Yeah I use about the same amount a month. I'm a huge geek. Most of it is used up in TV show torrents like the latest season of Lost.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 1
It's not just "don't like don't code", it's deliberate language discrimination. I can understand rejecting apps because they are malicious or because they duplicate existing functionality. I can understand not wanting the Flash runtime on their OS. But trying to prevent people from translating their code into actual Objective-C code? It's ludicrous. It's as if you banned translated books at your store purely for the reason that they are translated. It's very close to racial or cultural discrimination which is down right criminal.
This is one of the worst flamebaiting articles I've seen in awhile. The title is
Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately
But then they go on to prove something completely unrelated:
This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
How exactly does this make the piracy number any easier for developers to swallow? They put their hard work into a game and 80% of people using their work have not paid for it. The only thing we really learn from this article is that people will do anything to spin piracy into a positive action.
Let me expand that a bit. Apple sells digital music because an easy source of high-quality music that requires little thought to access leads to more sales of music which leads to more sales of music players, which Apple manufactures and gets a high margin on. If Apple could sell enough more music players to pay for the costs of hosting the songs just by giving away the songs, they would probably do it. The problem is that if the songs are all free, then Apple's costs go up (both hosting/bandwidth costs and the costs of royalties to the music companies) astronomically, so it's probably not possible to make more profit on music players from giving away music than from selling it at a nominal cost. If Apple could make more money giving away videos than selling them, they probably would for the same reason. And so on.
You could then easily argue that if they were to provide access to free content hosted by others then they would still get the device sales and not have to worry about hosting.
So why does Apple so tightly control the app store? Why is it that they want to ensure that apps are not crashing, or even worse crashing the device? Why is it that they want to ensure that applications are not poor performers, or that they don't drain the battery of the device? Why were they so long in allowing multi-tasking, and even then only allowing it in very restricted contexts? Quite simply, if apps for the platform were to do these things, then the ordinary, unsophisticated user would blame the platform rather than the software vendor for the crashes and performance problems they experience. This already happens on PCs: Microsoft gets blamed for badly written third party device drivers, poor third party software and the like. And if users start seeing the platform as poorly performing and underpowered and crash-prone, Apple would sell fewer of those devices and would make less money.
If Apple really just wanted to ensure quality applications and user experience, then why not offer the best of both worlds? Again your argument doesn't hold up. There's no reason that they couldn't have the "sanctioned" Apple App Store and then the "unsanctioned" wild west.
What it really boils down to is control under the guise of security and quality, neither of which are to be found on the iPhone.
I'd say this is the best option for any app, game, whatever. Build a barebones version first and make sure it's enjoyable. There are plenty of concepts that look good on paper but have enormous flaws in reality.
Apple making the music industry offer DRM free music is just a strawman. Apple nearly killing ubiquitous internet technologies is just a strawman. Riiight.
Trying to prevent cross platform apps is pretty futile. Especially when most platforms have a native development kit allowing users to write apps in C/C++. Apple's iPod and iPad support this very code.
There is no possibility of Apple acting in good faith in this case. They already have the approval process which must surely weed out any low quality apps. These restrictions are extra and serve Apple's business purposes.
Lets say you own the only bookstore that sells English books in the whole world. Not only that, but your store is English exclusive.
Some Spanish guy wants you to sell his books in your store. But you say you can't because you only sell English books. The Spanish guy says he'll have his books translated. But now you refuse because of some uptight notion that a translated book can never be as good as an untranslated one.
Sure, you have the right to refuse to sell things. But does that give you the right to discriminate against translated works?
You have the right, but you're probably going to face some heat for it. Just the same as a person who refuses to serve people of a certain race at their restaurant deserves to get some heat for that too.
Apple not only discriminates against apps, but also allows for double-standards when they let games run on third-party game engines. It might not be antitrust but it's still wrong no matter how you look at it.
1. BlackBerry will be getting Flash in the future.
2. RIM never outlawed any third-party development tools. If Adobe made a Flash to BlackBerry compiler I doubt they would disallow it.
3. This is ludicrous because the version of Java that runs on BlackBerry, J2ME, is cross platform and has been on nearly every mobile phone since the dumbphones.
No matter the technology, you can't control what people use it for.
Goodbye to Flash?
Hello to unblockable HTML5 ads. Hello HTML5 web apps that end up looking X different ways in X different browsers. Hello to extremely varied performance accross different browsers. Hello HTML5 pop ups!
Oh, and with less hardware integration than Flash.
