Considering they have nowhere near the catalog that Netflix does, I really don't see them as a serious competitor.
Netflix has more back-catalog movie content, and Hulu has much more up-to-date TV content. Hulu is closer to being a direct broadcast and cable TV replacement than Netflix.
Can you watch the nightly news on Netflix? Can you watch Netflix streaming videos on your Linux systems?
It's crazy to fault Hulu for having a free service. They're getting money from those 1 million Plus subscribers, AND the ads they're forced to watch. They're also getting money from ad viewing of many millions of others who are not paying, which Netflix/Amazon can't claim.
IMHO, Hulu Plus is too expensive for what you get... the same price as Netflix, for less value. They could increase their subscriber count by just lowering the price to something reasonable. Or they could just do a better job monetizing their huge hordes of free viewers.
I'd expect better treatment of Hulu around here... Its service works quite well on Linux. Netflix doesn't. If you can find a copy of the discontinued HuluDesktop for Linux (or Windows) you can even get their content wrapped in a nice 10ft interface that works well navigating with remotes (and has LIRC support).
If Shell(any company, really) had this tech they would make a mint licensing it.
You are mistaken in this assumption. It's quite possible for a new disruptive product to be less profitable than the product it is displacing.
Think of Kodak's film business being more profitable than the money they would have made from early digital cameras. Or think of entrenched monopolies that have fat margins on a product, like oil, who can't guarantee the same profits on better engine technology. Certainly, we've seen things like this with things like General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone buying light rail lines, and replacing them with bus service.
The original Ni-Cd and later Ni-MH batteries weren't up to the job but lithium tech batteries with their greater capacity, fast-charge capability and high current drain made the later development of hybrids and full-electric cars feasible.
I'm glad to hear the Toyota Prius, with it's NiMH battery pack, isn't actually a "feasible" vehicle.
This has been a common myth for decades, and it always falls apart under scrutiny. Back in the 70s, there were tons of people modifying carbs, claiming obscene fuel efficiency, but they all failed under testing (often improving low-speed fuel economy, and only ESTIMATED that high-speeds would do as well, but never did). Many people would run their engines far past their tolerance... Aggressive supercharging with no inter-cooler, burning up the engine for a modest improvement.
And the extreme claims, like yours of 80mpg, are simply laughable. There are theoretical limitations, ala Carnot, which can't be overcome with the best carburetor design in the world. And people today are STILL designing carburetors, and doing computer simulations of their efficiency. If it was possible to design one that would blow away the efficiency of modern vehicles, a million techie gear-heads would have found it. And any patents on the technology would have long since expired, and be free for ANYBODY to implement and upstaging the major car makers.
And just imagine the TRILLIONS someone could make off of such a product... Forget cars... how about grid power generation? How about locomotives, cargo ships, aircraft, and more? Hell, even if there was a conspiracy among all the oil companies, and ALL the engine and turbine manufacturers were in on it, you still have to explain why those 200 other countries in the world never had a single engineer also discover this magic snake-oil elixir that'll let your car do better than maximum theoretical Carnot efficiency... And yet YOU stumbled upon it and did it with $100. Shame that.
These things exist only as rumors and legends among conspiracy nuts. Go put some magnets on your fuel line, nitrogen in your tires, some solar battery chargers on your dash, and rant to your schizophrenic friends about the satellites stealing your brain waves and ruining your gas mileage.
Over twenty years ago GM made the EV-1 electric car. It was only available for lease. The leasees were so happy with it that they wanted to buy the car, but the cars were reclaimed and destroyed under very questionable circumstances and production lines were promptly shut down.
*Some* of the leasers wanted to buy their EV1s outright. But US regulations require car manufacturers to warranty their vehicles, and to continue to produce replacement parts for a decade. Plus, GM often cited their liability issues should there prove to be a problem with the EV1s they sold.
The reality is that it's just massively impractical to sell a small, limited-run vehicle.
