Wouldn't be if you sent it to me. I do not check my email constantly even though I have the ability to do so. My phone does not alert me when I receive an email (on purpose) since I get so many of them. However it does alert me when I receive a text message because I don't get those from a wide group of people and the ones who send one to me usually need my attention in some way. I can receive text messages in places I cannot get email or where email is prohibitively slow. Furthermore, not everyone I send text messages to is interested in constantly checking their email for short messages that require no reply.
everyone has an email addr (not everyone has IM or wants to)
The use cases are different. They overlap but only if you don't consider the needs of the party you are communicating with. Just because someone has an email address doesn't mean that's how they want to communicate nor is it necessarily optimal for a given circumstance. I send text messages (or IM) when I want to communicate something immediately but don't necessarily require more than a brief reply if any. Basically any time I might use a phone but don't want the handshake over head ("hi, how are you?...") and don't need strictly synchronous communication. Email tends to get read and responded to much slower by most people. That's fine in a lot of cases but there are plenty of times where you want to have a closer to real time conversation but don't need to say a lot. I tend to use it in circumstances like when my wife is at work and I want to let her know I'm headed home.
I have to pay extra for unlimited SMS (and this is recent, a few years ago SMS was absurdly expensive).
SMS at almost any price is absurdly expensive. SMS is about the closest thing in the known universe to pure profit. The primary cost of it is administering the billing system.
Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading.
Depending on the task it doesn't necessarily have to. While an AI researcher might care about that, people doing real tasks in the real world arguably do not. For example lots of radiology clinics use software to help identify tumors in parallel with the radiologists. The software has no real understanding of the implications of what it is doing but it works well at helping ensure that tumors aren't missed. In some cases it does a better job than the doctors who clearly understand the implications of what they find.
One mechanism that most immediately occurs to me would be that a device with a remote-brick feature would have a password, created and assigned by the user of the device, which would not get reset by wiping the firmware or installing a new sim card.
People are demonstrably TERRIBLE at remembering passwords. I know people who have to look up passwords for things they use daily.
the immediate response on/. is always "But what about the hackers!" as if there's a group of malicious hackers just waiting for the technology to appear so they could exploit it
That would be because there IS a group of malicious people looking to exploit technology, some of them merely because they can. The topic gets brought up because it usually is insufficiently considered in the beginning. If something can be exploited you can be pretty sure that sooner or later it will be exploited.
. Most systems get hacked because there's some profit to be made out of it or someone is trying to put a message out there.
You think there is no profit to be made in wiping people's cell phones? Ever hear of blackmail? How about terrorism? Think there is no profit to be made in selling technology to mass kill cell phones to terrorist groups who might want to cause problems? There is profit to be made in exploits if you really think about it hard enough.
There are various ways to monitor your bandwidth. PC World had this article about it. A few moments on Google will reveal lots of other ways depending on exactly what you are looking to measure. It's interesting to find out how much one actually really needs. Most of the time you'll need far less than you have but what you really need to worry about is the times when you are close to your peak need. Take the activity that has the peak need for your particular situation (voip or maybe some games for instance) and see what that takes. Give yourself a bit of a safety margin. If you are bumping into your speed cap with some regularity, that can mean that you need to consider upgrading your service if your budget permits. Obviously if the cost to bump up to the next tier of service is prohibitive (it is for me right now) then of course it's best to live with what you have for the present.
It is how much resources would be spent making it.
The answer is none because this will never happen. It's just science fiction that people write when they are looking for a grant to "study" something that isn't actually feasible. I'm amazed that anyone is actually bothering to worry about the physics of the power generation. That is FAR less of an issue than how to actually build the thing.
think one will need some sort of self-replicating solar-cell-producing robot on the moon to avoid this requiring too many launches.
You'd need a LOT more than a robot. Manufacturing on this sort of scale is hugely resource intensive and requires an entire supply chain. You have to have mining equipment, refineries, production equipment, assembly equipment, fabricating equipment, chemicals, additives, etc, etc. All of this has to work in space, with minimal human intervention, somehow be repaired, have replacement parts, etc. We do NOT have the technology to do this even here on Earth in a similar manner much less millions of miles away in a harsh vacuum. And I'm not even worrying about the economics of all this which are even more absurd.
Frankly even if the physics of the power generation made sense,
Agreed I corrected myself in a later post I did the speedtest and it was 31.65 down 4.5 up last night.
Ahh, that makes a lot more sense.
But I especially don't have need for up bandwidth. the only high bandwidth (going up) thing I could do is VOIP / facetime, and both of those seem designed to fit in well withing 4.5 up. perhaps if my housefold wnated to do multiple voips / facetimes at once...
I do a lot of VPN stuff that having a fast upstream connection is really super helpful for. I don't need voip or Facetime style teleconferencing at the moment but doing it well requires pretty fast connections on each end. (I'm talking good, not just acceptable) Plus there is the fact that I simply don't have to wait as long for everything. I have 100Mbps down/ 20Mbps up service at home and I saturate it more often than you'd think. I don't even do anything like download torrents or the like but I might have 3-4 computers running in the house at the same time.
Does anybody have ideas of what these super cool thigns are?
