SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Vid.me has announced that they are shutting down on December 15th 2017, saying that they could not find a path to sustainability.
This news should be of concern as content creators have been getting increasingly frustrated with Youtube's algorithms that demonetize their videos and this means they have one less alternative to turn towards.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Vid.me to Shut Down on Dec 15th 2017
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 79 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
We just joined the civil hair patrol!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:21PM (8 children)
I would wager most people would say ditto.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:56PM (7 children)
Some content creators moved to it [vice.com] as YouTube started wildly demonetizing videos in response to the "Adpocalypse". Basically, as it became clear that YouTube would lose hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue due to advertisers pulling out over controversies like Coca Cola ads appearing on a racist video, YouTube went into panic mode to try and stop the money from flooding away. It became clear that years of AI (machine learning) research would be necessary to solve the problem, and in the meantime, anything remotely controversial would need to be labeled so that advertisers (most of them) could avoid it.
Bots and Mechanical Turks have demonetized or age restricted videos with little recourse or transparency, leaving content creators on YouTube scratching their heads as to what they can get away with on the platform. YouTube has community guidelines and whatnot but they are applied unevenly. Not a surprise given that hundreds of hours of content are uploaded per minute.
Many people on the platform earned enough to make a living creating videos full time. Having your revenues suddenly drop to 10-30% due to trumped-up controversies caused them to shop around for other sites, including vid.me, and explore other options for making $$$ (such as Patreon/GoFundMe).
Some news outlets, particularly the Wall Street Journal, have dug around and exposed sexual/violent/weird/racist content on YouTube:
Google Fails to Stop Major Brands From Pulling Ads From YouTube [soylentnews.org]
YouTube Changes its Partner Program -- Channels Need 10k Views for Adverts [soylentnews.org]
AI Beating Mechanical Turks at YouTube Censorship Accuracy [soylentnews.org]
The latest bit is about content that made it onto the YouTube Kids app, which is supposedly tightly filtered:
YouTube Cracks Down on Weird Content Aimed at Kids [soylentnews.org]
Eric Feinberg has been associated with some of the controversy, allegedly because he thinks he can profit from it:
Meet the Man Behind YouTube's Sudden Ad Crisis. He Has a Patented Fix [adage.com]
The Truth About YouTube’s Monumental Ad Crisis [cloudhelix.io]
YouTube has had trouble making itself profitable from the beginning. So it's no surprise that vid.me would have similar problems. There are some other options out there, but none of them are as dominant as YouTube.
At the end of the day, YouTube will probably continue to exist even if it operates at a loss, because Google gains some significant cultural control with the platform (young people often prefer various YouTube channels and videos over TV). But there will be lots more censorship and ad wrangling, and it will be more difficult for YouTube uploaders to make a living on the platform.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:03PM (6 children)
I'm surprised Vimeo haven't done more to pick up the slack here. There's plenty of reason to move away from YouTube. Vimeo already have the infrastructure.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:21PM (4 children)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266201/us-market-share-of-leading-internet-video-portals/ [statista.com]
It says:
So two likely challengers to YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion, are #2 and #3 in the user video hosting segment (bing videos [wikipedia.org] appears to be just a search engine). And their combined view share is a whopping 1.4%, with YouTube getting 56 times more visits. Maybe you can find better data somewhere else, but it would probably look similar to this.
Never even heard of blinkx.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:53PM (3 children)
I hadn't even thought of Netflix, but there's no obvious reason they couldn't branch out into ad-funded services. Perhaps paying subscribers could be spared the ads.
Quite surprised Amazon video apparently didn't make the top 10. I figured they'd be comfortably in third place.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:58PM (2 children)
YouTube has ad-free subscription options such as YouTube Red [wikipedia.org]. Only a fraction of viewers pay and it doesn't cover the costs of running the site.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:16PM
YouTube Red is where you pay to not have any YouTube ads, right? What running costs are there, over ordinary YouTube videos?
I see no reason Netflix would be any less able to monetize freely-viewable videos than YouTube (modulo advertiser enthusiasm), and I see no reason they wouldn't be able to remove the ads for their paying subscribers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:24PM
Of course if your options are
it is not hard to see which option will generally win.
Oh, and the name "YouTube Red" probably isn't exactly the best advertising either. At least I think immediately of porn when reading that name, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. So those who don't want to see porn will probably not even go as far as researching what it actually is (indeed, it may not even reach the level of a conscious decision), while those who do want to see porn might research it, but then turn away after finding out that it is, indeed, not about porn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @02:48AM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:11PM (46 children)
if centralized slaveware isn't your cup o' tea, there's LBRY [lbry.io].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:17PM (1 child)
Does LIBRAPE automatically download CHILD PORN to your hard drive?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:46PM
Based on the FAQ posted on the website, LBRY is like BitTorrent in that users host only what they have watched. So unless you watch CP, you won't host CP.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:22PM (43 children)
There's a wise saying that applies here: if it's not on the web, it doesn't exist at all.
I'm sure their protocol is cute and all, and I can see they're enjoying being on the blockchain bandwagon, but if it doesn't work in the browser it's DOA. Next candidate please.
