So why do people buy Ferraris? The answer is exclusivity. People buy them because not everybody can own a Ferrari. Were there some way to magically replicate a Ferrari, nobody would spent $200,000 on one.
I would just like to point out some things: it's exactly because it is a physical product that manufacturing/replicating it is so difficult which leads to high price which leads to this exclusivity which again leads to higher monetary value. Software on the other hand cannot rely on the feeling of exclusivity, there is no cost whatsoever to replicating it once it has been manufactured and thus it quite isn't comparable. The value of a software product does not decrease with the number of people who own it, thereby its scarcity does not increase its monetary value.
Maybe they couldn't afford it, maybe they have some ideological reason, I really don't know as I'm not them.
Is it possible that they would indeed pay for x product if they couldn't get it for free? Perhaps not in all cases, but I doubt all freeloaders would entirely abandon movies/music/games if unable to grab free copies.
No one is saying all "freeloaders" would do that, you know. There are people who would, and there are people who wouldn't.
Hm, true enough, I admit my failure. We have no such silliness here and thus almost no one knows about encrypting one's traffic.
As an aside, even though encrypting traffic is quite a good measure an even better measure would be to use combine that with IP block-lists, too. Unfortunately uTorrent doesn't have such a feature. I don't know of any Windows-based BT-client that does, actually, only Linux-ones.
While not directly an answer to the question posed, gog.com's community wishlist ( http://www.gog.com/wishlist ) is one way of reviving old games. Not all companies are willing to open-source their creations, no matter how exceedingly good arguments you make, but they might be willing to revive these old games if there was a way of getting even one dollar of profit out of it.
How can they identify BitTorrent traffic, since virtually all such traffic is encrypted and all the ISP can see is that it is SSL?
Are some people still silly enough not to encrypt their transfers?
First of all, it is very easy to identify BitTorrent traffic even if it is encrypted, you just cannot identify the contents of said traffic. Secondly, e.g. uTorrent by default does not use encryption and quite obviously Joe Blow doesn't even come to think of that, let alone know how to enable it.
Something has been lost because the value of the original has been reduced.
If the person wouldn't be paying for it anyways then that person views its monetary value already at zero, therefore its value cannot be reduced any further anyways.
Girls on a computer screen are so much better: they'll never start bitching over something ridiculous, they don't smell sweaty, they don't spend your money, they're accessible whenever you want them but they also won't ever bother you when you don't want to. This "summer" and "outside" thing really sounds very much an inferior experience.
This really sounds like you think sitting at computer is the only thing to do in the world.
I don't understand what you're trying to insinuate. Could you elaborate?
But yesterday I went out and there was lots of beautiful and cute girls and people spending time outside in the summer. Amazing, I know. But the best thing - and let me tell she was so cute - was one girl who sat down to draw what she saw when people walked past her. I smiled at her. Should had said hello. Amazing.
Girls on a computer screen are so much better: they'll never start bitching over something ridiculous, they don't smell sweaty, they don't spend your money, they're accessible whenever you want them but they also won't ever bother you when you don't want to. This "summer" and "outside" thing really sounds very much an inferior experience.
Not necessarily. The definition for what is actually copyright and if e.g. a simple comment on a forum can even be copyrighted at all varies. Then there is the intent that must be taken into account, ie. the poster that made the comment on a public forum with no disclaimer did very likely mean for it to be publicly accessible and non-restricted, and similarly you must fair use - rights into account, not to mention the whole fact that facts cannot be copyrighted at all.
Since when does all BitTorrent traffic = piracy? I download 10's of gigabytes/year using BT and none of it is pirated content. All of my BT traffic is legitimate and legal.
In my opinion, this association of "all" BT traffic with illegal downloading is preventing BT from being more widely utilized for legitimate uses. It is nothing more than a distributed file-transfer protocol; the fact that some amount of BT traffic is used for illegal activities is really irrelevant. We should be driving more legitimate usage of BT to tilt the traffic patterns more towards legal use of the protocol and drown out the "noise" of illegal usage. This is the only way to ensure widespread use of the protocol in a way that survives any legal attempts to block it. The more BT is used for illegal activity the more likely it will be blocked or filtered at some point.
