This is worse than renting games. Streaming them too?
What's wrong with renting games? I like go-karting and dirt-biking and I don't feel the need to buy every track I want to race on, I've often been to theme parks like Disney Land and not felt a need to own every one of them. I don't see the need to own everything you pay to enjoy.
Why would I want to lag in a single player game, for instance?
Most people have more lag between the video output and the screen generating photons than you get sending a signal across the country. When you look at the input, processing and display lag there are a large amount of places you suffer significant lag already that can easily be eliminated.
Are you sure about that? Why would it be impossible. You could basically have an account on Google's to allow you to upload new game files like mods.
It's not impossible but highly improbable as it creates a huge security risk. In an ideal world everything is sandboxed in perfectly secure containers with no security issues, of course that's not reality. It's incredibly ignorant to say "oh yes it's simple, they can just allow people to upload arbitrary code/assets", that itself has massive implications.
The AGPL requires that code changes be provided back to the community, even if they aren't redistributing the code (cough google/facedbook/tweeter).
How do you enforce that in any way differently to the kind of draconian enforcement of proprietary software licenses?
OTOH, imagine how much better F/LOSS would be if commercial users had to fund back to the project based on the income derived from that code. $50 helps. $500 keeps the maintainers excited and going to local conferences. $5,000 would make a huge difference. $100,000 even more. As income increased, the F/LOSS projects would get more funding too. Cap the highest payment to be $200K
So you're suggesting license fees such that not only do you have to contribute back your changes but you also have to pay? Presumably some of that money then goes back to you as a contributor of that project then as well? I don't see such a system working particularly good for projects like Android that don't actually make any money and are just a platform on which to build products that do make money.
This could have been avoided if projects chose GPLv3. It was introduced 12 years ago to solve THIS VERY PROBLEM.
But for projects like Linux this isn't a problem, the usage is exactly by design. What you call a "problem" simply depends on your point of view and the reason the GPLv3 is not widely adopted is because most project maintainers don't see this as a problem at all.
And that fee covers everything from credit card processing to hosting and bandwidth, which for all of the free app downloads that Spotify enjoys is a non-negligible amount of money.
So how is that different from all the free, ad-supported apps?
If you had a brick and mortar electronics store would you sell Google/Apple streaming boxes without being compensated?
The enormous profit they make on the devices they sell is the compensation, the incentive for people to buy them is the wide variety of choice on the App Store.
spend your resources on flogging a product for somebody else for free?
Yes, in fact most of the apps in the App Store are exactly that, free, with many of the developers of those apps still making money via in-app ads.
2009 just called and solved your problem for you... go to Preferences in the App Store and untick: Automatically check for updates.
But I don't want to disable updates. I just don't want to upgrade the OS, if there's a setting for that somewhere it's not clear and it's certainly not presented simply like normal updates are where you can just dismiss and say 'remind me at X time'.
It has the "Remind me" Option. Yes, it does suck that the most you can defer it is "Remind me tomorrow"; but it does only ask once per day, and is happy to be dismissed like that forever.
No, that's for general updates, not for the OS update which only has the options to either "Install" or "Details". Perhaps 10.9 doesn't have it but certainly that is how 10.12 behaves.
macOS is just as bad, it does exactly the same thing if you don't upgrade. Periodically popping up a notification in the top right hand screen which, unlike most notifications that display there, you can't simply hit "Dismiss", the only options are "Install" and "Details", the latter opens up the update in the App Store program.
People complained about Microsoft bundling IE with Windows but I don't remember Google getting much flack for side loading Chrome (there was some but not really that much).
It wasn't a very good decision at the time, the 'browser ballot' was a mess and the result would have just been that people would have had to acquire a browser separately to install on their system even if that browser wasn't their browser of choice they would need it just to download their browser of choice. Netscape didn't lose because Microsoft bundled IE, they lost because Navigator wasn't a better browser (it wasn't necessarily worse though) so even though people had the choice they used IE. This was proven in the mid 2000s when the joke was always that IE was just there to download Chrome and that was fine, because Chrome was a better browser.
At least with Windows/IE you can install any browser you want, if you look at iPhones and iPads (iPads completely dominating the tablet market) not only do they ship with Apple's browser but you can't change it and use a different one, even Chrome and Firefox for iOS are just a UI over the underlying Safari.