The way forward is better web technologies, IndieWeb style, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:28PM (40 children)
But how would that be reconciled with the anti-JavaScript hardliners who claim that they would rather download, compile, and install a native app than run JavaScript in the browser? Or must a service offer both a native GTK+ front-end for technical users and a browser-based front-end for non-technical users?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:38PM (39 children)
Even the full-bore JavaScript-haters don't mind reasonable exceptions. It's the needless JS bloat that annoys them.
More broadly though, web support is essentially non-negotiable for something like this. People just won't try it otherwise. It's a bit different for subscription services, as they already have the payment barrier, so requiring an app isn't so lethal.
The general trend is to require an app for mobile, and to have an optional app on Windows alongside support for desktop browsers. Netflix and co don't bother supporting mobile browsers, for whatever reason. (The only technical reason to get the Netflix app for Windows, is surround-sound support. The picture quality is identical to viewing in-browser with IE/Edge.)
Services like Microsoft/Xbox video, and Playstation Video, have the advantage of an established platform, so they're better able to get away with otherwise poor device support. What we're discussing though, wouldn't have that sort of head-start.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:55PM (6 children)
How would web support work for something that operates like a BitTorrent client? Users of LBRY host what they have watched, and a user who has published videos generally needs to keep a service running in the background to host the videos that he has published. The web platform, on the other hand, works on a client-server model, not a peer-to-peer model. A script running in an HTML document can't open a socket to listen for connections from other users; it can communicate only with the same origin that hosts the document. This origin generally needs to have a fully qualified domain name so that it can qualify for a TLS certificate, and most non-technical end users haven't bought a domain for their home LANs.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @05:15PM (4 children)
Off the top of my head: either something clever with WebSockets (though iirc they're far less powerful than the name implies), or, more likely, you're just S.O.L.
But this isn't necessary to be free from the clutches of the megacorporations. The IndieWeb guys have it right: the web is here to stay, and it's pretty great. It doesn't need replacing, we just need to do it right.
Servers aren't the problem. Being tied to one company's platform, is the problem.
The only use for anything like BitTorrent would be as a performance/load-balancing tool that might be built into an optional app, but I really don't buy the idea that the future of online video is through pure peer-to-peer distribution with no browser support.
Another point against peer-to-peer: distribution of your video, is your problem, not mine. Many people have harsh data caps.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:59PM (3 children)
So then how should we go about convincing the non-technical general public of the benefits of spending $135 per household per year, comprising $15 per year for a domain and $10 per month for a VPS?
This is true whether "one company's platform" is YouTube/Facebook or even just a file hosting service like Amazon S3.
It's also true of advertising aggregators. In order to get away from AdSense, YouTube Partner Program, and the like, each household that runs its own website would have to find the time to sell its ad space to advertisers. How can that be made practical?
Even if distribution of Pino P's video is Pino P's problem, whose problem is distribution of Wootery's video?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:27AM (2 children)
Eh? Weren't we talking about video hosting lock-in? We don't need LBRY, we need more diversity of video-hosting platforms, and good FOSS server-side software so those who want to can host streaming videos independently. There's no need for everyone to maintain their own server or domain.
This is what the web is meant to be like: open to competing hosts that can give rise to healthy competition and an ecosystem that works well for all. There's no point wasting time planning how p2p will take over the world; the web approach works great when it's done right.
No. YouTube is a social media platform, whereas S3 is a backend technology. When people browse YouTube, they don't tend to leave the YouTube ecosystem. This is one of the reasons it's so hard for anyone to move away from YouTube. S3 on the other hand is just a backend technology, invisible to the consumer. There's nowhere near the same lock-in problem.
I'm not suggesting that each household run its own website and live the IndieWeb dream. [indieweb.org]
We should be hoping for a healthy ecosystem of competing YouTube-like platforms. That would be great. I'm really not convinced that p2p has anything to contribute here.
I don't expect others to donate their bandwidth for the distribution of my content, especially if it's monetised.
I'm not opposed to BitTorrent for distributing videos or other large blobs - it's a proven technology after all - but I can't see it replacing conventional 'webby' streaming.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:14PM (1 child)
Earlier you wrote:
Then you wrote:
If it's just video hosting platforms, then MediaGoblin ought to work for many. (The biggest drawback of MediaGoblin is probably support for iOS playback until the H.264 patents expire.) But I was confused as to how much of IndieWeb practice you were suggesting.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:15PM
When I said the 'IndieWeb dream' I meant the silly utopia of everyone having their own server. When I said 'The IndieWeb guys have it right', I meant they're right to oppose monoculture and monopolistic web platforms.
I don't have a lot of faith in MediaGoblin. Why is there not a simple embedded video demo anywhere to be seen?
Didn't know Safari on iOS lacked webm support. Weak sauce, Apple.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:32PM
WebRTC would probably work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC [wikipedia.org]
You would need to keep the browser window open, just the same as you would need to keep a torrent client open. But you could create a special background server program though for content producers who want to ensure their video is always online; plus a lot of users leave the browser open all the time anyway so that's not a huge problem (mine is literally only ever closed if a reboot is in progress). Could potentially even cram it into some kind of browser plugin to avoid having the tab there.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:44PM (31 children)
Eh, not exactly.
I mean that was the default position, about 30 years ago.
In retrospect, however, we can clearly see how that was the thin wedge that destroyed the web. Once you allow 'reasonable' exceptions, but there's no technically enforced definition of 'reasonable,' you're left on the honor system. And that system had no viable defense, no way to stop, the least honorable people. The spammers, the marketeers, the big corporations, and the government.