Indeed. One of the most-well-known examples is World of Warcraft which uses BitTorrent for distribution. Just wait till Mists of Pandaria is released and you'll again see quite a large jump in BitTorrent traffic. Then of course there are the usual candidates like any larger F/OSS application or distribution that almost invariably offer BitTorrent downloads, many commercial applications do that these days, too, Indie movies are often accessible via BitTorrent and so on.
Your analogy is really poor. If you take a Ferrari then the person who owns the Ferrari doesn't have it anymore. If you on the other hand take a digital copy of software then the original creator still has it, too. With that in mind: if a person downloads a copy of something and never has any intention for paying for it, even if it was unavailable via piracy, then how has anything been lost?
Why would I buy any device that supports Cinavia? A solution that can be expected only from non-ACs.
Because you may always not know what device supports Cinavia? For example all BluRay-players manufactured after February this year will have Cinavia mandatory. Not even all geeks are aware of that, let alone the non-geeks who may buy you a gift, for example.
Who needs it? Just direct the analog audio output of your sound card into the input of an audio recorder, and direct your browser at YouTube or whatever you want a copy of, and hit play. Cut, paste, print. Now you have the file, and no one can stop you. Basically the same as recording off radio, as far as I'm concerned. So you don't need the software... the can't plug the analog hole, Mal... they can never plug...
Silly "solution" as can only be expected from an AC.
First of all, you're just further reducing audio quality of something that is already not-so-good by decompressing it, playing it over analog, recording it over analog and then recompressing it. Secondly, that's a hassle. Thirdly, the "analog hole" can actually be plugged to an extent, like e.g. devices which support Cinavia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia ) wouldn't play Cinavia-protected content even after you've played it back and recorded over analog contacts.
Why can't the ISP's intercept all dns request packets to the infected servers and redirect the requests to their own dns server that has been programmed to send all requests save a few exceptions to a web page with explicit instructions and hard coded access to the websites necessary for removal of the virus and ONLY these websites. People can follow rudimentary instructions if they have to.
Because these computers likely have a bunch of other malware and viruses on them already and thus it's best to just have some geek to do a proper clean-up. It's the best option for all involved.
I disagree. The proper thing to do IMHO is to cut them off so their owners will have the machines checked and any malware and viruses removed. Who knows how many other such they have on their machines already and who knows how many of those owners have lost their credit cards due to that? Besides, there computers are also likely a part of some botnet by now and again for that reason it is a good thing to have them cleaned up.
Framerates will suffer some even with compression, but that's not really an issue for this use case.
Any non-casual gamers or game developers would disagree with you.
In actual practice 1080p streams just fine to one display at 12 FPS at 50 Mbps (HD movies over 802.11g), so this will be fine for desktop apps with 3-4 similar displays.
Desktop-imagery is not comparable to movies as in movies there's a lot of content that can be compressed without it affecting visual effect much, but on the desktop there's a lot of sharp lines, text that needs to stay sharp, UI-elements and so on. With lossy compression the image quality would quickly deteriorate to the point of uselessness. Also, you can try lossless compression over the network with e.g. TightVNC: you'll very quickly notice how much it lags and stutters, especially if you're using any Flash-animations, doing web-browsing, or -- god forbid -- watch some video.
Ergo, neither solution would actually work in practice.
If not, we move the per-monitor processing to the per-monitor dongle and it's all good because the dongle is more than capable and distributed processing has gotten that good.
That would entail moving the whole GPU on the per-monitor dongle which would increase their cost and drop your bandwidth down the drain. And you'd STILL have to transfer textures and any client-side rendering to the per-monitor dongle. Ie. that still doesn't solve the problem.
But again, we're talking about desktop apps where an average of 4 FPS is overkill.
I'm fairly certain ANYONE doing actual development work, web-browsing or -- again, god forbid -- video would like to disagree with you.
