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skull mask mcgee posted:That’s quite a take, Fishmech. They don't call him the Smartest Boy in America™ for nothing.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 00:41 |
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# ? May 22, 2024 10:01 |
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So what is going to be the first true unicorn to collapse. Twitter? Uber?
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 00:47 |
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Baby Babbeh posted:All this is more due to a quirks of history rather than any inherent virtue of Silicon Valley, the same way Hollywood becoming the center of universe as far as film goes is largely accidental. It isn't entirely rational, and certainly things are becoming more evenly distributed over time. But network effects are real and they play a part in where companies decide to locate
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 00:54 |
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I mean twitter had an IPO so technically it's not a unicorn anymore, but regardless I'd say Twitter will probably outlast Uber. Twitter doesn't really do jack poo poo and so they can probably keep the dream alive indefinitely whereas Uber has a fundamentally flawed business model involving (enormous) real costs in the real world and that house of cards is bound to collapse under the sheer weight of it's own immense stupidity sooner or later.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 00:58 |
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Baby Babbeh posted:All this is more due to a quirks of history rather than any inherent virtue of Silicon Valley, the same way Hollywood becoming the center of universe as far as film goes is largely accidental. It isn't entirely rational, and certainly things are becoming more evenly distributed over time. But network effects are real and they play a part in where companies decide to locate I wasn't joking when I said a major part of Shockley Semiconductor starting in Palo Alto was that his mom was sick and lived there. If she croaked a few years earlier SV might have been in New Jersey.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 00:59 |
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Morbus posted:I mean twitter had an IPO so technically it's not a unicorn anymore, but regardless I'd say Twitter will probably outlast Uber. Twitter doesn't really do jack poo poo and so they can probably keep the dream alive indefinitely whereas Uber has a fundamentally flawed business model involving (enormous) real costs in the real world and that house of cards is bound to collapse under the sheer weight of it's own immense stupidity sooner or later. Also, Twitter has the "advantage" of being the current US Administration's primary propaganda channel, which means they have a vested interest in keeping Twitter afloat as a de facto critical communications infrastructure. Uber could go bankrupt tomorrow and I doubt anyone in Washington would care unless it somehow directly lead to a wider market crash.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 01:00 |
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Hahaha anything that takes twitter away from Trump would be a blessing for the GOP. I don't think we are gonna be seeing a govt. bailout of twitter any time soon.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 01:18 |
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Curvature of Earth posted:Nice attempt at misdirection, but none of us claimed that Uber is good. It's just hard to beat the finance industry for the sheer scale of harms they commit. From a utilitarian perspective, Uber is small potatoes. They're evil, certainly, and absolutely ruinous to those it has harmed. But the bar is stupidly high considering that F.I.R.E. tanked the economy (and would very much like the capability to tank it again) and the oil industry furiously lobbies against any acknowledgement of and mitigation of global warming. That's nice dear, but whoever's running Uber right now is worse than any actual banker. Your little petty meltdown about the entirety of the financial industry is really quite irrelevant to that. Baby Babbeh posted:
Uhh, you can believe that if you want, but there's way more money at stake in NYC. Let alone "gravity" and "importance" weasel-metrics. Let alone the importance of merely Amazon and Microsoft on their own up around Seattle, all the defense/government tech around DC, and so on. Fart app land really really isn't as important as they've sold themselves to you. Stop buying the hype. Morbus posted:I mean twitter had an IPO so technically it's not a unicorn anymore, but regardless I'd say Twitter will probably outlast Uber. Twitter doesn't really do jack poo poo and so they can probably keep the dream alive indefinitely whereas Uber has a fundamentally flawed business model involving (enormous) real costs in the real world and that house of cards is bound to collapse under the sheer weight of it's own immense stupidity sooner or later. Well yeah, Twitter only lost $457 million last fiscal year. Uber got close to losing $3 billion in 2016. It's wild. Morbus posted:I wasn't joking when I said a major part of Shockley Semiconductor starting in Palo Alto was that his mom was sick and lived there. If she croaked a few years earlier SV might have been in New Jersey. The area around Newark, NJ was a hotbed of component manufacturing and general electronics and early computing design from the 1910s up to the 50s or so, including being essentially the capital of radio and early TV.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 01:28 |