And with no way to stop them we wind up with what we have today. The web still exists but the vast majority of what most people see and perceive as the web simply isn't. It's discarded all of the essential elements that made the web a valuable thing for humanity.
Ecmascript was a mistake. Even 10 years ago I would have agreed with what you said. But I can see now I was wrong.
The browser's job is taking documents with structural markup and rendering them in a usable manner on whatever sort of output device is available to it. That's its one and only job, and if it starts accepting and executing scripts it has failed.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @08:03AM (2 children)
There was no WWW, let alone JavaScript, 30 years ago.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 06 2017, @09:02AM (1 child)
I said *about* 30 years ago anon. You trying to make the old man do math? Fine.
2017-1990 = 27 I'd say that's close enough to 30 with the 'about.' In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee already had it running. Granted it hadn't spread much beyond him, wouldn't really start getting distribution till after New Years, but it did exist.
And it wasn't like he invented that out of whole cloth either. Hypertext was used a lot through the 80s. Internet protocols for Email, News, and File Transfer were well established and widely used, as were non-internet connected BBS systems that made extensive use of hypertext. His bright idea was bringing that hypertext environment from the local BBS to the open Internet, and doing it in a way that properly abstracted hardware (and software!) incompatibilities out of the picture. This part of it is so important. It made it easy for you to make documents publicly available in a truly transparent way, so that EVERYONE could access them, whether they had an HP (HP made real computers back then!) or Sun or VAX or some sort of PC, whether it was IBM or Apple or Amiga or whatever... none of that mattered. This was revolutionary, because virtually everything outside of these internet protocols had system requirements and if you didn't have the right system, the right add-in card, the right monitor even, you could be shut out. And migrating systems? Imagine you've been running a popular and useful BBS for several years but one day the hardware dies. They don't make what you had it running on anymore, but there's better faster hardware available for less, so you go off and buy a new PC. You hook up the old HDD and there's your BBS, just like you built it, you copy it over and... oops. Yeah, the program you built it with won't run on this PC, of course.
No problem! You get the great new BBS server for the new system, and it's back online quickly after that, right?
Wrong again! Because even though these two different bits of software do almost exactly the same thing (hyperlinked menus and documents) they don't speak the same language. You built your old BBS in the language the old program used, and the new program doesn't speak that lingo. So now you have to translate it all. And 9 times out of 10 well before you get that done you realize it would be less work just to start over from scratch.
The other problem with the BBS system was of course that they were local, as we had to connect with modems and pay long-distance charges few people frequented BBSs out of their area. So there was a level of indirection, in that for instance a lot of the Free Software stuff would be distributed on the Internet first, via News primarily but not exclusively, and then a little later a few people that had internet and also ran a BBS would get it put up for their neighbors, and over more time it would slowly filter out from BBS to BBS and area to area.
WWW solved all these problems in one sweet stroke. It was a BBS language that wasn't proprietary (HTML) transported directly on the internet (HTTP,) and abstracted away hardware differences completely so that it could be ported to any system imaginable. You go from having to have very specific video hardware, for instance, to not requiring any video hardware at all! You go from a system that probably won't be maintainable when this system dies, to one that should be easily maintainable and portable to whatever system the future could possibly throw at you. You go from staying local to avoid long-distance charges to being able to connect from and to any point that can get to the internet.
Took off like wildfire because it rocked. But very very quickly the marketeers started in, the ad money, the speculators^winvestors cash, and it exerted a constant, corrosive influence. Bit by bit that initial sweet stroke of abstraction has been chipped away. And again, ecmascript is a very very important part of how that corrosion has been done. Now we're back where we started, in the bad old pre-web days, when you can only access this if your video card is up to it, only access that if you're on X network but not Y network, etc.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:38AM
Microsoft continues this tradition with its C++ compilers.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:35AM (27 children)
Oh come on. It's ugly and bloated and... still thriving. For all its faults, the web is working pretty damn well, even if folks like us lament many of the technical details.
Not really. It's still open, it still allows free linking between sites (ignoring silos), it's read/write, and it's fairly successfully keeping up with technology (streaming video etc).
I'm not sure I share your universal opposition to using the web as an application platform. In real terms, I find webmail, streaming video, and web-based word processors to be highly valuable. In terms of giving us a secure cross-platform application sandbox, the web is doing much better than the JVM ever did.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 06 2017, @11:57AM (7 children)
I'm afraid you underestimate the problem.
Turn off ecmascript. Turn it off completely. Just for one day. Then come tell me that.
"It's still open"
It's not. A great many "websites" today do not serve a web page anymore. They attempt to run compiled or obfuscated scripts, flash or java, and simply do not work at all if denied. A few years back this was a relatively few pages and could be laughed at and worked around but no more. This has gotten baked into the way the 'web designers' work and virtually everytime a website gets a makeover they become inaccessible, if they weren't already. And nearly everything that 'normal' people, non-geeks, use is not open at all at this point.
"it still allows free linking between sites"
Yeah no that's getting broken every day too, by more and more sites.
"it's read/write"
Huh?
I am not aware of a single consumer ISP in this country that doesn't prohibit servers, and MASSIVELY gimp upload. Sometimes they won't even allow enough upload to ACK everything coming in on the other side.
