As someone in TV, I can tell you wholeheartedly that no, they are not. Our advertising projection and target for the next fiscal year is higher than last year -- but so are online projections (by a factor close to double). We're seeing more advertising clients that want to advertise both on TV and online for higher.
Local businesses are advertising less on the cheap, fringe stations and seem to be going back to the larger, more dominant stations even if they are more expensive per second of airtime.
Great. So users will start using it and get tired of bugs and paying for a service. They then cancel, only to find their files locked away in a proprietary service they have no control over. With an operating system, you can always reinstall and hopefully recover you files that way.
I think Ross will quickly find that name recognition alone won't get you very far.
At least with the.Mac online service, you know Apple won't suddenly fold and delete your files. Startups are a dime-a-dozen.
What were they supposed to do, write a transcript so you could read it with Lynx? Or maybe offer the entire video is an animated GIF?
Not everything can be fully accessible to everyone.
I'd wager that having it as Flash video makes it more accessible to more people than say, embedding it with other proprietary video software like Windows Media Player or Real Player, or even offering the file for direct download using some codec that you assume everyone has (not everyone can offer 10 different encoded videos so you can watch it on fringe systems). Flash video is, fortunately or unfortunately, the lowest common denominator across the widest variety of systems at this point.
We have the checks and balances, he just seems to be ignoring them. The Executive Branch is designed to enforce laws and represent the government as a whole. Bush, through a frightening number of executive orders, is ignoring the legislative process where laws are debated, written, and rewritten in the Legislative Branch. What I don't understand is why Congress, even under Republican control, isn't reprimanding the President for this behavior--afterall, he is effectively taking away their need to legislate things of national importance.
The GOP should be outraged as well. The focus is entirely on the President, who will become largely irrelevant in two years. They should be allowing the Legislature to work at full capacity and bring forth some new stars for the party. Having no attention on potential candidates will make public exposure of new candidates more difficult.
Norton has been using hacks in win32 from day 1, and I'm sure they'll use them again this time around. I just hope Microsoft closes them as quickly as Norton exploits them -- the same holes that Norton uses will be the same holes that viruses use.
Windows Update is being phased out and will be fully replaced with Microsoft Update, which will be expanded to provide updates for all Microsoft programs. Office updates will then become as routine as operating system ones.
If you produce more power than you need, though, you can sell the excess to the grid.
I didn't mean that every Google facility would be "off the grid", but reducing their reliance on grid power can insulate their energy demands during energy spikes and can smooth out their energy costs.
There is no short term goal, but mid- or long-term goal is clear. If Google can produce much of its own green, renewable, sustainable energy, they will become more profitable, particularly if energy costs skyrocket. Other search engines that rely on the grid will suffer.
If Google succeeds and helps engineer more efficient power production or conservation methods, they will have opened up a new business model, too: selling green technology and possibly selling power, both of which can net Google a lot of cash.
I should have clarified that my post was regarding PC demos, not XBox360 demos (which are generally pretty damn sweet). PC makers seem to use demos to test out their engine and platform choices on consumers instead of doing some good testing themselves.
Bad games with good demos won't sell, as you point out with the zombie-in-the-mall demo.
The problem with game ratings is they aren't fair or useful. What, exactly, is the difference between a 92% and a 93%? In order for them to be accurate and useful, game reviewers should be using the entire scope of their scale, not just the middle and top. A really bad game shouldn't get a 60% -- it should get a 10%. An average game shouldn't get 85%, it should get 50%.
Similarly, various review sites use category-based ratings, for instance, graphics are rated separately from sound effects. The game might have a low graphic, sound, and gameplay, but get a good overall grade. That doesn't make sense and they usually justify it in their review text by saying "We felt the average score of 80% just wasn't enough, so we're giving it an overall score of 90%." Why? If everything was so bad, your scores should back it up.
These and many other reasons are making game reviews less relevant and more like blog posts than concrete reviews.
Perhaps demo consoles in stores work, but that's only because they give you the full game.
Downloadable demos are notoriously bad. Game companies hack their game apart to coble to together a demo and shove it out the door. They don't give a crap about bugs, and a demo appears to be a complete afterthought.
Game studios should plan for a demo in advance. Having some bugs is acceptable, but too many will turn your users away from your game. I played the Caesar IV demo and refuse to buy the full game because of their demo. The installation process was brutal and completely retarded (for instance, I have DirectX 9.0c installed, but their demo installer insisted on uninstalling my DirectX and installing a fresh, unpatched copy of DirectX 9.0c, requiring no less than 3 reboots; it installed the.NET 2.0 framework, again, unpatched, installed an outdated version of MSXML parser, and disassociated my.NET file extensions so.cs files would no longer open in my editor by default).