Games, high def video, streaming, certain remote office tasks, good quality voip, good quality video conferencing, keeping your files on remote servers while working locally, VPNs, remote desktops, real time data backup, and of course, doing some combination of the above simultaneously or with multiple computers. If you are a business I can think of more exotic things like data capture, telerobotics, and the like.
And Twitter has yet to turn a penny of profit so I'm not sure what your point is. If they can't turn a profit with overhead that low I would be rather concerned if I were an investor.
They don't care about revenue, they want your data and they want lock-in. And they'll trade lock-in for data and omnipresence at any time.
Yeah we heard all the same BS arguments back around 1998-2001. They were bullshit then and they are bullshit now.
We are moving head on into a post-scarcity economy, at least in terms of digital connectivity...
"Post scarcity"? You've been watching too much Star Trek.
The purchase might bomb, yes, but it might as well just turn out to be a real bargain. And if it bombs it won't even do a blip on FBs bank account.
If you think a potential $19 billion write-down is just a "blip", you really don't understand finance. This is an investment that even under the rosiest scenario I can come up with, will take decades to break even. WhatsApp may be valuable but there is no way in hell it is worth that much money right now.
The world is changing, and it's changing fast. The dot-bomb era was just people getting ahead of them selves in a way that wasn't good for them. The hardware wasn't there, Databases and IDEs costed more than luxury cars, and what passes as a toy today was a cray workstation in 2001 that would set you back 30 grand. It was silly back then. It isn't now.
I love watching people who think the laws of economics have suddenly been repealed. It's hysterical. We heard all the same stupid arguments 15 years ago. Every other fool was trumpeting the "new economy" as justification for their stupid business plans and bad investments. A stupid valuation is a stupid valuation. There MUST be some way to recoup the investment or it is a waste of money no matter how many eyeballs it delivers or how much the company thinks they have "locked in" their users. If you can give me even a vaguely plausible way that this purchase makes financial sense at $19B, I'll eat my shoe in barbecue sauce.
WhatsApp already has 450 million users, if Facebook were to roll out their own app, they would have 0 users, and would be trying to take away from an incumbent.
True but that doesn't make $19 billion a sane price to purchase the company. Even under the most optimistic scenario I can come up with it will take Facebook somewhere over 25 YEARS to make their investment back. At current likely revenue and profit levels the time to break-even is around 150 YEARS.
WhatsApp didn't have to take them away from anyone, they had first-mover advantage.
So did Altavista and MySpace and lots of other companies. Being first mover isn't always and advantage. Sometimes it is the second mouse that gets the cheese.
And yet Facebook apparently disagrees. I'd suggest that they probably did a lot more math than you did before shelling out.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. You would be amazed how little thought sometimes goes into big acquisitions, particularly when the company is essentially owned by one guy who can do whatever he wants. I'm an accountant and I've been involved in a few acquisitions in the past. Some companies really do the math and others just throw out a number without checking really deeply. Zuckerberg doesn't strike me as a due-diligence kind of guy. I think they (he) wanted to keep it out of Google's hands and were willing to pay whatever it took to make that happen.
Let's take the 400 million users number at face value. This means roughly that WhatsApp has roughly $400 million in revenue / year. Let's assume they have a very nice net profit margin of 30% which is similar to Apple or Microsoft, ie very high. That means that to recoup their $19 billion purchase at current profit levels it will take 158 YEARS . Explain to me a scenario where that is a sane purchase price.
I'm not saying the company isn't valuable, but I am pretty good with finance and I cannot see how Facebook didn't grossly overpay.
While I admit up front that there is a lot I don't know. I'd never even heard of WhatsApp prior to this purchase announcement. That said, I have an extremely hard time believing that this company is worth anywhere close to $19 billion. The company employs 55 people and if they do have 400 million users, that means they have revenues of around $400 million / year since they charge $1/year for their service. Even if their net profit margins are really high (say 30%), that means that it will take Facebook 158 years to recoup their investment. ($19B / ($400M * 0.3) = 158 years) While I'm sure there are probably ways to increase revenues, its not clear how this is a sensible use of funds by Facebook.
I'm not saying WhatsApp isn't valuable but I don't see how Facebook doesn't end up writing off a few billion in a few years.
There was no such thing as "broadband" in the late 1980s and early 1990s, prior to the discovery of the web by the public in about 1994.
Oh you could get a T1 line (for $$$) or in some cases ISDN. There were a few other options too for data barely worth mentioning. The first ADSL patents were filed in 1988. DSL had about half a million customers by around 1997. There weren't a lot of customers for it but it was out there during the early-mid 90s. The term broadband didn't come about until much later but you could get higher speed network access before that. Of course the internet wasn't really a thing outside of college campuses until 1993-1994 like you said. Before that it was mostly a bunch of BBS systems though you could access some through the internet. I (sort of) fondly remember dialing up and a 2400baud modem in the late 1980s but I also remember a friend of mine running a BBS which you could use the internet to access.
I was at a University and we ordered a T1 line (1.5 Mbps) FOR THE WHOLE CAMPUS.
I was in college in the early 90s too. We had multiple T1s at my campus. Seemed fast at the time but we couldn't do much either looking back on it.
Since you're talking about decades of effort to build this thing, it doesn't really matter how long it takes to get there.
Yes it does because you have to fund the project. Even ignoring the technical problems (which are legion), anyone funding this is going to want a return on their investment that is not measured in decades if not centuries. Even governments aren't usually willing to put up with that long of a payback, particularly for something as absurdly hypothetical and risky as this.
