Wait, Apple wants you to pay for the infrastructure that your app uses?
The horror!
No, Apple wants to be paid for any goods or infrastructure that happen to be sold through programs running on their devices. Stuff that they had absolutely no relation to, 'skydrive' server space in some MS datacenter, accessed through the user's ISP, Kindle ebooks licensed by Amazon and downloaded directly from them, that sort of thing.
That is where the in-app-purchase rules get interesting. Yes, obviously, Apple doesn't want "Pissed-Off-Pigeons, $3.99" to turn into "Pissed-Off-Pigeons-Lite $0, in-app-upgrade $3.99, no money goes to Apple!"; but the cut is the same whether the in-app purchase is essentially just another ITMS download, or a wholly 3rd-party transaction for some good or service provided entirely by a non-Apple entity.
The difference here is that Windows has roughly 90% of the desktop marketshare (what is generally considered a monopoly market share), whereas iOS has an estimated 20%-50% (depending on who you ask) (30%-50% for Android).
The other major difference is that MS' attempts at anticompetitive behavior were fundamentally the same economic tactics that were already far from novel in 1890, when the Sherman Anti-trust act was put in place to combat them. Arm-twisting OEMs, tying, allegations of dumping, etc. Fundamentally very retro stuff.
Apple, by contrast, has built their strategy around a much more contemporary approach: cryptographic lockdown. They have no need to stoop to any 19th-century robber baron supply chain shenanigans against 3rd party application distributors, OEMs, or whatever. It's all just baked into the hardware.
Now, it's still a question of whether their market share is large enough for the fundamentally closed nature of their ecosystem to matter; but it is a significant distinction. If you look at regulators' treatment of Microsoft, they have largely focused on any attempt by MS to strong-arm what goes on on top of Windows, in the attempt to ensure that (while MS is the dominant platform vendor) they cannot leverage control of the platform into control of markets on top of the platform. In the case of Apple, the situation is almost the reverse: they are not the dominant platform vendor; but their dominance of all activity on top of the platform is nearly absolute.
'Trusted computing' doesn't work with untrusted components in the chain... In practice, this means that your fancy TPM is either just an incrementally superior storage area for the user's PGP key and similar, or you are using a 100% "trusted" stack that cannot be swapped out. Doesn't mean that it is necessarily closed source, 'Tivoization' works just fine; but OSS is questionably useful if you can't buy computers that will run what you compile.
Ultimately, it's the hardware guys who are dangerous. You can get locked into shitty software(particularly if you have an enterprise level interlinked spaghetti clusterfuck of the stuff); but the software guys can only attempt to make switching vendors more expensive than renewing your support contract.
The hardware guys, though, can ultimately leave you with nowhere to run(your software) unless you have a truly heroic appetite for 7400s and wire wrap...
So... just reduce the price. Zero sounds about right, and then it does not really matter who gets what percentage of it.
The fun part is that Apple demands 30% of any upsells through the app, even free apps. What hosed the 'skydrive' update was that it had an option to purchase additional storage baked into it somewhere, directly between you and Microsoft, without the tithe to Apple.
It's Apple's platform. I agree that a 30% cut is a bit too much, and there could be tiers introduced based on company size, revenue, etc., but to manage this would probably be a bit too much for them, although it would be beneficial for small startups.
But then again, what would the Microsoft do if they were in their position, suddenly play fair?
Change platform to 'walled garden'. If MS were whining about how much an Xcode license costs, or the system libraries changing all the time, or something like that, it'd be a platform problem. Trouble is, the iTunes store isn't just a system where you pay Apple 30% for digital distribution and billing services(though it is that), it is the system by which you get access to the magic signing key without which your program simply cannot run.
That, to my mind, is the critical difference between a vendor with a mere 'platform' and a vendor with a 'walled garden'. On the MS side, Windows is just a 'platform'. MS certainly derives considerable money from having a popular platform; and they do offer a distribution mechanism; but you can get binaries to customers however you want. The xbox, on the other hand, is a walled garden. You pay for MS' crypto key, or your program doesn't run, period. Windows RT is allegedly in the same vein.
That's the thing. Apparently, 30% for distribution logistics and billing is actually a pretty decent offer, especially for small outfits that don't have any capacity or experience in that area; but the crypto aspect means that it isn't an offer. There is no "No, no problem, I'll distribute the.ipa myself and handle billing" option.