Make a good demo and you'll see even better sales figures.
By not enforcing the patents earlier, yes, SGI should forfeit their right to pursue violators in the legal system. You can't just sit back and wait for a company to turn profitable and be on the verge of a $4.2B takeover before suing them.
I used to be a big RAC seller. It was great for a while, I hit the top 10 (as #10), had a perfect score, and thousands of $$ earned. As a US-based worker, English was my best tool available. A lot of US-based shops were very xenophobic, and perhaps rightfully so. I made more money off of failed outsourced projects than anything. I rarely saw any good work out of the foreign shops (usually India, although there were some eastern European ones, too). When it did work, it only did what the original project had asked for, and in the shortest, messiest route. Expanding one of their projects was almost impossible -- no scalability or future design in mind.
Rent-a-coder lost it for me when I bid on three projects over the course of three months. Two of them alone would be been fine, however, Rent-a-coder permitted the buyers to accept months-old bids. I was away at the time and missed my 24-hours to decline the project. I ended up with 3 concurrent projects with altered scopes (much larger than the original bid had been for), but Rent-a-coder leans toward the buyers, not the sellers, in disputes.
Despite my attempts, my account's cred was lost within a week due to the stupidity of the RAC system. This was about two years ago, so it may have changed.
On the up side, I did find a few very nice clients through RAC projects. Dazzle the right guy and you won't need to go through RAC anymore. I got a 2-year consulting contract out of a $500 project, made a few good friends, got a few free trips from helping an unnamed travel website, etc.
So, if you're going to do it, beware that you can find yourself royally screwed. If you're a native English speaker, that is your best asset -- advertise it, use it! Do not paste a form letter. Most buyers would rather see a short 1 paragraph response saying "Yeah, I can do that!" rather than a 6 paragraph form letter explaining what should be in your resume section, not your bid forms.
Another thing to be wary of is if you are a college student. Helping another college student on their homework through RAC is likely a violation of your school regulations, e.g., cheating. $50 is not worth possible punishment for both you and the person you're "helping".
When your company makes a single product, you cannot complain when that product is no longer relevant. They should have diversified when they had the capital to do so.
Also, Symantec and every other virus scanner makes use of non-approved APIs in win32. They were not documented, and not approved for the use that security companies gave them. Vista is finally removing deprecated APIs and replacing them with documented, hopefully bug-free versions. They have said numerous times in their blogs and elsewhere that they will help existing companies convert existing API calls into standard calls. Symantec et all are complaining because they make such liberal use of these APIs that they are facing a huge challenge to get their product on the market quickly, if at all.
Note that one-time file scanners will still work, e.g., what your e-mail client does with received messages. That can all run just fine in user space. The pervasiveness of anti virus clients, though, would require complete administrator access, something Microsoft has been trying to get rid of for every day use (as they should!). If you allow Anti virus software to run in administrator mode while in user mode, you also open the door to viruses easily being able to do the same.
Did they run out of ironic program and directive names? I mean, come on. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12? What about Security Initiative for the Protection and Valid Identification of Selected Individuals for the Protection of Families and Children of America? No one could say no to that!
In all the upcoming legal battles, will YouTube be able to fend off hungry media empires? I honestly doubt it. Napster didn't protect users, either, but they still got slammed (and appropriately, at that). YouTube is a party to massive copyright infringement, even if they didn't upload the clip themselves. It is obvious that YouTube knows that there is a plethora of copyrighted work in their system, and they continue to profit from it even if they do remove it.
Analogy: If a store knowingly sells bootleg DVDs and the MPAA comes along and says "Hey, stop!" the store won't get off by simply saying "Woops, my bad." and remove the offending DVD, particularly if they make the MPAA notify them of every bootleg DVD the store has in stock and the store kept selling new bootlegs. They'd get sued, and sued hard.
YouTube's best bet, in my opinion, is to strike a deal with the media companies. The media companies agree not to bring suits against YouTube or YouTube users, and in return, they get context-sensitive advertising. Are you watching a clip from last week's Simpsons episode? Then the ads would go to FOX-approved advertisers to buy boxed DVDs or high-quality downloadable episodes. However, based on the lack of forsight by most media groups, I doubt this would happen very quickly.
