That is probably one of the best posts ever that describes the gaming industry as of now.
I do think we may end up having a video game market collapse similar to '83. The companies that will be coming out of that will be the ones with decent IP and memorable games.
There is not a "culture of dumbness" in China as there is here in the US.
Example 1: Someone has exceptional blackhat skills and is able to focus on finding the bug in a haystack of large programs, finding new exploits. In China, they would be given a job and be considered a national hero. In Iran, they would be asked to join the IRG. Israel, they would be a part of the IDF. Here in the US, they would be tossed in the slammer for a long amount of years by a jury as fearful of them as the Salemites were of witches. Thankfully, this is beginning to change with smarter people in the public sector. However the greybeards still remember SJ Games and Operation Sun Devil.
Example 2: Heroes and role models. Last night, the University of Texas tower glowed orange, not for a football game, but for a noted scientist winning the Direc Medal. This is how the US *should* be. Most of the time, scientists and engineers are considered as a necessary evil, while people who strum a guitar, play a sport, or even just try to be stylish while sucking off a trust fund are considered the American role models. This is changing for the better, but because of the years of this, the style for America was to be dumb and let the "geeks" handle anything more complicated than an abacus. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to appear to know the "high tech stuff" as it would make him appear less macho among his Bud Light [1] swilling buds.
So, because of these trends, coupled with areas of the US that have had very poor education systems [2], the US has more than its share of dunderheads. Thankfully it seems that the pendulum towards Mike Judge's film is swinging back. There is a hope that Americans won't be watering crops with sports drink in the future.
[1]: Guinness has 170 calories per pint. BL has 110. For 60 calories, isn't it better to drink something that doesn't suck?
[2]: There are a lot of places where the education system does not fail the students, and the places are genuinely improving. However, there are still a lot of areas of the US where the only education is to "consume, consume, consume, and follow the orders given to you by the music and spoken words emanating from the TV."
That reminds me of a comment when car shopping yesterday. When kicking back during a test drive, the salesperson said, "its syncmyride, not stinkmyride".
Sync is pretty cool for what it offers. It definitely gives OnStar a run for its money when it comes to features.
This sounds almost exactly like turnitin.com where when one uploads a paper to it, it searches almost anything it can get ahold of and will list any text in any academic journal that is copied verbatim.
Another idea is to just use cryptographic nonces for the serial numbers, and have the true serials be stored on a database somewhere. This way, people can figure out what number it is, but wouldn't be able to know what other models are out there. Bonus points for adding a CRC or check digit to find typoed codes.
In WWII, it would have been almost impossible, but these days, if a place worried that a serial number would give too much data, then the true number could be encrypted, and readers be able to give the correct value.
Of course, there could be modifications to the serial number system, say XXX-YYYYY, where X is the version or key used, and Y is the actual number that is encrypted. Enemies find your static key? Increment the version number, go on.
Actually, my advice to Google would be three things:
Apps, apps, apps. Get everybody writing for the platform, from the people putting yet another 99 cent fart app on the market to people making vertical market software that costs hundreds of dollars. Then start slinging the ads showing off the cool stuff on the boob tube. This way, people will move to Android because the cool stuff they see is there.
Get a standard dock connector. Not a USB connector, but a dock connector where an Android device can sit upright, supported by it structurally and where a force perpendicular to the connector won't immediately damage the connector nor the device. Apple has craploads of accessories supporting their 30 pin dock... even new cars have a place for this. Of course, keep the USB port, but having a dock connector means one can use the Android phone with DJ equipment for mixing, use it for storage or another display on a studio control surface, have it automatically be useful for hands free calling without worrying about BT pairing, and so on.
And finally, and I've harped on this before... have an ADP device that is refreshed every 3-6 months. I don't care if it costs $600, as long as it works on either AT&T or T-Mobile, I will buy it, just for the guaranteed ability to have custom ROMS available.
