money where they currently get no money, than it is the content rules. Not being allowed to use flash, sound, movies, blinking images, all the other annoying 'sight pullers' results in what they think are less effective ads. This is despite said distracting ads being precisely why we install ad-blockers in the first place.
Yes, the raison d'être of an ad is to attract attention. So I can't see many sites and apps with compelling content wanting to restrict themselves to ineffective "acceptable ads". Sites like Google can however get away with them, because the content is already similar to acceptable ads. Static newspaper ads have always mostly been both acceptable and profitable, but that was before the explosion of information sources, and the associated quickening pace of life, stripped them of much of the attention time they once had.
I will accept ads that are essentially the electronic equivalent of newspaper ads. Those are acceptable. Those are really the only kind that are acceptable. Early-on I allowed ads. then ads started hijacking my browser, and eventually ad-delivered malware through a site that required the use of IE broke the DNS on a particular computer, and I decided that from that point forth I was not going to allow any Internet-based ads until they fixed the problem. They have not fixed the problem so I still do not allow ads.
Do you use Adblock Plus with its Acceptable Ad option turned on? That seems to be exactly what you want.
Yes, you'd likely only give your time to maintain an acceptable ads whitelist if you believe that visibility of less aggressive advertising makes the world a better place. This is a common view on Slashdot, but probably not as common as the view that all advertising shoved in other media is intrinsically bad. AdBlock Plus' rationale for introducing the acceptable ads system was that the majority of respondents to their survey wanted it.
My main point was that most of the work and expense is in the selling of list access, and the collection of associated fees, rather than in list maintenance.
This revenue allows us to hire employees to do the hard work providing that service demands. Software engineers have to maintain the whitelist, monitor it and provide customer service to each whitelisted site, whether payment is involved or not.
So they need to charge to pay for the manpower and infrastructure needed to be able to charge. A bit of a circular argument. The Easylist block list is over six times longer than the acceptable ads whitelist, yet is maintained by volunteers. I'm sure the community could maintain a whitelist if salespeople were no longer required.
If I want to buy something, I go to the actual source and I look around there.
Go where they sell the stuff? But these places are just another type of advertising. You're not going to get much unbiased information there. At least at independent sites you have a chance of getting the whole truth — though I agree that advertising is a bad way to fund them because ads both corrupt and annoy. A better way would be to reward information sources whenever they help or delight you.
Content ads will naturally be more relevant on niche-topic forums than on general forums or news sites.
Are they pay-per-post-view, pay-per-title-view, pay-per-period, pay-per-click-in-post, or pay-per-action? And are there strict rules against commercial posts outside this system?
Every citizen should have a vote on every topic, which they would give to their representative to use on their behalf. For most mundane issues, the representative would cast the votes given to him, but at any time any citizen could take their vote from their representative and cast it any way they see fit.
Yes, direct democracy could be saved from the tyranny of the active minority if for each citizen who didn't vote on an issue, their elected representative was given such a proxy vote. But I'd make representatives' proxy votes only fractional, so that the system wasn't a dead duck unless 50-75% of citizens cast a ballot.
Consider the perspective of the sponsor: When you have a new product you're trying to sell, you need a way to communicate with your customer that it is in fact available for them to buy. Take something you obviously use for example: A personal computer. Now, while you yourself might be well informed about the market and build your own, the vast majority of any given business's potential customers aren't. Advertising is how you reach them.
Yes, even though advertising is intrinsically bad because it spins, we're a long way from a nirvana where independent editorial is that's perfectly informed about both the market and each person's needs is always affordably available, and where no vendor tries to get an artificial leg-up by advertising anyway. But if we're going to have advertising, there's plenty of better forms of it than paid placements in and around other media. Company websites and point-of-sale for example.
To cover the situation where a start-up is finding it hard to get coverage, I'd support (disclosed) payments that encourage publishers to review or otherwise write about products in their own words. This is much better than a foreign or native ad, where the payment gives the advertiser the right to their own spin.
And then of course, the perspective of the website: They pay actual people actual money to write their content. That money doesn't come in when people don't pay to view it, but it DOES have to come from somewhere. Thus, advertising works suitably.
Advertising is working more and more poorly for information sources. The alternative is to better capture the value that the content gives the users. Direct charging is only one way.
A contrary experience with Native Advertising in this comment. I wonder if that's because you're doing things differently, or just have a different audience demographic.
A contrary experience with Native Advertising in this comment. I wonder if that's because you're doing things differently, or just have a different audience demographic.
He's pointing out that people like security well enough, but they want to get stuff DONE even more, and that most people will take the calculated risk to be less secure if it makes them more productive at lower costs.
