"Ohio Judge Rules Speed Cameras Are a Scam" -> This is a typical headline that you'd find in a tabloid, to hook readers in, only for the readers to find a different context. Please stop doing that.
Newspapers rely on advertising as their main source of incoming. The few dollars you pay for a copy are for distribution costs. That being said, there has been a massive struggle to move that business model as-is onto the internet, for various reasons, including people running adblockers and a general lack of understanding of this new medium. As webmasters become more desperate for advertising sales, they come up with new (annoying) ideas to ensure visibility - popups, popunders, popins, and forced ads before videos. All of these just cause frustration on both sides and users use ad blockers, or just learn to ignore them.
There's been a big topic of relevance. Users respond better to adverts that are more relevant to them. I call shenanigans on this. This is only partially true. If I am browsing a site related to financial markets, I am not interesting in Hobby King targeting an advert of a part that I looked at on their site a few days prior. My mindset while viewing this site is that of business, not play. In the same vein, Destructoid has the following adverts on their home page (probably targeted to me): Social Media Marketing from Vertical Response, Start your own gaming business from Game Wars, The frequent Download/Play belonging to some cellphone subscription service, Linode (even though I am a linode customer), Google Apps for Business, A conference for Data Center World. Maybe some of these are targeted to me, but while I am browsing a gaming site, I don't care about anything else that is not related to gaming. My point here is, relevance is true, but target something at me that is relevant to me AND relevant to what I am currently doing. I don't want to have to think about or reminded about work while I am on Destructoid.
Back in the day before the rise of these ad delivery networks, people used to put adverts up on their site manually. And only adverts that were relevant to them and their audience. Nowadays, these ad networks do allow you to customize the type of adverts that appear on your site. It seems that this is not being done, and webmasters are using the shotgun approach, allowing any type of advert to be targeted to their users. This is just plain laziness.
Also, where is the sponsorship that we see everywhere else? Companies pay a premium to sponsor a TV show (blah blah brought to you buy blah blah). This helps both the advertiser target a specific audience and the content provider pay for the content.
If Destructoid want to continue to rely on advertising for their income (and please do), they need to do some serious work on making sure that the advertisers on their site are relevant to themselves and their users. Content producers off-line have very close relationships with their advertisers. Strike up a deal with Razer or EA to do some skinning just before a product launch. I'm not suggesting "selling out", but rather realize that you are running a business selling content to us. We buy it by looking at your adverts. If we don't like your adverts, we will block them. If we don't like your content, we won't visit your site. It is up to you to connect us with your advertisers via your content.
In my third year of varsity, we had to write a search engine with indexing stored in files. My Perl solution returned results twice as fast (averaging 22ms/query) as any other in the class, most of which were C or C++. And it took me half the time to write.
I love Perl mainly because of I am a lazy programmer. Yes, most of my Perl scripts take a little bit longer to execute, but we're talking a difference of seconds or minutes, not hours. There are times where I choose Perl, Python, C/C++, PHP, etc, but this depends entirely on the problem and the circumstances. I will use Perl until I die, even if there aren't any more releases from now on.
Should we lament Bash for the same reasons? The last release (4.2) was 13 Feb 2011, and the last feature release (4.0) in early 2010. ZOMG!
2 years ago I moved from digital broadcast media (web dev before that) to a financial data services company. It was a hell of a change, and there was a massive amount that I had to learn in the new domain. I now have gained that knowledge (not that I know everything about equities, warrants, ETFs, derivatives, and all the things these brokers make up every day to make them more money). But, I'm still a code monkey, still applying the same programming techniques and theory that I've learnt over the years. It's interesting work, even though I do create glorified data processors.
That being said, the world of finance is driven by computers. They need us to bang out code for them. But, it is also high stress. Every minute of downtime translates directly to potential lost revenue. And that potential according to the brokers and traders means actual. It's ok if they lose a few hundred million in a few hours, because of bad luck, but woe betides you if your systems are down.
Lookout for that molehill! Yes, some versions are vulnerable, and everyone is having a hissy fit about this. I've tested every single copy of various versions of MySQL that I have running, and they are not vulnerable. And I'm running MySQL on Windows, Arch, RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS.
Once a year I do some calculations, to figure out which is cheaper for me: a data-only mobile contract and Skype; or a voice contract.
Skype claims that a skype-to-skype call is at 3MB/min, while a skype-to-landline/mobile is at 1MB/min. Considering that most of the calls that are make are to people that don't have skype, I'll use the latter figure.
I sometimes use up to 400 minutes, or less (no carry-over, which is illegal, but we are too scared to fight this). So 350 minutes equates to 350MB skype-to-skype calls. Let's call it 400MB including presence, contact information. I use around 350MB/month when away from my wifi networks. The most applicable data bundle is 1GB, at ZAR290. An "unlimited" package goes for 10x this amount. So, I'll be paying around ZAR320/month for the contract, including their lovely add-ons they always manage to squeeze in.
