Slashdot Mirror

Party games tend to be limited to the Nintendo platforms. If you want them, go there. Most people are happy without them.

I was thinking of this in part from a developer's perspective. Nintendo hasn't been kind to startup developers (source 1; source 2).

By "paywalled", I meant pay-to-win, or free-to-start-playing-but-pay-through-the-nose-if-you-want-to-play-for-more-than-ten-minutes.

Would that include any PC game with a demo that can be completed in ten minutes?

http://thenextweb.com/microsof...

While consumers are certainly still buying Windows 8, the latest and greatest operating system from Microsoft is not getting the same amount of love as Windows 7 did. That seems to be the general consensus, but now there's data straight from the horse's mouth to back that claim: at 15 months, Windows 8 sold 100 million fewer licenses than Windows 7 did, according to Microsoft's own sales figures.

Microsoft today revealed that Windows 8 has passed the 200 million mark. The two operating systems grew at the same rate for their respective first six months, but then at some point things slowed down for Windows 7's successor.

In other words, unlike GPL, it's not viral. It's this viral aspect of GPL that is turning people against it, and towards the more permissive BSD and MIT licenses.

Which is why we just heard Linux running out of funds? Oh wait, we didn't. And WebKit is LGPL (and not an Apple creation but a fork of KHTML - undoubtedly refined since though).

(For the record, I've nothing against BSD-licensed software, but people seem to be fine with GPL and its derivatives. Linux seems to be the platform of choice for most of smartphones and completely owns supercomputing. The desktop part is missing, insert compulsory joke about "YEAR OF LINUX DESKTOP" here - but generally it seems GPL is not scaring people away. And yes, even you, running Safari on your i-Device - you're running LGPL software.)

Attendance has dropped a bit over the last decade, but not by much.

http://thenextweb.com/media/2013/09/20/the-future-of-cinemas/#!sznZx

Certainly the loss is trivial compared to the losses from Cinemas heyday, and the subsequent recovery as the multiscreen came along.

http://www.significancemagazine.org/SpringboardWebApp/userfiles/sig/image/AbdelUpload/cineb.JPG

Looking at the list of most popular websites, I think only facebook & youtube would have more influence on video-standards settings.

People don't visit Wikipedia for the videos any more than they read Playboy for the articles. That you even put it in the same class as YouTube only makes you sound delusional, they are 99.99% video and Wikipedia is 99.99% not. When Google that owns the VP8 codec, owns YouTube and makes Android and Chrome don't want to eat their own dog food and push their own codec on their own site to their own devices and browser it'll never be more than an obscure alternative for ideological circlejerks, like art critics patting each other on the back for recognizing true art while the rest of the world watches Hollywood blockbusters.

Even Firefox has surrendered on this one and said they'd use the binary blob Cisco provides, if Wikimedia wants to be the Japanese soldiers hiding in the forest 10 years after the war is over and keep denying it's over and that they lost it's their problem. And by forest I mean /. where Ogg Vorbis never dies even though it totally* failed to catch any mainstream use. * Cue the counterexamples, the way Munich shows that Linux is totally going to take over the desktop. But to use an old proverb, one swallow does not a summer make.

Unfortunately the trend seems to be to optimize the site for mobile (all of them, at once) and say to-hell-with-PC-browsers. With extremely minimalist, Metro-like, stripped-of-any-useful-information pages now. So now the question has become "why do websites suck?". Lowest Common Denominator experience. Meetup.com went this way a few months ago and is now a shadow of its former self.

Since the start had big problems, but the reasons are the worrysome ones, sometimes for misconfigured network devices, forgetting to update a SSL certificate, dealing with leap years, and even over DNS (this one was last month, and took down other MS services).

Actually, that rule changed a few weeks ago: http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/21/motorola-will-longer-void-warranties-developer-devices-owners-request-unlock-codes/ Unlocking the bootloader on motorola devices no longer voids the warranty.

Actually at one point he did:

"Musk said he put everything he had left into the company, even borrowing money from friends. Tesla went on to close the investment round on the last hour of the last possible day. If the fundraise hadn’t come through, the company would have gone bankrupt a few days later."

http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2013/10/31/elon-musk-failure-fear/

See Also: Google Chrome 25 will disable silent extension installation, kill all such extensions retroactively
Friday, 21 Dec 2012

Translation: Google still can't figure out how to secure Chrome from stealth installs of malware.

Yep, pretty low of them. I'm sure Google, for example, would never stoop to something like this... Oh, wait.

Corporate world's a fucking snake pit.

