Why would it "probably" be as patent encumbered as h.264? Google claims no patents at least, so that would in this case be if it's too similar in some regard to MPEG LA patents. But if we are to dismiss codecs on the basis of pessimistic probably's, we won't approve a single modern video codec at all. What matters is that the format has, after scrutiny of the FSF, been endorsed, that Google has irrevocably released all patents of VP8, and that there are signs that On2 made an effort to avoid MPEG LA patents in designing the format. It doesn't really get much better than that. We'll always have the doubters, the pessimists, but we can't base decisions on possibilities, only facts. At least in a world that is moving forward as quickly as the IT world.
It's not ironic. If you look at the PDF of the document itself, every page of the policy is marked top and bottom with "Unclassified." It's not classified, it's not even Official Use Only, from scanning the document I didn't see anything indicating anybody was supposed to restrict its circulation.
BUT IT'S STILL LEAKED BECAUSE IT WASN'T PUBLISHED BY THE GOV'T, MR KILLJOY!
So if the Facebook hype is fading and FB already cashing in, what is the competitor and why did their user base just go from 500 million people to 600 million people? Facebook is stronger than ever, and I don't see why they have to keep increasing their user base to remain profitable. Google don't need to attract new users to their search engine all the time in order to stay profitable, since it's ad driven, not driven by signups.
Until there is a good competitor to Facebook, Facebook has absolutely no problems, and its future isn't even dim.
... in the US government's life of doing whatever the hell they want without a court involved if they're caught with their pants down. But that's not what's scary - it's that this will happen without objections, other than a silent whisper from the victims here, effectively quenched by a public that wants to read more about Khloe Kardashian getting her own reality show. Heck, it hasn't even been established in a court that what has been leaked could be endangering lives. But who cares?
Re:Is Facebook a viable long term business model ?
on
Facebook's Revenues Leaked
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Is Facebook a viable long term business model ?
If you ask me, social networks become more viable the longer the exist in a successful form, and the more people adopt it. FB would've been useless to me if only a fifth of my friends and relatives used it, but now even my mom and aunt use it. Suddenly it becomes a *very* strongly founded network. A new social network pops up? Well, ask Google how well Google Buzz went, and that was Google being the challenger. Why switch? We're already on one. We and 500 million others.
Yes, Facebook is a viable long term business model, and it becomes more viable by the day.
I'm not joking when I'm saying that to many, Facebook is already their central website, and the rest of the sites on the web mere "sidetracks".
I think it's good news especially for indie developers to get more attention. Pixelmator can now be fighting on the same place as Photoshop. If consumers also rate products well, this can give them a serious competitive advantage. I think this is a background to why a small company like those behind Angry Birds has been able to grow this popular so quickly.
I know it's good for me anyway. I love orderly stuff, and can't complain about a well categorized store with user reviews, simple installs, and automated version tracking. It's far better than their earlier marketplace that was basically just a link collection.
If there's one mistake I can see Microsoft making in 2011, is losing their grip on the enterprise so much that their competitors will gain a stronger foothold there. It's long been a pretty MS exclusive zone, but these efforts on Kinect, consumer-oriented Windows Phone 7, and rumors of Windows 8 being a cloud-oriented OS sounds risky if they're still shooting for the enterprise. These guys want to control their own network, they often don't want to rely on clouds, and they want enterprise-oriented phones, not awesome Facebook integration as a priority...
A sluggish box built of mediocre parts, running a new "Windows 7 Home Center Edition" that really wants 2 GB but only get 1 GB. Shipping from Samsung at the time of CES 2011! Can play anything, such as Windows Media Video and DivX, although users of FLAC, Ogg, or other "obscure formats" are out of the picture. People start wondering why they can't just as well buy a Boxee and be much better off for a similar price, and Steve Ballmer has no answer to that.
as the retort will be, "So you don't believe in protecting the children then?"
The sad part is that this is actually not protecting the children, but doing the opposite. It adds drama and makes sex taboo, for children in the early teens that (especially them!) need to learn that sex is supposed to be fun, playful, but responsible. Not dramatic and scary.
