But let's also not forget that Apple doesn't *only* sell computers through their website. Granted that computers probably make up the majority of their sales (duh), but the fact remains that they also sell accessories (such as mice), Apple software, and third-party software. Such things can cost as little as $30 and do comply with the whole impulse-buying philosophy. Hell, in their press release, Apple even uses iMove 2 ($49) as an example of a good product to purchase using 1-Click.
Excellent point. I'd completely overlooked Apple's sales of devices other than their computers.
But the point is well-taken: why does Apple need one-click shopping? The idea of one-click is that it simplifes impulse purchases, which are generally small-dollar.
I, right now, would really like some Ben & Jerry's. If I could snap my fingers and some would appear, I'd do so. But what I actually need to do is put on my shoes, leave my apartment, walk about 3 blocks to a cash machine, another 4 blocks to the convenience store, and then buy some. Either way it costs me around $2.67. But I'm only interested in one method.
I would not use the former process to purchase, say, an Apple. I want to proceed carefully; there are few people for whom $2500 is a small expense.
It does seem like a really weird use of one-click.
This really disgusts me. First we're told by Mattel that we have to cease-and-desist (I've gotten good at spelling that in the past few months), given a little legal piece of paper that says that we are legally obliged, by the word of the court, to take down our websites.
Then we're told, months later, that the case-and-desist doesn't apply to us, because our names didn't specifically appear on that piece of paper. So do we have to abide by that piece of paper? Nobody's saying. But can we fight it? No, we can't. We are bound to a ruling over which we have no input. Parties, yet nonparties.
It seems plain to me this is abuse of the legal system on the part of Mattel/Microsystems. We're right back where we were, unsure if we're legally OK or not. I have no idea of where we'll go from here. But I do know that I'm more frustrated with the American legal system than I've ever been.
I figure pretty much anybody that gets a cease-and-desist should have a say in the resulting legal case. I guess that must be unreasonable, but I definitely don't understand why.
And you've got no right saying where your post "ought to be" - that's why not being allowed to moderate your own posts is a Good Thing (tm)
Sure I do. I shouldn't be able to moderate my own posts, but there's nothing wrong with my having an opinion about where my own post ought to be ranked. This post, for example, shouldn't be at a 5, or a 4, or a 3, or a 2, and quite probably not a 1. (But I can't do anything about that, though I expect that somebody else will.)
No, I wish. My karma's at 50. It's totally depressing.
BTW, thanks to whoever moderated my post down from +2 Funny to +1, Redundant. It really was redundant, and deserves no karma. Not to say that I shouldn't have posted it. But it ought to be a +1, right where it is.
"Peacefire's Bennett Haselton takes the prize for his fun with Cybersitter. Bennett started with this phrase: 'Gary Bauer is a staunch anti-homosexual conservative who sees the gay movement as absolutely pure fascism and thinks movies of men with men are the greatest terror.'
"After Cybersitter's keen filters attacked it, here's what came out: 'Gary Bauer is a staunch anti-conservative who sees the gay movement as absolutely pure and thinks movies of men with men are the greatest.'
Heads up: our name has changed to NTELOS.{com,net}. Yes, all caps (when used in print, at least).
I've stopped trying to keep up. It was CFW, as it was for the past 100 years. (Literally.) Then it was CFW/Intelos, and I got used to that. Then it was Intelos, and I've finally gotten used to that. But NTELOS? I've started writing my checks to "[I|In]telos."
It's not as bad as ":Cue:Cat:" (or whatever it is), I guess. But it is a little disppointing to see a long-successful company use a name that will be tired within 5 years, tops.
I've been looking at some of the companies that people have suggested (thanks, folks), but I haven't met much luck. Looks like a bunch of these companies don't actually provide ads ("inventory"), but do things like ROI analysis, CPM, ad management, etc. But that's really not useful without any actual ads.
Engage turned us down because they've got enough entertainment sites, and don't want any more. Too bad.
There are small places (ie, not enough money to actually have their own domain), but we need a company with 100% uptime, a fast network and the usual goodness.
It looks like all that's left is DoubleClick. I guess I'll get an estimate from them, but I've gotta be honest, it makes me feel...unclean. (And that's just from the estimate!)
I get my connections through Intelos, a Central Virginia provider. Though I have no gripes about the quality of service, I've got to say that even this relatively-small, regional provider has absolutely abysmal install times. They like to blame it on Sprint, but it's quite frequently not Sprint's fault.
