I'm not taking sides and criticizing the blogger, but the reporter could have done a better job of explaining how a jury found him guilty and of what crime.
As the founding editor of startribune.com, I'm going to agree with you. The story doesn't take you by the hand, assuming that you know nothing whatsoever, and walk you gently through the facts. There's a significant backstory that isn't provided (or linked). The story doesn't explain the nature of civil proceedings (as distinct from criminal), which obviously is confusing many Slashdot commenters, including you.
I'm not picking on Abby Simons, the writer. These shortcomings aren't unusual. Most journalism -- print or online -- doesn't attempt to provide such context. In my view, this contributes to the general ignorance of the population, which journalism is supposed to alleviate.
A Web-centric report that was fully developed would link to previous coverage and external resources that explain the legal points that are at issue. Very little journalism, whether initiated on the Web or otherwise, is so Web-centric. We can blame time or other resources, or our ancient content management systems, or journalism education... the fact is that journalism is failing to fully inform a public that desperately needs a more coherent and comprehensive form of storytelling.
If you want to minimize, you can right-click the titlebar, then click minimize, or using ALT+F9.
There's no better way to say it: This decision is asinine and incredibly arrogant.
The change to the maximize function is... well, minimal. Double-clicking the menu bar is something that can be learned (although certainly confusing if you expect it to windowshade the window).
But killing miminize? Minimize is an important, frequently used function for anyone who does real-world work with multiple applications. Multiple screens are NOT a substitute. Anybody who thinks right-click/pick is an adequate substitute must not use a laptop. Clumsy, oafish interface.
I wasn't bothered when Ubuntu moved the close boxes around, because Gnome traditionally has followed a path of encouraging user customization, and I could easily move the controls back where I wanted them.
But if Gnome 3 removes the minimize button, it's dead to me.
Colossal waste of money. On so many decisions it seems like our president is taking advice from George Castanza and always doing the opposite of what makes good sense. With only a few exceptions all of the current Amtrak routes are money losers. Every ticket purchased on Amtrak from Los Angeles to New Orleans is subsidized by the taxpayer for over $400.
Link to a credible source, please.
And while you're at it, explain how air and highway transportation is not heavily subsidized with tax money. You can't, of course.
Transportation is so obviously important to the development of a nation that it's specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
Our biggest problem is an economy that's stagnating at the bottom of a curve. I don't mean to say deficit spending is good. It's not, in and of itself. But we're not going to budget-cut ourselves into a prosperous future. Investing in public infrastructure projects that deliver long-term benefits might be "tone deaf" from a tea party point of view, but it's sound policy.
If you're waiting for hardware manufacturers to give you free upgrades, you're going to be sorely disappointed. That's not their business. They want to sell more hardware. Buy a new phone.
But since Android is free, my T-Mobile Galaxy S Vibrant has been running Froyo since a few days after I bought it. I upgraded to a nice version of Froyo called Nero and I switched from Samsung's sucky, slow filesystem to Linux EXT4. I also installed VOIP software that lets me dial out without using T-Mobile minutes.
Nobody is going to hell, or even to jail, over this.
I had to install some software from the Android market, click a few things, take responsibility for what I was doing, download the new version, and reboot.
This article is stupid. It's comparing a single smartphone to an entire platform running on multiple smartphones. When you compare platforms, iOS is #1 in U.S. marketshare according to the recent Nielsen report.
Beware of what's being counted, and how.
The Nielsen report you cited lumps iPad users in with iPhone users. That's hardly a single platform; the iPad is far more akin to a laptop or netbook in terms of "mobility" than a smartphone. It's also based on Nielsen's Web usage monitoring, and it's well-known that iPad users are very heavy Web browsers -- mostly from home.
Overall, I find the tech "journalism" about this issue to be a dismal example of the innumeracy that mars much of the profession. Reading tech blogs, I can't tell what's being counted: Web unique users? Pageviews? Units sold? Units in a distribution pipeline? Activated smartphone accounts?