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Odd to see fishmech carry water for finance.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 01:34 |
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How the gently caress does twitter lose half a billion? It’s just a chat network, do they even have streaming or hosting costs? Everything is off their network.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 01:37 |
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cowofwar posted:How the gently caress does twitter lose half a billion? It’s just a chat network, do they even have streaming or hosting costs? Everything is off their network. Bandwidth, Servers, storage, employee compensation
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 01:47 |
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cowofwar posted:How the gently caress does twitter lose half a billion? It’s just a chat network, do they even have streaming or hosting costs? Everything is off their network. Uh, they don't have any way to make money except some pretty spotty ad buys and stuff. Most Twitter users probably don't make the company more than a few cents a month. Why wouldn't they have hosting costs? You upload videos and photos, and then you have the billions of tweets that get stored forever. That text doesn't take up all that much space, but you still need to have a whole bunch of global servers to handle all of them being shown. Not sure where you got the idea it's just chat that's "off their network", its never been that. Even at the start when all you could do was send 140 character messages with no embedded photos/videos/sound/etc, they still needed to pay for all their contracts with phone companies, so you could send tweets with your plain old cell phone and receive them the same way - which still works btw, on most US carriers you interface with it through shortcode 40404: https://support.twitter.com/articles/14589 shrike82 posted:Odd to see fishmech carry water for finance. Sure is weird that people read "Uber is worse than finance" as praising finance, but I guess some people are just that crazy.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 01:58 |
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I'd actually be interested in seeing some estimate / breakdown of Twitter's costs. Their bandwidth and storage requirements have got to be minimal compared to a lot of other applications. ~200 billion tweets per year at ~200 bytes per tweet is only 40TB/yr. Even if you assume something crazy like they are storing ~100 bytes of metadata every time someone views or interacts with a tweet, and that the average interactions per tweet is as high as 10,000, you'd still end up with ~200,000 TB which is <10 million dollars in storage. And that would only translate to an average bandwidth requirement of <10 Gbps...Even allowing for much larger spikes in peak bandwidth and data redundancy, servers in multiple locations, etc, it seems their infrastructure costs should be quite low compared to a lot of other web services, on the order of 10's of millions per year. At around 3000-4000 employees, compensation would be much larger, on the order of hundreds of millions to billion or so dollars per year. I'm gonna guess that's where most of their costs are, and the fact that they don't come close to covering their costs is responsible for the ~500M loss.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 02:03 |
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fishmech posted:Sure is weird that people read "Uber is worse than finance" as praising finance, but I guess some people are just that crazy. fishmech posted:You're going to defend whoever's in charge of Uber right now?
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 02:03 |
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i'd like to hear how Uber is worse than finance
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 02:05 |
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fishmech posted:Sure is weird that people read "Uber is worse than finance" as praising finance, but I guess some people are just that crazy. Finance came up because you claimed NYC has more robust industries to it's name than Silicon Valley, forgetting that NYC's most iconic industry lies on Wall Street.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 02:10 |
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shrike82 posted:i'd like to hear how Uber is worse than finance You might think I'm stuffy 'cause I work in finance/ But my bat mitzvah theme was DANCE!
