I don't understand the hype with here.
Google has the better mapping service by far an every other service are far behind, including here map.
The only contender is Osm with is already better than Google in some country and evolving fast.
Some good example is the maps.me application on Android and iOS which is an open source offline map application with everything needed. And you can even contribute to osm from the app.
So why do they buy something which is worse than a free one?
Back when I used a Windows Phone (Lumia 920), HERE was amazing. I actually bought the Nokia over the HTC specifically for that feature. I switched to a Nexus 4 later on and Google Maps still couldn't compare.
The best feature of HERE, that Google still doesn't have? Telling you where to turn like a human would. Instead of "turn right at 7 Mile Road" (street signs are often difficult to see, or sometimes non-existent), it would say "turn right at the McDonalds". McDonalds is very easy to see.
And like other have said, back then LTE service wasn't as robust as it is today. Having offline maps wherever I went was important. Bear in mind, I haven't used HERE since the Nexus 4 came out.
HERE is nice because you can download complete countries to work offline. Google Maps only lets you select a rectangular area and limits it size to a much smaller area.
Here is not just about maps, producing them and selling those. They are also specialized into complete solutions for Car manufacturers, car suppliers for integration into HUDs for guidance etc. Inside navigation and map making is a ton of stuff which are all challenges for themself like map matching, dead reckoning, compilation of cards, map rendering etc etc... Their stuff also runs on almost every platform.
The whole business may have changed quite much over there years. Back in the days you had your own people driving around, know you can crowd source quite much of the data collection. When you have the location data for millions of people, you can for example figure out where the roads go, make good guesses about speed limits and figure out one way streets. Points of interest can be mined from web. From search logs you can probably see if you are missing some addresses.
Most of the time when a company wants to get good at something, there are more factors than just the data/software involved. The developers who created it.
It'll be more difficult to hire and train a completely new team of people, and then hope they're a competent team. It's easier to just get the developers who are already experienced with their tools.
This'll be difference if the skill set was somewhat popular, but it'll be difficult to find people who really are good at OSM and the surrounding software + who are willing to work for Intel.
I wasn't aware it was possible to debug a running node server in the chrome browser until the addition of the 'inspect' flag in node 6. Maybe it was possible, I'm not superleet or anything.
On the technology side of things, h265 and VP9 are both attempting to further increase compression efficiency so that we can deliver super high resolutions, wide color gamuts, and bit depths greater than 8. These features are very difficult to achieve with wide compatibility when utilizing h264 and VP8.
More generally, h265 and VP9 can be seen as competitors in the same space, but with some meaningful differences in philosophy. VP9 is a royalty-free codec developed by Google. The VPx series of codecs all stem from the work of the On2 company, which Google acquired specifically so that it could get into the video codec space.
h265 is patent-protected by a number of parties who are chilling the adoption and rollout of this new codec. As a result, VP9 has seen some rapid adoption by both hardware and software manufacturers lately. If you work in digital video today, the likelihood is that you will need to support both codecs in your processing stack and delivery pipelines.
Other interesting developments in this space include the Daala codec in development by the Xiph Foundation (responsible for Ogg Vorbis, Theora, and the wonderful Opus audio codec) and the Thor codec in development by Cisco and their tech partners. Both are aiming to be next-generation royalty-free codecs for distribution of even smaller, and even prettier videos.
One issue is that it's a prototype with planned future greatness. It's tricky to reach H265 compression ratio without touching patented methods. Even if they reach it, by that time H265 will probably have well-optimized encoders/decoders, so there will be major speed differences. Still a worthy effort of course.
H.265 already has realtime 4kp60 10-bit encoder boxes out there, multiple hardware decoder and encoder IPs. This race started back in 2012 or earlier.
Existing chips in consumer devices trounces every H.264 encoder out there: http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2016/MSU_H... Which is not the case for any encoder of VPx ascent.
It's easy to project hopes into something that doesn't exist yet. But this contender is coming late.
>It's easy to project hopes into something that doesn't exist yet. But this contender is coming late.
I have to disagree, first off, it's not as if we've seen a massive shift over to HEVC, in fact the x265 developers lamented this quite recently, mainly blaming the licensing debacle which has ensued, with three different entities with which you need to negotiate royalties in order to use HEVC (MPEGLA, HEVC Advance, Technicolor), and the royalties were already much more expensive than h264 to begin with.
Secondly, it's quite clear that AV1 will happen, Google was already committed in creating a royalty free codec as evident by their VPX series of codecs, and now they have been joined by web and tech giants like Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Mozilla, Intel, ARM, NVidia, AMD etc.
For these players, a royalty free codec makes perfect sense, the streaming giants know full and well that they will only increase the amount of video they stream and thus will save money longterm by pooling their resources and creating a royalty free codec, and on the hardware side, not having to pay royalties in order to implement hardware support is obviously attractive.
And it does exist, it's in full development, not something in the 'planning stage', the bitstream is said to be finalized at the end of this year or at the beginning of next, so we are not talking 'many years into the future' here, it's based off VP10 and is adopting techniques from Daala and also have access to h264 patented techniques courtesy of Cisco.
As I see it, HEVC is in a bad situation, h264 is still good enough and much cheaper to license, and within a year we will likely have AV1 ready to go for hardware, why would you jump on the HEVC bandwagon at this point ?
My best suggestion would be to just stick with h264 and see how the HEVC/AV1 situation plays out.
I know the iPhone 6, 6s, and 7 all have hardware h.265, and use it for FaceTime for example for many years. I can not locate evidence that they have VP9.