Each number has its own importance to different interested parties. Fanbois can pick the one that reinforces their word view. Those of us building mobile websites or applications need to know the difference between users and usage, and between the iPad and the iPhone.
What I've found, looking at (I am being very specific here) mobile Web pageview counts by users of pocket-sized devices connected to mobile networks, is that Android smartphones are racing way, way, way ahead of the iPhone.
I don't really care that some of the devices are made by Motorola and some by Samsung and some by LG, because I'm not fanboi-ing for any manufacturer; I'm just trying to understand how the mobile market is unfolding for planning purposes.
If I were planning to develop an app, that information would be an important factor in prioritizing my platform targeting. (I actually am persuaded by this and other data that standards-based HTML5 mobile Web, is the better place to focus.)
Incidentally, the same data set tells me that Blackberry users pretty much stick to email and barely show up on the mobile Web. Windows Mobile is every bit as dead as everybody expected.
Have you ever seen a secretary or someone who only knows word processors try to update a website? Things like image aspect ratio, alignment, links... it's a nightmare. How often have we all seen links to files that end up pointing at something like "H://server/files/xyz.pdf"?
Not to mention that using WYWIWYG in a browser to edit the content always end up as HTML spaghetti which isn't only invalid, but can barely display within the compliant framework of the website itself.
What are you talking about? Oh... you don't know.
Drupal has awesome image-manipulation tools and filters that can clean up even the most heinous WYSIWYG Microsoft paste-bombs.
We are deploying Drupal to all of our newspaper sites in order to enable everyone to update appropriate parts of our sites. Our journalists don't know, don't care, and don't need to know any HTML. Our images are automatically sized, thumbnailed, positioned, lightboxed. Our links are automatically managed and validated.
Drupal is as user-friendly as the sitebuilder cares to make it. This is possible because there's a huge global community of developers contributing improvements all the time. Drupal 7 introduces major UI improvements and API changes that need to be thoroughly understood by this community of coders, which is why the reviewed book is significant. It is definitely not a book for beginners, or for you.
So, it's a dumb-terminal that requires me to have constant access to the internet, can't store files, can't have actual programs installed on it.
Please catch up. It is not what you think.
It's not a dumb terminal, it doesn't require you to have constant access to the Internet (some apps require it, others don't), it can store data locally, and you can install programs. They're registered in the cloud, and if you log in and one is missing, it's quickly synchronized to the local device.
Understanding the significance of ChromeOS requires that you abandon some old ways of thinking about how a computer should act. Yes, you're "losing" the desktop and the file folders. You're also losing slow boot times, viruses, the risk of losing your data in hard drive crashes or device theft, and the occasional maddening discovery that you left a critically important file on a hard drive at home|school|work.
This may not be the device for you, but it may be the device for a lot of people. It's worth pointing out that over half a million people buy smartphones every day that also walk away from a mountain of desktop-computer annoyances.
... why are they not just making the OS free for all? The Hexeh Chromium builds have shown that it can run on a variety of hardware... I don't understand why Google is partnering with device manufacturers instead of just letting this into the wild for everyone...
The Hexxeh builds show that it is free for all. Problem solved.
The builds that will come preinstalled will be highly tuned and tightly bound to the particular hardware. That's how they manage to boot so quickly -- there's no probing. See this video (over a year old) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTFfl7AjNfI
I dread the amount of lag if everything ran off the internet. Programs such as Photoshop or Visual Studio would download every time instead of run immediately?
http://buytaert.net/microsoft-and-drupal (2007): "Last week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Microsoft and SpikeSource announced their intention to work together to certify a number of Open Source projects on the Microsoft Windows platform. According to the press release, Drupal is the first application that has been tested and certified for Microsoft Windows..."
... and it's REALLY easy to fix, without any action whatsoever on the part of the dealer. The manufacturer should disclose the use of GPL software, provide the license and create the mechanism by which a purchaser can request and obtain a copy of the source code.