Shit like this serves to make sex something big and horrible and doesn't exactly help against a healthy and relaxed stance about it. We today face numerous problems exactly because of this. Wouldn't it be amazing if we let kids see sex in their early teens for what it was, right there in school, where the teacher taught about how silicon implants and various acts in common porn wasn't connected to reality? Because today -- they still see that. From the same age and all. Just without the commentary from adults. Because we think making it forbidden is better, and will lead to less child pregnancies and angst over their bodies. We couldn't be more wrong...
How do this hurt Microsoft? Because parents regularly play some sort of "guilt by association" game with them? "Oh, there's a porn game out for this console -- well I refuse to buy little Timmy a PORN CONSOLE!!!" Are we that stupid as a species? Or is it because Microsoft want to preserve an untainted image because Internet Explorer has all these times not been a PORN BROWSER where we can get to porn sites, and which is helping daily to fund the porn indus... Oh wait.
Or is it kind of like this: "OK, we're adults here. And we don't think other adults should be allowed to use this console how they want. That's not why we built this thing. We want content that children can play, and we refuse to license stuff that can be used after their bedtime. Why? Well, we have absolute no fucking clue why this is so ridiculously important, but we have to play by society's rules."
In any case, something is stupid here. We can't get away from the fact that we're stupid. Private companies parenting children. Jeez.
I'm not whining just because this is Microsoft. Most of what I've said above can be applied to Apple and iOS too.
This is so ingrained in society that typing a sentence like this: "Let's just pretend that those 13+ kids don't want to cum, and won't find ways to cum anyway" makes me feel dirty and like a horrible pedophile. Despite myself being exactly like that in that approximate age. And all friends I have talked about this with. I'm going off on a tangent here, but that doesn't help our kids either. Better make sex not be something dirty and forbidden. It'll help against child pregnancies because we take out the drama.
Sex isn't supposed to be dangerous and dramatic. Quite the opposite.
So what DOES someone do who has bankrolled their digital creation and would like to recoup their investment, even make a profit, only to find that it's spread amongst 10,000 people without a penny returned.
Since this is about porn, I guess amateur porn will keep killing the industry. And I'm not complaining.
I agree! *Precisely* because this is so impressive, will it also see many complaints about bad translations and so on. The better an application is, and the more hyped it is as a consequence, the more complaints will it see due to expectations so high that they are even impossible to meet given today's technology.
I also agree that the translations offered will probably not be the best, but so aren't the Google Translations either, with their online huge database of statistics on how to translate words. And this app isn't even online. But... It can definitely be useful on especially signs. Perhaps restaurant menus too, although that could start to make it unreliable.
And let's admit it -- most of us here wouldn't be able to write an as immediate and accurate image processing algorithm like this.
This reminds me of one thing: Why are posts tagged? Can we include posts based on tags? Exclude posts based on tags? I never actually realized why we have them, but posts keep getting tagged. *shrug*
If we can exclude posts on tags, I'm pretty sure filtering out everything "wikileaks" would work here.
First taking down hosting for Wikileaks despite not being charged with anything just because they feel like it'd be fun, and then this, also just because they feel like doing it. Like Wikileaks, the books are again not illegal, and I suspect many readers thought we were over book burning. This is even worse - taking the books out of the hand of their readers having purchased them, and *then* burning them. It's getting pretty hard here to not fall into that Godwin hole.
Was Amazon seeing a lot of bad press over openly offering books to read, or what?
Why haven't MS developed a touch-based shell for Windows 7? They could sell it as Windows 7 Tablet Edition. Yay, they'd get a new product to sell, too!
I've used Windows 7 as a touch OS, and I can tell you it's no pleasant experience. You know the virtual keyboard that iOS and Android pops up as you give a text box focus? Yeah. Windows 7 doesn't support that. It has a virtual keyboard, but you can only click to open it manually. Click to open it. Every time you want to type. Oh, and the dpi setting support to make things easier to point and click at? Well, Windows applications don't use to have good dpi setting support. Their GUI's will break, or simply ignore the setting, and keep using small fonts. And what about window management? Clicking at window borders to resize them, to give room for... Wait a minute -- why do you have to window manage at all? That was taken out of iOS and Android, for a reason.