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 02:10 |
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Curvature of Earth posted:Finance came up because you claimed NYC has more robust industries to it's name than Silicon Valley, forgetting that NYC's most iconic industry lies on Wall Street. See this is how I know you're just flailing. There is way the gently caress more than finance going on in New York City, but as well finance as a whole is massively more stable and robust than Yet Another Startup failure. gently caress man, they get billions of dollars in direct bailouts when they gently caress up and you're still acting like it's not a robust industry? I sincerely doubt you'd get random adtech and IOT device makers in Palo Alto getting the same sort of bailout terms. It's the same reason Ford or GM are pretty much always going to be around. They've got two huge countries ready and willing to bail them out if things go south, and most of the time they don't need that. You're not going to be getting Uber's collapse staunched by a joint buyout from the employees UAW, the United States federal government, and the Queen In Right Of Canada
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 02:56 |
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Baby Babbeh posted:The Bay Area is about 15 percent of the worldwide venture capital market just by itself. When (public) companies are ranked by revenue rather than market hype, you have 1. Apple 2. Alphabet 7. Intel 8. HP 9. Cisco 11. Oracle 15. Facebook Of these, two date from the 90s tech boom and one is from the unicorn era.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 02:58 |
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Morbus posted:I'd actually be interested in seeing some estimate / breakdown of Twitter's costs. Their bandwidth and storage requirements have got to be minimal compared to a lot of other applications. ~200 billion tweets per year at ~200 bytes per tweet is only 40TB/yr. Even if you assume something crazy like they are storing ~100 bytes of metadata every time someone views or interacts with a tweet, and that the average interactions per tweet is as high as 10,000, you'd still end up with ~200,000 TB which is <10 million dollars in storage. And that would only translate to an average bandwidth requirement of <10 Gbps...Even allowing for much larger spikes in peak bandwidth and data redundancy, servers in multiple locations, etc, it seems their infrastructure costs should be quite low compared to a lot of other web services, on the order of 10's of millions per year. I don't understand how a service like Twitter can pull in $2.2 Billion in Revenue (like, can't understand that in the general sense it's kind of insane) and not turn a profit. With that many employees my suspicion is that they have little in the way of automated systems and have a vast number of content janitors on staff. This says something about the business model but I feel like poo poo and can't articulate it.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 03:02 |
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cowofwar posted:How the gently caress does twitter lose half a billion? It’s just a chat network, do they even have streaming or hosting costs? Everything is off their network. Sales compensation. I don't really know but what's their gross revenue? Incentive comp taking 10-20% of revenue is pretty common in some industries.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 03:13 |
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Rime posted:I don't understand how a service like Twitter can pull in $2.2 Billion in Revenue (like, can't understand that in the general sense it's kind of insane) and not turn a profit. With that many employees my suspicion is that they have little in the way of automated systems and have a vast number of content janitors on staff. Twitter has done a lot of dumb stuff like signing exclusive streaming deals and other stuff like that. They also spend a lot of money in stock grants to their employees as a form of regular compensation. They have plenty of automated systems, that's no issue, but they also have tons of offices often in prime real estate across the world, and all sorts of other crazy expenses without their marketing/sales/revenue teams really monetizing the site properly. Basically Twitter should start charging big companies doing non-paid advertising on Twitter with advertising rates and stuff, and it'll probably do a lot to bring them towards profitable. Maybe over more compelling paid services for all segments of the userbase. One example of the weird poo poo they bought: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/11/15624988/twitter-nfl-live-video-deal-broadcast Basically exclusive rights to do some pre-game and post-game shows around NFL games, for a couple million bucks. This is after last year where they had a temporary agreement to stream Thursday Night Football games. But who would go to twitter to watch a stream of that? fishmech fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Oct 28, 2017 |
# ? Oct 28, 2017 03:25 |
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Rime posted:I don't understand how a service like Twitter can pull in $2.2 Billion in Revenue (like, can't understand that in the general sense it's kind of insane) and not turn a profit. With that many employees my suspicion is that they have little in the way of automated systems and have a vast number of content janitors on staff. Hmm I didn't realize their revenue was that high. I wen't and looked at some of their quarterly statements, and now I'm even more confused. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter (close to a billion dollars per year) on "equipment". >150M per quarter on "research and development", and a similar amount on sales and marketing. Where is all this money going???