GPL isn't onerous at all, and compliance is not difficult.
But there are boatloads of devices coming out of China that violate GPL due to sloppy practices on the part of the manufacturers. I have a Chinese Android tablet, for example, to which I can't obtain source code. That should never happen.
In this case, Telstra appears to be guilty of failure to exercise due diligence in its selection of vendors. It could fix the problem itself, but the best outcome would be for Telstra to knock some sense into the Chinese manufacturers. That would benefit us all.
If I live in a more developed country, why the fuck should I tolerate this? Being a sovereign nation means having the ability to regulate trade up to and including stopping it completely. Since, as you freely admit, foreign trade is utterly screwing us over, that sounds like a pretty good idea right now.
Because if you had to post on Slashdot using only domestically developed CPUs on domestic motherboards with domestic memory chips running domestic software communicating over domestic networking systems, speaking domestically developed languages and sharing domestically developed ideas, and so on and so forth, you'd be roasting wild squirrel over a cave fire and grunting.
Compared to a DVD remote, the Roku's is missing next and previous chapter buttons. When I'm watching a show, I like to jump past the opening credits, thank you.
It works differently with Netflix than you do with YouTube or Archive.org.
On the Netflix display, if you hit the Pause button, then the Fast Forward button, it'll fan out a series of still images representing scene changes.
I don't get any of that on the free channels. I have not yet tried Amazon. We're busy gorging on the all-you-can-eat Netflix.
I do not know if this is related to a different player, different encoding in the data stream, or both.
(I didn't know about this until my wife showed me. She's the one who tortures the remote until it reveals its secrets.)
Since I am from Europe that whole netflix and hulu-thing is beyond me. Why do you guys want to pay for this? You have torrents, youtube etc. What's on netflix or hulu that you just have to see
There are several big downsides to torrents:
* There's that nasty legality thing. * You have to dig through search engines, piles of spam, fake files, trojan-infected downloads and all sorts of crap to find anything. * It takes damned near forever to download. * Once it's downloaded it's on a computer, which means you have to hook up your computer to your TV set to watch it on the big screen. * After you download, your router is so slammed with torrent requests that you can't use the Internet for a week.
Or so I'm told.
With Netflix on my Roku, I just search or scroll through a library, click a selection, and seconds later it's on the HDTV. I can stop, back up, watch again, etc., as if it were local. The convenience is really impressive. And I got my laptop back.:-)
The library doesn't include everything under the sun, but it has some unusual stuff. The other day I watched a Thai-language martial arts film ("Chocolate.") And it's not just movies; there's a lot of TV. Last night I watched the old "Three Doctors" episode of Dr. Who, something I hadn't seen since the 1980s. Entire seasons of TV shows are neatly packaged.
My only real gripe against Netflix is that I can't watch it on my Ubuntu laptop when I'm traveling.
Hulu Plus works on Ubuntu, as does the free version. And Hulu Plus runs on Roku... but regular Hulu doesn't! This is a complete mess. And I'm not motivated to chuck in another $10/month when I already have more than I can watch with Netflix.
Every time there's a Slashdot post about ChromeOS there's immediately a rush of posts complaining that it won't work offline.
Slashdot is supposed to be news for nerds, not recent history for nerds... but SOME OF YOU GUYS ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION. Listen up. This is not 1999. You can come out of your bunker now.
Google introduced offline Web functionality in in 2007. Google Docs supported Google Gears, which made it possible to use the Google word processor on an airplane with no network connection at all. I've done it. It worked fine. When I reconnected, everything synchronized with the cloud.
In 2010-2011, you can write highly functional applications using HTML5 and Javascript, make them installable on your web browser, and have them work offline. Please stop assuming the Web is as it was when you were in junior high.
The reason for charging for subscriptions and at the news stand was to determine readership metrics.
This isn't historically accurate. The origin of periodical newspapers is largely tied to political organizations -- this is why even today you have newspapers with odd names like "Herald-Whig." Printing was extremely expensive, and even with organization subsidies, early newspapers had very high cover prices.
