They claim that Android is a great place to make money for decent apps, but what they fail to state is that if Battleheart hadn't had such a success on iOS, then their Android story might be completely different... it's not just that their Android App looks great and plays nice, it's that it's had 6 months of free marketing on the Apple App Store, and Android users have been waiting for the game to be ported.
I would love to see a similar game come out only on Android and compare the sales.
Would Mika Mobile be willing to make their next game initially exclusive to Android just to test this theory?
The goal of iTunes Match isn't to "hunt down pirates", it's an amnesty program to "legitimize" the honest folks who may or may not have pirated music.
It will do nothing for piracy rates for about 2-3 years.
However, as iTunes downloads saturate the populace (as Apple is the #1 music retailer) and folks spend less and less time ripping CDs (by then only life-free-or-die-tards or audiofiles will do that anymore!), any "sharing" of the downloaded music will be fingerprinted with the download info.
Of course, this will result in sharing of some iTunes match files... and when those fingerprinted files are sent from a different user back to Apple, then it's clear it's a copyright infringement. Perhaps Apple will simply disallow matching of copied itunes files, or ignore or gently remind the user "don't pirate music". However, at this point, it could happen that the RIAA has everything laid out for them in black and white... a few high-profile cases is all it will take to keep the sheep in line and money flowing.
A capitalist, free-market take on compulsory licensing that both benefits Apple and the RIAA while keeping the government and it's pesky mitts off the gold and the concept of "paid tracks" still alive (as a side effect, it even throws a few bones to the users)... quite diabolical and visionary.
There are still tons of accounts ripe for data mining.
Stale data is not as useful for data mining. Trending data, for example is often far more valuable than static data (like birthdate)... which is why people hated Twitter's #dickbar.
Lack of user interest will directly affect the value of Facebook's private data to their real customers (the paying ones).
How so? What is wrong with the current SFTP clients in comparison to the combination of a web browser and dropbox or similar?
Key exchange. How do you ensure that the other party has credentials to login? Send via email? Is that secure?... this regresses ad-infinitum.
With Dropbox (as an example), sharing is either with a group of dropbox users (key exchange solved already as they're authenticated via dropbox) or with the public at-large (ie, insecure).
i really don't know why this idea of remembering just one personal quirky algorithm isn't more widespread
The problem with algorithms is stupid artificial restrictions on credentials by some sites. For example, I can only choose numbers for my "PIN" on my 401k. Or my password must be all lowercase for my public utilities site or contain no special characters at my bank some other hair-brained restriction.
Same with user names. Often your username must be your email address. Sometimes they don't allow the @ sign. Other times, it's not modifiable and random characters assigned to you (I have at least one brokerage site where this is the case).
I've tried the algorithm approach, and eventually all the numerous restrictions lead to a completely insecure result from your algorithm, or the algorithm is too complex to store in wetware, resulting in many "forgot my password" delays. Describing and documenting your algorithm is as silly as writing down your master password, so that's going to work.
Eventually you must keep track of them all and if you're doing so you should definitely encrypt/secure it. Thus the password manager. If you get a good one, typing in credentials will be automated based on site (this also removes phishing attacks) and it will exist on your smartphone/PDA and can by synced by Dropbox and/or memory stick.
Password reuse is a major problem, regardless of site. There is very little excuse not to use tools like 1Password, LastPass or KeePassX. I've gotten my technophobic parents and wife on the treadmill (all use 1password via a family license).
I've gotten them comfortable ditching their "known good password" on their other sites, learning the strong master password by heart, and got them comortable enough to generate a good-length (default 18 characters) passwords for any site that needs it.
The best part about a password manager is that you can share (Dropbox for now, perhaps iCloud tomorrow) your credential set (which are encrypted, of course) and now you don't get bugged about the Amazon password from your spouse, she just logs in and buys the stuff.
Given the country's vast oil resources, it's pretty clear that the rest of the world is more interested in hedging their bets and ensuring the proper flow of oil. This entails working with whoever controls the oil fields, and making sure the currency exchange is stable for both groups (already solved for Ghaddafi's folks). Given the rebels are not going away any time soon, it's pretty clear that a stable currency exchange requires some form of central banking.