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 03:29 |
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I've started seeing ad videos placed in front of video content in promoted posts on Twitter. Wonder how companies feel about ads being added to their ads.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 03:29 |
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fishmech posted:Twitter has done a lot of dumb stuff like signing exclusive streaming deals and other stuff like that. They also spend a lot of money in stock grants to their employees as a form of regular compensation. They have plenty of automated systems, that's no issue, but they also have tons of offices often in prime real estate across the world, and all sorts of other crazy expenses without their marketing/sales/revenue teams really monetizing the site properly. I saw some of those and was totally confused. Does twitter think of itself as a content platform like hulu or netflix? Who the gently caress would think of watching the game on twitter? That’s for keeping on top of your field and President Retard.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 04:04 |
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pr0zac posted:I've started seeing ad videos placed in front of video content in promoted posts on Twitter. Wonder how companies feel about ads being added to their ads. I'm honestly surprised Twitter still allows me to mute/block promoted tweets and brands.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 04:18 |
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Rhesus Pieces posted:I'm honestly surprised Twitter still allows me to mute/block promoted tweets and brands. Here's a good monetization idea: users can pay a set amount a month to demote promoted tweets to merely showing up in their feed, and then that x2 to hide them altogether.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 04:32 |
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Gazpacho posted:When (public) companies are ranked by revenue rather than market hype, you have
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 04:57 |
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Phones yeah. Their profit margins are very high. They charge a premium for the conspicuous consumption of owning a highly visible luxury device. The phone itself is fine but nothing special. iPhone sales have made up two-thirds of Apple's yearly profits in the past, and their profit margins on iPhones have reached 19% for some years.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 05:17 |
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Morbus posted:I wasn't joking when I said a major part of Shockley Semiconductor starting in Palo Alto was that his mom was sick and lived there. If she croaked a few years earlier SV might have been in New Jersey. That probably depends on what New Jersey’s laws about noncompete agreements are like. A lot of Silicon Valley happened—and Hollywood too—because the companies couldn’t lock their employees into only working for themselves. While Zilog is a niche player now, for a period of time in the late 1970s through the early 1980s it pretty much owned the microprocessor market. It was started by people who quit Intel because they didn’t want to have an enforced start time, and won by making a CPU compatible with but better than their former employer’s. Where else could they have done that? If Epic was prevented from making its employees sign noncompete agreements, how many EMR companies would be based around Madison and Milwaukee? eschaton fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Oct 28, 2017 |
# ? Oct 28, 2017 05:34 |
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fishmech posted:Sure is weird that people read "Uber is worse than finance" as praising finance, but I guess some people are just that crazy. No, they’re reading it as you setting too low a bar for finance. Uber has serious problems with sexual harassment and flouting cab & livery laws, but some major banks provide banking services for drug cartels and international terrorism.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 05:40 |
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Arglebargle III posted:The phone itself is fine but nothing special. It must take a lot of effort to be this clueless.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 05:53 |
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fishmech posted:they get billions of dollars in direct bailouts fishmech posted:you're still acting like it's not a robust industry?