I've had about half a dozen installs from Intelos, all have been at least a month late. One was five months later than the four weeks that was promised. I really pushed on them hard for my home install about six months ago, and found that my sales representative had never filed any of the paperwork, despite his repeated assurances that Sprint was just slowing things down. Unfortunately, it look four weeks to find that out.
My biggest suggestion is this: take notes Everytime that you talk to a potential provider, record the date and time, number that you talked to, name of who you talked to, and what you talked about, complete with quotes. I've hit dead-ends so many times because I can't tell the Latrinas from the Britannys after a while. And it's assumed that I'm lying if I can't tell them the exact date, time and individual. Don't be a pushover.
If you do this, and behave like a complete asshole, you'll probably get good results.
Surely there are local businesses in your area that have websites...
And surely those businesses would *love* some attention from people who browse through your site...
You know, you're right, and I've actually spent a great deal of time doing some legwork on this. The first problem is that we get viewers from around the world, though mostly from the US. Because the site is a band fan site, we don't get traffic from any one geographic area within the US, so there aren't any obvious businesses to sell to.
Because our site has hundreds of pages (soon to have thousands of dynamically-generated pages), ad space would be a lot of work to administer and sell. And those of us that work on the site (~13 of us) don't have the time or the resources to be selling ad space.
I do think that there are a heck of a lot of sites that could do quite well with the system that you describe, and it's too bad that more sites don't take advantage of that system. I just don't think that we're one of them.
I think so, and I'll be posting (with permission) your e-mail and threads responses and thoughts in subsequent columns.
This isn't a flame. Really. I'm wondering why Katz needs to post our e-mail and "threads responses." Don't we have this whole fancy messaging system just so that isn't necessary?
:) Sorry about that -- generally, by the time that people get to the site, they know just why they're there. Still, in case people stumble across it, I guess it wouldn't kill us to write "Dave Matthews Band" on there somewhere. Consider the suggestion taken.
I've got a problem with that right now. A site that I operate, nancies.org, serves up about 600,000 pageviews each month. But we're regularly credited by 24/7 Media (aka ContentZone) for just over 400,000. But they don't give two shakes for our logs, and say that we just have to trust them. That's like the U.S. government saying, regarding carnivore, "trust us."
BS. So I applied to Engage (formerly Flycast) last night to get our ads through them. Are they any better? I have no idea. But I do know that ContentZone is screwing us over, and that's incentive enough for me.
Wow, do us a favor and don't link to articles that ask for money to read them. The NYT sign up thing I can deal with. But $5 for temporary access to one article? No thanks.
In the same way that a pound of gold is smaller than a pound of feathers, a 2-million-sun black hole is much smaller than 2 million suns.
What's even more interesting is that an ounce of gold is actually heavier than an ounce of feathers.
Gold is divided into Troy ounces, and there are 12 Troy ounces in a pound. As a result, 1/12 of a pound is a Troy ounce, being heavier than 1/16 of a pound, an ounce.
I'm frustrated by Wired on-line's unwillingness to cover this story. Not a peep out of them. They're supposed to be disconnected in all ways from the print version, so why won't they do a story on this?
I've e-mailed them twice about this, but I'm yet to receive a response. I assume that they really are tied to the print version still, and they're simply not allowed to write about it. Still, I guess I've come to expect more of Wired. I never thought I'd see the day when C|Net was proved to be a more useful news resource than Wired.
I took an NT machine, used partition magic to move NT over and installed 6.2 without incident. Trivial. Both boot flawlessly. This was a scsi system too.
Wow, that sounds great. It's too bad that PartitionMagic costs $60! But I see that Caldera comes with Partition Magic for $29.95 on Outpost. Tempting!
You know as well as I do that there's about 2 people in the world that have bought a Linux desktop system and thought "damnit, I've gotta get me some Windows on here" that didn't know how to go about doing it.
Further, to have a goal to only be as good as Windows is quite unfortunate. I think we should be (and are) shooting a little higher than that.
I tried, for the first time, to install RedHat alongside Windows this past weekend. I was appalled to find that the RedHat 6.1 installer wasn't able to do a non-destructive repartition, nor did it play well with Windows after I did so by hand. I tried and tried to get LILO (I have no experience with it, but I read every related HOWTO and FAQ) to recognize Windows, even popping my head into #linpeople for help, but I got nowhere. I eventually uninstalled Linux and apologized to the victim, my girlfriend, who is now somewhat less than impressed with Linux.
