Given this is/., I'd say it has more to do with people that make such claims not owning an iOS device. A/. user that has ever touched an iOS device and knows not about this deserves his account be closed and his bitcoin collection taken away.
Actually, you can with one of many available browsers in the App Store. With Opera Mini you don't even need to tweak anything, the site just does not seem capable of identifying it as an iPad browser. With Terra, my personal favorite browser (and free) for the iPad, allows me to set a permanent setting to identify as iPad Safari, OSX Safari 5, Internet Explorer 6 or Firerfox 3.6. There are a bunch of others with many different features that Safari does not have, like user agent change, full screen mode, ad blocking, social media integration, themes, bookmark syncing, download managers and built in emailing of files, etc etc.
iOS may be a walled garden, but the walls are nowhere near as tall as some Apple bashers like to think.
Off course they had an SDK from the start. They had it before the iPhone came out. It was used internally by Apple to develop their own software, and by jailbreakers to develop their own homebrew stuff.
I do have to note, though: If you have done any iOS development and OS X you would see there is a big enough overlap.
That is no evidence that Apple wanted to release it, though. Apple did indeed force developers to do their stuff in HTML+Javascript, but I think the reason they released the SDK and started working on the App Store and the approval process was a way to avoid jailbreaks to become a standard. Had they not acted fast they would had risk loosing control of their platform.
Although I don't agree with that article and it's points, I think most people are not worried about what kind of cracking can be done if their phones fall in the wrong hands, but instead of what kind of security can protect them while their phone is in their pockets.
How likely is a virus to get into a phone by downloading apps into it? How likely is a rouge app to steal all the data in the phone and send it somewhere else? How likely is, let's say, Facebook, to get software into my phone without my willing actions to install an app in my device?
Apple's walled garden make all those very very hard to happen. Even the most malicious of apps that manages to go past Apple's approval is very limited to what data it can leach out of your phone and send out.
There have been exploits in the past, though, like the one used to do an untethered jailbreak by just visiting a website. If I'm not wrong that was using a PDF exploit. On a side note, it's funny how most security concerns these days are tied up to Adobe technologies...
One gotcha though: if you dont defend a trademark you loose it. The previous owner of iCloud.com also called itself so for a long time, yet they were never pursued over the trademark. That is enough basis to make them loose their right to the TM, as far as I know (but IANAL).
No, it isn't. Anyone saying that has zero credibility right off the bat. Seriously. The built-in migrations tools are a joke, bridging.Net and COM components is insanely unreliable not to mention a million other corner cases and few are going to buy in any kind of specialised migration tools to rewrite code in another technology that does the same thing.
I never used migration tools, just Microsoft's extremely helpful documentation to find equivalence and the huge community of vb.net dedicated websites. I guess the largest hurdle I ever faced in projects was the horrid use of control arrays.
A requirement of a development tools is that you take your existing code, upgrade and are able to work with it straight away. VB.Net fails.
I'll return the "Anyone that says this has zero credibility right off the bat" and apply it to porting experience. H
Personal anecdotes (sound more like a wish to be honest) count for little I'm afraid.
Yet everything anyone says on this topic is really just a personal anecdote. How about your own personal anecdotes? How many projects have you migrated from VB to VB.net?
The VB world just has not moved along with VB.Net and that should tell you something.
Can you show the numbers on this? I cant because I have not looked them up, but in the last 10 years I have worked on 2 companies that have done the jump. Just jumped into a third company that has a very small IT staff, here there has not been a migration to VB.net for old code, but all new code is written in either VB.net or C#. It all is very dependent on what developer starts the project and their development history. The only reason that old VB code has not be touched is the same reason why it has not been maintained. It's basically forgotten code that keeps doing what it was meant to do. But these are "just anecdotes."
Well, I know there is a huge vb.net development community out there. There are a lot of sites devoted to it, forums and huge communities with loads of activity. Unless googling them up also just counts as "an anecdote."
Regardless, take this last anecdote: I have been developing VB since 1998 and do so today with VB.net. I have taken code written in 2001 and ported it to.net as recent as 2009. In my eyes, Microsoft did not "kill" VB, they just fixed it.
Not a very great way of putting it. What it meant was that countless billions of lines of existing code were useless overnight in Microsoft's new development environment. That was the first time something like that had happened and the warning signs should have been there for everyone involved as the same thing happened with.Net over the years - Winforms, WPF, XAML, Silverlight........ Microsoft could never decide what it was doing and seemed to expect everyone to rewrite their code every couple of years. Some people just haven't learned.
Porting from VB to VB.net is insanely easy. I have been working with VB since 1998 and have updated numerous projects to VB.net. I have meet numerous developers that argue how they don't know.net and how their code is dead and obsolete, that the best they can do is maintain it and hope it keeps working in future versions of Windows. I have taken code from such developers and ported it to.net in days. More complex software may take a couple of weeks. I actually learned.net doing a very successful port.
