Patent infringement is not the same as pirating/copyright infringement. Furthermore, the criteria for patent recognition - and indeed whether they recognise patents at all - is entirely up to the state in which said technology is being used: many countries have independent patent offices with their own criteria, which typically require individual filing to be recognised. China is quite at liberty not to recognise MS software patents and thus not pay any royalties; indeed, there are many who think that software patents are unnecessary so long as copyright/reverse engineering is prohibited and would welcome such a stance.
The only power that Do Not Track is as a means of making it clear that a user has a particular desire not to be tracked. An advertiser can chose to respect this choice, and will do so if a minority of motivated and technically inclined users make their desire clear - they don't lose out on much information, and they get substantial goodwill for it.
If Do Not Track is the default, it is no different than not having the bit at all - it's just a useless header that has no meaning. If an advertiser has a stance on tracking, they're not suddenly going to change it because browser vendors have stated they don't intend for their users to be tracked.
Given that the LG Optimus 2x - also known as the Star - benchmarks pretty impressively, I doubt a Nexus S overclock will put it to shame. In the quadrant benchmark the Nexus S has been noted as obtaining a score of 1474, whilst the Star scores 1759.
Assuming linear scaling from 1ghz, the Nexus S would obtain 1769 with android 2.3 whilst the star manages the previously stated 1759 with android 2.2 which has received fewer performance optimisations. Whilst this is only one benchmark, the more graphically focussed ones favour the Star's tegra (nVidia) processor to an even greater extent.
Therefore far from putting the new dual core Optimus to shame, I would argue that an overclocked Nexus S can just about keep level with it whilst using a faster OS version on benchmarks that favour it. Hardly putting the Star to shame...
Why? All the items that count can be earned by playing well/regularly - these micro-transactions are exactly that: single, small transactions to buy the odd item that you haven't got yet and can't be bothered to wait around for.
This is how the BBC reports online - single sentence 'paragraphs' under headings that are closer to where you'd really divide paragraphs. I'm not sure why you're so outraged, news reports in general use short paragraphs and fragments. The NY Times, for example, frequently uses single sentence paragraphs.
It makes articles easier to skim and ensures a consistent style between journalists, I'm not sure what your issue with it is.
If your 180 watt graphics card cannot function without drawing less power than that, you have bigger problems. It would, for example, be drawing 180 watts in any modern composited desktop (windows 7/compiz/kde 4/os x). Fortunately, graphics cards don't always run at 100%.
Regardless, it's not either or - code can be made more efficient and be hardware accelerated. One of the real advantages of interpreted code is that we can make sensible and reusable decisions on how best to use hardware to run it.
Right, and if piracy wasn't so prevalent those people would take a step back, realise they had to put some many aside to actually use their rig and buy a less ridiculous machine.
I came here to post pretty much the same thing. The other problem with apps, and often movies, is that they become 'obsolete' quite quickly to some degree. Apps in particular will have a new version released requiring an update fee to be 'current', presenting a good incentive to switch - and may well require such an update for the new version of an OS.
Movies less so, but I know that I rarely rewatch films more than a few times unless they're particularly good ones. This is reflected by the 75%+ discounting on amazon that makes it relatively cheap to repurchase the good parts of an old collection.
Right, but the same applies to Mac ports - they're generally treated equally since they both essentially require similar technologies for graphics/audio/networking - and the new Steam for OS X is exclusively native games (if you consider the handful of Flash games to be native I guess).
That, and if there's one thing we know about Valve it's that while they may take their time, it's generally pretty polished by the time they're done with it.
Cedega is a hacked up fork of Wine which is itself an incomplete and buggy implementation of Windows APIs on linux - why would you have similar expectation of Valve's official ports? Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.
You come up with some fair points, I'm not so sure they're relevant though.
In a short space of time they have achieved what's approaching a mobile application monopoly, and have come up with a load of very restrictive policies to make it difficult for developers to target multiple platforms, so in this way restricted compiled apps are far more anti-competitive than open spec web apps.
They're not forced to use those tools - but are forced to use Apple's APIs and languages, which severely limits the ability of 3rd party IDEs to differentiate themselves. I'm not sure where to access the current version of the developer's agreement, but wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of restriction to xcode.
I'd say if anything that's more abusive - selectively blocking out the competition but letting it in elsewhere when they benefit your platform. Also - point six has nothing to do with monotouch, they've added every new set of APIs within hours because they directly reference them.