And why did GM produce the EV1 in the first place? Because the CARB was going to require 1% of vehicles sold in California be zero-emission, the same regulation that got Toyota to develop the Prius. Though GM was going to lose tons of money on every EV1 they sold (or gave away...), they were going to make up for it by being able to sell 100 other conventional cars. And GM gets the worst wrap, because their EV1 was so good, but all other. There aren't nearly as many dedicated adherents to Ford's Th!nk.
But CARB simply didn't have the testicular fortitude to stick to their guns. They completely undermined the rules, and among other things allowed golf carts to count as cars... So car companies bought golf cart companies (like GEM), and dropped prices to move the units they needed, without the burden of $100,000 *practical* electric cars.
GM should have moved aggressively into hybrids, like the Volt, before Toyota's Prius got off the ground. But that's one of many of GM's sins that brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. GM was too busy churning out SUV after SUV, at nice fat margins, while the economy was booming, and gas was staying nice and cheap. Not to mention unfortunate tax laws that allowed heavy SUVs to be classified the same as tractors, and essentially paid business owners a nice chunk of money to to buy one.
With all the previous stupid decisions, I wouldn't be surprised if GM buried their Volt, and then started selling cars that run on compressed natural gas... That said, Musk should be taking GM's threats very seriously. As a tiny startup, the #1 cause of death is your entrenched competitors quickly turning around and selling a product like yours, but with the resources and infrastructure to completely undercut you and drive you out of business before you can turn a profit.
Just last quarter they sold 53 million phones in China using the Sybian system that Elop tried to bury and halted all development on. Even hamstrung they sold more phones in a single market than Apple did in the entire world
That number is no-doubt dumb/feature phones. A dying market with razor-thin profit margins, that nobody cares about any more. Nice way to twist things, though, just mention Symbian and people will assume you're talking about the smartphone platform, and not the tiny RTOS used on dumb phones.
Dumb phones has always been Nokia's bread and butter, and their demise is because they failed miserably to transition into the rapidly growing (and highly profitable) smartphone market.
Sure, Elop sounds like Microsoft's boy, and he's successfully driven Nokia into the ground, but staying on Symbian wouldn't have been a fix for Nokia's problem. And even switching to Android might have been very difficult, as the sales figures showing Samsung's massive dominance can attest. This may just be the time for a major shakeout of cell phone manufacturers who can't compete in the changing market, and Nokia will simply be first...
And what is on a world scale relevant about a single market?
The most valuable consumer market on earth? Nothing at all... It's quite insignificant I'm sure...
Besides, what stops you from doing like the Rest Of the World and buying your own phone?
You can buy whatever you want... But the carriers will tell you to go to hell when you want to get service for it. You decide what service you want, first, and then buy one of the phones that carrier is selling for whatever price they decide to charge for it.
It's partly a legacy of incompatible standards and varying frequency allocations. But it's also a self-sustaining cycle: The carriers sell or even give away phones, so nobody buys sextuple-band phones. so few or no carrier-independent phones are sold, so people buy from the carriers...
In the US, almost NOBODY buys mobile phones off-contract.
That's absolute nonsense. It's a minority for sure, but a VERY significant one.
Sprint alone has 16 million pre-paid (Boost/Virgin) customers, which means they ALL bought their own cell phones. That's just #3 Sprint, and doesn't even include their dozens of MVNOs like Ting, Republic, etc. And of course that doesn't cover any of their contract customers who may have purchased their own phone.
T-Mobile has switched to entirely pre-paid, so ALL their 35 million customers either did, or in the future will need to, buy their own phones.
NET10/TracFone seems to have about 22 million prepaid subscribers... All purchased their cell phones.
A couple years ago when I checked last, AT&T and Verizon had about 10% of their customers as prepaid users. That's at least another 20+ million people buying their own phones or tablets.
So your "almost NOBODY" consists of AT LEAST 90 million people, about 1/3rd of the entire US population... I sure wish I had "almost no money..."
The last great US flu epidemic only killed so many because of the crude state of medicine at the time and uneven sanitation in large U.S. cities. Even a virulent flu would be unlikely to rack up such a death toll in a first world nation.
Let's see:
"...the official World Health Organization estimate for the current outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza to date is around 60% [case mortality rate]."
