Summary, their oldest markets, i.e. US/Canada/Europe have reached "peak Facebook", and numbers are going down in those older markets. E.g. in the Technorati article...
> Data released by analytics firm SocialBakers suggests that people are > leaving Facebook in their millions. > > It reveals that the social network has shed 6 million US visitors in the > last month, which represents a 4% fall. The UK fares no better having > lost 1.4 million users last month, a drop of 4.5%.
> Worryingly for Facebook this is far from a blip. In the last six months the site > has lost 9 million users in America and 2 million in the UK. There's a similar > picture across the developed world, with usage falling in Canada, Spain, > France, Germany and Japan.
Yes, the numbers of well-off North Americans and Europeans leaving will be more than offset by the influx of third-worlders. But that guy or gal in the call centre in Mumbai, or the peasant in Asia, is not worth as much to advertisers as the westerners that they replace.
> But what if it's 20,000 customer's on an IP? and what if every time you reboot > your modem you stay on the same node behind the same NAT with the same IP?
That would destroy the internet as we know it. Several hundred max. Problem is that many websites have a ton of 3rd-party ads displaying. That will eat up a bunch of ports. There are 64K ports, with the bottom 1K being reserved. After that, a NAT machine has to start terminating connections with prejudice. I don't like much of the crap in IPV6, but it's come down to the point where having IPV6 is a lesser evil than not having IPV6.
Tell the guys writing the smartphone virus cleaning software that our world is in danger of obliteration by a large asteroid, and we're building a series of Ark ships to get everybody off the planet to safety. The smartphone virus cleaning software writers will depart on the "B" Ark, along with hairdressers and middle-managers.
> Never talk when you can nod and never nod when you can wink and never write an > e-mail, because it's death. You're giving prosecutors all the evidence we need.
> Atmospheric PCO2 as determined from the goethites in these four âoewell-behavedâ > cases ranged from values indistinguishable from modern (within analytical > uncertainty) to values up to approximately 16 time modern (modern > atmospheric PCO2 was taken to be 10â'3.5 atm). One interpretation > of the fifth, âoeanomalousâ, comparison is that atmospheric CO2 levels > increased from about 3 times modern to about 18 times modern from the > Triassic into the Early Jurassic. This inferred value for the PCO2 of the > Early Jurassic atmosphere is not uniquely constrained by the existing data > and needs to be substantiated. However, even considerably lower Early > Jurassic atmospheric PCO2 values of 6 to 9 times modern (i.e., 1/3 to 1/2 > of the estimated value of 18 times modern) would still indicate significant > differences between the global carbon cycles then and now. These > results highlight the need for more research on the behavior of the > atmosphere during and after the Triassic-Jurassic transition.
Guess what... * planet earth didn't blow up * it didn't turn into a Venusian hell * planet earth had some of the lushest growth of flora and fauna in its entire history
> I'm downplaying the effectiveness. I'm not saying FB is not out to get > every last bit of info out there. If you're very privacy conscious, there's > quite a number of things you should be looking out before this one.
If you're very privacy conscious... then you're not on Facebook in the first place.
> I think this is slightly more elegant: > Write your password on a piece of cardboard. Fold it, and put it in an envelope. Mail > it to a relative, saying it's your password for [service], and not to be opened unless > you ask or you're dead. You don't need to hunt down three friends. You don't have > to give facebook information about who you trust. And you're covered even if you die.
Wrong, wrong wrong. 1) Your relative may die, or lose contact with you
2) or the relationship may sour. And he's got your password(s). Dumb.
Use a safety-deposit box instead. You're not relying on a human being, which makes this better.
If police need to break into computers as part of their job, will computer security (firewalls/anti-virus/etc) be considered "obstructing a police officer"?
If you're single and living by yourself, and there's a store within walking distance near your home or workplace, and you're physically fit, and the weather is half-decent, fine. How much can you lug in a couple of shopping bags? A week's worth of groceries for 2 or more people is not going to fit in a shopping bag, or in the itty-bitty basket on your bicycle.
My initial reaction to the article is... like... dohhh. This is what's known as "The travelling salesman problem". No, it's not a joke or a movie... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem > The travelling salesman problem (TSP) or travelling salesperson problem > asks the following question: Given a list of cities and the distances between > each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly > once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial > optimization, important in operations research and theoretical computer science.