Once they've got 80% market share back, they can fork Chromium to add Windows-only components and get websites to implement those, and ta-da they've got lock-in again like in the good old ActiveX days.
Even if they managed to get 80% of the browser market on Windows that would only be about 25% of the browser market overall and nobody is going to develop websites that only work on 25% of people's browsers.
Given how strategically important it is, and they they have integrated browser rengering all over their OS, it seems an odd choice to me to not keep control of it. Thinking in terms of years rather thna quarters that is.
Well I suppose that's the benefit of free software, they can have control over it. They can fork it and take control whenever they wish but the browser engine is really just an implementation of the HTML standard so when a cross-platform one already exists it's hard to see what you bring to the table if you create another one. Kind of like Firefox, I can see niche reasons for using the browser side of it but it wouldn't really make any difference if they switched from Gecko to Blink, in fact I doubt anybody would even notice.
I take your point though, a monopoly isn't a good thing but neither is NIH syndrome.
They'll probably end up contributing back to the chromium project once they've got the hang of it too.
It's already happening.. You're right, they need a standards-compliant browser because they don't own the platform anymore and it's pretty clear they don't want to, Microsoft want their software and services to run everywhere which means compatibility with web standards is critical. There's no point building your own standards-compliant HTML engine when you can just use and contribute to a collaborative one that way you know the software and services you build for your browser will run on others too.
The point, sorry *my* point, is that it's a concept that's very difficult for Microsoft to compete against. A cheap enough OS to provide a $200 (retail) computing device that's at all useful, is simply not part of Microsoft's business model.
Not part of their previous business model, but if you've been following along you'll notice that cloud services are really Microsoft's focus now and an operating system that treats their services as a first-class citizen (like Google's platforms do with its services) is important for that business.
But it's way too late to compete with ChromeBooks now.
What can you do on a Chromebook that you can't do on just about any other personal computing device? Does it have some exclusive functionality to compete with? Some catalog of programs that only run on it?
It's too late to compete with platforms like Android and iOS that have vast libraries of native applications that you simply cannot replicate with a new entry to that established market but does ChromeOS have that as well?
But if you want a computer... one that does what you tell it to do, not what the platform manager tells it to do, well, that's gonna cost you.
What makes you think that? Chromebooks are a Linux system and you have full access to it, general purpose computing is cheaper than ever with a huge range of products like the Raspberry PI and even - despite all of the panicking about SecureBoot - Microsoft's own Surface products that have been released over the past 6 years and Apple's line of Mac products still have the ability to install alternative operating systems. It's also not like we haven't had locked down computers in the past either, products like Blackberry and Windows smartphones or various gaming consoles were around long ago and didn't affect the general purpose computer market in any significant way.
Well specifically how much tax should they pay? The amount is defined by the law, if you think the law is immoral then you need to change the law. Do you just volunteer to pay additional tax or do you pay the amount you need to pay as defined by the law?
Actually i think the touchbar would be better if it had the haptic engine that the trackpad uses, it really works well for the trackpad and I think it could Work for typing.
That's likely what they're going for with the crappy typing experience they have now: reduce the key travel and typing experience so it is comparable to the haptic touchpad feel so they can replace the physical keyboard with a touch one. I hope they don't because the typing experience on the current lineup is very poor and a haptic one would be even worse.
That's the point, the MacBook only has USB-C ports and ships with a USB-C-to-USB-C cable and the iPhone only has a Lightning port and ships with a Lightning-to-USB-A cable. What kind of ass-backwards nonsense is that? Apple used to pride themselves on an ecosystem of devices that worked seamlessly together and now if you buy their latest phone and laptop and you'll be supplied with an incompatible selection of ports and cables.
Gotta love that, the devices users pay the largest markup for and apple choose cost saving measures over functionality.
Yep so you can buy a new apple macbook and a new apple iphone and be supplied a cable that can't connect the two of them...you have to go and buy a different cable or an adapter if you actually want to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
This is worse than renting games. Streaming them too?
What's wrong with renting games? I like go-karting and dirt-biking and I don't feel the need to buy every track I want to race on, I've often been to theme parks like Disney Land and not felt a need to own every one of them. I don't see the need to own everything you pay to enjoy.
Why would I want to lag in a single player game, for instance?
Most people have more lag between the video output and the screen generating photons than you get sending a signal across the country. When you look at the input, processing and display lag there are a large amount of places you suffer significant lag already that can easily be eliminated.
