If you're wanting a sequel to X-COM you're looking for Laser Squad Nemesis. It was developed by the original X-COM team (Julian Gollop and crew) and shares most of the basic play mechanics.
Hey, I'm following up on people's comments, which is more than most people do on this discussion site, no?
There's nothing "bureaucratic" about asking that people get the facts straight. I don't care if Apple Blog sends an email to Apple or not. What I do care about is that they get the facts straight -- or, if they can't be bothered, that they don't pretend that their speculations are based on fact.
If Wired's report was wrong, someone should correct it. But nobody's offered a correction yet amounting to any more than "it's obvious". The thing is, the truth is not always intuitive and people's gut feelings do not substitute for asking questions and digging for details.
Wired is a reputable news outlet and they presumably check their facts. What they reported is not what Apple Blog says they reported. So either one or the other is wrong. I have no stake in it either way; my interest is in figuring out what the facts are. If anyone here can demonstrate that Wired's assertion is incorrect, bring the evidence, that's fine by me. But "it just makes sense" doesn't disprove anything.
Ah yes, the Apple-designed DRM system has hit the fundamental limits of physics / current technology...
I didn't say it makes sense to me -- I said that's what Wired reported. Apple Blog presents no facts to contradict this report. If Apple Blog wants to speculate about things other than what Wired reported, that's their call. But let's all be clear that it's speculation unsupported by evidence.
In fact, Apple Blog could do us all a favor and dig into this question for us. What are these limits imposed by FairPlay that Wired wrote about? Or is Wired just off its rocker? Either one would be useful to know.
Unless compelling evidence is given otherwise, let's make the more valid assumption that decisions businesses make are "BUSINESS DECISIONS."
You've never encountered a piece of software with a ridiculous limitation built in? Even today when computers have 4GB of RAM on board, MS Excel can only address ~64,000 rows in a spreadsheet. Is that evidence of a conspiracy by MS to "sabotage" the financial sector? Or is it just bad programming?
... Even saintly only-good-intentioned, non-predatory (cough, cough) Apple.
Who said Apple was "saintly" or "good intentioned"? I don't have trouble believing that Apple would screw Moto. We just don't have any evidence to indicate this is what happened, unless Apple Blog is privy to facts Wired is not.
You wish to invalidate his speculation because he is not a journalist and posting online?
No, I wish to point out that his speculation is not supported by the article he cites. You don't have to be a full time journalist to have a reasonable grasp on the difference between speculating based on established facts and speculating based on your unsupported opinions.
Maybe Apple Blog should call up Apple and ask them to comment on Wired's reporting. That would actually shed some light on the situation, rather than just aimlessly speculating based on the phase of the moon or what have you.
Is a movie reviewer invalidated because he didn't really make the movie?
If the reviewer panned the movie on the basis of scenes that did not actually appear in the film, then yes, his opinion is not valid. This does not seem like a controversial assertion to me.
It's not "my theory", it's what Wired reported. I presume that they had some reason for reporting that. I have no idea about the mechanics of FairPlay and how they would affect a mobile device. If you or anyone else does, you should contact Wired with a correction.
People can spin theories all they want, but there's a difference between "reporting" and "speculation" and it's important to distinguish one from the other.
The Apple Blog isn't doing any original reporting of its own -- it's just riffing off an article from Wired about the business relationship between Apple and Motorola. And it doesn't seem like they read that article very closely, either.
The Apple Blog asserts:
Apple mandated the artificial 100 song limit on the ROKR.
... which makes it sound like Apple pulled the limitation out of thin air. Apple Blog goes on from there to speculate about Apple's motivation for doing so.
But if you read the Wired article, the actual claim made is nowhere near as conclusive as Apple Blog indicates it is:
The Motorola team soon discovered that working with Apple means making compromises. A key part of the iTunes package, for example, is FairPlay, Apple's digital rights management software. Ostensibly, DRM exists to benefit the music companies, but it's an equally handy control mechanism for the tech outfits that develop it - companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Apple. FairPlay would set limits on the new phone: It couldn't play music from any major online store but iTunes. It couldn't hold more than 100 songs.
The Wired article makes it sound like the 100-song limit was less an arbitrary business decision and more a decision based on limits inherent in Apple's FairPlay DRM. Apple's never going to allow an iTunes client that does not use FairPlay, so if there's something about FairPlay-for-mobiles that means you're stuck with 100 songs, that could mean that there was no predatory action on the part of Apple to "sabotage" the ROKR. It was just "the cost of doing business" for using FairPlay.
