Sorry to tell you this, but the telecom industry doesn't care about a handful of geeks that think they know what the revolution in mobile communication is. I'd say it's pretty safe that they know much more about the market than anyone else here.
Which would be why telecoms companies have been doing so well recently, right...?
Telecom companies have no clue what is going to be the next hit. GSM, SMS and i-mode were surprise successes; IDSN, WAP and 3G have been disastrous failures. The companies are to some degree aware of this, and they hire legions of geeks to help them forecast the future, but often greed takes over -- and sometimes the geeks are just wrong. (For instance, I guessed right on the failure of 3G and WAP, and I'm pretty sure GPRS and MMS will take off, but if you'd followed my advice and dumped Nokia stock for SonyEricsson you would have regretted it.)
First up, since many posters seem to be rather confused, RC5 is a symmetric algorithm while RSA is asymmetric, which are very different beasts. Asymmetric keys need about 10 bits more length to double their security, compared to only one for symmetric keys. Cracking a 2048-bit asymmetric key isn't thus quite as difficult as you might think.
Which, however, does not mean it's easy.
RSA has been running the RSA Challenge for a few years now, the lowest prize being $10,000 for a 576-bit key and up to a whopping $200,000 for a 2048-bit key -- like the one in the Xbox. There have been no takers yet, and the largest RSA key cracked to date remains 512 bits. RSA's own estimate is that you would need 320 million 520 MHz Pentium-class machines to crack
a 1024-bit key in one year, and we're talking 2^100 times that for a 2048-bit key!
Smith can be entertaining to watch but I just can't imagine his hyperactive persona portraying a robot with any of the dignity Asimov ascribed to them.
The article doesn't say what role Smith will be playing, but it says the plot will revolve around
a detective investigating a murder. The robots in I, Robot aren't humaniform, so odds are Smith will be playing the detective.
I know, that I have no idea why I would want this service. If I need to send someone a picture, I turn on the computer, and send via email. It's done. I've never been anywhere where the need to send a picture or a video was so great that I *HAD* to do it right there over my phone, like they're showing in the ads. It's just ridiculous. They're trying to fill a non-existent need for a non-existent market.
Then would you care to explain why
J-Phone's
picture service Sha-Mail has managed to
pick up
over 5 million subscribers in the last year,
leading to the doubling of data ARPU to
15%?
As for reasons why, pretty much the only reason I still use snail mail is postcards; MMS is about
to fill that gap as well. And just the way I
send a hell of a lot more email than I used to write paper letters, I suspect I'll be sending
a hell of a lot more picture mails than I currently send postcards.
Here's hoping European operators have learned
from the WAP debacle and don't price themselves out of the market -- again.
Doesn't the European Union want a.eu domain? Surely ICANN can't allow that and at the same time nix maintaining.su...
The.eu domain was officially approved March 26, 2002; registration is expected to start early next year. The tiny difference between the Soviet Union and the European Union is that the USSR was officially dissolved over 10 years ago, while the EU is not just alive but growing.
The 3G was auctioned by the gov's, telco's have nobody to blame for those insane prices but themself.
Sure, I agree that a large part of the blame rests on the operators -- but the fact that European operators had to pay the huge fees to get in the 3G market, while those in the rest of the world didn't, still puts them at a serious competitive disadvantage.
To summarize the summary, Europe's TDMA has the
tiny problem of basically being a broken piece of crap, while CDMA2000 actually works.
This has been beautifully illustrated in
Japan, where Docomo's TDMA network has been
a miserable flop, while KDDI's CDMA2000-1X
is booming. (Although I'll admit that KDDI's pricing is also a bit more sane.)
Couple that with European governments kneecapping their operators with insane 3G license fees,
causing immense financial problems right now,
and the result is that European telecoms are going to fall off a cliff very soon.
And oh -- contrary to what the Slashdot brief claims, Den Beste's article says nothing
about Japan having problems; quite the contrary,
KDDI's network is the first successful 3G network on the planet. NTT Docomo is admittedly running into a brick wall, but that's only one operator's problem. The US, while it seems to have
gotten the technology right for once (about time!),
is still stuck with severe frequency
allocation problems, a plethora of incompatible
operators and generally a more cellular-hostile
culture due to inanities like having to
pay for received calls; my 5 is that Japan
is the only country that's going to come out
a winner from all this.
