People who find the ads intrusive will filter them, period. Especially the tech-savvy folks on slashdot. Those who can't, probably won't mind the ads either, since they have to watch them on other sites where there is no way to turn them off.
If you want to introduce a subscription system, offer additional features instead. But be prepared to deal with users asking for money too, when they submit stories, because capitalism works both ways.
If someone runs an open relay, they deserve to be blacklisted.
That's just stupid. What's wrong with an open relay, if no-one has ever sent spam e-mail through it (because, perhaps, it may have its own black list of domains that may not send mail through it)? If even a single user who has not sent spam is affected by blacklisting, then this blacklisting is wrong, it's like denying someone his First Amendment rights because someone else might say something illegal...
That's all very valid, it's their money, their responsibility for it etc. - however, I find it unacceptable when they effectively destroy a project/a company by selling to a competitor or someone who is only interested in IP or the brand.
In times such as these, a VC firm run by techies would be very useful. It should have a clear policy about supporting the founders, when shares are sold etc., so that people like you and me could build a business without the feeling that some VC vultures might suddenly stab us in the back with a decision that ruins everything...
I bet there is plenty of capital in the hands of the right people (techie entrepreneurs who have built successful businesses - Jobs, Gilmore... ) and they already invest in interesting projects. I'd really like to see some cooperation among them to support more business ideas that are based on interesting technology.
"The cache has been reduced from 256 to 128 KB/sec, which shouldn't be overloaded. "
???
"As far as memory is concerned, the PS2 has a 250 MHz processor, even if the two are not comparable. "
Huh?
"The wait times in dedicated programming on a dedicated platform have nothing to do with the PC, where the CPU spends its time fishing for information, in every sense of the word. To better understand this, it's enough to compare it with the Mac, which, because of its more closed architecture, also makes do with less cache.
"
??? I stopped reading there. I already have a headache.:-)
That hasn't worked and will never work - people will go to a few selected sites where they know they can find good prices and a large number of products when they're interested in purchasing something. ThinkGeek would be the place to go when someone wanted to buy geek T-shirts, Amazon the one for books, price comparison sites for electronics... It's nonsense to offer products for sale to an audience not interested in buying anything at the moment (and I don't want to buy stuff when I read news online - and when I do want to buy something, I want to do it consciously).
... from someone operating a web site with ~ 8 mil. PIs/month:
AFAIK it's true that most sites with significant traffic have a hard time selling even 10% of their ad space
it makes no sense to drown your users in banners that aren't even paid - just show an empty banner code so that they don't need to use WebWasher etc. on your site if they don't mind 5% or 10% of the pages having banners
click-through rates can be 5% with Google's system - it's important to learn from this: low cost, cost-effective, very targeted - that's the future. Try to offer a system for your customers that can be effective with a very low initial cost (e.g. a simple system to buy ad space only on pages in the Apache section). Offer text-based ads the greedy, short-sighted users who want everything for free and no ads too can't remove easily.
before you do it secretly, offer it as a service: "advertorials", paid news items for selected customers. Don't accept just anything, but new hardware etc. released by some companies can just as well be announced in a manner that earns slashdot a few dollars. It's not as if users didn't suspect the slashdot staff getting paid for some of the articles anyway.
subscriptions are what everyone who operates a large web site wants
, but don't do it alone. Get a few other interesting sites for the same audience together and offer a "premium" package with some extra content first (web mail, notification service, no ads, whatever).
don't laugh: advertisers still have an obscure obsession with paper, so if you can provide content that can be printed without looking too silly, do it. Slashdot could have a monthly issue printed with the submitted articles and a few links and sell it together with a CD containing all the comments for that month and a few goodies (the latest Mozilla, updated Debian packages, security announcements, whatever). It's not a big investment (keep it that way!).
Well, this shows that Apache and mod_perl have the speed, performance, configurability, etc, to get the job done. Why do we see so many Microsoft/ASP web sites?
Because just like Apache/Perl or JSP/Servlets, PHP etc. ASP can also be an adequate environment for large-scale solutions if someone with enough experience is using it. If you throw enough brains and money on a problem set, you're bound to get a good answer, no matter which technology is used (unless it has some fundamental deficiencies, of course).
As far as the article is concerned - I doubt that more than the top 1% of experienced Perl programmers could build anything like that...
Considering that the US has called TV stations, water supplies etc. "military targets" (see Serbia...), I guess they'll kill many thousands of innocent people again before the Talibans flee and some US-backed dictator is installed...
