The iphone in providing an sdk is considerably more open than it's competition.
The symbian SDK is free. You can get a developer certificate for free (Apple charges $100/year), you can distribute in any manner you choose (Apple insist on using itunes), you can use background apps, you can do VOIP over 3G/Edge....
So in what way is the iphone 'considerably more open'.
The problem is that pretty much limits your distribution to geeks.
You need to change BT so it doesn't penalise dowloading before it'll be useful as a distribution mechanism. There are three problems with demanding ratios like this:
1. A lot of (probably most) users are on asymmetric connections - I'm on 8mb down, 832k up. So your 1:1 ratio forcing now limited me to 832k down maximum. I'll use an FTP server at 8mb thanks. 2. Nearly all users are on NAT, which means that they *can't* seed without farting around with port forwarding. upnp is rare - even when it's switched on (which, after much education about security, it isn't generally) different upnp implementations are incompatible with each other anyway. 3. Increasing numbers of ISPs are starting to account for upload bandwidth, precisely because of people taking the smeg with P2P software.
Firstly, if you thnk the content producers will reduce prices simply because they've saved money then you're deluded - that's why it's still mostly cheaper to buy a physical CD than buy from itunes.
Secondly, did you read the post you replied to? The increase in cost to the ISP is much greater than the saving in cost to the producer. You will pay *more* in increased ISP charges than you could save by reduced movie costs.
Overall costs aren't reduced (in fact they're increased - home users pay far more per gb than a large business user does). They're pushed into the users, who think that they have 'free' unlimited bandwidth - then bitch when their ISP increases prices/introduces capping/blocks torrents completely.
Unfortunately the majority don't understand this and will fall for it.
If you don't forward ports to your machine then BT runs like ass - capping out at 5k/s or less. The average user doesn't know what a port *is* let alone how to forward one.
I absolutely refuse to forward ports to BT for security reasons* (and anyway which one of the 20-odd machines here would I forward to?) so even though I know what BT is I can't use it, because the trackers either refuse to connect completely or refuse to serve data.
* There are only 2 machines on this network that allow incoming ports, and those are strictly monitored and have no access to the secure LAN.
It scales just fine - that's why the flash version is the most popular way of viewing iplayer. Added to that that the P2P is kontiki, which is a horrid piece of crap that eats bandwidth even when you're not using the iplayer (and with many users on 1gb/month caps that has already led to some enormous bandwidth bills)... people with sense don't install the app.
Bittorrent is not efficient - far from it. What this shows is that if you push your costs onto the end users (in the form of increased ISP bills to cover the bandwidth used by the torrenters) then you can save money on your own bottom line.
An evaluation of the true costs would be interesting, but probably nearly impossible to calculate as it's too distributed.
I don't think it actually runs it on the phone, only uses it as a display/touch screen.
btw. Don't take much from the slides... having played with the SDK it's nothing like what was demoed - the stuff they were talking about probably won't hit until June.
Have you downloaded the SDK? It's a gcc cross compiler, enough integration to use xcode as a text editor and the simulator. Everything has to be written in raw objective C. There's no app designer, the documentation is a copy/paste job from OSX and there are no sample applications.
I'm not even sure that you can run the code on real hardware - haven't worked out how to yet short of jailbreaking it... and it is *definately* absolutely nothing like what was demonstrated - which was either a quicktime mockup or a very early version of the next version.
Looking at what they've achieved since October don't expect *anything* like the demo before June.
Remember the broadcom kernels? Standard kernel with a huge ass copyrighted binary blob statically linked into it to provide the motherboard/networking/dsl support.
Those *definately* weren't fully GPL, but are still being distributed to this day.
If it was illegal they wouldn't be distributed.. ergo.. the lawyers have decided that it's completely legal to do that.
(a) The directors will own 51% as insurance against this anyway, (b) the remainder of the shares will be split between maybe thousands of investors and you can't buy them all at once (c) Because of (b) it will take long enough to be recognised as a hostile takeover attempt, and people will stop selling to you.
