Whoever wrote this silly blogpost clearly hasn't considered the real reason Google needs their products to succeed. Google's bread and butter is their search product. But here's the problem: search growth is slowing. The only way for Google to keep growing their business at the breakneck speed that they and Wall St have become accustomed to is to find new places besides search pages that they can stick their ads on. Right now Google gets to do that using their Adsense program. Thousands of websites around the world are making Google tons of money. But the margins there will keep slipping as more competitors (Yahoo, MSN etc) come on in and offer to share higher percentages of their revenue with 3rd party publishers. This leaves Google with having to own their own "content" pages where they can stick their ads and book 100% of revenues from them. Unless their other products succeed, Google will truly become a one trick pony as far as their revenues are concerned. No responsible business can afford to become a one trick pony. That way lies death.
Reading the comments here, it's not clear to me that people get why AOL is suddenly so valuable and has multiple suitors. It isn't the dialup business. AOL has about 20M customers and that number is falling month over month. So nobody is actually expecting to build a business around dialup (although quite a cash source currently). What Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google want(ed) is: - AOL's immense demographic information and purchase history etc on a large segment of the population. This is much much more valuable to MSFT and GOOG because they don't currently have much of this. - AOL's content network. AOL has a large content network that garner substantial number of impressions every day. You might not like their content, but a great number of people do. This is valuable to MSFT, GOOG, and YHOO.
Why is all this suddenly so important? Check what has been driving Internet revenues over the last 3 years (especially Google): advertising. Search engine advertising is beginning to top out in the US, there is only so much more growth to be had there before it flattens out. The next surge must come from advertising on content networks (Adsense, Yahoo Publishing Network etc). Suddenly AOL looks like a big prize: lots of impressions, captive audience and tons of fine-grained consumer data.
Yahoo was never a serious contender in this race, they don't have the kind of valuations that AOL would want, and they have a vast repository of consumer information already themselves so the only value to buying AOL would be to ensure that Google and Microsoft don't get their hands on it.
And Windows and Linux are never offtopic in the Slashdot World. So I'm reading the article, and on the sidebar I see: Study: Windows Can Be Cheaper to Use Than Linux. And I'm thinking, how come the story on IBM and privacy made it to Slashdot but not this wonderful story on Microsoft and Linux so we can all have a grand fight and yelling match. I mean really, standards around here are slipping.
consider this: the ceo of diebold is a strong supporter of bush (nothing wrong with that), and he sent out a fundraising letter proclaiming that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
Now I'm not an authority on cell phones and how they work. I did hear this story on the BBC a couple days ago. And the CEO of the company that is implementing this said that: 1) They put a mini cell receiver in the plane. Then the cell receiver itself probably talks to a satellite or something. They aren't porting cell phone technology into planes, they're just letting you use your cell phone on the plane. 2) Apparently since they put a cell receiver on the plane, the cell phones negotiate a lower signal strength with the in-house tower (so to speak). As a result, since they're transmitting at much lower power than if they were trying to reach a tower miles away, it reduces the interference with the navigation equipment. 3)They foresee airlines creating a "cell phone" section of the plane. Sort of like smoking/no-smoking in restaurants etc.
This is similar to Google realizing that there's plenty of ad-space going a-begging on blogs. Google will be making the ads more prominent, presumably these guys will be inserting the advertising into the copy. But really, the principle's the same.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
so here i am reading all the replies to the post. and i'm looking around for the moderation on it. was this an insightful reply? was the other one supposed to be funny? should i have been laughing at it?
One of my friends set up a web based emailer that rocks: netmails.net. It totally rocks. Let's you create a unique email address for each website that demands one. And you can attach lifetimes to them so that they expire as soon as you get that shipping confirmation. Or you can tag it as coming from a particular registration attempt etc. Really cool.
Specifically in the case of Elizabeth Smart, this article is missing something. It's called the LDS church. Besides being among the richest (probably the richest?) churches in the world, it is easily the most media savvy, and the most committed to its members. It also has many many connections to opinion makers. Personally, I am not surprised at all that the Smart case is getting so much coverage.
It doesn't matter at all how much faster than the average dialup modem they transfer data so long as there is still a user with a dialup modem at the other end of the transfer. I am not looking to belittle the fabulous work these folks have put in. Merely pointing out that until we solve the "last mile problem" these efforts are largely wasted.
Actually they have already been weakened. This happened a few weeks ago, when nobody was watching. What? You actually thought this administration would let them stand?