A video codec is a set of algorithms used to compress and decompress video content. H265 and VP9 are two different video codecs. H265 is the successor to H264, and is a proprietary codec developed by MPEG-LA. VP9 is a royalty-free video codec developed by Google, and is the successor to VP8.
Well, they actually did have (veiled) connections to various mafias. They had associates who just hung out all day in strip clubs and solicited girls (with the consent of the owners). Where do you think all those eastern European and Latina chicks starring in porn come from? Strip clubs are an entirely different level of shady.
Also, at the company I worked at, they had a sort of level of employee where you were "made". You got to go on lavish trips (the owner had a private jet) and dinners with executives. At that point, you had a job for life as long as you didn't fuck them over.
(To elaborate - strip club owners would often set up dorms where women hung out all day doing cam stuff. They would "import" the women, but eventually the porn companies came up with a less risky idea. They simply went to the origin countries and set up (with the help of the shadier people) these porn dorms. No need to illegally bring talent into other countries.)
What cerrelio is describing happens in my area, too. Another common technique is a modification of pickup-artist stuff where they make lots of fraudulent promises, push them into more risky stuff, often pressure them to do initial stuff in isolation, and/or use drugs for dependence. This is not to say that many women don't do it just for the money, fun, etc. There's groups that use those techniques to pull them. It's those that push them which we're referring to.
I don't know the ratio but there's a lot of pushers.
Makes me think of something i read a while back, about a "professional" (guy seems to have his own online show or something) pick-up artist. He claimed that he hated Nordic women, because his usual MO of offering economic support didn't work. This thanks to the Nordic welfare model.
More like Russia over Hungary over Czech and Romania. Russians have their safe heaven in Russia because there's no foreign competition, and the mafia-like connections do help. Hungary's golden age is over.
Have a listen to the Codebreaker podcast about internet porn. It's gives some pretty interesting insight into the internet porn industry, mostly from the social and business point of view.
I know that some companies are very secretive about it. One big company here in Montreal never advertise that they develop pornographic products. You kind of know it from word of mouth or it's a surprise during the interview. They also change name every other year.
They don't want they employees to be stigmatized for it, I would guess.
I'd be curious to learn more about that as well. I've had recruiters for MindGeek reach out to me several times and the whole "separate company but really just an arm of the porn company" thing seemed a little strange. It made sense when the recruiter explained not everyone wants a porn company on their resume, but they went so far as to have a fake company website and and everything to really sell it. What else do they do that's sketchy?
Usually. There were a lot of lifers there. I left the company about a decade ago and I'd say about 80% of the people I worked with are still there. However, my particular skill set is very adaptable and I found better pay elsewhere. Regardless, I very much miss the engineering culture I experienced there.
Not really. Pornhub is very late in tech. Their website is a lot buggy. A lot of thumbnails don't load. They were very late on HD. And you can't even pay with bitcoin. It would be perfect for pornsite. And their is still no Netflix equivalent for porn which is very expensive when you compare to a normal show which is a lot more expensive to make
Pornhub doesn't generate most of their money from subscriptions. It was never their primary business model to do that. It's mostly ad and referral revenue. I also think most tube sites run on thin margins or even at a loss. And like a commenter below mentioned, you can't do recurring payments with bitcoin. It's strictly a push payment, and even if there were a third party or service that could effect a recurring payment model, it would be too risky.
A good chunk of porn site revenue comes from rebills to people who forget to cancel their subscription after they've joined at 2am Saturday morning, drunk/high, needing to pound one out before passing out. (This is literally the description of a typical customer a porn studio manager gave me.)
We launched "Netflix like" Pornhub Premium last year. We license thousands of scenes from all the top producers. It's $9.99 a month with a free trial (real free trial, not the normal porn stuff where they charge you anyway). It's closer to say Hulu Plus though because you also get the regular Pornhub content without the ads and better quality.
Personally I have two issues with subscribing to that: I don't want what I view traceable to me (hence I always use porn mode in my browser) and I wouldn't be comfortable handing my CC to a porn site, because I assume it would be very difficult to cancel.
"It's closer to say Hulu Plus though because you also get the regular Pornhub content without the ads and better quality."
That by itself could be a great market. Porn sites are notorious for inefficient, disgusting, and sometimes malicious advertisements. Getting the product without all that for low cost would appeal to many. I'm curious what the actual numbers are on one of the highest, trafficked sites. It could provide a nice, upper bound on what others might expect with their actual results being lower unless they're a niche operator like Kink.
Yeah the free sites are owned by the same German company, they basically jack your material as soon as it hit DVD, now that doesn't happen because they destroyed 90% of the industry.
Nah. TV shows can be hard to find (especially right after release) and of variable quality, plus the sites can be very shady with worse ads/adware than all porn sites combined [not to mention that they tend to be closed or ISP blocked fairly often].
Porn is reliably served by many _respectable_ sites.
We chose it mostly because at the time, it looked like it had more active maintenance from the people at Mapbox, and it eventually looked like it was going to pass Leaflet.
I wouldn't say it's more complex. mapbox-gl favors a more declarative style (look into "Map Style" in the docs), but the concepts are not that different than Leaflet.
Web GL features (such as video support) is an obvious advantage, and part of why we chose it. We don't use plugins for this project, so can't say much about that.
The only contender is Osm with is already better than Google in some country and evolving fast.
Some good example is the maps.me application on Android and iOS which is an open source offline map application with everything needed. And you can even contribute to osm from the app.
So why do they buy something which is worse than a free one?
Maybe I'm just missing something.