And yes, 7.9 MB is "a few megabytes". Especially when your phone comes with 1024 or 2048 megabytes of RAM. That's a reasonable measure for a framebuffer. 512MB is 64 8MB framebuffers.
You're confusing things again. The size of the framebuffers is irrelevant, it's the amount of data to be transferred that matters. Besides, most systems use double- or triple-buffering, plus any additional buffers for textures and vertex data, so you're still off by quite a large margin even on that.
Tablets will have quad core very soon (maybe already? I haven't kept up). The gap between tablets and PCs will close just as PCs quickly passed the workstations in power, just because the market was SO much larger and so more money went into their development.
I see why you're posting as AC. Mobile devices will never catch up to PCs simply because PCs have access to much more space for the components, better cooling and access to a lot more electrical power, you simply cannot cram that in a mobile form.
Displays are only a few megabytes each - your average Tegra3 tablet like the $200 Nexus 7 can handle dozens of them.
Only a few megabytes each? You still use a CGA-screen? 1920x1080 resolution at 32bit colours is already ~7,9 megabytes PER A SINGLE FRAME. At 60Hz that suddenly becomes ~475 megabytes PER SECOND. You could apply some sort of lossless compression but it'd still be well over 300 megabytes of data every second. I would really love to see you driving such over Bluetooth, I really would.
That's like saying the "To:" field in an email app is CLI, but really, you're confusing the term CLI -- ie. command-line interface -- with text-based entry. They are not the same thing. But thank you for proving my point about ignorance.
To be frank I'd say this is mostly a complete non-issue. What tasks Average Joe may need to do on his computer do *require* using CLI? I can't think of anything other than recovery from update/upgrade failures and such. Sure, even those should be automated as much as possible and tbh, there shouldn't happen such failures that cause one to drop down to CLI in the first case. But why would Average Joe need a GUI tool for e.g. setting up Apache2+PHP+MySQL? Average Joes do not care about such things and for the rest of us CLI is often the faster and easier way of setting that up.
With all that said: pray tell what functions would Average Joe need on his computer that at the moment *require* CLI? I really want an answer on that.
Budget phones are obviously a category for themselves, I still believe that with slimming down and modularizing Android one could actually still fit several updates even on those. One thing that budget phones often lack is storage space which makes it hard to fit newer Android-releases there, but with modularized installs one could leave less-useful features out and still get the rest of the benefits of the newer release. Also, when it comes to RAM the "Google Experience" Android would quite likely actually fit much better in there than the stock ROMs do due to e.g. how horribly inefficient Samsung's TouchWiz is; strip that out and POOF, you'll have just made 100 megabytes of free RAM.
On the other hand I own two quite well-specced Android-devices, one Acer Iconia Tab A500 10"-tablet and a Samsung Galaxy Note-mobile; both sport plenty of storage, they're dual-core systems, 1GB RAM and all that, both are still quite recent devices, yet I still don't expect to receive new updates for either of them anymore. There is no reason hardware-wise why either of them couldn't be upgraded, I just see no willigness from the manufacturers to do that, nor does Google even try to give them an incentive for doing that.
The general consensus regarding the PDK for Android Jellybean and upwards seems to lean in the same direction as I am saying: "it won't amount to much, if anything at all." The biggest problem for end-users is the fact that companies do not want to do updates for already-released products, so releasing a PDK that is supposed to let start working on the updates slightly earlier than regularly -- with no other positive effects or incentives whatsoever -- really means nothing. If Google really sought to improve the situation for end-users they should start maintaining a "Google Experience" - version of Android.
Implementing a "Google Experience" Android would first off require them to modularize Android somewhat so that it can be slimmed down by not installing features that won't be used, like e.g. voice search and everything related to it is mostly worthless in any country which do not support it so why insist on installing it? Allow user to choose to install it, yes, but do not force it. Modularizing Android this way would help in a situation where there is not enough storage to install the whole thing: the installer could present the user with a warning dialog explaining the situation and let user pick and unpick features -- with explanation on what each feature means -- until the system fits comfortably, then before starting the installation remind the user of what features won't be available and make certain the user still wishes to proceed.