I'm not arguing that pirates would have payed for the software because they could not pirate it. That point is moot because people are still using the software without paying for it. This the argument that pirates often use to justify their actions. They also say "Well if the DRM worked then sales would shoot through the roof" Right? Wrong, for exactly the reason you said. Because the pirates probably wouldn't play it if they couldn't get it for free.
You can just throw in the towel and say "OK we'll let the pirates have their free games... but we saved money because we didn't use DRM!" However, like any other business, this people's livelihood at stake here. You might as well say to a book store owner that you're OK with people walking in, borrowing a book, creating an exact replica of it and then returning it.
Yeah I did run Flash on my laptop before a leak in my building killed the thing. It was a Windows machine and it ran just fine. I never had a crash while using Flash.
You should check out the benchmarks for Flash vs. HTML5 in a recent Engadget article. I believe the results were from Tomshardware. Flash actually runs better than HTML5, at least on Windows.
Flash is a runtime which will run apps consistently across multiple browsers. With HTML5/Javascript/SVG/(insert other hacked together web techs) you would have to test on every browser and it would still turn out differently.
You're right. Apple isn't trying to stop web apps. They are just crippling them. In no way with current web technologies can you achieve what Flash can. This is how Apple can promote the "openness" of disallowing Flash while still preventing web apps from reaching their full potential on their platform. And since Apple is such a powerhouse, this consequently screws over all other platforms.
The Palm Pre, Pixi, and Pre Plus hardware is well known for being cheap. I can't see how it would get any worse. The software is nice but the hardware kills it for me.
I'm no lawyer, but lets assume that EFF is right and the warrant is invalid. Wouldn't this only protect Gizmodo and not the iPhone seller? Gizmodo could get damages or something if the warrant was invalid, but any evidence found against the seller can still be used in court.
Either way, they probably have other sources who can verify the identity of the seller.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh shit I forgot to sign in for that one. Don't know how that happened...
Yeah I use about the same amount a month. I'm a huge geek. Most of it is used up in TV show torrents like the latest season of Lost.
It's not just "don't like don't code", it's deliberate language discrimination. I can understand rejecting apps because they are malicious or because they duplicate existing functionality. I can understand not wanting the Flash runtime on their OS. But trying to prevent people from translating their code into actual Objective-C code? It's ludicrous. It's as if you banned translated books at your store purely for the reason that they are translated. It's very close to racial or cultural discrimination which is down right criminal.
This is one of the worst flamebaiting articles I've seen in awhile. The title is
Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately
But then they go on to prove something completely unrelated:
This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
How exactly does this make the piracy number any easier for developers to swallow? They put their hard work into a game and 80% of people using their work have not paid for it. The only thing we really learn from this article is that people will do anything to spin piracy into a positive action.
Let me expand that a bit. Apple sells digital music because an easy source of high-quality music that requires little thought to access leads to more sales of music which leads to more sales of music players, which Apple manufactures and gets a high margin on. If Apple could sell enough more music players to pay for the costs of hosting the songs just by giving away the songs, they would probably do it. The problem is that if the songs are all free, then Apple's costs go up (both hosting/bandwidth costs and the costs of royalties to the music companies) astronomically, so it's probably not possible to make more profit on music players from giving away music than from selling it at a nominal cost. If Apple could make more money giving away videos than selling them, they probably would for the same reason. And so on.
You could then easily argue that if they were to provide access to free content hosted by others then they would still get the device sales and not have to worry about hosting.
So why does Apple so tightly control the app store? Why is it that they want to ensure that apps are not crashing, or even worse crashing the device? Why is it that they want to ensure that applications are not poor performers, or that they don't drain the battery of the device? Why were they so long in allowing multi-tasking, and even then only allowing it in very restricted contexts? Quite simply, if apps for the platform were to do these things, then the ordinary, unsophisticated user would blame the platform rather than the software vendor for the crashes and performance problems they experience. This already happens on PCs: Microsoft gets blamed for badly written third party device drivers, poor third party software and the like. And if users start seeing the platform as poorly performing and underpowered and crash-prone, Apple would sell fewer of those devices and would make less money.
If Apple really just wanted to ensure quality applications and user experience, then why not offer the best of both worlds? Again your argument doesn't hold up. There's no reason that they couldn't have the "sanctioned" Apple App Store and then the "unsanctioned" wild west.
What it really boils down to is control under the guise of security and quality, neither of which are to be found on the iPhone.
I'd say this is the best option for any app, game, whatever. Build a barebones version first and make sure it's enjoyable. There are plenty of concepts that look good on paper but have enormous flaws in reality.