Of course, it's my fault that I couldn't get things running right, but this seems like a no-brainer for RedHat. They need to get the rights to (or make) a disk optimizing utility and a non-destructive repartitioning utility. So here's my question: does 7.0 incorporate this? For folks like my girlfriend that just want to try Linux, not go whole-hog, the 6.1 setup is ludicrous. As a 5-year Linux user, I should have known how to do this. As a brand-new user, there's no possible way that she would be able to install RedHat. How can we hope to get more widespread use of Linux without comfortable, flexible, reasonable installers?
Y'all might be interested in the Fast Company article that's somewhat related, entitled "They Write the Right Stuff." I believe that there was mention of this on/. some months back. It's about the computers that actually control the shuttle and the process of writing that software. Pretty hard-core.
For me, it's a real bummer to have my karma only go down. Additionally, it ends any incentive, for those who rely on numbers for such things, to make positive contributions to the/. community. Though I must admit that the overall desire to engage in interesting conversation is my main goal in participating in Slashdot, I do find that a general score serves as a good overview of my contributions. (Question the usefulness and accuracy of the existing system as you will.)
Also, I do feel like the rules were changed in the middle of the game. I was playing by the rules, doing fairly well, and then they were just yanked out. My uncle won a silver in the Olympics (hockey) in the 70s. The rules of hockey were changed after the game but before the award ceremony (I must admit that I know virtually nothing about hockey), and he was only give a bronze. I guess I feel sort of like that, in a small way.
Can I expect that my relatively-simple chrooted named setup will be a simple upgrade? I can't really afford to screw around with my name server (who can?), but it's the kind of thing that I'd definitely screw up, given the opportunity.:)
-Waldo
Slashdot Mirror
But let's also not forget that Apple doesn't *only* sell computers through their website. Granted that computers probably make up the majority of their sales (duh), but the fact remains that they also sell accessories (such as mice), Apple software, and third-party software. Such things can cost as little as $30 and do comply with the whole impulse-buying philosophy. Hell, in their press release, Apple even uses iMove 2 ($49) as an example of a good product to purchase using 1-Click.
Excellent point. I'd completely overlooked Apple's sales of devices other than their computers.
-Waldo
But the point is well-taken: why does Apple need one-click shopping? The idea of one-click is that it simplifes impulse purchases, which are generally small-dollar.
I, right now, would really like some Ben & Jerry's. If I could snap my fingers and some would appear, I'd do so. But what I actually need to do is put on my shoes, leave my apartment, walk about 3 blocks to a cash machine, another 4 blocks to the convenience store, and then buy some. Either way it costs me around $2.67. But I'm only interested in one method.
I would not use the former process to purchase, say, an Apple. I want to proceed carefully; there are few people for whom $2500 is a small expense.
It does seem like a really weird use of one-click.
-Waldo
This really disgusts me. First we're told by Mattel that we have to cease-and-desist (I've gotten good at spelling that in the past few months), given a little legal piece of paper that says that we are legally obliged, by the word of the court, to take down our websites.
Then we're told, months later, that the case-and-desist doesn't apply to us, because our names didn't specifically appear on that piece of paper. So do we have to abide by that piece of paper? Nobody's saying. But can we fight it? No, we can't. We are bound to a ruling over which we have no input. Parties, yet nonparties.
It seems plain to me this is abuse of the legal system on the part of Mattel/Microsystems. We're right back where we were, unsure if we're legally OK or not. I have no idea of where we'll go from here. But I do know that I'm more frustrated with the American legal system than I've ever been.
I figure pretty much anybody that gets a cease-and-desist should have a say in the resulting legal case. I guess that must be unreasonable, but I definitely don't understand why.
-Waldo
cp.waldo.net
And you've got no right saying where your post "ought to be" - that's why not being allowed to moderate your own posts is a Good Thing (tm)
Sure I do. I shouldn't be able to moderate my own posts, but there's nothing wrong with my having an opinion about where my own post ought to be ranked. This post, for example, shouldn't be at a 5, or a 4, or a 3, or a 2, and quite probably not a 1. (But I can't do anything about that, though I expect that somebody else will.)
That didn't feel so wrong.
-Waldo
No applications from Adobe? How about FrameMaker?
-Waldo
No, I wish. My karma's at 50. It's totally depressing.