Though that's a problem with the Internet rather than the WWW proper.
"I'm not sure I share your universal opposition to using the web as an application platform. In real terms, I find webmail, streaming video, and web-based word processors to be highly valuable. In terms of giving us a secure cross-platform application sandbox, the web is doing much better than the JVM ever did."
I would have agreed with you a few years ago, but I've come to see that I was wrong.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday December 06 2017, @02:53PM (6 children)
Right. Hence 'bloated'. But it still works.
Right. Hence 'bloated'. But it still works.
Java applets are long dead, and Flash is continuing its long decline. We do have EME now though. Proprietary binary blobs by any other name...
That's not what 'open' means. What you are referring to is compliance with good old-school web-design principles like using HTML and CSS and only using JavaScript when necessary.
Silos are a problem, but I don't know that it's getting worse. Blogs and news articles are always linkable, for example. Videos are generally linkable. (This is even true of Netflix, though they don't advertise it.)
We're talking about the web, not consumer ISPs. The web lets us have discussions and submit our own content. That's what 'read/write web' means. As you say, an Internet matter, not a web matter.
What is there to disagree with? Browsers are more secure than Sun Java ever was, and it really does work as a, uh, cross-platform platform.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 06 2017, @06:07PM (5 children)
Where are these "discussions" and this "content" stored, and over what network are they transmitted? You can't have much of a World Wide Web without the Internet, unless you're talking about an intranet within a single building.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:22PM (4 children)
Proper servers, not home machines. This isn't a big problem.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:47PM (3 children)
How do we go about convincing the non-technical general public to pay out of pocket for "Proper servers"?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:04PM (2 children)
Pay for it with advertising, of course.
You seem to think my ideas are pie-in-the-sky. They're not. I just want competition for YouTube.
Vimeo offer video hosting already, but they're not in the ad-revenue-sharing business. Would be interesting if they branched out.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday December 07 2017, @01:37AM (1 child)
That's how we got into this mess.
Who pays the piper calls the tune. Advertising is a plague and advertisers should be quarantined.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday December 07 2017, @09:27AM
Advertising is the biggest reason people are able to make a living making YouTube videos. Our whole conversation has been about doing that kind of thing better than YouTube does it.
Some people are able to go with patronage and make it work, but advertising has shown itself to be a generally more reliable way to pay the bills.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 06 2017, @12:13PM (16 children)
To be clear, I'm not advocating the JVM either, at least outside of narrow circumstances. I've come to suspect the entire concept is rotten, the question is not which tech can do this job best, the question is why would we want this job to be done? And what 'job' specifically is it? They're mostly used to do bad things. They're used to obfuscate and deceive. They're used to obfuscate, they're used to avoid showing source, they're used to fool people into thinking they can take very risky actions without risk. "No download" is a marketing slogan with no basis in reality. Of course there's a download. It's just hidden from you, you can't observe it, you can't examine it, you can't verify what it's really doing. It's a step backwards disguised as a step forwards.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 06 2017, @06:13PM (15 children)
One such "job" is to allow the creation and distribution of computer programs with a graphical user interface without having to write the program six times: once for Win32, once for UWP, once for macOS, once for iOS, once for GNU/Linux, and once for Android.
Another is to allow the creation and distribution of computer programs that can access only the data that the user submits, not all data in the user's local account on his device. Desktop programs are rarely if ever sandboxed in this manner. This sandbox feature makes the owner of a device intended for guest access, such as a PC in the computer lab of a school or public library, more likely to allow (implicitly) downloading and running programs in the sandbox.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:21PM (14 children)
Except that job was already being done just fine, through the use of compilers and makescripts.
The JVM makes it easier to do this while still keeping the software secret from the user, which is a bad thing.
"Another is to allow the creation and distribution of computer programs that can access only the data that the user submits, not all data in the user's local account on his device."
And that's the deception part. It's a "feature" whose primary purpose is psychological, it's a (false) assurance of safety that facilitates the con game. All an elaborate ruse to avoid the distribution of source.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:45PM (13 children)
Without a Mac, you can't run "compilers and makescripts" for an iOS native app. Not every owner of an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad owns a sufficiently recent Mac or is willing to buy one just to compile, install, and run one application.
Nor can someone building an application with (say) a Win32 GUI for a target other than Windows expect to successfully link the application. The following can be expected:
Even an application distributed in (apparent) source code form can access files that the user doesn't intend for it to access.
Besides, not all applications can be distributed in source code form under a free software license without completely breaking the business model. Major categories of such applications include video games, players for rented movies, and tax return preparation software [pineight.com]. Or were you referring to distributing proprietary applications in source code form under a non-disclosure agreement?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 06 2017, @08:14PM (9 children)
Because you're running an OS deliberately designed to disempower you. Why would you do that?
Because nothing else is on sale. How did we get to such a sorry state of affairs as that, hmm?
"Nor can someone building an application with (say) a Win32 GUI for a target other than Windows expect to successfully link the application."
Again, this is because you're working with slaveware to start with. There's no technical issue preventing cross-compilers from existing, and in fact many do. But when you're buying products from companies that regard you as a slave, when you're feeding that beast you can't really expect anything but this abuse.