Heck, the process is so straightforward I have seen packages that do the port for you without human intervention (I personally never used them though, so cant vouch for their reliability.) I would go as far to say the only reason VB.net exists is to make sure such ports can be done quickly and easily by developers with little.net experience. I am sure MS would prefer if everyone just jumped into C#
Many developers used the VB.net shift as an excuse to stop learning and updating their code. That's their problem. Just like the developers that refuse to learn anything but their precious COBOL, and gamble their careers on institutions perpetually sustaining old COBOL code instead of migrating to recent technologies.
Also, to this date, I have not seen a machine where old VB code refuses to run. You can still develop VB6 and deploy it. It's no longer improved but it's not "dead" either. That is very different from the fear of Microsoft entirely killing Silverlight, in that case you can be fear Silverlight may not even run in Win8 machines (although I doubt it, MS has always been a pack-rat and knows not how to get rid of excess baggage.)
Interesting how people's bias color their perception. In the yes of others, I'm sure should Google be the one building this they would call it a celestial halo.
A big doughnut, though, would go GREAT with the department-store sized cafe they showed planned for employe use.
And unfortunately, it takes about $30,000 to start an investigation to have the patent invalidated. Even then it may take months for it to happen, should you be sued in the time it takes no one will force them to pay your lawyers, and the investigation may not result in the patent being invalidated resulting in a waste of 30 grand.
This is another example on how broken the patent system is. It's designed so the common man can't apply for them, nor even attempt to revoke obvious ones with decades of prior art. It's a tool for the wealthy to harass the poor and force control of inventions into the hands of corporations that actually can afford the patent process.
Apple does not say it "thinks", their letter boldly states "Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patents and the App Makers are protected by that license," [emphasis mine].
They also state they are prepared to take legal action against Lodsys if they insist to go after developers. If Apple flexes it's legal muscle, it can do a lot of harm to Lodsys, from a simple bankrupting of the company, to a more complex process of having all patents invalidated (resulting in the same, given these patents seem to be their source of income.)
The real question there is: how effective and fast can that be? Even if Apple manages to submit a lawsuit against Lodsys overnight, I don't think they can stop Lodsys from terrorizing developers and launching lawsuits against them. Given most developers can't afford any level of legal defense, they would be automatically ruined and that alone can result in huge shock-waves in the development community.
I think this was Apple's "friendly and polite" request to stop, and made public to reassure developer's confidence in Apple's intentions to defend them. Future actions may be done in a private, more direct, manner and next time we hear about this may be either party saying they have come to an agreement and developers will be left alone, or Lodsys saying they don't give a @#$@% and start the lawsuits against developers. The later may happen as early as tomorrow. I would guess dialog between the companies may take a bit longer and we wont hear much until Friday or next week.
The thing I do have to ponder though, would Google actually step in the same way Apple did, should they go after Android developers? Up to this date, they have not taken responsibilities for any patent issues phone makers have faced, despite being as capable to interfere.
Microsoft promises anyone that manufactures WP7 devices that it will take full responsibility for any patent lawsuits, but will they extend this to developers? Actually bigger question for WP7, does the OS even support in app purchases?
That last question brings up another one: Google just recently introduced in-app purchases. This means that most, if any, in app purchase options in android apps is bypassing Google, just because they were forced to do it that way. Almost all such Android developers will become potential targets, even if they remove the functionality they can be pursued for retroactive pay.
Hopefully this will be meaningless, as this action may block the company from doing any further moneymaking from the patents in question and be forced out of business once their lawsuit against HP will make them entirely bankrupt and unable to purchase any more patents. It wont stop others from attempting the same, but at least it may mean one less patent troll.
Thing food and clothing. Recipes and designs cannot be copyrighted. Yet these industries thrive and the creative people make money inspire of copies.
They cant be copyrighted but there are "workarounds". For one, simply keeping recipes secret in the food department. Other than that you can trademark names for foods, and you can copyright art that is attacked to the brand, and huge amounts of marketing result in convincing the masses that brand is better than anything else that happens to be out there.
As far as clothing goes, you may notice a big amount of branding in clothing these days. Every day it seems to be more and more obvious (ever seen huge AX or CKs stamped all over people's shirts while walking down the mall?) The design may not be copyrighted, but the logos are making it impossible for anyone to fully copy your design, since it depends on copyrighted art.
I am sure there are ways to make some money without depending on copyright law, but removing such laws will change things drastically. As soon as a big publisher realizes that he can just make as much money by grabbing any author's books and selling them without paying royalties, they will start doing that. It's a chain of events that ends up only favoring he who already has loads of money and connections to push their products.
Both are forms of intellectual property, but both are still very different in scope and execution.
Patents cover inventions. Also, patents require thousands and thousands of dollars to apply for, and it may take millions to defend against a patent claim. It can take at least 5 figures to attempt get a patent invalidated, no matter how unfair it is or how much prior art there may be. Patents also work as a blockade, as soon as you have them, you can legally stop anyone from inventing something that is too similar or depends on similar ideas, even if the new inventor had no knowledge of the existence of your patent.
Copyright covers arts and literature. Copyrights are automatic. As soon as you write a page of a short story or do a doodle, the copyright belongs to you. Although a copyright case can also eat a lot of money, it is focused on proving the infringing artist was aware of your work before he made his. If he had no clue of it, and you had no evidence to the contrary, there is no case. If you have evidence, then things can get more complex and things like Fair Use come into play. Copyrights do not work as a creative barricade. As long as my work is unique enough, similitude or reuse of certain ideas is fair game, even if you were aware of the original art.