In this case substitute residences in the same city for locations in multiple cities. But the principle is the same. Given today's computing power, it should be easy to plan an optimum route for delivering groceries to several customers in a geographic area. Depending on how the truck is loaded, and how many doors it has, the groceries will need to be loaded in either the same order as the deliveries, or the reverse order.
While we're at it, hasn't this problem been addressed by other delivery systems? TV/furniture/bed stores (or the companies they subcontract out to) will obviously want their delivery guys to deliver pieces of furniture to multiple customers, in the shortest time possible, assuming hourly pay.
> That sounds very dangerous, what if that instead causes a large algae growth?
Temporary large-scale algae growth (aka "Blooms") are a problem in small lakes/ponds/rivers. They are *NOT* a problem in oceans. Indeed, deliberate iron fertilization projects have been suggested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization as a means of reducing atmospheric CO2. Algae are plants, and part of the photosynthesis process converts CO2+H2O into sugars.
> Blogger Michael Arrington seems to have already performed a helpful > proof-of-concept by adding Mark Zuckerberg to a group supposedly > representing NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association.
But wait... there's more more...
> Zuckerbergâ(TM)s addition to the group is broadcast to all of his friends, > as shown in the image above.
That's right. Not only can be added to groups you don't like, but each addition is broadcast to everyone on your friends list. Imagine the following scenario... * gay university student hides sexual orientation from parents * joins the university "Queer Chorus" (yes, that's what they called themselves) * the president of the "Queer Chorus" adds them to the "Queer Chorus" Facebook group * this addition *IS BROADCAST TO EVERYBODY ON THE PERSON'S FRIENDS LIST* * since parents usually demand to be on their kids friends list, they were recipients of the broadcast message of their child being added to the group
Seriously folks, what is this infatuation with "apps" when a URL will do? If I want weather, I can tap the link to the local conditions and forecast. If I want streaming music, I can tap the link to my music service subscription. Unlike "apps", web browsers do not rumage around your filesystem and send all sorts of info back to the mothership. Cookies and browsing history at worst, but not phone contacts, etc.
> It's Slashdot. Despite being a tech and science nerd gathering spot, there's > a strange strain of climate change denialism here. Maybe it's because > the non-denialists don't bother commenting on these stories any more, > leaving the denialists to defecate all over the comment section.
Nobody's denying climate change. Climate has been changing the past 4 billion years; climate is changing now; and it will keep changing for the next 4 billionn years. Deal with it.
http://exhibits.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/larson/LP_extinction.html shows a couple of maps of glacial retreat. The past few years are merely the logical continuation of a ice cover retreat that's been going on for the past 18,000 years. Yes, there have been a few speed bumps along the road (e.g. Younger Dryas and Little Ice Age) but the macro trend has been decreasing ice cover for the past 18,000 years.
And 18,000 years ago, the planet's total human population was approx a million people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Antiquity_and_Middle_Ages They weren't running around in CO2-spewing SUV's. So we must agree that the retreat of the icecaps for most of the past 18,000 years was not caused by human civilization. Why is it suddenly humanity's fault today?
What is the billing mechanism, anyways? Is it the wireless carrier? I'm an adult, and I wouldn't want that billing "feature" enabled on my phone, just in case I fat-fingered the wrong key.
> After 8 years, I finally bought a new PC. My prior one was a custom built Core 2, 2Ghz > and 3G Ram. The new one is a Dell T3600 with a Quad Core Xeon, 3.6Ghz and 8G > memory. Both machines run Windows 7. Overall I do not see that much of a > performance difference for running basic browser and email. The new machine does > have a better video card and that is noticeable in games and CAD software performance.
I'm finally getting around to replacing a 2007 Dell Core Duo. It still works, but it can't handle NHL GameCenterLive very well. I had to "rice" it up in Gentoo linux to get it to do the slowest stream (400 kbits/sec). The dual core CPU shows a load of 2.5 and higher, just handling that. My HTPC machine (an i3) can handle the 800 kbits, 1600 kbits, and 3000 kbits streams easily. Not quite HD, but still very good. My new machine is a Dell with i5 and 8 gigs of ram.
Let's assume that the complaint is upheld. The following year, Microsoft complains about free linux being a trojan horse. And Oracle complains about free MariaDB and free PostgreSQL being trojan horses.