"Even an application distributed in (apparent) source code form can access files that the user doesn't intend for it to access."
Vigilance is required beyond simply having source, of course, but having the source is the prereq. Without that you can't even get started, you have no options, no leverage, no information, nothing. That's why it's called slaveware.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 06 2017, @09:31PM (8 children)
I agree with you that it is "a sorry state of affairs". But what steps should I take to help end this "sorry state of affairs"?
Say I download the source code for a computer program originally designed for use on Windows to a PC running GNU/Linux. If I were to compile it for a GNU/Linux target using GCC for GNU/Linux, I would get errors about missing windows.h and missing import libraries. If I were to cross-compile it for a Windows target using MinGW (GCC that targets Windows), I would end up with a Windows executable instead of a GNU/Linux executable. How would I run the result of such cross-compilation on my PC running GNU/Linux?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:25PM (7 children)
I wish I had a magic answer to that, I don't. But I'm pretty sure that when you find yourself in a hole the first step is to stop digging.
As to compatibility, again, obviously this relies on using standards. Code that's written directly to a proprietary platform using proprietary libraries won't be out of the box portable, which is just one more good reason not to do that!
Ansi C is remarkably portable, and will do just about anything you might need to do. Make does an excellent job covering any cracks. And even if you decide you simply MUST have a fancy GUI that you can't do in ANSI, the meat of the program can still be done portably with well-defined interfaces so the next user can drop his own GUI into place with little effort.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday December 07 2017, @01:23AM (6 children)
Non-technical users will have no idea how to do that. Web applications avoid having to write the GUI six times.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday December 07 2017, @01:34AM (5 children)
But you only need one user who does.
UIs aren't hard to do, unless of course you're a 'professional designer' in which case you're going to make something atrocious anyway.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday December 07 2017, @04:56AM (4 children)
Non-technical users will probably have no idea how to find such a "user who does."
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday December 07 2017, @05:13AM (3 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday December 07 2017, @04:14PM (2 children)
Distros don't do the hard work of creating a new GUI from scratch. As I understand it, a request for package to the effect "Please package this application which already compiles and runs on your distro" is a lot more likely to get acted on than "Please write a new GUI from scratch for this application that has a GUI compatible with a competing operating system but not with your distro".
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday December 07 2017, @07:37PM (1 child)
You lost the context there, you clearly think you're contradicting me but you're not.
The distro picks up the UI, the users that wouldn't otherwise know how to find it get it from their repository.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday December 08 2017, @01:44PM
If a UI has even been created for the application which is compatible with that operating system. My point is that often one has not.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday December 07 2017, @09:35AM (2 children)
Not so. Various games have released their source-code as FOSS while keeping the game resources (maps, models, textures, sounds, etc) as payware. Doom, Quake, and Doom 3 for instance.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday December 07 2017, @04:10PM (1 child)
Any from day one, not five years later after they've already made practically all the revenue they're likely to ever make in revenue sales and engine licensing? And any not developed by Id?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday December 07 2017, @04:35PM
Not as far as I know, no. I believe the Unreal Engine's source is available to all who want it (non-FOSS), and can be used free of charge for free games. Again though, non-FOSS.
The ancient original SimCity, Serious Sam, various others. [wikipedia.org] Old titles and old engines, admittedly.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:46PM (1 child)
"Ignoring silos" means ignoring at least half of all modern internet traffic.
https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html [staltz.com]
You can no longer just ignore that 30% of all web traffic is completely inaccessible if you don't have a Facebook account, for one example. To many users these silos *are* the web. Those of us who recognize why this is a problem have a duty to start working to tear down these goddamn walls.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:07PM
Totally agree that it sucks that Facebook and Twitter are openly hostile to anyone not signed in.
A lot of Facebook content isn't meant to be public, though. Enforcing user preference in social media websites isn't the same as siloing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Tuesday December 05 2017, @05:56PM (1 child)
Javascript was a mistake.
I wonder if you noticed the extra-thick irony of your last sentence.
All that is going to be left of the web is a cable-tv model of filtered, ToSed, EULAed, YouTube Heroed cesspool. Enjoy the bed you have built through unsigned, unverified silent code execution through a text and image displaying application.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @10:10PM
"unsigned"? Every script delivered over HTTPS is signed by the server that delivers it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:37PM (17 children)
ISPs fraudulently sell oversubscribed bandwidth, throttle upload speeds and require abusive TOS that restrict running servers on residential connections, these third-party services will continue to decide who can profit from just about any scheme to monetize content on the Internet.
As long as centralized middlemen/gatekeepers are necessary (due to the anti-competitive and anti-consumer services and policies above) to reach content consumers, they will have an outsize effect on how and who can profit.
Which is just another reason that getting rid of net neutrality will only make this worse. ISPs *already* break the spirit of net neutrality by preferring *downloaded* content to uploaded content on their networks.
It's about liberty. If ISPs can restrict your liberty by treating packets differently, these middlemen will continue to thrive and be able to further restrict our liberty, and (as our favorite anarcho-capitalist [wikipedia.org] AC keeps telling us) limits how we can engage in "well-defined contracts" with advertisers, content consumers and others. No government necessary.
If ISP connections were really just dumb pipes with synchronous upload/download bandwidth, and end-users could send/receive whatever packets they wish, it would be impossible for third-party middlemen/content hosts to "demonetize" or restrict access to content.