Ftfs: "how can the police be sure the tape hasn't been edited?"
more like how can the defense lawyers know the police rent railroading them! Or how can the police successfully fake an edit! (or to be fair,m how can the police prove a tape is genuine when the defense lawyer throws up somew fud).
The only real defense against accusations of railroading is context. If this technique works, it should at least be possible to demonstrate that chunks of context haven't been removed(ie. the 'ask question', 'stop tape', '6 D-cell maglite', 'start tape', 'tearful confession' use case); but it obviously doesn't magically add recordings that were never taken, that's more of a procedural problem.
Wonder how they submit oral coursework now, with MP3's and things? It would be the work of a second to get a perfectly smooth recording of the same thing happening nowadays.
At least with spoken-language AP exams, you are allowed to record digitally(if memory serves, the AP people actually tell you to use Audacity); but you are then forced to burn the result to CD, just to remind you that we don't actually live in the future yet...
I can imagine that some mic designs pick up mains hum particularly well; but others(albeit probably the much less common ones, optical ones, say) should be essentially immune. The power supply also wouldn't be an issue on battery-powered devices, though I'm sure most AC adapters are pretty lousy at filtering.
Is the hum all picked up by the mic, in most commonly used designs, or are there other parts of a recording system that are sensitive to picking up noise?
No, they want to make it illegal for the phone company to block the call from ever going through.
Do you really want your phone company deciding who can and cannot call you?
Ideally, I'd want some analog to Sieve and RFC 5804 for SMS and phone calls so that I can decided who can and cannot call me before they hit my handset.
Architecturally, it is more desirable to terminate the spammers at a point that lies inside Team Telco's systems(even on smartphones that have the power for PC-level client side filtering, you've still burned the spectrum and battery power to receive the message before you delete it, and not all phones are nearly that punchy); but you certainly wouldn't want them in charge of compiling the blacklists...
While that is true, such legislation would impact all of those sending spam, not just ccAdvertising. Further, last I checked, there are plenty of people outside of the US spamming individuals inside the US, which would necessitate some sort of legal recourse.
This is America, you communist. Last I checked we don't bother with 'legal recourse' if foreigners annoy us enough.(And, honestly, in terms of US quality of life, having the CIA dedicate the secret torture dungeons and assassin robots currently used on 'terrorists' to the war on spammers would probably be an improvement...)
Umm not really. Now it's a magnet for bullets. It's a lot harder to conceal. It can be easily spotted from the air. Yeah you can't kill it with a rock or a bottle, but even WW1 tanks were more heavily armored than this. Against real military equipment it will fail instantly.
Based on the popularity of "technicals" in assorted horrid little bush wars, I'm forced to assume that there is a significant market for nearly-unarmored vehicles mounting machine guns or light-ish cannon, despite the fact that armies with actual money can crush them like insects. This appears to be the geek-friendly version.
For my edification, how much punch will it have left for the lucky driver after heading through a 1/4 or 1/2 inch plate? Is that "why did you even bother?" territory or "Congratulations! You've received an upgrade from 'fatality' to 'casualty'"?
Umm, that's not a Playstation controller, or at least not an official first-party one. Give how many PC controllers have used that style, it's more likely just some generic PC controller.
These guys are out to smash the state; but they aren't the sort of depraved nihilists who violate EULAs!
Unless you are seriously proposing that humans differ in kind in some profound way from everything else, it seems absurd to suggest that things can't be learned(or, at very least, used to construct good hypotheses to test against humans and narrow down the amount of human testing you need to do).
You'd probably be safer on foot than inside that box if a real tank shows up for a fight... Even some rusty export-grade T-34 stolen from a museum and bodged back into shape.
That said, it could prove to be quite a nasty surprise for any infantry caught without RPGs or anti-armor ammunition.
There are definitely some nasty little meatgrinders going on(and, depending on how exactly you want to tot them up, a fair amount of violence-application by internal security forces whose targets are mostly too outmatched for it to even count as 'conflict'); but by historical standards that's pretty good.
The Syrian civil war, for instance, killed about as many people, per year, as motor vehicle accidents do in the US(the US population is higher, obviously, so the individual risk of death is lower).
No, no it wasn't. It was overwhelmingly state-sponsored. And the land grants went far beyond what was required.
No railroad businesses involved, no railroads. Funny how that works out. And how valuable was that land given the absence of railroads? There's a reason the feds were giving it away. They couldn't get rid of it in any other way.