> At the moment Microsoft is under attack because GNU/Linux is an operating > system which can replace Windows.
> But once we see an open source alternative to Quark Express running on > those Linux boxes, or Postgres databases replacing Oracle, and an open > source digital music store that challenges iTunes, we can expect to see > Adobe, Apple and the rest of the software industry piling in too.
> Google has threatened phone manufacturers over forks of the code. > Amazon doesn't use Android to describe Kindle's OS, though it is a fork, > because Google won't allow it.
This is identical to the situation where Sun (now part of Oracle) successfully sued Microsoft for forking Java, while still calling it Java. If you want to create a new different product, fine, but don't stomp over somebody else's trademarks in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Melinda Gates (yes, Bill's wife) pushed through Microsoft Bob.
Julie Larsen-Green was twice as bad.
1) She pushed through the MS Office ribbon interface
2) Then she pushed through Metro
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/28/facebook-loses-users-biggest-markets
http://www.geek.com/news/millions-are-leaving-facebook-every-month-due-to-boredom-1553510/
http://technorati.com/social-media/article/facebook-deserted-by-millions-of-users/
Summary, their oldest markets, i.e. US/Canada/Europe have reached "peak Facebook", and numbers are going down in those older markets. E.g. in the Technorati article...
> Data released by analytics firm SocialBakers suggests that people are
> leaving Facebook in their millions.
>
> It reveals that the social network has shed 6 million US visitors in the
> last month, which represents a 4% fall. The UK fares no better having
> lost 1.4 million users last month, a drop of 4.5%.
> Worryingly for Facebook this is far from a blip. In the last six months the site
> has lost 9 million users in America and 2 million in the UK. There's a similar
> picture across the developed world, with usage falling in Canada, Spain,
> France, Germany and Japan.
Yes, the numbers of well-off North Americans and Europeans leaving will be more than offset by the influx of third-worlders. But that guy or gal in the call centre in Mumbai, or the peasant in Asia, is not worth as much to advertisers as the westerners that they replace.
> But what if it's 20,000 customer's on an IP? and what if every time you reboot
> your modem you stay on the same node behind the same NAT with the same IP?
That would destroy the internet as we know it. Several hundred max. Problem is that many websites have a ton of 3rd-party ads displaying. That will eat up a bunch of ports. There are 64K ports, with the bottom 1K being reserved. After that, a NAT machine has to start terminating connections with prejudice. I don't like much of the crap in IPV6, but it's come down to the point where having IPV6 is a lesser evil than not having IPV6.
Tell the guys writing the smartphone virus cleaning software that our world is in danger of obliteration by a large asteroid, and we're building a series of Ark ships to get everybody off the planet to safety. The smartphone virus cleaning software writers will depart on the "B" Ark, along with hairdressers and middle-managers.
Then the rest of us will laugh our asses off.
1) Lose your phone, you've lost your data to someone else
2) If it's in the cloud, any police agency can walk in with a warrant.
3) If it's in the cloud, access can be socially engineered by the bad guys, and your data wiped. See http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/08/07/0250248/how-apple-and-amazon-security-flaws-led-to-mat-honans-identity-theft
> Never talk when you can nod and never nod when you can wink and never write an
> e-mail, because it's death. You're giving prosecutors all the evidence we need.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer
Just one of many articles that a Google search turns up. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012821X9500213V
> Atmospheric PCO2 as determined from the goethites in these four âoewell-behavedâ
> cases ranged from values indistinguishable from modern (within analytical
> uncertainty) to values up to approximately 16 time modern (modern
> atmospheric PCO2 was taken to be 10â'3.5 atm). One interpretation
> of the fifth, âoeanomalousâ, comparison is that atmospheric CO2 levels
> increased from about 3 times modern to about 18 times modern from the
> Triassic into the Early Jurassic. This inferred value for the PCO2 of the
> Early Jurassic atmosphere is not uniquely constrained by the existing data
> and needs to be substantiated. However, even considerably lower Early
> Jurassic atmospheric PCO2 values of 6 to 9 times modern (i.e., 1/3 to 1/2
> of the estimated value of 18 times modern) would still indicate significant
> differences between the global carbon cycles then and now. These
> results highlight the need for more research on the behavior of the
> atmosphere during and after the Triassic-Jurassic transition.