Cloning a VM is amazing? The real magic(tm) is in creating the VM the first time.
You obviously don't understand PaaS. The developer who deploys *never touches* a VM. It's created on the fly, not cloned, with load-balancing, dependencies and caching all figured out for you.
Apparently that's what it looks like... except it's a 15 year old who dun it. FTFA:
Your app is launched into a securely partitioned environment on a cloud server. All CPAN modules required by your app are installed. MySQL and memcached are automatically set up, and connection information is exposed to you via environmental variables. In front of your app sits a Varnish caching server, quietly improving the performance of your app.
More in the article, but that's already pretty amazing.
Apple's not far behind. Plans are already in the works for the iDildo. Mobile orgasms... there's an app for that!
You speak as if this thing doesn't already exist. When it comes to physical devices, the Apple ecosystem is a lot more mature (or teen if that's your thang).
If that's the case then why did iPad 2 come out only ONE YEAR after iPad 1?
Nothing to do with iPad 1 being rushed out without a camera, by chance?
Sorry, this is a lame argument. A camera is not a necessary tablet item by any means. I have a "rushed" iPad v1 and there was simply no other tablet I could have bought anywhere near the price with the same capabilities. Apple didn't include a camera because there was no competition and it wasn't absolutely essential.
The law is for audio recordings, not video only. I know I was pulled over once (light out) and the first thing the officer did was to inform me that he was recording audio and asked if I consented (I don't know what would happen if I didn't....).
I wonder what would happen if you asked him the same thing? If he didn't consent, what could you do about it?
Granted XP is ancient and not very supported, but its still heavily used. If we're talking about end-users, its more likely to go:
"Aww, not supported. I guess I'll use something else"
instead of
"Aww, not supported. Let me pay a few hundred euros to upgrade my OS (and maybe need to improve my hardware) to use this product/service."
And when confronted with the choice of paying those hundreds of euros/dollars for a silly OS license on their non-compliant box as opposed to a few hundred more shekels for shiny new Mac...
I don't think it's a bad idea at all. Not only is supporting a 10 year old OS more costly, forcing the upgrade could net Apple some new Mac owners (perhaps they'll choose a PC for upgrading, that's ok too)
Again, Apple doesn't lose if Microsoft somehow gains by their actions.
Unfortunately, they'll be protected as employees. The school board will take the heat for this one, and not without justification, seeing as someone at the very least had their head buried firmly up their asses.
Why should the school board allow this travesty of privacy? Let them suffer or have them recommend the firing of the guilty employees.
For example, users with admin privs have write access to the/Applications folder.
IIRC, on the Mac, it behaves like a sudo permission: you are required for password anytime you touch/Applications (which is why XAMPP for Mac was such a PITA - they put htdocs in/Applications!!! - protip: symlink it or change the php.ini so you can place webroot elsewhere and change content without admin pwd).
In short, no, local user access won't allow one app to infect others (unless they're in ~/Applications).
What are the odds that this iCloud service isn't run OSX server at it's core?
It shouldn't matter because Apple as a company (nowadays) isn't as interested in dogfoodingfor the sake of it... that's a position popularized by Microsoft, which proudly proclaimed their OS as better than the competition (Ballmer still doesn't allow iPhones or Google services in his household, for example)... which brought on the hotmail conversion debacle and the Danger dataloss fiasco.
Apple makes no such (unrealistic) claims, so they have no such expectations to meet.
...can a foreign power do damage to "nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines" via a cyber attack? Seriously, I want to know, this is not a rhetorical question. Are their computer systems connected to an outside network or is there a someone on the inside (a la Stuxnet)?
Personally I think that any country that hides and shelters a terrorist that kills thousands and thousands of the civilians would be considered an act of war. Pakistan should consider itself lucky that its only got a small slap on the wrist by the USA navy seals.
They got a lot more than a slap on the wrist... for nearly a decade, they got $10B+ in funding from the US by being their "ally" in the "War on Terror" (of course, the majority of that was funding started by the previous administration). So I guess we slapped their wrist and embarrassed them, but while also giving them billions in funding and propping up their military.
