Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1715 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"The 'quality' of the scoops inevitably falls and the public interest is not piqued"
Surely the quality "increases"? I mean, once we can't buy celebrities' voicemail and medical records, we'll have to go back to reporting *real news*. I agree that the public interest won't be piqued, though... :-(
"I think it is far too late to start a subscription model for web news services."
You are mostly right... if you assume that the goal of web subscriptions is to get web users.
Since News International announced their paywall, I have always maintained that they did so not with a view to getting web subscribers, but iPad subscribers.
Stopping offering free stuff causes resentment among users of the free, but freetard web users are a market NI could afford to use. They needed to have the free out of the way before the start of the slab-fondling fad to ensure that they weren't taking the free stuff away from the executive slab-fondling set, because they are a core demographic for white-top newspapers.
The figures agree with my predictions -- it's a strategy that has worked. Other newspapers now have the problem of part of their slab-fondlers being used to having the free web edition available, and it's going to hard to push that segment to the subscription model.
@Chris 19
" First, the long tail is of no relevance whatsoever to the problem of marketing and getting your app into that top 10 chart. "
True, but the fact that the top 10 iPhone/Android apps is a bigger proportion of all sales than any top 10 in any luxury goods market before the dawn of the internet is of direct relevance to the importance of being in that top 10.
You have been lucky to get a good living out of app sales, but your personal experience isn't enough to disprove the statistics that show that most app writers get $sq_rt(FA) and that the writers of Angry Birds got $2^shedloads.
He was working on a flawed business model based on dodgy figures -- he underestimated the size of the Earth. You know when he was reportedly told by the pope that he'd fall off the edge? It's not true. It's more likely the papal astronomer pointed out that the world was much bigger (based on the ancient Greek calculations) and that he'd be out of food long before reaching the Indies....
I don't think it's necessarily a question of "greed" with respect to fees -- Spotify's current business model simply isn't profitable for artists.
It has been estimated that an artist (a single singer-songwriter, that is, not a band) has to get over 4 MILLION plays to earn the equivalent of a month's salary at US minimum wage.
(http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/)
Even back in 2009, it was claimed that Lady Gaga received a payment of only $167 for over a million plays of Poker Face.
(reported in 2010: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/357217/songwriters-attack-spotifys-tiny-royalties)
What will kill these legal services is that they are unsustainable.
Like a lot of stuff online, the business model is fixated on the price of bit-juggling, not the value of the content.
Before passing judgement on bamboo, I think we'd need more information on the points of failure of these bikes. The thing that jumps out at me is this:
" He said that even the wheel rims were made of bamboo strips. "
A lot of the strength of bamboo comes from its cylindrical structure, which is lost when you cut it. You also lose the benefit of the dense impermeable outer layer if you expose the insides. The wheels certainly sound like the weak link here -- I would expect the rims to be in splinters before you'd even see a split in the tubes.
You're missing the whole point of using a fibrous medium. The fibres will move to some degree within the medium, but the structure as a whole will appear rigid on the macro scale. Vibration is medium frequency and low power, which will be absorbed in the fibres rather than the structure, preventing in reaching the rider. Bumps are low frequency and high power, and have the potential to damage the structure, but the bamboo is rigid enough relative to these to protect itself (the rider gets a jolt, but it's less than he'd get if the bike split beneath him and he hit the road).
Or to put it another way: bamboo is harder to bend/break than metal pipes, but hit them both with a drumstick and it's the metal pipe that will ring...
The whole Wi-Fi standard was very poorly thought out. The only authentication method specified was a single all-user password, so you can't really blame BT or anyone else for needing a web-based login screen.
What we need is for the successor to WEP and WPA to specify a standard for individual user domain authentication. Until then, we're stuck with the hacks in the current generation.
@AC,
"2) as per the CD and cassette tape, there should be MASSIVE, and retrospective compensation to the creative industries (film, music), from the digital businesses which have received money which would have gone on paying for content."
A "tape tax" is a blunt instrument and affects many innocent parties. The argument against it in the physical media space is that the small band that sells their own original material direct to the public finds themselves paying royalties to someone who has nothing to do with their purchase.
If you applied the same principle to internet connections, you end up with old Granny Johnstone, who has a computer to email the grandkids at college paying money to Fox because somewhere else someone else is downloading X-Men 2.
The result of a "download tax" is exactly the opposite to what you want: people cease to respect IP laws because they start to consider the tax as "I've already paid for it".