They plan to use lunar materials, so no hundresds of rocket launches to get started
Right, because entire supply chains can magically materialize out of the vacuum of space. Look, even here on Earth just because there is a pile of iron ore sitting around doesn't mean you have everything you need to refine, process, form, machine, deliver and install the products you need. I think there is a general lack of appreciation here of how complicated it is to make a lot of the products we take for granted. You don't just have to deliver a few robots to the moon and let the magic happen. You have to deliver an entire supply chain. That is VERY hard to do and extremely expensive. You are BADLY underestimating the amount of equipment and manpower and technology that would be needed to make this happen.
For any technology that is likely within the next 100 years, there would be hundreds (probably thousands) of rocket launches. The parent post is quite correct on this point.
I guess the point is kind of that real estate and raw materials are "free", if you get the proper manufacturing equipment up there.
Nothing is free. The people that make that hypothetical manufacturing equipment are going to want a return on their investment. Just because the costs are not direct doesn't mean they don't exist.
The lunar surface is covered in silicon, and has plenty of iron, aluminum, and magnesium.
Great! What about oxygen? Carbon? Water? The thousands of other chemicals, materials and tools that we take for granted here on Earth which are required for production?
Ship a refinery and fab up to the Moon, and whatever trace dopants and alloys you need.
Oh is that all there is to it? We just have to ship a hypothetical refinery which can somehow process all the different materials without any supply chain of any kind. Where pray tell can we find this magic piece of technology? [/joking sarcasm]
Seriously, have you given this a moment's actual serious thought? You seem to seriously think that we can send a few rocket loads of equipment and somehow manufacturing will magically take place. It doesn't work like that. You are talking about a level of manufacturing technology that is probably two to three centuries away at minimum. We don't have ANY equipment that resembles what would be needed here on Earth much less something ready to go into space. I have been in manufacturing for the better part of three decades and I'm both an engineer and an accountant. Proposals like this are absurd on the economics alone. There is FAR more to manufacturing than just a refinery and a few robots.
Yes, I don't however see any data on their website about how wide they are planning to build the ring out.
Maybe because they aren't actually planning anything. This is science fiction, not a serious endeavor. People propose all kinds of things that can't reasonably be done but sounds pretty cool. Spend about 30 seconds thinking about the economics, technical problems, logistics problems and our current level of technology and you'll appreciate how absurd this "proposal" is. This is the sort of thing people do when they want a grant to "study" some far out idea that they know damn well cannot be done.
I pay $30/mo for 30 up/30 down. Can't think of a reason why I would want anything more, and I'm certainly not willing to pay for it.
If you don't want to pay more I can understand and respect that. But if you can't think of a reason why you might want a faster connection you aren't thinking about it very hard. The simplest answer is that you would rather not waste your life waiting on data to be delivered. I assure you that you spend a measurable and significant amount of time waiting on your computer and network. Why would you waste your life doing that when you don't have to? Furthermore there are plenty of applications where faster internet connections make everything work better. Gaming, streaming, VPNs, voip, and more.
Plus I don't know where you live but you can't get anywhere near 30MBps down and up anywhere near where I live for $30/month. I can get that speed and I can get service for that amount of money but not both. Very few places have similar up and down speeds.
2Mbps would be right about 40X faster than dial-up. That's not "barely".
You missed the "up to" part of the deal. That's a very important part. 2Mbps is the max you will ever see and it is still dirt slow. It also is likely much slower than that upstream, probably 384K or 512K.
I've used service that speed. While I wouldn't trade it for dial-up it is in practical terms barely faster.
If you have to ask that question you probably don't.
there is nothing out there that needs 100mbps access.
There are plenty of applications where 100mbps or faster is extremely helpful. Everything from high qulaity video and music streaming to VPNs to teleconferencing to remote computer access all benefit from faster connections. Sure you can do it (usually) with slower connections but it doesn't work as well. There are applications that only become feasible with faster internet connection speeds. Furthermore even when you don't technically need faster access it is still really nice to have. Why spend your life waiting when you don't have to?
what exactly am i missing without fast internet?
Probably just wasting your life in small increments waiting for data that could have been there faster. If you don't mind wasting your life waiting for something when you don't have to, then knock yourself out. Personally I want the fastest internet service I can reasonably afford because I can think of better things to do with my life than wait.
Corporate greed is also the reason you have broadband in the first place. Your argument is necessary but not sufficient to explain what is going on. Greed is why these companies exist but it also is the reason that once they achieve monopolistic power they tend to slow down investment and try to maximize profits. They merely have to invest enough to keep their cost of providing service low enough that it is difficult for competitors to enter the market. Absent regulation demanding minimum service levels you will see a slow increase in network speeds but less than you would expect in a more competitive market.
What you have is a classic barrier to entry. It is REALLY expensive to build a network of cables to provide data services to the entire population. The expected return on investment becomes quite poor when there is an existing competitor with already in place infrastructure. Cable and phone service tends to be a natural monopoly meaning that the lowest costs are achieved by having all production concentrated in a single firm. Incoming competitors literally cannot achieve cost parity with the incumbent cable/phone monopoly without enough funding to build out a network of similar size. So the only way to get competitors is to have a parallel service (like phone versus cable tv) where they can then cross over and compete. Theoretically the power company has a third set of wires that could be used for data but there are technical issues there.