Next is the cost of skype. If i choose the pay-per-minute option, I'll be paying ZAR0.177/minute, or roughly ZAR61.95/month. This brings my total monthly bill to ZAR381.95, rounding up for the unexpected - ZAR400/month.
I pay ZAR350 for 350 minutes per month, plus a few other items (promotion fee (WTF is that???), itemized statement). The cost of the phone is included in all of that. Assuming I don't go over any of my bundles (350 minutes, 100 sms, 350 GB), then I pay ZAR637/month. And yes, I do often go over my bundles.
So, a data-only contract (it's not data only, but rather the only bundle is data. Voice calls are paid at full rates - ZAR2.85) is 75% of a voice contract. Plus, i pay the same for local calls as I do for international calls when done through skype. ZAR400 vs ZAR637 is a massive difference, making it well-worth it. If I choose the skype route, I end up paying my mobile operator ~ZAR340/month instead of ~ZAR640/month. They will lose out ZAR300/month - or ZAR7,000 over a 24 month contract period.
If I was a mobile operator, I would hate to lose half of my income from a number of my users. But, that's what they get for bending us over the coals, pulling down our pants, and...well...this is a family show. I've used the most expensive skype option, so the prices for monthly or annual subscriptions would only drop.
The only issue is that of battery consumption of skype, and coverage. I spend 99.9% of my time in urban areas with semi-decent data coverage. For the times when I'm in rural/low coverage areas, then I would pay out my of ass to do voice calls. But I'm not too worried about that.
So my point is, yes mobile operators are losing money to VOIP. Yes, they can do something about that. But, they have been dropping their prices in recent years due to consumer demand and dissatisfaction, so they are losing "potential" revenue regardless. I say stick it to "the man" until we collapse the economy with all these work-arounds.
Slashdot Mirror
Bioinformatic data, Linux distros, F/OSS games, plus I wrote a libtorrent client to distribute multimedia for a digitical signage company.
Skype or Microsoft won't, but they introduced a weakness recently to discover a user's IP address: http://www.anonware.net/index.php?page=resolvers
Yes, but paintball has moar pixels and a better physics engine. Not to mention the audio is pretty sweet.
1) Create a company to fight against DDoS
2) Sign up customers, but not enough
3) Report that DDoS is out of control
4) Profit!
A space-like vacuum is one that is not as big as space.
Dear Submitters,
"Ohio Judge Rules Speed Cameras Are a Scam" -> This is a typical headline that you'd find in a tabloid, to hook readers in, only for the readers to find a different context. Please stop doing that.
Thank you,
One /. reader
View page source, search for my nick, and you'll see it with plenty of \n's.
Damn it, apologies for the crappy formatting.
Newspapers rely on advertising as their main source of incoming. The few dollars you pay for a copy are for distribution costs. That being said, there has been a massive struggle to move that business model as-is onto the internet, for various reasons, including people running adblockers and a general lack of understanding of this new medium. As webmasters become more desperate for advertising sales, they come up with new (annoying) ideas to ensure visibility - popups, popunders, popins, and forced ads before videos. All of these just cause frustration on both sides and users use ad blockers, or just learn to ignore them. There's been a big topic of relevance. Users respond better to adverts that are more relevant to them. I call shenanigans on this. This is only partially true. If I am browsing a site related to financial markets, I am not interesting in Hobby King targeting an advert of a part that I looked at on their site a few days prior. My mindset while viewing this site is that of business, not play. In the same vein, Destructoid has the following adverts on their home page (probably targeted to me): Social Media Marketing from Vertical Response, Start your own gaming business from Game Wars, The frequent Download/Play belonging to some cellphone subscription service, Linode (even though I am a linode customer), Google Apps for Business, A conference for Data Center World. Maybe some of these are targeted to me, but while I am browsing a gaming site, I don't care about anything else that is not related to gaming. My point here is, relevance is true, but target something at me that is relevant to me AND relevant to what I am currently doing. I don't want to have to think about or reminded about work while I am on Destructoid. Back in the day before the rise of these ad delivery networks, people used to put adverts up on their site manually. And only adverts that were relevant to them and their audience. Nowadays, these ad networks do allow you to customize the type of adverts that appear on your site. It seems that this is not being done, and webmasters are using the shotgun approach, allowing any type of advert to be targeted to their users. This is just plain laziness. Also, where is the sponsorship that we see everywhere else? Companies pay a premium to sponsor a TV show (blah blah brought to you buy blah blah). This helps both the advertiser target a specific audience and the content provider pay for the content. If Destructoid want to continue to rely on advertising for their income (and please do), they need to do some serious work on making sure that the advertisers on their site are relevant to themselves and their users. Content producers off-line have very close relationships with their advertisers. Strike up a deal with Razer or EA to do some skinning just before a product launch. I'm not suggesting "selling out", but rather realize that you are running a business selling content to us. We buy it by looking at your adverts. If we don't like your adverts, we will block them. If we don't like your content, we won't visit your site. It is up to you to connect us with your advertisers via your content.