Around $250 million for a shuttle launch, closer to $1 billion if you figure in base maintenance etc.
Or $85 million for a Titan IV.
What about the European Arienne rocket?
$85 million for an Ariane 4, around $200 million for an Ariane 5.
As usual, Russians manage the cheapest launches, putting a Soyuz up in orbit is figured to be less than $20 million.
Do remember that these figures (courtesy of Encyclopedia Astronautica) are not all that comparable, because the above costs are the price of putting the entire thing in orbit, when in practice they carry multiple satellites. An Ariane 5 can also lift up a hell of a lot more stuff than the Indian PSLV.
Right now NaturalPoint works only with Windows,
but according to their FAQ:
Concern 10: If only it worked in Linux, Mac OS, windows 3.0, etc.
Reply : Several members of our development community are working on linux drivers. And if we sense a lot of interest in a certain platform (like the macintosh OS. nudge nudge), we'll go ahead and crank out drivers for it.
My problem with monorails in general is that they are usually poorely implimented, they cost more then electric light rail, and above all - I've never seen one anywhere in the world where it was more then just a gimic used to attract tourists.
There are plenty of "real" high-capacity monorails,
especially in Japan: Tokyo, Chiba, Tama, Osaka
and Kitakyushu are the biggies, with more
under construction even right now (eg. a new system in Naha, Okinawa).
Malaysia is also investing
heavily in monorails. See
monorails.org for details.
I wonder how much more useful a 266mhz Pentium wearable would be than a Sharp Zaurus hacked to use a head-mounted display, like a Sony glasstron. I played with a Zaurus the other day, and noted that it had both SD and CF slots. Sandisk 512 MB CF is $329.99 direct, and I know of few linux apps that won't run in 128MB RAM and 512MB disk.
A good question, but just how are you going
to "hack" a Zaurus to use a head-mounted display,
or any kind of wearable-friendly input? The sort of miniaturization used in the Zaurus needs
big factory runs to be profitable, and
the market for wearables remains tiny.
In addition, VGA-quality head-mounted displays are expensive,
the basic Glasstron is next to useless because of
its poor resolution and NTSC-only input.
(Yes, there was a PC Glasstron as well, but it
was terribly bulky and expensive, and it's been
discontinued anyway.)
Also, instead of forking out big bucks for
huge chunks of solid memory, IBM's CompactFlash
Microdrives are a much more affordable
solution -- you can get as much as an gig's
storage with one.
I'm seeing a lot of griping here about how they dare to charge $250 for installing Linux and how the entire system is overpriced -- well hey, build your own then. The hardware design is
open source and available
right
here, and the full list of commercial components used to build the kit is available
here.
Also, the $6000 price tag is not particularly unreasonable for a commercial wearable computer,
eg. Xybernaut's stuff isn't much cheaper. Last year I had the job of purchasing a wearable for our lab --
we almost went with the earlier model of CharmIT, but in the
end decided that we needed a bit more power
and expandability, so we
rolled our own. Had the Crusoe version existed then, we quite probably would have chosen it.
"That is, they can't sell it for less than the manufacturing costs"
What, you mean like mobile telephones?
In a number of EU countries (like Finland,
home of Nokia),
it is illegal to subsidize phones with
forced long-term subscriptions. This is not
quite the same thing, but the net effect is
the same: phones are sold at full price.
Oddly enough, this actually
increases competition, as hopping between
operators is much easier.
Write the classes you need - declaring the necessary methods as native, run a program to generate JNI C++ headers to go with them and implement them, shipping the native bits as shared libraries.
Oh, sorry, did I just shoot your claim in the foot?
When you're making software that costs $(BIGNUM) a pop, it's a far better solution to buy pre-written, carefully tested and well-supported 3rd-party software for a couple of grand than to try to roll your own. The S in SNMP may be "Simple", but in reality it's one seriously hairy protocol.
And yeah, I know that NET-SNMP (ex-UCD-SNMP) is open source, but it's all C and our software has to work under Linux, Solaris, HP/UX and Windows -- this, of course, being why we use Java in the first place!
