http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game)#Snake_on_Nokia_phones says 1997 was the first appearance of Snake on a Nokia phone, for instance. But again, I'm pretty sure the article is talking about "mobile" in general, not specifically mobile phones. The Game Boy for instance certainly had "really noddy 2D games like the stuff you used to see on your telly back when I was a kid playing Pong on these little Atari machines"
"If you look over the last 15 years, we've gone from really noddy 2D games like the stuff you used to see on your telly back when I was a kid playing Pong on these little Atari machines, and now you can take a platform like the Galaxy S II and you can play some really complicated mobile games on it," enthused Ian Smythe, the director of marketing for ARM's Media Processing Division and the man tasked with getting Mali into the hands of the company's licensees.
That's funny, I could have sworn 15 years ago we were playing Super Mario 64 and Battle Arena Toshinden 2, with Final Fantasy VII, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night all announced as coming out the next year.
They mean 15 years ago *on mobile devices*. Things like the old Snake game that came on every black-and-white cell phone those days. Things like the Game Boy Color, at best.
Though I do find it amusing that I can play Super Mario 64 on my cell phone right now. It's not exactly playable, but it's possible.
Because unlike the copyright cartels, Netflix is actually trying to bring content to people the way people want to have it, in an online form where much of it is at their fingertips, without having to resort to piracy to achieve same? A legitimate service that's about as good as what the pirates enjoy is a good thing for everyone. It's something the cartels should be encouraging. If they had any sense at all or any ability to think beyond the next quarter, they'd remove as many obstacles as possible and become as easy to deal with as possible in order to help this happen.
That's fine and dandy, and I agree with you there. But the fact remains that they're simply not being easy to work with, and as they control the content, they get to make the rules, as stupid and stubborn as they're being about it.
Netflix is bringing them a lot of business they may not have enjoyed otherwise. That should be a decent bargaining position. If not, someone at Netflix needs to learn how to negotiate...
I have no data to confirm this, but I suspect that Netflix is actually taking away a lot of their traditional business (DVD sales, pay-per-view showings, etc). The studios gave Netflix great rates before under the impression that it would be an additional source of revenue, but now they're losing money on the deal and are jacking up the rates as their contracts expire.
I think they'd be celebrated if that's the reason and they were actually honest about it.
Probably, yes, but there's a chance that the money they'd lose to the angry studios would be greater than the money they'd gain from an increase in appreciative subscribers. Hell if I know if that's true or not though; hypotheticals were never my strong point.
I appreciate the real response though, unlike the AC above who decided to be pedantic about my wording.
If they had said, "Our licensing fees are going through the roof, and this new pricing scheme will help us build an even better collection of streaming content," I would have been happy to pay a little more.
That was my first reaction as well. But think about it. Why would Netflix intentionally bad-mouth the very people they're trying to negotiate lower prices with? That would accomplish nothing except even HIGHER prices for the content.
Their hands were tied. Sure, what they ended up saying didn't sound good at all, but there's no way they could have blamed the real reason for the increase.
Real question is why would you need an app? These are websites, they ought to just be tailored for specific mobile devices.
A mobile website can't access the camera to upload a photo, or send you push notifications when you get a reply, for starters. Facebook's mobile website is good, but there are uses for a separate app.
Anyone with an iDevice reading this, please go backup your 4.3.3 SHSH file right now. Even if you don't think you'll ever jailbreak, please do it as an insurance measure. It's as simple as downloading a program (TinyUmbrella), connecting your phone to the computer, and clicking a button. Behind the scenes it's saving Apple's magic "approval" that allows you to restore your device to the fully-hacked 4.3.3 firmware. In the next few days, Apple is likely to stop signing restore requests for anything except 4.3.4.
It's not that I expect most people to actively *want* to downgrade their firmware in the future. I just like having the *option* to do so. For instance, right now I could restore my iPhone to iOS version 3.1.3 if I wanted to, even though Apple stopped allowing restores to that version years ago.
As they mentioned, Namecoin is still in its infancy but serves exactly that purpose. There's even one (maybe two) Bitcoin/Namecoin exchange sites out there. Right now there's a fee to register domains, to discourage initial domain squatting, and those coins are lost forever into the ether, but that fee will eventually dwindle down to zero (no clue what the timeframe is though).
