Interesting Links for 8-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Radiohead: are they any good? (A sceptic listens to the first five albums - funny and well written)
  (tags: music radiohead reviews)
• The S stands for Simple (Thankfully I don't have to work with SOAP, but if you ever have, this is hilarious)
  (tags: humor xml programming software web soa soap)
• The cowardly fudge behind the rhetoric of Control Orders (This being the bit that worries me about today's speech)
  (tags: law uk rights freedom government)
• Nick Clegg's speech on civil liberties. More of this please - reminds me why I couldn't vote for Labour last time around.
  I'm nervous, of course, of what the actual laws will be. But this is generally pointing in the right direction.
  (tags: uk government law rights freespeech libel terrorism)
• Glasgow pantomime dress broke Geneva Convention
  (tags: law uk)
• Facebook made profits of $350m in 9 months. Valued at $50Bn. Not sure that multiplier makes sense to me...
  (tags: facebook business web2.0)
• Harry Potter plagiarism case dismissed. (They claimed that she copied the idea of wizards travelling on trains. WTF?)
  (tags: harrypotter law books)

Comments

[birguslatro]

Facebook. "Not sure that multiplier makes sense to me..." Maybe the multiplier's a simple $10 per account?

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

It's this particular bit of blatant plagiarism that bothers me, particularly considering many (really bloody stupid) people seem to think it's the other way round

[autopope.livejournal.com]

On the topic of FB: we can extrapolate their profits for the whole of 2010 as being something like $0.5Bn (they're still growing, so Q4 will be bigger). Revenue will probably be on the order of $1.5-2Bn.

In a sane market, the multiplier for a valuation is revenue x 8; in a bubble market it's revenue x 30-50. I figure a sane valuation for FB would therefore be somewhere in the range $15-20Bn, taking into account the prospects for further growth (which aren't as good as they would be if FB hadn't already grabbed 500M users).

A $50Bn valuation is either making disturbing assumptions about FB's future growth prospects -- disturbing because it implies FB can milk its user base enough to triple the per-user revenue, or can triple in in size to 1.5Bn users -- or it's a bubble valuation.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

The Radiohead one is interesting. I thought it was only me who could be heavily put off a track due to not liking the sound of the vocalist's voice. Nice to know I am not alone...

S stands for Simple

[darkoshi]

I work with SOAP somewhat. That page explains/summarizes it better than I have seen anywhere else (I still struggle with the RPC vs doc/lit vs wrapped thing, and how to tell which one is being used), and it may be why I've never gotten a "warm & fuzzy" feeling of understanding about it. On the other hand, I feel comfortable with XML schemas, even though I don't know it all off the top of my head.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

SOAP is a nightmare. I spent a week trying to consume a SOAP resource in Ruby that EBI have. At the end of the week I gave up and started using their provided Java client.

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

J.K. Rowling may not have plagiarized from "Willy The Wizard," but her books are based on a very, very old German fable about a boy who goes to a school for wizards.

It's so old that it's surprising she found out about it, but the similarities are a bit too "coincidental." Since the fable was written before there were copyrights I think she's okay, legally.

Now if someone would just slap her for book 4, 5 and that last piece of crap from the series.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

that's great Nick.

Can you IMMEDIATELY instruct the riot police to stop launching cavalry charges on student protesters? And the whole kettling thing is a bit naughty too. Especially when a number of those protesters - who have a legal right TO protest - are minors

cheers, mate