Sun sells hardly *any* Java-based products (the only thing that comes to mind is the HotJava Bean which has been discontinued, and Forte, which there is already a free edition!)
Maybe you should take a peek into the corporate world. Want to add SNMP functionality to your Java product? J. Random Hacker doesn't, but Q. Big Corporation often will, and the only way to do this is to fork out the moolah for Sun's JDMK.
The cost? $10000 for one (1) developer seat and 50 runtime licenses.
But Sun's basic strategy is to popularize Java (at a loss) and then sell Sun hardware for it (at a profit). The company I work for is almost entirely a Java shop. We make carrier-grade applications, and whenever possible we ask our customers to use Sun hardware, because that's what Java works best on. This is not a coincidence.
Lightrail can be built in the air just as easily as Monorail. Lightrail trains are also wider than the track (have you ever seen a train that is narrower than it's track?)
"Track" does not equal just the rails. A light rail train is not attached to its rails, so there is a possibility of derailment. If you build an
elevated light trail track, you also have to build a "chute" around the track to prevent a simple derailment from plunging people to their deaths, and this chute must obviously be wider than the train running in it.
Monorails, on the other hand, wrap around their track and thus physically cannot fall off it (barring truly spectacular structural failure). No chutes needed, so the width of the car itself is the sole determining factor.
The jury is still out on the efficiency bit, but rubber tires seem to be gaining favor even for light rail. One big reason why is noise: rubber on concrete is a lot quieter than metal on metal.
Monorails don't really have any place in modern transit. They don't really save any space advantage(the limiting factor is the width of the cars, not of the track) and they aren't any more efficient than your everyday lightrail or subway or whatever else you feel like building. In addition, they tend to be less efficient, and also less stable in turns and such.
The friendly folks at the Monorail Society might disagree with you on that.
Monorails are an efficient solution for crowded cities, since they can be built in the air, and as (by definition) the car is wider than the track they use less space than light rail. Their speed and capacity are more than sufficient for most applications, and they cost a lot less than building subways. This is why there has been
a bit of a monorail renaissance lately,
with cities as diverse as Las Vegas, Chiba, Kuala Lumpur and Okinawa (Naha) building monorail systems.
Many people seem to be missing the important
little point that the 498 million figure
refers to people who can access the Net
at home. There are quite a few people
who have Internet access at work or at school
but not at home, and even more people who
can (and do?) access the Internet
at cafes, libraries, etc. Getting exact
figures for these is probably impossible,
but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the
total of all of these was well over a
billion.
I want my/. back, so I'm going to burn through those pageviews I have, and then not pay for another set. If I can get the option to pay per month or something similar - and especially if they eventually implement some interesting perk for paying - then I'm in again. Until then, I just find this scheme cramps my surfing habits too much.
I'm in the same boat as you (4000 impressions paid for, 60 or so used up) and I agree completely. I keep hitting subscribe.pl and watching that little counter tick up, and I get annoyed if I "waste" a page view by reloading/.before an interesting story shows up. Yes, I am fully aware that 30 cents for a week's slashdotting isn't much, but with metered access the fun factor is a lot less than it used to be.
And while I'm at it, I'll cast another vote
for Kuro5hin's text ad system -- in retrospect, I would rather have spent those same $20 on redirecting random people to my site
or my pictures or something.
Access to Slashdot stories and comments via NNTP would also be amazingly cool (after all these years I still hate the Slash comment interface!), but that
would require a lot of work and it ain't gonna work on a pay-per-view basis.
3. I'm sorry, but the cost is too high. You have a circulation of 300,000+, and employ fewer than 10 people. You have hardware and bandwidth costs too, but 300,000x$20 = $6 million a year, not counting the 15% who are paying more than that. You can't advocate open source and free software and then overcharge for your website.
What planet do you live on? I doubt even
Playboy.com gets that kind of money from
subscriptions. Frankly, I'll be amazed
if even 1% of Slashdot's readers actually
fork out the cold cash, and I expect most
of those who do will start off with $5,
just to see how it works.
That's $15,000, which probably doesn't
even suffice to pay for a single month of
Slashdot's bandwidth, never mind the salaries
of 10 people.