Are you sure about that? Why would it be impossible. You could basically have an account on Google's to allow you to upload new game files like mods.
It's not impossible but highly improbable as it creates a huge security risk. In an ideal world everything is sandboxed in perfectly secure containers with no security issues, of course that's not reality. It's incredibly ignorant to say "oh yes it's simple, they can just allow people to upload arbitrary code/assets", that itself has massive implications.
It's hard to tell from the article, but Google is obviously running the game on PC's in the backend.
No, it runs systems with x86 processors but with custom AMD GPUs. I'm not sure what your definition of a PC is but this wouldn't fit most.
The AGPL requires that code changes be provided back to the community, even if they aren't redistributing the code (cough google/facedbook/tweeter).
How do you enforce that in any way differently to the kind of draconian enforcement of proprietary software licenses?
OTOH, imagine how much better F/LOSS would be if commercial users had to fund back to the project based on the income derived from that code. $50 helps. $500 keeps the maintainers excited and going to local conferences. $5,000 would make a huge difference. $100,000 even more. As income increased, the F/LOSS projects would get more funding too. Cap the highest payment to be $200K
So you're suggesting license fees such that not only do you have to contribute back your changes but you also have to pay? Presumably some of that money then goes back to you as a contributor of that project then as well? I don't see such a system working particularly good for projects like Android that don't actually make any money and are just a platform on which to build products that do make money.
This could have been avoided if projects chose GPLv3. It was introduced 12 years ago to solve THIS VERY PROBLEM.
But for projects like Linux this isn't a problem, the usage is exactly by design. What you call a "problem" simply depends on your point of view and the reason the GPLv3 is not widely adopted is because most project maintainers don't see this as a problem at all.
And that fee covers everything from credit card processing to hosting and bandwidth, which for all of the free app downloads that Spotify enjoys is a non-negligible amount of money.
So how is that different from all the free, ad-supported apps?
But the thing is, I bought a *phone*. I did not buy a service, I did not buy a license.
Nope, definitely a license on that software.
They are selling a physical product and then deciding how you are allowed to use it.
No it is both hardware and software but go ahead, wipe the software off it and do what you wish, go install Linux on it or something.
If you had a brick and mortar electronics store would you sell Google/Apple streaming boxes without being compensated?
The enormous profit they make on the devices they sell is the compensation, the incentive for people to buy them is the wide variety of choice on the App Store.
spend your resources on flogging a product for somebody else for free?
Yes, in fact most of the apps in the App Store are exactly that, free, with many of the developers of those apps still making money via in-app ads.
2009 just called and solved your problem for you... go to Preferences in the App Store and untick: Automatically check for updates.
But I don't want to disable updates. I just don't want to upgrade the OS, if there's a setting for that somewhere it's not clear and it's certainly not presented simply like normal updates are where you can just dismiss and say 'remind me at X time'.
Bullshit.
It has the "Remind me" Option. Yes, it does suck that the most you can defer it is "Remind me tomorrow"; but it does only ask once per day, and is happy to be dismissed like that forever.
No, that's for general updates, not for the OS update which only has the options to either "Install" or "Details". Perhaps 10.9 doesn't have it but certainly that is how 10.12 behaves.
macOS is just as bad, it does exactly the same thing if you don't upgrade. Periodically popping up a notification in the top right hand screen which, unlike most notifications that display there, you can't simply hit "Dismiss", the only options are "Install" and "Details", the latter opens up the update in the App Store program.
People complained about Microsoft bundling IE with Windows but I don't remember Google getting much flack for side loading Chrome (there was some but not really that much).
It wasn't a very good decision at the time, the 'browser ballot' was a mess and the result would have just been that people would have had to acquire a browser separately to install on their system even if that browser wasn't their browser of choice they would need it just to download their browser of choice. Netscape didn't lose because Microsoft bundled IE, they lost because Navigator wasn't a better browser (it wasn't necessarily worse though) so even though people had the choice they used IE. This was proven in the mid 2000s when the joke was always that IE was just there to download Chrome and that was fine, because Chrome was a better browser.
At least with Windows/IE you can install any browser you want, if you look at iPhones and iPads (iPads completely dominating the tablet market) not only do they ship with Apple's browser but you can't change it and use a different one, even Chrome and Firefox for iOS are just a UI over the underlying Safari.
Once they've got 80% market share back, they can fork Chromium to add Windows-only components and get websites to implement those, and ta-da they've got lock-in again like in the good old ActiveX days.
