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Comment The importance of protecting our wallets (Score 1) 351

Would you like to pay for every Internet search, like the good old days of Lexus Nexus? Watching Antenna TV? Buying physical goods, because the company was not able to sell lots through advertisement and ramp up efficiencies on volume? Money in our wallets is limited resource and most of us want some choices on what to pay for and what to get for free while giving businesses a chance to sell something else to us later.

Ads can be seen as a kind of voluntary income transfer. It's possible to get lots of stuff for free or low price by accepting ads, gathering coupons or starting and canceling free trials. Poor do not have money to buy advertised products anyway. The only issues are deceptive/emotionally exploitive ads, and need for universal ability to opt out by paying fair price that the content provider would otherwise get for the impressions.

Comment With stock tires on my local road? (Score 1, Interesting) 171

Somehow I get the feeling that this $10K upgrade will just get me a bit more smoke and rubber left on the road. Just how was this tested? What am I likely to really achieve on a local highway and with stock tires (presumably while steering clear of cops and any other nearby traffic)?

Comment No problem, there is lots of other music to listen (Score 1) 574

I typically create a playlist and then create a radio station based on this playlist. If some artists are not part of streaming, the server will just substitute other, similar music and I get to discover new artists that are willing to meet customers where they are now.

Maybe over time a market for higher quality digital music can be created and people can even be trained to hear the difference. But having them move on to other music is not going to sell yours.

Comment What is the motivation to block access? (Score 2) 267

If it's security, a 45 minute window is no improvement over unrestricted access. In fact, firewall login page is an extra chance for password snooping. Ideally, users would be able to open a remote desktop session to an unrestricted VM and the later can be rolled back to initial state once the session is over.

If you just don't want them to slack off, consider the battle lost. Everyone has smartphones perfectly suited to watch movies or chat with friends for the whole day. Find ways to measure and reward actual productivity rather than hoping to make people work out of boredom.

Comment POSIX I/O is not really a good fit for versioning (Score 1) 212

If someone updates a file in place, do you really want to create a new version for every write call? On the other hand, apps that update files atomically do so by renaming original and backup, which breaks tracking these as the same file.

What you can do is make hourly snapshots and make them available as read only shared directories. Easy enough with simple hard links, and many filesystems support snapshots natively.

Protocols like WebDav do support versioning, but it would work best with WebDav clients, not naive apps that think they are writing to a local disk.

The best version control is actual version control such as git.

Comment Absolutely not, especially for a personal project (Score 1) 296

Your first priority is to finish it, and make it useful to others. Start with the language you are familiar with, and that facilitates maximum portability and compile time error detection. Once you are done, there is always an option to rewrite performance critical parts in native code. With C/C++, there is always a chance of memory corruption in your own code or libraries you are using. It may never manifest on your development system, but affect other users and other platforms.

Unless of course your primary motivation is to learn another language. Then go right ahead, but don't expect maximum productivity.

Comment Incognito/Private Window/etc (Score 1) 112

Then your browser will not give your search agent of much of a chance to track you, and in most cases you have the source code to verify that. Search engines don't bother to track by IP because it's both unreliable and you will likely be pissed off if you see ads which are too relevant when you take such precautions.

Presumably most of your searches are not privacy sensitive and you might even appreciate the ads that show what you are looking for right at the moment. And when you are seriously looking into overthrowing your government, you use your browser's Incognito mode to connect to Tor over a VPN provider outside the jurisdiction of your local spooks.

Use DuckDuckGo if you like it, but it can not be your only privacy measure when you need real privacy, especially as startup on American soil forwarding searches to Putin's Yandex. Most search engines track you to get some money from ad clicks. Having to produce records to various law enforcement agencies is both costly and bad for brand reputation, so some effort is expanded in degrading usefulness of stored data for this purpose while minimally complying with the law.

Comment Re:Recognition won't pay the bills (Score 1) 368

This is simply not the way to run any business that makes most money from repeat customers, let alone one with no marginal costs. People will not suddenly stop listening to music after 3 months. If I was a musician participating in Apple music, I would be much more worried about their conversion rate, ongoing pay rate and discovery of my songs in the service. Speaking from experience of marketing a photo app and giving away free printed photos in all kind of kids events to jump start word of the mouth awareness.

If you in a mortuary business, maybe things are different. But for everyone else recognition is exactly what opens up possibility of paying the bills.

Comment Re:Clean my house for free. It's recognition! (Score 1) 368

you hire other people to clean houses

Here we go again! These artists are not losing any money or time to have their tracks played to a wider audience. They are just gaining potential new revenue in future. What Apple should have done is let artists opt out of the free trial and take a chance that people will establish different listening habits in the meantime.

Comment Re:I'm sorry, what? (Score 4, Insightful) 368

Ah, the classic blunder of confusing physical goods with intellectual property.

You can wave a magic wand to get a house cleaned. Someone is running a service where a significant portion of users sign up to pay you some change for each cleaning after a 3 month free trial. Is it really a bad deal, even if it did take you a lot of time to make your magic wand?

Comment Free trials are great (Score 1) 368

If you are running a startup, you would love a service that offers 3 month free trials with decent conversion rate. It would be easy enough to get a bank loan and cover expenses while subscriptions ramp up, so long as you can document your likely monthly profits afterwards.

Now it could well be that most musicians would rather be paid a salary than depending on fluctuating royalties. But the likes of Taylor Swift would actually be strongly against that. When you are on a salary and become a megahit, you would get a nice bonus and maybe stock grants, but nowhere near the actual value of your work.

Comment Re:Yes, it's called redundancy (Score 2) 107

A hardware server start may take ten minutes - if it actually comes up successfully. If you are starting a cluster in an emergency outage, you never know how many servers, power supplies and network switches kicked the bucket since you last used them. Plus, your DNS, NFS, db and other dependencies have to be unaffected by the outage and handle the added load of hundreds of servers starting at the same time. If you do a staggered restart of 100 servers in groups of 10, that's an hour and 40 minutes of outage if everything goes without a hitch. Worth the power savings from idle standby?

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