I considered keeping up with the field a
part of my job, and that's why I've checked
Slashdot at least one a day for the past
two years. Sure,./ is not perfect, but
neither are there any adequate substitutes.
I just subscribed for $20 worth
of articles, and I think this is a tiny
price to pay for the privilege -- my subscription to the Economist
was 5 times more, even after a 50% discount.
Proper usability is way less obvious than most people think -- the fundamental problem is that the web site designer is not the user, and many ideas that seem fine or obvious to the designer will be incomprehensible or very unnatural to the user. I'm both a programmer and usability engineer, with years of experience in both fields, and my jaw still drops every now and then at how a designer's "common sense" user interface fails miserably when tested with real users. But with practice, you can learn to avoid many of these pitfalls and think outside your own narrow box.
As for the author's credits, Nielsen is widely acknowledged to be a guru in the field.
Check out his website, UseIt, for lots of more usability-related stuff.
Okay, I'm a 26 white american male, of irish descent and I probably am pulling this out of my ass.
Well, you got one thing right...
However, this isn't the case in Asia. The common example is Animation and Japan. For some reason, they see Animation as a very important part of their culture. People hold parades to look like their favorite anime characters in Japan! Anime is for all ages, as you can see by the wide selection of everything from the super sappy to the hard core violent and sexual scenes one can only see in "adult" anime.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but in Japan, anime otaku are every bit as marginal and despised a phenomenon as in the US. Kiddie comics are read mostly by young kids (surprise surprise),
adult comics are read by the same demographic
that reads Playboy in the US. Yes, there is a parade of people who dress up as anime characters (and anything else they want to) every Sunday in Tokyo -- half the people there are giggling
tourists and
amateur photographers like myself who like watching the freakshow.
Try another generalization instead: online
gaming is fun. I have no doubt that in a few
years, well over 5% of the entire industrialized
world will be playing them in one form or another.
... is that Japan's network infistructure can't support it. Ever noticed how expensive bandwidth is in almost any country other than the US? That's because there isn't as much to go around. Japan survives now because of of it's slow wireless (slow connection = bandwith thrifty websites = not much load on the network) and lack of high-speed connections. Try putting 30+ million people on 128K-300K connections. Their network will collapse.
This is the most clueless comment I've ever seen
about the Japanese mobile phone system, and trust me, after 4 years in the business I've seen
plenty. Where to start?
The whole reason DoCoMo is pushing 3G
so hard is that they're running out of capacity
on their current PDC network -- projections
say PDC will hit a brick wall by 2005, possibly
earlier. The fact
that 3G has bigger bandwidth and can support
video transmission yadda yadda is all nice
and dandy, but what DoCoMo really wants
is to be able to push penetration to the point
where landlines are obsolete (they're almost
there) and, even more importantly, increase
the use of wireless phones for machine-to-machine
data transmissions, which are almost all
handled by landline at the moment. There is
not enough capacity for this yet, but 3G
should make this possible.
Second, the i-mode wireless Internet system
does not require dedicated circuits, it's a
packet network. The current heavy
congestion on Japanese PDC networks is
caused by plain old voice calls, which are
still circuit-switched.
Third, as for the price and availability
of bandwidth, Japanese companies
didn't have to fork out a single yen for
their licenses. Bandwidth would be expensive
in the US if there was any to spare, but
all the desirable frequencies (eg. those used
by GSM in the rest of the world) are in use
by the US military!
And oh -- with 125 million people and penetration
rates above 50%, you're looking at over 60
million mobiles in use right now, and quite
possibly well over 100 million if Tachikawa's
visions come true.
Linuxworld 'have' this? Jesus. I hope that the submitter doesn't speak English natively, because that's a pretty grievious error.
At the risk of feeding the trolls, using a
plural verb for a corporate entity (e.g. "Linuxworld have") is perfectly normal
British/Australian English. The reasoning is that
it's not a Linuxworld which has
an article, it's all those happy folks at
Linuxworld who have an article.
Slashdot Mirror
Which would be why telecoms companies have been doing so well recently, right...?
