Facebook has a captive audience that is in a consistent demographic and has all of the users verified as real human beings. Or close enough to that.
Certainly true, I agree.
This means that advertisers can make very focused advertising campaigns to a large group of people in the ever so popular 18-24 demographic.
Alright, so where is that revenue now? What's keeping them from fully realizing this potential? They'd better have an EBIT of $50mil+ if they expect to be valued at $2b by a rich fool;-)
Do your understand the difference between what's occuring today and what occured six years ago?
This is the same thing as when Microsoft takes a hit on the Xboxs...market infiltration you'll recoup your money from existing areas.
Well, at least the crappy analogies some people come up with have stayed the same. Microsoft has grabbed a huge chunk out of a very limited market there and they actually sell something to their "users". How does that compare to a small chunk of the infinitely extensible web, where all you can hope for is to influence your users through advertising (does anyone still believe in compulsory subscriptions for such web sites?)?
Now, show me the business model please. I'm easy to convince with facts, but largely resistant to obscure beliefs. I heard all that "we'll make money from ads" stuff before a few years ago, so it's not very convincing either, even though the cost side of such projects looks much better these days.
Tell that to Google. It's not like money can be made from ads.
Google has a unique standing - almost a monopoly in the search engine market, which is (arguably) the only online market next to pure e-commerce enabling sites where advertising actually works to some extent. Also, they get almost everything right (no annoying Flash ads etc.).
That is, until, you think about what a media conglomerate like News Corp can do with such an active community. News Corp has holdings like Fox News and primetime shows like American Idol. You can bet that they will leverage their MySpace internet real-estate to push users towards their old media offerings. That, in itself, will generate a lot of revenue.
This is what they may think that it may do, but it's far from certain that it will. The community may be completely resistant to efforts to push Fox content down their throats, especially if it messes up the myspace.com experience (which seems to revolve about music, fandom and ugly beeping personal webspace). Others have tried to "leverage" their freshly bought online properties (you know, back in 2000, where the number of registered users were as good as a hard currency) and failed (Bertelsmann's brief adventures with AOL Europe spring to mind). But hey, at least the ideas you described will serve to keep the stock holders happy;-)
Why do the Facebook people feel the need to sell their company? Come on, just keep running Facebook the way it is. It doesn't need to be sold.
... such sites either make money (i.e. have a working business model) or they try to get bought by some senile billionaire (or the corporate equivalent of one).
go ahead, inflate that bubble again
on
Facebook On The Block
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· Score: 4, Insightful
with such insane amounts of money pouring into overhyped dotcoms again, I can see the next crash coming... show me the myspace.com business model please - I mean, I'm all for sites driven by user-generated content (it works for slashdot and many others), but such large investments should have at least a tiny chance of being made back eventually (i.e. in the next 10 years or so);-)
Germany's is the first government that has officially conceded to all lobbyism efforts on behalf of the industry and adopted a policy that supports the industry's demands fully while completely disregarding the rights and needs of its citizen.
Many people believe that this is due to corruption, it can no longer be attributed to "goodwill" towards the industry and stupidity alone. In any case, it goes way beyond being irresponsible and neglecting the government's duty to take care of its citizens and the long-term effect of this will be civil disobedience and loss of respect for laws in general.
OpenSSH and OpenBSD will still exist even if noone pays a dime for them anymore, if all developers die of bird flu (*knock wood*) or if their ISP goes up in flames. What is in danger is the income of a few people who are trying to make a living off these.
So, please don't make it look as if any OSS project depended on money. It just looks bad (a bit like: "look, we'll stop developing this unless you send us some $$$").
This is a problem of CRPGs and probably the reason why I don't remember anything particularly enjoyable (OK, some were funny, but that's about it). Really noteworthy "quests" were always the domain of adventure games (you know, good old Infocom and Sierra stuff etc.)
The settlement was a joke (sorry EFF). What kind of message is that - the typical guy who installs malware/spyware on a computer is fined heavily and sometimes goes to jail, while a big corporation Sony gets away with a ridiculous amount of cash per malevolent action? Where's the justice in that?
We had great game development libraries for stuff like that 10 years ago, e.g. Allegro. While I appreciate the Perl support here, I don't think anyone would put more than a couple of hours' worth of effort into a game that doesn't support pretty 3D stuff on modern graphics cards. If you want to do such things, SDL_Perl isn't a viable option (look at the effort involved).