Also, too much security can backfire. I call this the Garbage Compacter Rule: In Star Wars it was too difficult to shut down all the garbage compacters on the detention level, so R2-D2 just shut them all down. Similarly, when you run up against a security system that's stopping you doing what you want, but it's hard to poke a hole in it, you sometimes just "shut them all down" to get some work done. You're left with less security than if the original block wasn't there.
It'll be on a torrent site 10 min after airing so you can watch it are you leisure.
Have hackers worked out how to rip CBS All Access streams?
I'm surprised that CBS All Access seems to be available here in Australia — the only country besides the US and Canada. But given the reports here that this subscription stream includes ads, I'd be hoping that they also made ad-free episodes available for individual or season purchase, in a timely manor.
Some ads on most news sites, such as Google ads, would already be matched to the article content. They would be reluctant to get rid of the rest, including direct campaigns by big brands that pay very well. My angle was that, contextual or not, people are less interested in ads when they're absorbed by the content, forcing those ads to be flashy (and Flash-y).
See, Slashdot doesn't author any new content. Their value, whether they realize it or not, is in the people who comment.
Slashdot without the comments is a rather pathetic news aggregator.
Aggregators still provide value through their summaries and editorial selection, although this value should be shared with the original sources (even if TFA isn't visited). Slashdot also has some original interviews.
There is an ad-free, paywall-free way for Slashdot to get paid for this article value, as well as from the value of user comments (which Slashdot can choose to share with comment authors).
I remember when Google first came out with their ads and they seemed innovative because they were simple text ads. At the time, the "common knowledge" was that you needed blinking Flash ads that played sound, triggered full screen video if the mouse cursor went anywhere near the ad, and spawed a dozen pop-up ads.
Google is lucky that their ads are nearly as interesting as their content (organic search results), and that their users are often in a buying mode. Contrast this with websites that offer quality content that is much more interesting than the (often irrelevant) ads around it. It's here that ads need to be garish to draw people away from the content. That's why I don't think "acceptable ads" would work for many websites. They have to learn how to earn more from their content rather than the spin around it.
Allow customers to make a single monthly payment, which would be distributed among participating websites according to some metric like pageviews or time-on-site.
Would these be voluntary payments like Flattr, or would the site be paywalled to non-payers? If the former, how many will pay just for the good vibes, or pay to remove ads that their ad-blocker is already removing? If the latter, how will they survive initially becoming invisible to most, including social sharers?
Blendle shows that a walled pay-per-article option (with refunds when you don't like what you get) can work for an agglomeration of quality articles. But participants risk losing existing subscribers to a system where they're just one source among many, drastically cutting their revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
They said the same about the Kinect. It lasted ... what, 3 months?
What interests me is how Microsoft seems to have again missed the boat after being a pioneer in augmented reality with their HoloLens. A replay of earlier failures to press home their market-leader status in pocket and larger touch-screen devices, in gestural interfaces, and in web browsers.
They seem to have a fixation on big lost battles like search and their own phone ecosystem, rather than exploiting and continuing to perfect their innovations. They develop exciting things, but move on while they're still primitive.
After 20 years in the business, I spend MUCH more time thinking about the problem and the best solutions than I do actually coding.
True. But if you program by the hour it's hard to charge for where this real work is done: in the shower and while eating lunch.
Is there really any advantage over 16 bit integer, which would be faster and less complex?
Yes, artificial (and real) neurons deliver a weighted average of positive and negative inputs. So you usually have large positive and negative inputs which subtractively cancel to a moderate output. Integer doesn't handle this subtractive cancellation nearly as well as floating point, which can keep the same precision over large changes in scale.
If they lose they get a liberal who will change the court profoundly.
I think a Democrat POTUS would avoid kicking Garland to the kerb in favour of a revenge uber-liberal. The poor guy gets his hopes built up, then dashed. It doesn't matter that politics was probably a factor in his choosing over others. Once chosen, and given no relevant skeletons in the closet, he should no longer be treated as a political football.
UL certification is a good analogy up to a point. Ad classification is however a less expert and less capital-intensive task. Most advertising block lists are maintained by volunteers. (I don't know whether ABP donates to support any of these.) The main reason acceptable ad whitelists are not similarly created by volunteers is that there's not enough people committed to the idea that making good ads visible makes the world a better place. But though unattractive, creating such a list is lucrative when it's enabled by default. So that's why it now exists.
Yes, the raison d'être of an ad is to attract attention.
I only have so much money though. I'd liken it to a game of shuffleboard - or perhaps a race to a cliff. The faster/closer to the cliff you get, the more points you earn. However, go over and you lose all the points.
The most aggressive capitalist usually wins. If they go too far, they can either back-off to the point of profit maximization, or re-open under a new identity.