Even if they managed to get 80% of the browser market on Windows that would only be about 25% of the browser market overall and nobody is going to develop websites that only work on 25% of people's browsers.
Given how strategically important it is, and they they have integrated browser rengering all over their OS, it seems an odd choice to me to not keep control of it. Thinking in terms of years rather thna quarters that is.
Well I suppose that's the benefit of free software, they can have control over it. They can fork it and take control whenever they wish but the browser engine is really just an implementation of the HTML standard so when a cross-platform one already exists it's hard to see what you bring to the table if you create another one. Kind of like Firefox, I can see niche reasons for using the browser side of it but it wouldn't really make any difference if they switched from Gecko to Blink, in fact I doubt anybody would even notice.
I take your point though, a monopoly isn't a good thing but neither is NIH syndrome.
They'll probably end up contributing back to the chromium project once they've got the hang of it too.
It's already happening.. You're right, they need a standards-compliant browser because they don't own the platform anymore and it's pretty clear they don't want to, Microsoft want their software and services to run everywhere which means compatibility with web standards is critical. There's no point building your own standards-compliant HTML engine when you can just use and contribute to a collaborative one that way you know the software and services you build for your browser will run on others too.
The point, sorry *my* point, is that it's a concept that's very difficult for Microsoft to compete against. A cheap enough OS to provide a $200 (retail) computing device that's at all useful, is simply not part of Microsoft's business model.
Not part of their previous business model, but if you've been following along you'll notice that cloud services are really Microsoft's focus now and an operating system that treats their services as a first-class citizen (like Google's platforms do with its services) is important for that business.
> What can you do on a Chromebook that you can't do on just about any other personal computing device?
Do it for $200 new in box.
So the answer is no, there's nothing unique about what you can do on a Chromebook.
Beats me. But it doesn't matter much, because.
That's exactly my point. It has no unique functionality.
But it's way too late to compete with ChromeBooks now.
What can you do on a Chromebook that you can't do on just about any other personal computing device? Does it have some exclusive functionality to compete with? Some catalog of programs that only run on it?
It's too late to compete with platforms like Android and iOS that have vast libraries of native applications that you simply cannot replicate with a new entry to that established market but does ChromeOS have that as well?
But if you want a computer... one that does what you tell it to do, not what the platform manager tells it to do, well, that's gonna cost you.
What makes you think that? Chromebooks are a Linux system and you have full access to it, general purpose computing is cheaper than ever with a huge range of products like the Raspberry PI and even - despite all of the panicking about SecureBoot - Microsoft's own Surface products that have been released over the past 6 years and Apple's line of Mac products still have the ability to install alternative operating systems. It's also not like we haven't had locked down computers in the past either, products like Blackberry and Windows smartphones or various gaming consoles were around long ago and didn't affect the general purpose computer market in any significant way.
The problem is that they send the clients way more information than necessary.
Can you be more specific about that?
I mean we could eliminate it by just going to streaming games, maybe that's what you meant.
Well specifically how much tax should they pay? The amount is defined by the law, if you think the law is immoral then you need to change the law. Do you just volunteer to pay additional tax or do you pay the amount you need to pay as defined by the law?
Actually i think the touchbar would be better if it had the haptic engine that the trackpad uses, it really works well for the trackpad and I think it could Work for typing.
That's likely what they're going for with the crappy typing experience they have now: reduce the key travel and typing experience so it is comparable to the haptic touchpad feel so they can replace the physical keyboard with a touch one. I hope they don't because the typing experience on the current lineup is very poor and a haptic one would be even worse.
That's the point, the MacBook only has USB-C ports and ships with a USB-C-to-USB-C cable and the iPhone only has a Lightning port and ships with a Lightning-to-USB-A cable. What kind of ass-backwards nonsense is that? Apple used to pride themselves on an ecosystem of devices that worked seamlessly together and now if you buy their latest phone and laptop and you'll be supplied with an incompatible selection of ports and cables.
Yet the cable they supply with the iphone can't even connect the iphone to their laptops because their laptops only have usb-c.
Gotta love that, the devices users pay the largest markup for and apple choose cost saving measures over functionality.
Yep so you can buy a new apple macbook and a new apple iphone and be supplied a cable that can't connect the two of them...you have to go and buy a different cable or an adapter if you actually want to do that.