And while I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears than watch ads, the current situation makes us all vulnerable to censorship ny both ISPs and these centralized gatekeepers. That will only get worse with the roll-back of net neutrality.
The centralized nature of Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. is (as we're seeing) a threat to freedom of expression.
That said, I don't blame Coca Cola and others for not wanting their product advertised with speech and other content they find objectionable. But until we can bypass the centralized gatekeepers for more distributed models, that's how it's going to be.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:36PM (10 children)
Assuming that by "synchronous" you mean "symmetric":
The world's population is twice as big as the IPv4 address space. This means there must be fewer connections than human beings. Though a few rich countries may have as many IPv4 addresses as residents, the Internet as a whole doesn't, and a lot of users end up stuck behind a carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) layer operated by their ISP.
Even if we were to assume a flag day sunset of IPv4 on the public Internet, the physical layer has for decades been asymmetric, especially over a wireless last mile such as satellite or cellular. Please specify what private entity will foot the bill for the transition to a symmetric layer 1.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:38PM (5 children)
Because of FCC limitations on EMF output between residential and commercial connection points.
Originally 33.6+ modems and later ADSL connections, where due to the copper and the electrical transmission characteristics, a higher frequency/power signal could be transmitted from the Branch Exchange (since it was in a commercial/industrial zone and less concerned/more insulated with regards to RF interference) than within a residential zone, allowing the exchange to provide more data over the same line as the residential link could. This is why residential modem connections to each other capped out at 33.6+bis rather than at the 52-56k like most modems advertised as their speed rating. ADSL, being based on similiar technology but at frequencies outside of the normal voice band had similiar issues, which is why SDSL connections were always at lower rated speeds than an ADSL connection.
As a result of this ISPs started providing primarily asymmetric connections and using it as marketing that only business connections or ultra-high end expensive residential plans could be symmetric, when in reality it was a technical restriction with some technologies which got coopted as a marketing restriction to better monetize the sheeple who were now clamoring for internet connections en-masse and not paying attention to the fine print of their telephone/cable/ISP contracts.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:48PM (4 children)
The FCC-imposed 33.6 kbps uplink limit on v.90 dial-up explains ratios of downstream rate to upstream rate on the order of 2:1. But what explains acceptance of ADSL ratios greater than 2:1?
(Score: 2) by jdccdevel on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:58PM (3 children)
Time Divsion Duplexing (TDD) [wikipedia.org]
Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) [wikipedia.org]
Consumer demand for Download vs Upload data (dictating the division for the two above)
and physics [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:51AM (2 children)
Again, what causes a demand ratio in excess of 2:1?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @01:45PM (1 child)
Most people don't run servers at home.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 19 2017, @01:14AM
Why is this, other than that home ISPs ban it? And if you claim that home ISPs banning it is reason enough, you have begged the question.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Tuesday December 05 2017, @08:40PM (3 children)
A very good point. NAT has helped significantly with that, but it reached he point a number of years ago where public IPv4 addresses have all been assigned. CIDR has helped with allocation issues, although there's still significant waste in the Class A and Class B spaces.
Lucky for us, there's this brand spanking new thing [ietf.org] that might help. Once they work out the kinks [ietf.org], perhaps it might be useful someday. Who knows, maybe it might even be a standard [internetsociety.org] someday.
The issues with asymmetric upload/download were, at one time, issues with the physical infrastructure, as borne out by the DOCSIS 1 and 2 specs, as well as ADSL. However, with DOCSIS 3.0 (another brand new thing -- it's specs were released only 12 years ago -- a blink of an eye compared to that other thing I referenced above) and the rapidly falling costs of fiber deployments, really the only thing keeping us from having high-speed symmetrical internet links is the unwillingness of the ISPs to spend that US$400 Billion [soylentnews.org] we gave them on actually building out infrastructure. Apparently, they'd rather spend it buying politicians to block any competition.
As for who should pay? The same people who pay for sewers and roads and police and fire departments. Internet connectivity is part of our critical infrastructure at this point, and will only become more critical moving forward.
Personally (and I've posted about this many, many times), I believe that the most cost effective and efficient way (as do the ISPs, or they wouldn't be buying state and local legislators trying to stop it) to provide "last mile" services is to have a utility build and maintain last-mile connections, and contract with ISPs to compete for their customers on price, reliability and features.
For new deployments, that infrastructure, like sewers and other public services should be owned and managed by non-profit, quasi-public (somtimes referred to as public-benefit), or private corporations that focus specifically on providing last-mile services.
For existing deployments, the Telecommuinications Act of 1996 [wikipedia.org] is quite clear, incumbents (LECs [wikipedia.org], specifically, but this should be expanded to include cable providers as well, since they're in exactly the same position) are required to provide access to rights-of-way, reciprocal compensation and interconnection for competitive offerings.
This mechanism is currently used in many places for the electricity, with competing energy providers selling power over the local monopoly's infrastructure.
This isn't as hard as you make it out to be, nor would it be so unprofitable as to drive any of these guys out of business.
Is it a slam dunk? No. Would it increase individual liberty? Definitely. And if our state and local governments weren't drowning in a river of filthy lucre from the incumbent network providers, we might get it.