Open Source developers need to build better quality code, release useable packages that can help companies generate revenue. I gladly paid for Caucho's Resin server (i.e. for the deployment license), because it's a high-quality product. I would also pay for an Apache license, as well as for a few other Open Source projects and related consulting services, but most of the Open Source projects are still being developed with a self-righteous "if you don't like it or it doesn't work for you, fix it yourself" type of attitude, so they won't be able to feed any developers. Please, listen to the people who could use your software in a commercial environment, the hobbyist Linux hackers won't pay for your bills.
It keeps getting worse. Try to find really negative reviews in a current issue. Even sites like AnandTech and Tom's Hardware find more flaws in the reviewed products. The only rants they manage to publish are about competing media, like the one about price comparison websites (afraid of losing some advertising Marks? It's too bad that some other large magazine publishers in Germany already have price comparison websites and heise doesn't...). I used to buy every issue, but stopped about 2 years ago.
Freecom's Beatman mp3 player supports Mini-CD media. What's the big deal with Philips' products? Does slashdot now forward press releases of large (paying?) companies? Please don't...
I think you simply haven't realized quite how useful it is, in real life, for information to be human-readable. When it isn't, it becomes harder to deal with. If you've programmed anything on the web, you're certainly familiar with using "View Source" to see the final source of a page
I have programmed something "on the web", but before it became such a fad, I used to like assembly language programming... Decoding a simple binary format is trivial and if the usual format for web pages was binary, Browsers would still allow you to use a "view source" command (to decode the binary format, probably giving a much more readable presentation of the structure of the document than the HTML code you can see nowdays)
I've never quite understood why some people found the idea to have machines communicate with a data format designed to be readable by humans so intelligent. Because of this oh-so-intelligent idea, we have:
lots of broken pages with wrong HTML syntax
lots of broken browsers with different ideas about how to interpret HTML
a huge amount of bandwidth wasted with unnecessary whitespace and superfluous characters
A standard format for web content without a human-readable form (i.e. a compact binary encoding) would have many advantages:
syntax could be strict, so no ambiguity would be supported (i.e. there would never have been a reason to support things like both size="123" and size=123)
the documents/content would be checked prior to publication on the WWW (because a "compilation" step would be needed in case the content was typed in by a human being, and high level libraries / widgets would probably be used in generators for dynamic content)
no waste of precious bandwidth!
anyone who wanted proprietary extensions for their encoding would have to give you their parser and generator/compiler
OK, so XML is more strict and extensible than HTML, but it's still based on the irrational notion of encoding things in a human-readable form - trading bandwidth for readability - when in most cases no human will ever look at them.
Check out our own website if you have a fast connection, specifically:
this page, and this page. We keep the HTML very trimmed and the pages load quickly (IMHO) after the images are in the cache. I tried to change between these 2 pages several times using Opera, MSIE 6.0 beta and Mozilla 0.9.2, and while the page itself is rendered quickly with Mozilla, there is a noticeable delay before anything appears on the screen.
You can see similar effects with very lightweight pages such as heise Newsticker, where the pages load quickly with all other browsers, but for some reason there's a delay with Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, right. Kindly ask your ISP to give some of that money to the sites he allegedly charges you for.
You forget that the company that bought Slashdot wants to earn interest on that investment.
serious:
If you want to introduce a subscription system, offer additional features instead. But be prepared to deal with users asking for money too, when they submit stories, because capitalism works both ways.
That's just stupid. What's wrong with an open relay, if no-one has ever sent spam e-mail through it (because, perhaps, it may have its own black list of domains that may not send mail through it)? If even a single user who has not sent spam is affected by blacklisting, then this blacklisting is wrong, it's like denying someone his First Amendment rights because someone else might say something illegal ...
That's all very valid, it's their money, their responsibility for it etc. - however, I find it unacceptable when they effectively destroy a project/a company by selling to a competitor or someone who is only interested in IP or the brand.
I bet there is plenty of capital in the hands of the right people (techie entrepreneurs who have built successful businesses - Jobs, Gilmore ... ) and they already invest in interesting projects. I'd really like to see some cooperation among them to support more business ideas that are based on interesting technology.
No, you can't ... I guess it's not on their priority list ;-)
...
I'm all for automatically converting Word attachments into something better (e.g. at the MTA), but there aren't any good filters available yet...
I remember reading that many times on cnet.com until a while ago. I haven't seen a public statement by cnet.com regarding this fact, have you?
Intel is an investor in CNET...
