This is just patently incorrect ...

200 years ago the average age at first marriage was 28 and 26 for men/women respectively - and that is EXACTLTY where it is for the US population at the moment. The lowest average age was typically around 20-21yo in 1950/60s (depending on country).

Norm of 16yo is just wrong unless you want to head back to medieval times and prior - even then I doubt it.

whala? really? you said whala?

Voila perhaps ?????

About 25-50% higher according to most estimates. There aren't any optimised decoders to really compare real-world performance though.

Happy to be proven wrong, but I'd imagine fairly soon.

H.265 is a superset of H.264, so much of the same hardware could probably be used. As for complexity, it seems H.265 is around 25-50% more complex for DECODING so certainly not unreasonable for current mobile devices.

The current Samsung Galaxy S4 advertised both HEVC support and Full HD (1080p) playback - not sure if they are both together however.

Agreed but 4x pixels does not equate to 4x bitrate for a given codec - typically more like 2x.

so maybe something like

4K H.265 = 75% * 200%* 1080p H.264 = 150% H.264

So not as bad as you'd think and a lot of current format stuff is still MPEG-2 as well so even more scope for improvement !!!

Wow ... just wow!

I'll assume by "proprietary codec developers" you actually mean developers who have closed source implementation of the encoder. In which case, the statement may not be completely unreasonable ie closed-source encoders have not kept pass with this open-source implementation due to less comphrensive (and less costly) implementation of the encoding tools.

The rest is complete rubbish though ...

So what if the bulk of non-pirated comes from closed source encoders ... what does that have to do x264 or x265 or H.265 development? Is this just a shot at closed-source software given you seem to be VERY pro-open source?

Do you understand that H.265 is essentially a superset of H.264? You know, as in H.264 + extensions? How is x264 going to out-perform x265 given it is a subset of the later?

Do you understand that x264 uses a superset of the encoder algorithms implemented by other encoders? So what you attribute is primarily due to codec and then codec parameters and then software optimisations.

You could have said "I hate standards .. I love open source ... I hope H.265 fails" ... much quicker and doesn't need any pretence of understanding video codecs.

Nope - think we agree on the numbers

$1 billion / 600 million users / 12 months = $0.139/user/month ... $0.15 is close enough

US books sales were running about 80% hardcopy / 20% electronic in 2012 vs 85% / 15% in 2011 ...

Current numbers of up towards 25% e-book share seem completely reasonable

However, the growth rates have plummeted and seems that e-books may top out at less than 30% market over the next few years

The biggest surprise is that the "new-ness" of ebooks may be wearing off

That is really the guts of it ...

Ad revenue is actually tiny at around $0.15/mth/user up from closer to $0.05/mth/user last year ... any subscription would be SUBSTANTIALLY higher than that and it questionable how far they can push ad revenue given people are complaining at the current levels.

I agree the userbase is the product so you can't afford to push them away with too much advertising - the question is how to monetize the userbase.

And that's the problem ... Around $0.15/user/month in ad revenue is a lot lower than $1

And your logic problem:
- it's not 10% * $10/mth subscription vs 100% * $1/mth ads
- it is (10% * $10/mth subs + 90% * $1/mth ads) vs (100% * $1/mth ads)

Replacing 10% of your user-base at higher profits ($10 vs $0.15) while retaining the ad-revenue for the rest kind of makes it a no-brainer.

As for Office - it still has something like 90-95% market share ... it may be struggling in certain niches (in fact, I'm sure it is!) but overall it's doing quite well ... the bigger problem is that productivity software is quite a mature market now, so prices and profitability drop but that is the same as most high volume software of any sort - OS, games, office suites, etc

Answer: Because it is not a failed model but is the traditional life-cycle of ANY business product.

The cycle is:
- develop a product
- create demand for the product
- monetize the demand
- continue until the life-cycle is over

Part of monetizing the product is to segment the market based on willingness/ability to pay. Premium vs ad-supported is a very easy and successful way to do that with media-type products.

Where this model fails is where there is not a viable business to start with and an attempt to monetize then completely fails - that was most of the original dot-com bubble of the late '90s

What businesses are you thinking you that built up large userbases before screwing it up?

Yikes - you butchered that analogy.

We can see where you started with the mantra "facebook (A) is not the product for users (B), but users (B) are the product for advertisers (C)" ... 3 separate entities and a reasonable concept ...

You've concluded that "ads (A) don't finance users (B), users (B) are the target of ads (A)" ... only 2 entities and logically inconsistent given the ads are there EXACTLY to finance a free subscription model

What has been proposed may actually make sense given it makes facebook the product for a group of customers:
- advertisers value the platform at $2/user per annum
- the subscription model suggested values the platform at $120/user per annum
- i'd guess that anyone who wanted ad-free would worth less $120 (ie 60x the average) to advertisers

Nothing wrong with fragmenting your market and cashing in the high-value component. Exactly what most of the media does - pay services for high value customers and throw low value advertising at the others. Think why cinemas still exist when TV viewers are the product for advertisers and that can be a free service????

To save you actually reading:
- yes, they tested them
- those authorities that knew how to test (i.e. blind tests) knew they didn't work
- those that didn't know how to test properly fell for the Ideomotor Effect

Disassembly of the devices showed they had NO active components - hence the lack of a power source (supposedly run on static electricity !!)

But more importantly, one can infer that there was a lot of corruption in the sales processes to a number of third-world and war-torn countries ... hardly an incentive for them to find they don't work and not buy them when you'd miss out on your kickbacks.

Or in the UK in a city that debuted it after 27th December 1977 ... not really that difficult to work out !

FYI - the UK release was London only until January 1978

26 Jan 1788 or 1 Jan 1901 ... take your pick, but not 26 Jan 1901 !