In places where the greedy fucks have been thwarted, municipalities have successfully implemented this model and provide their residents with inexpensive, high-speed, symmetrical connections.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:52PM (2 children)
So how would you recommend go about ending that without risking that the legislation or regulation violate the U.S. constitutional guarantee of freedom to hire someone to speak on your behalf?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday December 05 2017, @10:23PM (1 child)
I'm not sure which constitutional guarantee you're talking about. Please. Do elucidate!
As far as I'm aware, elected officials have already been hired to speak for their constituents. Hiring one to serve the agenda of an individual, group or corporation is popularly referred to as bribery [wikipedia.org].
Is that the 1.5th Amendment? "Congress shall make no law abridging the right of corporations and the monied classes to buy elected officials."
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @10:37PM
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
Lobbying simply means hiring someone "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" on your behalf. Campaign contributions are the same thing as hiring the mainstream media to speak in favor of a particular candidate, because ad spending forms a major part of a campaign budget. This isn't illegal, nor is forming an independent expenditures only committee [wikipedia.org] for the purpose of speaking in favor of a candidate.
You linked this word to a Wikipedia article stating that campaign contributions are not considered illegal bribery in my and SN's home country:
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 05 2017, @06:44PM (2 children)
It's amusing to me that the majority of people who complain about YouTube censorship are supporting the elimination of net neutrality.
Guess who has all the cash to pay for those fast-lanes, now? Definitely not your competing "free speech" platform...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:59PM
I'm just gonna say it, anyone who is anti NN is a fucking moron.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @02:02AM
The majority? Is that the case?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jdccdevel on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:51PM (2 children)
I'm going to assume you mean symmetric instead of synchronous, because your statements makes no sense otherwise.
ISPs don't give a damn about content. They only care about two things, traffic and money.
Respectfully, it's quite obvious you have no clue about how the technology that gets the Internet into your house works. The vast majority of Internet in North America (and most of the rest of the world afaik) is delivered in one of three ways, ADSL, Cable Modem, or Wireless. All of these (except for some licensed wireless using multiple frequencies) use a shared medium for upload and download, and use Frequency devision duplex (FDD) or Time division duplex (TDD) to separate the transmit from the receive. The "Division" part of these means the hardware has to strike a balance between upload (Frequency or Time dedicated to listening) and download (the rest can be used to broadcast) Only the lucky few that have Fiber, Ethernet, or similar connections that don't have to deal with that trade-off.
What that means is that better upload speeds almost always come at the expense of download speeds. (i.e. you have 10Mbit/s available, do you want 5Mbit/s download, and 5 Mbit/s upload, or 8Mbit/s down, 2Mbit/s up?) The VAST majority of users barely touch their upload speeds at all. If you want a connection that has better upload, buy a business class connection, that's what they're for!
As for servers and whatnot, these are shared medium connections. The restrictions on servers are usually there to allow the ISP to disconnect abusive customers. How would you feel your Internet stopped working because some ass using the same shared last-mile medium as you had a cat video on their home-based server go viral? Those restrictions are there to allow the ISP to disconnect someone like that so everyone else's Internet keeps working.
You're ranting against (at least in part) physics, and that has nothing to do with net neutrality, liberty, or even economics. As more and more people get Fiber connections, upload speeds will become less of an issue, and home based servers and true peer to peer will be more practical.
Until then, you can rant against physics all you want, but there's still only so much bandwidth to go around. TDD and FDD are how it's divided up, and demand dictates closer to an 80/20 split than a 50/50 one.
As for net neutrality, it's about money and control more than censorship. The ISPs don't give a damn about you and me exchanging whatever packets we want. They want money from Youtube, Netflix, and other video streaming services... because they can. Freedom of expression is just a unfortunate casualty. Explicitly censoring the Internet won't make them any money, and that's all they care about. Ditching Net Neutrality is a money grab plain and simple.
Net neutrality is completely separate from the "ad-pocalypse" on youtube. That's all about Google having no fscking clue about how to vet videos for advertisers, and advertisers being far, far to paranoid about the videos their ads are shown with.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 06 2017, @06:45PM (1 child)
"We're sorry; business class Internet connections aren't available to subscribers to residential TV."
"We're sorry; business class Internet connections aren't available at residentially zoned service addresses."
"We're sorry; business class Internet connections require the tax ID of a corporation, LLC, or partnership."
Besides, why does a 5 up/5 down connection cost so much more per month than a 2 up/8 down connection?
If that's the goal, the acceptable use policy (AUP) ought to phrase it as a restriction on household server traffic volume, not as a blanket restriction on even low-traffic household servers. A better technical solution would involve renegotiating the FDD or TDD for each subscriber over time to open up more upstream at the expense of downstream when needed.
Citation needed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @02:05PM
Probably because, unlike with home connections, with business connections there is no, or at least less, overcommitment.
Imagine a provider selling a hundred 16Mbps connections. Now the typical home user will rarely max out their 16 Mbps, and especially, rarely will all of them at the same time. So instead of providing 1.6 Gbps in total on the uplink, the provider will provide maybe 800 Mbps, relying on the fact that most of the time, less than half of the users will max out their connection, so most of the time they won't notice a difference. When traffic goes beyond, people will get slowdowns, but if you prioritize real-time stuff (video streaming, Skype, etc.) and de-prioritize things like BitTorrent, most people will still not notice. So the provider gets away with it most of the time, and if there's an occasional slowdown, most people are likely to accept it.