I can't recommend gandi (www.gandi.net) highly enough. In addition to the small and entirely pro-consumer terms of service, it's really cheap: a mere $10. And since I switched to them, the email address that I use to register domain names has stopped getting spam. (The old one that I used with netsol still gets plenty). These guys are the best.
-- kurukshetra all the desi news and views you could use
That it should be simple. Here's how it normally works. You borrow money to pay for your college education. That money is given to you based on your creditworthiness. But once the money is given to you, the bank doesn't step in to say "You shall major in Computer Science or else we will take our money back." The bank does not step in to say, "Take that high paying job with the soulless corporation instead of this low paying startup job that you really want to do because we say so". No, the bank merely lets you pay it back and that process affects your creditworthiness positively or negatively.
The IMF does not work this way. The IMF demands that sovereign countries send their annual budget and other fiscal policies to the IMF before they are announced, so they can be vetted for "conformance".
For instance, the IMF does not lend money to countries if they intend using the money to improve their education infrastructure (the governments believing that investing in education today is far better than investing for short term gains). There are cases where the World Bank was willing to lend to a country but couldn't because the IMF would not give that country a good credit rating for the simple reason that the government in that country did not check with the IMF before implementing a recent fiscal policy.
The biggest participant in the IMF is the US. The US government policies are largely decided by what big corporations want. Guess whom the IMF helps with its loans to poor countries?
How would you like to gift away your control over your life to a lender even though you were dirt poor but believed you had a way to climb out of that poverty by yourself with a loan from a willing lender?
Amen to that, brother! For far too long we noble citizens have been paying way to much for our domes. It's high time we made them free! Dome lovers of the world, Unite(d Center)!
Taco would never refer to free-as-in-beer domes. Obviously, he means free-as-in-speech domes. You can copy these domes, redistribute them or even change the structure of the dome. I hear a religious war has broken out in the architect community over the difference between the GPL dome and the BSD dome.
referring to the multitude of Linux distributions:
Where does this stop? This is starting to sound like we're headed back in time to the 1980's and 1990's era where retailers were locked into a single vendor's innovation.
I don't know about you, but telling my mother that she just needs to "uncompress the tarball, configure, make, and make install" won't really get us very far. OTOH, if I can e-mail her a single command (ie, rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.ximian.com/directory/to/rpm/distro.rpm), then we're doing pretty well.
Even that is a little too hard in my opinion. I remember when the nautilus (early) beta was out and one of my friends was interviewing there. She wanted to install nautilus on a linux box and play with it so she could talk intelligently about it at the interview. I remember being on the phone with her for an hour as we went through "Oh error message, eh? How about if you try rpm --force-something-or-the-other", or "Why not download all those rpms and go rpm -ivh *" or "Let's try to get rid of old rpms on your machine and try to reinstall". And so on and on, and it really did take an hour to get it installed. Now I understand that the nautilus install process and the gnome install process have come a long way since, but they still seem to be overly complicated. We need to make it as easy as Windows: click link - click execute from remote location in dialog - click yes on security warning - click next on a few boxes and we're off to the races (no reboot remember).
Anything that involves an xterm or a shell is too complicated. period.
Re:Just One Little Problem - I Can't Find It
on
FreeBSD 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2
why Slashdot has to go creating stories that don't exist when they can find perfectly good "real" stories that make as much sense as this one. Take for example:
this. Woohoo! Let's take back the net! Or something.
And have been using it that way for years. So I don't know where this claim that FreeBSD is not a desktop OS comes from. Review the facts:
Almost any desktop software available for Linux is available for FreeBSD via the ports or their packages collection.
If something is only available as a redhat rpm, it can be installed and run on FreeBSD under Linux emulation(emulation is not quite the right word, think of it as Linux mode FreeBSD).
Even vmware runs on FreeBSD thanks to some excellent work by a porter who wrote kernel modules to bridge between the FreeBSD kernel and the vmware kernel modules
The ports team works extremely hard these days to keep the packages up to date. Pretty much any "major" piece of software gets its latest version into ports within days of its release. Gnome, KDE, sawfish, you name it...