Apple's policies ensure that if a developer wants access to their market then they're not going to be able to easily reuse that code elsewhere, handicapping other platforms that are themselves barely worth targeting because they don't benefit from multi-platform development. In that sense they could be seen as expanding a mobile application monopoly into a mobile devices monopoly.
Right, but Apple's policies are trying to remove viable alternatives for users interested in mobile applications.
Right, but that applies to pretty much any government regulation. The issue at stake here is whether the consumer would benefit from Apple's restrictions and consequent control over developers and consumers being lifted. In my opinion they would.
I think it really comes down to whether or not their dominance over mobile apps is sufficient to count as a monopoly - and even if it isn't currently, it could well become one with expansion into the MID market with the iPad.
Why do we have to assume it's HDTV ruining things? Maybe there's a point of diminishing returns at which it makes more sense to focus on things like contrast ratios, refresh rates, viewing ratios and additional features. Maybe the average resolution is going down while size goes up because that's how consumers want to spend their money?
Maybe your average consumer or business just doesn't have that much need for a single display larger than 1920x1080 or so? In specialised applications multiple screens are frequently at least as useful, and I know many people who still find 1280x1024 perfectly adequate. Obviously at smaller sizes every additional pixel can be a big benefit, but this is less of an issue at desktop scales.
There are plenty of specialist screens with higher resolutions, but if 1920x1080 or so is a sweet spot for the average consumer - allowing 1080p video, two side by side pages, more than enough space to view any webpages etc - then higher resolutions won't benefit from economics of scale.
Your last link didn't work for me, any idea why not? I'm absolutely sickened by how illegitimate and utterly out of touch with the voting populace this government is. It's been nothing but scandal followed by absurd legislation marred with gross incompetence for years now.
Which would be precisely the reason they made this change in the first place and does nothing but prove them right. If you want to stick it to the man (as with all piracy), don't buy their products, send them an email and maybe try to draw some media attention to the issue. Sure the impact might be small, but at least it's a positive one.
Pirating just convinces the corporations that stricter anti-piracy measures are the answer, and frankly they may have a point in this case given console vs PC piracy rates. If you don't think the game's worth what those who made it are asking for, show some self restraint and *don't buy it* rather than ruining things for the rest of us.
Their hand was pretty much forced when Geohot hacked it in the first place. Since their console is already in third place, rampant piracy could destroy the motivation for other publishers to release on their system. This firmware demonstrates that custom firmwares are possible and I'm sure it won't be long until people are allowing playback of disks from external HDs or whatever.
I'd rather this hadn't happened but the Other OS feature is of little use besides the option to run code on the Cell, and in that case the latest firmware is probably not needed. Ultimately Sony reached out to the hobbyist community with better access to their hardware than any other recent console has provided, and somebody has come along and ruined that.
I'm not so sure - in the case of traditional advertising you get certain groups intentionally targeting users that match a given criteria such as views of a certain type of website or TV program. Even if web advertising then adjusts based on the effectiveness of links between given groups and given adverts, that's still fundamentally driven by a manually selected connection.
In the case of the system described in the article, to match you with similar uses and then apply a degree of randomness to provide more interesting results. In this case, the link is driven by automatically calculated connections based on usage rather than targeting. This means it can be applied not only to products, but to any other site that involves multiple users with varying interests.
This seems like a more interesting alternative with more potential than traditional targeted advertising.
Your analogy does nothing but complicate financial markets. There's also no real consistency in your argument - you seem to be using vague and increasingly baseless environmental analogies that have no real connection to each other. Your last two sentences in particular also seem to have no real relevance to the earth as a system, economic or environmental, due to the input of the sun's energy and the potential for exploitation of resources within and external to the earth.
I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing - a full mobile browser is a full browser that has the bonus of mobility i.e. runs on a mobile device. Certain websites serving certain variations on their standard HTML to specific useragent strings reflects nothing on the capabilities or the type of the browser that renders them.
Yup, they're *so* anti-DRM that they chose to restrict application sales on the iPhone/iPod Touch to iTunes, with mandatory DRM even for developers who don't want it and no way to distribute or install outside of their proprietary methods.
Apple were happy to go anti-DRM for a bit of geek cred once iTunes and the iPod were both already dominant and they no longer had to rely on technological lock-in. When it gives them more control they're all for it. Ars have an article that sums up the iPad's restrictions on freedom.