Advertising became dominant only after the introduction of rotary presses and mechanical typesetting, which enabled the rise of the so-called penny press and allowed newspapers to become commercially focused rather than being the arms of political groups.
Even so, circulation revenues typically account for one-fourth to one-third of total income at U.S. printed newspapers. The proportion varies significantly around the world. For the UK "quality" dailies, which have almost no classified ad revenue, circulation revenue as a percentage is higher. The UK dailies were charging a pound per weekday copy at a time when many US newspapers were charging a quarter.
From a print sense, Murdoch is basically imposing an Advert boycott on himself, which is insane from a business point of view.
One of the characteristics of print circulation revenue is that it's much less affected by economic cycles than ad revenue. During a severe recession, advertisers cut spending and newspapers suffer the consequences.
Circ revenue becomes far more interesting when you can't sell ads -- as in right now.
If we were in a strong economic cycle, I doubt that you'd see Murdoch putting up a paywall. As much as he bellows about principle, it's really just about the money. If it were about principle, he'd be charging for access to Foxnews.com and News.Sky.com.
Being an information reseller, as that what Murdoch is, is now much more nuanced, and finely grained.
I don't think there's any future in being an information reseller. There is a business in information creation. News organizations should be creating information (which is not the same as data). Unfortunately, what Murdoch's institutions create is too often not information or even news.
Slashdot Mirror
Or that Linux is ALREADY on their tablet.
Android is Linux. WebOS is Linux.
I'm not taking sides and criticizing the blogger, but the reporter could have done a better job of explaining how a jury found him guilty and of what crime.
As the founding editor of startribune.com, I'm going to agree with you. The story doesn't take you by the hand, assuming that you know nothing whatsoever, and walk you gently through the facts. There's a significant backstory that isn't provided (or linked). The story doesn't explain the nature of civil proceedings (as distinct from criminal), which obviously is confusing many Slashdot commenters, including you.
I'm not picking on Abby Simons, the writer. These shortcomings aren't unusual. Most journalism -- print or online -- doesn't attempt to provide such context. In my view, this contributes to the general ignorance of the population, which journalism is supposed to alleviate.
A Web-centric report that was fully developed would link to previous coverage and external resources that explain the legal points that are at issue. Very little journalism, whether initiated on the Web or otherwise, is so Web-centric. We can blame time or other resources, or our ancient content management systems, or journalism education ... the fact is that journalism is failing to fully inform a public that desperately needs a more coherent and comprehensive form of storytelling.
(sigh)
Civil case between individuals, not government prosecution. And quite possibly heading for reversal on appeal.
http://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2011/03/14/26584/johnny_northside_damn_right_were_appealing_60000_judgment
Somebody has a religious agenda here and it's definitely not me...
Of course not. Couldn't possibly be you. :-) But maybe you should look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco
There's no better way to say it: This decision is asinine and incredibly arrogant.
The change to the maximize function is ... well, minimal. Double-clicking the menu bar is something that can be learned (although certainly confusing if you expect it to windowshade the window).
But killing miminize? Minimize is an important, frequently used function for anyone who does real-world work with multiple applications. Multiple screens are NOT a substitute. Anybody who thinks right-click/pick is an adequate substitute must not use a laptop. Clumsy, oafish interface.
I wasn't bothered when Ubuntu moved the close boxes around, because Gnome traditionally has followed a path of encouraging user customization, and I could easily move the controls back where I wanted them.
But if Gnome 3 removes the minimize button, it's dead to me.
Did you bother reading the article?
Ah, you must be new here.
Colossal waste of money. On so many decisions it seems like our president is taking advice from George Castanza and always doing the opposite of what makes good sense. With only a few exceptions all of the current Amtrak routes are money losers. Every ticket purchased on Amtrak from Los Angeles to New Orleans is subsidized by the taxpayer for over $400.