BTW, thanks to whoever moderated my post down from +2 Funny to +1, Redundant. It really was redundant, and deserves no karma. Not to say that I shouldn't have posted it. But it ought to be a +1, right where it is.
-Waldo
This has had me laughing all day:
"Peacefire's Bennett Haselton takes the prize for his fun with Cybersitter. Bennett started with this phrase: 'Gary Bauer is a staunch anti-homosexual conservative who sees the gay movement as absolutely pure fascism and thinks movies of men with men are the greatest terror.'
"After Cybersitter's keen filters attacked it, here's what came out: 'Gary Bauer is a staunch anti-conservative who sees the gay movement as absolutely pure and thinks movies of men with men are the greatest.'
-Waldo
You own your post, whether or not they remove it. I see no violation of that copyright.
-Waldo
Heads up: our name has changed to NTELOS.{com,net}. Yes, all caps (when used in print, at least).
I've stopped trying to keep up. It was CFW, as it was for the past 100 years. (Literally.) Then it was CFW/Intelos, and I got used to that. Then it was Intelos, and I've finally gotten used to that. But NTELOS? I've started writing my checks to "[I|In]telos."
It's not as bad as ":Cue:Cat:" (or whatever it is), I guess. But it is a little disppointing to see a long-successful company use a name that will be tired within 5 years, tops.
-Waldo
I've been looking at some of the companies that people have suggested (thanks, folks), but I haven't met much luck. Looks like a bunch of these companies don't actually provide ads ("inventory"), but do things like ROI analysis, CPM, ad management, etc. But that's really not useful without any actual ads.
Engage turned us down because they've got enough entertainment sites, and don't want any more. Too bad.
There are small places (ie, not enough money to actually have their own domain), but we need a company with 100% uptime, a fast network and the usual goodness.
It looks like all that's left is DoubleClick. I guess I'll get an estimate from them, but I've gotta be honest, it makes me feel...unclean. (And that's just from the estimate!)
-Waldo
I get my connections through Intelos, a Central Virginia provider. Though I have no gripes about the quality of service, I've got to say that even this relatively-small, regional provider has absolutely abysmal install times. They like to blame it on Sprint, but it's quite frequently not Sprint's fault.
I've had about half a dozen installs from Intelos, all have been at least a month late. One was five months later than the four weeks that was promised. I really pushed on them hard for my home install about six months ago, and found that my sales representative had never filed any of the paperwork, despite his repeated assurances that Sprint was just slowing things down. Unfortunately, it look four weeks to find that out.
My biggest suggestion is this: take notes Everytime that you talk to a potential provider, record the date and time, number that you talked to, name of who you talked to, and what you talked about, complete with quotes. I've hit dead-ends so many times because I can't tell the Latrinas from the Britannys after a while. And it's assumed that I'm lying if I can't tell them the exact date, time and individual. Don't be a pushover.
If you do this, and behave like a complete asshole, you'll probably get good results.
-Waldo
Surely there are local businesses in your area that have websites...
And surely those businesses would *love* some attention from people who browse through your site...
You know, you're right, and I've actually spent a great deal of time doing some legwork on this. The first problem is that we get viewers from around the world, though mostly from the US. Because the site is a band fan site, we don't get traffic from any one geographic area within the US, so there aren't any obvious businesses to sell to.
Because our site has hundreds of pages (soon to have thousands of dynamically-generated pages), ad space would be a lot of work to administer and sell. And those of us that work on the site (~13 of us) don't have the time or the resources to be selling ad space.
I do think that there are a heck of a lot of sites that could do quite well with the system that you describe, and it's too bad that more sites don't take advantage of that system. I just don't think that we're one of them.
-Waldo
How do you know that they are lying?
Because we get paid based on views, not on clickthroughs. No iframes, just an img src tag. I count many more views than they count.
-Waldo
I think so, and I'll be posting (with permission) your e-mail and threads responses and thoughts in subsequent columns.
This isn't a flame. Really. I'm wondering why Katz needs to post our e-mail and "threads responses." Don't we have this whole fancy messaging system just so that isn't necessary?
-Waldo
:) Sorry about that -- generally, by the time that people get to the site, they know just why they're there. Still, in case people stumble across it, I guess it wouldn't kill us to write "Dave Matthews Band" on there somewhere. Consider the suggestion taken.