Nobody is disputing that the transcontinental railroad was a good idea, (unlike, say, putting a man on the moon, the utility of having a railway link across the middle of the country is quite obvious), or that the construction was handled by contractors, with the feds doing overall route planning, territorial acquisition, and funding. It's just that, by that standard of "private", the Apollo program was practically a private sector project. The feds had some managers to keep the contractors in line, and some hastily rehabilitated nazi war criminals to handle some of the trickier rocket science; but virtually every piece of hardware of nontrivial size was stamped out by one defense contractor or another.
Well, oh wise one, what reference should they have used to check the plausibility of the route?
Use this handy guide to check the software version that your iDevice is running. If the 'version' value is 6.x, you know you have a plausibility problem. Simple!
Is anyone else struck by the fact that people who are allegedly intending to deliver an economically feasible private-sector ride to the moon would choose a name alluding to the completion ceremony for a massively government-sponsored(and deeply politicized and not a little corruption-plagued) infrastructure project?
I'm not a fancy lawyer or nothing; but this suggests that it could.
Specifically: "In Virginia, a statement that does any of the following things amounts to defamation per se: (some irrelevant ones omitted) hurts the plaintiff in his or her profession or trade."
A nasty yelp review would reasonably seem to be something that would hurt a contractor in their profession or trade. However, in order to be defamatory, the statement has to be a false statement of fact. If what she says turns out to be substantially true, he can just go cry about it(and "Nasty yelp review upheld in court of law" probably doesn't help your PR any). If she is lying or terribly ill-supported, though...
On the tablets it was designed for? Not particularly. If Apple suddenly decided to start shipping it on all their desktops and laptops? You bet it would be.
If you get lucky, you'll occasionally run across fools just throwing away, or selling by the box for peanuts, Model Ms; but you won't find a buckling-spring keyboard for sale under ordinary conditions for much less than $80 new. Unicomp still makes them; but they don't exactly give them away.
If you are willing to embrace heresy, the Cherry MX keyswitches aren't nearly as bad as the rubber dome crap, and can sometimes be found slightly cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, Apple wants you to pay for the infrastructure that your app uses?
The horror!
No, Apple wants to be paid for any goods or infrastructure that happen to be sold through programs running on their devices. Stuff that they had absolutely no relation to, 'skydrive' server space in some MS datacenter, accessed through the user's ISP, Kindle ebooks licensed by Amazon and downloaded directly from them, that sort of thing.
That is where the in-app-purchase rules get interesting. Yes, obviously, Apple doesn't want "Pissed-Off-Pigeons, $3.99" to turn into "Pissed-Off-Pigeons-Lite $0, in-app-upgrade $3.99, no money goes to Apple!"; but the cut is the same whether the in-app purchase is essentially just another ITMS download, or a wholly 3rd-party transaction for some good or service provided entirely by a non-Apple entity.
The difference here is that Windows has roughly 90% of the desktop marketshare (what is generally considered a monopoly market share), whereas iOS has an estimated 20%-50% (depending on who you ask) (30%-50% for Android).
Source
The other major difference is that MS' attempts at anticompetitive behavior were fundamentally the same economic tactics that were already far from novel in 1890, when the Sherman Anti-trust act was put in place to combat them. Arm-twisting OEMs, tying, allegations of dumping, etc. Fundamentally very retro stuff.
Apple, by contrast, has built their strategy around a much more contemporary approach: cryptographic lockdown. They have no need to stoop to any 19th-century robber baron supply chain shenanigans against 3rd party application distributors, OEMs, or whatever. It's all just baked into the hardware.
Now, it's still a question of whether their market share is large enough for the fundamentally closed nature of their ecosystem to matter; but it is a significant distinction. If you look at regulators' treatment of Microsoft, they have largely focused on any attempt by MS to strong-arm what goes on on top of Windows, in the attempt to ensure that (while MS is the dominant platform vendor) they cannot leverage control of the platform into control of markets on top of the platform. In the case of Apple, the situation is almost the reverse: they are not the dominant platform vendor; but their dominance of all activity on top of the platform is nearly absolute.
'Trusted computing' doesn't work with untrusted components in the chain... In practice, this means that your fancy TPM is either just an incrementally superior storage area for the user's PGP key and similar, or you are using a 100% "trusted" stack that cannot be swapped out. Doesn't mean that it is necessarily closed source, 'Tivoization' works just fine; but OSS is questionably useful if you can't buy computers that will run what you compile.
