The problems that monetizing free services like Facebook are largely as follows.
-The value of the product to users is determined by the number of your friends that use it.. What this effectively means is that Facebook cannot charge users for content. As soon as they do that, some people will leave, which pushes down the value for money that users who want to stay get. So they leave too. No future there.
Facebook has 600M+ users. There is a huge advantage in having a user base that large. It means your friends *are* on it, most likely, and unless they do something monumentally stupid, most of the user base is going to stick. They'd have to drop that user base a lot before the service became significantly less valuable. Any competing service will start from a much smaller user base and probably never get as large.
And there are many ways of monetizing user information. You may not click on Google display ads, but enough people do to make that business worthwhile to Google.
Now, whether this makes Facebook worth an enormous valuation is another matter. But one thing that remains true from the first Internet boom is that the number of eyeballs on your site matters, and Facebook is doing very well by that measure.
Yeah, and Solaris (+Java) are the success stories of Sun software. What about all the other stuff (mostly acquired) they have been trying to market over the years? Anyone remember SeeBeyond (enterprise integration vendor)? Sun historically could not market any of this - it just sank because they were never a top vendor and didn't even get onto evaluation lists, much less close deals. Now, Oracle does know how to sell software. So maybe they can make a go of some of these products. But Oracle mostly had something equivalent already, so in some cases I suspect they will let the Sun software die (or more accurately, continue to die, because it was already headed there).
2 objects moving on directly opposed vectors traveling at just less than light speed. The RATE at which those objects move away from each other will be larger than light speed even if neither of the objects is moving faster than light.
I think not, because velocities are not additive as they approach the speed of light. That's Special Relativity. You don't get FTL relative to another moving object.
You are asking the government to prosecute itself. Without a person at the top with a highly developed sense of morality it isn't likely to happen within the same branch of government. Even with such a person at the top, political reality may make it impossible.
We did it once. We got a sitting President to resign (in place of impeachment) for, among other things, spying on and using various federal agencies (including the FBI) to attack his political enemies.
So it's not impossible. But I do wonder where the outrage is this time. We have a whole bunch of people stirred up over the government being too big and spending too much money. But they and their representatives aren't moving to enforce the laws we have against illegal wiretapping, etc., nor are they pushing to repeal things like the Patriot Act, which gives the government hugely expanded surveillance powers. Government overreaching in the area of civil liberties doesn't seem to be an issue - it should be IMO.
The real problem IMO is the people who get their own set of rules are not the ones who are so valuable that you can't live without them. Instead they are the ones who are very good at sussing out company politics, and working the system for maximum personal advancement. That doesn't help morale, either, because others see that the company isn't rewarding based on achievement.
I'm kind of surprised none of the "big bug" movies made the top 10. A tarantula the size of a house probably couldn't walk, nor could a giant scaled up mantis (as in "The Deadly Mantis") fly. I kind of liked "Wasp Woman," though, which is actually more plausible, but laughable because of the incredibly cheap and sloppy production (it was one of the innumerable Roger Corman made-in-a-week flicks).
Certainly OpenBSD has a good track record and finding and fixing security flaws. But in this case, I wouldn't assume the flaw, if any, can be found quickly and fixed. The post alleging it was certainly not very detailed about it.
+1 to parent. I lived for quite a while in a city next to a couple of large military bases. I met people, including some who were gay and still in the military, and some who'd been kicked out. They all volunteered. It was their job. So kicking out people who have made the choice to join and are doing a job because of their sexual orientation is wrong (regardless of what you think about the military and the uses to which it is put). Now, the next thing the Congress should do is repeal DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), which effectively prevents all federal employees (not just military) from receiving benefits for same-sex partners. Another Clinton-era bad idea. Challenges to this are winding their way up the court system (it has already been ruled unconstitutional at the District level), but there is no telling what will happen there.
The problem is that the NSA has, or at least it believes it has and other believe it has, information whose value is essentially beyond price.