The only way things are going to progress faster on internet service levels is either through regulation mandating minimum service levels or through some other technology like wireless. You could in theory mandate via regulation that companies that provide the wires cannot be the actual ISP (you provide the pipe or router but not both) but I doubt this would ever happen for a variety of reasons.
Back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, US used to be the top country in the world in term of broadband competition.
According to who? I was a paying customer during that time period and most people had precisely one "broadband" option if they had any at all. (and most didn't) In a few places you might have had two options. In the late 80s only a small fraction of the population had broadband access. Maybe you lived in some small utopia where there was actual competition but for most of us the choice was dial-up or slow broadband through the local monopoly and in the late 80s and early 90s most people were still on dial up. Remember, AOL was still a thing until around 2000 or so.
There were some ill fated efforts to force the local carriers (the companies that owned the wires) to sell access to other companies at regulated rates but that went about as badly as you might expect. Verizon, AT&T (was SBC) and the rest didn't exactly bend over backwards to help competitors who were using their infrastructure. Basically if you have as much competition as you have sets of wires coming into your house. Right now my options are shitty slow service through DSL or Comcast where I live because I have one pair of wires from the local telco monopoly and a second set of wires from the local cable co monopoly. Since I've never had more than two sets of wires coming into my house I've never in my life really had more than two options for high speed internet service and usually I've only had one. If you want to call that competition fine, but I've never seen it.
I was one of the many thousands who were pulling cables in order to hook up the communities...
If you were doing that then you were wasting your time. You simply did not have the resources to make a meaningful dent in this problem outside of a very small local area. I remember people wanting to do this and the intention is good but you really need the resources of a major telco/cableco to make this happen nationwide.
Apple went from a computer company to a mobile phone company and media company.
Apple went from a computer focused consumer electronics company to a more general consumer electronics company. Phones, tablets, MP3 players, digital music and personal computers are all just different forms of consumer electronics. Apple's real expertise is in the software that goes into these devices. Love them or hate them, their software is what keeps people buying from Apple as opposed to Dell or Sony. It's what really differentiates their products.
The problem Apple (and Google) are running into is the law of big numbers. For Apple to grow by around 8% next year they will have to create enough new revenue equal to a company the size of eBay. That is hard to do and the number of products they can make or buy that will move the needle that much is pretty small. Even if they were to buy Telsa, Tesla's revenues are a rounding error to Apple (about $2 billion with basically zero profit versus $170 billion with $37 billion in profit) even if you ignore the fact that Tesla's stock is absurdly overpriced right now. Buying Tesla even for a fair price does not appear to make any financial or strategic sense for either company.
Google is also into a lot of markets now as well.
Google dabbles in a lot of stuff but their business is advertising and that accounts for virtually all their revenue. Almost all these other things they dabble in are to support the advertising engine. Google built Android as a defensive play so that they wouldn't be beholden to Apple or Microsoft or Nokia or Samsung for advertising revenue. Google does not and probably never will make a lot of money on Android directly. Google got into maps and email and most of the other things they are dealing with to keep their lead in information so that they would be the go to source for search and thus advertising. They're putting money into some stuff that is speculative like robots and self driving cars but these do not appear to be serious efforts at diversification. If Google wants to diversify away from advertising they haven't done anything yet that will substantially accomplish that.
GE was a company that made electrical products to one that makes just about everything including jet engines.
GE is a conglomerate. There are very very few successful big conglomerates. I can only think of a few off hand worthy of the name. (GE, Berkshire Hathaway, Siemens, Tyco, and a few others) It's obscenely difficult to manage companies that are in wildly different industries. However, GE is really in just a few businesses when you look at them big picture. Manufacturing, financial products, infrastructure and consumer products. Most of what they do falls under one of those headings. If it doesn't or if they aren't the market leader, they sell the business to someone else. It's not easy to successfully turn a company that isn't a conglomerate into one that is. The management skill sets required are very different. Just because you are good ad managing a tech company doesn't mean you will be any good at finance or auto manufacturing.
GM, Ford, and Chrysler where all very diversified at one point.
And now they are not. What does that tell you? They tried to be diversified back in the middle of the 20th century when conglomerates were kind of the in thing to do. This eventually proved to be a bad idea for most companies that tried. Diversification is a two edged sword and while it might protect against industry specific cycles, it doesn't (usuallly) protect against macroeconomic cycles. Furthermore diversification often has the effect of distracting management. Most successful conglomerates (like GE or Berkshire Hathaway) basically run the businesses they own as standalone businesses and focus on capital allocation.
It's obviously anecdotal, and I can't even provide a citation, but I sure remember reading people say they did exactly this... I thought it was even here on Slashdot. Bought a MacBook, wiped it, and ran only Windows on it.
That's pretty much the definition of the exception that proves the rule. If Apple were dumb enough to sell Macs with Windows, there would be essentially zero reason to buy a Mac. A Mac is OS X. Apple is fundamentally a software company that sells their software in some custom hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
email is pretty much instant these days.