@Lee,
There's standard pricing across the industry. If the prices of material by the big names came down to the sort of level you seem to be expecting, it would squeeze all the little guys out, because while U2 could live on a hundredth of their current income, your average hopeful couldn't. Even many charting artists aren't that far off the breadline after they pay off their operating costs. And I doubt people would buy anything from an "unknown" at a hundred times the price of a known good artist. Bye-bye variety.
Rurwin, you too are acting under a misapprehension. You think that "filesharing" should be decriminalised, but that "distribution" should be punished. The whole point is that a filesharer *is* a distributor, and the law as it stands does indeed only punish distributors.
The problem is not with the definition of the offense, but that the assumptions of damage don't match the reality. US law in particular has high damages as it was written when pirate distribution was generally carried out in back-room mid-scale production operations punting their wares at flea markets and in pub car parks.
"Who cares what John Gray's opinion is? It's an opinion. It's no more valid than yours or mine. Arguing about whether an invisible sky fairy exists or not is not rational."
Exactly, which is presumably going to be the main point of the programme. It's not rational to say God/a god/goes exist and it's not rational to say he/they don't exist. Which is why any scientific attack on the concept of deities is "misguided".
(Not to other readers: there's a difference between "not rational" and "irrational". Being irrational means going against logic. When there's no logical path to follow, it's a non-rational matter.)
I always found the best way to avoid committing an accidental browser faux pas was to run two browsers. And seeing as the corporate web apps only worked on IE, it was easy. So all my personal browsing etc was in Opera (or Firefox, latterly), all my work stuff was IE.
""just because someone is using a stolen laptop it does not automatically make them a criminal"
Err, yes it does. Unless of course you happen to live in some obscure country where possession of stolen property is not a crime. Criminal = Someone who has committed a crime."
Correction: Criminal = Someone WHO HAS BEEN CONVICTED OF a crime. It really is disappointing to see so many people trotting out the tired old line of "criminals don't deserve rights" for stuff that the police or other parties do before they've even cautioned the alleged "perp".
Well, if you've configured it that way for your own use and you interception of other people's email is incidental, you're probably alright, as long as you take action to sort it out if the problem ever arises in real-world use.
But if you've done it to spy on the wife/kids/whoever-else-uses-your-laptop, you're already breaking the law designedly, so the court would no doubt find against you in a dispute with a third party.
OTOH...
Most people who buy a cheap laptop off some bloke in the pub will probably be webmail users anyway....
Many companies make it difficult to find who to complain to, so people don't complain -- it's not worth the hassle. So the companies can pretend that the problem doesn't exist.
Sites like this make it easy to complain, and in a way that is tracked and audited -- no more turning a blind eye to the problem.
Sure, it won't fix everything, but it gets things started...
I doubt Rentokill would be involved if there wasn't an element of pest elimination involved, but they'll be playing it down for fear of PETA et al trying to stop them. I suspect they'll be aiming to kill the black rats and use the local ones as a barrier to stop the black rats moving between buildings and repopulating areas they've already left.
But this leaves the question: do bushrats like sewers? Cos if they don't, this probably won't work....
... and a nice contrasty backing sheet.
And there's the reason it will last: new technology will always be hackable to read old technology.
Looking at the physical burn marks, I imagine this disc won't really care what colour of laser is used to read it, which would make it more future proof than CDs and DVDs, which I'm told aren't colour-compatible with BluRay, meaning current-gen players often need two lasers.
It may be that in 1000 years (or even just 100!), you read your old discs with a general-purpose laser-scanner or electron microscope, getting a full physical image of the disc (just like scanning punchcards) and then processing this. This would also be a better solution for damaged discs anyway, as the track layout can be recreated so that one damaged block doesn't mangle a whole section of the data.
They did mention delivery failure notifications.
It's a while since I've seen it (2000, maybe?), but a badly configured automatic inbox can send autoresponses to autoresponses, so if their inbox "competitions@filthyrag.evilempire.uk" or whatever was on the blink, they could have ended up in a massive knot....
If they've bought back shares, doesn't this change the percentage ownership? I mean, Newswhatever owns 39% of all shares, but if BSkyB owns shares in itself, then they don't have 100% of shares on the public stock market, and sure Murdoch senior effectively owns more than 40% now...?
@Naughtyhorse
"nope that suggests to me bloody long long time ago (this assumes the films were shot with the mother of all zoom lenses)"
Well obviously -- that's why the text's so squint at the start. Proper alignment would have involved travelling several light-centuries due galactic north....
"It is a case of being between a rock and a hard place for the MPC. Given the SE of the UK and London, in general, subsidise the rest of the economy of the UK and contain the largest part of the economy it makes sense to target rates for that area."