No, I don't think (nor do I think they think) their data is beyond price. In fact, since they troll a lot of communication traffic looking for significant patterns, most of what they have is almost certainly junk. And the stuff that is valuable - probably a lot of the value is just the fact that they have it, and their enemies don't know they have it. Just as in WW II, German submarine traffic was secret not because of what the information was, but because we wanted the fact that we had intercepted and decoded it kept a secret, so that countermeasures would not be taken.
Lots of organizations are uncomfortable with high value data being out of their control.
But are your IT guys better than their IT guys? Do you patch, monitor, secure, more than they do? Maybe, maybe not. It pays to ask questions but the cloud isn't a worse place for data, necessarily.
That said, top secret data like NSA has is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
It's way less reform that I'd like see, but it is certainly a lot better than the status quo we had before the bill was passed.
The biggest change is eliminating underwriting based on pre-existing conditions (starting 2014). This is a huge deal because right now we have two insurance markets: one for those who are getting insurance through their employer (the "group market") and a kind of ghetto insurance hell that everybody else falls into, where you may or not be able to find coverage and can even be dropped retro-actively, after you get sick. Note that you may not even have a condition that is expensive to treat - a lot of chronic illnesses are manageable with moderate cost. But the insurance company is in the driver's seat (pre-health care reform) and if they don't like your risk profile, you are not insurable, insurable with conditions, or theoretically insurable but you can't afford it.
So rolling back this part of reform would leave a lot of people back where they were as far as getting insurance is concerned - which is to say, out of luck. Think this doesn't apply to you? Your employer can usually decide anytime to change or eliminate your coverage. Or eliminate you from their workforce. Then once your COBRA period runs out you are out on your own.
Fortunately this is only one legal salvo in a long process. But I'm not cheering the prospect of what reform we now have being reversed.
True, but maybe not a JDK (Harmony). Also, ticking off one of the largest organizations using, developing, supporting and popularizing Java applications, can't be good for the future of the platform.
Unless you are a much better photographer than I am, the data set that is worth archiving is much smaller than the set of pictures you took. I have a few decades of photos (digital + scanned negatives) and the raw stuff is huge but the "must archive" set, which I keep separately, is still reasonable.
It's the download time you should worry about. If you ever need to a complete restore from backup, I have heard horror stories about how hard/lengthy that can be, from some of the popular backup services. I think Amazon at least can ship physical disks to you, as a last resort.
Just ask if your benefits exceed the cost. If you are spending time fixing your manifests, tracking down why dynamic class loading is broken, integrating legacy code, or the like, then you're not adding features or value to your end software product. You are just burning cycles that your framework and app server are making you burn.
Quite the contrary, IMO. After having had considerable recent experience with it, and before that, having had extensive knowledge of older enterprise Java technologies (EJB, Servlets), I think the benefits of OSGi are mostly illusory, while the costs are real and substantial. There are theoretical benefits in terms of flexibility and modularity, which are good things, but these benefits can be realized in other and simpler ways. The costs come in the form of complexity - especially dependency management and class loading headaches - as well as bugs and immaturity in the frameworks and tools, and the fact that a good chunk of existing Java code wasn't planned to be used in OSGi environment and so doesn't support it well.
Security holes, like illegal toxic waste dumps are negative externalities.
They are not strictly externalities, because some of the bad effects can and do rebound on the business entity that is causing the problem. At least they can involve loss of reputation, and they can include the cost of emergency ex post facto mitigation measures, if a security problem is severe. Other financial or legal consequences are also possible, but license agreements typically include a limitation of liability, which provides some insulation.
I'm disenchanted, and I haven't even been in political trouble with the site.
One principle of Wikipedia is that all information is sourced from somewhere else. So Wikipedia is at its very best a secondary source of information - a bunch of links and paraphrased material - and the real information is somewhere else, possibly offline, where it is not directly verifiable or even discussable.
Another principle is that level of personal knowledge gives you no authority or control over content. So a Ph.D. in a subject can be overwritten by a 10-year-old. You could argue that gets corrected over time but still, I've seen a lot of misinformed edits. Britannica doesn't have this problem - they get an expert to write an article (though they do take reader input). That person may well be biased, but they probably aren't heavily misinformed.