Wouldn't be if you sent it to me. I do not check my email constantly even though I have the ability to do so. My phone does not alert me when I receive an email (on purpose) since I get so many of them. However it does alert me when I receive a text message because I don't get those from a wide group of people and the ones who send one to me usually need my attention in some way. I can receive text messages in places I cannot get email or where email is prohibitively slow. Furthermore, not everyone I send text messages to is interested in constantly checking their email for short messages that require no reply.
everyone has an email addr (not everyone has IM or wants to)
The use cases are different. They overlap but only if you don't consider the needs of the party you are communicating with. Just because someone has an email address doesn't mean that's how they want to communicate nor is it necessarily optimal for a given circumstance. I send text messages (or IM) when I want to communicate something immediately but don't necessarily require more than a brief reply if any. Basically any time I might use a phone but don't want the handshake over head ("hi, how are you?...") and don't need strictly synchronous communication. Email tends to get read and responded to much slower by most people. That's fine in a lot of cases but there are plenty of times where you want to have a closer to real time conversation but don't need to say a lot. I tend to use it in circumstances like when my wife is at work and I want to let her know I'm headed home.
I have to pay extra for unlimited SMS (and this is recent, a few years ago SMS was absurdly expensive).
SMS at almost any price is absurdly expensive. SMS is about the closest thing in the known universe to pure profit. The primary cost of it is administering the billing system.
Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading.
Depending on the task it doesn't necessarily have to. While an AI researcher might care about that, people doing real tasks in the real world arguably do not. For example lots of radiology clinics use software to help identify tumors in parallel with the radiologists. The software has no real understanding of the implications of what it is doing but it works well at helping ensure that tumors aren't missed. In some cases it does a better job than the doctors who clearly understand the implications of what they find.
One mechanism that most immediately occurs to me would be that a device with a remote-brick feature would have a password, created and assigned by the user of the device, which would not get reset by wiping the firmware or installing a new sim card.
People are demonstrably TERRIBLE at remembering passwords. I know people who have to look up passwords for things they use daily.
the immediate response on /. is always "But what about the hackers!" as if there's a group of malicious hackers just waiting for the technology to appear so they could exploit it
That would be because there IS a group of malicious people looking to exploit technology, some of them merely because they can. The topic gets brought up because it usually is insufficiently considered in the beginning. If something can be exploited you can be pretty sure that sooner or later it will be exploited.
. Most systems get hacked because there's some profit to be made out of it or someone is trying to put a message out there.
You think there is no profit to be made in wiping people's cell phones? Ever hear of blackmail? How about terrorism? Think there is no profit to be made in selling technology to mass kill cell phones to terrorist groups who might want to cause problems? There is profit to be made in exploits if you really think about it hard enough.
There are various ways to monitor your bandwidth. PC World had this article about it. A few moments on Google will reveal lots of other ways depending on exactly what you are looking to measure. It's interesting to find out how much one actually really needs. Most of the time you'll need far less than you have but what you really need to worry about is the times when you are close to your peak need. Take the activity that has the peak need for your particular situation (voip or maybe some games for instance) and see what that takes. Give yourself a bit of a safety margin. If you are bumping into your speed cap with some regularity, that can mean that you need to consider upgrading your service if your budget permits. Obviously if the cost to bump up to the next tier of service is prohibitive (it is for me right now) then of course it's best to live with what you have for the present.
It is how much resources would be spent making it.
The answer is none because this will never happen. It's just science fiction that people write when they are looking for a grant to "study" something that isn't actually feasible. I'm amazed that anyone is actually bothering to worry about the physics of the power generation. That is FAR less of an issue than how to actually build the thing.
think one will need some sort of self-replicating solar-cell-producing robot on the moon to avoid this requiring too many launches.
You'd need a LOT more than a robot. Manufacturing on this sort of scale is hugely resource intensive and requires an entire supply chain. You have to have mining equipment, refineries, production equipment, assembly equipment, fabricating equipment, chemicals, additives, etc, etc. All of this has to work in space, with minimal human intervention, somehow be repaired, have replacement parts, etc. We do NOT have the technology to do this even here on Earth in a similar manner much less millions of miles away in a harsh vacuum. And I'm not even worrying about the economics of all this which are even more absurd.
Frankly even if the physics of the power generation made sense,
Agreed I corrected myself in a later post I did the speedtest and it was 31.65 down 4.5 up last night.
Ahh, that makes a lot more sense.
But I especially don't have need for up bandwidth. the only high bandwidth (going up) thing I could do is VOIP / facetime, and both of those seem designed to fit in well withing 4.5 up. perhaps if my housefold wnated to do multiple voips / facetimes at once...
I do a lot of VPN stuff that having a fast upstream connection is really super helpful for. I don't need voip or Facetime style teleconferencing at the moment but doing it well requires pretty fast connections on each end. (I'm talking good, not just acceptable) Plus there is the fact that I simply don't have to wait as long for everything. I have 100Mbps down/ 20Mbps up service at home and I saturate it more often than you'd think. I don't even do anything like download torrents or the like but I might have 3-4 computers running in the house at the same time.
Does anybody have ideas of what these super cool thigns are?
Games, high def video, streaming, certain remote office tasks, good quality voip, good quality video conferencing, keeping your files on remote servers while working locally, VPNs, remote desktops, real time data backup, and of course, doing some combination of the above simultaneously or with multiple computers. If you are a business I can think of more exotic things like data capture, telerobotics, and the like.