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 05:53 |
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Banking is actually important and very good, you colossal nimrods.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 07:11 |
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Morbus posted:I'd actually be interested in seeing some estimate / breakdown of Twitter's costs. Their bandwidth and storage requirements have got to be minimal compared to a lot of other applications. ~200 billion tweets per year at ~200 bytes per tweet is only 40TB/yr. Even if you assume something crazy like they are storing ~100 bytes of metadata every time someone views or interacts with a tweet, and that the average interactions per tweet is as high as 10,000, you'd still end up with ~200,000 TB which is <10 million dollars in storage. And that would only translate to an average bandwidth requirement of <10 Gbps...Even allowing for much larger spikes in peak bandwidth and data redundancy, servers in multiple locations, etc, it seems their infrastructure costs should be quite low compared to a lot of other web services, on the order of 10's of millions per year. You should renegotiate their contracts then. Given that tweets can also contain pictures and video, I'd guess that you're vastly underestimating their bandwidth costs alone - and when you build in redundancy, you can add a multiple for all of their compute and storage costs as well. And yes, their talent is expensive, they're competing with Facebook and Google. I'm not going to defend Twitter as being a profitable enterprise, I'm surprised they're making much money. But it's far from surprising that such a popular service should be so expensive to run. Hell, they're public - check their books, it should be illuminating.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 07:39 |
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Morbus posted:I'd actually be interested in seeing some estimate / breakdown of Twitter's costs. Their bandwidth and storage requirements have got to be minimal compared to a lot of other applications. ~200 billion tweets per year at ~200 bytes per tweet is only 40TB/yr. Even if you assume something crazy like they are storing ~100 bytes of metadata every time someone views or interacts with a tweet, and that the average interactions per tweet is as high as 10,000, you'd still end up with ~200,000 TB which is <10 million dollars in storage. And that would only translate to an average bandwidth requirement of <10 Gbps...Even allowing for much larger spikes in peak bandwidth and data redundancy, servers in multiple locations, etc, it seems their infrastructure costs should be quite low compared to a lot of other web services, on the order of 10's of millions per year. This is the same logical failing you see from small business owners when they go "I can buy a 1TB drive from best buy for $100 why does this 300GB server drive cost $500" You're massively underestimating the cost of having the data in active storage rather than archival and the complexity of running a website with that much traffic across different global regions.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 12:26 |
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It's a stupid estimate anyway since loads of tweets have images attached, sometimes multiple. Videos are common as well. There is no way the average tweet is only 200 bytes. Multiply by 1000 and you're probably closer to the real average, and even that may be lowballing it. Even so, labor IS usually the biggest expense most businesses have, especially a tech business. Between salaries, benefits, and all other associated costs, it adds up quick. Tuxedo Gin fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Oct 28, 2017 |
# ? Oct 28, 2017 13:52 |
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eschaton posted:It must take a lot of effort to be this clueless. To understand where he's coming from you have to stop looking at apples performance in the US. Europe for example https://www.statista.com/statistics/632478/mobile-phone-market-share-by-vendor-in-europe/ Samsung outperforms them two fold alone, iPhones while being decent phones are not seen as something super special in plenty of countries in Europe(probably most in fact). EDIT: only now realized that site likes to go all "exclusive content" on you so here's a screenshot TheCoach fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Oct 28, 2017 |
# ? Oct 28, 2017 13:56 |
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You're an idiot if you don't think being able to rely on government help whenever you want it makes you a robust industry. Meanwhile what does your favorite fart app/tea infuser company rely on but the ever shifting whims of a small group of investors, before they collapse because nobody actually wanted the product? https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/27/1000-tea-infuser-startup-teforia-shuts-down/ In what the company is calling “a very difficult time for hardware companies in the smart kitchen space,” Tea infusion device startup Teforia is saying it is ceasing operations today, according to its website. The above note about it being hard for hardware companies in the smart kitchen is likely a reference to devices like the now-defunct Juicero (which raised more than $100 million in venture financing). Teforia’s main product was an internet-connected tea infuser that could brew the pre-packaged teas from the startup, which it called “Sips.” Users pack the Sips into the company’s “infusion globe,” and those packages cost a couple of bucks each. The price tag was very high, much like some of these other Silicon Valley solutions that look to hit people with more spending power. “However, the reality of our business is that it would take a lot more financing and time to educate the market and we simply couldn’t raise the funds required in what is a very difficult time for hardware companies in the smart kitchen