As others have mentioned - Ad blocking wouldn't be such a big deal if the advertisers hadn't shat in their own pool and poisoned the viewing of it's audience.
Yes, it's been a death spiral as ad volume has been made to compensate for diminishing ad effectiveness. TV is adapting though, through a rise in subscription services. Subscriptions aren't the entire solution for news and information, but there is the option here of them getting compensated for helping their users make smart choices.
As Jerry mentioned, the choice is 'acceptable ads' for me, or NO ads. My policy is simple. You put up a 'I won't let you access the content without allowing ads' notice and I'll go elsewhere.
Global, ubiquitous, neutral, and cheap Internet connectivity has certainly put the power back in the consumers' hands. But unless alternative revenue sources are developed, there is a risk that the loss of ad revenue will result in a tragedy of the commons, where you either pay or get junk.
Since the option is 'acceptable but less effective' or 'no ads, no effect' it's not really a choice.
While there are still sufficient people who will cop (or don't know how to block) "unacceptable" ads, showing them will be what most sites choose, though sites could accommodate the ad-sensitive by allowing an acceptable-ad mode to be turned on (this would work because those who don't care are unlikely to turn it on).
Still, acceptable ads by virtue of their invisibility, or by virtue of being targeted at the ad-shy, don't pay well. So no ads, by making a site more attractive and more independent, may be a worthwhile choice if an alternative source of revenue is found. And there are alternatives.
No, the acceptable ads option is a paid whitelist, which is what this news story is lamenting. You could be distributing driveby-download malware to create a bot army and so long as the danegeld is given to ABP, your software will be on the acceptable ads list.
Adblock Pro claim, and I believe them, that no one can buy their way on to the acceptable ads list. Ads have to meet their guidelines to get on there.
What ABP do do however, is to refuse to put ads they deem acceptable on the list if payment is demanded but refused. Somewhat distasteful, but they wouldn't have a business without it.
Hell, I'll assert that I think that it's less the fee, because most companies would be willing to accept less money where they currently get no money, than it is the content rules. Not being allowed to use flash, sound, movies, blinking images, all the other annoying 'sight pullers' results in what they think are less effective ads. This is despite said distracting ads being precisely why we install ad-blockers in the first place.
Yes, the raison d'être of an ad is to attract attention. So I can't see many sites and apps with compelling content wanting to restrict themselves to ineffective "acceptable ads". Sites like Google can however get away with them, because the content is already similar to acceptable ads. Static newspaper ads have always mostly been both acceptable and profitable, but that was before the explosion of information sources, and the associated quickening pace of life, stripped them of much of the attention time they once had.
I will accept ads that are essentially the electronic equivalent of newspaper ads. Those are acceptable. Those are really the only kind that are acceptable. Early-on I allowed ads. then ads started hijacking my browser, and eventually ad-delivered malware through a site that required the use of IE broke the DNS on a particular computer, and I decided that from that point forth I was not going to allow any Internet-based ads until they fixed the problem. They have not fixed the problem so I still do not allow ads.
Do you use Adblock Plus with its Acceptable Ad option turned on? That seems to be exactly what you want.
Yes, you'd likely only give your time to maintain an acceptable ads whitelist if you believe that visibility of less aggressive advertising makes the world a better place. This is a common view on Slashdot, but probably not as common as the view that all advertising shoved in other media is intrinsically bad. AdBlock Plus' rationale for introducing the acceptable ads system was that the majority of respondents to their survey wanted it.
My main point was that most of the work and expense is in the selling of list access, and the collection of associated fees, rather than in list maintenance.
This revenue allows us to hire employees to do the hard work providing that service demands. Software engineers have to maintain the whitelist, monitor it and provide customer service to each whitelisted site, whether payment is involved or not.
So they need to charge to pay for the manpower and infrastructure needed to be able to charge. A bit of a circular argument. The Easylist block list is over six times longer than the acceptable ads whitelist, yet is maintained by volunteers. I'm sure the community could maintain a whitelist if salespeople were no longer required.
If I want to buy something, I go to the actual source and I look around there.
Go where they sell the stuff? But these places are just another type of advertising. You're not going to get much unbiased information there. At least at independent sites you have a chance of getting the whole truth — though I agree that advertising is a bad way to fund them because ads both corrupt and annoy. A better way would be to reward information sources whenever they help or delight you.
Thanks for the explanation.
Content ads will naturally be more relevant on niche-topic forums than on general forums or news sites.
Are they pay-per-post-view, pay-per-title-view, pay-per-period, pay-per-click-in-post, or pay-per-action? And are there strict rules against commercial posts outside this system?