Without copyrights, a writer that comes up with a script and attempts to sell the script to a studio can forget about it. As soon as he shows the script, the studio would be able to just make the movie and never give a penny back. An indie developer would also get screwed. He would spend months or years working in a game, publish it, and now any big studio can decide to just copy his work and sell it in big stores without giving him a penny.
The only problem right now with copyright law, is how it's used by the music industry to harass civilians, specially the use of precedent to claim absurd amounts from theses poor people, cases that were originally ruled upon the idea that a big corporation doing the infringement should not feel the consequences of being caught to be negligible. Citizens should not be pursued under that same standard.
Patents are horrible, and turn the inventing into an over encumbered practice. You are expected to do insane amounts of research before you can even proceed with the most ridiculously small segments of inventions, you may find that a round knob in a centered position on the top of a box to be patented. It is nearly impossible to do and ends up making it a huge gamble for anyone but large corporations to invent anything without running the risk of being sued to bankruptcy.
Patents need to be killed. They are horrible and just get in the way of progress, counter to what they were designed to do. Products name and design should be allowed to be copyrighted as the only way to protect the creator from being ripped off.
How do you figure Apple's entry should had lowered prices? Anyone's entry would simply had given publishers more options, and the ability to take content away from whoever does not agree with a higher price-point.
Apple never attempted to fix prices. The publishers did. They were not able to fix prices before because Amazon was the only viable option and they strong-armed publishers to keep the low prices. As soon as a viable option showed up, publishers turned around and used that to force Amazon to actually "negotiate". Had the Nook been viable before iBooks (now Nook is just as viable) the publishers would had likely done the same with them.
The only way Apple would had been able to keep prices low, or lower them further, would had been to enter into an agreement with Amazon (and Barns and Noble's for the nook) to as a group force publishers to lower prices. THAT is illegal and would had resulted in the federal powers that be stepping in.
You can accuse Apple of many things, like control, walled gardens, and arrogance, between many other things. But one thing you cant blame them for is high content price fixing. They have always done their best to keep content prices low. Heck, for a long time Apple did exactly the same as Amazon did, strong-arming music labels to sell songs for 99c and only giving in and allowing a price increase in exchange for total removal of DRM and the introduction of lower price in some of the catalog. To this date there is no force as large as iTunes to give music labels the strength to attempt increase music prices further. There are other ways to sell music, but labels know they cant threaten Apple to remove music from iTunes, because the label that does will loose way more than Apple in doing so.
No. What happens if the carrier bundles an app? The app is already there, you never got to see if it has access to your location data unless you start digging through settings. Worse, what happens if some one that wants to spy on you manages to get his hands on your phone for 5 minutes? He has enough time to download and install tracking software that you may never know off (unless you are an above-average user.)
What is being requested here seems to be that every time the app starts asking for tracking permission every time tracking is initiated. iOS does something like this, but once you accept it wont ask for that same application for another 24 hours. (Note, you used to have to tell apps if they were able to use location every time they launched, this was a pain for many and was changed to 24 hours with iOS 4.) As a user I find that acceptable, not sure if the EU will. Also, iOS will never ask for permission to inform MobileMe of the phone's current location (not exactly log tracking, only current position.) Only a phone owner/administrator can get to this console (unless hacked) but employer tracking is noted among the entities that should not be able to track you without asking, so that may also be an issue for Apple. It's also a double edge sword, I would hate MobileMe location requests to ask confirmation. If my phone was lost, how will the bottom of my bed click "Accept tracking?" Worse, a thief would definitively decline the request for a stolen unit.
Some may say that a smart user would know how to track this, and a dumb user deserves any harm they get for being dumb, but that's precisely the point of these kind of movements: to make it harder for companies to take advantage of the dumb. At the end of the day there is no easy answer to this, but I think Apple's 24 hour grant is the closest we can get to a balance between usability and privacy.
Yes, we were better off with Amazon keeping a monopoly on eBooks.
Competition was going to come out of somewhere, one way or another. Had it not been iBooks, it would had been the Nook. But competition exists at many levels, and even if publishers lock their titles and no one else competes with those specific titles, authors are more and more deciding to just skip the publisher all-together and go directly to Amazon, resulting in cheaper eBooks that give the original author more money and a reason to write more to sell in that cheaper way.
The publishing industry is going to suffer big in the next few years, and they don't seem to be willing to adjust. They will die in less than a decade, and eBooks will be much cheaper. This once enough authors realize how much more they can earn by self-epublishing.
I all I heard was how you (or more accurately, your contemporaries) are such a crappy tradesman that people would willingly take a huge loss on your product from trading it in rather than keep it, and that it takes a while for word to get out that it really was a lousy game.
I take it you cant foresee the fact that most people are crappy tradesmen, and this was proven by the recent housing market collapse, even traders by trade proved how bad they can be at it. Odd thin is, you seem to suggest the option to be a "bad tradesman" is to just keep the game. That's not the option, the option is to find a more profitable channel to sell your game, even if it may take a bit longer to do so.