A second thing that would be needed would be for manufacturers to start including, say, 32 kilobytes of ROM where would be details about the actual hardware: device manufacturer, model, revision, amount of installed RAM, sizes, types and location of any storage and then a listing of all the hardware with manufacturer, model, revision, connection type, memory addresses/register addresses/etc. needed for using the device, what features the device supports and so on. The installer would then be able to check the list against Google-maintained drivers to see if there even exists drivers for the hardware, if the drivers support the connection type/scheme, etc. Also, one of the more important things would be that it would also be able to check if the Google-maintained drivers support all the features the hardware supports, and if not, the installer could warn the user of the features they would lose by installing "Google Experience" - Android.
In that ROM could also be defined a list -- even if it were just a partial one -- of what applications the manufacturer provides on the stock ROM so that the "Google Experience" installer could try to offer substitutes for them after the installation is finished.
These two things would solve almost all the major issues related to upgrading to newer Android-versions and would quite obviously benefit end-users enormously. As always, though, there's a catch. Actually, two catches, in this case: manufacturers won't want to make it easier for customers to get updates for their devices because they want people to keep buying new shiny, ergo. they will not install the kind of list I mentioned, and Google won't want to go along with the plan because Google wants only their Nexus-line to be directly Google-approved.
It costs per year to get onto the iOS App Store, Mac App Store, Amazon Appstore, or Windows Store, even for applications priced at $0.00. Epic sees none of this. So let me rephrase: With a completely free game, how does one recoup the $99 per year fee payable to Apple for a developer certificate?
I really fail to see how that is related to UDK. As for the answer to the question: put away $10 a month by e.g. drinking a few beers less? Ask for donations? Even if you only got 10 donations, each for $10, you'd still afford to pay the $99 fee. Or just release the game on your own website instead of App Store. Quite simple, really.
Slashdot Mirror
So why do people buy Ferraris? The answer is exclusivity. People buy them because not everybody can own a Ferrari. Were there some way to magically replicate a Ferrari, nobody would spent $200,000 on one.
I would just like to point out some things: it's exactly because it is a physical product that manufacturing/replicating it is so difficult which leads to high price which leads to this exclusivity which again leads to higher monetary value. Software on the other hand cannot rely on the feeling of exclusivity, there is no cost whatsoever to replicating it once it has been manufactured and thus it quite isn't comparable. The value of a software product does not decrease with the number of people who own it, thereby its scarcity does not increase its monetary value.
But why wouldn't they pay for it?
Maybe they couldn't afford it, maybe they have some ideological reason, I really don't know as I'm not them.
Is it possible that they would indeed pay for x product if they couldn't get it for free? Perhaps not in all cases, but I doubt all freeloaders would entirely abandon movies/music/games if unable to grab free copies.
No one is saying all "freeloaders" would do that, you know. There are people who would, and there are people who wouldn't.
Hm, true enough, I admit my failure. We have no such silliness here and thus almost no one knows about encrypting one's traffic.
As an aside, even though encrypting traffic is quite a good measure an even better measure would be to use combine that with IP block-lists, too. Unfortunately uTorrent doesn't have such a feature. I don't know of any Windows-based BT-client that does, actually, only Linux-ones.
While not directly an answer to the question posed, gog.com's community wishlist ( http://www.gog.com/wishlist ) is one way of reviving old games. Not all companies are willing to open-source their creations, no matter how exceedingly good arguments you make, but they might be willing to revive these old games if there was a way of getting even one dollar of profit out of it.
You really do not have any experience of Joe Blows then. Of all the people I know even most geeks didn't know about turning on encyption.
How can they identify BitTorrent traffic, since virtually all such traffic is encrypted and all the ISP can see is that it is SSL?
Are some people still silly enough not to encrypt their transfers?
First of all, it is very easy to identify BitTorrent traffic even if it is encrypted, you just cannot identify the contents of said traffic. Secondly, e.g. uTorrent by default does not use encryption and quite obviously Joe Blow doesn't even come to think of that, let alone know how to enable it.