If Wired had conclusive proof that Apple made an arbitrary business decision to limit the ROKR to 100 songs, they would have sourced that allegation -- i.e. run a quote from someone who would be in a position to know. But they didn't. If they had inconclusive evidence that Apple might have done that, they could have sourced the assertion to someone more tangential via the old "A source who asked to remain anonymous told us..." approach. They did not do that either.
What that indicates to me is that either (a) Apple Blog knows something Wired does not, in which case they should source their assertion independently of the Wired article, or (b) Apple Blog's speculations are ungrounded. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which is the case.
Makes sense. Just for grins, I went ahead and downloaded the Visual C# Express so I could check out the EULA, too, and it doesn't make mention of any specific term for the license -- so I guess it's just a case of a poorly worded FAQ...
You said "free for one year" -- what does that mean, exactly? Will you be charging for this later?
We originally announced pricing of Visual Studio Express at US$49. We are now offering Visual Studio Express for free, as a limited-in-time promotional offer, until November 6, 2006.
Do customers who acquire the Visual Studio Express products during the free promotional pricing period have to pay after the first year if they want to continue to use them?
If you acquire Visual Studio Express products within the one-year promotional period, you will enjoy the rights granted in the applicable license at no cost for the term of that license.
That "for the term of that license" sounds like a loophole to me. Anyone seen the licenses that these "free" versions come with? Do they have a time period written into them?
"[T]here's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"
Maybe because the more compelling bandwidth-intensive apps there are, the more demand there will be for bandwidth (i.e. "your pipes")?
Vonage isn't stealing from you, they are selling your product! You can't use Vonage without a broadband connection. And if customers get used to running several apps like Vonage, they'll find that they have saturated their cheap $19.99/month DSL plan, which means they'll start wanting to bump up to the pricier plans.
Nothing sells a platform like apps, and if you're the phone company or the cable company, you're the platform. You want to encourage the growth of these apps, not shut them down.
I'll call it "Bzz", because I don't remember the name but Bzz is pretty close...
You're thinking of BzzAgent. Otherwise known as "the third horseman of the Apocalypse".
From their site:
Read a great report of how a BzzAgent introduced Clamato to his coworkers and spread the Bzz right away!
"Clamato", in case you haven't heard of it, is tomato juice mixed with clam juice. Seriously. If one of my coworkers came up to me in the office and started pushing something that disgusting on me, I'd have to be physically restrained from picking up the nearest stapler and dealing out some Frontier Justice.
[The Web is] the standard we ended up adopting mainly because, like so much else in the technology field, it was in the right place at the right time.
Nah, it's the standard we adopted because it was the first online hypertext system to understand an important point: that "Good Enough, Now" is better than "Perfect, Later".
Xanadu was/is an attempt to design a Perfect Hypertext System: one in which the architecture prevents links from ever breaking, updates to a document flow out to linked documents, and so forth. From the Xanadu perspective the Web is intolerably fragile.
The problem was that to get to that Perfect Hypertext System you had to solve a number of incredibly difficult problems. Just take that issue of "links never break", for starters; read over Nelson's explanation of "enfilades" to get a sense for the amount of architecture required to solve this one problem.
The key insight Berners-Lee and the WWW brought to the table was that it was OK to not try and solve every problem. The WWW doesn't try to prevent you from doing things that break the system; if you do, it just throws an error, and it's up to you to notice and fix it. When you get over trying to provide "unbreakable links" you can make creating links as simple as providing a string that points to the location of a document. And that makes the WWW a system that is very easy to get started with.
Berners-Lee's system wasn't particularly elegant but it was Good Enough, and it did the limited amount of things it claimed to do. It Worked. Even after decades of hacking, Nelson's system has never managed to escape the realm of theory. It may be Perfect, but if you give people something that works today, very few will be willing to wait for perfection.
Yahoo have been investing a lot in improving their search results, and I've found them to be as good as (or even, in some cases, better than) Google for everyday use. Your mileage may vary, of course...
You seem to be under the impression that digital TV is a technology designed to benefit the end-user/viewer.
This is incorrect. Digital TV is designed to benefit broadcasters, not viewers. It does this by allowing them to (a) squeeze more programming into a given slice of spectrum, and (b) use the spectrum for other, non-TV applications that can use over-the-air digital signals (many of which are more lucrative than running sitcoms).