Great post -- more thought provoking than my parent post had intended.
I hope and suspect that Google is already in talks with the major media conglomerates in order to work out a deal with them. I imagine something along the lines of "Don't sue us or make us take down copyrighted stuff and we'll link those copyrighted pages so users can easily purchase the originals from you." It's pretty smart, actually. A lot of the copyrighted stuff on YouTube people watch only because it is free -- and easy to pick and choose. If you don't like something, simply press the back button.
I am betting Google will teach the mass media companies a thing or two about the Internet and how they can benefit from everything--including IP theft.
It doesn't matter, though, since the distribution of toolbars is not uniform across all Internet users. A good example is the website I work on. We know our traffic, yet Alexa under-reports us. We also know a local competitor's traffic -- both sets of numbers are generally public information that advertisers use. They have a nice site but get about 1/2 of our traffic, yet Alexa over-reports them over us by a factor of 3-4.
You can pull accurate statistics if and only if your data points are distributed correctly. Because Alexa has no way to randomly and accurately assign toolbars to users, their data is not reliable in any form.
A similar example is how political polls are taken. You can get accurate numbers with 1,000 adults if, and only if, those 1,000 are random throughout the entire population. You can skew the poll numbers by polling 1,000 Democrats or Republicans only instead of 1,000 random. Your results are only accurate to your surveyed population -- in Alexa's case, their numbers are only accurate so far as "Rank ### amongst Internet Explorer 6.0 users who speak a limited number of languages who have voluntarily installed our toolbar to submit their surfing habits to us for analysis and are subjected to trade secret methods of ranking".
The only way that you could pull accurate numbers would be through all ISPs selecting random data points to find what hostnames people were using. It would have to be filtered, though, to produce accurate numbers in terms of actual "website hits" instead of just "website requests". Keep-alive would further impede accurate results. As would proxies, DNS caches, and HOSTS files.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone in TV, I can tell you wholeheartedly that no, they are not. Our advertising projection and target for the next fiscal year is higher than last year -- but so are online projections (by a factor close to double). We're seeing more advertising clients that want to advertise both on TV and online for higher.
Local businesses are advertising less on the cheap, fringe stations and seem to be going back to the larger, more dominant stations even if they are more expensive per second of airtime.
Sorry, I was going mostly off of comments and not TFA (couldn't load when I posted), which now loads. Go figure.
Had enough bookmark sites? Heh.
As long as I can use the service to easily sync my Firefox profiles between home and work, I'd be happy even with data lock in potentials.
Great. So users will start using it and get tired of bugs and paying for a service. They then cancel, only to find their files locked away in a proprietary service they have no control over. With an operating system, you can always reinstall and hopefully recover you files that way.
.Mac online service, you know Apple won't suddenly fold and delete your files. Startups are a dime-a-dozen.
I think Ross will quickly find that name recognition alone won't get you very far.
At least with the
What were they supposed to do, write a transcript so you could read it with Lynx? Or maybe offer the entire video is an animated GIF?
Not everything can be fully accessible to everyone.
I'd wager that having it as Flash video makes it more accessible to more people than say, embedding it with other proprietary video software like Windows Media Player or Real Player, or even offering the file for direct download using some codec that you assume everyone has (not everyone can offer 10 different encoded videos so you can watch it on fringe systems). Flash video is, fortunately or unfortunately, the lowest common denominator across the widest variety of systems at this point.
Officer workers don't care what their system has as long as it can run (a) solitare and (b) popcap games.
Particularly government workers.
What can be seen or heard can be copied, no matter how difficult you make it.
We have the checks and balances, he just seems to be ignoring them. The Executive Branch is designed to enforce laws and represent the government as a whole. Bush, through a frightening number of executive orders, is ignoring the legislative process where laws are debated, written, and rewritten in the Legislative Branch. What I don't understand is why Congress, even under Republican control, isn't reprimanding the President for this behavior--afterall, he is effectively taking away their need to legislate things of national importance.
The GOP should be outraged as well. The focus is entirely on the President, who will become largely irrelevant in two years. They should be allowing the Legislature to work at full capacity and bring forth some new stars for the party. Having no attention on potential candidates will make public exposure of new candidates more difficult.
Norton has been using hacks in win32 from day 1, and I'm sure they'll use them again this time around. I just hope Microsoft closes them as quickly as Norton exploits them -- the same holes that Norton uses will be the same holes that viruses use.
