RuggedAltair's are very similar to my thoughts. Some people will make a good return on Facebook in the short term. Alas, the general investing public will not be among them.
Indeed FB is just a website. It's not even a search engine. Over the long-term people are fickle about websites. They will eventually want something new and fresh.
Being a website allows FB an incredible amount of surveillance, like Google, for the benefit of marketing, but even with all the surveillance, FB is not able to generate the return that people would expect of it. Google does much better because people who visit Google are looking for products and services in a fixed amount of time. FB OTOH is just a way of killing time and no one is necessarily looking for products or services or is in any rush.
FB has a gigantic email list. And heaps of personal info to annnotate it with. (And Google is about to do that with Gmail anyway... adding in all the info from your account). But FB is still trying to figure out how to turn what they have into more than the usual email marketing (a euphemism for opt-in spam) returns. Google does not have the problem.
It's naive to think that FB's email list is somehow exclusive. As a database, it might even raise legal issues in Europe. And without email, FB is dead in the water. Aside from the few FB fanatics who stay logged in all day every day, FB still relies on email to keep their users engaged. Because it's just a website. And it's not as "essential" as a search engine like Google. Anyone can grab all their friends' contact info (phone, email, address) from FB and never have to use FB to make contact. What does FB offer that can't ge gotten elsewhere, other than a way to get friends' contact info?
My prediction is FB's business will fizzle and they will essentially just keep selling this email list to marketers.
FB the company may fade away, but the email list, with accompanying data, will be around (sold and resold) for a long time.
Though static-linking was originally used for a different purpose, today statically linked binaries make my life easier, and it has nothing to do with space constraints.
Paths are a pain in the neck. It feels like 90% of the work we have to do at the prompt is typing/automcompleting paths, or symlinking or setting env variables to deal with paths.
We certainly need a way to differentiate "system" stuff from "user" stuff. And on BSD, one can do this with the mtree spec files. mtree is one of my favourite utilities. One that is of course absent in Linux.
Linux could never have an mtree because its userland development has been too haphazard. Moreover, different "distros" are always pushing for idiosyncratic changes. The goalposts move much more frequently than with BSD.
Indeed FB is just a website. It's not even a search engine. Over the long-term people are fickle about websites. They will eventually want something new and fresh.
Being a website allows FB an incredible amount of surveillance, like Google, for the benefit of marketing, but even with all the surveillance, FB is not able to generate the return that people would expect of it. Google does much better because people who visit Google are looking for products and services in a fixed amount of time. FB OTOH is just a way of killing time and no one is necessarily looking for products or services or is in any rush.
FB has a gigantic email list. And heaps of personal info to annnotate it with. (And Google is about to do that with Gmail anyway... adding in all the info from your account). But FB is still trying to figure out how to turn what they have into more than the usual email marketing (a euphemism for opt-in spam) returns. Google does not have the problem.
It's naive to think that FB's email list is somehow exclusive. As a database, it might even raise legal issues in Europe. And without email, FB is dead in the water. Aside from the few FB fanatics who stay logged in all day every day, FB still relies on email to keep their users engaged. Because it's just a website. And it's not as "essential" as a search engine like Google. Anyone can grab all their friends' contact info (phone, email, address) from FB and never have to use FB to make contact. What does FB offer that can't ge gotten elsewhere, other than a way to get friends' contact info?
My prediction is FB's business will fizzle and they will essentially just keep selling this email list to marketers. FB the company may fade away, but the email list, with accompanying data, will be around (sold and resold) for a long time.