As for the game "being crappy", just go to the stores and spend a while there. You will see even the best quality games get traded in. Off course, the game may be considered crappy by the person that traded it in, but its not about quality, just that user's perception. Most trade-ins are not because of quality, though, but because of the game being beaten and then just sold fast because they are just bad tradesmen.
Finally, I don't think the price is the issue, since a 65 dollar game tends to be sold by GameSpot for 60-63 dollars used. That's not a significant difference, and far from worth the condition the games tend to be sold at. For the most part, the used game is sold at almost the same price as the new copy. And this also affects games that are at much lower price points.
The guy buying a used game for $5 may not ever have purchased that game for $60. It's not a lost sale in that case. If I get ten used games for free from a friend of mine and play them once each, none of those count as lost purchases since I would never have bought them in the first place (and chances are half of those games have had their publishers go out of business).
Now if you're thinking about scams about selling used games for $59 to undercut the new $60 prices you may be right that those are lost sales. But that should never be an excuse to screw everyone else. People have the legal right to sell or give away property that they purchased no matter how much teeth gnashing it causes in publishers who want a piece of that money.
Yes, I thought I made it clear (and perhaps too verbose) that I am talking about cases there is only a few dollars of difference. Note the guy in the article was never quoted as saying that all re-sale must stop. And nor did I state that person to person sales are bad. The only thing that hurt are these stores that mass-purchase used games for pennies and sell them at near new-price. I don't think there is any legal way to stop that, and even if there was, I am not sure if they should be any law to do so (since those laws will likely be twisted to go hunt the small people selling at eBay once all retail are out of the way.)
In my post I was just trying to express the reasoning behind the feeling, and who the real responsible party for this is (GameStop/EB.) I also noted some approaches some publishers are starting to take, but I didn't really suggest anything be done about it. It's just a clarification of the true situation.
This has nothing to do with the First Sale Doctrine, and it is not really an issue of being able to trade your used copy. First off, we have to see what the guy actually said in the article:
"But, as I say, second-hand sales cost us more in the long-run than piracy these days."
The reason second hand sales cost them more is not obvious unless you give it some thought. One reason is that pirates are very unlikely to had bought a legitimate copy either way, they never saw enough value in the product to pay for it. The guy that buys a used copy, though, did see the value to open his wallet. So, although you can't say that a pirated copy was a lost sale, you may be able to say that about second hand copies.
I would had liked to see the full transcript of that interview, too. For some reason I was not able to find any mention to that specific topic from within the printed interview itself (ponder what else was left out.) As a developer, personally, I have my own view on the topic and it's obviously biased towards a developer standpoint, but I also buy games and have my own view as a consumer stand point (unlike many suits that just sell the games and only care to make the money.)
As both, a consumer and a developer I have a grudge with chains like GameStop. Specially with hot anticipated games, they make sure to barely buy enough copies to fulfill pre-orders, even knowing there will be people interested to buy new copies weeks to come. They then litterally harass customers to buy the used copy they just drastically underpaid buying back from the customers that either did not like the game that much or cant afford to buy more games without selling back their games as soon as they beat the last one they bought.
Over the years, and dating back all the way to my days as a student, I have witnessed many convinced to buy used copies for just 2 or 3 dollars less than the new one. These consumers are convinced that they are unlikely to find a copy anywhere due to the "hot nature" of the title they want and that they can not only have it now by getting the used one, but also get away with paying 2 bucks less. At the end of the day these people may walk home with games lacking cases, thorn pages in manuals (if one is included) or disks and cases full of stickers that forever will remind you of how you or your mother got ripped off.
This is only the way the buyer of used games can get shafted. The ones that traded the games in may had it worse. The prices they pay for these games in trade in are horribly low and would never beat you selling the game yourself in eBay or Amazon.
So we have 3 victims, and one common cause: GameStop/EB.
*They actually put extra effort to avoid helping publishers even by accident.
*They attempt to buy the same products back at unfairly low price.
*Finally they harass consumers and do anything they can to sell them poor condition copies for pennies in savings.
I buy used games once in a while, and when I do I do so from either eBay or Amazon (and sometimes from friends first hand.) I nearly always end up with a far superior copy of the game, and I know the original buyer gets a better deal. At the same time, I know that the sources did not go out of their way to shaft either party or hurt the publisher that spent millions developing the games I love to play.
From a plain developer standpoint, I can see any developer annoyed at GameStop for their practices and I doubt any developer (not talking about publishers) very likely is specifically referring to those practices when they criticize the used game market.
The worse part is that many developers end up feeling they must either go fully digital or offer growing chunks of the game as "one time digital download bonuses" that a buyer of the used copy will be forced to pay for (potentially making used copy purchase too expensive to be worth it) or making many of these games useless years from now when the services are down.
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Given this is /., I'd say it has more to do with people that make such claims not owning an iOS device. A /. user that has ever touched an iOS device and knows not about this deserves his account be closed and his bitcoin collection taken away.