Twitter is run by 13 people. 13 people!
And Twitter has yet to turn a penny of profit so I'm not sure what your point is. If they can't turn a profit with overhead that low I would be rather concerned if I were an investor.
They don't care about revenue, they want your data and they want lock-in. And they'll trade lock-in for data and omnipresence at any time.
Yeah we heard all the same BS arguments back around 1998-2001. They were bullshit then and they are bullshit now.
We are moving head on into a post-scarcity economy, at least in terms of digital connectivity...
"Post scarcity"? You've been watching too much Star Trek.
The purchase might bomb, yes, but it might as well just turn out to be a real bargain. And if it bombs it won't even do a blip on FBs bank account.
If you think a potential $19 billion write-down is just a "blip", you really don't understand finance. This is an investment that even under the rosiest scenario I can come up with, will take decades to break even. WhatsApp may be valuable but there is no way in hell it is worth that much money right now.
The world is changing, and it's changing fast. The dot-bomb era was just people getting ahead of them selves in a way that wasn't good for them. The hardware wasn't there, Databases and IDEs costed more than luxury cars, and what passes as a toy today was a cray workstation in 2001 that would set you back 30 grand. It was silly back then. It isn't now.
I love watching people who think the laws of economics have suddenly been repealed. It's hysterical. We heard all the same stupid arguments 15 years ago. Every other fool was trumpeting the "new economy" as justification for their stupid business plans and bad investments. A stupid valuation is a stupid valuation. There MUST be some way to recoup the investment or it is a waste of money no matter how many eyeballs it delivers or how much the company thinks they have "locked in" their users. If you can give me even a vaguely plausible way that this purchase makes financial sense at $19B, I'll eat my shoe in barbecue sauce.
WhatsApp already has 450 million users, if Facebook were to roll out their own app, they would have 0 users, and would be trying to take away from an incumbent.
True but that doesn't make $19 billion a sane price to purchase the company. Even under the most optimistic scenario I can come up with it will take Facebook somewhere over 25 YEARS to make their investment back. At current likely revenue and profit levels the time to break-even is around 150 YEARS.
WhatsApp didn't have to take them away from anyone, they had first-mover advantage.
So did Altavista and MySpace and lots of other companies. Being first mover isn't always and advantage. Sometimes it is the second mouse that gets the cheese.
And yet Facebook apparently disagrees. I'd suggest that they probably did a lot more math than you did before shelling out.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. You would be amazed how little thought sometimes goes into big acquisitions, particularly when the company is essentially owned by one guy who can do whatever he wants. I'm an accountant and I've been involved in a few acquisitions in the past. Some companies really do the math and others just throw out a number without checking really deeply. Zuckerberg doesn't strike me as a due-diligence kind of guy. I think they (he) wanted to keep it out of Google's hands and were willing to pay whatever it took to make that happen.
Let's take the 400 million users number at face value. This means roughly that WhatsApp has roughly $400 million in revenue / year. Let's assume they have a very nice net profit margin of 30% which is similar to Apple or Microsoft, ie very high. That means that to recoup their $19 billion purchase at current profit levels it will take 158 YEARS . Explain to me a scenario where that is a sane purchase price.
I'm not saying the company isn't valuable, but I am pretty good with finance and I cannot see how Facebook didn't grossly overpay.
While I admit up front that there is a lot I don't know. I'd never even heard of WhatsApp prior to this purchase announcement. That said, I have an extremely hard time believing that this company is worth anywhere close to $19 billion. The company employs 55 people and if they do have 400 million users, that means they have revenues of around $400 million / year since they charge $1/year for their service. Even if their net profit margins are really high (say 30%), that means that it will take Facebook 158 years to recoup their investment. ($19B / ($400M * 0.3) = 158 years) While I'm sure there are probably ways to increase revenues, its not clear how this is a sensible use of funds by Facebook.
I'm not saying WhatsApp isn't valuable but I don't see how Facebook doesn't end up writing off a few billion in a few years.
There was no such thing as "broadband" in the late 1980s and early 1990s, prior to the discovery of the web by the public in about 1994.
Oh you could get a T1 line (for $$$) or in some cases ISDN. There were a few other options too for data barely worth mentioning. The first ADSL patents were filed in 1988. DSL had about half a million customers by around 1997. There weren't a lot of customers for it but it was out there during the early-mid 90s. The term broadband didn't come about until much later but you could get higher speed network access before that. Of course the internet wasn't really a thing outside of college campuses until 1993-1994 like you said. Before that it was mostly a bunch of BBS systems though you could access some through the internet. I (sort of) fondly remember dialing up and a 2400baud modem in the late 1980s but I also remember a friend of mine running a BBS which you could use the internet to access.
I was at a University and we ordered a T1 line (1.5 Mbps) FOR THE WHOLE CAMPUS.
I was in college in the early 90s too. We had multiple T1s at my campus. Seemed fast at the time but we couldn't do much either looking back on it.
Since you're talking about decades of effort to build this thing, it doesn't really matter how long it takes to get there.
Yes it does because you have to fund the project. Even ignoring the technical problems (which are legion), anyone funding this is going to want a return on their investment that is not measured in decades if not centuries. Even governments aren't usually willing to put up with that long of a payback, particularly for something as absurdly hypothetical and risky as this.