How exactly is 100k apps = no apps?

iOS (iPad and iPhone) is the walled garden.

True, but it's an extremely spacious walled garden with ridiculously few pests and weeds (otherwise called malware). To wit:

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/08/26/internal-us-government-memo-warns-authorities-about-android-malware-threats/

"According to the government’s findings, 79% of mobile operating malware threats in 2012 took place on Android, compared to 0.7% on iOS."

Because it's been promised for years.

I believe mozilla can see what websites you are requesting, but they claim they do not retain this because they are not required to do so.
That could change I suppose. Clearly they have to have a list of emails that they can process, but not necessarily what sites you can use them for because they can just try to log in, and let it fail. Then go thru the authorization process.

I like the idea of spreading the knowledge around so that no one source knows everything. This essentially puts a middle-man in the Auth process, but that man knows very little.

But I don't think this will work in the long run because someone will break SSL or demand the keys and the whole thing comes down.

Mozilla is just as much subject to NSA letters as anyone else. And since almost 100% of their funding comes from Google anyway, I can't help but thinking this is a joint project, or at least carried out with Google's full approval. But still it makes it necessary for the NSA to look a lot more places when building a list and checking it twice.

They post exactly what they have on you and how they use the data here.

Basically it keeps Google from snooping, and allows Mozilla still has some records of the sites you access.
All information is transferred by SSL but its highly likely that Mozilla has already been forced to quietly turn over its SSL keys
to the government. (At least Snowden claims this has happened).

So at best you protect yourself from Google, and make the government look in two databases to see where you log in.

Wow a share button?!?!

This is what Mozilla is wasting time on now?

Don't forget the NEW LOGO!

http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/06/firefox_logo.png

I'm at a loss for words, but that picture tells you everything you need to know about the UI/art direction types at Mozilla. It's painful.

Yep, they're spending more time on product development than marketing.

Which is why I use Firefox (I also use Chrome for the same reason, sold product, little marketing).

Wow a share button?!?!

This is what Mozilla is wasting time on now?

Don't forget the NEW LOGO!

http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/06/firefox_logo.png

I'm at a loss for words, but that picture tells you everything you need to know about the UI/art direction types at Mozilla. It's painful.

Little details always mess numbers

I guess the kernel doesn't matter. Only the icon theme.

Not even. Only the shiny aluminum case matters.

Until it electrocutes you of course

A security researcher claims it was him, and he meant well.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/07/22/researcher-claims-he-told-apple-of-developer-center-vulnerability-but-didnt-maliciously-steal-data/

One method is Google Play Services. I've noticed that even on a 2.2 device, the app formerly known as Android Market installed a new application called "Google Settings" and an .apk file handler called "Verify and Install". Apparently app verification, introduced alongside Android 4.2, is some subset of the "bouncer" that Google uses to reject applications exhibiting the most common malicious behaviors, and Google could easily update it to reject .apk files that include two files with the same name.

So what do they do with my locked and encrypted device? I surely cannot be compelled to remember the password after being in an accident. The trauma could easily explain why I can't remember.

Most people do not encrypt their phone (unless their job requires them to), encryption-down-to-the-hardware is a drain on the battery, it heats up your phone, and it makes everything you do on your phone slower (this usually means that the person with an encrypted phone will usually be carrying two phones, one for the job that's encrypted and one that's personal and unencrypted). Most likely, the police will just plug in your personal unencrypted phone into one of their devices, and copy everything there is on it in less than two minutes.

The same reasoning that says you could have been talking on your phone while driving, or texting, could be used to justify that they check that you were not chatting through other applications, tweeting, checking facebook, checking email, inputting/querying a new address into the gps, or taking pictures of the scenery, etc. so the reasoning will go that they might as well just copy everything on your phone since it's definitely easier to do that than having to manually thumb through your phone and check every possibility from the side of a road.

Real Time Quotes European Exchanges:

Just use Google.

http://news.stockmarketvideo.com/google-adding-real-time-quotes-on-european-exchanges/4546/

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/01/31/google-finance-adds-real-time-stock-quotes-for-the-uk-germany-and-italy/

A little while ago, there was some Android malware on Google Play that had this as a side effect.

It not only infected your phone, but then installed an autorun script on SD cards so the next time you plugged your phone into your PC, it would infect Windows as well.

You can bet such things will continue... or if it was the cause of some of the spikes, as well.

even closer to the "live tweeting a past war" idea is Real Time WW2 Tweets, which has been going on since August 31, 2011.

So, new to the OP, not really a new idea though.