That would be a fine point if Bitcoin was indeed hacked, which it wasn't. As was brought up countless times in the comments, it was a security vulnerability on an exchange site. It just happened to be the most popular exchange, that's all.
Would you say that the USD has failed if your Bank Of America account got hacked?
Isn't that what's happening in Mexico as is? Full disclaimer, I heard this from a friend in casual conversation, but my understanding is that it's more profitable for Mexican farmers to sell their corn crops to the US for ethanol than to feed their people, so prices of corn products have risen sharply and the nation is starving as a result.
There is no difference, and the money is indeed lost forever. Technically the coins are never destroyed, but nobody has the private keys corresponding to them anymore so no one can claim them.
It's still publicity, and it's still based on facts that might have never happened. I'll admit my use of the word "advertisement" was probably wrong, but it's certainly not news.
A better analogy would be leaving the front door closed but unlocked (like having a firewall on your computer), but otherwise pretty much, yeah. You shouldn't have $500k worth of jewelry and $100 bills sitting in a known location in your house, and likewise it's pretty stupid to have $500k worth of BTC in an unencrypted, insecure wallet.dat file.
It's relatively easy to make a new wallet unknown to anybody, copy the first address made by this fresh wallet, send that address most of your coins, then encrypt your "savings" wallet and delete the unencrypted copy. Heck, put the encrypted "savings" wallet on some USB keys and a few CDs/DVDs and put them in a safety deposit box if you want to. You can continue sending payments to that address as much as you want.
It's likely that he got the majority of those coins when they were worth much less. The $500k figure would be from using today's market price of ~$20/BTC, while even a mere 6 months ago they were less than $1 apiece. It was also much easier to "mine" them at that point in time.
Come on Slashdot, I love Bitcoin and all, but enough already with the blatant advertisements! Is there anything other than allegations here? Even if it did happen, is there anyone who actually expects the police to be able to do anything about this?
Very late response so you may not see this unless you get email notifications, but whatever. Disclaimer: I am 21, and learned about the Internet at the age of 7, via AOL 3.0.
If you are indeed 12 (4chan memes aside), then I sympathize with you. I'm eternally thankful that I wasn't subjected to censorship by my parents at that age, and if I ever have kids I want to raise them right so I *don't* feel the need to censor them or snoop on their online presence or whatever. The terrible side of the Internet is inevitably going to find its way through at some point, so we might as well be prepared for it.
Heh, I already feel old when I think back to when I was in middle school, using some version of Netscape on our Mac computers, and the only allowed search engines were "Ask Jeeves For Kids" and "Onekey" which was a proxy for Google searches with Safesearch enabled. Ask Jeeves For Kids at one point showed, as a "recently asked question," "what do I do if I think I'm gay?" and my classmates and I were both amused and horrified upon seeing it. That shouldn't have happened.
I can only hope that the trend continues where each generation is more open and accepting than the last. My parents were raised in an era where it was okay to think of black people as inferior beings. I grow up in an era where that has changed, but it's still okay to hate on the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual community. Hell, I didn't really accept the "transsexual" idea until sometime this past year, when I had a one-on-one talk with a good friend who happens to be one. I'm not proud that it took me so long to realize their point of view.
Long story short, best of luck to you in the future, and I hope you keep an open mind.
Google Voice is VoIP when initiated on your computer via Gmail, and is still free up through the end of this year at least. On a (typical) mobile phone you're right, it's merely a call negotiator, not a VoIP service.
I fully agree. Case in point, there's a website that I sometimes visit that's known to have some rogue ads on it, so I always visit it with Adblock enabled. Never had a problem this way. 3 days ago I completely forgot about this and went to the site on the family computer since my own wasn't set up yet. The main page redirected to an ad, the ad loaded Java, and whatever Java applet it was loaded a virus. Took a few hours and several tools to remove fully.
I've been burned too many times to risk leaving Adblock off except on a whitelist basis for sites I trust and wish to continue supporting.
I'd have to agree here. I'm a big supporter of Bitcoin, but this isn't news. People make new mining clients all the time; this one just happens to be a Java applet embedded in a web page. Interesting, but certainly not front-page newsworthy.
My interpretation was that he was asking "What is this and why should I care?" and I answered with that in mind. The Bitcoin wiki contains a great deal more information on the details behind it, the cryptology used, the technical reasons why double-spending cannot occur and why it's virtually impossible for an attacker to compromise the entire network with CPU power, etc. But there's no point in going into that much detail if the basic premise of "it's online cash" isn't understood.