I think the Monsanto situation could be easily resolved by making them responsible for not allowing the spread of the pollen, rather than making the private farmers responsible for pollen getting into their area.
This would likely make the practice of GM crops infeasible. Monsanto got "ahead of the issue" by posing the opposite from rational position (since it's not possible), and will sound like a hero when they eventually "compromise" on the issue by saying that no one should be held responsible (thus removing the biggest issue to GM crops - infestation of non-GM crops by pollen/hybridization).
For embracing what Android is supposed to be about. When Motorola and Samsung decided to lock down their devices tighter than the iPhone, it boggled my mind why any freedom-loving geek would opt for such devices (unless they were looking for challenge).
Kudos to HTC for their consumer friendliness... sad to think that 10-15 years ago Motorola would provide open schematics for their kit on request, and now they're leading the charge for the Big Brother lockdown.
If Apple is a design genius, Amazon is a sales & distribution genius. This looks to be a wonderful match up!
Amazon has many many strengths and is a formidable competitor (for such a large company they are very nimble). About the only two larger and nimbler companies are Google and Apple, however. Apple is the king of premium. They can sell anything at a premium (see Apple battery charger) and can decommoditize and disinter-mediate nimbly. They are a serial disruptor of markets. Tim Cook also knows a bit about distribution (and beat Dell at their own game). Google is the king of free, and owns the bleeding edge. From Google Voice to free navigation, Google's beta's are often better than competitor's years-old services... and hundreds of millions of people depend on google on a daily basis. Amazon may be a very strong entity but it's playing with giants that are themselves agile and strong. Best of luck to Amazon.
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They claim that Android is a great place to make money for decent apps, but what they fail to state is that if Battleheart hadn't had such a success on iOS, then their Android story might be completely different ... it's not just that their Android App looks great and plays nice, it's that it's had 6 months of free marketing on the Apple App Store, and Android users have been waiting for the game to be ported.
I would love to see a similar game come out only on Android and compare the sales.
Would Mika Mobile be willing to make their next game initially exclusive to Android just to test this theory?
The goal of iTunes Match isn't to "hunt down pirates", it's an amnesty program to "legitimize" the honest folks who may or may not have pirated music.
It will do nothing for piracy rates for about 2-3 years.
However, as iTunes downloads saturate the populace (as Apple is the #1 music retailer) and folks spend less and less time ripping CDs (by then only life-free-or-die-tards or audiofiles will do that anymore!), any "sharing" of the downloaded music will be fingerprinted with the download info.
Of course, this will result in sharing of some iTunes match files... and when those fingerprinted files are sent from a different user back to Apple, then it's clear it's a copyright infringement. Perhaps Apple will simply disallow matching of copied itunes files, or ignore or gently remind the user "don't pirate music". However, at this point, it could happen that the RIAA has everything laid out for them in black and white... a few high-profile cases is all it will take to keep the sheep in line and money flowing.
A capitalist, free-market take on compulsory licensing that both benefits Apple and the RIAA while keeping the government and it's pesky mitts off the gold and the concept of "paid tracks" still alive (as a side effect, it even throws a few bones to the users)... quite diabolical and visionary.
....may not have effectively "owned" Nokia like they do today (Microsoft effectively paid Nokia $1B+ to guarantee WP7 was their prime platform).
I'm not saying it's too little to late, it does look like a fantastic phone with really fluid UI. And it runs Linux without a JVM layer. Nice.
There are still tons of accounts ripe for data mining.
Stale data is not as useful for data mining. Trending data, for example is often far more valuable than static data (like birthdate)... which is why people hated Twitter's #dickbar.
Lack of user interest will directly affect the value of Facebook's private data to their real customers (the paying ones).
It's a surprise because mac users are usually happy when someone else who's competent decides what's best for them.
FTFY.
If you haven't been paying attention, those folks at Skype who released 5.0 are *not* competent, at least design-wise.
How so?
What is wrong with the current SFTP clients in comparison to the combination of a web browser and dropbox or similar?
Key exchange. How do you ensure that the other party has credentials to login? Send via email? Is that secure? ... this regresses ad-infinitum.