They plan to use lunar materials, so no hundresds of rocket launches to get started
Right, because entire supply chains can magically materialize out of the vacuum of space. Look, even here on Earth just because there is a pile of iron ore sitting around doesn't mean you have everything you need to refine, process, form, machine, deliver and install the products you need. I think there is a general lack of appreciation here of how complicated it is to make a lot of the products we take for granted. You don't just have to deliver a few robots to the moon and let the magic happen. You have to deliver an entire supply chain. That is VERY hard to do and extremely expensive. You are BADLY underestimating the amount of equipment and manpower and technology that would be needed to make this happen.
For any technology that is likely within the next 100 years, there would be hundreds (probably thousands) of rocket launches. The parent post is quite correct on this point.
I guess the point is kind of that real estate and raw materials are "free", if you get the proper manufacturing equipment up there.
Nothing is free. The people that make that hypothetical manufacturing equipment are going to want a return on their investment. Just because the costs are not direct doesn't mean they don't exist.
The lunar surface is covered in silicon, and has plenty of iron, aluminum, and magnesium.
Great! What about oxygen? Carbon? Water? The thousands of other chemicals, materials and tools that we take for granted here on Earth which are required for production?
Ship a refinery and fab up to the Moon, and whatever trace dopants and alloys you need.
Oh is that all there is to it? We just have to ship a hypothetical refinery which can somehow process all the different materials without any supply chain of any kind. Where pray tell can we find this magic piece of technology? [/joking sarcasm]
Seriously, have you given this a moment's actual serious thought? You seem to seriously think that we can send a few rocket loads of equipment and somehow manufacturing will magically take place. It doesn't work like that. You are talking about a level of manufacturing technology that is probably two to three centuries away at minimum. We don't have ANY equipment that resembles what would be needed here on Earth much less something ready to go into space. I have been in manufacturing for the better part of three decades and I'm both an engineer and an accountant. Proposals like this are absurd on the economics alone. There is FAR more to manufacturing than just a refinery and a few robots.
Yes, I don't however see any data on their website about how wide they are planning to build the ring out.
Maybe because they aren't actually planning anything. This is science fiction, not a serious endeavor. People propose all kinds of things that can't reasonably be done but sounds pretty cool. Spend about 30 seconds thinking about the economics, technical problems, logistics problems and our current level of technology and you'll appreciate how absurd this "proposal" is. This is the sort of thing people do when they want a grant to "study" some far out idea that they know damn well cannot be done.
I pay $30/mo for 30 up/30 down. Can't think of a reason why I would want anything more, and I'm certainly not willing to pay for it.
If you don't want to pay more I can understand and respect that. But if you can't think of a reason why you might want a faster connection you aren't thinking about it very hard. The simplest answer is that you would rather not waste your life waiting on data to be delivered. I assure you that you spend a measurable and significant amount of time waiting on your computer and network. Why would you waste your life doing that when you don't have to? Furthermore there are plenty of applications where faster internet connections make everything work better. Gaming, streaming, VPNs, voip, and more.
Plus I don't know where you live but you can't get anywhere near 30MBps down and up anywhere near where I live for $30/month. I can get that speed and I can get service for that amount of money but not both. Very few places have similar up and down speeds.
2Mbps would be right about 40X faster than dial-up. That's not "barely".
You missed the "up to" part of the deal. That's a very important part. 2Mbps is the max you will ever see and it is still dirt slow. It also is likely much slower than that upstream, probably 384K or 512K.
I've used service that speed. While I wouldn't trade it for dial-up it is in practical terms barely faster.
why do i need to pay for super fast internet?
If you have to ask that question you probably don't.
there is nothing out there that needs 100mbps access.
There are plenty of applications where 100mbps or faster is extremely helpful. Everything from high qulaity video and music streaming to VPNs to teleconferencing to remote computer access all benefit from faster connections. Sure you can do it (usually) with slower connections but it doesn't work as well. There are applications that only become feasible with faster internet connection speeds. Furthermore even when you don't technically need faster access it is still really nice to have. Why spend your life waiting when you don't have to?
what exactly am i missing without fast internet?
Probably just wasting your life in small increments waiting for data that could have been there faster. If you don't mind wasting your life waiting for something when you don't have to, then knock yourself out. Personally I want the fastest internet service I can reasonably afford because I can think of better things to do with my life than wait.
Corporate greed is the overwhelming reason.
Corporate greed is also the reason you have broadband in the first place. Your argument is necessary but not sufficient to explain what is going on. Greed is why these companies exist but it also is the reason that once they achieve monopolistic power they tend to slow down investment and try to maximize profits. They merely have to invest enough to keep their cost of providing service low enough that it is difficult for competitors to enter the market. Absent regulation demanding minimum service levels you will see a slow increase in network speeds but less than you would expect in a more competitive market.
What you have is a classic barrier to entry. It is REALLY expensive to build a network of cables to provide data services to the entire population. The expected return on investment becomes quite poor when there is an existing competitor with already in place infrastructure. Cable and phone service tends to be a natural monopoly meaning that the lowest costs are achieved by having all production concentrated in a single firm. Incoming competitors literally cannot achieve cost parity with the incumbent cable/phone monopoly without enough funding to build out a network of similar size. So the only way to get competitors is to have a parallel service (like phone versus cable tv) where they can then cross over and compete. Theoretically the power company has a third set of wires that could be used for data but there are technical issues there.