In summary: 1) 2% is mercifully low. 2) DON'T CATCH H5N1
If these parents were having trouble getting their kids to go play outside, surely it would have been easier to force the kids to simply go play outside without their ipads than it was to transport their whole family back in time 30 years.
Seconded!
Before computers, it was TV and video games... If your kids are spending too much time on it, SHUT IT OFF (but not permanently). Plenty of parents limit their kids' TV and computer time to very few hours each week.
Those things can all be educational, positive influences. And they can all, also, be a source of addition. As can may other good things. Folks addicted to spending all day at the gym aren't healthy, well adjusted adults either.
I can't wait to see what crazy thing he comes up with when one of his kids starts getting overweight... BAN ALL FOOD!
I COULD read TFA, but no. I think I'll wait until next week, when some NASA scientist announces that Voyager I is STILL in the solar system, and why the theory/sensors/calculations were wrong. Then the week after that, NASA will announce again that Voyager I is in interstellar space "for real this time..." Repeat, ad-nauseum.
CONAN: Do you ever have trouble keeping it all straight as the guy who is writing this? GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Occasionally, yes. I have a guy in Sweden that I call, not one of Alexander's nude polar bear writers, but he is actually an American fan who lives in Sweden and they run the website. They know the world better than I do. Occasionally when I'm stuck on something, I call them up and say what color eyes did this guy have? Was that his nephew or cousin? He has it all. CONAN: He can tell you right away? GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: That's right. CONAN: You made mistakes that these fans have caught, is that right? Over the books, there are inconsistencies? GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I'm terrible with eye color. Some had blue eyes and then green eyes. Fans noticed this, I get tons of letters. A horse changed sex between the first book and the second book. I'm not good with horses. CONAN: That happens. It's legal. [Laughter]
This kind of thing is quite common. George R. R. Martin of "Game of Thrones" / A Game of Fire and Ice infamy, recently talked about the obsessed fan he calls and asks to fact-check what he is writing, specifically to verify details about characters, rather than continuing to get things like "eye color" wrong, and accidentally changing the gender of a horse between books... etc.
you don't want to learn number theory, then accept that you are incapable of having an informed opinion on asymmetrical cryptography
Just because you are incapable or unwilling to give an approachable explanation to an amateur, does NOT mean it is difficult or impossible for someone to do so.
The constants may well not be back-doored. Or they may be. But once the trust is gone, and there's no verification of how the numbers arose in the first place, it's already too late.
The story was almost the same with NSA and the original DES, and yet we found later that the special magic numbers were in-fact PROTECTING the crypto alg from as-yet unknown cryptanalysis methods. Though I still fault them for not using a 64-bit key from the start.
Make a new fully open process, open source encryption system, fully peer-reviewed, global internet participation possible, global peer review possible.
You mean like AES? Or OpenSSL? Or...?
Use the global participation of Debian as a model.
If my complaint is "removing additional compilers from the base install will discourage their use", please describe how the complaint is baseless.
Encouraging the use of GCC won't solve the "trusting trust" problem on its own... Installing from ports/pkgs is trivial... There is still a huge installed base of GCC compilers out there. It's not as if FreeBSD just assassinated the GCC upstream. GCC has a HUGE base, and encouraging use and development of LLVM is the move that will get healthier competition in the open source compiler space.
I'm deeply disappointed that this issue was decided over philosophical instead of technical merits.
So you think we should scrap GCC all-together as well, and all switch over to Intel's C Compiler (ICC), since it's technically better?
After all, you think philosophy doesn't matter...
And GPLv3 incompatibilities with the project are more than just abstract "philosophical" differences, as it can impact use and distribution of FreeBSD.
but of course since you've assumed the whole continent is like Chile's Atacama desert you've thought that is unimportant
...Which is why I SPECIFICALLY TALKED ABOUT THESE PROBLEMS... Statements about them being: "washed-out and impassable for some time"
It gets tiresome speaking to morons so frequently...
The graf zeppillin world circumnavigation revealed some very real limits for large lighter than air vehicles
Then it's quite fortunate that modern rigid airships aren quite different than those original "lighter than air" vehicles... Strangely enough, they often study the history of airships, and DESIGN them DIFFERENTLY because of those known limitations...