There are a dozen more reasons it'll make your skin crawl. It's an as poor OS for tablets, as Windows Mobile 6.5 is for mobile devices. It's as if Microsoft didn't learn! Why hasn't Ballmer learnt? Why is he so stubborn. It's his job to understand these things, and lead his company in the right direction! Windows 7 Tablet Edition should have been developed *along with Windows 7* itself! Because even back then, after Windows Vista, did visionaries in the tech industry see this as becoming huge in the future. But no -- MS seem to be willing to repeat their Windows Mobile mistake again. Trying to shoe-horn an OS design in a form factor and a human/computer interface it was never intended for.
Will it have USB support? I'm not sure if Google told anything about that? Even if I won't store anything on my computer (I know that's not something this OS is aimed for), I still need to store photos on Flickr and docs on Google Docs. I sure hope you can plug in an USB stick, or an external hard drive via USB, and get access to its files in some sort of file manager? Otherwise it's horrible -- you'd need to use another computer just to get stuff from your mobile phone, etc.
Also, I doubt Apple will ever support iPhone syncing with this thing, since it doesn't have iTunes for the web. I know Google don't care much for Apple, but that could be a bad thing for Google. Remember that purchases on iTunes would then be out too, and this is a hugely popular store. And Spotify is super-popular in Europe as a music service, and they don't have any web client, or any announced plans to release one. It's things like these, Google...
Slashdot Mirror
Why would it "probably" be as patent encumbered as h.264? Google claims no patents at least, so that would in this case be if it's too similar in some regard to MPEG LA patents. But if we are to dismiss codecs on the basis of pessimistic probably's, we won't approve a single modern video codec at all. What matters is that the format has, after scrutiny of the FSF, been endorsed, that Google has irrevocably released all patents of VP8, and that there are signs that On2 made an effort to avoid MPEG LA patents in designing the format. It doesn't really get much better than that. We'll always have the doubters, the pessimists, but we can't base decisions on possibilities, only facts. At least in a world that is moving forward as quickly as the IT world.
It's not ironic. If you look at the PDF of the document itself, every page of the policy is marked top and bottom with "Unclassified." It's not classified, it's not even Official Use Only, from scanning the document I didn't see anything indicating anybody was supposed to restrict its circulation.
BUT IT'S STILL LEAKED BECAUSE IT WASN'T PUBLISHED BY THE GOV'T, MR KILLJOY!
Why do a social network need new users for the existing users to be willing to communicate?
I haven't seen any difference in the activity in my feed, and I haven't added more than just 5 users the last year.
So if the Facebook hype is fading and FB already cashing in, what is the competitor and why did their user base just go from 500 million people to 600 million people? Facebook is stronger than ever, and I don't see why they have to keep increasing their user base to remain profitable. Google don't need to attract new users to their search engine all the time in order to stay profitable, since it's ad driven, not driven by signups.
Until there is a good competitor to Facebook, Facebook has absolutely no problems, and its future isn't even dim.
... in the US government's life of doing whatever the hell they want without a court involved if they're caught with their pants down. But that's not what's scary - it's that this will happen without objections, other than a silent whisper from the victims here, effectively quenched by a public that wants to read more about Khloe Kardashian getting her own reality show. Heck, it hasn't even been established in a court that what has been leaked could be endangering lives. But who cares?
Is Facebook a viable long term business model ?
If you ask me, social networks become more viable the longer the exist in a successful form, and the more people adopt it. FB would've been useless to me if only a fifth of my friends and relatives used it, but now even my mom and aunt use it. Suddenly it becomes a *very* strongly founded network. A new social network pops up? Well, ask Google how well Google Buzz went, and that was Google being the challenger. Why switch? We're already on one. We and 500 million others.
Yes, Facebook is a viable long term business model, and it becomes more viable by the day.
I'm not joking when I'm saying that to many, Facebook is already their central website, and the rest of the sites on the web mere "sidetracks".