I still have no clue what this 'bitcons' are. Can anyone give an explanation not stepped in sensationalism?
Simply put, it's a form of digital cash. Its main advantage is that it's a peer-to-peer thing, so there's no central authority (aka PayPal or Visa) to shut it down, or to block payments from anyone to anyone for political purposes. For instance, there's no way to prevent someone from donating to Wikileaks if they want to. Like cash, there are no chargebacks, which is either an advantage or disadvantage depending on your point of view. The cryptology makes it rather secure and prevents people from issuing a double-spend, or "writing a bad check" so to speak.
There are a few other aspects, such as low transaction fees and its status as a deflationary currency, and backing up the wallet file because suddenly you are your own bank and are in charge of your own security, but you don't need to know much about that unless you're interested in learning more.
At the moment, it's more of an experiment or proof-of-concept, though it's rapidly expanding beyond that. It's a currency in that it has value because people believe it to have value and are willing to exchange it for goods and services. The market is somewhat shallow at the moment, but it's growing all the time. An interesting project to watch, at the very least.
Several Comcast users have written in to say they can't access the website, but we've also heard from at least one Virgin Media customer overseas and a Rogers customer in Canada who are also having problems accessing the site.
Further comments in that thread suggest that it might be a problem with the LAN on their end, perhaps a routing issue or something.
If it bothers you that much, fork out the 36$/year for Pandora One and avoid advertising altogether.
It has nothing to do with the ads being played on the stream itself. Nobody's complaining about those. It's about Pandora collecting and selling your private information to other 3rd parties without clearly stating as such.
Unless you're suggesting that by forking over $36 a year, they WON'T actively track your data, which we can reasonably assume is false. Sure you don't get ads, but they're still violating your privacy.
The iOS version of Pandora uses an ad framework called "Medialets" or at least it did as of an update in January 2010. Medialets is known to track exactly this kind of data (phone ID, physical location, etc). When I made a comment on their blog at the time, their response was essentially "Everyone else is doing it so it's okay."
Personally I'm jailbroken and installed the PrivaCy addon, so I *think* I'm being at least somewhat less tracked. Who knows for sure, though?
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game)#Snake_on_Nokia_phones says 1997 was the first appearance of Snake on a Nokia phone, for instance. But again, I'm pretty sure the article is talking about "mobile" in general, not specifically mobile phones. The Game Boy for instance certainly had "really noddy 2D games like the stuff you used to see on your telly back when I was a kid playing Pong on these little Atari machines"
"If you look over the last 15 years, we've gone from really noddy 2D games like the stuff you used to see on your telly back when I was a kid playing Pong on these little Atari machines, and now you can take a platform like the Galaxy S II and you can play some really complicated mobile games on it," enthused Ian Smythe, the director of marketing for ARM's Media Processing Division and the man tasked with getting Mali into the hands of the company's licensees.
That's funny, I could have sworn 15 years ago we were playing Super Mario 64 and Battle Arena Toshinden 2, with Final Fantasy VII, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night all announced as coming out the next year.
They mean 15 years ago *on mobile devices*. Things like the old Snake game that came on every black-and-white cell phone those days. Things like the Game Boy Color, at best.
Though I do find it amusing that I can play Super Mario 64 on my cell phone right now. It's not exactly playable, but it's possible.
Because unlike the copyright cartels, Netflix is actually trying to bring content to people the way people want to have it, in an online form where much of it is at their fingertips, without having to resort to piracy to achieve same? A legitimate service that's about as good as what the pirates enjoy is a good thing for everyone. It's something the cartels should be encouraging. If they had any sense at all or any ability to think beyond the next quarter, they'd remove as many obstacles as possible and become as easy to deal with as possible in order to help this happen.
That's fine and dandy, and I agree with you there. But the fact remains that they're simply not being easy to work with, and as they control the content, they get to make the rules, as stupid and stubborn as they're being about it.
Netflix is bringing them a lot of business they may not have enjoyed otherwise. That should be a decent bargaining position. If not, someone at Netflix needs to learn how to negotiate...
I have no data to confirm this, but I suspect that Netflix is actually taking away a lot of their traditional business (DVD sales, pay-per-view showings, etc). The studios gave Netflix great rates before under the impression that it would be an additional source of revenue, but now they're losing money on the deal and are jacking up the rates as their contracts expire.