I'm thoroughly done with this thread... Nothing but factually incorrect assertions all twisted around to desperately try and discredit a sound idea, before it has had ANY time to be tested in the real world.
you have to truck all that asphalt out there and cut down all that brush
As I said already, you MAY be able to do without the asphalt. Australian truck-train drivers aren't unfamiliar with unpaved dirt roads, and they work reasonably well in the outback. They're more likely to get washed-out and impassable for some time, but with low volume trucking (which is surely what we're talking about) that's an easy trade-off to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Netflix has more back-catalog movie content, and Hulu has much more up-to-date TV content. Hulu is closer to being a direct broadcast and cable TV replacement than Netflix.
Can you watch the nightly news on Netflix? Can you watch Netflix streaming videos on your Linux systems?
It's crazy to fault Hulu for having a free service. They're getting money from those 1 million Plus subscribers, AND the ads they're forced to watch. They're also getting money from ad viewing of many millions of others who are not paying, which Netflix/Amazon can't claim.
IMHO, Hulu Plus is too expensive for what you get... the same price as Netflix, for less value. They could increase their subscriber count by just lowering the price to something reasonable. Or they could just do a better job monetizing their huge hordes of free viewers.
I'd expect better treatment of Hulu around here... Its service works quite well on Linux. Netflix doesn't. If you can find a copy of the discontinued HuluDesktop for Linux (or Windows) you can even get their content wrapped in a nice 10ft interface that works well navigating with remotes (and has LIRC support).
And your point is???
Almost everything you said about NiMH/NiCAD vs LiIon is still entirely incorrect.
You are mistaken in this assumption. It's quite possible for a new disruptive product to be less profitable than the product it is displacing.
Think of Kodak's film business being more profitable than the money they would have made from early digital cameras. Or think of entrenched monopolies that have fat margins on a product, like oil, who can't guarantee the same profits on better engine technology. Certainly, we've seen things like this with things like General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone buying light rail lines, and replacing them with bus service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Streetcar_Conspiracy
I'm glad to hear the Toyota Prius, with it's NiMH battery pack, isn't actually a "feasible" vehicle.
This has been a common myth for decades, and it always falls apart under scrutiny. Back in the 70s, there were tons of people modifying carbs, claiming obscene fuel efficiency, but they all failed under testing (often improving low-speed fuel economy, and only ESTIMATED that high-speeds would do as well, but never did).
Many people would run their engines far past their tolerance... Aggressive supercharging with no inter-cooler, burning up the engine for a modest improvement.
And the extreme claims, like yours of 80mpg, are simply laughable. There are theoretical limitations, ala Carnot, which can't be overcome with the best carburetor design in the world. And people today are STILL designing carburetors, and doing computer simulations of their efficiency. If it was possible to design one that would blow away the efficiency of modern vehicles, a million techie gear-heads would have found it. And any patents on the technology would have long since expired, and be free for ANYBODY to implement and upstaging the major car makers.
And just imagine the TRILLIONS someone could make off of such a product... Forget cars... how about grid power generation? How about locomotives, cargo ships, aircraft, and more? Hell, even if there was a conspiracy among all the oil companies, and ALL the engine and turbine manufacturers were in on it, you still have to explain why those 200 other countries in the world never had a single engineer also discover this magic snake-oil elixir that'll let your car do better than maximum theoretical Carnot efficiency... And yet YOU stumbled upon it and did it with $100. Shame that.
These things exist only as rumors and legends among conspiracy nuts. Go put some magnets on your fuel line, nitrogen in your tires, some solar battery chargers on your dash, and rant to your schizophrenic friends about the satellites stealing your brain waves and ruining your gas mileage.
*Some* of the leasers wanted to buy their EV1s outright. But US regulations require car manufacturers to warranty their vehicles, and to continue to produce replacement parts for a decade. Plus, GM often cited their liability issues should there prove to be a problem with the EV1s they sold.
The reality is that it's just massively impractical to sell a small, limited-run vehicle.