I think it's good news especially for indie developers to get more attention. Pixelmator can now be fighting on the same place as Photoshop. If consumers also rate products well, this can give them a serious competitive advantage. I think this is a background to why a small company like those behind Angry Birds has been able to grow this popular so quickly.
I know it's good for me anyway. I love orderly stuff, and can't complain about a well categorized store with user reviews, simple installs, and automated version tracking. It's far better than their earlier marketplace that was basically just a link collection.
It should be said that Apple is closing down their previous marketplace because of this, though. :p
http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20101221/tc_zd/258336
If there's one mistake I can see Microsoft making in 2011, is losing their grip on the enterprise so much that their competitors will gain a stronger foothold there. It's long been a pretty MS exclusive zone, but these efforts on Kinect, consumer-oriented Windows Phone 7, and rumors of Windows 8 being a cloud-oriented OS sounds risky if they're still shooting for the enterprise. These guys want to control their own network, they often don't want to rely on clouds, and they want enterprise-oriented phones, not awesome Facebook integration as a priority...
I agree. I don't get why they have to present a "device" for this when they can just spend their resources on a "WMC 2011".
Maybe they want some of Apple's entertainment device market share cake. :p
Would be quite a shift in business if they start building more MS-branded devices though...
A sluggish box built of mediocre parts, running a new "Windows 7 Home Center Edition" that really wants 2 GB but only get 1 GB. Shipping from Samsung at the time of CES 2011! Can play anything, such as Windows Media Video and DivX, although users of FLAC, Ogg, or other "obscure formats" are out of the picture. People start wondering why they can't just as well buy a Boxee and be much better off for a similar price, and Steve Ballmer has no answer to that.
What about Windows Phone 7??
HA, that will be the joker in this game that will conquer it all!!
uhm...
So I recommend those annoyed by this game to play those instead.
as the retort will be, "So you don't believe in protecting the children then?"
The sad part is that this is actually not protecting the children, but doing the opposite. It adds drama and makes sex taboo, for children in the early teens that (especially them!) need to learn that sex is supposed to be fun, playful, but responsible. Not dramatic and scary.
Shit like this serves to make sex something big and horrible and doesn't exactly help against a healthy and relaxed stance about it. We today face numerous problems exactly because of this. Wouldn't it be amazing if we let kids see sex in their early teens for what it was, right there in school, where the teacher taught about how silicon implants and various acts in common porn wasn't connected to reality? Because today -- they still see that. From the same age and all. Just without the commentary from adults. Because we think making it forbidden is better, and will lead to less child pregnancies and angst over their bodies. We couldn't be more wrong...
How do this hurt Microsoft? Because parents regularly play some sort of "guilt by association" game with them? "Oh, there's a porn game out for this console -- well I refuse to buy little Timmy a PORN CONSOLE!!!" Are we that stupid as a species? Or is it because Microsoft want to preserve an untainted image because Internet Explorer has all these times not been a PORN BROWSER where we can get to porn sites, and which is helping daily to fund the porn indus... Oh wait.
Or is it kind of like this: "OK, we're adults here. And we don't think other adults should be allowed to use this console how they want. That's not why we built this thing. We want content that children can play, and we refuse to license stuff that can be used after their bedtime. Why? Well, we have absolute no fucking clue why this is so ridiculously important, but we have to play by society's rules."
In any case, something is stupid here. We can't get away from the fact that we're stupid. Private companies parenting children. Jeez.
I'm not whining just because this is Microsoft. Most of what I've said above can be applied to Apple and iOS too.
This is so ingrained in society that typing a sentence like this: "Let's just pretend that those 13+ kids don't want to cum, and won't find ways to cum anyway" makes me feel dirty and like a horrible pedophile. Despite myself being exactly like that in that approximate age. And all friends I have talked about this with. I'm going off on a tangent here, but that doesn't help our kids either. Better make sex not be something dirty and forbidden. It'll help against child pregnancies because we take out the drama.
Sex isn't supposed to be dangerous and dramatic. Quite the opposite.