Actually, you can with one of many available browsers in the App Store. With Opera Mini you don't even need to tweak anything, the site just does not seem capable of identifying it as an iPad browser. With Terra, my personal favorite browser (and free) for the iPad, allows me to set a permanent setting to identify as iPad Safari, OSX Safari 5, Internet Explorer 6 or Firerfox 3.6. There are a bunch of others with many different features that Safari does not have, like user agent change, full screen mode, ad blocking, social media integration, themes, bookmark syncing, download managers and built in emailing of files, etc etc.
iOS may be a walled garden, but the walls are nowhere near as tall as some Apple bashers like to think.
As a side note, the VHS and Internet were "legitimized" by unsavory elements of society.
Objection!!!
There is nothing "unsavory" about good porn!
If this was true, they would forbid you from distributing free apps through the App Store.
Off course they had an SDK from the start. They had it before the iPhone came out. It was used internally by Apple to develop their own software, and by jailbreakers to develop their own homebrew stuff.
I do have to note, though: If you have done any iOS development and OS X you would see there is a big enough overlap.
That is no evidence that Apple wanted to release it, though. Apple did indeed force developers to do their stuff in HTML+Javascript, but I think the reason they released the SDK and started working on the App Store and the approval process was a way to avoid jailbreaks to become a standard. Had they not acted fast they would had risk loosing control of their platform.
Although I don't agree with that article and it's points, I think most people are not worried about what kind of cracking can be done if their phones fall in the wrong hands, but instead of what kind of security can protect them while their phone is in their pockets.
How likely is a virus to get into a phone by downloading apps into it? How likely is a rouge app to steal all the data in the phone and send it somewhere else? How likely is, let's say, Facebook, to get software into my phone without my willing actions to install an app in my device?
Apple's walled garden make all those very very hard to happen. Even the most malicious of apps that manages to go past Apple's approval is very limited to what data it can leach out of your phone and send out.
There have been exploits in the past, though, like the one used to do an untethered jailbreak by just visiting a website. If I'm not wrong that was using a PDF exploit. On a side note, it's funny how most security concerns these days are tied up to Adobe technologies...
One gotcha though: if you dont defend a trademark you loose it. The previous owner of iCloud.com also called itself so for a long time, yet they were never pursued over the trademark. That is enough basis to make them loose their right to the TM, as far as I know (but IANAL).
No, it isn't. Anyone saying that has zero credibility right off the bat. Seriously. The built-in migrations tools are a joke, bridging .Net and COM components is insanely unreliable not to mention a million other corner cases and few are going to buy in any kind of specialised migration tools to rewrite code in another technology that does the same thing.
I never used migration tools, just Microsoft's extremely helpful documentation to find equivalence and the huge community of vb.net dedicated websites. I guess the largest hurdle I ever faced in projects was the horrid use of control arrays.
A requirement of a development tools is that you take your existing code, upgrade and are able to work with it straight away. VB.Net fails.
I'll return the "Anyone that says this has zero credibility right off the bat" and apply it to porting experience. H
Personal anecdotes (sound more like a wish to be honest) count for little I'm afraid.
Yet everything anyone says on this topic is really just a personal anecdote. How about your own personal anecdotes? How many projects have you migrated from VB to VB.net?
The VB world just has not moved along with VB.Net and that should tell you something.
Can you show the numbers on this? I cant because I have not looked them up, but in the last 10 years I have worked on 2 companies that have done the jump. Just jumped into a third company that has a very small IT staff, here there has not been a migration to VB.net for old code, but all new code is written in either VB.net or C#. It all is very dependent on what developer starts the project and their development history. The only reason that old VB code has not be touched is the same reason why it has not been maintained. It's basically forgotten code that keeps doing what it was meant to do. But these are "just anecdotes."
Well, I know there is a huge vb.net development community out there. There are a lot of sites devoted to it, forums and huge communities with loads of activity. Unless googling them up also just counts as "an anecdote."
Regardless, take this last anecdote: I have been developing VB since 1998 and do so today with VB.net. I have taken code written in 2001 and ported it to .net as recent as 2009. In my eyes, Microsoft did not "kill" VB, they just fixed it.
Not a very great way of putting it. What it meant was that countless billions of lines of existing code were useless overnight in Microsoft's new development environment. That was the first time something like that had happened and the warning signs should have been there for everyone involved as the same thing happened with .Net over the years - Winforms, WPF, XAML, Silverlight........ Microsoft could never decide what it was doing and seemed to expect everyone to rewrite their code every couple of years. Some people just haven't learned.
Porting from VB to VB.net is insanely easy. I have been working with VB since 1998 and have updated numerous projects to VB.net. I have meet numerous developers that argue how they don't know .net and how their code is dead and obsolete, that the best they can do is maintain it and hope it keeps working in future versions of Windows. I have taken code from such developers and ported it to .net in days. More complex software may take a couple of weeks. I actually learned .net doing a very successful port.
Heck, the process is so straightforward I have seen packages that do the port for you without human intervention (I personally never used them though, so cant vouch for their reliability.) I would go as far to say the only reason VB.net exists is to make sure such ports can be done quickly and easily by developers with little .net experience. I am sure MS would prefer if everyone just jumped into C#
Many developers used the VB.net shift as an excuse to stop learning and updating their code. That's their problem. Just like the developers that refuse to learn anything but their precious COBOL, and gamble their careers on institutions perpetually sustaining old COBOL code instead of migrating to recent technologies.
