maurycy

Simply put, ads are about turning money into sales.

The history of the modern Internet is the history of more efficient ways to turn money into sales, to name a few like affiliate marketing, AdWords, social media, or Groupon.

It takes a very pessimistic bet on the innovation to seriously consider showing ads as a part of the business model.

EDIT: style

EDIT: And if their goal is to deliver the best browser, it would be more efficient to buy GOOG shares with the money extracted from cakes. ;->

Of course, BitCoins are easily trackable, thus doomed. It was possible, though, to design them without this property, ensuring that costs of tracking offset the potential tax gains.

EDIT: It would be fun to consider the arbitrage opportunities rendered possible by such sales tax.

In an economy with a finite amount of money, even potentially, the exchange is not rational given that the money's value grows over time.

That's why the focus is on generating BitCoins.

Simply put, money is whatever market participants agree on.

Shortly, Twitter should be more profitable than Google.

How Google makes money? More or less, they sell queries. They do not know the right price, so they let the market to figure it out. It works extremely well but they are able to flood someone with ads only about 10-20 times a day.

Twitter, on the other hand, is able to flood with ads all the time. Actually, they are able to push ads, instead of having to wait for a query. Twitter is able to auction with more "vectors", such as location, whole feed, followers etc. They do not have to do any information retrieval over this data, it is already provided with the structure.

Twitter does not have any privacy issues. It is already assumed that nearly everything you post on Twitter is public, so no one is going to screw them for using this. The data posted on Twitter is not sensitive, unlike Facebook.

Also, there is a huge value about the way they receive the data. They have a significant edge over the old web, as they get a lot of things before the whole world. What is even better, they do not have to pull this data, people push it to Twitter. They have data faster and they do not have costs related to crawling the web.

So, if for some reason they do not want flood people with ads, they are also able to auction immediate notifications about queries, the whole stream of tweets, some parts of it. They are able to set the minimum price of each auction so they offset their costs. Everyone focuses on Twitter as a marketing channel but there are many, very profitable, industries that live by the speed, die by the speed.

And do not get me started with the control they have over links posted in Tweets...

EDIT: typos

Things are not either safe or unsafe. It all depends on trade-offs, and what risks we can accept in exchange of other values, such as comfort.

The article mentionds, though, two worrying things such as the bias in investigations and ongoing GPS technology usage increase.

I would also stress that it _might be not_ linear. Combined risk of few hundrends of turned on cell phones is not a mere multiplication of risk for a single device.

If there is no demand for middle-aged geeks, their salaries are going to drop eventually. And, if their productivity is at least as good as young-aged geeks, it means that there is an obvious arbitrage opportunity.

What is interesting in this particular study how quickly the market acquires the information.

So, if the unemployment is a global phenomenon across many different markets, in the same civilisation, it is possible that it changed somewhat permanently.

(just an idea; I'm not fully convinced as well)

[1]. http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16730

I have a suspicion, though, that this research would be much more productive if the researches had deeper understanding of philosophy, especially of mathematics and language, and subjects such as symbolic logic and model theory.

Few years passed since my last studies in this area, and I have practically no neuroscience knowledge, but the simplest bet would be to say that the operator/verb example are just special cases of the relationship between objects.

The bootstrapping process might be explained by the fact that in mathematics we encounter purer form of this mechanism. In case of language, there might be much more distractions, making it harder to muscle this one particular area.

tl;dr Cellphones and other electronics are more of a risk than you think

For instance, questions about the reality such as "what if?", "what makes it right?". Once there's the answer, try to find another space where it fits.

Sometimes, free users increase the network effect; also, sometimes the longer they use the system, more likely they are to pay for it eventually.

Please focus on the first part: "condoms exacerbated the problem of HIV/AIDS".

The statement is wildly untrue, and makes the Church guilty of STD's spread.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7967173.stm

It said the Pope's recent comments that condoms exacerbated the problem of HIV/Aids were wildly inaccurate and could have devastating consequences.

The Pope had said the "cruel epidemic" should be tackled through abstinence and fidelity rather than condom use.

I'm on Mac and, to be honest, once you get used to Chrome, Firefox is completely unusable. It is slow, cluttered interface, w/o any major advantages over other browsers.

I use Chrome on daily basis and it is pleasure to browse the web. Folks, do not underestimate speed. It is one of the most important UI features.

I agree that Windows' drivers compatibility is a hard task but I imagine there might be some hack. For instance, you could give up some speed, using virtualization.

If such hack is not available (patents?), it is always possible to come up with a set of rock solid supported devices, might be with some cooperation from hardware vendors. It is exactly how Apple solved this problem, and it seems that regular people are happy to accept such restrictions, as long as everything works great.

Right now, the problem is that if you install Linux on your computer, the official story is that "Linux supports more hardware than any other OS". Last time I checked (6 months ago), though, hibernation is still problematic, and you have to Google to ensure that your printer will actually work.

As for the UI. To be honest, it is not a technical problem. There will be some technical work involved but it does not matter that much. Linux development focuses too much on technicalities. (I write it as software developer)

The biggest issue are fonts. Every time I launch Linux, my eyes hurt. Few hours of work are required to get fonts right and they are still not that good as on OS X or Windows. There is a lot of typography know how available right now, and I bet you'd easily find a top notch typography agency or folks to solve this problem.

The second issue is design and basic usability. You do not have to rewrite everything, initally. The things I mean is fixing many small issues, such as mismatched padding everywhere, and UI inconsistencies, as well as running serious usability studies to find how regular people cope with the basic tasks.

I think it would be the best to pick XFCE for such improvements. Exactly like big corporations picked WebKit instead of Mozilla's engine. XFCE is modular, still relatively small, not that bloated as GNOME, and you could fork it without too much hassle.

Also, it helps a lot that most of the world switches to the web. You longer need to write all possible tools, except good integration with the web. I dream about something like transparent Google Gears integrated into the WM.

Paradoxically, I'd start work with porting TextMate to Linux. VIM or emacs are a bit too hardcore for regular developers, and there is no good editor on Linux for dynamic languages, which is light weight, nice and works perfectly within a minute, or two. Developers are crucial part of the infrastructure and Linux does not attract developers with eye for usability.

I agree that I might underestimate the costs. I don't think, though, that it is going to take more than $50m, and money is not that big problem, actually. The biggest problem is to realize that current Linux experience sucks a lot for people who do not want to spend their valuable time tweaking settings. The improvement is enormous but it is merely a start.

As for multi billion corporations that started and failed, it is not true. Right now, Linux's development is focused on getting servers right. The corporations succeed in this area. RHEL is de facto corporate standard. No one relatively big, except medium-sized Canonical, cares about your mother's experience.

BTW. To be honest, I was very surprised it is only $1.4 billion when I read it. Given the scope of the project, I expected few times more. But this is me.

I wish someone had enough money to come up with decent UI on Linux (pardon me but GNOME looks and works horrible), better typography and write some general, and widely working, framework for supporting Windows drivers.

It should not take more than $20-30m I think. Ubuntu, unfortunately, is not aggressive enough in those, critical, areas.