I think they'd be celebrated if that's the reason and they were actually honest about it.
Probably, yes, but there's a chance that the money they'd lose to the angry studios would be greater than the money they'd gain from an increase in appreciative subscribers. Hell if I know if that's true or not though; hypotheticals were never my strong point.
I appreciate the real response though, unlike the AC above who decided to be pedantic about my wording.
If they had said, "Our licensing fees are going through the roof, and this new pricing scheme will help us build an even better collection of streaming content," I would have been happy to pay a little more.
That was my first reaction as well. But think about it. Why would Netflix intentionally bad-mouth the very people they're trying to negotiate lower prices with? That would accomplish nothing except even HIGHER prices for the content.
Their hands were tied. Sure, what they ended up saying didn't sound good at all, but there's no way they could have blamed the real reason for the increase.
Real question is why would you need an app? These are websites, they ought to just be tailored for specific mobile devices.
A mobile website can't access the camera to upload a photo, or send you push notifications when you get a reply, for starters. Facebook's mobile website is good, but there are uses for a separate app.
Anyone with an iDevice reading this, please go backup your 4.3.3 SHSH file right now. Even if you don't think you'll ever jailbreak, please do it as an insurance measure. It's as simple as downloading a program (TinyUmbrella), connecting your phone to the computer, and clicking a button. Behind the scenes it's saving Apple's magic "approval" that allows you to restore your device to the fully-hacked 4.3.3 firmware. In the next few days, Apple is likely to stop signing restore requests for anything except 4.3.4.
It's not that I expect most people to actively *want* to downgrade their firmware in the future. I just like having the *option* to do so. For instance, right now I could restore my iPhone to iOS version 3.1.3 if I wanted to, even though Apple stopped allowing restores to that version years ago.
As they mentioned, Namecoin is still in its infancy but serves exactly that purpose. There's even one (maybe two) Bitcoin/Namecoin exchange sites out there. Right now there's a fee to register domains, to discourage initial domain squatting, and those coins are lost forever into the ether, but that fee will eventually dwindle down to zero (no clue what the timeframe is though).
Cool story, bro.
Exactly what accounts do you think you're cracking the passwords to? What login name are you referring to?
That would be a fine point if Bitcoin was indeed hacked, which it wasn't. As was brought up countless times in the comments, it was a security vulnerability on an exchange site. It just happened to be the most popular exchange, that's all.
Would you say that the USD has failed if your Bank Of America account got hacked?
Isn't that what's happening in Mexico as is? Full disclaimer, I heard this from a friend in casual conversation, but my understanding is that it's more profitable for Mexican farmers to sell their corn crops to the US for ethanol than to feed their people, so prices of corn products have risen sharply and the nation is starving as a result.
There is no difference, and the money is indeed lost forever. Technically the coins are never destroyed, but nobody has the private keys corresponding to them anymore so no one can claim them.
It's still publicity, and it's still based on facts that might have never happened. I'll admit my use of the word "advertisement" was probably wrong, but it's certainly not news.
A better analogy would be leaving the front door closed but unlocked (like having a firewall on your computer), but otherwise pretty much, yeah. You shouldn't have $500k worth of jewelry and $100 bills sitting in a known location in your house, and likewise it's pretty stupid to have $500k worth of BTC in an unencrypted, insecure wallet.dat file.
It's relatively easy to make a new wallet unknown to anybody, copy the first address made by this fresh wallet, send that address most of your coins, then encrypt your "savings" wallet and delete the unencrypted copy. Heck, put the encrypted "savings" wallet on some USB keys and a few CDs/DVDs and put them in a safety deposit box if you want to. You can continue sending payments to that address as much as you want.
It's likely that he got the majority of those coins when they were worth much less. The $500k figure would be from using today's market price of ~$20/BTC, while even a mere 6 months ago they were less than $1 apiece. It was also much easier to "mine" them at that point in time.
Come on Slashdot, I love Bitcoin and all, but enough already with the blatant advertisements! Is there anything other than allegations here? Even if it did happen, is there anyone who actually expects the police to be able to do anything about this?
Very late response so you may not see this unless you get email notifications, but whatever. Disclaimer: I am 21, and learned about the Internet at the age of 7, via AOL 3.0.