No doubt you felt the same way back in 2011 when someone took to tweeting WWII in real time: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/09/25/how-an-ex-history-student-is-using-twitter-to-bring-world-war-2-to-life/

Were you calling for a 'counter channel with a play-by-play according to the other sides' back then? perhaps adding: "YAY WAR, YAY ALLIES propaganda"?

That's the first I have ever heard of such thing! I wonder why that didn't get mentioned on Slashdot?

No doubt you felt the same way back in 2011 when someone took to tweeting WWII in real time: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/09/25/how-an-ex-history-student-is-using-twitter-to-bring-world-war-2-to-life/

Were you calling for a 'counter channel with a play-by-play according to the other sides' back then? perhaps adding: "YAY WAR, YAY ALLIES propaganda"?

From the screenshot, it looks like they are finally completing the project of making Firefox completely indistinguishable from Chrome.

They 0wn Hackathon!
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/03/the-word-hackathon-has-been-trademarked-in-germany/

Dude, that's the tip of the iceberg... you should see the things they've been doing to try to prevent windows phone from developing apps that use google services.. A couple of recent examples:

1) They tried to prevent WPs from syncing Gmail calendar and contact data (link). Note that this involves deliberately breaking something that wasn't broken. Making changes/improvements is cool -- but why not work with MS to ensure users don't get affected? How about a little heads up for a major change like that?
2) They've been hindering the development of a youtube app on WP (link). They've even deliberately broken third party youtube apps on WP more than once before this latest spat.

At least Apple and MS are honest about their intentions... I can't stand the doublespeak the comes out of Google's top leaders.

"New Skype malware spreading at 2,000 clicks per hour to mine Bitcoins"

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/05/new-skype-malware-spreading-at-2000-clicks-per-hour-makes-money-by-using-victims-machines-to-mine-bitcoins/

And they try to prevent it by detecting malware and we get headlines like this. Looks like people are on a witch hunt here.

Color me surprised.

WebGL in particular is not supported by Chrome or the old Android Browser (except for one specific phone).

Three things: First, one Android phone is greater than zero iPhones. Second, Android lets you install Firefox, which does support WebGL according to this chart. Third, WebGL is in Chrome for Android beta, which means it's coming soon to Chrome for Android.

You got to see this in context of Apple's policies. They've been known to exclude journalists from events because they've said things Apple didn't like.

Oooh. Of course Samsung is known for inviting bloggers to international trade fairs, where they are forced to staff the booths. True story. Not to mention suing journalists that say things they didn't like. Another true story

Pornography is banned in the app store. If other images got through before, then they were simply overlooked. That's no reason not to uphold the rules now.

If you're attempting to imply there's institutional homophobia at Apple, then you've got a bit of a problem, what with their history of publicly supporting gay issues. Such as this recently.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/27/apple-joins-the-intel-facebook-microsoft-in-supporting-the-legalization-of-gay-marriage-in-the-us/

Still don't let the facts get in the way of your bigotry (against Apple).

Hopefully Opera adopts this instead of WebKit.

They already have.

I don't know where you are getting your data. But IE 8 + 9 has around 45% market share http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/01/internet-explorer-continues-growth-past-55-market-share-thanks-to-ie9-and-ie10-as-chrome-hits-17-month-low/

Find me some in the google play store.

It doesn't seem hard to find.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/07/more-malware-found-hosted-in-google-android-market/

http://wmpoweruser.com/trend-micro-one-in-ten-google-play-store-apps-is-malware/

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/03/android-malware-emerges-on-google-play-which-installs-a-trojan-on-your-pc-uses-your-microphone-to-record-you/

Oh, and of course not all app types are available from Google Play Store are they? Where are the ad-blockers for example?

Stop trolling, and educate yourself.

It's you that headed down this path. I merely pointed out that your comment about the user always being the flaw which would always let malware in did not apply to iOS or consoles. Rather than just accept that iOS has that advantage, you wandered off into ever more unrealistic scenarios of how iOS could get malware. And then, when Android's malware problem is pointed out you flip the opposite way, and try to minimise that.

Accept that both platforms have pros and cons. And that people quite rationally make different decisions. Your opinion is just opinion, it's not generic wisdom.

And this here fellow /. readers is a prime example of a pedantic troll with no social skills.

Instead of saying 'I don't use either but it shows nothing for me, btw - did you know ghostery is ad industry funded and here is why?'