The tin can 'by your command' ones were the earlier generation model - there was an extra episode (post season 3) that contained this information in passing, where they come across an old abandoned military post still manned by them.
Presumably whilst designing for perfection they saw the human form as 'more perfect' and designed themselves as humanoid/biological. These became the commanders of cylon society. The less sophisticaded models are needed as foot soldiers and presumably perform the more menial asks.
It's true that MS is sellng Macs by proxy than I think it realizes. Given the choice of Vista or 'anything else' then people are taking the second option.
I just spent some time with a group of people. Some ages probably about 19-50. About a 15 laptops were present. 14 were Macs. The one PC owner was cursing that his machine wouldn't work! (dud hard drive I think).
I'm aware that that's possibly not a representative sample (compared to what the marketing sites say, anyway) but it surprised me since a couple of years ago you might have had about 1 Mac if you were lucky (and fewer PCs of course, since the idea of ordinary people having one has really only recently caught on).
Businesses are normally on MSDN and get their activation codes from Microsoft, not from DVDs (MS send out DVDs but nowhere near as frequently as they used to - it's considered normal to download the ISO nowadays).
Vista does ask for reactivation from time to time. For MSDN users that's once a year as the codes change each year (had this happen this year and I expect it to happen next too). Also if your environment changes it'll ask for reactivation also (much more than XP, which almost never used to do this)... which is why it's good practice to only install it on virtual machines with virtual hardware that never changes.
There's also the problem of activation codes suddenly going bad.. which has happened to us. Suddenly you can't install Vista and it's a choice of an overseas phone call (typically lasting an hour or more if you're in a qeueue) or an activation crack.
I had that - MS have started limiting MSDN activations in Vista, whereas they never bothered in XP, so you can only have a certain number of VMs installed. Like you I keep VMs around for more than a month so need to activate - we had a whole pile of VMs go fubar on us because our MSDN sub rolled into the next year and they changed all our activaton codes overnight.
Took the best part of a day to sort that mess out.
Most of the office is Linux servers running VMWare and Macbooks running VMWare Fusion, to limit the amount of damage MS can do to us with this stupidity.. unfortunately for product testing you need to have some of their crap around.
From the UK perspective this does all seem a bit confusing, but from what I gather in the US the carriers actually mandate what browser you can install and even what websites that you view. It's the North Korea of the mobile phone market.
I see no problem with Mozilla creating a version of Firefox for Symbian and WM, everyone who wants it if they feel they need to and that's the end of the story... don't see what the carriers have to do with it - it's none of the bleedin' business. No different to Opera 5 years or so ago on the Nokia 7650, where it was a separate download (that was a decent phone btw. one of the best I ever owned).
I've never heard of pederasts walking around the streets approaching young boys for sex (I'm sure it happens, just as I'm sure there are people who walk around in rain coats flashing people for fun and excitement), but there is more FUD in your statement than reality.
Happened to me twice in my relatively unremarkable childhood. I was smart enough to walk away.
Wouldn't surprise me if it was pretty common, in fact.
You can't even get into safe mode if the driver for your primary boot device goes byebye.
Unlike other OSs it doesn't do hardware detection at boot, it assumes nothing has changed and carries on blindly, at least until the UI is up and the upnp kicks in.
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The iphone in providing an sdk is considerably more open than it's competition.
The symbian SDK is free. You can get a developer certificate for free (Apple charges $100/year), you can distribute in any manner you choose (Apple insist on using itunes), you can use background apps, you can do VOIP over 3G/Edge....
So in what way is the iphone 'considerably more open'.
The problem is that pretty much limits your distribution to geeks.
You need to change BT so it doesn't penalise dowloading before it'll be useful as a distribution mechanism. There are three problems with demanding ratios like this:
1. A lot of (probably most) users are on asymmetric connections - I'm on 8mb down, 832k up. So your 1:1 ratio forcing now limited me to 832k down maximum. I'll use an FTP server at 8mb thanks.
2. Nearly all users are on NAT, which means that they *can't* seed without farting around with port forwarding. upnp is rare - even when it's switched on (which, after much education about security, it isn't generally) different upnp implementations are incompatible with each other anyway.