With Dropbox (as an example), sharing is either with a group of dropbox users (key exchange solved already as they're authenticated via dropbox) or with the public at-large (ie, insecure).
i really don't know why this idea of remembering just one personal quirky algorithm isn't more widespread
The problem with algorithms is stupid artificial restrictions on credentials by some sites. For example, I can only choose numbers for my "PIN" on my 401k. Or my password must be all lowercase for my public utilities site or contain no special characters at my bank some other hair-brained restriction.
Same with user names. Often your username must be your email address. Sometimes they don't allow the @ sign. Other times, it's not modifiable and random characters assigned to you (I have at least one brokerage site where this is the case).
I've tried the algorithm approach, and eventually all the numerous restrictions lead to a completely insecure result from your algorithm, or the algorithm is too complex to store in wetware, resulting in many "forgot my password" delays. Describing and documenting your algorithm is as silly as writing down your master password, so that's going to work.
Eventually you must keep track of them all and if you're doing so you should definitely encrypt/secure it. Thus the password manager. If you get a good one, typing in credentials will be automated based on site (this also removes phishing attacks) and it will exist on your smartphone/PDA and can by synced by Dropbox and/or memory stick.
Password reuse is a major problem, regardless of site. There is very little excuse not to use tools like 1Password, LastPass or KeePassX.
I've gotten my technophobic parents and wife on the treadmill (all use 1password via a family license).
I've gotten them comfortable ditching their "known good password" on their other sites, learning the strong master password by heart, and got them comortable enough to generate a good-length (default 18 characters) passwords for any site that needs it.
The best part about a password manager is that you can share (Dropbox for now, perhaps iCloud tomorrow) your credential set (which are encrypted, of course) and now you don't get bugged about the Amazon password from your spouse, she just logs in and buys the stuff.
Something about the fact that they've formed their own central bank seems less than grass-roots to me.
Given the country's vast oil resources, it's pretty clear that the rest of the world is more interested in hedging their bets and ensuring the proper flow of oil. This entails working with whoever controls the oil fields, and making sure the currency exchange is stable for both groups (already solved for Ghaddafi's folks). Given the rebels are not going away any time soon, it's pretty clear that a stable currency exchange requires some form of central banking.
Cloning a VM is amazing? The real magic(tm) is in creating the VM the first time.
You obviously don't understand PaaS. The developer who deploys *never touches* a VM. It's created on the fly, not cloned, with load-balancing, dependencies and caching all figured out for you.
So its Heroku for perl devs?
Apparently that's what it looks like... except it's a 15 year old who dun it. FTFA:
Your app is launched into a securely partitioned environment on a cloud server. All CPAN modules required by your app are installed. MySQL and memcached are automatically set up, and connection information is exposed to you via environmental variables. In front of your app sits a Varnish caching server, quietly improving the performance of your app.
More in the article, but that's already pretty amazing.
Apple's not far behind. Plans are already in the works for the iDildo. Mobile orgasms... there's an app for that!
You speak as if this thing doesn't already exist. When it comes to physical devices, the Apple ecosystem is a lot more mature (or teen if that's your thang).
If that's the case then why did iPad 2 come out only ONE YEAR after iPad 1?
Nothing to do with iPad 1 being rushed out without a camera, by chance?
Sorry, this is a lame argument. A camera is not a necessary tablet item by any means. I have a "rushed" iPad v1 and there was simply no other tablet I could have bought anywhere near the price with the same capabilities. Apple didn't include a camera because there was no competition and it wasn't absolutely essential.
The law is for audio recordings, not video only. I know I was pulled over once (light out) and the first thing the officer did was to inform me that he was recording audio and asked if I consented (I don't know what would happen if I didn't....).
I wonder what would happen if you asked him the same thing? If he didn't consent, what could you do about it?
This is a bad decision on their part.
Granted XP is ancient and not very supported, but its still heavily used. If we're talking about end-users, its more likely to go:
"Aww, not supported. I guess I'll use something else"
instead of
"Aww, not supported. Let me pay a few hundred euros to upgrade my OS (and maybe need to improve my hardware) to use this product/service."
And when confronted with the choice of paying those hundreds of euros/dollars for a silly OS license on their non-compliant box as opposed to a few hundred more shekels for shiny new Mac...