Telecom companies have no clue what is going to be the next hit. GSM, SMS and i-mode were surprise successes; IDSN, WAP and 3G have been disastrous failures. The companies are to some degree aware of this, and they hire legions of geeks to help them forecast the future, but often greed takes over -- and sometimes the geeks are just wrong. (For instance, I guessed right on the failure of 3G and WAP, and I'm pretty sure GPRS and MMS will take off, but if you'd followed my advice and dumped Nokia stock for SonyEricsson you would have regretted it.)
Cheers,
-j. (a geek in telecoms)
Which, however, does not mean it's easy. RSA has been running the RSA Challenge for a few years now, the lowest prize being $10,000 for a 576-bit key and up to a whopping $200,000 for a 2048-bit key -- like the one in the Xbox. There have been no takers yet, and the largest RSA key cracked to date remains 512 bits. RSA's own estimate is that you would need 320 million 520 MHz Pentium-class machines to crack a 1024-bit key in one year, and we're talking 2^100 times that for a 2048-bit key!
Cheers,
-j.
The article doesn't say what role Smith will be playing, but it says the plot will revolve around a detective investigating a murder. The robots in I, Robot aren't humaniform, so odds are Smith will be playing the detective.
Cheers,
-j.
Then would you care to explain why J-Phone's picture service Sha-Mail has managed to pick up over 5 million subscribers in the last year, leading to the doubling of data ARPU to 15%?
As for reasons why, pretty much the only reason I still use snail mail is postcards; MMS is about to fill that gap as well. And just the way I send a hell of a lot more email than I used to write paper letters, I suspect I'll be sending a hell of a lot more picture mails than I currently send postcards.
Here's hoping European operators have learned from the WAP debacle and don't price themselves out of the market -- again.
Cheers,
-j.
The .eu domain was officially approved March 26, 2002; registration is expected to start early next year. The tiny difference between the Soviet Union and the European Union is that the USSR was officially dissolved over 10 years ago, while the EU is not just alive but growing.
ObURL: http://www.eu-domain-names-resource.com/
Cheers,
-j.
Sure, I agree that a large part of the blame rests on the operators -- but the fact that European operators had to pay the huge fees to get in the 3G market, while those in the rest of the world didn't, still puts them at a serious competitive disadvantage.
Cheers,
-j.
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm ?story_id=1353050
To summarize the summary, Europe's TDMA has the tiny problem of basically being a broken piece of crap, while CDMA2000 actually works. This has been beautifully illustrated in Japan, where Docomo's TDMA network has been a miserable flop, while KDDI's CDMA2000-1X is booming. (Although I'll admit that KDDI's pricing is also a bit more sane.) Couple that with European governments kneecapping their operators with insane 3G license fees, causing immense financial problems right now, and the result is that European telecoms are going to fall off a cliff very soon.
And oh -- contrary to what the Slashdot brief claims, Den Beste's article says nothing about Japan having problems; quite the contrary, KDDI's network is the first successful 3G network on the planet. NTT Docomo is admittedly running into a brick wall, but that's only one operator's problem. The US, while it seems to have gotten the technology right for once (about time!), is still stuck with severe frequency allocation problems, a plethora of incompatible operators and generally a more cellular-hostile culture due to inanities like having to pay for received calls; my 5 is that Japan is the only country that's going to come out a winner from all this.
Cheers,
-j.
Around $250 million for a shuttle launch, closer to $1 billion if you figure in base maintenance etc. Or $85 million for a Titan IV.
What about the European Arienne rocket?
$85 million for an Ariane 4, around $200 million for an Ariane 5.
As usual, Russians manage the cheapest launches, putting a Soyuz up in orbit is figured to be less than $20 million.
Do remember that these figures (courtesy of Encyclopedia Astronautica) are not all that comparable, because the above costs are the price of putting the entire thing in orbit, when in practice they carry multiple satellites. An Ariane 5 can also lift up a hell of a lot more stuff than the Indian PSLV.
Cheers,
-j.
Nope, even the article itself says they used 6 people's DNA to build the genome. Dr. Venter is just the biggest contributor.
Cheers,
-j.
Concern 10: If only it worked in Linux, Mac OS, windows 3.0, etc.
Reply : Several members of our development community are working on linux drivers. And if we sense a lot of interest in a certain platform (like the macintosh OS. nudge nudge), we'll go ahead and crank out drivers for it.