Your argument that Apple succeeding with a closed DRM'd model forced open music is also counter-intuitive - their leverage over the music industry may have hastened DRM-free music, but that was at best an unintended side effect. Indeed, it's possible that without the success of iTunes the industry would never have bothered shoving DRM on us and we'd have seen a natural progression from CDs (although that may be a bit optimistic...)
It's DRM'd to high hell - books, movies and apps. The only reason the music isn't is thanks to competition from the likes of Amazon. There's something slightly frustrating about using an explicitly open format and then spewing their own brand of DRM all over it.
1. I've had the exact opposite experience - reading long journal articles and the like on a kindle is a far nicer experience than trying to do the same off my laptop. Given its glossy screen, I can't imagine the iPad will cope too well either if you sit with a 200W light behind you. I still prefer books given the choice, but spending a significant amount of time in front of an LCD sucks in my experience.
2. That's fair enough - it's more of a fundamental problem with e-ink, although I'm sure Amazon could do something with the software (a single button to zoom straight in).
3. This seems to be very similar to 2 - the fact is it's a very specialised device that does one thing well (IMO) and a few value-added things significantly less well. Your reference book point - when I'm looking for something specific I find the search function sufficient but I guess that's a personal thing.
4. This is more a case of publishers not wanting to sabotage their existing business model I'd have thought - hopefully things will equalise over time. Unless publishers lower prices to undermine Amazon I can't see this changing. Hopefully competition will eventually benefit all parties involved in this respect.
Really, I think the Kindle will remain the superior straight reading device - it's a vast improvement over a standard LCD in my experience and in that of friends who've tried ebook readers.
That said, Apple's bling-factor and the devices other features could be enough to relegate the Kindle to a niche. We'll see...
Or you could make *two clicks* and change it back. This is a significant opportunity for Canonical to become profitable and could potentially see a minor, insignificant revenue increase for MS. If they were dealing directly with MS you could argue they're asking to be screwed, but with Bing/Windows on the one side and Google/Chrome OS/Android on the other Yahoo appears to be the least self-sabotaging search engine at the moment. Particularly with Chrome OS, Google is looking to make the desktop ecosystem on which Canonical depends an irrelevant commodity in the face of a closed, in-the-cloud system.
If you'd rather use Google then take the two clicks to change it, but don't act as if you're making an ethical stance against corporatism. Google's end goal is you being locked into their webapps, just as MS' end goal is you being locked into their OS and apps.
Canonical brokered a compromise with Mozilla, something about authorising their patchset, whereby they were also allowed to keep the branding. However, if a user makes further changes to Firefox and distributes it they would have to remove the branding. These terms were unacceptable to Debian but Canonical decided it was worth it to draw new users with the Firefox brand.
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Patent infringement is not the same as pirating/copyright infringement. Furthermore, the criteria for patent recognition - and indeed whether they recognise patents at all - is entirely up to the state in which said technology is being used: many countries have independent patent offices with their own criteria, which typically require individual filing to be recognised. China is quite at liberty not to recognise MS software patents and thus not pay any royalties; indeed, there are many who think that software patents are unnecessary so long as copyright/reverse engineering is prohibited and would welcome such a stance.
The only power that Do Not Track is as a means of making it clear that a user has a particular desire not to be tracked. An advertiser can chose to respect this choice, and will do so if a minority of motivated and technically inclined users make their desire clear - they don't lose out on much information, and they get substantial goodwill for it.
If Do Not Track is the default, it is no different than not having the bit at all - it's just a useless header that has no meaning. If an advertiser has a stance on tracking, they're not suddenly going to change it because browser vendors have stated they don't intend for their users to be tracked.
Given that the LG Optimus 2x - also known as the Star - benchmarks pretty impressively, I doubt a Nexus S overclock will put it to shame. In the quadrant benchmark the Nexus S has been noted as obtaining a score of 1474, whilst the Star scores 1759.
Assuming linear scaling from 1ghz, the Nexus S would obtain 1769 with android 2.3 whilst the star manages the previously stated 1759 with android 2.2 which has received fewer performance optimisations. Whilst this is only one benchmark, the more graphically focussed ones favour the Star's tegra (nVidia) processor to an even greater extent.
Therefore far from putting the new dual core Optimus to shame, I would argue that an overclocked Nexus S can just about keep level with it whilst using a faster OS version on benchmarks that favour it. Hardly putting the Star to shame...
