Just curious, how do browser-only companies like Opera or Mozilla make money? I know Opera Mini used to be shipped with phones, but what other sources of revenue do they have?
Advertising income due to selling the default homepage and search boxes. In case of Opera and Mozilla Corporation, the majority of that income is from Google (who calls this "traffic acquisition costs" in their accounting).
Opera also licenses their browser to many phones and devices. That market may be starting to dry up.
Opera actually has a substantial sideline in selling mobile advertising, just like AdMob et al. I know this because my current employer spun-off our mobile ad network, which Opera then bought.
Opera sells to hardware OEMs that want an embedded browser for their devices (Nintendo Wii, Feature phones, etc). Lots of feature phones have Opera Mini.
That as well as the search revenue that was already mentioned.
At a conservative average of $40K pa per employee, that's an annual staff bill of around $35M annually. The Firefox-Google deal is worth $300M annually, and their user base is 15x larger.
Add in other costs, and it's not hard to see that either they've got a huge source of other income or they are hemorrhaging cash.
You assume all users are equally valuable to Google: if there were to be a market in which Opera had significant marketshare but Google had little, then those users would be far more valuable to Google than, say, an American using Firefox.
To quote the 4Q12 report:
"Opera’s monetization strategy for its desktop browser revolves
predominantly around search. Google is Opera’s global search
partner and provides the majority of desktop monetization. This
global partnership is supplemented by local search partnerships
in certain markets, such as Russia, Japan, and China, where
Opera works with Yandex, Yahoo! Japan and Baidu, respective-
ly. In addition, Opera has signed up e-commerce players such
as Amazon.com (USA, Germany, Japan), Booking.com (64
countries), and Ozon (Russia) to further enhance ARPU."
"Desktop Consumer" made 16MUSD in the last quarter: that's ~64MUSD annually. Of course, that won't be all the Google revenue (as there's also the default browser on other platforms), but gives a reasonable baseline figure.
The minimum hourly wage for an 18+ employee with no education and no experience the area in Norway is 152 NOK which is 28 USD. That's what you might get if you were to help building a house.
So the only way you might get a $40k/year in Norway, is if you are under 18 and work in a supermarket. Here it's 102 NOK/hour (but you probably wouldn't be allowed to have a full time job like that, this is just if you help out in a shop say 10 hours/week as an extra job while getting an education).
That's all the net wage, not including overhead!
Expect a pizza and a beer to cost you $50. Maybe $100 if you want some Danish cheese on top of it, which has a 277 percent custom tax. Foreign lamb has 429%. Such is the result of Norway not being part of EU proper!
Well that's extremely conservative. I don't know whether you speak from personal knowledge of Norwegian market but I can tell you that it's about 1/4 of what a intermediate/senior level engineer in the bay area would make. In fact it's about at the level of what a senior engineer (from a top level school) in India would make.
It was very conservative (although I guess not all Opera employees are senior engineers). I was trying to make the point that there's no way Opera can be profitable from just selling search engine traffic. The open accounts show that they spent around $25M on salaries in Q4 of last year.
Making a living out of doing what you love will only work if you're exceptionally good at it or if there's plenty of demand for it. For example, there's plenty of people who love to play chess, but if you can't break into the top 100 in the world, forget about living off it. I know plenty of IMs and GMs who struggle to making a living. I think it's important to find a balance between doing what you love and doing what's practical. And if you develop the discipline to manage your non-work hours, there will be plenty of time for play.
By being hated, I guess the author wants us to stay true to our convictions. It's okay to be hated, as long as there are supporters as well. It's very difficult to stand alone, though sometimes we must. Even so, if we can be accommodating but still stay true to our convictions most of the time, that's the way to go.
What's wrong with sticking to an older version of Ubuntu - 11.04 or earlier where you're not forced to use Unity? That's what I do. And I get a lot more work done without having to worry with the latest shiny new toys in town.
to really get meat, he would have needed a lot more time than he had allotted to him. i think if anything you could say that he tried to cover to much in the time he had.
The talk stops at ~19 minutes, but there were many questions asked and answered in the Q&A segment. That doesn't help in the meat department for that video however.
I would love to give that same talk, but extend it to 90 minutes. I suppose it still wouldn't reach the depth that such a talk requires, but it would be more satisfying.
Well, everybody was pretty civil and evenhanded- for example, prematurely heading off any static/dynamic debate. If you want passion and drama, you also need more people butting heads.
I go to plenty of used book sales at libraries and these guys are annoying as hell. They scan and hoard a lot of the books irrespective of the topic, and later spend time looking at each one to check its resale prospects. What they don't want, they dump back, not necessarily where they were supposed to be, and head out.
My library has even started posting flyers saying hoarding is disallowed. Libraries have also started not bringing out all the books at once, so that once these guys have done their "business", there's more quality books left for the rest. As for me, I think they should just ban the use of these devices at these sales.
I call bullshit. The very definition of close friends is that they are close, whether you spend less time with them or not. I've got friends across the country and we're very close even though we meet a only few times a year.
Well, they're difficult books to read to begin with. Knuth himself would be surprised if someone has read and understood them all. At the same time, I find they're hyped up a bit (like SICP). There are plenty of other really good algorithms books IMHO.
At http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266502 someone cites a particular occasion on which Knuth supposedly denied the story. As I remarked then, "full of shit" seems quite an unknuth expression.