Also, to this date, I have not seen a machine where old VB code refuses to run. You can still develop VB6 and deploy it. It's no longer improved but it's not "dead" either. That is very different from the fear of Microsoft entirely killing Silverlight, in that case you can be fear Silverlight may not even run in Win8 machines (although I doubt it, MS has always been a pack-rat and knows not how to get rid of excess baggage.)
Interesting how people's bias color their perception. In the yes of others, I'm sure should Google be the one building this they would call it a celestial halo.
A big doughnut, though, would go GREAT with the department-store sized cafe they showed planned for employe use.
Ironically, by hard to trace Anonymous Readers.
Only if they want to please the Microsoft fans. Here, for /. Fans it would be best for it to be called AMOSXCLD.
And unfortunately, it takes about $30,000 to start an investigation to have the patent invalidated. Even then it may take months for it to happen, should you be sued in the time it takes no one will force them to pay your lawyers, and the investigation may not result in the patent being invalidated resulting in a waste of 30 grand.
This is another example on how broken the patent system is. It's designed so the common man can't apply for them, nor even attempt to revoke obvious ones with decades of prior art. It's a tool for the wealthy to harass the poor and force control of inventions into the hands of corporations that actually can afford the patent process.
Apple does not say it "thinks", their letter boldly states "Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patents and the App Makers are protected by that license," [emphasis mine].
They also state they are prepared to take legal action against Lodsys if they insist to go after developers. If Apple flexes it's legal muscle, it can do a lot of harm to Lodsys, from a simple bankrupting of the company, to a more complex process of having all patents invalidated (resulting in the same, given these patents seem to be their source of income.)
The real question there is: how effective and fast can that be? Even if Apple manages to submit a lawsuit against Lodsys overnight, I don't think they can stop Lodsys from terrorizing developers and launching lawsuits against them. Given most developers can't afford any level of legal defense, they would be automatically ruined and that alone can result in huge shock-waves in the development community.
I think this was Apple's "friendly and polite" request to stop, and made public to reassure developer's confidence in Apple's intentions to defend them. Future actions may be done in a private, more direct, manner and next time we hear about this may be either party saying they have come to an agreement and developers will be left alone, or Lodsys saying they don't give a @#$@% and start the lawsuits against developers. The later may happen as early as tomorrow. I would guess dialog between the companies may take a bit longer and we wont hear much until Friday or next week.
The thing I do have to ponder though, would Google actually step in the same way Apple did, should they go after Android developers? Up to this date, they have not taken responsibilities for any patent issues phone makers have faced, despite being as capable to interfere.
Microsoft promises anyone that manufactures WP7 devices that it will take full responsibility for any patent lawsuits, but will they extend this to developers? Actually bigger question for WP7, does the OS even support in app purchases?
That last question brings up another one: Google just recently introduced in-app purchases. This means that most, if any, in app purchase options in android apps is bypassing Google, just because they were forced to do it that way. Almost all such Android developers will become potential targets, even if they remove the functionality they can be pursued for retroactive pay.
Hopefully this will be meaningless, as this action may block the company from doing any further moneymaking from the patents in question and be forced out of business once their lawsuit against HP will make them entirely bankrupt and unable to purchase any more patents. It wont stop others from attempting the same, but at least it may mean one less patent troll.
Thing food and clothing. Recipes and designs cannot be copyrighted. Yet these industries thrive and the creative people make money inspire of copies.
They cant be copyrighted but there are "workarounds". For one, simply keeping recipes secret in the food department. Other than that you can trademark names for foods, and you can copyright art that is attacked to the brand, and huge amounts of marketing result in convincing the masses that brand is better than anything else that happens to be out there.
As far as clothing goes, you may notice a big amount of branding in clothing these days. Every day it seems to be more and more obvious (ever seen huge AX or CKs stamped all over people's shirts while walking down the mall?) The design may not be copyrighted, but the logos are making it impossible for anyone to fully copy your design, since it depends on copyrighted art.
I am sure there are ways to make some money without depending on copyright law, but removing such laws will change things drastically. As soon as a big publisher realizes that he can just make as much money by grabbing any author's books and selling them without paying royalties, they will start doing that. It's a chain of events that ends up only favoring he who already has loads of money and connections to push their products.
Both are forms of intellectual property, but both are still very different in scope and execution.
Patents cover inventions. Also, patents require thousands and thousands of dollars to apply for, and it may take millions to defend against a patent claim. It can take at least 5 figures to attempt get a patent invalidated, no matter how unfair it is or how much prior art there may be. Patents also work as a blockade, as soon as you have them, you can legally stop anyone from inventing something that is too similar or depends on similar ideas, even if the new inventor had no knowledge of the existence of your patent.