You attempt to belittle me for choosing the tool-set I do and provide absolutely no evidence to support your claims

http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/31/ghostery-a-web-tracking-blocker-that-actually-helps-the-ad-industry/

There, I just gave you one because I'm kind - any proof they are doing anything nefarious? like oh I don't know - adblock that whitelists people that pay?
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/05/reddit-whitelisted-by-adblock-plus-for-using-acceptable-online-advertisements/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/adblock-plus-accused-of-shaking-down-websites/

OMG, I provided another source - are you learning yet?

So troll, go back to your lynx browser - I have to wonder what the domain rpxnow.com knows about you though :)

This source also suggests that this is a hoax:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/04/the-pirate-bay-may-or-may-not-have-been-invited-to-north-korea-but-its-not-being-hosted-there/

This source also suggests that this is a hoax:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/04/the-pirate-bay-may-or-may-not-have-been-invited-to-north-korea-but-its-not-being-hosted-there/

You can find a copy of the 2012 Valve employee handbook floating around the net.

Yes, they have no bosses. Everyone is peer-review rated.

As the Valve handbook states: Of all the people who are not your boss, Gabe Newell is the most not your boss....if you catch their meaning there.

So, the layoffs likely came straight from the horses mouth and probably on the recommendation of all of their peers.

Here's one link that should lead you to the handbook. It's a fascinating read.
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/04/21/valves-new-employee-handbook-is-as-inspiring-as-the-games-it-makes/

I don't know what you mean by the term "the wireless standards", but both the 802.11 WLAN standards

Example: Ericsson sues Samsung over wireless patents

and H.264

Example: Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you

are open standards, and are well-documented in public archives.

So this is really a debate about what an "open standard" is. I side with the idea that open means the specification is freely available and no fees are required to implement it. Wikipedia has a good summary of your usage versus mine:

"The definitions of the term "open standard" used by academics, the European Union and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark, France, and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as do the New Zealand, South African and the Venezuelan governments. On the standard organisation side, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ensures that its specifications can be implemented on a royalty-free basis.

Many definitions of the term "standard" permit patent holders to impose "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers and/or users of the standard. For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the IETF, ISO, IEC, and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. Among these organizations, only the IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards," while the others refer only to producing "standards." The IETF and ITU-T use definitions of "open standard" that allow "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing fee requirements."

You mean, something like this? You don't have to search a lot to find several examples. You are renting their software after all, so better that they are aware how you use it.

Nokia started making profits with Windows Phone 8.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/10/nokia-sold-4-4-million-lumia-smartphones-in-solid-q4-2012-results-exceeded-expectations/

Googorola continues to make losses making Android phones.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57565253-94/motorolas-$353m-q4-loss-weighs-on-google-results/

Go figure, and get a clue.

What do you mean "doesn't happen under Android" ? Have you been sleeping under a rock?

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2012/12/31/android_malware_using_google_play_store_icon_to_trick_users

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/03/android-malware-emerges-on-google-play-which-installs-a-trojan-on-your-pc-uses-your-microphone-to-record-you/

http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/10/3751202/google-android-malware-scanner-test

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/05/android-malware-surges-despite-googles-efforts-to-bounce-dodgy-apps-off-its-platform-f-secure-ids-51447-unique-samples-in-q3/

If the Play Store gets so much attention from malware writers, the PC ecosystem with a couple of billion of PCs most of them with good network connections(for spam and DDoS) and used to login to banks and in heavy corporate use across the largest companies in the world has no chance not attracting malware.

>And frankly, if you had decent spam filters on your own personal domain, you probably wouldn't be seeing these emails anyway. I doubt anyone with a Gmail or Yahoo or Outlook.com address sees this stuff.

Depends how and how many were sent. If you were on any of the above and gave me your mail, I could send you a spam that wouldn't be classified or blocked. Because I would only send one. GYO blocks most spam going to you because they get hundreds of copies of it (or similar so it fails sameness tests). It is like being part of a herd, you're protected by numbers, but not from individual attack. And you are more at risk when disease strikes the herd.

There's always malware on any operating system, including IOS. While Apple does a good job at preventing it, they can't prevent it 100% of the time. Here are a few articles talking about malware on iOS for those who think it doesn't exist.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2012/07/06/first-ios-malware-hits-app-store/
http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/08/29/finfisher-malware-goes-mobile-infects-android-iphone-blackberry/
http://www.redmondpie.com/another-malware-app-sneaks-into-ios-app-store/
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/238101/scitech/hacker-reveals-ios-malware-vulnerability-gets-punished
http://www.techpluto.com/ios-malware/

Sounds like something Dwolla did a few months ago. Pay your friend just my sending a twitter message.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/12/dwolla-builds-support-for-sending-money-over-twitter-taking-on-chirpify-at-their-own-game/