And why did GM produce the EV1 in the first place? Because the CARB was going to require 1% of vehicles sold in California be zero-emission, the same regulation that got Toyota to develop the Prius. Though GM was going to lose tons of money on every EV1 they sold (or gave away...), they were going to make up for it by being able to sell 100 other conventional cars. And GM gets the worst wrap, because their EV1 was so good, but all other. There aren't nearly as many dedicated adherents to Ford's Th!nk.
But CARB simply didn't have the testicular fortitude to stick to their guns. They completely undermined the rules, and among other things allowed golf carts to count as cars... So car companies bought golf cart companies (like GEM), and dropped prices to move the units they needed, without the burden of $100,000 *practical* electric cars.
GM should have moved aggressively into hybrids, like the Volt, before Toyota's Prius got off the ground. But that's one of many of GM's sins that brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. GM was too busy churning out SUV after SUV, at nice fat margins, while the economy was booming, and gas was staying nice and cheap. Not to mention unfortunate tax laws that allowed heavy SUVs to be classified the same as tractors, and essentially paid business owners a nice chunk of money to to buy one.
With all the previous stupid decisions, I wouldn't be surprised if GM buried their Volt, and then started selling cars that run on compressed natural gas... That said, Musk should be taking GM's threats very seriously. As a tiny startup, the #1 cause of death is your entrenched competitors quickly turning around and selling a product like yours, but with the resources and infrastructure to completely undercut you and drive you out of business before you can turn a profit.
That number is no-doubt dumb/feature phones. A dying market with razor-thin profit margins, that nobody cares about any more. Nice way to twist things, though, just mention Symbian and people will assume you're talking about the smartphone platform, and not the tiny RTOS used on dumb phones.
Dumb phones has always been Nokia's bread and butter, and their demise is because they failed miserably to transition into the rapidly growing (and highly profitable) smartphone market.
Sure, Elop sounds like Microsoft's boy, and he's successfully driven Nokia into the ground, but staying on Symbian wouldn't have been a fix for Nokia's problem. And even switching to Android might have been very difficult, as the sales figures showing Samsung's massive dominance can attest. This may just be the time for a major shakeout of cell phone manufacturers who can't compete in the changing market, and Nokia will simply be first...
The most valuable consumer market on earth? Nothing at all... It's quite insignificant I'm sure...
You can buy whatever you want... But the carriers will tell you to go to hell when you want to get service for it. You decide what service you want, first, and then buy one of the phones that carrier is selling for whatever price they decide to charge for it.
It's partly a legacy of incompatible standards and varying frequency allocations. But it's also a self-sustaining cycle: The carriers sell or even give away phones, so nobody buys sextuple-band phones. so few or no carrier-independent phones are sold, so people buy from the carriers...
That's absolute nonsense. It's a minority for sure, but a VERY significant one.
Sprint alone has 16 million pre-paid (Boost/Virgin) customers, which means they ALL bought their own cell phones. That's just #3 Sprint, and doesn't even include their dozens of MVNOs like Ting, Republic, etc. And of course that doesn't cover any of their contract customers who may have purchased their own phone.
T-Mobile has switched to entirely pre-paid, so ALL their 35 million customers either did, or in the future will need to, buy their own phones.
NET10/TracFone seems to have about 22 million prepaid subscribers... All purchased their cell phones.
A couple years ago when I checked last, AT&T and Verizon had about 10% of their customers as prepaid users. That's at least another 20+ million people buying their own phones or tablets.
So your "almost NOBODY" consists of AT LEAST 90 million people, about 1/3rd of the entire US population... I sure wish I had "almost no money..."
Let's see:
"...the official World Health Organization estimate for the current outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza to date is around 60% [case mortality rate]."
In summary: 1) 2% is mercifully low. 2) DON'T CATCH H5N1
Seconded!
Before computers, it was TV and video games... If your kids are spending too much time on it, SHUT IT OFF (but not permanently). Plenty of parents limit their kids' TV and computer time to very few hours each week.
Those things can all be educational, positive influences. And they can all, also, be a source of addition. As can may other good things. Folks addicted to spending all day at the gym aren't healthy, well adjusted adults either.
