It makes a lot of sense to use the subreddits to provide targeted ads. Being seen as friendly with goodwill notice for visitors might also be part of this.
Still, that remains one of the least agressive revenue models I've seen.
I think most of us realize it. But we also realize that the reward is so large that it counters the small probability to make a pretty high expectancy, above a regular programmer salary.
Let's say one startup out of the, say, ten thousand of serious startups founded every year will make it. For simplicity's sake, let's say that its founder will be a billionaire and the others will ALL gain their money back and then declare bankruptcy. Then 10^9/10^4=100000, which is better than most programmers' payout for that year.
The end user shouldn't care or know what version the browser for anything but troubleshooting anyways, to them it's just "Firefox" and "Chrome" no more of this stupid bullshit like IE6/7/8/9/10 that will held back progress for the last decade and will continue to do so for the next decade to come.
So? Chrome's dev channel is version 25. Plus, Chrome has a shorter beta testing cycle than Firefox, so Chrome's version number will always outpace Firefox's.
Chrome and Firefox both have 6 week release cycles, but Chrome does not have an equivalent to Firefox's Aurora channel. Aurora adds an extra 6 weeks from feature checkin to release. :\
Oh, I didn't realize that. I don't see this written anywhere though, the best I could find is a quote from Paul Irish that features on Canary get to users in 11 weeks, "unless there is a delay".
God forbid. At least Microsoft didn't control our hardware. If Apple gets the same kind of monopole as Microsoft over computers, tablets and smartphones, they would basically control the entire field of technology.
As for the prices, people pirated Microsoft, which kept their prices pretty low (otherwise no one would buy it). With a monopole for hardware, Apple can dictate its prices (already very high) however it wants and people can either pay or go for the small non-integrated OSes.
Worth the cost of asking for more information for the replacement of expensive items? It just takes a few more seconds to each rep and is surely shorter than all the new orders being placed for scammers.
Exactly. And what happens when a user needs a legitimate refund/exchange and Amazon then refuse because their account has had so much fraudulent account gone unnoticed? Not very good customer service at this point...
Yep, make that an opt-in feature, add some light ads, and you have a full business model.
I believe they may have just wanted to spare themselves the headache of a money system and of people who would reupload other people's pictures or copyrighted works for their own profit.
I think it's more about how they sold the company while the application was still not making any money. People expected to have to pay one day, of course, but by selling the users without the business model, Instagram showed it didn't care about the users.
Letting another company figure out how to make money with your product does sound odd, particularly when the product is the users and not some kind of resource.
Indeed. Arrogant people get their requests fulfilled more often than humble people because they push for it, and many people who have the power to give that stuff are either arrogant and depise humble people or humble and intimidated.
If it's just the 50Hz frequency, it's easy to make a cheap application with a GUI that computes the FFT of a wav file, replaces the value at 50Hz using some straightforward parameters (e.g home/suburban street/city center) and IFFT back to an output wav file.
I may be wrong but this sounds quite easy to fake...
That would still sound tampered because you'd lose any bleed over from other (ambient) sounds. Having all bleed over suddenly stop at 50Hz and then a clean electrical hum would look very suspicious.
You can solve this pretty easily. First, record the victim, and tamper with the recording as needed. Call this tampered recording "sample A". You need this recording to be somewhere that ambient noise will not vary much throughout the day.
Next, go to the same room (or a similar room) at a time when the victim will not have a good alibi and when the room will have the same basic ambient noise. Record using the same recording device in the same conditions (e.g. if it was in your pocket for the original recording, keep it in your pocket for the second recording). This is "sample B".
Take your recordings into Audacity. On sample A, apply the "Equalization" effect like this: http://i.imgur.com/gxPTV.png
Now mix the two samples. As long as the ambient noise does not contain easily isolated components like other people's voices, you'll have a convincing forgery.
Now you might argue that there could be other forensics techniques to detect this kind of tampering, but I would argue that if such reliable alternative techniques were available, this mains analysis technique wouldn't be particularly valuable in the first place.
I don't think that's taking into account the harmonic frequencies. The 50Hz buzz is not a sine wave. That means that even with that filter, both 50 Hz mains sounds should still be detectable in the recording. Unless I'm missing something?
Ok, so you look up the true signal for the actual recording time, subtract that from the recording, and then add the signal from the time you want it to look like. Voila: perfect bleed over.
And its frequency is not constant. You'd have to have some kind of adaptive comb filter to remove the original buzz with all its components. I've a feeling that would be tricky to do in a way that doesn't scream "photoshopped" (or whatever the equivalent is for audio).
It's not even that complicated and you can do it with existing software. You can take the file into something like Audacity, band stop the range surrounding 50 Hz (or 60Hz in the US), and then simply mix in the prerecorded mains sound like you would do any other mixing.
It's not necessary to mix in the frequency domain because mixing in the frequency domain is mathematically equivalent to mixing in the time domain (FFT(x + y) = FFT(x) + FFT(y)).
This might leave ghosting of the original signal and would probably highlight any fluctuations inherent to "the main" that the phase cancellation would miss. I think this would probably be one of the cleaner and easier ways to proceed though.
It's niche enough to not justify the hundreds of millions of dollars such a project would require and the high risks.
OSX "just works" because it has a full suite of software that comes loaded on it and "just works" very well and makes a lot of Windows programs jealous (except for some Office products). If people want customization and general freedom, they already have Linux for free.
I think it is safe to say that the market for people unhappy enough with both OSX and Linux, and willing to pay for that, enough to justify years and years of expensive and risky development, is _relatively_ small.
Still, that remains one of the least agressive revenue models I've seen.