Why? All the items that count can be earned by playing well/regularly - these micro-transactions are exactly that: single, small transactions to buy the odd item that you haven't got yet and can't be bothered to wait around for.
This is how the BBC reports online - single sentence 'paragraphs' under headings that are closer to where you'd really divide paragraphs. I'm not sure why you're so outraged, news reports in general use short paragraphs and fragments. The NY Times, for example, frequently uses single sentence paragraphs.
It makes articles easier to skim and ensures a consistent style between journalists, I'm not sure what your issue with it is.
It isn't either/or.
If your 180 watt graphics card cannot function without drawing less power than that, you have bigger problems. It would, for example, be drawing 180 watts in any modern composited desktop (windows 7/compiz/kde 4/os x). Fortunately, graphics cards don't always run at 100%.
Regardless, it's not either or - code can be made more efficient and be hardware accelerated. One of the real advantages of interpreted code is that we can make sensible and reusable decisions on how best to use hardware to run it.
Right, and if piracy wasn't so prevalent those people would take a step back, realise they had to put some many aside to actually use their rig and buy a less ridiculous machine.
I came here to post pretty much the same thing. The other problem with apps, and often movies, is that they become 'obsolete' quite quickly to some degree. Apps in particular will have a new version released requiring an update fee to be 'current', presenting a good incentive to switch - and may well require such an update for the new version of an OS.
Movies less so, but I know that I rarely rewatch films more than a few times unless they're particularly good ones. This is reflected by the 75%+ discounting on amazon that makes it relatively cheap to repurchase the good parts of an old collection.
Right, but the same applies to Mac ports - they're generally treated equally since they both essentially require similar technologies for graphics/audio/networking - and the new Steam for OS X is exclusively native games (if you consider the handful of Flash games to be native I guess).
That, and if there's one thing we know about Valve it's that while they may take their time, it's generally pretty polished by the time they're done with it.
Cedega is a hacked up fork of Wine which is itself an incomplete and buggy implementation of Windows APIs on linux - why would you have similar expectation of Valve's official ports? Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.
I think it really comes down to whether or not their dominance over mobile apps is sufficient to count as a monopoly - and even if it isn't currently, it could well become one with expansion into the MID market with the iPad.
Why do we have to assume it's HDTV ruining things? Maybe there's a point of diminishing returns at which it makes more sense to focus on things like contrast ratios, refresh rates, viewing ratios and additional features. Maybe the average resolution is going down while size goes up because that's how consumers want to spend their money?
Maybe your average consumer or business just doesn't have that much need for a single display larger than 1920x1080 or so? In specialised applications multiple screens are frequently at least as useful, and I know many people who still find 1280x1024 perfectly adequate. Obviously at smaller sizes every additional pixel can be a big benefit, but this is less of an issue at desktop scales.
There are plenty of specialist screens with higher resolutions, but if 1920x1080 or so is a sweet spot for the average consumer - allowing 1080p video, two side by side pages, more than enough space to view any webpages etc - then higher resolutions won't benefit from economics of scale.
Your last link didn't work for me, any idea why not? I'm absolutely sickened by how illegitimate and utterly out of touch with the voting populace this government is. It's been nothing but scandal followed by absurd legislation marred with gross incompetence for years now.
Which would be precisely the reason they made this change in the first place and does nothing but prove them right. If you want to stick it to the man (as with all piracy), don't buy their products, send them an email and maybe try to draw some media attention to the issue. Sure the impact might be small, but at least it's a positive one.
Pirating just convinces the corporations that stricter anti-piracy measures are the answer, and frankly they may have a point in this case given console vs PC piracy rates. If you don't think the game's worth what those who made it are asking for, show some self restraint and *don't buy it* rather than ruining things for the rest of us.
Their hand was pretty much forced when Geohot hacked it in the first place. Since their console is already in third place, rampant piracy could destroy the motivation for other publishers to release on their system. This firmware demonstrates that custom firmwares are possible and I'm sure it won't be long until people are allowing playback of disks from external HDs or whatever.
I'd rather this hadn't happened but the Other OS feature is of little use besides the option to run code on the Cell, and in that case the latest firmware is probably not needed. Ultimately Sony reached out to the hobbyist community with better access to their hardware than any other recent console has provided, and somebody has come along and ruined that.
You mean like Stardock's Impulse? That's been out for nearly two years now? Ah, thought not...