I can't wait to see what crazy thing he comes up with when one of his kids starts getting overweight... BAN ALL FOOD!
Meh. My preferred slogan is:
"FreeBSD. Still dying after all these years..."
Netcraft confirms it, in the library, with the lead pipe.
Nicely done, and EXACTLY what I was thinking...
I COULD read TFA, but no. I think I'll wait until next week, when some NASA scientist announces that Voyager I is STILL in the solar system, and why the theory/sensors/calculations were wrong. Then the week after that, NASA will announce again that Voyager I is in interstellar space "for real this time..." Repeat, ad-nauseum.
There's actually a *SIMPLE* explanation for all of that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BMgegut3UM
Well worth watching.
http://teamcoco.com/video/george-r-r-martin-writing-fast
Transcript:
CONAN: Do you ever have trouble keeping it all straight as the guy who is writing this?
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Occasionally, yes.
I have a guy in Sweden that I call, not one of Alexander's nude polar bear writers, but he is actually an American fan who lives in Sweden and they run the website.
They know the world better than I do.
Occasionally when I'm stuck on something, I call them up and say what color eyes did this guy have?
Was that his nephew or cousin?
He has it all.
CONAN: He can tell you right away?
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: That's right.
CONAN: You made mistakes that these fans have caught, is that right?
Over the books, there are inconsistencies?
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I'm terrible with eye color.
Some had blue eyes and then green eyes.
Fans noticed this, I get tons of letters.
A horse changed sex between the first book and the second book.
I'm not good with horses.
CONAN: That happens.
It's legal.
[Laughter]
http://teamcoco.com/video/george-r-r-martin-writing-fast
This kind of thing is quite common. George R. R. Martin of "Game of Thrones" / A Game of Fire and Ice infamy, recently talked about the obsessed fan he calls and asks to fact-check what he is writing, specifically to verify details about characters, rather than continuing to get things like "eye color" wrong, and accidentally changing the gender of a horse between books... etc.
http://teamcoco.com/celebs/george-r-r-martin
Just because you are incapable or unwilling to give an approachable explanation to an amateur, does NOT mean it is difficult or impossible for someone to do so.
The story was almost the same with NSA and the original DES, and yet we found later that the special magic numbers were in-fact PROTECTING the crypto alg from as-yet unknown cryptanalysis methods. Though I still fault them for not using a 64-bit key from the start.
You mean like AES? Or OpenSSL? Or...?
You know it was Debian that fucked-up OpenSSL in an EPIC way, right? http://blogs.computerworld.com/fixing_debian_openssl
Encouraging the use of GCC won't solve the "trusting trust" problem on its own... Installing from ports/pkgs is trivial... There is still a huge installed base of GCC compilers out there. It's not as if FreeBSD just assassinated the GCC upstream. GCC has a HUGE base, and encouraging use and development of LLVM is the move that will get healthier competition in the open source compiler space.
So you think we should scrap GCC all-together as well, and all switch over to Intel's C Compiler (ICC), since it's technically better?
After all, you think philosophy doesn't matter...
And GPLv3 incompatibilities with the project are more than just abstract "philosophical" differences, as it can impact use and distribution of FreeBSD.
It gets tiresome speaking to morons so frequently...
Then it's quite fortunate that modern rigid airships aren quite different than those original "lighter than air" vehicles... Strangely enough, they often study the history of airships, and DESIGN them DIFFERENTLY because of those known limitations...
I'm thoroughly done with this thread... Nothing but factually incorrect assertions all twisted around to desperately try and discredit a sound idea, before it has had ANY time to be tested in the real world.
We're talking about Australian DESERTS here. WTF does permafrost, cooling devices, and Alaska have to do with it?
Dirt roads have been around FOREVER. They're well understood.
Neither is an airship...
As I said already, you MAY be able to do without the asphalt. Australian truck-train drivers aren't unfamiliar with unpaved dirt roads, and they work reasonably well in the outback. They're more likely to get washed-out and impassable for some time, but with low volume trucking (which is surely what we're talking about) that's an easy trade-off to make.