Link to a credible source, please.
And while you're at it, explain how air and highway transportation is not heavily subsidized with tax money. You can't, of course.
Transportation is so obviously important to the development of a nation that it's specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
Our biggest problem is an economy that's stagnating at the bottom of a curve. I don't mean to say deficit spending is good. It's not, in and of itself. But we're not going to budget-cut ourselves into a prosperous future. Investing in public infrastructure projects that deliver long-term benefits might be "tone deaf" from a tea party point of view, but it's sound policy.
If you're confused by this, you shouldn't be allowed to use any technology more complex than a spoon.
If you're waiting for hardware manufacturers to give you free upgrades, you're going to be sorely disappointed. That's not their business. They want to sell more hardware. Buy a new phone.
But since Android is free, my T-Mobile Galaxy S Vibrant has been running Froyo since a few days after I bought it. I upgraded to a nice version of Froyo called Nero and I switched from Samsung's sucky, slow filesystem to Linux EXT4. I also installed VOIP software that lets me dial out without using T-Mobile minutes.
Nobody is going to hell, or even to jail, over this.
I had to install some software from the Android market, click a few things, take responsibility for what I was doing, download the new version, and reboot.
This article is stupid. It's comparing a single smartphone to an entire platform running on multiple smartphones. When you compare platforms, iOS is #1 in U.S. marketshare according to the recent Nielsen report.
Beware of what's being counted, and how.
The Nielsen report you cited lumps iPad users in with iPhone users. That's hardly a single platform; the iPad is far more akin to a laptop or netbook in terms of "mobility" than a smartphone. It's also based on Nielsen's Web usage monitoring, and it's well-known that iPad users are very heavy Web browsers -- mostly from home.
Overall, I find the tech "journalism" about this issue to be a dismal example of the innumeracy that mars much of the profession. Reading tech blogs, I can't tell what's being counted: Web unique users? Pageviews? Units sold? Units in a distribution pipeline? Activated smartphone accounts?
Each number has its own importance to different interested parties. Fanbois can pick the one that reinforces their word view. Those of us building mobile websites or applications need to know the difference between users and usage, and between the iPad and the iPhone.
What I've found, looking at (I am being very specific here) mobile Web pageview counts by users of pocket-sized devices connected to mobile networks, is that Android smartphones are racing way, way, way ahead of the iPhone.
I don't really care that some of the devices are made by Motorola and some by Samsung and some by LG, because I'm not fanboi-ing for any manufacturer; I'm just trying to understand how the mobile market is unfolding for planning purposes.
If I were planning to develop an app, that information would be an important factor in prioritizing my platform targeting. (I actually am persuaded by this and other data that standards-based HTML5 mobile Web, is the better place to focus.)
Incidentally, the same data set tells me that Blackberry users pretty much stick to email and barely show up on the mobile Web. Windows Mobile is every bit as dead as everybody expected.
" a new Turbo Boost mode that increases clock speeds dynamically "
Dynamically? I want my Turbo Boost button back. 66 megahertz or bust!
Have you ever seen a secretary or someone who only knows word processors try to update a website? Things like image aspect ratio, alignment, links... it's a nightmare. How often have we all seen links to files that end up pointing at something like "H://server/files/xyz.pdf"?
Not to mention that using WYWIWYG in a browser to edit the content always end up as HTML spaghetti which isn't only invalid, but can barely display within the compliant framework of the website itself.
What are you talking about? Oh... you don't know.
Drupal has awesome image-manipulation tools and filters that can clean up even the most heinous WYSIWYG Microsoft paste-bombs.
We are deploying Drupal to all of our newspaper sites in order to enable everyone to update appropriate parts of our sites. Our journalists don't know, don't care, and don't need to know any HTML. Our images are automatically sized, thumbnailed, positioned, lightboxed. Our links are automatically managed and validated.