Something has been lost because the value of the original has been reduced.
If the person wouldn't be paying for it anyways then that person views its monetary value already at zero, therefore its value cannot be reduced any further anyways.
Girls on a computer screen are so much better: they'll never start bitching over something ridiculous, they don't smell sweaty, they don't spend your money, they're accessible whenever you want them but they also won't ever bother you when you don't want to. This "summer" and "outside" thing really sounds very much an inferior experience.
Said by a girl with an username 'gaygirlie'.
I don't see the problem.
This really sounds like you think sitting at computer is the only thing to do in the world.
I don't understand what you're trying to insinuate. Could you elaborate?
But yesterday I went out and there was lots of beautiful and cute girls and people spending time outside in the summer. Amazing, I know. But the best thing - and let me tell she was so cute - was one girl who sat down to draw what she saw when people walked past her. I smiled at her. Should had said hello. Amazing.
Girls on a computer screen are so much better: they'll never start bitching over something ridiculous, they don't smell sweaty, they don't spend your money, they're accessible whenever you want them but they also won't ever bother you when you don't want to. This "summer" and "outside" thing really sounds very much an inferior experience.
Not necessarily. The definition for what is actually copyright and if e.g. a simple comment on a forum can even be copyrighted at all varies. Then there is the intent that must be taken into account, ie. the poster that made the comment on a public forum with no disclaimer did very likely mean for it to be publicly accessible and non-restricted, and similarly you must fair use - rights into account, not to mention the whole fact that facts cannot be copyrighted at all.
Since when does all BitTorrent traffic = piracy? I download 10's of gigabytes/year using BT and none of it is pirated content. All of my BT traffic is legitimate and legal.
In my opinion, this association of "all" BT traffic with illegal downloading is preventing BT from being more widely utilized for legitimate uses. It is nothing more than a distributed file-transfer protocol; the fact that some amount of BT traffic is used for illegal activities is really irrelevant. We should be driving more legitimate usage of BT to tilt the traffic patterns more towards legal use of the protocol and drown out the "noise" of illegal usage. This is the only way to ensure widespread use of the protocol in a way that survives any legal attempts to block it. The more BT is used for illegal activity the more likely it will be blocked or filtered at some point.
Indeed. One of the most-well-known examples is World of Warcraft which uses BitTorrent for distribution. Just wait till Mists of Pandaria is released and you'll again see quite a large jump in BitTorrent traffic. Then of course there are the usual candidates like any larger F/OSS application or distribution that almost invariably offer BitTorrent downloads, many commercial applications do that these days, too, Indie movies are often accessible via BitTorrent and so on.
Your analogy is really poor. If you take a Ferrari then the person who owns the Ferrari doesn't have it anymore. If you on the other hand take a digital copy of software then the original creator still has it, too. With that in mind: if a person downloads a copy of something and never has any intention for paying for it, even if it was unavailable via piracy, then how has anything been lost?
Why would I buy any device that supports Cinavia? A solution that can be expected only from non-ACs.
Because you may always not know what device supports Cinavia? For example all BluRay-players manufactured after February this year will have Cinavia mandatory. Not even all geeks are aware of that, let alone the non-geeks who may buy you a gift, for example.
Who needs it? Just direct the analog audio output of your sound card into the input of an audio recorder, and direct your browser at YouTube or whatever you want a copy of, and hit play. Cut, paste, print. Now you have the file, and no one can stop you. Basically the same as recording off radio, as far as I'm concerned. So you don't need the software... the can't plug the analog hole, Mal... they can never plug...
Silly "solution" as can only be expected from an AC.
First of all, you're just further reducing audio quality of something that is already not-so-good by decompressing it, playing it over analog, recording it over analog and then recompressing it. Secondly, that's a hassle. Thirdly, the "analog hole" can actually be plugged to an extent, like e.g. devices which support Cinavia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia ) wouldn't play Cinavia-protected content even after you've played it back and recorded over analog contacts.