There's nothing mysterious about Oracle's actions if you remember that they are here to sell their database software and associated services.
You are right that with Oracle, it is all about the money. But middleware and applications are a lot of their revenue stream nowadays (it is hard to tell exactly how much because they lump middleware + database together). Oracle is not a one-trick pony: they are a one-stop software shop now.
It would be nice if Oracle did support Java on Mac. I work in a large dev organization that is heavily Java-centric, and the wonderful thing about Java is that we can have developers on Windows, Linux or Mac - their choice. Quite a few choose Mac. But Oracle (and Sun before them) has never really made money off Java on the client, or dev tools. The big money is in server-side Java apps, for which the preferred Oracle platform is Solaris now. So they may not care to invest in this project.
The Bay Area is still hugely expensive to live in, by most measures. Not just housing but many other things are expensive and it is in a high tax state/region. So wages tend to be higher here, too. It is not a low cost place to operate a business. Many local high-tech firms find the advantages of being here outweigh the costs, but these companies also typically have large offshore development centers, so a lot of their labor is non-local.
You forgot to mention sales tax - 10% or so all by itself in Northern California. It is a regressive tax because poor people spend a higher percentage of their income on taxable items.
Social security tax is "paid by the wealthy" but since there is an income cap above which it does not apply, it is also a much lower percentage for income for the wealthy than for the poor or middle class.
In addition, the AMT, originally intended to snare extremely wealthy taxpayers, has in effect become a surcharge that affects upper-middle and some middle-class taxpayers, especially in states with high state, local and property taxes. Ironically the very wealthy often escape this tax.
You know, somebody has to pay the cost of waste disposal. We already have a lot of issues with mining companies that have polluted a site then abandoned it. They're gone, but the waste remains. Nuclear waste is that much more toxic, so why is this not a concern, and why shouldn't the utility that is taking in the revenue from power generation bear the cost of it?
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The problems that monetizing free services like Facebook are largely as follows.
-The value of the product to users is determined by the number of your friends that use it .. What this effectively means is that Facebook cannot charge users for content. As soon as they do that, some people will leave, which pushes down the value for money that users who want to stay get. So they leave too. No future there.
Facebook has 600M+ users. There is a huge advantage in having a user base that large. It means your friends *are* on it, most likely, and unless they do something monumentally stupid, most of the user base is going to stick. They'd have to drop that user base a lot before the service became significantly less valuable. Any competing service will start from a much smaller user base and probably never get as large.
And there are many ways of monetizing user information. You may not click on Google display ads, but enough people do to make that business worthwhile to Google.
Now, whether this makes Facebook worth an enormous valuation is another matter. But one thing that remains true from the first Internet boom is that the number of eyeballs on your site matters, and Facebook is doing very well by that measure.
Yeah, and Solaris (+Java) are the success stories of Sun software. What about all the other stuff (mostly acquired) they have been trying to market over the years? Anyone remember SeeBeyond (enterprise integration vendor)? Sun historically could not market any of this - it just sank because they were never a top vendor and didn't even get onto evaluation lists, much less close deals. Now, Oracle does know how to sell software. So maybe they can make a go of some of these products. But Oracle mostly had something equivalent already, so in some cases I suspect they will let the Sun software die (or more accurately, continue to die, because it was already headed there).
2 objects moving on directly opposed vectors traveling at just less than light speed. The RATE at which those objects move away from each other will be larger than light speed even if neither of the objects is moving faster than light.
I think not, because velocities are not additive as they approach the speed of light. That's Special Relativity. You don't get FTL relative to another moving object.
You are asking the government to prosecute itself. Without a person at the top with a highly developed sense of morality it isn't likely to happen within the same branch of government. Even with such a person at the top, political reality may make it impossible.
We did it once. We got a sitting President to resign (in place of impeachment) for, among other things, spying on and using various federal agencies (including the FBI) to attack his political enemies.