So what DOES someone do who has bankrolled their digital creation and would like to recoup their investment, even make a profit, only to find that it's spread amongst 10,000 people without a penny returned.
Since this is about porn, I guess amateur porn will keep killing the industry. And I'm not complaining.
I agree! *Precisely* because this is so impressive, will it also see many complaints about bad translations and so on. The better an application is, and the more hyped it is as a consequence, the more complaints will it see due to expectations so high that they are even impossible to meet given today's technology.
I also agree that the translations offered will probably not be the best, but so aren't the Google Translations either, with their online huge database of statistics on how to translate words. And this app isn't even online. But... It can definitely be useful on especially signs. Perhaps restaurant menus too, although that could start to make it unreliable.
And let's admit it -- most of us here wouldn't be able to write an as immediate and accurate image processing algorithm like this.
I had great success in finding her mammaries and vagina via the search box!
Her vagina is there - check!
Liberties are *always* taken away if not constantly fought for! Regardless country.
Guess what the French revolution was all about?
This reminds me of one thing: Why are posts tagged? Can we include posts based on tags? Exclude posts based on tags?
I never actually realized why we have them, but posts keep getting tagged. *shrug*
If we can exclude posts on tags, I'm pretty sure filtering out everything "wikileaks" would work here.
First taking down hosting for Wikileaks despite not being charged with anything just because they feel like it'd be fun, and then this, also just because they feel like doing it. Like Wikileaks, the books are again not illegal, and I suspect many readers thought we were over book burning. This is even worse - taking the books out of the hand of their readers having purchased them, and *then* burning them. It's getting pretty hard here to not fall into that Godwin hole.
Was Amazon seeing a lot of bad press over openly offering books to read, or what?
Why haven't MS developed a touch-based shell for Windows 7? They could sell it as Windows 7 Tablet Edition. Yay, they'd get a new product to sell, too!
I've used Windows 7 as a touch OS, and I can tell you it's no pleasant experience. You know the virtual keyboard that iOS and Android pops up as you give a text box focus? Yeah. Windows 7 doesn't support that. It has a virtual keyboard, but you can only click to open it manually. Click to open it. Every time you want to type. Oh, and the dpi setting support to make things easier to point and click at? Well, Windows applications don't use to have good dpi setting support. Their GUI's will break, or simply ignore the setting, and keep using small fonts. And what about window management? Clicking at window borders to resize them, to give room for... Wait a minute -- why do you have to window manage at all? That was taken out of iOS and Android, for a reason.
There are a dozen more reasons it'll make your skin crawl. It's an as poor OS for tablets, as Windows Mobile 6.5 is for mobile devices. It's as if Microsoft didn't learn! Why hasn't Ballmer learnt? Why is he so stubborn. It's his job to understand these things, and lead his company in the right direction! Windows 7 Tablet Edition should have been developed *along with Windows 7* itself! Because even back then, after Windows Vista, did visionaries in the tech industry see this as becoming huge in the future. But no -- MS seem to be willing to repeat their Windows Mobile mistake again. Trying to shoe-horn an OS design in a form factor and a human/computer interface it was never intended for.
And who's to say that they really are former Wikileaks members
I agree that "Wikileaks defectors" isn't very precise.
There's an interview with a named Wikileaks ex-member here though:
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/12/09/how-openleaks-the-first-wikileaks-spinoff-will-work/
Will it have USB support? I'm not sure if Google told anything about that? Even if I won't store anything on my computer (I know that's not something this OS is aimed for), I still need to store photos on Flickr and docs on Google Docs. I sure hope you can plug in an USB stick, or an external hard drive via USB, and get access to its files in some sort of file manager? Otherwise it's horrible -- you'd need to use another computer just to get stuff from your mobile phone, etc.
Also, I doubt Apple will ever support iPhone syncing with this thing, since it doesn't have iTunes for the web. I know Google don't care much for Apple, but that could be a bad thing for Google. Remember that purchases on iTunes would then be out too, and this is a hugely popular store. And Spotify is super-popular in Europe as a music service, and they don't have any web client, or any announced plans to release one. It's things like these, Google...