Apple making the music industry offer DRM free music is just a strawman. Apple nearly killing ubiquitous internet technologies is just a strawman. Riiight.
Trying to prevent cross platform apps is pretty futile. Especially when most platforms have a native development kit allowing users to write apps in C/C++. Apple's iPod and iPad support this very code.
There is no possibility of Apple acting in good faith in this case. They already have the approval process which must surely weed out any low quality apps. These restrictions are extra and serve Apple's business purposes.
I don't think Nintendo puts clauses in their contracts that try and prevent cross-platform development.
Yeah I don't see it as antitrust either. But I do see it as language discrimination. A version of "We don't serve your kind here."
Lets say you own the only bookstore that sells English books in the whole world. Not only that, but your store is English exclusive.
Some Spanish guy wants you to sell his books in your store. But you say you can't because you only sell English books. The Spanish guy says he'll have his books translated. But now you refuse because of some uptight notion that a translated book can never be as good as an untranslated one.
Sure, you have the right to refuse to sell things. But does that give you the right to discriminate against translated works?
You have the right, but you're probably going to face some heat for it. Just the same as a person who refuses to serve people of a certain race at their restaurant deserves to get some heat for that too.
Apple not only discriminates against apps, but also allows for double-standards when they let games run on third-party game engines. It might not be antitrust but it's still wrong no matter how you look at it.
1. BlackBerry will be getting Flash in the future.
2. RIM never outlawed any third-party development tools. If Adobe made a Flash to BlackBerry compiler I doubt they would disallow it.
3. This is ludicrous because the version of Java that runs on BlackBerry, J2ME, is cross platform and has been on nearly every mobile phone since the dumbphones.
Yeah, 12 inch screen? Lame.
No matter the technology, you can't control what people use it for.
Goodbye to Flash?
Hello to unblockable HTML5 ads. Hello HTML5 web apps that end up looking X different ways in X different browsers. Hello to extremely varied performance accross different browsers. Hello HTML5 pop ups!
Oh, and with less hardware integration than Flash.
Hello innovation!
I'm not arguing that pirates would have payed for the software because they could not pirate it. That point is moot because people are still using the software without paying for it. This the argument that pirates often use to justify their actions. They also say "Well if the DRM worked then sales would shoot through the roof" Right? Wrong, for exactly the reason you said. Because the pirates probably wouldn't play it if they couldn't get it for free.
You can just throw in the towel and say "OK we'll let the pirates have their free games... but we saved money because we didn't use DRM!" However, like any other business, this people's livelihood at stake here. You might as well say to a book store owner that you're OK with people walking in, borrowing a book, creating an exact replica of it and then returning it.
I hadn't heard of this but I sure as hell am interested. Do you know if it runs without plug-ins? Pretty neat either way!
Yeah I did run Flash on my laptop before a leak in my building killed the thing. It was a Windows machine and it ran just fine. I never had a crash while using Flash.
You should check out the benchmarks for Flash vs. HTML5 in a recent Engadget article. I believe the results were from Tomshardware. Flash actually runs better than HTML5, at least on Windows.
Speaking of straw men...
Flash has way more capabilities than HTML5.
Flash is a runtime which will run apps consistently across multiple browsers. With HTML5/Javascript/SVG/(insert other hacked together web techs) you would have to test on every browser and it would still turn out differently.
You're right. Apple isn't trying to stop web apps. They are just crippling them. In no way with current web technologies can you achieve what Flash can. This is how Apple can promote the "openness" of disallowing Flash while still preventing web apps from reaching their full potential on their platform. And since Apple is such a powerhouse, this consequently screws over all other platforms.
That Apple limits the first two is an example of them placing limits on their tech, not on their users.
How can you say that with a straight face? It's a straight-out logical fallacy.
She looked more like an extra from the Lord of the Rings (generic elf maiden #38) than a spokesmodel for a technical product.
I thought I recognized her.
The Palm Pre, Pixi, and Pre Plus hardware is well known for being cheap. I can't see how it would get any worse. The software is nice but the hardware kills it for me.
iNicorette. Simulates smoking to help you crush your worst cravings!
I'm no lawyer, but lets assume that EFF is right and the warrant is invalid. Wouldn't this only protect Gizmodo and not the iPhone seller? Gizmodo could get damages or something if the warrant was invalid, but any evidence found against the seller can still be used in court.
Either way, they probably have other sources who can verify the identity of the seller.
Finders jailed losers win.