Why can't the ISP's intercept all dns request packets to the infected servers and redirect the requests to their own dns server that has been programmed to send all requests save a few exceptions to a web page with explicit instructions and hard coded access to the websites necessary for removal of the virus and ONLY these websites. People can follow rudimentary instructions if they have to.
Because these computers likely have a bunch of other malware and viruses on them already and thus it's best to just have some geek to do a proper clean-up. It's the best option for all involved.
I disagree. The proper thing to do IMHO is to cut them off so their owners will have the machines checked and any malware and viruses removed. Who knows how many other such they have on their machines already and who knows how many of those owners have lost their credit cards due to that? Besides, there computers are also likely a part of some botnet by now and again for that reason it is a good thing to have them cleaned up.
Framerates will suffer some even with compression, but that's not really an issue for this use case.
Any non-casual gamers or game developers would disagree with you.
In actual practice 1080p streams just fine to one display at 12 FPS at 50 Mbps (HD movies over 802.11g), so this will be fine for desktop apps with 3-4 similar displays.
Desktop-imagery is not comparable to movies as in movies there's a lot of content that can be compressed without it affecting visual effect much, but on the desktop there's a lot of sharp lines, text that needs to stay sharp, UI-elements and so on. With lossy compression the image quality would quickly deteriorate to the point of uselessness. Also, you can try lossless compression over the network with e.g. TightVNC: you'll very quickly notice how much it lags and stutters, especially if you're using any Flash-animations, doing web-browsing, or -- god forbid -- watch some video.
Ergo, neither solution would actually work in practice.
If not, we move the per-monitor processing to the per-monitor dongle and it's all good because the dongle is more than capable and distributed processing has gotten that good.
That would entail moving the whole GPU on the per-monitor dongle which would increase their cost and drop your bandwidth down the drain. And you'd STILL have to transfer textures and any client-side rendering to the per-monitor dongle. Ie. that still doesn't solve the problem.
But again, we're talking about desktop apps where an average of 4 FPS is overkill.
I'm fairly certain ANYONE doing actual development work, web-browsing or -- again, god forbid -- video would like to disagree with you.
And yes, 7.9 MB is "a few megabytes". Especially when your phone comes with 1024 or 2048 megabytes of RAM. That's a reasonable measure for a framebuffer. 512MB is 64 8MB framebuffers.
You're confusing things again. The size of the framebuffers is irrelevant, it's the amount of data to be transferred that matters. Besides, most systems use double- or triple-buffering, plus any additional buffers for textures and vertex data, so you're still off by quite a large margin even on that.
Tablets will have quad core very soon (maybe already? I haven't kept up). The gap between tablets and PCs will close just as PCs quickly passed the workstations in power, just because the market was SO much larger and so more money went into their development.
I see why you're posting as AC. Mobile devices will never catch up to PCs simply because PCs have access to much more space for the components, better cooling and access to a lot more electrical power, you simply cannot cram that in a mobile form.
Displays are only a few megabytes each - your average Tegra3 tablet like the $200 Nexus 7 can handle dozens of them.
Only a few megabytes each? You still use a CGA-screen? 1920x1080 resolution at 32bit colours is already ~7,9 megabytes PER A SINGLE FRAME. At 60Hz that suddenly becomes ~475 megabytes PER SECOND. You could apply some sort of lossless compression but it'd still be well over 300 megabytes of data every second. I would really love to see you driving such over Bluetooth, I really would.
That's like saying the "To:" field in an email app is CLI, but really, you're confusing the term CLI -- ie. command-line interface -- with text-based entry. They are not the same thing. But thank you for proving my point about ignorance.
To be frank I'd say this is mostly a complete non-issue. What tasks Average Joe may need to do on his computer do *require* using CLI? I can't think of anything other than recovery from update/upgrade failures and such. Sure, even those should be automated as much as possible and tbh, there shouldn't happen such failures that cause one to drop down to CLI in the first case. But why would Average Joe need a GUI tool for e.g. setting up Apache2+PHP+MySQL? Average Joes do not care about such things and for the rest of us CLI is often the faster and easier way of setting that up.