That hasn't worked and will never work - people will go to a few selected sites where they know they can find good prices and a large number of products when they're interested in purchasing something. ThinkGeek would be the place to go when someone wanted to buy geek T-shirts, Amazon the one for books, price comparison sites for electronics... It's nonsense to offer products for sale to an audience not interested in buying anything at the moment (and I don't want to buy stuff when I read news online - and when I do want to buy something, I want to do it consciously).
- AFAIK it's true that most sites with significant traffic have a hard time selling even 10% of their ad space
- it makes no sense to drown your users in banners that aren't even paid - just show an empty banner code so that they don't need to use WebWasher etc. on your site if they don't mind 5% or 10% of the pages having banners
- click-through rates can be 5% with Google's system - it's important to learn from this: low cost, cost-effective, very targeted - that's the future. Try to offer a system for your customers that can be effective with a very low initial cost (e.g. a simple system to buy ad space only on pages in the Apache section). Offer text-based ads the greedy, short-sighted users who want everything for free and no ads too can't remove easily.
- before you do it secretly, offer it as a service: "advertorials", paid news items for selected customers. Don't accept just anything, but new hardware etc. released by some companies can just as well be announced in a manner that earns slashdot a few dollars. It's not as if users didn't suspect the slashdot staff getting paid for some of the articles anyway.
- subscriptions are what everyone who operates a large web site wants
, but don't do it alone. Get a few other interesting sites for the same audience together and offer a "premium" package with some extra content first (web mail, notification service, no ads, whatever).
- don't laugh: advertisers still have an obscure obsession with paper, so if you can provide content that can be printed without looking too silly, do it. Slashdot could have a monthly issue printed with the submitted articles and a few links and sell it together with a CD containing all the comments for that month and a few goodies (the latest Mozilla, updated Debian packages, security announcements, whatever). It's not a big investment (keep it that way!).
And, do it at your own risk.Because just like Apache/Perl or JSP/Servlets, PHP etc. ASP can also be an adequate environment for large-scale solutions if someone with enough experience is using it. If you throw enough brains and money on a problem set, you're bound to get a good answer, no matter which technology is used (unless it has some fundamental deficiencies, of course).
As far as the article is concerned - I doubt that more than the top 1% of experienced Perl programmers could build anything like that...
Considering that the US has called TV stations, water supplies etc. "military targets" (see Serbia...), I guess they'll kill many thousands of innocent people again before the Talibans flee and some US-backed dictator is installed...
cut off your finger accidentally and you won't be able to access your files. :-)
Just my thoughts.
It keeps getting worse. Try to find really negative reviews in a current issue. Even sites like AnandTech and Tom's Hardware find more flaws in the reviewed products. The only rants they manage to publish are about competing media, like the one about price comparison websites (afraid of losing some advertising Marks? It's too bad that some other large magazine publishers in Germany already have price comparison websites and heise doesn't ...). I used to buy every issue, but stopped about 2 years ago.
Oh, that's OK... Let them laugh, just like we will when we look at stuff like this ;-)
Freecom's Beatman mp3 player supports Mini-CD media. What's the big deal with Philips' products? Does slashdot now forward press releases of large (paying?) companies? Please don't...
I have programmed something "on the web", but before it became such a fad, I used to like assembly language programming... Decoding a simple binary format is trivial and if the usual format for web pages was binary, Browsers would still allow you to use a "view source" command (to decode the binary format, probably giving a much more readable presentation of the structure of the document than the HTML code you can see nowdays)
- lots of broken pages with wrong HTML syntax
- lots of broken browsers with different ideas about how to interpret HTML
- a huge amount of bandwidth wasted with unnecessary whitespace and superfluous characters
A standard format for web content without a human-readable form (i.e. a compact binary encoding) would have many advantages:- syntax could be strict, so no ambiguity would be supported (i.e. there would never have been a reason to support things like both size="123" and size=123)
- the documents/content would be checked prior to publication on the WWW (because a "compilation" step would be needed in case the content was typed in by a human being, and high level libraries / widgets would probably be used in generators for dynamic content)
- no waste of precious bandwidth!
- anyone who wanted proprietary extensions for their encoding would have to give you their parser and generator/compiler
OK, so XML is more strict and extensible than HTML, but it's still based on the irrational notion of encoding things in a human-readable form - trading bandwidth for readability - when in most cases no human will ever look at them.You can see similar effects with very lightweight pages such as heise Newsticker, where the pages load quickly with all other browsers, but for some reason there's a delay with Mozilla.