Windows Phone 7 will be gunning for the Blackberry market with strong encryption and the ability to use SharePoint directly from the device. Because Microsoft is the only game in town when it comes to corporate messaging with Exchange [1], having a device that is tightly coupled with it will be something that gives it a permanent berth in a lot of enterprises.
Windows Phone 7 also will have the ability to stream what you want, like Spotify. Apple made sure Spotify isn't going to ever see daylight on US soil, and Microsoft has a large scale music store with the Zune Marketplace. So, for the usual subscription fee, being able to stream/download most stuff out there will be a plus.
Of course, there is the XBox 360 cross-pollination. This may make the device a good add-on for gaming, especially with games that interface with a console. I can see a game based on collectible cards where people have their decks stored on their WP7 devices, and play hands using the XBox 360 as a go-between, all communicating via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
So, MS has a tough road ahead of them, but it is not impossible. It wasn't that long ago when the iPhone was announced and people were laughing at Apple for trying to fight their way into an extremely crowded and well-entrenched market.
[1]: I wish IBM would revitalize Notes/Domino... they have the only product out there that would even come close to competing with MS directly in this arena.
To get my iPhone to have some of the features of the Droid X sitting right by it requires jailbreaking and installing apps. For example, if I want to see a list of E-mail, appointments, or to dos without having to unlock the device, it requires unlocking the screen unless I install LockInfo. The Droid X has a nice message light to warn of impending doom, be it a meeting, critical mail, or just a FB message from someone cool. When the screen is woken up, it is easy to tell via widgets who sent what for a message without having to actively fire up an app. Even the weather icon shows the temperature and sunny/cloudy/rainy.
If people like buttons, Android provides that. If people prefer widgets to see more stuff at a glance, that is also present.
The cool thing about Android? If something does come along that is better, Android can move fast enough to be able to be feature comparable.
Let's take encryption. Say users want to completely encrypt everything on their device, and memory card. Android can start sporting LUKS for partition encryption, or for files, it can do EncFS via FUSE. This functionality could be added on by anyone in the food chain, be it Google, the phone maker, the cellular provider, a ROM modder, or even an app vendor with an app that needs root to install the needed items. If iOS had to sport complete filesystem encryption, the only place it will be coming from is Apple, and that would be likely only on new devices the next year.
I have used a number of homebrew ROMs on my Android device, and never have had to do all of that. The worst I've had to do was tap on the Advanced Task Killer icon to bump off some background apps which were slurping up more than their share of CPU.
Android has a number of weaknesses; having to reboot often isn't really one of them unless you are using a modded/custom ROM that isn't very stable.
If you want a real complaint about the Android phone market (not Android itself), its the fact that there are no developer friendly devices that have a recent CPU and specs available in the US. I know the N1 flopped, but I do wish Google would have an ADP refresh every 3-6 months.
Depending on system, if it is something like an ATM, or other embedded appliance, it will have a watchdog card in it. This, coupled with a driver that just sends a random piece of output to the card's device makes it so that if the kernel crashes, the machine will automatically power cycle.
This takes care of the system level, but if a crash happens in userland, it is up to the appliance writer to be able to have a daemon that can detect if stuff is wedged and either kill/restart it, or maybe even trigger a hard reboot to make sure everything is completely ready to go on the next startup.
CA has its ups and downs. In 1990, the state was in a nasty recession, which the Bay Area brought it out of. I'm sure the next item that will propel the economy will be coming from there. Most likely the next boom will be alternative energy and smart grids, or it might be something completely different.
However, CA is saturated with data centers, and Apple already has a lot of eggs in that basket.
1: The NIMBY syndrome in CA. CA is so crowded that most city residents do not want a half a million square foot data center anywhere they live or work. Other areas of the US are happy to have the revenue from construction and maintenance coming in.
2: Availability of water and electricity. CA is hurting for water, and even though Enron isn't in the picture anymore, CA still is on the edge when it comes to electrical infrastructure.