With all that said: pray tell what functions would Average Joe need on his computer that at the moment *require* CLI? I really want an answer on that.
as the twitter search sucks.
You made a typo there, mate; you added two extra words there by mistake. Here, let me fix it for you: "as twitter sucks."
Budget phones are obviously a category for themselves, I still believe that with slimming down and modularizing Android one could actually still fit several updates even on those. One thing that budget phones often lack is storage space which makes it hard to fit newer Android-releases there, but with modularized installs one could leave less-useful features out and still get the rest of the benefits of the newer release. Also, when it comes to RAM the "Google Experience" Android would quite likely actually fit much better in there than the stock ROMs do due to e.g. how horribly inefficient Samsung's TouchWiz is; strip that out and POOF, you'll have just made 100 megabytes of free RAM.
On the other hand I own two quite well-specced Android-devices, one Acer Iconia Tab A500 10"-tablet and a Samsung Galaxy Note-mobile; both sport plenty of storage, they're dual-core systems, 1GB RAM and all that, both are still quite recent devices, yet I still don't expect to receive new updates for either of them anymore. There is no reason hardware-wise why either of them couldn't be upgraded, I just see no willigness from the manufacturers to do that, nor does Google even try to give them an incentive for doing that.
To quote what I wrote:
The general consensus regarding the PDK for Android Jellybean and upwards seems to lean in the same direction as I am saying: "it won't amount to much, if anything at all." The biggest problem for end-users is the fact that companies do not want to do updates for already-released products, so releasing a PDK that is supposed to let start working on the updates slightly earlier than regularly -- with no other positive effects or incentives whatsoever -- really means nothing. If Google really sought to improve the situation for end-users they should start maintaining a "Google Experience" - version of Android.
Implementing a "Google Experience" Android would first off require them to modularize Android somewhat so that it can be slimmed down by not installing features that won't be used, like e.g. voice search and everything related to it is mostly worthless in any country which do not support it so why insist on installing it? Allow user to choose to install it, yes, but do not force it. Modularizing Android this way would help in a situation where there is not enough storage to install the whole thing: the installer could present the user with a warning dialog explaining the situation and let user pick and unpick features -- with explanation on what each feature means -- until the system fits comfortably, then before starting the installation remind the user of what features won't be available and make certain the user still wishes to proceed.
A second thing that would be needed would be for manufacturers to start including, say, 32 kilobytes of ROM where would be details about the actual hardware: device manufacturer, model, revision, amount of installed RAM, sizes, types and location of any storage and then a listing of all the hardware with manufacturer, model, revision, connection type, memory addresses/register addresses/etc. needed for using the device, what features the device supports and so on. The installer would then be able to check the list against Google-maintained drivers to see if there even exists drivers for the hardware, if the drivers support the connection type/scheme, etc. Also, one of the more important things would be that it would also be able to check if the Google-maintained drivers support all the features the hardware supports, and if not, the installer could warn the user of the features they would lose by installing "Google Experience" - Android.
In that ROM could also be defined a list -- even if it were just a partial one -- of what applications the manufacturer provides on the stock ROM so that the "Google Experience" installer could try to offer substitutes for them after the installation is finished.
These two things would solve almost all the major issues related to upgrading to newer Android-versions and would quite obviously benefit end-users enormously. As always, though, there's a catch. Actually, two catches, in this case: manufacturers won't want to make it easier for customers to get updates for their devices because they want people to keep buying new shiny, ergo. they will not install the kind of list I mentioned, and Google won't want to go along with the plan because Google wants only their Nexus-line to be directly Google-approved.
It costs per year to get onto the iOS App Store, Mac App Store, Amazon Appstore, or Windows Store, even for applications priced at $0.00. Epic sees none of this. So let me rephrase: With a completely free game, how does one recoup the $99 per year fee payable to Apple for a developer certificate?
I really fail to see how that is related to UDK. As for the answer to the question: put away $10 a month by e.g. drinking a few beers less? Ask for donations? Even if you only got 10 donations, each for $10, you'd still afford to pay the $99 fee. Or just release the game on your own website instead of App Store. Quite simple, really.