If you are indeed 12 (4chan memes aside), then I sympathize with you. I'm eternally thankful that I wasn't subjected to censorship by my parents at that age, and if I ever have kids I want to raise them right so I *don't* feel the need to censor them or snoop on their online presence or whatever. The terrible side of the Internet is inevitably going to find its way through at some point, so we might as well be prepared for it.
Heh, I already feel old when I think back to when I was in middle school, using some version of Netscape on our Mac computers, and the only allowed search engines were "Ask Jeeves For Kids" and "Onekey" which was a proxy for Google searches with Safesearch enabled. Ask Jeeves For Kids at one point showed, as a "recently asked question," "what do I do if I think I'm gay?" and my classmates and I were both amused and horrified upon seeing it. That shouldn't have happened.
I can only hope that the trend continues where each generation is more open and accepting than the last. My parents were raised in an era where it was okay to think of black people as inferior beings. I grow up in an era where that has changed, but it's still okay to hate on the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual community. Hell, I didn't really accept the "transsexual" idea until sometime this past year, when I had a one-on-one talk with a good friend who happens to be one. I'm not proud that it took me so long to realize their point of view.
Long story short, best of luck to you in the future, and I hope you keep an open mind.
Google Voice is VoIP when initiated on your computer via Gmail, and is still free up through the end of this year at least. On a (typical) mobile phone you're right, it's merely a call negotiator, not a VoIP service.
I fully agree. Case in point, there's a website that I sometimes visit that's known to have some rogue ads on it, so I always visit it with Adblock enabled. Never had a problem this way. 3 days ago I completely forgot about this and went to the site on the family computer since my own wasn't set up yet. The main page redirected to an ad, the ad loaded Java, and whatever Java applet it was loaded a virus. Took a few hours and several tools to remove fully.
I've been burned too many times to risk leaving Adblock off except on a whitelist basis for sites I trust and wish to continue supporting.
I'd have to agree here. I'm a big supporter of Bitcoin, but this isn't news. People make new mining clients all the time; this one just happens to be a Java applet embedded in a web page. Interesting, but certainly not front-page newsworthy.
My interpretation was that he was asking "What is this and why should I care?" and I answered with that in mind. The Bitcoin wiki contains a great deal more information on the details behind it, the cryptology used, the technical reasons why double-spending cannot occur and why it's virtually impossible for an attacker to compromise the entire network with CPU power, etc. But there's no point in going into that much detail if the basic premise of "it's online cash" isn't understood.
I still have no clue what this 'bitcons' are. Can anyone give an explanation not stepped in sensationalism?
Simply put, it's a form of digital cash. Its main advantage is that it's a peer-to-peer thing, so there's no central authority (aka PayPal or Visa) to shut it down, or to block payments from anyone to anyone for political purposes. For instance, there's no way to prevent someone from donating to Wikileaks if they want to. Like cash, there are no chargebacks, which is either an advantage or disadvantage depending on your point of view. The cryptology makes it rather secure and prevents people from issuing a double-spend, or "writing a bad check" so to speak.
There are a few other aspects, such as low transaction fees and its status as a deflationary currency, and backing up the wallet file because suddenly you are your own bank and are in charge of your own security, but you don't need to know much about that unless you're interested in learning more.
At the moment, it's more of an experiment or proof-of-concept, though it's rapidly expanding beyond that. It's a currency in that it has value because people believe it to have value and are willing to exchange it for goods and services. The market is somewhat shallow at the moment, but it's growing all the time. An interesting project to watch, at the very least.
Further comments in that thread suggest that it might be a problem with the LAN on their end, perhaps a routing issue or something.
If it bothers you that much, fork out the 36$/year for Pandora One and avoid advertising altogether. It has nothing to do with the ads being played on the stream itself. Nobody's complaining about those. It's about Pandora collecting and selling your private information to other 3rd parties without clearly stating as such.
Unless you're suggesting that by forking over $36 a year, they WON'T actively track your data, which we can reasonably assume is false. Sure you don't get ads, but they're still violating your privacy.
The iOS version of Pandora uses an ad framework called "Medialets" or at least it did as of an update in January 2010. Medialets is known to track exactly this kind of data (phone ID, physical location, etc). When I made a comment on their blog at the time, their response was essentially "Everyone else is doing it so it's okay."
Personally I'm jailbroken and installed the PrivaCy addon, so I *think* I'm being at least somewhat less tracked. Who knows for sure, though?