3: Geography. Just like #3 mentioned by the parent poster, if Apple needs more bandwidth to other areas of the US, they can lay more physical fiber and have another peer.
4: Security. The local police will be responding to a break-in attempt or a trespasser far more quickly than the resource starved departments in California.
5: Geographic stability. No earthquakes in that zone, the DC is not in a flood plain, it isn't in twister country, and there are no dormant volcanoes ready to pop their tops.
6: (going a bit out on a limb here) Nuclear war survivability. In a nuclear exchange, CA from Tijuana to Oregon would be glassed first thing. This DC is an area that would not be a primary target. Perhaps it would be a secondary target, but not something that would be taken out for strategic military reasons in the first round.
7: Room to expand. Need another million square feet of space? Pick a direction.
Even better, perhaps focus on sandboxing and jailing. This way, if some add-on gets compromised on one session of Firefox, the window with the user's bank data isn't able to be accessed by the infected part. Or make sure that if the compromised window is in the background, it cannot get keystrokes from the foreground windows.
Better yet, use the underlying OS's protection measures, be it jail(), AppArmor, SELinux, or dropping all rights and running in a limited context, and have all add-ons run in sandboxes. This way, just compromising an add-on doesn't mean full user rights to blow away $HOME or %UserProfile%, or edit any file stored there.
That is exactly what I saw. When I was in college, I ran a program that would find the shortest path using SA/genetic algorithms. 100 cities? Let it chug on a sleepy old PC for about 60 seconds until it stabilized on a route. Maybe a little more time before it found something even better, but after a minute or two, it would find a short path and stay on it.
Of course, this route can't be *proven* to be the shortest, but "good enough" applies here. The SA algorithm was O(N). Finding the true correct shortest path would be O(N!).
The big question here: Is a path found by SA or genetic algorithms acceptable? Or does the absolute best path, found by brute force be the only thing that does the job?
This functionality wouldn't be hard to put in other operating systems as a default, especially now that AppArmor is an integral part of the Linux kernel, and similar functionality is in Darwin.
Very true, but malware running in this context can get out of this and start affecting other parts of the system. If malware can get a full user context, it really does not need admin rights other than to sneak past A/V utilities and perhaps install a.sys file for encrypting user files for ransom later on. Having the whole program encapsulated a la Sandboxie prevents this from happening.
This is not intended to knock IE's protected mode. Microsoft is the first OS mainstream OS maker to have functionality to reduce the amount of damage a compromised Web browser or its add-ons can do to a system.
And we would have an OS made in 2001 being patched and repatched.
Apple does not support OS 9 anymore. IBM doesn't sell new copies of AIX 5L or 4.3. Oracle supports Solaris 8, but one isn't going to use anything but Solaris 10 for a modern deployment. Microsoft had to move on, because XP has so many issues, and MS had to have an OS to deal with security issues of 2010, not 2001.
In 2001, Web browsers were not the primary focus of blackhats. Instead, getting people to run executables via E-mail and remote attacks were the primary infection vector. These days, browsers and their add-ons are the primary means of infecting PCs, with the Dancing Bunnies the second.
What caused people to hate Vista wasn't Microsoft. It was third party software and hardware makers who were too lazy to get release-quality drivers out. Instead, they put out alpha or beta drivers, and told the customers to blame the blue-screens on Microsoft. These are the same developers who put out pages and pages of blogs lambasting UAC and whining how they actually had to separate user and admin privs... just like how UNIX developers have been doing for over 30 years.
There were a few valid complaints, but they were addressed by disabling a few services in Vista.
All and all, Vista was a needed security update, especially with the addition of ASLR, and BitLocker.
I'd like to see MS work on virtualization on the app level. This way, a Web browser (or more specifically a Web browser instance) has its own instance of everything in the OS. If the instance gets compromised. malware can happily scribble on the Registry, drop files into SYSTEM32, etc. However, those changes are mapped to a temp directory and as soon as that window is closed, those changes all drop. Of course, saved files that the user wants would be set aside somewhere so they don't get erased on the VM shutdown.