Every citizen should have a vote on every topic, which they would give to their representative to use on their behalf. For most mundane issues, the representative would cast the votes given to him, but at any time any citizen could take their vote from their representative and cast it any way they see fit.
Yes, direct democracy could be saved from the tyranny of the active minority if for each citizen who didn't vote on an issue, their elected representative was given such a proxy vote. But I'd make representatives' proxy votes only fractional, so that the system wasn't a dead duck unless 50-75% of citizens cast a ballot.
Consider the perspective of the sponsor: When you have a new product you're trying to sell, you need a way to communicate with your customer that it is in fact available for them to buy. Take something you obviously use for example: A personal computer. Now, while you yourself might be well informed about the market and build your own, the vast majority of any given business's potential customers aren't. Advertising is how you reach them.
Yes, even though advertising is intrinsically bad because it spins, we're a long way from a nirvana where independent editorial is that's perfectly informed about both the market and each person's needs is always affordably available, and where no vendor tries to get an artificial leg-up by advertising anyway. But if we're going to have advertising, there's plenty of better forms of it than paid placements in and around other media. Company websites and point-of-sale for example.
To cover the situation where a start-up is finding it hard to get coverage, I'd support (disclosed) payments that encourage publishers to review or otherwise write about products in their own words. This is much better than a foreign or native ad, where the payment gives the advertiser the right to their own spin.
And then of course, the perspective of the website: They pay actual people actual money to write their content. That money doesn't come in when people don't pay to view it, but it DOES have to come from somewhere. Thus, advertising works suitably.
Advertising is working more and more poorly for information sources. The alternative is to better capture the value that the content gives the users. Direct charging is only one way.
A contrary experience with Native Advertising in this comment. I wonder if that's because you're doing things differently, or just have a different audience demographic.
A contrary experience with Native Advertising in this comment. I wonder if that's because you're doing things differently, or just have a different audience demographic.
He's pointing out that people like security well enough, but they want to get stuff DONE even more, and that most people will take the calculated risk to be less secure if it makes them more productive at lower costs.
Also, too much security can backfire. I call this the Garbage Compacter Rule: In Star Wars it was too difficult to shut down all the garbage compacters on the detention level, so R2-D2 just shut them all down. Similarly, when you run up against a security system that's stopping you doing what you want, but it's hard to poke a hole in it, you sometimes just "shut them all down" to get some work done. You're left with less security than if the original block wasn't there.
Huh? I buy all my media at the local timely manor. Don't tell me you're forced to shop at some dump with poor opening hours.
It'll be on a torrent site 10 min after airing so you can watch it are you leisure.
Have hackers worked out how to rip CBS All Access streams?
I'm surprised that CBS All Access seems to be available here in Australia — the only country besides the US and Canada. But given the reports here that this subscription stream includes ads, I'd be hoping that they also made ad-free episodes available for individual or season purchase, in a timely manor.
Some ads on most news sites, such as Google ads, would already be matched to the article content. They would be reluctant to get rid of the rest, including direct campaigns by big brands that pay very well. My angle was that, contextual or not, people are less interested in ads when they're absorbed by the content, forcing those ads to be flashy (and Flash-y).
See, Slashdot doesn't author any new content. Their value, whether they realize it or not, is in the people who comment.
Slashdot without the comments is a rather pathetic news aggregator.
Aggregators still provide value through their summaries and editorial selection, although this value should be shared with the original sources (even if TFA isn't visited). Slashdot also has some original interviews.
There is an ad-free, paywall-free way for Slashdot to get paid for this article value, as well as from the value of user comments (which Slashdot can choose to share with comment authors).
I remember when Google first came out with their ads and they seemed innovative because they were simple text ads. At the time, the "common knowledge" was that you needed blinking Flash ads that played sound, triggered full screen video if the mouse cursor went anywhere near the ad, and spawed a dozen pop-up ads.
Google is lucky that their ads are nearly as interesting as their content (organic search results), and that their users are often in a buying mode. Contrast this with websites that offer quality content that is much more interesting than the (often irrelevant) ads around it. It's here that ads need to be garish to draw people away from the content. That's why I don't think "acceptable ads" would work for many websites. They have to learn how to earn more from their content rather than the spin around it.
Allow customers to make a single monthly payment, which would be distributed among participating websites according to some metric like pageviews or time-on-site.
Would these be voluntary payments like Flattr, or would the site be paywalled to non-payers? If the former, how many will pay just for the good vibes, or pay to remove ads that their ad-blocker is already removing? If the latter, how will they survive initially becoming invisible to most, including social sharers?
Blendle shows that a walled pay-per-article option (with refunds when you don't like what you get) can work for an agglomeration of quality articles. But participants risk losing existing subscribers to a system where they're just one source among many, drastically cutting their revenue.