Ultimately, it's the hardware guys who are dangerous. You can get locked into shitty software(particularly if you have an enterprise level interlinked spaghetti clusterfuck of the stuff); but the software guys can only attempt to make switching vendors more expensive than renewing your support contract.
The hardware guys, though, can ultimately leave you with nowhere to run(your software) unless you have a truly heroic appetite for 7400s and wire wrap...
So... just reduce the price. Zero sounds about right, and then it does not really matter who gets what percentage of it.
The fun part is that Apple demands 30% of any upsells through the app, even free apps. What hosed the 'skydrive' update was that it had an option to purchase additional storage baked into it somewhere, directly between you and Microsoft, without the tithe to Apple.
It's Apple's platform. I agree that a 30% cut is a bit too much, and there could be tiers introduced based on company size, revenue, etc., but to manage this would probably be a bit too much for them, although it would be beneficial for small startups.
But then again, what would the Microsoft do if they were in their position, suddenly play fair?
Change platform to 'walled garden'. If MS were whining about how much an Xcode license costs, or the system libraries changing all the time, or something like that, it'd be a platform problem. Trouble is, the iTunes store isn't just a system where you pay Apple 30% for digital distribution and billing services(though it is that), it is the system by which you get access to the magic signing key without which your program simply cannot run.
That, to my mind, is the critical difference between a vendor with a mere 'platform' and a vendor with a 'walled garden'. On the MS side, Windows is just a 'platform'. MS certainly derives considerable money from having a popular platform; and they do offer a distribution mechanism; but you can get binaries to customers however you want. The xbox, on the other hand, is a walled garden. You pay for MS' crypto key, or your program doesn't run, period. Windows RT is allegedly in the same vein.
That's the thing. Apparently, 30% for distribution logistics and billing is actually a pretty decent offer, especially for small outfits that don't have any capacity or experience in that area; but the crypto aspect means that it isn't an offer. There is no "No, no problem, I'll distribute the .ipa myself and handle billing" option.
Ftfs: "how can the police be sure the tape hasn't been edited?"
more like how can the defense lawyers know the police rent railroading them! Or how can the police successfully fake an edit! (or to be fair,m how can the police prove a tape is genuine when the defense lawyer throws up somew fud).
The only real defense against accusations of railroading is context. If this technique works, it should at least be possible to demonstrate that chunks of context haven't been removed(ie. the 'ask question', 'stop tape', '6 D-cell maglite', 'start tape', 'tearful confession' use case); but it obviously doesn't magically add recordings that were never taken, that's more of a procedural problem.
Wonder how they submit oral coursework now, with MP3's and things? It would be the work of a second to get a perfectly smooth recording of the same thing happening nowadays.
At least with spoken-language AP exams, you are allowed to record digitally(if memory serves, the AP people actually tell you to use Audacity); but you are then forced to burn the result to CD, just to remind you that we don't actually live in the future yet...
I can imagine that some mic designs pick up mains hum particularly well; but others(albeit probably the much less common ones, optical ones, say) should be essentially immune. The power supply also wouldn't be an issue on battery-powered devices, though I'm sure most AC adapters are pretty lousy at filtering.
Is the hum all picked up by the mic, in most commonly used designs, or are there other parts of a recording system that are sensitive to picking up noise?
No, they want to make it illegal for the phone company to block the call from ever going through.
Do you really want your phone company deciding who can and cannot call you?
Ideally, I'd want some analog to Sieve and RFC 5804 for SMS and phone calls so that I can decided who can and cannot call me before they hit my handset.
Architecturally, it is more desirable to terminate the spammers at a point that lies inside Team Telco's systems(even on smartphones that have the power for PC-level client side filtering, you've still burned the spectrum and battery power to receive the message before you delete it, and not all phones are nearly that punchy); but you certainly wouldn't want them in charge of compiling the blacklists...
While that is true, such legislation would impact all of those sending spam, not just ccAdvertising. Further, last I checked, there are plenty of people outside of the US spamming individuals inside the US, which would necessitate some sort of legal recourse.
This is America, you communist. Last I checked we don't bother with 'legal recourse' if foreigners annoy us enough.(And, honestly, in terms of US quality of life, having the CIA dedicate the secret torture dungeons and assassin robots currently used on 'terrorists' to the war on spammers would probably be an improvement...)