So, sit down on your bums and write a Perl API for DirectX with good WINE support, folks.;-)
... that we have to insert the bloody CD every time we want to load a game, just because some idiots at the publishers think that it's a tradition or an old charter or something to annoy the the honest customer like that (I have been told that some of them think that it prevents illegal copying, but people who think so would probably suffocate because they'd be too stupid to breathe, so I doubt that this is the real reason).
Solving these issues with XHTML and CSS may be a viable solution compatible with current standards, but it is not a good solution from a technical point of view. Why? Because it's silly to transfer large amounts of XHTML to a wireless device and then hide all the stuff that doesn't fit or look good on a small device using CSS. It's much better to have only the HTML that the device is actually going to display transferred to the device.
But hey, everything is bloated today, so why not web pages, eh?
And what kind of bullshit do we have to read here on Slashdot these days? "now that Microsoft has sold more Windows Server software than Linux." - do you mean Microsoft is selling Linux now? Or is Linux some dude selling Windows Server software?
I really recommend to put fewer, but worthwhile articles on Slashdot - we won't read it more often if you fill the front page up with such crap.
Everyone who is using AdWords knows that Google introduced standard (graphical) banners in skyscraper format a while ago... The only reason why text ads became so popular is that AdSense was made available in a very simple way to many small web sites that would have a hard time finding paying advertisers otherwise (and of course Google's popularity helped too).
it was my first thought too, but in the end Amazon is just exploiting ridiculous patent legislation and the existence of completely and utterly braindamaged and illiterate patent reviewers who have no idea whatsoever about the trivial nature of these patents. They are the ones to blame and whoever is in charge of them should be aware of the fact that he is a complete failure and he'd better resign or shoot himself before he completely ruins the IT economy.;-)
so then we get the stock slashdot rant against Half Life 2 and Steam.
I don't care. If that is your excuse, implement both and give your customers the choice...
Like our previous games, Civ IV requires the CD to be in the drive on start-up. The funding we get for all of our games, which allows us to hire developers to work on the AI, graphics, interface, etc., is a direct reflection of how many copies our previous games have sold in the marketplace. (yada, yada...)
Ah well, you can go screw yourself then. If you can't think of any ways other than annoying your honest customers (and creating a broader market for pirated copies in the progress, since actual buyers will go looking for no-cd cracks), I don't feel your priorities as a developer are where they should be. I bet the game is full of such stupid design decisions as well and you will probably have put more effort into releasing the game before christmas than into testing it and fixing bugs. It's safe to assume that it will be as bug-ridden as Civ3 was at its release.
For the record, both more expensive and more popular products than your latest incarnation of the worn-out Civ series exist that get it right and do not annoy customers with CD copy protection. Some examples: World of Warcraft, Microsoft Windows, Adobe Photoshop,...
The home of internet porn, spam and crime declares war on one of these things.
That's very much like the USA trying to abolish weapons of mass distructions. Doh.
Bigotry is bliss.:-)
Why is that? Is MySQL suddently going to lose features, or perform worse?
No, because most of MySQL's cheerleaders were muppets who were not interested in technical issues at all (nor could they judge them if they wanted to) and now they'll be looking for a new religion.;-)
Opera's default cache settings are more aggressive than other browsers' and they sometimes result in annoying problems (URLs ending in.html are apparently considered static HTML, even though they are often dynamically generated). Opera feels slower than MSIE when the cache settings are "correct", at least on my PC...
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly true, I agree.
This means that advertisers can make very focused advertising campaigns to a large group of people in the ever so popular 18-24 demographic.
Alright, so where is that revenue now? What's keeping them from fully realizing this potential? They'd better have an EBIT of $50mil+ if they expect to be valued at $2b by a rich fool ;-)
This is the same thing as when Microsoft takes a hit on the Xboxs...market infiltration you'll recoup your money from existing areas.
Well, at least the crappy analogies some people come up with have stayed the same. Microsoft has grabbed a huge chunk out of a very limited market there and they actually sell something to their "users". How does that compare to a small chunk of the infinitely extensible web, where all you can hope for is to influence your users through advertising (does anyone still believe in compulsory subscriptions for such web sites?)?
Now, show me the business model please. I'm easy to convince with facts, but largely resistant to obscure beliefs. I heard all that "we'll make money from ads" stuff before a few years ago, so it's not very convincing either, even though the cost side of such projects looks much better these days.
Google has a unique standing - almost a monopoly in the search engine market, which is (arguably) the only online market next to pure e-commerce enabling sites where advertising actually works to some extent. Also, they get almost everything right (no annoying Flash ads etc.).
That is, until, you think about what a media conglomerate like News Corp can do with such an active community. News Corp has holdings like Fox News and primetime shows like American Idol. You can bet that they will leverage their MySpace internet real-estate to push users towards their old media offerings. That, in itself, will generate a lot of revenue.