Windows Update is being phased out and will be fully replaced with Microsoft Update, which will be expanded to provide updates for all Microsoft programs. Office updates will then become as routine as operating system ones.
That's what you get for hiring a furniture store for your quality assurance department.
If you produce more power than you need, though, you can sell the excess to the grid.
I didn't mean that every Google facility would be "off the grid", but reducing their reliance on grid power can insulate their energy demands during energy spikes and can smooth out their energy costs.
There is no short term goal, but mid- or long-term goal is clear. If Google can produce much of its own green, renewable, sustainable energy, they will become more profitable, particularly if energy costs skyrocket. Other search engines that rely on the grid will suffer.
If Google succeeds and helps engineer more efficient power production or conservation methods, they will have opened up a new business model, too: selling green technology and possibly selling power, both of which can net Google a lot of cash.
I should have clarified that my post was regarding PC demos, not XBox360 demos (which are generally pretty damn sweet). PC makers seem to use demos to test out their engine and platform choices on consumers instead of doing some good testing themselves.
Bad games with good demos won't sell, as you point out with the zombie-in-the-mall demo.
The problem with game ratings is they aren't fair or useful. What, exactly, is the difference between a 92% and a 93%? In order for them to be accurate and useful, game reviewers should be using the entire scope of their scale, not just the middle and top. A really bad game shouldn't get a 60% -- it should get a 10%. An average game shouldn't get 85%, it should get 50%.
Similarly, various review sites use category-based ratings, for instance, graphics are rated separately from sound effects. The game might have a low graphic, sound, and gameplay, but get a good overall grade. That doesn't make sense and they usually justify it in their review text by saying "We felt the average score of 80% just wasn't enough, so we're giving it an overall score of 90%." Why? If everything was so bad, your scores should back it up.
These and many other reasons are making game reviews less relevant and more like blog posts than concrete reviews.
Perhaps demo consoles in stores work, but that's only because they give you the full game.
.NET 2.0 framework, again, unpatched, installed an outdated version of MSXML parser, and disassociated my .NET file extensions so .cs files would no longer open in my editor by default).
Downloadable demos are notoriously bad. Game companies hack their game apart to coble to together a demo and shove it out the door. They don't give a crap about bugs, and a demo appears to be a complete afterthought.
Game studios should plan for a demo in advance. Having some bugs is acceptable, but too many will turn your users away from your game. I played the Caesar IV demo and refuse to buy the full game because of their demo. The installation process was brutal and completely retarded (for instance, I have DirectX 9.0c installed, but their demo installer insisted on uninstalling my DirectX and installing a fresh, unpatched copy of DirectX 9.0c, requiring no less than 3 reboots; it installed the
Make a good demo and you'll see even better sales figures.
I just asked one. She laughed. A lot.
By not enforcing the patents earlier, yes, SGI should forfeit their right to pursue violators in the legal system. You can't just sit back and wait for a company to turn profitable and be on the verge of a $4.2B takeover before suing them.
"Hey! They have money now! GET THEM!"
I used to be a big RAC seller. It was great for a while, I hit the top 10 (as #10), had a perfect score, and thousands of $$ earned. As a US-based worker, English was my best tool available. A lot of US-based shops were very xenophobic, and perhaps rightfully so. I made more money off of failed outsourced projects than anything. I rarely saw any good work out of the foreign shops (usually India, although there were some eastern European ones, too). When it did work, it only did what the original project had asked for, and in the shortest, messiest route. Expanding one of their projects was almost impossible -- no scalability or future design in mind.
Rent-a-coder lost it for me when I bid on three projects over the course of three months. Two of them alone would be been fine, however, Rent-a-coder permitted the buyers to accept months-old bids. I was away at the time and missed my 24-hours to decline the project. I ended up with 3 concurrent projects with altered scopes (much larger than the original bid had been for), but Rent-a-coder leans toward the buyers, not the sellers, in disputes.
Despite my attempts, my account's cred was lost within a week due to the stupidity of the RAC system. This was about two years ago, so it may have changed.
On the up side, I did find a few very nice clients through RAC projects. Dazzle the right guy and you won't need to go through RAC anymore. I got a 2-year consulting contract out of a $500 project, made a few good friends, got a few free trips from helping an unnamed travel website, etc.
So, if you're going to do it, beware that you can find yourself royally screwed. If you're a native English speaker, that is your best asset -- advertise it, use it! Do not paste a form letter. Most buyers would rather see a short 1 paragraph response saying "Yeah, I can do that!" rather than a 6 paragraph form letter explaining what should be in your resume section, not your bid forms.