Combine this with Microsoft's app store that is coming out in W8, and this would do a good job in reducing the instance of compromise. Once Joe Sixpack is used to only installing files from a glorified repository, he actually might click "cancel" if something asks him to download a pr0n viewer pops up on the screen.
Apple would open themselves to a world of hurt by doing that. Using clients for P2P is verboten almost everywhere on the Internet. To boot, people would be complaining about the CPU usage, and the fact that they are paying Apple for the store, so why do they also have to pay in CPU and bandwidth as well (see the Blizzard flame threads around WoW patch days for examples of this.)
On the other hand, A data center makes perfect sense, especially if it is used for serving applications. I wonder if Apple's app store will encrypt or "personalize" downloaded stuff. This means that Apple can't just mirror files; they have to have the files processed in some way before the download to the end user begins. This makes the fact that Apple being rumored to be going with high end AIX and Sun machines more understandable, as those have the CPU power to package the.ipk files for each user.
This is the reason I also have a MM account. No wink, wink, nudge, nudge and "accidental" leaks of personal information to advertisers. There is no third party in the mix with conflicting interests, just the E-mail provider and the end user.
I also am waiting on that data. I want to know in the real world how long a SSD sitting on a shelf with data will last in general. How long will it last before enough electrons escape and goes beneath the threshold for discerning a one or a zero (or in the case of MLC, a 0,1,2, or 3.) Two years? Three years? 10-20 years? Because of the way SSDs are, if they can reliably last "X" amount of time, one can keep adding redundancy in the form of ECC and even RAID to bump that factor up to tolerable levels.
The archival life of SSDs (and flash in general) is important -- especially for people like Aunt Tillie with the photos on the SD card in her camera that are not backed up anywhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
That is probably one of the best posts ever that describes the gaming industry as of now.
I do think we may end up having a video game market collapse similar to '83. The companies that will be coming out of that will be the ones with decent IP and memorable games.
Even better, just pull the white option totally, and focus more efforts on the next generation of device.
Let the iPhone 5 have two colors.
There is not a "culture of dumbness" in China as there is here in the US.
Example 1: Someone has exceptional blackhat skills and is able to focus on finding the bug in a haystack of large programs, finding new exploits. In China, they would be given a job and be considered a national hero. In Iran, they would be asked to join the IRG. Israel, they would be a part of the IDF. Here in the US, they would be tossed in the slammer for a long amount of years by a jury as fearful of them as the Salemites were of witches. Thankfully, this is beginning to change with smarter people in the public sector. However the greybeards still remember SJ Games and Operation Sun Devil.
Example 2: Heroes and role models. Last night, the University of Texas tower glowed orange, not for a football game, but for a noted scientist winning the Direc Medal. This is how the US *should* be. Most of the time, scientists and engineers are considered as a necessary evil, while people who strum a guitar, play a sport, or even just try to be stylish while sucking off a trust fund are considered the American role models. This is changing for the better, but because of the years of this, the style for America was to be dumb and let the "geeks" handle anything more complicated than an abacus. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to appear to know the "high tech stuff" as it would make him appear less macho among his Bud Light [1] swilling buds.
So, because of these trends, coupled with areas of the US that have had very poor education systems [2], the US has more than its share of dunderheads. Thankfully it seems that the pendulum towards Mike Judge's film is swinging back. There is a hope that Americans won't be watering crops with sports drink in the future.
[1]: Guinness has 170 calories per pint. BL has 110. For 60 calories, isn't it better to drink something that doesn't suck?
[2]: There are a lot of places where the education system does not fail the students, and the places are genuinely improving. However, there are still a lot of areas of the US where the only education is to "consume, consume, consume, and follow the orders given to you by the music and spoken words emanating from the TV."