This is what they may think that it may do, but it's far from certain that it will. The community may be completely resistant to efforts to push Fox content down their throats, especially if it messes up the myspace.com experience (which seems to revolve about music, fandom and ugly beeping personal webspace). Others have tried to "leverage" their freshly bought online properties (you know, back in 2000, where the number of registered users were as good as a hard currency) and failed (Bertelsmann's brief adventures with AOL Europe spring to mind). But hey, at least the ideas you described will serve to keep the stock holders happy ;-)
What does robbery committed at sea have to do with this? If you're trying to be funny, you failed. Sorry.
a friend of mine wrote this a long time ago, it measures your reflexes too (and doesn't require some stupid windows software)
Many people believe that this is due to corruption, it can no longer be attributed to "goodwill" towards the industry and stupidity alone. In any case, it goes way beyond being irresponsible and neglecting the government's duty to take care of its citizens and the long-term effect of this will be civil disobedience and loss of respect for laws in general.
So, please don't make it look as if any OSS project depended on money. It just looks bad (a bit like: "look, we'll stop developing this unless you send us some $$$").
This is a problem of CRPGs and probably the reason why I don't remember anything particularly enjoyable (OK, some were funny, but that's about it). Really noteworthy "quests" were always the domain of adventure games (you know, good old Infocom and Sierra stuff etc.)
The settlement was a joke (sorry EFF). What kind of message is that - the typical guy who installs malware/spyware on a computer is fined heavily and sometimes goes to jail, while a big corporation Sony gets away with a ridiculous amount of cash per malevolent action? Where's the justice in that?
Compared to the amount of money you waste on invading and influencing poor countries around the world, the NASA budget is rather small.
So, sit down on your bums and write a Perl API for DirectX with good WINE support, folks. ;-)
... that we have to insert the bloody CD every time we want to load a game, just because some idiots at the publishers think that it's a tradition or an old charter or something to annoy the the honest customer like that (I have been told that some of them think that it prevents illegal copying, but people who think so would probably suffocate because they'd be too stupid to breathe, so I doubt that this is the real reason).
But hey, everything is bloated today, so why not web pages, eh?
And what kind of bullshit do we have to read here on Slashdot these days? "now that Microsoft has sold more Windows Server software than Linux." - do you mean Microsoft is selling Linux now? Or is Linux some dude selling Windows Server software?
I really recommend to put fewer, but worthwhile articles on Slashdot - we won't read it more often if you fill the front page up with such crap.
Thank you.
Everyone who is using AdWords knows that Google introduced standard (graphical) banners in skyscraper format a while ago... The only reason why text ads became so popular is that AdSense was made available in a very simple way to many small web sites that would have a hard time finding paying advertisers otherwise (and of course Google's popularity helped too).
it was my first thought too, but in the end Amazon is just exploiting ridiculous patent legislation and the existence of completely and utterly braindamaged and illiterate patent reviewers who have no idea whatsoever about the trivial nature of these patents. They are the ones to blame and whoever is in charge of them should be aware of the fact that he is a complete failure and he'd better resign or shoot himself before he completely ruins the IT economy. ;-)
so then we get the stock slashdot rant against Half Life 2 and Steam. I don't care. If that is your excuse, implement both and give your customers the choice...
Ah well, you can go screw yourself then. If you can't think of any ways other than annoying your honest customers (and creating a broader market for pirated copies in the progress, since actual buyers will go looking for no-cd cracks), I don't feel your priorities as a developer are where they should be. I bet the game is full of such stupid design decisions as well and you will probably have put more effort into releasing the game before christmas than into testing it and fixing bugs. It's safe to assume that it will be as bug-ridden as Civ3 was at its release. For the record, both more expensive and more popular products than your latest incarnation of the worn-out Civ series exist that get it right and do not annoy customers with CD copy protection. Some examples: World of Warcraft, Microsoft Windows, Adobe Photoshop, ...
The home of internet porn, spam and crime declares war on one of these things. That's very much like the USA trying to abolish weapons of mass distructions. Doh. Bigotry is bliss. :-)
No, because most of MySQL's cheerleaders were muppets who were not interested in technical issues at all (nor could they judge them if they wanted to) and now they'll be looking for a new religion. ;-)
Opera's default cache settings are more aggressive than other browsers' and they sometimes result in annoying problems (URLs ending in .html are apparently considered static HTML, even though they are often dynamically generated). Opera feels slower than MSIE when the cache settings are "correct", at least on my PC ...