commentzorro

First, micropayments are less than a penny (the "micro" part). Anything 25 cents is just a payment.

Second, 25 cents means I can quickly bump into my monthly/yearly maximums and have to start cutting back on my reading each month and year end. I don't want to go each October-December without being able to read the web just because I overspent on marginal articles earlier in the year.

The model that will work (for me anyway) is one like Netflix. I pay essentially a yearly fee and can consume as much as I want. Bingeing, if you will, when I desire. But only if, again like Netflix, a significant portion of the web is included. If I have to pay for five or six subscriptions it's a no-go because it gets too expensive.

I help support an app with just a few thousand users (US and Canada). It's about 9 years old but still actively updated. Coincidentally, it's user base is decidedly poorer people. In the years I've been involved there have only been a handful of people running macs and about the same number running Linux. Easily 99 percent run Windows. XP was most common until last year when Windows 7 finally took over. The first Win 10 users are just starting to show up.

My (admittedly limited) experience is just the opposite of yours.

That's because wealthier people tend to keep up with the latest technology. And Apple has always made a conscious decision to target the wealthier customers.

Walk into any Best Buy and compare prices for Apple machines against the likes of Dell, Asus, Acer, and such.

Poor people buy cheap because of need and upgrade only when things stop working. Rich people are more likely to buy to optimize the and share the latest and greatest experience.

As Fox News likes to say, if we take away social program people will have to take theses jobs or they'll starve to death. The "free market" will fix everything!

After all these years of stepping in the middle, maybe we want to see some of the VCs not targeting skimming money going some place else but instead, creating a startup that doesn't concentrate on "bringing the most money to founders and shareholders" but moves society around others who do. Even if that means their startup won't get them a seat at the billionaire's table.

--eat the rich Are we getting hungry yet?

First, pay by the article means I can easily go through the annual amount I'm willing to spend on "news" in just a few active months. Then I have nothing left for the rest of the year. I don't want to go through the mental effort based on each article and how it _might_ compare to others in the future in order to decide what to read, regardless of having to make that decision before or after I read the article. In other words, it may be a fine article on in it's own right and fully worth 25 cents. But not compared to all the articles I might read in a year. For example, if I have $150 per year for "subscriptions" that means I get 600 (25 cent) articles per year or 20 per month. Is this article worth it?

Second, as mentioned in numerous blogs, paying by the article creates a race to push more articles with just the minimum quality to get the pay click.

This exactly is why I can never get past the first couple weeks of playing with Rust. Every few months I revisit it and every couple weeks after that I put it aside again.

When I was first learning C++ I spent a huge amount of my time inside the debugger trying to figure out why a pointer wasn't ... pointing. There was always a reasonable explanation that way my fault and if I had just understood what my code was really doing I would have coded things right and it wouldn't have crashed.

Now we have Rust that essentially takes away that entire problem. Just wipes it out by way of a clever compiler. Only now we substitute this same learning curve "debugging" the compiler rather than debugging memory space. (Probably a better trade-off in the long run. Rust sort of bets on that being true anyway.)

Go does not suffer from either of these traits. For me, Go is not often a "fun language" to code in but it's eminently practical and is remarkably fast to pick up for what it does express. I've ported a couple pieces of C# application systems to Go and they've worked really well. But it's kind of a grind unwinding the higher level abstractions from C# into the more primitive Go space.

I wish there was some way to bury Rust's borrow checker for those parts of an application where you don't want to care about it and then surface it gradually when you do want it. Because the elegance of the rest of the language is what pulls me back every few months.

Hear Hear. Command line support over the phone is a nightmare.

Hear Hear. This sounds wonderful. Sort of like from a Star Trek Utopian future. You're an insightful person. Now, who do we vote for to make it happen?

Not sure what the future of programming languages is. But if humans are involved I suspect there will be a visual representation. And that means syntax. And that syntax will matter then just as it does now.

I don't think these two are related in the way you imply. In fact, I go so far as to say they are related in the opposite way you describe. ex: If you don't want to pay for food then you don't value it? If you don't want to pay for medicine then you don't value it? If you don't want to pay for an education then you don't value it? Many of the things I don't want to pay for I value quite a bit.

Also, I can certainly value the contents of this particular article but not value the contents of the WSJ (in entirety) enough to pay for a subscription.

Finally, and in keeping with the spirit of the comments, I can actively despise that the WSJ has now been taken over by an America Destroying (TM) conservative and be going out of my way to read the article w/o paying.

Anyway, lots of issues with tying value to payments.

When I was in school we called these people "philosophy majors." ;-)

  There is nothing here
  It has all been said before
  Generic fatigue

Anyway, here's a couple links on what to report to which:

Secret Service: http://www.fraudaid.com/solution_center/jurisdictions/usfed-...

FBI: http://www.fraudaid.com/solution_center/jurisdictions/usfed-...

I suppose once that language comes along we can stop our constant whining ;-)

BUT, it must also have a nice set of high level abstractions. For web and application level stuff rather than system level stuff.

So, what's that magic language? Really!

Go is almost that language, but it "missed it by that much."

I'm in the U.S. and this is quite true. Then again, it think it always has been. The difference now is that the media is owned by a the parties (or the parties and the media have become one) and simply push the party line rather than pushing a particular candidate. And the particular candidate that will move the nation farthest in the party/media's direction gets the most positive attention. And any candidate from the opposite side becomes "Hitler Satan" (TM).

>> ...media are really, really bad.

No, the media has become really, really good! It's just that what their good at is not what you think you want out of media. Once you realize the media exists to corral and direct you rather than inform you, you begin to see how truly good they've become.

I've been toying with getting a couple home servers going (replaced home service w/ business service, just installed two router based DMZ, looking at lightweight hardware -- probably will be Fit-PC products). I was going to run a separate reverse proxy and Lighttpd or similar but a quick glance makes it seem like Caddy could be used for both and more easily. Thanks for the link.

(Edit. BTW, you're not here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_server_softw...