That reminds me of a comment when car shopping yesterday. When kicking back during a test drive, the salesperson said, "its syncmyride, not stinkmyride".
Sync is pretty cool for what it offers. It definitely gives OnStar a run for its money when it comes to features.
This sounds almost exactly like turnitin.com where when one uploads a paper to it, it searches almost anything it can get ahold of and will list any text in any academic journal that is copied verbatim.
Another idea is to just use cryptographic nonces for the serial numbers, and have the true serials be stored on a database somewhere. This way, people can figure out what number it is, but wouldn't be able to know what other models are out there. Bonus points for adding a CRC or check digit to find typoed codes.
In WWII, it would have been almost impossible, but these days, if a place worried that a serial number would give too much data, then the true number could be encrypted, and readers be able to give the correct value.
Of course, there could be modifications to the serial number system, say XXX-YYYYY, where X is the version or key used, and Y is the actual number that is encrypted. Enemies find your static key? Increment the version number, go on.
Actually, my advice to Google would be three things:
Apps, apps, apps. Get everybody writing for the platform, from the people putting yet another 99 cent fart app on the market to people making vertical market software that costs hundreds of dollars. Then start slinging the ads showing off the cool stuff on the boob tube. This way, people will move to Android because the cool stuff they see is there.
Get a standard dock connector. Not a USB connector, but a dock connector where an Android device can sit upright, supported by it structurally and where a force perpendicular to the connector won't immediately damage the connector nor the device. Apple has craploads of accessories supporting their 30 pin dock... even new cars have a place for this. Of course, keep the USB port, but having a dock connector means one can use the Android phone with DJ equipment for mixing, use it for storage or another display on a studio control surface, have it automatically be useful for hands free calling without worrying about BT pairing, and so on.
And finally, and I've harped on this before... have an ADP device that is refreshed every 3-6 months. I don't care if it costs $600, as long as it works on either AT&T or T-Mobile, I will buy it, just for the guaranteed ability to have custom ROMS available.
Windows Phone 7 will be gunning for the Blackberry market with strong encryption and the ability to use SharePoint directly from the device. Because Microsoft is the only game in town when it comes to corporate messaging with Exchange [1], having a device that is tightly coupled with it will be something that gives it a permanent berth in a lot of enterprises.
Windows Phone 7 also will have the ability to stream what you want, like Spotify. Apple made sure Spotify isn't going to ever see daylight on US soil, and Microsoft has a large scale music store with the Zune Marketplace. So, for the usual subscription fee, being able to stream/download most stuff out there will be a plus.
Of course, there is the XBox 360 cross-pollination. This may make the device a good add-on for gaming, especially with games that interface with a console. I can see a game based on collectible cards where people have their decks stored on their WP7 devices, and play hands using the XBox 360 as a go-between, all communicating via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
So, MS has a tough road ahead of them, but it is not impossible. It wasn't that long ago when the iPhone was announced and people were laughing at Apple for trying to fight their way into an extremely crowded and well-entrenched market.
[1]: I wish IBM would revitalize Notes/Domino... they have the only product out there that would even come close to competing with MS directly in this arena.
To get my iPhone to have some of the features of the Droid X sitting right by it requires jailbreaking and installing apps. For example, if I want to see a list of E-mail, appointments, or to dos without having to unlock the device, it requires unlocking the screen unless I install LockInfo. The Droid X has a nice message light to warn of impending doom, be it a meeting, critical mail, or just a FB message from someone cool. When the screen is woken up, it is easy to tell via widgets who sent what for a message without having to actively fire up an app. Even the weather icon shows the temperature and sunny/cloudy/rainy.
If people like buttons, Android provides that. If people prefer widgets to see more stuff at a glance, that is also present.
The cool thing about Android? If something does come along that is better, Android can move fast enough to be able to be feature comparable.