Drupal is as user-friendly as the sitebuilder cares to make it. This is possible because there's a huge global community of developers contributing improvements all the time. Drupal 7 introduces major UI improvements and API changes that need to be thoroughly understood by this community of coders, which is why the reviewed book is significant. It is definitely not a book for beginners, or for you.
I really hope the Republicans make a civil rights issue out of this.
You must be new on this planet. Welcome to the circus!
Please catch up. It is not what you think.
It's not a dumb terminal, it doesn't require you to have constant access to the Internet (some apps require it, others don't), it can store data locally, and you can install programs. They're registered in the cloud, and if you log in and one is missing, it's quickly synchronized to the local device.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/offline.html
http://dev.w3.org/html5/webstorage/
http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/offline/storage/
http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/
Understanding the significance of ChromeOS requires that you abandon some old ways of thinking about how a computer should act. Yes, you're "losing" the desktop and the file folders. You're also losing slow boot times, viruses, the risk of losing your data in hard drive crashes or device theft, and the occasional maddening discovery that you left a critically important file on a hard drive at home|school|work.
This may not be the device for you, but it may be the device for a lot of people. It's worth pointing out that over half a million people buy smartphones every day that also walk away from a mountain of desktop-computer annoyances.
xmodmap -e "clear Lock"
If this doesn't work, get a real operating system.
... why are they not just making the OS free for all? The Hexeh Chromium builds have shown that it can run on a variety of hardware... I don't understand why Google is partnering with device manufacturers instead of just letting this into the wild for everyone...
The Hexxeh builds show that it is free for all. Problem solved.
The builds that will come preinstalled will be highly tuned and tightly bound to the particular hardware. That's how they manage to boot so quickly -- there's no probing. See this video (over a year old) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTFfl7AjNfI
I dread the amount of lag if everything ran off the internet. Programs such as Photoshop or Visual Studio would download every time instead of run immediately?
That's now how it works.
It's always dangerous to claim you're the first.
http://buytaert.net/microsoft-and-drupal (2007): "Last week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Microsoft and SpikeSource announced their intention to work together to certify a number of Open Source projects on the Microsoft Windows platform. According to the press release, Drupal is the first application that has been tested and certified for Microsoft Windows ..."
See also http://www.microsoft.com/web/drupal/
... and it's REALLY easy to fix, without any action whatsoever on the part of the dealer. The manufacturer should disclose the use of GPL software, provide the license and create the mechanism by which a purchaser can request and obtain a copy of the source code.
GPL isn't onerous at all, and compliance is not difficult.
But there are boatloads of devices coming out of China that violate GPL due to sloppy practices on the part of the manufacturers. I have a Chinese Android tablet, for example, to which I can't obtain source code. That should never happen.
In this case, Telstra appears to be guilty of failure to exercise due diligence in its selection of vendors. It could fix the problem itself, but the best outcome would be for Telstra to knock some sense into the Chinese manufacturers. That would benefit us all.
If I live in a more developed country, why the fuck should I tolerate this? Being a sovereign nation means having the ability to regulate trade up to and including stopping it completely. Since, as you freely admit, foreign trade is utterly screwing us over, that sounds like a pretty good idea right now.
Because if you had to post on Slashdot using only domestically developed CPUs on domestic motherboards with domestic memory chips running domestic software communicating over domestic networking systems, speaking domestically developed languages and sharing domestically developed ideas, and so on and so forth, you'd be roasting wild squirrel over a cave fire and grunting.
Human beings advance together or not at all.
Compared to a DVD remote, the Roku's is missing next and previous chapter buttons. When I'm watching a show, I like to jump past the opening credits, thank you.
It works differently with Netflix than you do with YouTube or Archive.org.
On the Netflix display, if you hit the Pause button, then the Fast Forward button, it'll fan out a series of still images representing scene changes.
I don't get any of that on the free channels. I have not yet tried Amazon. We're busy gorging on the all-you-can-eat Netflix.
I do not know if this is related to a different player, different encoding in the data stream, or both.