3. Increasing numbers of ISPs are starting to account for upload bandwidth, precisely because of people taking the smeg with P2P software.
Firstly, if you thnk the content producers will reduce prices simply because they've saved money then you're deluded - that's why it's still mostly cheaper to buy a physical CD than buy from itunes.
Secondly, did you read the post you replied to? The increase in cost to the ISP is much greater than the saving in cost to the producer. You will pay *more* in increased ISP charges than you could save by reduced movie costs.
Overall costs aren't reduced (in fact they're increased - home users pay far more per gb than a large business user does). They're pushed into the users, who think that they have 'free' unlimited bandwidth - then bitch when their ISP increases prices/introduces capping/blocks torrents completely.
Unfortunately the majority don't understand this and will fall for it.
No it's a technical problem.
If you don't forward ports to your machine then BT runs like ass - capping out at 5k/s or less. The average user doesn't know what a port *is* let alone how to forward one.
I absolutely refuse to forward ports to BT for security reasons* (and anyway which one of the 20-odd machines here would I forward to?) so even though I know what BT is I can't use it, because the trackers either refuse to connect completely or refuse to serve data.
* There are only 2 machines on this network that allow incoming ports, and those are strictly monitored and have no access to the secure LAN.
It scales just fine - that's why the flash version is the most popular way of viewing iplayer. Added to that that the P2P is kontiki, which is a horrid piece of crap that eats bandwidth even when you're not using the iplayer (and with many users on 1gb/month caps that has already led to some enormous bandwidth bills)... people with sense don't install the app.
Bittorrent is not efficient - far from it. What this shows is that if you push your costs onto the end users (in the form of increased ISP bills to cover the bandwidth used by the torrenters) then you can save money on your own bottom line.
An evaluation of the true costs would be interesting, but probably nearly impossible to calculate as it's too distributed.
The app disappears when you unplug the iphone.
I don't think it actually runs it on the phone, only uses it as a display/touch screen.
btw. Don't take much from the slides... having played with the SDK it's nothing like what was demoed - the stuff they were talking about probably won't hit until June.
No.
You can write your own software and test it using your phones hardware. You can't walk away with that app installed and keep running it.
That kind of full installation is part of the package you get for $99.
Also the $99 deal is a *limited* deal. You may right your app and not get on the shortlist. Sucks, but there it is.
No. You can't run apps independently of the new xcode. The new SDK does not upload, only tests.
You could try to pay $99 and see if you get in the shortlist of developers allowed to do that (if you're not in the US give up now).
Other than that absolutely nothing is going to change until June.
They now have an official documented API and development environment.
The documentation is not finished, or for the most part even there.. it's a copy/paste from OSX - even says it on the docs as you read it.
The 'development environmnet' is barely beta.
Anyone who wasn't writing apps with the unofficial SDK isn't going to be writing apps with this new one. It's just not there yet.
It's not right out of the gate.
Have you downloaded the SDK? It's a gcc cross compiler, enough integration to use xcode as a text editor and the simulator. Everything has to be written in raw objective C. There's no app designer, the documentation is a copy/paste job from OSX and there are no sample applications.
I'm not even sure that you can run the code on real hardware - haven't worked out how to yet short of jailbreaking it... and it is *definately* absolutely nothing like what was demonstrated - which was either a quicktime mockup or a very early version of the next version.
Looking at what they've achieved since October don't expect *anything* like the demo before June.
Note that this isn't tha simple.
You request to enroll on the developer programme, and apple select a *few* developers charge them $99 and let them publish.
They have 100% compete control on who writes software. This explicitly excludes anyone not in the US, for example.
That doesn't look like it encourages free apps to me - it looks like they're keeping a few developers in the loop as a PR exercise.
Remember the broadcom kernels? Standard kernel with a huge ass copyrighted binary blob statically linked into it to provide the motherboard/networking/dsl support.
Those *definately* weren't fully GPL, but are still being distributed to this day.