Cheers,
-j.
There are plenty of "real" high-capacity monorails, especially in Japan: Tokyo, Chiba, Tama, Osaka and Kitakyushu are the biggies, with more under construction even right now (eg. a new system in Naha, Okinawa). Malaysia is also investing heavily in monorails. See monorails.org for details.
Cheers,
-j.
A good question, but just how are you going to "hack" a Zaurus to use a head-mounted display, or any kind of wearable-friendly input? The sort of miniaturization used in the Zaurus needs big factory runs to be profitable, and the market for wearables remains tiny. In addition, VGA-quality head-mounted displays are expensive, the basic Glasstron is next to useless because of its poor resolution and NTSC-only input. (Yes, there was a PC Glasstron as well, but it was terribly bulky and expensive, and it's been discontinued anyway.)
Also, instead of forking out big bucks for huge chunks of solid memory, IBM's CompactFlash Microdrives are a much more affordable solution -- you can get as much as an gig's storage with one.
Cheers,
-j.
Also, the $6000 price tag is not particularly unreasonable for a commercial wearable computer, eg. Xybernaut's stuff isn't much cheaper. Last year I had the job of purchasing a wearable for our lab -- we almost went with the earlier model of CharmIT, but in the end decided that we needed a bit more power and expandability, so we rolled our own. Had the Crusoe version existed then, we quite probably would have chosen it.
Cheers,
-j.
What, you mean like mobile telephones?
In a number of EU countries (like Finland, home of Nokia), it is illegal to subsidize phones with forced long-term subscriptions. This is not quite the same thing, but the net effect is the same: phones are sold at full price. Oddly enough, this actually increases competition, as hopping between operators is much easier.
Cheers,
-j.
Oh, sorry, did I just shoot your claim in the foot?
When you're making software that costs $(BIGNUM) a pop, it's a far better solution to buy pre-written, carefully tested and well-supported 3rd-party software for a couple of grand than to try to roll your own. The S in SNMP may be "Simple", but in reality it's one seriously hairy protocol.
And yeah, I know that NET-SNMP (ex-UCD-SNMP) is open source, but it's all C and our software has to work under Linux, Solaris, HP/UX and Windows -- this, of course, being why we use Java in the first place!
Cheers,
-j.
Maybe you should take a peek into the corporate world. Want to add SNMP functionality to your Java product? J. Random Hacker doesn't, but Q. Big Corporation often will, and the only way to do this is to fork out the moolah for Sun's JDMK. The cost? $10000 for one (1) developer seat and 50 runtime licenses.
But Sun's basic strategy is to popularize Java (at a loss) and then sell Sun hardware for it (at a profit). The company I work for is almost entirely a Java shop. We make carrier-grade applications, and whenever possible we ask our customers to use Sun hardware, because that's what Java works best on. This is not a coincidence.
Cheers,
-j.
"Track" does not equal just the rails. A light rail train is not attached to its rails, so there is a possibility of derailment. If you build an elevated light trail track, you also have to build a "chute" around the track to prevent a simple derailment from plunging people to their deaths, and this chute must obviously be wider than the train running in it.
Monorails, on the other hand, wrap around their track and thus physically cannot fall off it (barring truly spectacular structural failure). No chutes needed, so the width of the car itself is the sole determining factor.
The jury is still out on the efficiency bit, but rubber tires seem to be gaining favor even for light rail. One big reason why is noise: rubber on concrete is a lot quieter than metal on metal.
Cheers,
-j.
The friendly folks at the Monorail Society might disagree with you on that. Monorails are an efficient solution for crowded cities, since they can be built in the air, and as (by definition) the car is wider than the track they use less space than light rail. Their speed and capacity are more than sufficient for most applications, and they cost a lot less than building subways. This is why there has been a bit of a monorail renaissance lately, with cities as diverse as Las Vegas, Chiba, Kuala Lumpur and Okinawa (Naha) building monorail systems.
Cheers,
-j.
Cheers,
-j.
I'm in the same boat as you (4000 impressions paid for, 60 or so used up) and I agree completely. I keep hitting subscribe.pl and watching that little counter tick up, and I get annoyed if I "waste" a page view by reloading /.before an interesting story shows up. Yes, I am fully aware that 30 cents for a week's slashdotting isn't much, but with metered access the fun factor is a lot less than it used to be.