Guess what...
* planet earth didn't blow up
* it didn't turn into a Venusian hell
* planet earth had some of the lushest growth of flora and fauna in its entire history
> I'm downplaying the effectiveness. I'm not saying FB is not out to get
> every last bit of info out there. If you're very privacy conscious, there's
> quite a number of things you should be looking out before this one.
If you're very privacy conscious... then you're not on Facebook in the first place.
> I think this is slightly more elegant:
> Write your password on a piece of cardboard. Fold it, and put it in an envelope. Mail
> it to a relative, saying it's your password for [service], and not to be opened unless
> you ask or you're dead. You don't need to hunt down three friends. You don't have
> to give facebook information about who you trust. And you're covered even if you die.
Wrong, wrong wrong.
1) Your relative may die, or lose contact with you
2) or the relationship may sour. And he's got your password(s). Dumb.
Use a safety-deposit box instead. You're not relying on a human being, which makes this better.
If police need to break into computers as part of their job, will computer security (firewalls/anti-virus/etc) be considered "obstructing a police officer"?
> It was actually a she with a he signing off on it all, the :facepalm:
> he is gone, the she now heads windows dev.
First there was Melinda Gates with Microsoft Bob. 'Nuff said.
Now it's Julie Larson-Green, who is twice as bad. She also pushed through the MS-Office Ribbon Interface http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/julie-larson-green.aspx in addition to her latest "triumph", the Metro interface.
If you're single and living by yourself, and there's a store within walking distance near your home or workplace, and you're physically fit, and the weather is half-decent, fine. How much can you lug in a couple of shopping bags? A week's worth of groceries for 2 or more people is not going to fit in a shopping bag, or in the itty-bitty basket on your bicycle.
My initial reaction to the article is... like... dohhh. This is what's known as "The travelling salesman problem". No, it's not a joke or a movie... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
> The travelling salesman problem (TSP) or travelling salesperson problem
> asks the following question: Given a list of cities and the distances between
> each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly
> once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial
> optimization, important in operations research and theoretical computer science.
In this case substitute residences in the same city for locations in multiple cities. But the principle is the same. Given today's computing power, it should be easy to plan an optimum route for delivering groceries to several customers in a geographic area. Depending on how the truck is loaded, and how many doors it has, the groceries will need to be loaded in either the same order as the deliveries, or the reverse order.
While we're at it, hasn't this problem been addressed by other delivery systems? TV/furniture/bed stores (or the companies they subcontract out to) will obviously want their delivery guys to deliver pieces of furniture to multiple customers, in the shortest time possible, assuming hourly pay.
> Meanwhile, in a parallel universe: "...experiments at the LHC are
> seeking to cast light on this dominance of antimatter over matter."
Actually, they would consider their form of matter to be "matter" and "the other kind" would be "anti-matter".
> That sounds very dangerous, what if that instead causes a large algae growth?
Temporary large-scale algae growth (aka "Blooms") are a problem in small lakes/ponds/rivers. They are *NOT* a problem in oceans. Indeed, deliberate iron fertilization projects have been suggested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization as a means of reducing atmospheric CO2. Algae are plants, and part of the photosynthesis process converts CO2+H2O into sugars.
>> Can I prevent people from adding me to a new group?'
> If the answer is anything other than an unqualified yes, then Facebook
> is fatally flawed and no reasonable person should ever use it.
No, you cannot prevent yourself from being added to groups. One of Zuckerbergs's friends was so pissed off at this, that he created a NAMBLA group and added Zuck. See http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/10/07/mark-zuckerberg-joins-the-north-american-man-boy-love-association-and-other-adventures-in-facebook-groups/
> Blogger Michael Arrington seems to have already performed a helpful
> proof-of-concept by adding Mark Zuckerberg to a group supposedly
> representing NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association.
But wait... there's more more...
> Zuckerbergâ(TM)s addition to the group is broadcast to all of his friends,
> as shown in the image above.
That's right. Not only can be added to groups you don't like, but each addition is broadcast to everyone on your friends list. Imagine the following scenario...