The only problem that I've encountered is this:
I come across a fine piece of free software that I decide I would like to use on my FreeBSD desktop. The chances are very high that the maintainer of the software couldn't care enough to provide a FreeBSD package. Worse, the chances are very high that the maintainer did not even care to build it on a non-Linux machine. Sure, the package has a configure script and all the other bells and whistles to create the Makefiles. But the sucker doesn't build. But all is not lost. You have the source. Spend some time. Build it. Fix it. Spend a couple hours with it on FreeBSD, it's very likely that you can get it to build and run (Linux and FreeBSD are not that much different). Then create a patch and send it to the maintainer. Create a port and send it to the FreeBSD team. Both parties are always happy to include it in their next release. I should know, I've done it.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever wrote this silly blogpost clearly hasn't considered the real reason Google needs their products to succeed. Google's bread and butter is their search product. But here's the problem: search growth is slowing. The only way for Google to keep growing their business at the breakneck speed that they and Wall St have become accustomed to is to find new places besides search pages that they can stick their ads on. Right now Google gets to do that using their Adsense program. Thousands of websites around the world are making Google tons of money. But the margins there will keep slipping as more competitors (Yahoo, MSN etc) come on in and offer to share higher percentages of their revenue with 3rd party publishers. This leaves Google with having to own their own "content" pages where they can stick their ads and book 100% of revenues from them. Unless their other products succeed, Google will truly become a one trick pony as far as their revenues are concerned. No responsible business can afford to become a one trick pony. That way lies death.
Reading the comments here, it's not clear to me that people get why AOL is suddenly so valuable and has multiple suitors. It isn't the dialup business. AOL has about 20M customers and that number is falling month over month. So nobody is actually expecting to build a business around dialup (although quite a cash source currently). What Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google want(ed) is:
- AOL's immense demographic information and purchase history etc on a large segment of the population. This is much much more valuable to MSFT and GOOG because they don't currently have much of this.
- AOL's content network. AOL has a large content network that garner substantial number of impressions every day. You might not like their content, but a great number of people do. This is valuable to MSFT, GOOG, and YHOO.
Why is all this suddenly so important? Check what has been driving Internet revenues over the last 3 years (especially Google): advertising. Search engine advertising is beginning to top out in the US, there is only so much more growth to be had there before it flattens out. The next surge must come from advertising on content networks (Adsense, Yahoo Publishing Network etc). Suddenly AOL looks like a big prize: lots of impressions, captive audience and tons of fine-grained consumer data.
Yahoo was never a serious contender in this race, they don't have the kind of valuations that AOL would want, and they have a vast repository of consumer information already themselves so the only value to buying AOL would be to ensure that Google and Microsoft don't get their hands on it.
And Windows and Linux are never offtopic in the Slashdot World. So I'm reading the article, and on the sidebar I see: Study: Windows Can Be Cheaper to Use Than Linux. And I'm thinking, how come the story on IBM and privacy made it to Slashdot but not this wonderful story on Microsoft and Linux so we can all have a grand fight and yelling match. I mean really, standards around here are slipping.
now let's talk conspiracy theories
Now I'm not an authority on cell phones and how they work. I did hear this story on the BBC a couple days ago. And the CEO of the company that is implementing this said that: 1) They put a mini cell receiver in the plane. Then the cell receiver itself probably talks to a satellite or something. They aren't porting cell phone technology into planes, they're just letting you use your cell phone on the plane.
2) Apparently since they put a cell receiver on the plane, the cell phones negotiate a lower signal strength with the in-house tower (so to speak). As a result, since they're transmitting at much lower power than if they were trying to reach a tower miles away, it reduces the interference with the navigation equipment.
3)They foresee airlines creating a "cell phone" section of the plane. Sort of like smoking/no-smoking in restaurants etc.
heh. reminds me of:
Journalist: Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?
Mahatma Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
Surely it could be both.
This is similar to Google realizing that there's plenty of ad-space going a-begging on blogs. Google will be making the ads more prominent, presumably these guys will be inserting the advertising into the copy. But really, the principle's the same.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
so here i am reading all the replies to the post. and i'm looking around for the moderation on it. was this an insightful reply? was the other one supposed to be funny? should i have been laughing at it?
how did they get by in those days?
One of my friends set up a web based emailer that rocks: netmails.net. It totally rocks. Let's you create a unique email address for each website that demands one. And you can attach lifetimes to them so that they expire as soon as you get that shipping confirmation. Or you can tag it as coming from a particular registration attempt etc. Really cool.
Specifically in the case of Elizabeth Smart, this article is missing something. It's called the LDS church. Besides being among the richest (probably the richest?) churches in the world, it is easily the most media savvy, and the most committed to its members. It also has many many connections to opinion makers. Personally, I am not surprised at all that the Smart case is getting so much coverage.