(I didn't know about this until my wife showed me. She's the one who tortures the remote until it reveals its secrets.)
Since I am from Europe that whole netflix and hulu-thing is beyond me. Why do you guys want to pay for this? You have torrents, youtube etc. What's on netflix or hulu that you just have to see
There are several big downsides to torrents:
* There's that nasty legality thing.
* You have to dig through search engines, piles of spam, fake files, trojan-infected downloads and all sorts of crap to find anything.
* It takes damned near forever to download.
* Once it's downloaded it's on a computer, which means you have to hook up your computer to your TV set to watch it on the big screen.
* After you download, your router is so slammed with torrent requests that you can't use the Internet for a week.
Or so I'm told.
With Netflix on my Roku, I just search or scroll through a library, click a selection, and seconds later it's on the HDTV. I can stop, back up, watch again, etc., as if it were local. The convenience is really impressive. And I got my laptop back. :-)
The library doesn't include everything under the sun, but it has some unusual stuff. The other day I watched a Thai-language martial arts film ("Chocolate.") And it's not just movies; there's a lot of TV. Last night I watched the old "Three Doctors" episode of Dr. Who, something I hadn't seen since the 1980s. Entire seasons of TV shows are neatly packaged.
My only real gripe against Netflix is that I can't watch it on my Ubuntu laptop when I'm traveling.
Hulu Plus works on Ubuntu, as does the free version. And Hulu Plus runs on Roku ... but regular Hulu doesn't! This is a complete mess. And I'm not motivated to chuck in another $10/month when I already have more than I can watch with Netflix.
Every time there's a Slashdot post about ChromeOS there's immediately a rush of posts complaining that it won't work offline.
Slashdot is supposed to be news for nerds, not recent history for nerds ... but SOME OF YOU GUYS ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION. Listen up.
This is not 1999. You can come out of your bunker now.
Google introduced offline Web functionality in in 2007. Google Docs supported Google Gears, which made it possible to use the Google word processor on an airplane with no network connection at all. I've done it. It worked fine. When I reconnected, everything synchronized with the cloud.
This concept has been reworked and is a part of the HTML5 standard. See http://www.w3.org/TR/offline-webapps/
In 2010-2011, you can write highly functional applications using HTML5 and Javascript, make them installable on your web browser, and have them work offline. Please stop assuming the Web is as it was when you were in junior high.
The reason for charging for subscriptions and at the news stand was to determine readership metrics.
This isn't historically accurate. The origin of periodical newspapers is largely tied to political organizations -- this is why even today you have newspapers with odd names like "Herald-Whig." Printing was extremely expensive, and even with organization subsidies, early newspapers had very high cover prices.
Advertising became dominant only after the introduction of rotary presses and mechanical typesetting, which enabled the rise of the so-called penny press and allowed newspapers to become commercially focused rather than being the arms of political groups.
Even so, circulation revenues typically account for one-fourth to one-third of total income at U.S. printed newspapers. The proportion varies significantly around the world. For the UK "quality" dailies, which have almost no classified ad revenue, circulation revenue as a percentage is higher. The UK dailies were charging a pound per weekday copy at a time when many US newspapers were charging a quarter.
From a print sense, Murdoch is basically imposing an Advert boycott on himself, which is insane from a business point of view.
One of the characteristics of print circulation revenue is that it's much less affected by economic cycles than ad revenue. During a severe recession, advertisers cut spending and newspapers suffer the consequences.
Circ revenue becomes far more interesting when you can't sell ads -- as in right now.
If we were in a strong economic cycle, I doubt that you'd see Murdoch putting up a paywall. As much as he bellows about principle, it's really just about the money. If it were about principle, he'd be charging for access to Foxnews.com and News.Sky.com.
Being an information reseller, as that what Murdoch is, is now much more nuanced, and finely grained.
I don't think there's any future in being an information reseller. There is a business in information creation. News organizations should be creating information (which is not the same as data). Unfortunately, what Murdoch's institutions create is too often not information or even news.