Oh, okay, that is a problem. Part of what makes a newspaper successful is being influential and widely-discussed. It certainly may stop being that by being behind a paywall. And if bloggers and social media users can't link to it, getting younger readers is going to be harder.

I have a funny feeling that the Times will not stop being influential offline though. It still has the status of being the 'paper of record' in Britain. It may actually end up being profitable, influential and read by almost no one. Which would be very strange indeed.

To be devil's advocate (and when you are arguing Rupert Murdoch's case, you really are being devil's advocate): might not the defender of the paywall say "yes, it has no value because people aren't paying for it". Paying for a newspaper means that they can put in actually important content because they can cover sending correspondents out to warzones and to spend the time doing in-depth investigative journalism, ploughing through government documents and archives and so on. And, you know, without that funding they will simply resort to doing cheap and crappy pseudo-journalism like pulling down easy entertainment stories and posting them online and waiting for the comment threads to push up their page view counts. Basically, that without direct funding from readers, you end up with Gawker rather than The Times.

You know, the same argument that the BBC make - that commercial advertising means you end up with lots more crappy game shows and and far fewer symphony orchestras and obscure John Peel sessions and 'Life on Earth' and so on.

The point that vlm was making was that since such a small proportion of the Internet is subscribed to The Times, it must be a failure.

Getting 100,000 subscribers online is - if true - no bad thing. The top-selling broadsheet (Daily Telegraph) in Britain has a daily circulation of 691k. The Times itself has a 508k circulation. vlm is wrong to compare the subscriber numbers to the Internet as a whole: instead, you need to compare it with the UK broadsheet market. Because, really, all they need to do is cover their costs online. Anything else is profit, since they already have an existing offline newspaper business.

The problem is that it is doubtful whether they have got 100,000 subscribers: someone spending £1 trying out the paywall for a day is not necessarily someone who will then continue paying.

To see whether or not it has turned out to be a success, we need to wait until there are figures counting the subscribers once things have settled down and compare them with their own business objectives. It's a business: subscriber numbers don't matter, profit matters.

Is that the right analogy though? Sure, if a advertising-funded (or, in Britain, a license-fee-payer-funded) show gets a small audience share, then it may get taken off air.

But I imagine that some of the porno channels that you have to pay a subscription for don't get many viewers. But so long as the viewers they have are paying enough to fund their whole operation, they don't really give a shit that they aren't getting the same number of viewers as Prison Break or whatever. (Same for premium non-porno channels.)

I haven't had any reason to read the Times since nobody links to their articles any more. And since I have no reason to read the Times, I haven't had any reason to pay for it.

Because of the very negative political effects that Murdoch's money and influence is having both here (where The Sun newspaper has become a kingmaker in British politics and in the US and other countries), I rather object to giving money to Murdoch's companies. I'm very glad we have stopped paying for Sky, for instance - there's enough crap to watch on Freeview/Freesat without paying £40 a Murdoch to watch repeats littered with adverts.

Save democracy: starve the Murdoch beast!

Ah, iTunes for Windows. That wasn't specified in the parent post, and we are talking Flash on OS X in this thread...

The voodoo about syncing? I don't notice any voodoo at all. Plug in device. It puts songs, podcasts et al. on. Unplug.

Here's why you have to suffer iTunes though: the other MP3 device manufacturers were completely shortsighted and thought that "drag files around in your filesystem" was a suitable user experience. It isn't.

If the thing is 64Mb in size, filling that up by hand is easy. If it is 64Gb like the top-end iPads, that's not so easy. Geeks can write rsync/unison scripts (I have for my ebook reader) but normal people just want a music playing app that syncs up with their MP3 player/phone/etc.

If Microsoft, SanDisk, Creative and Archos etc. had an ounce of intelligence between them, they would have built a decent iTunes alternative that syncs up with any of their players as easily as iTunes does. (Or better yet, come up with a simple, easy-to-implement sync protocol and released open source plugins for Winamp, fb2k, Amarok, Rhythmbox etc.)

Instead, SanDisk put out stupid adverts about "iPod sheep" instead of actually producing a compelling user experience. The whole sync process is the main reason I've bought iPods: I listen to lots of audiobooks and podcasts, and I don't want to have to carry around a piece of paper where I write down which ones I've listened to and where I am in the often multi-hour files.

Apple has an excuse: it doesn't want to include broken shit by a bunch of lazy fuckwits who couldn't build a working toaster let alone maintain a Mac port of a popular web browser plugin. They don't want to include something that causes a ton of crashes, instability, memory leaks and security holes. And so it is not including Flash.