So it's not impossible. But I do wonder where the outrage is this time. We have a whole bunch of people stirred up over the government being too big and spending too much money. But they and their representatives aren't moving to enforce the laws we have against illegal wiretapping, etc., nor are they pushing to repeal things like the Patriot Act, which gives the government hugely expanded surveillance powers. Government overreaching in the area of civil liberties doesn't seem to be an issue - it should be IMO.
The real problem IMO is the people who get their own set of rules are not the ones who are so valuable that you can't live without them. Instead they are the ones who are very good at sussing out company politics, and working the system for maximum personal advancement. That doesn't help morale, either, because others see that the company isn't rewarding based on achievement.
I'm kind of surprised none of the "big bug" movies made the top 10. A tarantula the size of a house probably couldn't walk, nor could a giant scaled up mantis (as in "The Deadly Mantis") fly. I kind of liked "Wasp Woman," though, which is actually more plausible, but laughable because of the incredibly cheap and sloppy production (it was one of the innumerable Roger Corman made-in-a-week flicks).
Certainly OpenBSD has a good track record and finding and fixing security flaws. But in this case, I wouldn't assume the flaw, if any, can be found quickly and fixed. The post alleging it was certainly not very detailed about it.
+1 to parent. I lived for quite a while in a city next to a couple of large military bases. I met people, including some who were gay and still in the military, and some who'd been kicked out. They all volunteered. It was their job. So kicking out people who have made the choice to join and are doing a job because of their sexual orientation is wrong (regardless of what you think about the military and the uses to which it is put). Now, the next thing the Congress should do is repeal DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), which effectively prevents all federal employees (not just military) from receiving benefits for same-sex partners. Another Clinton-era bad idea. Challenges to this are winding their way up the court system (it has already been ruled unconstitutional at the District level), but there is no telling what will happen there.
That's true enough, although the value of intelligence information tends to degrade with time.
The problem is that the NSA has, or at least it believes it has and other believe it has, information whose value is essentially beyond price.
No, I don't think (nor do I think they think) their data is beyond price. In fact, since they troll a lot of communication traffic looking for significant patterns, most of what they have is almost certainly junk. And the stuff that is valuable - probably a lot of the value is just the fact that they have it, and their enemies don't know they have it. Just as in WW II, German submarine traffic was secret not because of what the information was, but because we wanted the fact that we had intercepted and decoded it kept a secret, so that countermeasures would not be taken.
Lots of organizations are uncomfortable with high value data being out of their control.
But are your IT guys better than their IT guys? Do you patch, monitor, secure, more than they do? Maybe, maybe not. It pays to ask questions but the cloud isn't a worse place for data, necessarily.
That said, top secret data like NSA has is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
It's way less reform that I'd like see, but it is certainly a lot better than the status quo we had before the bill was passed.
The biggest change is eliminating underwriting based on pre-existing conditions (starting 2014). This is a huge deal because right now we have two insurance markets: one for those who are getting insurance through their employer (the "group market") and a kind of ghetto insurance hell that everybody else falls into, where you may or not be able to find coverage and can even be dropped retro-actively, after you get sick. Note that you may not even have a condition that is expensive to treat - a lot of chronic illnesses are manageable with moderate cost. But the insurance company is in the driver's seat (pre-health care reform) and if they don't like your risk profile, you are not insurable, insurable with conditions, or theoretically insurable but you can't afford it.
So rolling back this part of reform would leave a lot of people back where they were as far as getting insurance is concerned - which is to say, out of luck. Think this doesn't apply to you? Your employer can usually decide anytime to change or eliminate your coverage. Or eliminate you from their workforce. Then once your COBRA period runs out you are out on your own.
Fortunately this is only one legal salvo in a long process. But I'm not cheering the prospect of what reform we now have being reversed.
True, but maybe not a JDK (Harmony). Also, ticking off one of the largest organizations using, developing, supporting and popularizing Java applications, can't be good for the future of the platform.
Unless you are a much better photographer than I am, the data set that is worth archiving is much smaller than the set of pictures you took. I have a few decades of photos (digital + scanned negatives) and the raw stuff is huge but the "must archive" set, which I keep separately, is still reasonable.