And while I'm at it, I'll cast another vote for Kuro5hin's text ad system -- in retrospect, I would rather have spent those same $20 on redirecting random people to my site or my pictures or something. Access to Slashdot stories and comments via NNTP would also be amazingly cool (after all these years I still hate the Slash comment interface!), but that would require a lot of work and it ain't gonna work on a pay-per-view basis.
Cheers,
-j.
3. I'm sorry, but the cost is too high. You have a circulation of 300,000+, and employ fewer than 10 people. You have hardware and bandwidth costs too, but 300,000x$20 = $6 million a year, not counting the 15% who are paying more than that. You can't advocate open source and free software and then overcharge for your website.
What planet do you live on? I doubt even Playboy.com gets that kind of money from subscriptions. Frankly, I'll be amazed if even 1% of Slashdot's readers actually fork out the cold cash, and I expect most of those who do will start off with $5, just to see how it works. That's $15,000, which probably doesn't even suffice to pay for a single month of Slashdot's bandwidth, never mind the salaries of 10 people.
I considered keeping up with the field a part of my job, and that's why I've checked Slashdot at least one a day for the past two years. Sure, ./ is not perfect, but
neither are there any adequate substitutes.
I just subscribed for $20 worth
of articles, and I think this is a tiny
price to pay for the privilege -- my subscription to the Economist
was 5 times more, even after a 50% discount.
Cheers,
-j.
As for the author's credits, Nielsen is widely acknowledged to be a guru in the field. Check out his website, UseIt, for lots of more usability-related stuff.
Well, you got one thing right...
However, this isn't the case in Asia. The common example is Animation and Japan. For some reason, they see Animation as a very important part of their culture. People hold parades to look like their favorite anime characters in Japan! Anime is for all ages, as you can see by the wide selection of everything from the super sappy to the hard core violent and sexual scenes one can only see in "adult" anime.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but in Japan, anime otaku are every bit as marginal and despised a phenomenon as in the US. Kiddie comics are read mostly by young kids (surprise surprise), adult comics are read by the same demographic that reads Playboy in the US. Yes, there is a parade of people who dress up as anime characters (and anything else they want to) every Sunday in Tokyo -- half the people there are giggling tourists and amateur photographers like myself who like watching the freakshow.
Try another generalization instead: online gaming is fun. I have no doubt that in a few years, well over 5% of the entire industrialized world will be playing them in one form or another.
Cheers,
-j. (in Tokyo)
This is the most clueless comment I've ever seen about the Japanese mobile phone system, and trust me, after 4 years in the business I've seen plenty. Where to start?
The whole reason DoCoMo is pushing 3G so hard is that they're running out of capacity on their current PDC network -- projections say PDC will hit a brick wall by 2005, possibly earlier. The fact that 3G has bigger bandwidth and can support video transmission yadda yadda is all nice and dandy, but what DoCoMo really wants is to be able to push penetration to the point where landlines are obsolete (they're almost there) and, even more importantly, increase the use of wireless phones for machine-to-machine data transmissions, which are almost all handled by landline at the moment. There is not enough capacity for this yet, but 3G should make this possible.
Second, the i-mode wireless Internet system does not require dedicated circuits, it's a packet network. The current heavy congestion on Japanese PDC networks is caused by plain old voice calls, which are still circuit-switched.
Third, as for the price and availability of bandwidth, Japanese companies didn't have to fork out a single yen for their licenses. Bandwidth would be expensive in the US if there was any to spare, but all the desirable frequencies (eg. those used by GSM in the rest of the world) are in use by the US military!
And oh -- with 125 million people and penetration rates above 50%, you're looking at over 60 million mobiles in use right now, and quite possibly well over 100 million if Tachikawa's visions come true.
Ijoo desu.
Cheers,
-j. (straight from rainy Tokyo)
At the risk of feeding the trolls, using a plural verb for a corporate entity (e.g. "Linuxworld have") is perfectly normal British/Australian English. The reasoning is that it's not a Linuxworld which has an article, it's all those happy folks at Linuxworld who have an article.
Cheers,
-j.