For us poor schlubs on the other end of the broadcast the only attraction of digital is that it allows High Definition programming; and the molasses-like pace with which broadcasters have rolled out HD tells you exactly how much they care about that.
Once you realize that digital TV is a lot more about making life better for NAB members than for you or I, the decisions that surround it will start to make more sense.
Giving me quick access to something like a blog or Flickr isn't "innovative". A bookmark/favorite does the same thing with less overhead.
I thought the same thing until I actually tried the Flock Developer Preview that was just released. (I'm posting this from it now.)
I was all set to be unimpressed but I have to tell you, it's pretty impressive if you have a blog how easy they have made posting Web content to it. There's a "shelf" tool, for starters, that you use by just highlighting any text on a page and dragging-and-dropping it into the Shelf. Then, when you want to post about that text, you just click the "Blog this" button on the toolbar; this opens a new post (Flock autodetects the settings for your blog, so there's no configuration if you use most popular packages) in a WYSIWYG editor. Drag the text from the shelf into the editor and it pops the text in, encloses it in BLOCKQUOTE tags, and adds the cite="" attribute with the URL from the original page.
Revolutionary? Maybe not. But it's so damn slick! Currently when I blog something I copy it from Firefox into an HTML editor (Movable Type's built in editor sucks), mark it up there, log into the admin screen for my blog, then paste the marked-up text into a new post. Oh, and then I have to go back and find the original URL, copy it, and paste it in the appropriate pages. That's a lot of back and forth that Flock eliminates.
Some people use a tool like MarsEdit or wBloggar to combine the "markup" and "posting" steps together in one place. But Flock puts all the features of those products right in my browser -- no switching between programs, no copy/paste gymnastics. There's a market for those products, so it's not a big leap to imagine a market for Flock, either (albeit a small one).
It'll be interesting to see how well Flock holds up to ongoing use over time. But my first impressions are better than I expected them to be. You might want to try it too before you pass judgement...
(Random other observation: Flock changes the default engine for the Firefox search box from Google to Yahoo! A political statement? Is Yahoo! connected to Flock somehow? Veeery interesting...)
If you want to combine MySQL and InnoDB to a product which you distribute, and which is not open source, or for which the user has to pay a fee to you, you have to purchase a commercial license from MySQL AB.
So MySQL AB could fork off InnoDB, but they'd then have to change their own licensing model for MySQL, moving it from dual license to plain ol' GPL as well -- which completely wrecks the scheme they've built their business on. Or they're back to having to pay Oracle for a commercial license.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're wanting a sequel to X-COM you're looking for Laser Squad Nemesis. It was developed by the original X-COM team (Julian Gollop and crew) and shares most of the basic play mechanics.
Hey, I'm following up on people's comments, which is more than most people do on this discussion site, no?
There's nothing "bureaucratic" about asking that people get the facts straight. I don't care if Apple Blog sends an email to Apple or not. What I do care about is that they get the facts straight -- or, if they can't be bothered, that they don't pretend that their speculations are based on fact.
If Wired's report was wrong, someone should correct it. But nobody's offered a correction yet amounting to any more than "it's obvious". The thing is, the truth is not always intuitive and people's gut feelings do not substitute for asking questions and digging for details.
Wired is a reputable news outlet and they presumably check their facts. What they reported is not what Apple Blog says they reported. So either one or the other is wrong. I have no stake in it either way; my interest is in figuring out what the facts are. If anyone here can demonstrate that Wired's assertion is incorrect, bring the evidence, that's fine by me. But "it just makes sense" doesn't disprove anything.
Somebody had too much coffee this morning! Yeesh.
I didn't say it makes sense to me -- I said that's what Wired reported. Apple Blog presents no facts to contradict this report. If Apple Blog wants to speculate about things other than what Wired reported, that's their call. But let's all be clear that it's speculation unsupported by evidence.
In fact, Apple Blog could do us all a favor and dig into this question for us. What are these limits imposed by FairPlay that Wired wrote about? Or is Wired just off its rocker? Either one would be useful to know.
You've never encountered a piece of software with a ridiculous limitation built in? Even today when computers have 4GB of RAM on board, MS Excel can only address ~64,000 rows in a spreadsheet. Is that evidence of a conspiracy by MS to "sabotage" the financial sector? Or is it just bad programming?