It's the download time you should worry about. If you ever need to a complete restore from backup, I have heard horror stories about how hard/lengthy that can be, from some of the popular backup services. I think Amazon at least can ship physical disks to you, as a last resort.
Starting an unnecessary war is certainly one of the worst thing you can do as President.
Claiming now, even with the all the better information we have, that it was actually a good idea, adds insult to injury.
Just ask if your benefits exceed the cost. If you are spending time fixing your manifests, tracking down why dynamic class loading is broken, integrating legacy code, or the like, then you're not adding features or value to your end software product. You are just burning cycles that your framework and app server are making you burn.
Quite the contrary, IMO. After having had considerable recent experience with it, and before that, having had extensive knowledge of older enterprise Java technologies (EJB, Servlets), I think the benefits of OSGi are mostly illusory, while the costs are real and substantial. There are theoretical benefits in terms of flexibility and modularity, which are good things, but these benefits can be realized in other and simpler ways. The costs come in the form of complexity - especially dependency management and class loading headaches - as well as bugs and immaturity in the frameworks and tools, and the fact that a good chunk of existing Java code wasn't planned to be used in OSGi environment and so doesn't support it well.
Security holes, like illegal toxic waste dumps are negative externalities.
They are not strictly externalities, because some of the bad effects can and do rebound on the business entity that is causing the problem. At least they can involve loss of reputation, and they can include the cost of emergency ex post facto mitigation measures, if a security problem is severe. Other financial or legal consequences are also possible, but license agreements typically include a limitation of liability, which provides some insulation.
I'm disenchanted, and I haven't even been in political trouble with the site.
One principle of Wikipedia is that all information is sourced from somewhere else. So Wikipedia is at its very best a secondary source of information - a bunch of links and paraphrased material - and the real information is somewhere else, possibly offline, where it is not directly verifiable or even discussable.
Another principle is that level of personal knowledge gives you no authority or control over content. So a Ph.D. in a subject can be overwritten by a 10-year-old. You could argue that gets corrected over time but still, I've seen a lot of misinformed edits. Britannica doesn't have this problem - they get an expert to write an article (though they do take reader input). That person may well be biased, but they probably aren't heavily misinformed.
There's nothing mysterious about Oracle's actions if you remember that they are here to sell their database software and associated services.
You are right that with Oracle, it is all about the money. But middleware and applications are a lot of their revenue stream nowadays (it is hard to tell exactly how much because they lump middleware + database together). Oracle is not a one-trick pony: they are a one-stop software shop now.
It would be nice if Oracle did support Java on Mac. I work in a large dev organization that is heavily Java-centric, and the wonderful thing about Java is that we can have developers on Windows, Linux or Mac - their choice. Quite a few choose Mac. But Oracle (and Sun before them) has never really made money off Java on the client, or dev tools. The big money is in server-side Java apps, for which the preferred Oracle platform is Solaris now. So they may not care to invest in this project.
The Bay Area is still hugely expensive to live in, by most measures. Not just housing but many other things are expensive and it is in a high tax state/region. So wages tend to be higher here, too. It is not a low cost place to operate a business. Many local high-tech firms find the advantages of being here outweigh the costs, but these companies also typically have large offshore development centers, so a lot of their labor is non-local.
You forgot to mention sales tax - 10% or so all by itself in Northern California. It is a regressive tax because poor people spend a higher percentage of their income on taxable items.
Social security tax is "paid by the wealthy" but since there is an income cap above which it does not apply, it is also a much lower percentage for income for the wealthy than for the poor or middle class.
In addition, the AMT, originally intended to snare extremely wealthy taxpayers, has in effect become a surcharge that affects upper-middle and some middle-class taxpayers, especially in states with high state, local and property taxes. Ironically the very wealthy often escape this tax.
You know, somebody has to pay the cost of waste disposal. We already have a lot of issues with mining companies that have polluted a site then abandoned it. They're gone, but the waste remains. Nuclear waste is that much more toxic, so why is this not a concern, and why shouldn't the utility that is taking in the revenue from power generation bear the cost of it?