-Waldo
I've got a problem with that right now. A site that I operate, nancies.org, serves up about 600,000 pageviews each month. But we're regularly credited by 24/7 Media (aka ContentZone) for just over 400,000. But they don't give two shakes for our logs, and say that we just have to trust them. That's like the U.S. government saying, regarding carnivore, "trust us."
BS. So I applied to Engage (formerly Flycast) last night to get our ads through them. Are they any better? I have no idea. But I do know that ContentZone is screwing us over, and that's incentive enough for me.
-Waldo
Wow, do us a favor and don't link to articles that ask for money to read them. The NYT sign up thing I can deal with. But $5 for temporary access to one article? No thanks.
-Waldo
In the same way that a pound of gold is smaller than a pound of feathers, a 2-million-sun black hole is much smaller than 2 million suns.
What's even more interesting is that an ounce of gold is actually heavier than an ounce of feathers.
Gold is divided into Troy ounces, and there are 12 Troy ounces in a pound. As a result, 1/12 of a pound is a Troy ounce, being heavier than 1/16 of a pound, an ounce.
Totally off-topic, but still vaguely interesting.
-Waldo
I'm frustrated by Wired on-line's unwillingness to cover this story. Not a peep out of them. They're supposed to be disconnected in all ways from the print version, so why won't they do a story on this?
I've e-mailed them twice about this, but I'm yet to receive a response. I assume that they really are tied to the print version still, and they're simply not allowed to write about it. Still, I guess I've come to expect more of Wired. I never thought I'd see the day when C|Net was proved to be a more useful news resource than Wired.
-Waldo
I took an NT machine, used partition magic to move NT over and installed 6.2 without incident. Trivial. Both boot flawlessly. This was a scsi system too.
Wow, that sounds great. It's too bad that PartitionMagic costs $60! But I see that Caldera comes with Partition Magic for $29.95 on Outpost. Tempting!
-Waldo
You know as well as I do that there's about 2 people in the world that have bought a Linux desktop system and thought "damnit, I've gotta get me some Windows on here" that didn't know how to go about doing it.
Further, to have a goal to only be as good as Windows is quite unfortunate. I think we should be (and are) shooting a little higher than that.
-Waldo
I tried, for the first time, to install RedHat alongside Windows this past weekend. I was appalled to find that the RedHat 6.1 installer wasn't able to do a non-destructive repartition, nor did it play well with Windows after I did so by hand. I tried and tried to get LILO (I have no experience with it, but I read every related HOWTO and FAQ) to recognize Windows, even popping my head into #linpeople for help, but I got nowhere. I eventually uninstalled Linux and apologized to the victim, my girlfriend, who is now somewhat less than impressed with Linux.
Of course, it's my fault that I couldn't get things running right, but this seems like a no-brainer for RedHat. They need to get the rights to (or make) a disk optimizing utility and a non-destructive repartitioning utility. So here's my question: does 7.0 incorporate this? For folks like my girlfriend that just want to try Linux, not go whole-hog, the 6.1 setup is ludicrous. As a 5-year Linux user, I should have known how to do this. As a brand-new user, there's no possible way that she would be able to install RedHat. How can we hope to get more widespread use of Linux without comfortable, flexible, reasonable installers?
-Waldo
Y'all might be interested in the Fast Company article that's somewhat related, entitled "They Write the Right Stuff." I believe that there was mention of this on /. some months back. It's about the computers that actually control the shuttle and the process of writing that software. Pretty hard-core.
-Waldo
For me, it's a real bummer to have my karma only go down. Additionally, it ends any incentive, for those who rely on numbers for such things, to make positive contributions to the /. community. Though I must admit that the overall desire to engage in interesting conversation is my main goal in participating in Slashdot, I do find that a general score serves as a good overview of my contributions. (Question the usefulness and accuracy of the existing system as you will.)
Also, I do feel like the rules were changed in the middle of the game. I was playing by the rules, doing fairly well, and then they were just yanked out. My uncle won a silver in the Olympics (hockey) in the 70s. The rules of hockey were changed after the game but before the award ceremony (I must admit that I know virtually nothing about hockey), and he was only give a bronze. I guess I feel sort of like that, in a small way.
JM2C.
-Waldo
Can I expect that my relatively-simple chrooted named setup will be a simple upgrade? I can't really afford to screw around with my name server (who can?), but it's the kind of thing that I'd definitely screw up, given the opportunity. :)
-Waldo