The only way things are going to progress faster on internet service levels is either through regulation mandating minimum service levels or through some other technology like wireless. You could in theory mandate via regulation that companies that provide the wires cannot be the actual ISP (you provide the pipe or router but not both) but I doubt this would ever happen for a variety of reasons.
I see visiting their site, that Time Warner is offering me their internet service "Everyday Low Price (up to 2Mbps) for $14.99/mo.
Great. $15/month for barely faster than dial-up. What a deal.
Back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, US used to be the top country in the world in term of broadband competition.
According to who? I was a paying customer during that time period and most people had precisely one "broadband" option if they had any at all. (and most didn't) In a few places you might have had two options. In the late 80s only a small fraction of the population had broadband access. Maybe you lived in some small utopia where there was actual competition but for most of us the choice was dial-up or slow broadband through the local monopoly and in the late 80s and early 90s most people were still on dial up. Remember, AOL was still a thing until around 2000 or so.
There were some ill fated efforts to force the local carriers (the companies that owned the wires) to sell access to other companies at regulated rates but that went about as badly as you might expect. Verizon, AT&T (was SBC) and the rest didn't exactly bend over backwards to help competitors who were using their infrastructure. Basically if you have as much competition as you have sets of wires coming into your house. Right now my options are shitty slow service through DSL or Comcast where I live because I have one pair of wires from the local telco monopoly and a second set of wires from the local cable co monopoly. Since I've never had more than two sets of wires coming into my house I've never in my life really had more than two options for high speed internet service and usually I've only had one. If you want to call that competition fine, but I've never seen it.
I was one of the many thousands who were pulling cables in order to hook up the communities...
If you were doing that then you were wasting your time. You simply did not have the resources to make a meaningful dent in this problem outside of a very small local area. I remember people wanting to do this and the intention is good but you really need the resources of a major telco/cableco to make this happen nationwide.
Apple went from a computer company to a mobile phone company and media company.
Apple went from a computer focused consumer electronics company to a more general consumer electronics company. Phones, tablets, MP3 players, digital music and personal computers are all just different forms of consumer electronics. Apple's real expertise is in the software that goes into these devices. Love them or hate them, their software is what keeps people buying from Apple as opposed to Dell or Sony. It's what really differentiates their products.
The problem Apple (and Google) are running into is the law of big numbers. For Apple to grow by around 8% next year they will have to create enough new revenue equal to a company the size of eBay. That is hard to do and the number of products they can make or buy that will move the needle that much is pretty small. Even if they were to buy Telsa, Tesla's revenues are a rounding error to Apple (about $2 billion with basically zero profit versus $170 billion with $37 billion in profit) even if you ignore the fact that Tesla's stock is absurdly overpriced right now. Buying Tesla even for a fair price does not appear to make any financial or strategic sense for either company.
Google is also into a lot of markets now as well.
Google dabbles in a lot of stuff but their business is advertising and that accounts for virtually all their revenue. Almost all these other things they dabble in are to support the advertising engine. Google built Android as a defensive play so that they wouldn't be beholden to Apple or Microsoft or Nokia or Samsung for advertising revenue. Google does not and probably never will make a lot of money on Android directly. Google got into maps and email and most of the other things they are dealing with to keep their lead in information so that they would be the go to source for search and thus advertising. They're putting money into some stuff that is speculative like robots and self driving cars but these do not appear to be serious efforts at diversification. If Google wants to diversify away from advertising they haven't done anything yet that will substantially accomplish that.
GE was a company that made electrical products to one that makes just about everything including jet engines.
GE is a conglomerate. There are very very few successful big conglomerates. I can only think of a few off hand worthy of the name. (GE, Berkshire Hathaway, Siemens, Tyco, and a few others) It's obscenely difficult to manage companies that are in wildly different industries. However, GE is really in just a few businesses when you look at them big picture. Manufacturing, financial products, infrastructure and consumer products. Most of what they do falls under one of those headings. If it doesn't or if they aren't the market leader, they sell the business to someone else. It's not easy to successfully turn a company that isn't a conglomerate into one that is. The management skill sets required are very different. Just because you are good ad managing a tech company doesn't mean you will be any good at finance or auto manufacturing.
GM, Ford, and Chrysler where all very diversified at one point.
And now they are not. What does that tell you? They tried to be diversified back in the middle of the 20th century when conglomerates were kind of the in thing to do. This eventually proved to be a bad idea for most companies that tried. Diversification is a two edged sword and while it might protect against industry specific cycles, it doesn't (usuallly) protect against macroeconomic cycles. Furthermore diversification often has the effect of distracting management. Most successful conglomerates (like GE or Berkshire Hathaway) basically run the businesses they own as standalone businesses and focus on capital allocation.
It's obviously anecdotal, and I can't even provide a citation, but I sure remember reading people say they did exactly this... I thought it was even here on Slashdot. Bought a MacBook, wiped it, and ran only Windows on it.
That's pretty much the definition of the exception that proves the rule. If Apple were dumb enough to sell Macs with Windows, there would be essentially zero reason to buy a Mac. A Mac is OS X. Apple is fundamentally a software company that sells their software in some custom hardware.