Let's take encryption. Say users want to completely encrypt everything on their device, and memory card. Android can start sporting LUKS for partition encryption, or for files, it can do EncFS via FUSE. This functionality could be added on by anyone in the food chain, be it Google, the phone maker, the cellular provider, a ROM modder, or even an app vendor with an app that needs root to install the needed items. If iOS had to sport complete filesystem encryption, the only place it will be coming from is Apple, and that would be likely only on new devices the next year.
I have used a number of homebrew ROMs on my Android device, and never have had to do all of that. The worst I've had to do was tap on the Advanced Task Killer icon to bump off some background apps which were slurping up more than their share of CPU.
Android has a number of weaknesses; having to reboot often isn't really one of them unless you are using a modded/custom ROM that isn't very stable.
If you want a real complaint about the Android phone market (not Android itself), its the fact that there are no developer friendly devices that have a recent CPU and specs available in the US. I know the N1 flopped, but I do wish Google would have an ADP refresh every 3-6 months.
Depending on system, if it is something like an ATM, or other embedded appliance, it will have a watchdog card in it. This, coupled with a driver that just sends a random piece of output to the card's device makes it so that if the kernel crashes, the machine will automatically power cycle.
This takes care of the system level, but if a crash happens in userland, it is up to the appliance writer to be able to have a daemon that can detect if stuff is wedged and either kill/restart it, or maybe even trigger a hard reboot to make sure everything is completely ready to go on the next startup.
CA has its ups and downs. In 1990, the state was in a nasty recession, which the Bay Area brought it out of. I'm sure the next item that will propel the economy will be coming from there. Most likely the next boom will be alternative energy and smart grids, or it might be something completely different.
However, CA is saturated with data centers, and Apple already has a lot of eggs in that basket.
There are also a number of other reasons:
1: The NIMBY syndrome in CA. CA is so crowded that most city residents do not want a half a million square foot data center anywhere they live or work. Other areas of the US are happy to have the revenue from construction and maintenance coming in.
2: Availability of water and electricity. CA is hurting for water, and even though Enron isn't in the picture anymore, CA still is on the edge when it comes to electrical infrastructure.
3: Geography. Just like #3 mentioned by the parent poster, if Apple needs more bandwidth to other areas of the US, they can lay more physical fiber and have another peer.
4: Security. The local police will be responding to a break-in attempt or a trespasser far more quickly than the resource starved departments in California.
5: Geographic stability. No earthquakes in that zone, the DC is not in a flood plain, it isn't in twister country, and there are no dormant volcanoes ready to pop their tops.
6: (going a bit out on a limb here) Nuclear war survivability. In a nuclear exchange, CA from Tijuana to Oregon would be glassed first thing. This DC is an area that would not be a primary target. Perhaps it would be a secondary target, but not something that would be taken out for strategic military reasons in the first round.
7: Room to expand. Need another million square feet of space? Pick a direction.
Even better, perhaps focus on sandboxing and jailing. This way, if some add-on gets compromised on one session of Firefox, the window with the user's bank data isn't able to be accessed by the infected part. Or make sure that if the compromised window is in the background, it cannot get keystrokes from the foreground windows.
Better yet, use the underlying OS's protection measures, be it jail(), AppArmor, SELinux, or dropping all rights and running in a limited context, and have all add-ons run in sandboxes. This way, just compromising an add-on doesn't mean full user rights to blow away $HOME or %UserProfile%, or edit any file stored there.
That is exactly what I saw. When I was in college, I ran a program that would find the shortest path using SA/genetic algorithms. 100 cities? Let it chug on a sleepy old PC for about 60 seconds until it stabilized on a route. Maybe a little more time before it found something even better, but after a minute or two, it would find a short path and stay on it.
Of course, this route can't be *proven* to be the shortest, but "good enough" applies here. The SA algorithm was O(N). Finding the true correct shortest path would be O(N!).
The big question here: Is a path found by SA or genetic algorithms acceptable? Or does the absolute best path, found by brute force be the only thing that does the job?
Er, first mainstream OS maker...