If it was illegal they wouldn't be distributed.. ergo.. the lawyers have decided that it's completely legal to do that.
You couldn't because
(a) The directors will own 51% as insurance against this anyway,
(b) the remainder of the shares will be split between maybe thousands of investors and you can't buy them all at once
(c) Because of (b) it will take long enough to be recognised as a hostile takeover attempt, and people will stop selling to you.
My guess is it's named appropriately...
Singularity: Sucks so hard it won't even let light escape!
Anyway, this isn't an OS. You can't write an OS in something (.NET) that requires a fully fledged windows installation to run! At best it's a shell.
Clearly you've not used vista. Bad video drivers can and do bluescreen it just like XP.
btw. I was the opposite way around. I found (and still find) Season 1 utterly unwatchable. Season 2 is quite good, Season 3 was the best for me.
The tin can 'by your command' ones were the earlier generation model - there was an extra episode (post season 3) that contained this information in passing, where they come across an old abandoned military post still manned by them.
Presumably whilst designing for perfection they saw the human form as 'more perfect' and designed themselves as humanoid/biological. These became the commanders of cylon society. The less sophisticaded models are needed as foot soldiers and presumably perform the more menial asks.
It's true that MS is sellng Macs by proxy than I think it realizes. Given the choice of Vista or 'anything else' then people are taking the second option.
I just spent some time with a group of people. Some ages probably about 19-50. About a 15 laptops were present. 14 were Macs. The one PC owner was cursing that his machine wouldn't work! (dud hard drive I think).
I'm aware that that's possibly not a representative sample (compared to what the marketing sites say, anyway) but it surprised me since a couple of years ago you might have had about 1 Mac if you were lucky (and fewer PCs of course, since the idea of ordinary people having one has really only recently caught on).
Businesses are normally on MSDN and get their activation codes from Microsoft, not from DVDs (MS send out DVDs but nowhere near as frequently as they used to - it's considered normal to download the ISO nowadays).
Vista does ask for reactivation from time to time. For MSDN users that's once a year as the codes change each year (had this happen this year and I expect it to happen next too). Also if your environment changes it'll ask for reactivation also (much more than XP, which almost never used to do this)... which is why it's good practice to only install it on virtual machines with virtual hardware that never changes.
There's also the problem of activation codes suddenly going bad.. which has happened to us. Suddenly you can't install Vista and it's a choice of an overseas phone call (typically lasting an hour or more if you're in a qeueue) or an activation crack.
I had that - MS have started limiting MSDN activations in Vista, whereas they never bothered in XP, so you can only have a certain number of VMs installed. Like you I keep VMs around for more than a month so need to activate - we had a whole pile of VMs go fubar on us because our MSDN sub rolled into the next year and they changed all our activaton codes overnight.
Took the best part of a day to sort that mess out.
Most of the office is Linux servers running VMWare and Macbooks running VMWare Fusion, to limit the amount of damage MS can do to us with this stupidity.. unfortunately for product testing you need to have some of their crap around.
From the UK perspective this does all seem a bit confusing, but from what I gather in the US the carriers actually mandate what browser you can install and even what websites that you view. It's the North Korea of the mobile phone market.
I see no problem with Mozilla creating a version of Firefox for Symbian and WM, everyone who wants it if they feel they need to and that's the end of the story... don't see what the carriers have to do with it - it's none of the bleedin' business. No different to Opera 5 years or so ago on the Nokia 7650, where it was a separate download (that was a decent phone btw. one of the best I ever owned).
I've never heard of pederasts walking around the streets approaching young boys for sex (I'm sure it happens, just as I'm sure there are people who walk around in rain coats flashing people for fun and excitement), but there is more FUD in your statement than reality.
Happened to me twice in my relatively unremarkable childhood. I was smart enough to walk away.
Wouldn't surprise me if it was pretty common, in fact.
You can't even get into safe mode if the driver for your primary boot device goes byebye.
Unlike other OSs it doesn't do hardware detection at boot, it assumes nothing has changed and carries on blindly, at least until the UI is up and the upnp kicks in.