Another thing to be wary of is if you are a college student. Helping another college student on their homework through RAC is likely a violation of your school regulations, e.g., cheating. $50 is not worth possible punishment for both you and the person you're "helping".
Maybe it will convince people to abandon the abomination known as Norton :-)
When your company makes a single product, you cannot complain when that product is no longer relevant. They should have diversified when they had the capital to do so.
Also, Symantec and every other virus scanner makes use of non-approved APIs in win32. They were not documented, and not approved for the use that security companies gave them. Vista is finally removing deprecated APIs and replacing them with documented, hopefully bug-free versions. They have said numerous times in their blogs and elsewhere that they will help existing companies convert existing API calls into standard calls. Symantec et all are complaining because they make such liberal use of these APIs that they are facing a huge challenge to get their product on the market quickly, if at all.
Note that one-time file scanners will still work, e.g., what your e-mail client does with received messages. That can all run just fine in user space. The pervasiveness of anti virus clients, though, would require complete administrator access, something Microsoft has been trying to get rid of for every day use (as they should!). If you allow Anti virus software to run in administrator mode while in user mode, you also open the door to viruses easily being able to do the same.
Did they run out of ironic program and directive names? I mean, come on. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12? What about Security Initiative for the Protection and Valid Identification of Selected Individuals for the Protection of Families and Children of America? No one could say no to that!
In all the upcoming legal battles, will YouTube be able to fend off hungry media empires? I honestly doubt it. Napster didn't protect users, either, but they still got slammed (and appropriately, at that). YouTube is a party to massive copyright infringement, even if they didn't upload the clip themselves. It is obvious that YouTube knows that there is a plethora of copyrighted work in their system, and they continue to profit from it even if they do remove it.
Analogy: If a store knowingly sells bootleg DVDs and the MPAA comes along and says "Hey, stop!" the store won't get off by simply saying "Woops, my bad." and remove the offending DVD, particularly if they make the MPAA notify them of every bootleg DVD the store has in stock and the store kept selling new bootlegs. They'd get sued, and sued hard.
YouTube's best bet, in my opinion, is to strike a deal with the media companies. The media companies agree not to bring suits against YouTube or YouTube users, and in return, they get context-sensitive advertising. Are you watching a clip from last week's Simpsons episode? Then the ads would go to FOX-approved advertisers to buy boxed DVDs or high-quality downloadable episodes. However, based on the lack of forsight by most media groups, I doubt this would happen very quickly.
Great post -- more thought provoking than my parent post had intended.
I hope and suspect that Google is already in talks with the major media conglomerates in order to work out a deal with them. I imagine something along the lines of "Don't sue us or make us take down copyrighted stuff and we'll link those copyrighted pages so users can easily purchase the originals from you." It's pretty smart, actually. A lot of the copyrighted stuff on YouTube people watch only because it is free -- and easy to pick and choose. If you don't like something, simply press the back button.
I am betting Google will teach the mass media companies a thing or two about the Internet and how they can benefit from everything--including IP theft.
As a sidenote: video ringtones? What the hell?
Seriously. Did anyone, including Google, not see this coming?
It doesn't matter, though, since the distribution of toolbars is not uniform across all Internet users. A good example is the website I work on. We know our traffic, yet Alexa under-reports us. We also know a local competitor's traffic -- both sets of numbers are generally public information that advertisers use. They have a nice site but get about 1/2 of our traffic, yet Alexa over-reports them over us by a factor of 3-4.
You can pull accurate statistics if and only if your data points are distributed correctly. Because Alexa has no way to randomly and accurately assign toolbars to users, their data is not reliable in any form.
A similar example is how political polls are taken. You can get accurate numbers with 1,000 adults if, and only if, those 1,000 are random throughout the entire population. You can skew the poll numbers by polling 1,000 Democrats or Republicans only instead of 1,000 random. Your results are only accurate to your surveyed population -- in Alexa's case, their numbers are only accurate so far as "Rank ### amongst Internet Explorer 6.0 users who speak a limited number of languages who have voluntarily installed our toolbar to submit their surfing habits to us for analysis and are subjected to trade secret methods of ranking".
The only way that you could pull accurate numbers would be through all ISPs selecting random data points to find what hostnames people were using. It would have to be filtered, though, to produce accurate numbers in terms of actual "website hits" instead of just "website requests". Keep-alive would further impede accurate results. As would proxies, DNS caches, and HOSTS files.