Why does SE England subsidise the rest of the UK? Because it earns more money. But could it be that the only reason they earn more money is that the economy revolves around them? If the economy in Newcastle or Manchester or Cardiff or Belfast or Glasgow or Inverness is constantly being battered by changes made to suit London and its neighbours, then other parts of the Union aren't going to be given the opportunity to pay their way.
Except that this subsidy stuff is a bit of a myth anyway. Which makes me wonder -- is SE England actually holding back the UK? Is it actually the *least* productive part, and if we controlled the economy to suit the rest of the country, might we all be richer...? (And we wouldn't all have to emigrate to London to look for a decent job.)
BBC Alba is a channel on a shoestring budget -- and at launch this was £14 million. If I recall correctly, that 14 million paid for: satellite bandwidth; listing on the Sky EPG; listing on the Freesat EPG; 2.5 hours of news content weekly; 2.5 hours of original non-news content weekly.
The budget has now increased slightly, but only in order to pay for the Freeview bandwidth. 5 million -- I suspect that this is calculated on the market rate of bandwidth costs alone, but who receives the bandwidth cash? Her Majesty's Chancellor of the Exchequer.
So it's a zero cost that they can claim is 5mill in "opportunity cost" (from not being able to sell the whitespace), but then it will increase the value of other whitespace licenses through scarcity, and besides, most whitespace use will be unlicensed networking because the regional patchwork of frequencies makes whitespace fairly impractical for anything other than a longer-range-than-usual WLAN.
Superman is a dinosaur, a relic of a more innocent age. He's a messiah in a cape and silly tights, a Big Brother Is Good figure who absolves us of responsibility for our own actions. His continued success is down to the same self-sustaining celebrity that sees talentless nobodies like the Kardashians able to generate such huge amounts of cash.
Film writing is a discipline that relies on tightly crafted stories, and Superman just doesn't give much leeway for good stories (at least, not on Earth, but Superman-in-space only works in the comics because you already know Superman from Earth, and cinema-goers would need a decent Earth-bound story or two to generate context). Alternatively, you could just commision Michael Bay and replace the plot with high-speed 3D combat/chase sequences. Superman racing against a pyroclastic flow to save a family of 4, in full 3D? After he saves the family, he could fly on, but the camera could stop and get engulfed in a cloud of flying rocks. That might confuse the audience long enough that they don't realise there's no plot until the Bluray version comes out....
The car allowance analogy is kind of flawed. At the start of this century, the car allowance morphed into a cost-savings dodge. It was used as an alternative to pay-rises post-tech-crash-and-9/11.
In the office I worked in at the time, it didn't change anything for the people who didn't already have a company car -- they would use their own car whenever practical beforehand, and claim mileage against the project, and they continued to do so. When impractical, they'd get alternative transport and charge it against the project. But that was in a Scottish office of a London-based company. Down at HQ, it led to the situation where people who would normally have used public transport to get about were told they had to use their cars, and it took them longer to get to many places. It reduced choice, thus reducing the ability to be flexible to specific needs, and thus hampered operational efficiency.
My last employer tauted the idea of a laptop allowance a year before I left. The general feeling among the employees on the discussion boards was that it was a Bad Idea.
Having personal responsibility is all well and good, but if we're all buying individually, the company loses economies of scale, and compatibility testing becomes impossible for even the most important core business software. Does a lowly helpdesk operative have to buy a second PC out of his own pocket if the ticket-logging software crashes on his machine?
Secondly, the coverage of support. For a mobile workforce, there is really only one place you would be able to guarantee UK-wide coverage: PC World. So in order to have somewhere to go whenever your PC breaks down, you would be squeezed into buying from one of the UK's most expensive suppliers, and getting your support from a company who happens to have an notably poor reputation for quality of support.
Until computers are reliable, consistent and 100% commoditised, companies will continue to need to buy direct and in bulk.
And lets face it -- that's never going to happen
Ok, so you can shift volume on a smartphone... IF you're one of the lucky 0.00001%
Have you seen how many also-rans there are in the smartphone world? There's a sea of casual games and it's easy to get lost in the crowd.
Also, what does Angry Birds have to do with what Carmack said? Casual games just don't need the sort of computing oomph sported by current consoles.
It currently says "Mediaspring", but there are several companies going by that name.
In interesting move for a URL squatter...
If NI want it free, they'll get it free through a simple domain name dispute. But they might just want to keep their heads down and but it for a couple of grand just to keep things quiet.
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