Umm not really. Now it's a magnet for bullets. It's a lot harder to conceal. It can be easily spotted from the air. Yeah you can't kill it with a rock or a bottle, but even WW1 tanks were more heavily armored than this. Against real military equipment it will fail instantly.
Based on the popularity of "technicals" in assorted horrid little bush wars, I'm forced to assume that there is a significant market for nearly-unarmored vehicles mounting machine guns or light-ish cannon, despite the fact that armies with actual money can crush them like insects. This appears to be the geek-friendly version.
For my edification, how much punch will it have left for the lucky driver after heading through a 1/4 or 1/2 inch plate? Is that "why did you even bother?" territory or "Congratulations! You've received an upgrade from 'fatality' to 'casualty'"?
Umm, that's not a Playstation controller, or at least not an official first-party one. Give how many PC controllers have used that style, it's more likely just some generic PC controller.
These guys are out to smash the state; but they aren't the sort of depraved nihilists who violate EULAs!
They still presumably have access to the door(hopefully placed somewhere not-too-wildly-dangerous-to-bail-out-through).
Unless you are seriously proposing that humans differ in kind in some profound way from everything else, it seems absurd to suggest that things can't be learned(or, at very least, used to construct good hypotheses to test against humans and narrow down the amount of human testing you need to do).
You'd probably be safer on foot than inside that box if a real tank shows up for a fight... Even some rusty export-grade T-34 stolen from a museum and bodged back into shape.
That said, it could prove to be quite a nasty surprise for any infantry caught without RPGs or anti-armor ammunition.
There are definitely some nasty little meatgrinders going on(and, depending on how exactly you want to tot them up, a fair amount of violence-application by internal security forces whose targets are mostly too outmatched for it to even count as 'conflict'); but by historical standards that's pretty good.
The Syrian civil war, for instance, killed about as many people, per year, as motor vehicle accidents do in the US(the US population is higher, obviously, so the individual risk of death is lower).
No, no it wasn't. It was overwhelmingly state-sponsored. And the land grants went far beyond what was required.
No railroad businesses involved, no railroads. Funny how that works out. And how valuable was that land given the absence of railroads? There's a reason the feds were giving it away. They couldn't get rid of it in any other way.
Nobody is disputing that the transcontinental railroad was a good idea, (unlike, say, putting a man on the moon, the utility of having a railway link across the middle of the country is quite obvious), or that the construction was handled by contractors, with the feds doing overall route planning, territorial acquisition, and funding. It's just that, by that standard of "private", the Apollo program was practically a private sector project. The feds had some managers to keep the contractors in line, and some hastily rehabilitated nazi war criminals to handle some of the trickier rocket science; but virtually every piece of hardware of nontrivial size was stamped out by one defense contractor or another.
Well, oh wise one, what reference should they have used to check the plausibility of the route?
Use this handy guide to check the software version that your iDevice is running. If the 'version' value is 6.x, you know you have a plausibility problem. Simple!
Is anyone else struck by the fact that people who are allegedly intending to deliver an economically feasible private-sector ride to the moon would choose a name alluding to the completion ceremony for a massively government-sponsored(and deeply politicized and not a little corruption-plagued) infrastructure project?
I'm not a fancy lawyer or nothing; but this suggests that it could.
Specifically: "In Virginia, a statement that does any of the following things amounts to defamation per se:
(some irrelevant ones omitted)
hurts the plaintiff in his or her profession or trade."
A nasty yelp review would reasonably seem to be something that would hurt a contractor in their profession or trade. However, in order to be defamatory, the statement has to be a false statement of fact. If what she says turns out to be substantially true, he can just go cry about it(and "Nasty yelp review upheld in court of law" probably doesn't help your PR any). If she is lying or terribly ill-supported, though...
On the tablets it was designed for? Not particularly. If Apple suddenly decided to start shipping it on all their desktops and laptops? You bet it would be.
If you get lucky, you'll occasionally run across fools just throwing away, or selling by the box for peanuts, Model Ms; but you won't find a buckling-spring keyboard for sale under ordinary conditions for much less than $80 new. Unicomp still makes them; but they don't exactly give them away.
If you are willing to embrace heresy, the Cherry MX keyswitches aren't nearly as bad as the rubber dome crap, and can sometimes be found slightly cheaper.
It's AT to PS/2.. ATX standard used PS/2...
Just needed to state that..
On the topic, AT and PS/2 only differ mechanically. XT didn't differ mechanically from AT; but was logically incompatible.