I'm not so sure - in the case of traditional advertising you get certain groups intentionally targeting users that match a given criteria such as views of a certain type of website or TV program. Even if web advertising then adjusts based on the effectiveness of links between given groups and given adverts, that's still fundamentally driven by a manually selected connection.
In the case of the system described in the article, to match you with similar uses and then apply a degree of randomness to provide more interesting results. In this case, the link is driven by automatically calculated connections based on usage rather than targeting. This means it can be applied not only to products, but to any other site that involves multiple users with varying interests.
This seems like a more interesting alternative with more potential than traditional targeted advertising.
Your analogy does nothing but complicate financial markets. There's also no real consistency in your argument - you seem to be using vague and increasingly baseless environmental analogies that have no real connection to each other. Your last two sentences in particular also seem to have no real relevance to the earth as a system, economic or environmental, due to the input of the sun's energy and the potential for exploitation of resources within and external to the earth.
It's supported on the HTC Hero, but only as an explicit addon by HTC.
I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing - a full mobile browser is a full browser that has the bonus of mobility i.e. runs on a mobile device. Certain websites serving certain variations on their standard HTML to specific useragent strings reflects nothing on the capabilities or the type of the browser that renders them.
Yup, they're *so* anti-DRM that they chose to restrict application sales on the iPhone/iPod Touch to iTunes, with mandatory DRM even for developers who don't want it and no way to distribute or install outside of their proprietary methods.
Apple were happy to go anti-DRM for a bit of geek cred once iTunes and the iPod were both already dominant and they no longer had to rely on technological lock-in. When it gives them more control they're all for it. Ars have an article that sums up the iPad's restrictions on freedom.
Your argument that Apple succeeding with a closed DRM'd model forced open music is also counter-intuitive - their leverage over the music industry may have hastened DRM-free music, but that was at best an unintended side effect. Indeed, it's possible that without the success of iTunes the industry would never have bothered shoving DRM on us and we'd have seen a natural progression from CDs (although that may be a bit optimistic...)
It's DRM'd to high hell - books, movies and apps. The only reason the music isn't is thanks to competition from the likes of Amazon. There's something slightly frustrating about using an explicitly open format and then spewing their own brand of DRM all over it.
1. I've had the exact opposite experience - reading long journal articles and the like on a kindle is a far nicer experience than trying to do the same off my laptop. Given its glossy screen, I can't imagine the iPad will cope too well either if you sit with a 200W light behind you. I still prefer books given the choice, but spending a significant amount of time in front of an LCD sucks in my experience. 2. That's fair enough - it's more of a fundamental problem with e-ink, although I'm sure Amazon could do something with the software (a single button to zoom straight in). 3. This seems to be very similar to 2 - the fact is it's a very specialised device that does one thing well (IMO) and a few value-added things significantly less well. Your reference book point - when I'm looking for something specific I find the search function sufficient but I guess that's a personal thing. 4. This is more a case of publishers not wanting to sabotage their existing business model I'd have thought - hopefully things will equalise over time. Unless publishers lower prices to undermine Amazon I can't see this changing. Hopefully competition will eventually benefit all parties involved in this respect. Really, I think the Kindle will remain the superior straight reading device - it's a vast improvement over a standard LCD in my experience and in that of friends who've tried ebook readers. That said, Apple's bling-factor and the devices other features could be enough to relegate the Kindle to a niche. We'll see...
Or you could make *two clicks* and change it back. This is a significant opportunity for Canonical to become profitable and could potentially see a minor, insignificant revenue increase for MS. If they were dealing directly with MS you could argue they're asking to be screwed, but with Bing/Windows on the one side and Google/Chrome OS/Android on the other Yahoo appears to be the least self-sabotaging search engine at the moment. Particularly with Chrome OS, Google is looking to make the desktop ecosystem on which Canonical depends an irrelevant commodity in the face of a closed, in-the-cloud system.
If you'd rather use Google then take the two clicks to change it, but don't act as if you're making an ethical stance against corporatism. Google's end goal is you being locked into their webapps, just as MS' end goal is you being locked into their OS and apps.
Canonical brokered a compromise with Mozilla, something about authorising their patchset, whereby they were also allowed to keep the branding. However, if a user makes further changes to Firefox and distributes it they would have to remove the branding. These terms were unacceptable to Debian but Canonical decided it was worth it to draw new users with the Firefox brand.