Who said Apple was "saintly" or "good intentioned"? I don't have trouble believing that Apple would screw Moto. We just don't have any evidence to indicate this is what happened, unless Apple Blog is privy to facts Wired is not.
No, I wish to point out that his speculation is not supported by the article he cites. You don't have to be a full time journalist to have a reasonable grasp on the difference between speculating based on established facts and speculating based on your unsupported opinions.
Maybe Apple Blog should call up Apple and ask them to comment on Wired's reporting. That would actually shed some light on the situation, rather than just aimlessly speculating based on the phase of the moon or what have you.
If the reviewer panned the movie on the basis of scenes that did not actually appear in the film, then yes, his opinion is not valid. This does not seem like a controversial assertion to me.
It's not "my theory", it's what Wired reported. I presume that they had some reason for reporting that. I have no idea about the mechanics of FairPlay and how they would affect a mobile device. If you or anyone else does, you should contact Wired with a correction.
People can spin theories all they want, but there's a difference between "reporting" and "speculation" and it's important to distinguish one from the other.
I call BS.
The Apple Blog isn't doing any original reporting of its own -- it's just riffing off an article from Wired about the business relationship between Apple and Motorola. And it doesn't seem like they read that article very closely, either.
The Apple Blog asserts:
... which makes it sound like Apple pulled the limitation out of thin air. Apple Blog goes on from there to speculate about Apple's motivation for doing so.
But if you read the Wired article, the actual claim made is nowhere near as conclusive as Apple Blog indicates it is:
The Wired article makes it sound like the 100-song limit was less an arbitrary business decision and more a decision based on limits inherent in Apple's FairPlay DRM. Apple's never going to allow an iTunes client that does not use FairPlay, so if there's something about FairPlay-for-mobiles that means you're stuck with 100 songs, that could mean that there was no predatory action on the part of Apple to "sabotage" the ROKR. It was just "the cost of doing business" for using FairPlay.
If Wired had conclusive proof that Apple made an arbitrary business decision to limit the ROKR to 100 songs, they would have sourced that allegation -- i.e. run a quote from someone who would be in a position to know. But they didn't. If they had inconclusive evidence that Apple might have done that, they could have sourced the assertion to someone more tangential via the old "A source who asked to remain anonymous told us..." approach. They did not do that either.
What that indicates to me is that either (a) Apple Blog knows something Wired does not, in which case they should source their assertion independently of the Wired article, or (b) Apple Blog's speculations are ungrounded. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which is the case.
That's 3/4ths of 22 votes. I don't think I would hold up this poll as a representative sample of opinion :-)
Makes sense. Just for grins, I went ahead and downloaded the Visual C# Express so I could check out the EULA, too, and it doesn't make mention of any specific term for the license -- so I guess it's just a case of a poorly worded FAQ...
Yes, if by "free" you mean "free to use for one year":
That "for the term of that license" sounds like a loophole to me. Anyone seen the licenses that these "free" versions come with? Do they have a time period written into them?
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
I imagine that when your stock is trading at $389/share a drop of four bucks doesn't have much of a sting :)
You must be new here...
Hooray! First the Web, then TV... I can hardly wait until all media are subsumed into the maw of a single corporation. What could possibly go wrong?!?
Maybe because the more compelling bandwidth-intensive apps there are, the more demand there will be for bandwidth (i.e. "your pipes")?
Vonage isn't stealing from you, they are selling your product! You can't use Vonage without a broadband connection. And if customers get used to running several apps like Vonage, they'll find that they have saturated their cheap $19.99/month DSL plan, which means they'll start wanting to bump up to the pricier plans.
Nothing sells a platform like apps, and if you're the phone company or the cable company, you're the platform. You want to encourage the growth of these apps, not shut them down.
... but all I got was this error message!
You're thinking of BzzAgent. Otherwise known as "the third horseman of the Apocalypse".
From their site:
"Clamato", in case you haven't heard of it, is tomato juice mixed with clam juice. Seriously. If one of my coworkers came up to me in the office and started pushing something that disgusting on me, I'd have to be physically restrained from picking up the nearest stapler and dealing out some Frontier Justice.
Yeah! Since it's not like there's a kick-ass, extensible open source IDE that you can download for free which supports a whole range of languages, including C#...
Not to be confused with Argumentum ad Baculum: the technique of answering any challenge with the assertion that "Enterprise" wasn't a crappy show.