* gay university student hides sexual orientation from parents
* joins the university "Queer Chorus" (yes, that's what they called themselves)
* the president of the "Queer Chorus" adds them to the "Queer Chorus" Facebook group
* this addition *IS BROADCAST TO EVERYBODY ON THE PERSON'S FRIENDS LIST*
* since parents usually demand to be on their kids friends list, they were recipients of the broadcast message of their child being added to the group
See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578008740578200224.html
Seriously folks, what is this infatuation with "apps" when a URL will do? If I want weather, I can tap the link to the local conditions and forecast. If I want streaming music, I can tap the link to my music service subscription. Unlike "apps", web browsers do not rumage around your filesystem and send all sorts of info back to the mothership. Cookies and browsing history at worst, but not phone contacts, etc.
> It's Slashdot. Despite being a tech and science nerd gathering spot, there's
> a strange strain of climate change denialism here. Maybe it's because
> the non-denialists don't bother commenting on these stories any more,
> leaving the denialists to defecate all over the comment section.
Nobody's denying climate change. Climate has been changing the past 4 billion years; climate is changing now; and it will keep changing for the next 4 billionn years. Deal with it.
http://exhibits.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/larson/LP_extinction.html shows a couple of maps of glacial retreat. The past few years are merely the logical continuation of a ice cover retreat that's been going on for the past 18,000 years. Yes, there have been a few speed bumps along the road (e.g. Younger Dryas and Little Ice Age) but the macro trend has been decreasing ice cover for the past 18,000 years.
And 18,000 years ago, the planet's total human population was approx a million people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Antiquity_and_Middle_Ages They weren't running around in CO2-spewing SUV's. So we must agree that the retreat of the icecaps for most of the past 18,000 years was not caused by human civilization. Why is it suddenly humanity's fault today?
What is the billing mechanism, anyways? Is it the wireless carrier? I'm an adult, and I wouldn't want that billing "feature" enabled on my phone, just in case I fat-fingered the wrong key.
> After 8 years, I finally bought a new PC. My prior one was a custom built Core 2, 2Ghz
> and 3G Ram. The new one is a Dell T3600 with a Quad Core Xeon, 3.6Ghz and 8G
> memory. Both machines run Windows 7. Overall I do not see that much of a
> performance difference for running basic browser and email. The new machine does
> have a better video card and that is noticeable in games and CAD software performance.
I'm finally getting around to replacing a 2007 Dell Core Duo. It still works, but it can't handle NHL GameCenterLive very well. I had to "rice" it up in Gentoo linux to get it to do the slowest stream (400 kbits/sec). The dual core CPU shows a load of 2.5 and higher, just handling that. My HTPC machine (an i3) can handle the 800 kbits, 1600 kbits, and 3000 kbits streams easily. Not quite HD, but still very good. My new machine is a Dell with i5 and 8 gigs of ram.
> Why reboot? All you need is
> # service sshd restart
For the non-RedHatters in the audience, it's...
# /etc/init.d/sshd restart
A bunch of fans sweet-talked CBS/Paramount into allowing them to continue the original Star Trek series on the internet. See http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/ and the download pages at http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/?page_id=74
Let's assume that the complaint is upheld. The following year, Microsoft complains about free linux being a trojan horse. And Oracle complains about free MariaDB and free PostgreSQL being trojan horses.
A lot of compainies fear Open Source. This isn't a new idea either. It was present 9 years ago when Bill Thompson wrote about SCO for BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3537165.stm
> At the moment Microsoft is under attack because GNU/Linux is an operating
> system which can replace Windows.
> But once we see an open source alternative to Quark Express running on
> those Linux boxes, or Postgres databases replacing Oracle, and an open
> source digital music store that challenges iTunes, we can expect to see
> Adobe, Apple and the rest of the software industry piling in too.
>I wonder if Google would put a real version of Android for Desktop...
Oh boy; just what I always wanted; yet another touch-based OS crapping up people's desktop machines... !NOT
> if they could maybe crush Mircosoft in the Desktop too.
I think Microsoft is doing that just fine, thank you, with Windows 8.
> Google has threatened phone manufacturers over forks of the code.
> Amazon doesn't use Android to describe Kindle's OS, though it is a fork,
> because Google won't allow it.
This is identical to the situation where Sun (now part of Oracle) successfully sued Microsoft for forking Java, while still calling it Java. If you want to create a new different product, fine, but don't stomp over somebody else's trademarks in the process.