space,” the company said on its website. “Therefore, it is with heavy hearts that we are announcing that all business operations, for Teforia Company, will cease effective today. We will continue to seek a partner that can leverage Teforia technology and/or provide Sips tea sales to continue our mission of elevating the tea experience. Hopefully, you will see Teforia technology in future products.” Teforia raised $12 million just about a year ago in a financing round led by Translink Capital, with Upfront Ventures, Lemnos Labs, Correlation Ventures and Mousse Partners also investing in the company. The device was originally priced at $649 when it raised $5.1 million in a seed round led by Upfront Ventures. A little more than a week ago the site listed the device’s price at almost $1,000 (or about the cost of an iPhone X). Users can still purchase the infuser, which now costs $200, as well as a variety of teas, until November 3. Arsenic Lupin posted:Now for the General Ignorance category. Where is the majority of Apple's money coming from? iTunes? iPhones? Other? I can't believe it's anything in the laptop/desktop area, although as usual I've been wrong before. People already mentioned that it's coming from iPhones, but it's worth noting that iTunes more or less runs at a break-even margin. Because its primary job is simply to have content available to try to make people buy other Apple products. People used to say from iPhones and iPads but as the tablet market as a whole continues to collapse iPads really aren't pulling that much anymore. And of course, iPods used to be a thing that really brought in profits, the only thing that saved Apple from just being the also-ran computer manufacturer and nothing more in the 2000s. But they've all but halted sales of any model of iPod in favor of just selling older versions of their phones cheap as the replacement. As of this summer, the only "iPod" branded device in active manufacturing is the 2015 model of the iPod Touch, and that's only on sale in limited quantities. eschaton posted:That probably depends on what New Jersey’s laws about noncompete agreements are like. A lot of Silicon Valley happened—and Hollywood too—because the companies couldn’t lock their employees into only working for themselves. You are grossly overestimating the influence of noncompete agreements. Zilog could have started anywhere that cheap suitable manufacturing of their product was available, especially given the much more hazy legal copyright/trademark status of computer software, hardware, and APIs at the time. Also if Epic was prevented from signing noncompete agreements, EMR companies would still have no incentive to try to open around Madison and Milwaukee, they're kind of rear end areas and Epic has to offer quite a bit to convince employees to come up there, relatively speaking. I'm laughing pretty hard at your assertion that Hollywood started because companies couldn't lock their employees in to only working for them - like studios had near total control of talent and often even crew lives for decades on end, often with the only way out being to quit the business altogether to head for NYC stage or TV, or to sign yourself into the same depth of control but for a different company willing to pay off the first. fishmech fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Oct 28, 2017 |
# ? Oct 28, 2017 15:31 |
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# ? May 22, 2024 10:01 |
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Morbus posted:I'd actually be interested in seeing some estimate / breakdown of Twitter's costs. Their bandwidth and storage requirements have got to be minimal compared to a lot of other applications. ~200 billion tweets per year at ~200 bytes per tweet is only 40TB/yr. Even if you assume something crazy like they are storing ~100 bytes of metadata every time someone views or interacts with a tweet, and that the average interactions per tweet is as high as 10,000, you'd still end up with ~200,000 TB which is <10 million dollars in storage. And that would only translate to an average bandwidth requirement of <10 Gbps...Even allowing for much larger spikes in peak bandwidth and data redundancy, servers in multiple locations, etc, it seems their infrastructure costs should be quite low compared to a lot of other web services, on the order of 10's of millions per year. Others have already pointed out several flaws in this reasoning, but I'll add a few: first, it's entirely probable that they are storing at least 100 bytes of metadata every time someone views or interacts with a tweet. They're probably saving access logs (not indefinitely, but for some period of time) for every single web request for diagnostic purposes. They're probably also recording and broadcasting these events for analytics and streaming application purposes, and likely storing them downstream in several different places for different consumers. Additionally, for every entity they're storing, it's certainly being stored several times over in different places: you don't just add up the size of each unique piece of data: it's all going to be stored and indexed in several different forms for redundancy (as you mentioned) but also indexed and denormalized in various ways for efficient access (for example, search, and also how do you think they ensure that it's not horribly slow to determine and load the most recent tweets from the people you're following each time you load the app/page?) That of course all matters even less if you stop assuming that storage and bandwidth are their most significant computing resource costs: they also have to actually pay for all of the computers that are running this: serving web requests, implementing application logic, broadcasting analytics events, performing batch jobs on bulk data, database servers, etc etc. Raw storage is probably a small fraction of their total server infrastructure costs.
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# ? Oct 28, 2017 17:48 |