This functionality wouldn't be hard to put in other operating systems as a default, especially now that AppArmor is an integral part of the Linux kernel, and similar functionality is in Darwin.
Very true, but malware running in this context can get out of this and start affecting other parts of the system. If malware can get a full user context, it really does not need admin rights other than to sneak past A/V utilities and perhaps install a .sys file for encrypting user files for ransom later on. Having the whole program encapsulated a la Sandboxie prevents this from happening.
This is not intended to knock IE's protected mode. Microsoft is the first OS mainstream OS maker to have functionality to reduce the amount of damage a compromised Web browser or its add-ons can do to a system.
And we would have an OS made in 2001 being patched and repatched.
Apple does not support OS 9 anymore. IBM doesn't sell new copies of AIX 5L or 4.3. Oracle supports Solaris 8, but one isn't going to use anything but Solaris 10 for a modern deployment. Microsoft had to move on, because XP has so many issues, and MS had to have an OS to deal with security issues of 2010, not 2001.
In 2001, Web browsers were not the primary focus of blackhats. Instead, getting people to run executables via E-mail and remote attacks were the primary infection vector. These days, browsers and their add-ons are the primary means of infecting PCs, with the Dancing Bunnies the second.
What caused people to hate Vista wasn't Microsoft. It was third party software and hardware makers who were too lazy to get release-quality drivers out. Instead, they put out alpha or beta drivers, and told the customers to blame the blue-screens on Microsoft. These are the same developers who put out pages and pages of blogs lambasting UAC and whining how they actually had to separate user and admin privs... just like how UNIX developers have been doing for over 30 years.
There were a few valid complaints, but they were addressed by disabling a few services in Vista.
All and all, Vista was a needed security update, especially with the addition of ASLR, and BitLocker.
I'd like to see MS work on virtualization on the app level. This way, a Web browser (or more specifically a Web browser instance) has its own instance of everything in the OS. If the instance gets compromised. malware can happily scribble on the Registry, drop files into SYSTEM32, etc. However, those changes are mapped to a temp directory and as soon as that window is closed, those changes all drop. Of course, saved files that the user wants would be set aside somewhere so they don't get erased on the VM shutdown.
Combine this with Microsoft's app store that is coming out in W8, and this would do a good job in reducing the instance of compromise. Once Joe Sixpack is used to only installing files from a glorified repository, he actually might click "cancel" if something asks him to download a pr0n viewer pops up on the screen.
Apple would open themselves to a world of hurt by doing that. Using clients for P2P is verboten almost everywhere on the Internet. To boot, people would be complaining about the CPU usage, and the fact that they are paying Apple for the store, so why do they also have to pay in CPU and bandwidth as well (see the Blizzard flame threads around WoW patch days for examples of this.)
On the other hand, A data center makes perfect sense, especially if it is used for serving applications. I wonder if Apple's app store will encrypt or "personalize" downloaded stuff. This means that Apple can't just mirror files; they have to have the files processed in some way before the download to the end user begins. This makes the fact that Apple being rumored to be going with high end AIX and Sun machines more understandable, as those have the CPU power to package the .ipk files for each user.
This is the reason I also have a MM account. No wink, wink, nudge, nudge and "accidental" leaks of personal information to advertisers. There is no third party in the mix with conflicting interests, just the E-mail provider and the end user.
TANSTAAFL.
I also am waiting on that data. I want to know in the real world how long a SSD sitting on a shelf with data will last in general. How long will it last before enough electrons escape and goes beneath the threshold for discerning a one or a zero (or in the case of MLC, a 0,1,2, or 3.) Two years? Three years? 10-20 years? Because of the way SSDs are, if they can reliably last "X" amount of time, one can keep adding redundancy in the form of ECC and even RAID to bump that factor up to tolerable levels.
The archival life of SSDs (and flash in general) is important -- especially for people like Aunt Tillie with the photos on the SD card in her camera that are not backed up anywhere else.