What you are describing is a website behind a paywall. We don't all want that.
Yup, and it works. Anonymous reader did not do their homework.
And all traffic is routed via New York. Gotto love the NSA.
Here's a man that managed to infect Madagascar.
I have a degree in it. (More specifically B.Sc in Computer Science specializing in Bioinformatics)
Hell, even Olympians miss. Oscar Pistorius only scored 2 hits, with 4 shots fired.
Hello pedant! I hope you enjoy your stay.
Absolutely nothing, I do it. It's great to get up into the sunshine and fresh air. If I didn't smoke, I wouldn't.
Exactly! It's a *stealth* plane. You aren't meant to see stealth anything. Clearly created in a studio.
There, fixed it.
In my third year of varsity, we had to write a search engine with indexing stored in files. My Perl solution returned results twice as fast (averaging 22ms/query) as any other in the class, most of which were C or C++. And it took me half the time to write.
I love Perl mainly because of I am a lazy programmer. Yes, most of my Perl scripts take a little bit longer to execute, but we're talking a difference of seconds or minutes, not hours. There are times where I choose Perl, Python, C/C++, PHP, etc, but this depends entirely on the problem and the circumstances. I will use Perl until I die, even if there aren't any more releases from now on.
Should we lament Bash for the same reasons? The last release (4.2) was 13 Feb 2011, and the last feature release (4.0) in early 2010. ZOMG!
4.3% of the words in that summary is MIT.
I've been waiting since 26 June for my Pi. And this guy has 64, just for kicks! WTF?
2 years ago I moved from digital broadcast media (web dev before that) to a financial data services company. It was a hell of a change, and there was a massive amount that I had to learn in the new domain. I now have gained that knowledge (not that I know everything about equities, warrants, ETFs, derivatives, and all the things these brokers make up every day to make them more money). But, I'm still a code monkey, still applying the same programming techniques and theory that I've learnt over the years. It's interesting work, even though I do create glorified data processors.
That being said, the world of finance is driven by computers. They need us to bang out code for them. But, it is also high stress. Every minute of downtime translates directly to potential lost revenue. And that potential according to the brokers and traders means actual. It's ok if they lose a few hundred million in a few hours, because of bad luck, but woe betides you if your systems are down.
Lookout for that molehill! Yes, some versions are vulnerable, and everyone is having a hissy fit about this. I've tested every single copy of various versions of MySQL that I have running, and they are not vulnerable. And I'm running MySQL on Windows, Arch, RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS.
Once a year I do some calculations, to figure out which is cheaper for me: a data-only mobile contract and Skype; or a voice contract.
Skype claims that a skype-to-skype call is at 3MB/min, while a skype-to-landline/mobile is at 1MB/min. Considering that most of the calls that are make are to people that don't have skype, I'll use the latter figure.
I sometimes use up to 400 minutes, or less (no carry-over, which is illegal, but we are too scared to fight this). So 350 minutes equates to 350MB skype-to-skype calls. Let's call it 400MB including presence, contact information. I use around 350MB/month when away from my wifi networks. The most applicable data bundle is 1GB, at ZAR290. An "unlimited" package goes for 10x this amount. So, I'll be paying around ZAR320/month for the contract, including their lovely add-ons they always manage to squeeze in.
Next is the cost of skype. If i choose the pay-per-minute option, I'll be paying ZAR0.177/minute, or roughly ZAR61.95/month. This brings my total monthly bill to ZAR381.95, rounding up for the unexpected - ZAR400/month.
I pay ZAR350 for 350 minutes per month, plus a few other items (promotion fee (WTF is that???), itemized statement). The cost of the phone is included in all of that. Assuming I don't go over any of my bundles (350 minutes, 100 sms, 350 GB), then I pay ZAR637/month. And yes, I do often go over my bundles.
So, a data-only contract (it's not data only, but rather the only bundle is data. Voice calls are paid at full rates - ZAR2.85) is 75% of a voice contract. Plus, i pay the same for local calls as I do for international calls when done through skype. ZAR400 vs ZAR637 is a massive difference, making it well-worth it. If I choose the skype route, I end up paying my mobile operator ~ZAR340/month instead of ~ZAR640/month. They will lose out ZAR300/month - or ZAR7,000 over a 24 month contract period.
If I was a mobile operator, I would hate to lose half of my income from a number of my users. But, that's what they get for bending us over the coals, pulling down our pants, and...well...this is a family show. I've used the most expensive skype option, so the prices for monthly or annual subscriptions would only drop.
The only issue is that of battery consumption of skype, and coverage. I spend 99.9% of my time in urban areas with semi-decent data coverage. For the times when I'm in rural/low coverage areas, then I would pay out my of ass to do voice calls. But I'm not too worried about that.
So my point is, yes mobile operators are losing money to VOIP. Yes, they can do something about that. But, they have been dropping their prices in recent years due to consumer demand and dissatisfaction, so they are losing "potential" revenue regardless. I say stick it to "the man" until we collapse the economy with all these work-arounds.