On the other hand, if you are a business ordering 16Mbps, chances are high that you'll actually be using that most of the time, at least during business hours. And you'll most probably less accepting about occasional slowdowns than the typical home user. Also, businesses are more likely to have good lawyers. So if a business orders 16Mbps, it's probably a good idea to really have the full 16Mbps available all the time. Which means that for a hundred 16Mbps business connections, the provider will need to provide the full 1.6Gbps in the uplink.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:37PM (4 children)
I don't like our culture being under the thumbs of private companies. Google is way too powerful, and not nearly accountable enough.
I confess to mental laziness when it comes to video. Youtube is the first and often the only site I think of when I want video services. (Unless it's porn I'm looking for, then there are a number of ever changing sites for that.) I notice Netflix and their commercial brethren some of the time, but they don't do uploads of homemade video, only downloads of slick, professional shows. To me, a service like Hulu is one of those commercial fee based peddlers I wouldn't even know existed if it wasn't built into smart TVs. Never used them, and not planning to. Apparently they all share a vision of keeping video out of the hands of the masses, encouraging us all to continue being passive consumers, just like the good old days of broadcast TV.
Why can't our public libraries get in on this action? They could, if only we funded them. Store and catalog this vast, growing video collection. Maybe even Youtube doesn't know how all those videos they host are really organized.
At the least, public libraries ought to be allowed to handle digital books! It's a mistake that we just stumbled into giving Google the right to scan everything, for their search engine, but didn't make that a more general right.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday December 05 2017, @05:58PM (2 children)
Yes, libraries is a good solution.
Hooktube.
Vimeo isn't all that bad.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @10:24PM (1 child)
The big drawback with Vimeo is the $240 per year fee for uploaders of anything that could be considered "Product demos and tutorials" per the commercial content guidelines [vimeo.com]. Taken strictly, this would deem something along the lines of "How to model and rig a face in Blender" as "Product demos and tutorials" of Blender software. There's a carve-out for "an independent production company, artist, or non-profit", but neither the legal FAQ about this section [vimeo.com] nor even the "Tell me more" article [vimeo.com] draws anything close to a bright line about what uploaders qualify as "independent". Or what did I miss?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:10AM
Try putting it up and seeing what happens. You can't lose more than you do when utube chooses to demonetize or remove your video.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:19PM
It's a matter not only of funding, but of time. Technology has simply outstripped our ability to keep up. As tachyon said earlier in the discussion, "hundreds of hours of content are uploaded per minute," and there aren't enough hours in that minute for us (or enough catalogers on duty during that minute) to make a dent. That said, there are those of us who would be willing to casually catalog as we browse in our spare, were it not for:
The lack of cataloging mechanisms and structure: Youtube would have to give us a way to catalog the page that was robust and secure, and we would have to have a way of protecting the catalog from vandalism without descending into the problems that plague other sites (Wikipedia, etc). We would also need to be effective (I report errors in Amazon's listings frequently, and not only do I never get a response, but the corrections are often not implemented, despite being easily verifiable). Are we tagging the pages, building an index, both, or neither?
The lack of standards: Do we use Dewey, LofC, UDC, BISAC? Proprietary, and arguably expensive, at least for individuals or small institutions (I run a small rural library, and we are historically locked into Dewey, but can't afford to pay OCLC's fees for access even to the abridged system). Open Shelves? Open, but still in development. [I am assuming, for the sake of argument, that we are looking for an English-based system, rather than any of the myriad fine classification systems from the non-English library world.] Or do we make space for all of them and either force separate catalogings for each system or make a translator between systems, which brings up the problem of cooperation between proprietary systems. ALso: who will govern the catalog, and who will control the eventual classification system?
The lack of uniformity and accuracy in any system: To offer an example, do I put a video on building and growing food in a solar greenhouse under solar energy, greenhouses, greenhouse operation, greenhouse construction, gardening, or edible crop cultivation? All of them (easier to do with a virtual item online than with a physical volume on the shelf)? Did I miss the one classification that will bring the viewers? What about the host or the creator? They probably need catalog entries as well. At what point do I stop, or do I open it to a wiki-style collaboration and risk malicious vandalism?
Its a complicated thing, and one that the library world discusses frequently. I also think Google/Youtube doesn't know what it has posted, leaving management to algorithms (witness the mess they make of DCMA) and only look at content when it makes a splash in the media.
That's a publisher thing. And an ILS vendor thing. The publishers would rather us not make any e-content available, and saddle us with DRM, restrictions on format and terms of use, and often prohibitive pricing, (such as paying full price for a book that locks out downloads after a certain number of checkouts, but which the library can't remove from the catalog, to force us to re-purchase). The vendors of proprietary library catalog systems, for those of us who are locked into that, make us pay per title (or per a number of titles), which sets a limit to what some library can take on before becoming prohibitively expensive (which is why my little library does not offer Project Gutenberg or Librivox titles in its catalog).
The one benefit of Google's scanning is the proliferation of reprinted public domain books in facsimile, which has allowed us to replace old copies of interesting books on the shelves or to obtain books formerly unavailable. Unfortunately, there are also those who publish poorly OCR'ed versions of the same books, and it is nearly impossible to tell which is which.