Copyright covers arts and literature. Copyrights are automatic. As soon as you write a page of a short story or do a doodle, the copyright belongs to you. Although a copyright case can also eat a lot of money, it is focused on proving the infringing artist was aware of your work before he made his. If he had no clue of it, and you had no evidence to the contrary, there is no case. If you have evidence, then things can get more complex and things like Fair Use come into play. Copyrights do not work as a creative barricade. As long as my work is unique enough, similitude or reuse of certain ideas is fair game, even if you were aware of the original art.
Without copyrights, a writer that comes up with a script and attempts to sell the script to a studio can forget about it. As soon as he shows the script, the studio would be able to just make the movie and never give a penny back. An indie developer would also get screwed. He would spend months or years working in a game, publish it, and now any big studio can decide to just copy his work and sell it in big stores without giving him a penny.
The only problem right now with copyright law, is how it's used by the music industry to harass civilians, specially the use of precedent to claim absurd amounts from theses poor people, cases that were originally ruled upon the idea that a big corporation doing the infringement should not feel the consequences of being caught to be negligible. Citizens should not be pursued under that same standard.
Patents are horrible, and turn the inventing into an over encumbered practice. You are expected to do insane amounts of research before you can even proceed with the most ridiculously small segments of inventions, you may find that a round knob in a centered position on the top of a box to be patented. It is nearly impossible to do and ends up making it a huge gamble for anyone but large corporations to invent anything without running the risk of being sued to bankruptcy.
Patents need to be killed. They are horrible and just get in the way of progress, counter to what they were designed to do. Products name and design should be allowed to be copyrighted as the only way to protect the creator from being ripped off.
How do you figure Apple's entry should had lowered prices? Anyone's entry would simply had given publishers more options, and the ability to take content away from whoever does not agree with a higher price-point.
Apple never attempted to fix prices. The publishers did. They were not able to fix prices before because Amazon was the only viable option and they strong-armed publishers to keep the low prices. As soon as a viable option showed up, publishers turned around and used that to force Amazon to actually "negotiate". Had the Nook been viable before iBooks (now Nook is just as viable) the publishers would had likely done the same with them.
The only way Apple would had been able to keep prices low, or lower them further, would had been to enter into an agreement with Amazon (and Barns and Noble's for the nook) to as a group force publishers to lower prices. THAT is illegal and would had resulted in the federal powers that be stepping in.
You can accuse Apple of many things, like control, walled gardens, and arrogance, between many other things. But one thing you cant blame them for is high content price fixing. They have always done their best to keep content prices low. Heck, for a long time Apple did exactly the same as Amazon did, strong-arming music labels to sell songs for 99c and only giving in and allowing a price increase in exchange for total removal of DRM and the introduction of lower price in some of the catalog. To this date there is no force as large as iTunes to give music labels the strength to attempt increase music prices further. There are other ways to sell music, but labels know they cant threaten Apple to remove music from iTunes, because the label that does will loose way more than Apple in doing so.
No. What happens if the carrier bundles an app? The app is already there, you never got to see if it has access to your location data unless you start digging through settings. Worse, what happens if some one that wants to spy on you manages to get his hands on your phone for 5 minutes? He has enough time to download and install tracking software that you may never know off (unless you are an above-average user.)
What is being requested here seems to be that every time the app starts asking for tracking permission every time tracking is initiated. iOS does something like this, but once you accept it wont ask for that same application for another 24 hours. (Note, you used to have to tell apps if they were able to use location every time they launched, this was a pain for many and was changed to 24 hours with iOS 4.) As a user I find that acceptable, not sure if the EU will. Also, iOS will never ask for permission to inform MobileMe of the phone's current location (not exactly log tracking, only current position.) Only a phone owner/administrator can get to this console (unless hacked) but employer tracking is noted among the entities that should not be able to track you without asking, so that may also be an issue for Apple. It's also a double edge sword, I would hate MobileMe location requests to ask confirmation. If my phone was lost, how will the bottom of my bed click "Accept tracking?" Worse, a thief would definitively decline the request for a stolen unit.
Some may say that a smart user would know how to track this, and a dumb user deserves any harm they get for being dumb, but that's precisely the point of these kind of movements: to make it harder for companies to take advantage of the dumb. At the end of the day there is no easy answer to this, but I think Apple's 24 hour grant is the closest we can get to a balance between usability and privacy.
Yes, we were better off with Amazon keeping a monopoly on eBooks.
Competition was going to come out of somewhere, one way or another. Had it not been iBooks, it would had been the Nook. But competition exists at many levels, and even if publishers lock their titles and no one else competes with those specific titles, authors are more and more deciding to just skip the publisher all-together and go directly to Amazon, resulting in cheaper eBooks that give the original author more money and a reason to write more to sell in that cheaper way.
The publishing industry is going to suffer big in the next few years, and they don't seem to be willing to adjust. They will die in less than a decade, and eBooks will be much cheaper. This once enough authors realize how much more they can earn by self-epublishing.
I all I heard was how you (or more accurately, your contemporaries) are such a crappy tradesman that people would willingly take a huge loss on your product from trading it in rather than keep it, and that it takes a while for word to get out that it really was a lousy game.