US Population: approx 0.25Bn
Cost of Windows XP: $200
Total cost: $50Bn
Yeah sounds about right
It doesn't matter at all how much faster than the average dialup modem they transfer data so long as there is still a user with a dialup modem at the other end of the transfer. I am not looking to belittle the fabulous work these folks have put in. Merely pointing out that until we solve the "last mile problem" these efforts are largely wasted.
Actually they have already been weakened. This happened a few weeks ago, when nobody was watching. What? You actually thought this administration would let them stand?
I can't recommend gandi (www.gandi.net) highly enough. In addition to the small and entirely pro-consumer terms of service, it's really cheap: a mere $10. And since I switched to them, the email address that I use to register domain names has stopped getting spam. (The old one that I used with netsol still gets plenty). These guys are the best.
--
kurukshetra all the desi news and views you could use
The IMF does not work this way. The IMF demands that sovereign countries send their annual budget and other fiscal policies to the IMF before they are announced, so they can be vetted for "conformance".
For instance, the IMF does not lend money to countries if they intend using the money to improve their education infrastructure (the governments believing that investing in education today is far better than investing for short term gains). There are cases where the World Bank was willing to lend to a country but couldn't because the IMF would not give that country a good credit rating for the simple reason that the government in that country did not check with the IMF before implementing a recent fiscal policy.
The biggest participant in the IMF is the US. The US government policies are largely decided by what big corporations want. Guess whom the IMF helps with its loans to poor countries?
How would you like to gift away your control over your life to a lender even though you were dirt poor but believed you had a way to climb out of that poverty by yourself with a loan from a willing lender?
Taco would never refer to free-as-in-beer domes. Obviously, he means free-as-in-speech domes. You can copy these domes, redistribute them or even change the structure of the dome.
I hear a religious war has broken out in the architect community over the difference between the GPL dome and the BSD dome.
Where does this stop? This is starting to sound like we're headed back in time to the 1980's and 1990's era where retailers were locked into a single vendor's innovation.
Unless that single vendor is us.
Even that is a little too hard in my opinion. I remember when the nautilus (early) beta was out and one of my friends was interviewing there. She wanted to install nautilus on a linux box and play with it so she could talk intelligently about it at the interview. I remember being on the phone with her for an hour as we went through "Oh error message, eh? How about if you try rpm --force-something-or-the-other", or "Why not download all those rpms and go rpm -ivh *" or "Let's try to get rid of old rpms on your machine and try to reinstall". And so on and on, and it really did take an hour to get it installed. Now I understand that the nautilus install process and the gnome install process have come a long way since, but they still seem to be overly complicated. We need to make it as easy as Windows: click link - click execute from remote location in dialog - click yes on security warning - click next on a few boxes and we're off to the races (no reboot remember).
Anything that involves an xterm or a shell is too complicated. period.
The release announcement didn't go out until the iso was available at: ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/IS O-IMAGES/4.3-install.iso
.
You mean Perl and Python coming together to become Parrot was just a joke?? I had totally believed it seeing as it was on Slashdot and all....
why Slashdot has to go creating stories that don't exist when they can find perfectly good "real" stories that make as much sense as this one. Take for example: this. Woohoo! Let's take back the net! Or something.
Almost any desktop software available for Linux is available for FreeBSD via the ports or their packages collection.
If something is only available as a redhat rpm, it can be installed and run on FreeBSD under Linux emulation(emulation is not quite the right word, think of it as Linux mode FreeBSD).
Even vmware runs on FreeBSD thanks to some excellent work by a porter who wrote kernel modules to bridge between the FreeBSD kernel and the vmware kernel modules
The ports team works extremely hard these days to keep the packages up to date. Pretty much any "major" piece of software gets its latest version into ports within days of its release. Gnome, KDE, sawfish, you name it... The only problem that I've encountered is this:
I come across a fine piece of free software that I decide I would like to use on my FreeBSD desktop. The chances are very high that the maintainer of the software couldn't care enough to provide a FreeBSD package. Worse, the chances are very high that the maintainer did not even care to build it on a non-Linux machine. Sure, the package has a configure script and all the other bells and whistles to create the Makefiles. But the sucker doesn't build. But all is not lost. You have the source. Spend some time. Build it. Fix it. Spend a couple hours with it on FreeBSD, it's very likely that you can get it to build and run (Linux and FreeBSD are not that much different). Then create a patch and send it to the maintainer. Create a port and send it to the FreeBSD team. Both parties are always happy to include it in their next release. I should know, I've done it.