There are plenty of reasons to criticise Apple. The App Store sounds like a pretty Orwellian idea. Not including a bug-ridden pile of shit in their operating system by default is one of the better things Apple have done. If it leads to the demise of Flash quicker, I'll be very happy.

rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app/

There. Fixed that for you. Enjoy your Zune.

Personally, I don't get all the iTunes hate. There's a lot I don't like about Apple, but iTunes is one of the few not-completely-shite MP3 players out there because it can do handy little things like remember where you are in audiobooks, something the open source players have yet to catch onto despite almost a decade of iTunes/iPod dominance...

How does pushing HTML5/JavaScript-based web apps "necessitate" - as the GP said - the removal of Java and other "old" technology?

The GP said that as with Flash, Apple are "helping to move old tech out". This is true: they helped rid us of floppy disks and serial/LPT ports in favour of USB, were one of the first computer companies to push wireless etc.

But I don't see how for HTML5 or any other new technology to come about, one must throw away our 'old' JVM? Did we have to throw away C when Python came out?

Sometimes you do have to throw away old technology - I'm glad that Intel et al. are finally getting around to replacing BIOS with UEFI. But I don't see how a world of webapps "necessitates getting rid of" the JVM.

The push for getting everyone into HTML 5 using Javascript and all of those technologies necessitates getting rid of the old ways.

By which you mean the JVM? It has nothing to do with "internet standards" ffs.

You do know that 'Java' is to 'JavaScript' as 'car' is to 'carpet'. Beyond a few shared letters for early buzzword compliance, and things like the Rhino interpreter, there is no real relationship between the two.

All those sexy HTML5/JavaScript apps have to be written in programming languages and hosted on servers. And plenty of people are building on top of the JVM. Large chunks of both Twitter and Foursquare are written in Scala, a JVM language. Why? Oh, something about how it is good for long-running processes due to something ridiculous like a million engineer-hours going into JVM development.

If we should get rid of technology simply because it is old, let's get rid of C. No, wait, let's not. Because it is a useful and practical technology, and we should base our technical decisions on technical merit not on buzzword compliance and what appeals to Web 2.0 shiny-seekers.

Not all academics suck at it. The LaTeX crowd (not just maths/physics/comp sci, increasingly social sci., philosophy and so on) these days tend to stick everything in version control. With distributed version control like Git/Mercurial etc., it is pretty easy to have a complete history of your work stuffed onto a few different machines and backed up to some online service too.

Being able to get diffs, branch on chapters and work out the average age of different sections of work is a neat trick that goes with it.

And now normal people are starting to use Google Docs, Dropbox and all sorts of other cloud services, there is no longer any excuse. Yeah, you may lose your iTunes folder, but your Documents/Dissertation folder should be in the damn Dropbox.

Reminds me of the philosophy department at the University of Sydney which, during the heyday of the student movement split into two departments - General Philosophy (which was run as a little Communist collective, trying to live by the various French poststructuralist and postmodern theorists) and Traditional and Modern Philosophy (which taught mainstream Anglo-American philosophy in a normal way). From an article on the topic:

The Department was fully democratic, with all staff and students having the right to speak and vote on matters of course content, assessment and appointments. Meetings of up to 500 were known, though student apathy kept most down to some 20. Formal exams were eliminated, and in some subjects students assessed themselves.

IIRC, they also ended up assessing political philosophy modules by counting attendance at various political protests. The 'Traditional and Modern' department eventually 'won' in the 90s after poaching various other top professors over, and Sydney has gone back to being a pretty good department.

(When I see people trying to take what works on the Internet and apply it back to offline society, I sort of want to shake them and say "yeah, there's a reason we started doing it this way online - because it's online, duh. The mechanics and economics of it might not really work out in the same way if you are doing it in real life.")

I'm also not sure what Roblimo's problem with Atlassian or proprietary software is; from my experience Atlassian produces fairly good software and charges far less than competitors.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha! You are joking, right?

Confluence is classic enterprise software. Purchased by people who never have to use it. I've used it and it is unintuitive shit. They've taken what should be a fundamentally simple piece of software - a wiki - and made it into the bastard lovechild of Lotus Notes and Outlook so they can add a bunch of bullet point features. The result is a horrific monstrosity that nobody would ever use if it weren't for Enterprise Architects needing Important Enterprise Features.

Just like I'm sure someone who has never used any Windows, Mac or Linux GUI application would wonder what the hell

File -> Save As ...

did.

FTFY

The house of lords don't have to worry about elections and consists of a lot of knowledgeable people.

If only.