I don't think it's a bad idea at all. Not only is supporting a 10 year old OS more costly, forcing the upgrade could net Apple some new Mac owners (perhaps they'll choose a PC for upgrading, that's ok too)
Again, Apple doesn't lose if Microsoft somehow gains by their actions.
Unfortunately, they'll be protected as employees. The school board will take the heat for this one, and not without justification, seeing as someone at the very least had their head buried firmly up their asses.
Why should the school board allow this travesty of privacy? Let them suffer or have them recommend the firing of the guilty employees.
For example, users with admin privs have write access to the /Applications folder.
IIRC, on the Mac, it behaves like a sudo permission: you are required for password anytime you touch /Applications (which is why XAMPP for Mac was such a PITA - they put htdocs in /Applications!!! - protip: symlink it or change the php.ini so you can place webroot elsewhere and change content without admin pwd).
In short, no, local user access won't allow one app to infect others (unless they're in ~/Applications).
What are the odds that this iCloud service isn't run OSX server at it's core?
It shouldn't matter because Apple as a company (nowadays) isn't as interested in dogfooding for the sake of it... that's a position popularized by Microsoft, which proudly proclaimed their OS as better than the competition (Ballmer still doesn't allow iPhones or Google services in his household, for example)... which brought on the hotmail conversion debacle and the Danger dataloss fiasco.
Apple makes no such (unrealistic) claims, so they have no such expectations to meet.
...can a foreign power do damage to "nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines" via a cyber attack? Seriously, I want to know, this is not a rhetorical question. Are their computer systems connected to an outside network or is there a someone on the inside (a la Stuxnet)?
Perhaps it has something to do with this recent news about nuclear plants converting to digital controls?
What about SEAL Team 6 invading Pakistan?
Personally I think that any country that hides and shelters a terrorist that kills thousands and thousands of the civilians would be considered an act of war. Pakistan should consider itself lucky that its only got a small slap on the wrist by the USA navy seals.
They got a lot more than a slap on the wrist... for nearly a decade, they got $10B+ in funding from the US by being their "ally" in the "War on Terror" (of course, the majority of that was funding started by the previous administration). So I guess we slapped their wrist and embarrassed them, but while also giving them billions in funding and propping up their military.
Continually at War with some group, product, or idea since 1941.
Perhaps we should be a bit more honest and just revert the Department of Defense back to the Department of War.
I think the Monsanto situation could be easily resolved by making them responsible for not allowing the spread of the pollen, rather than making the private farmers responsible for pollen getting into their area.
This would likely make the practice of GM crops infeasible. Monsanto got "ahead of the issue" by posing the opposite from rational position (since it's not possible), and will sound like a hero when they eventually "compromise" on the issue by saying that no one should be held responsible (thus removing the biggest issue to GM crops - infestation of non-GM crops by pollen/hybridization).
Agreed. I don't need multi-user video, so I'm fine with Skype 2.8 on Mac (gotten on oldversion.com)
For embracing what Android is supposed to be about. When Motorola and Samsung decided to lock down their devices tighter than the iPhone, it boggled my mind why any freedom-loving geek would opt for such devices (unless they were looking for challenge).
Kudos to HTC for their consumer friendliness... sad to think that 10-15 years ago Motorola would provide open schematics for their kit on request, and now they're leading the charge for the Big Brother lockdown.
If Apple is a design genius, Amazon is a sales & distribution genius. This looks to be a wonderful match up!
Amazon has many many strengths and is a formidable competitor (for such a large company they are very nimble). About the only two larger and nimbler companies are Google and Apple, however.
Apple is the king of premium. They can sell anything at a premium (see Apple battery charger) and can decommoditize and disinter-mediate nimbly. They are a serial disruptor of markets. Tim Cook also knows a bit about distribution (and beat Dell at their own game).
Google is the king of free, and owns the bleeding edge. From Google Voice to free navigation, Google's beta's are often better than competitor's years-old services... and hundreds of millions of people depend on google on a daily basis.
Amazon may be a very strong entity but it's playing with giants that are themselves agile and strong. Best of luck to Amazon.