I take it you cant foresee the fact that most people are crappy tradesmen, and this was proven by the recent housing market collapse, even traders by trade proved how bad they can be at it. Odd thin is, you seem to suggest the option to be a "bad tradesman" is to just keep the game. That's not the option, the option is to find a more profitable channel to sell your game, even if it may take a bit longer to do so.
As for the game "being crappy", just go to the stores and spend a while there. You will see even the best quality games get traded in. Off course, the game may be considered crappy by the person that traded it in, but its not about quality, just that user's perception. Most trade-ins are not because of quality, though, but because of the game being beaten and then just sold fast because they are just bad tradesmen.
Finally, I don't think the price is the issue, since a 65 dollar game tends to be sold by GameSpot for 60-63 dollars used. That's not a significant difference, and far from worth the condition the games tend to be sold at. For the most part, the used game is sold at almost the same price as the new copy. And this also affects games that are at much lower price points.
I was under the impression that bitcoin IS malware.
The guy buying a used game for $5 may not ever have purchased that game for $60. It's not a lost sale in that case. If I get ten used games for free from a friend of mine and play them once each, none of those count as lost purchases since I would never have bought them in the first place (and chances are half of those games have had their publishers go out of business).
Now if you're thinking about scams about selling used games for $59 to undercut the new $60 prices you may be right that those are lost sales. But that should never be an excuse to screw everyone else. People have the legal right to sell or give away property that they purchased no matter how much teeth gnashing it causes in publishers who want a piece of that money.
Yes, I thought I made it clear (and perhaps too verbose) that I am talking about cases there is only a few dollars of difference. Note the guy in the article was never quoted as saying that all re-sale must stop. And nor did I state that person to person sales are bad. The only thing that hurt are these stores that mass-purchase used games for pennies and sell them at near new-price. I don't think there is any legal way to stop that, and even if there was, I am not sure if they should be any law to do so (since those laws will likely be twisted to go hunt the small people selling at eBay once all retail are out of the way.)
In my post I was just trying to express the reasoning behind the feeling, and who the real responsible party for this is (GameStop/EB.) I also noted some approaches some publishers are starting to take, but I didn't really suggest anything be done about it. It's just a clarification of the true situation.
This has nothing to do with the First Sale Doctrine, and it is not really an issue of being able to trade your used copy. First off, we have to see what the guy actually said in the article:
"But, as I say, second-hand sales cost us more in the long-run than piracy these days."
The reason second hand sales cost them more is not obvious unless you give it some thought. One reason is that pirates are very unlikely to had bought a legitimate copy either way, they never saw enough value in the product to pay for it. The guy that buys a used copy, though, did see the value to open his wallet. So, although you can't say that a pirated copy was a lost sale, you may be able to say that about second hand copies.
I would had liked to see the full transcript of that interview, too. For some reason I was not able to find any mention to that specific topic from within the printed interview itself (ponder what else was left out.) As a developer, personally, I have my own view on the topic and it's obviously biased towards a developer standpoint, but I also buy games and have my own view as a consumer stand point (unlike many suits that just sell the games and only care to make the money.)
As both, a consumer and a developer I have a grudge with chains like GameStop. Specially with hot anticipated games, they make sure to barely buy enough copies to fulfill pre-orders, even knowing there will be people interested to buy new copies weeks to come. They then litterally harass customers to buy the used copy they just drastically underpaid buying back from the customers that either did not like the game that much or cant afford to buy more games without selling back their games as soon as they beat the last one they bought.
Over the years, and dating back all the way to my days as a student, I have witnessed many convinced to buy used copies for just 2 or 3 dollars less than the new one. These consumers are convinced that they are unlikely to find a copy anywhere due to the "hot nature" of the title they want and that they can not only have it now by getting the used one, but also get away with paying 2 bucks less. At the end of the day these people may walk home with games lacking cases, thorn pages in manuals (if one is included) or disks and cases full of stickers that forever will remind you of how you or your mother got ripped off.
This is only the way the buyer of used games can get shafted. The ones that traded the games in may had it worse. The prices they pay for these games in trade in are horribly low and would never beat you selling the game yourself in eBay or Amazon.
So we have 3 victims, and one common cause: GameStop/EB.
*They actually put extra effort to avoid helping publishers even by accident.
*They attempt to buy the same products back at unfairly low price.
*Finally they harass consumers and do anything they can to sell them poor condition copies for pennies in savings.
I buy used games once in a while, and when I do I do so from either eBay or Amazon (and sometimes from friends first hand.) I nearly always end up with a far superior copy of the game, and I know the original buyer gets a better deal. At the same time, I know that the sources did not go out of their way to shaft either party or hurt the publisher that spent millions developing the games I love to play.
From a plain developer standpoint, I can see any developer annoyed at GameStop for their practices and I doubt any developer (not talking about publishers) very likely is specifically referring to those practices when they criticize the used game market.
The worse part is that many developers end up feeling they must either go fully digital or offer growing chunks of the game as "one time digital download bonuses" that a buyer of the used copy will be forced to pay for (potentially making used copy purchase too expensive to be worth it) or making many of these games useless years from now when the services are down.
As a side not in that line, i
That's easy! Move your desk to the side of the TV! :D That's what I did :)