At the cost of turning the Web from an open environment with no barriers to entry into a proprietary network controlled by one company, of course.
Nah, it's the standard we adopted because it was the first online hypertext system to understand an important point: that "Good Enough, Now" is better than "Perfect, Later".
Xanadu was/is an attempt to design a Perfect Hypertext System: one in which the architecture prevents links from ever breaking, updates to a document flow out to linked documents, and so forth. From the Xanadu perspective the Web is intolerably fragile.
The problem was that to get to that Perfect Hypertext System you had to solve a number of incredibly difficult problems. Just take that issue of "links never break", for starters; read over Nelson's explanation of "enfilades" to get a sense for the amount of architecture required to solve this one problem.
The key insight Berners-Lee and the WWW brought to the table was that it was OK to not try and solve every problem. The WWW doesn't try to prevent you from doing things that break the system; if you do, it just throws an error, and it's up to you to notice and fix it. When you get over trying to provide "unbreakable links" you can make creating links as simple as providing a string that points to the location of a document. And that makes the WWW a system that is very easy to get started with.
Berners-Lee's system wasn't particularly elegant but it was Good Enough, and it did the limited amount of things it claimed to do. It Worked. Even after decades of hacking, Nelson's system has never managed to escape the realm of theory. It may be Perfect, but if you give people something that works today, very few will be willing to wait for perfection.
Yahoo have been investing a lot in improving their search results, and I've found them to be as good as (or even, in some cases, better than) Google for everyday use. Your mileage may vary, of course...
You seem to be under the impression that digital TV is a technology designed to benefit the end-user/viewer.
This is incorrect. Digital TV is designed to benefit broadcasters, not viewers. It does this by allowing them to (a) squeeze more programming into a given slice of spectrum, and (b) use the spectrum for other, non-TV applications that can use over-the-air digital signals (many of which are more lucrative than running sitcoms).
For us poor schlubs on the other end of the broadcast the only attraction of digital is that it allows High Definition programming; and the molasses-like pace with which broadcasters have rolled out HD tells you exactly how much they care about that.
Once you realize that digital TV is a lot more about making life better for NAB members than for you or I, the decisions that surround it will start to make more sense.
"[T]his long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."
-- John Maynard Keynes
No, it makes it easier for them to quote and cite "non-original stuff" in a semantically correct way.
Considering that we are all publishing on a "Web" of documents with links to each other, such things are important, you know?
I thought the same thing until I actually tried the Flock Developer Preview that was just released. (I'm posting this from it now.)
I was all set to be unimpressed but I have to tell you, it's pretty impressive if you have a blog how easy they have made posting Web content to it. There's a "shelf" tool, for starters, that you use by just highlighting any text on a page and dragging-and-dropping it into the Shelf. Then, when you want to post about that text, you just click the "Blog this" button on the toolbar; this opens a new post (Flock autodetects the settings for your blog, so there's no configuration if you use most popular packages) in a WYSIWYG editor. Drag the text from the shelf into the editor and it pops the text in, encloses it in BLOCKQUOTE tags, and adds the cite="" attribute with the URL from the original page.
Revolutionary? Maybe not. But it's so damn slick! Currently when I blog something I copy it from Firefox into an HTML editor (Movable Type's built in editor sucks), mark it up there, log into the admin screen for my blog, then paste the marked-up text into a new post. Oh, and then I have to go back and find the original URL, copy it, and paste it in the appropriate pages. That's a lot of back and forth that Flock eliminates.
Some people use a tool like MarsEdit or wBloggar to combine the "markup" and "posting" steps together in one place. But Flock puts all the features of those products right in my browser -- no switching between programs, no copy/paste gymnastics. There's a market for those products, so it's not a big leap to imagine a market for Flock, either (albeit a small one).
It'll be interesting to see how well Flock holds up to ongoing use over time. But my first impressions are better than I expected them to be. You might want to try it too before you pass judgement...
(Random other observation: Flock changes the default engine for the Firefox search box from Google to Yahoo! A political statement? Is Yahoo! connected to Flock somehow? Veeery interesting...)
Aah, but InnoDB is dual licensed, just like MySQL:
So MySQL AB could fork off InnoDB, but they'd then have to change their own licensing model for MySQL, moving it from dual license to plain ol' GPL as well -- which completely wrecks the scheme they've built their business on. Or they're back to having to pay Oracle for a commercial license.