You mock, but have you checked out the operator run "App Store" equivalents?
They consist of primarily rubbish mobile versions of established titles by EA - who even managed to screw up something as simple as Tetris royally with numerous bugs - and direct ports of old 16 bit games that are totally unsuited to being played on most phones.
If you want non-lowest-common-denominator software like Opera or a VoIP app you'll usually have to download that yourself on you computer - unlike with Apple they are not interested in distributing applications that don't have an upfront cost they can take a cut of and in dealing with major publishers who they can form "strategic partnerships".
There is nothing to stop Opera, P2P software or a VoIP app being written for the iPhone, in fact IIRC Apple have confirmed the latter as being in the works - although the chances of a VoIP app that works over 3G as well as WiFi appearing on the App Store are not much above nill I would imagine.
Having used VoIP over 3G with iChat and Gizmo, with a Nokia E60/E61i* and N95 on Vodafone 3G, it's not something I'd even be interested in, the sound quality really was awful and the delay was significant (as bad as with a portable sat phone).
My 3G modem (on Three) is alright for VoIP, even for a camera, if I'm in an area with good reception, but that that's with the laptop doing the encoding and decoding, and the 3G modem gets better reception than my phone (not least because I'm not covering it with my hands while I'm using it).
I haven't had a Pocket PC in a while, so I don't know what Skype is like over 3G on a Windows Mobile Smartphone. I'd be interested in hearing what the call quality is like from someone who has tried that. I am curious if part of the problem on the Nokia is the performance of the encoding/decoding being limited by the hardware.
* Can't remember which one I was using at the time.
But AT&T is not imposing a quota, or propsing to bill by the gigabyte.
That's exactly what they do. The exception is the default data plan exclusively offered with the iPhone, but you can still use another SIM with different AT&T plan on the iPhone and do all the tethering you can afford.
It's pretty important to make sure those damn poor people don't have access to good entertainment, eh?
All the "poor people" who have laptops they want to tether their iPhones to so they can download large files while away from home? Honestly, that's not a definition of "poor" I'm familiar with.
Cruder (mostly web based) implementations of the iPhones "App Store" already exist with other operators.
I know that Vodafone, for example, distribute an application on their branded S60 Nokia phones that links to a small portal site, where you can read news and buy access to premium content, including TV shows and games.
The application is a small web based one and doesn't have feature the "App Store" has such as the ability to track updates for applications nor does it recognize if you've already made a purchase. I don't recall seeing any significant free applications on their either, almost all the applications were games from major publishers (e.g. branded as EA or Sega titles) and most were consistently priced.
For me, a major strength of the App Store is that it has a wide range of applications at a range of price points and from a range of developers - I think that's what attracts so many people to it.
I think mobile operators will struggle to understand the importance of having a wide range of applications (including free ones) and they will continue to take a short sighted view of focusing on doing business with major publishers like EA at the expense of independent developers - pushing to the market what they mistakenly think people want - ultimately to their own detriment.
So far, I've spent about 25 GBP on the App Store since July I've bought a couple of apps at about 5 GBP, one at about 10 GBP and a few at between 50p to 1.50 GBP. I'm sure I will buy more. I've been with Vodafone for about 8 years, and in that time only bought two applications from them (both games, at around 2.50-4.50 each I think).
I don't think mobile operators understand the importance of good software enough to replicate the success of the App Store on other devices. If good software was important to them there wouldn't have been a gap big enough for Apple to exploit in the first place.
I think you'll find 3G bandwith is expensive because it very much is still a limited resource. Unlike, say text message handling, it's not just pure greed on the part of the operators.
The thing about making 3G bandwidth cheap and affordable to everyone (as it is rapidly becoming in Europe) is that very quickly a small number of jerks will start grossly over utilizing it (e.g. by using it to download movies or large amounts of data, even using it at home, just so it doesn't ). Hence, their get quota limits with 3G - essentially because people are greedy and unable to exercise reasonable self control.
These same very small number of idiots - who would use up all the available bandwidth with P2P software to download films and games they are too cheap to pay for - will then moan when quota and contention ratios take effect that providers are shafting them by not providing them with "the service they have paid for".
Providers (wired or wireless) can't win. It's either a rip off because it's "too expensive" (i.e. when people are asked to pay for what they are using) or because "they are not getting the service [they imagine] they are entitled to" (i.e. when there are quotas or contention ratios in effect).
Except the S60 Nokia's have a really crappy operating system, that's sluggish (often fails to respond/repaint properly), and has considerably inferior map, mail and web browser applications. I gave up using them they were so crappy.
The text message handling on Nokia S60 phones is good, and the IMAP/POP client wasn't the worst, but it's nowhere near as responsive or functional as on the iPhone (which does a much better job of attachments).
The web browser on the Nokia is utterly crap compared to the browser on the iPhone they just happen to share SOME of the same code in the rendering engine but it's not the same browser by a long shot. IMO you are better running Opera on the S60 than the built in browser (and I'm not normally a fan of Opera).
The turn-by-turn navigation for the built in map app was nice (though costs extra to activate on Nokias - the money goes to Nokia directly) but this is negated as the GPS on the Nokia is utterly useless in built up areas, and takes a good 10 minutes or more to get a signal even out in the open, largely due to a lack of AGPS signal support by carriers.
Some of the hardware on some models - like the N95 - is technically very good, and arguably better than on the iPhone (save the screen size). I liked the N95's 5 MP camera, for example. Unfortunately the software is a total let down - the camera would frequently fail to initialize when I tried to take a picture and I'd have to restart the phone, or at least open and close the camera app. When it did start, it would often take a while to respond.
Something like the the S60 based Nokia E61 (which I owned two of, after losing the first) is a great Blackberry alternative with it's Qwerty keyboard and better screen layout for browsing - I think it's miles better than the Blackberry - but it's still inferior to the iPhone at pretty much everything (arguably it's better at text message/email sending - not as great at reading emails though).
Windows Mobile is flakey beyond belief and not even in the running - I'm not touching that again with a barge pole - it's as stable as a ropey install of WIndows 98.
Serious question: why do you rip to mp3 instead of to wma or ogg or some other more efficient format?
Really, that's a serious question?
Neither AAC or WMA currently have the same level widespread support in players as the MP3 format (although it's getting better). Support for Ogg by vendors is very limited to the point of being almost non-existent.
And of course they brought that technology with them to other countries. Certainly there were Roman baths, temples and villas in the UK, and towns with large open stone floored forums surrounded by Roman buildings.
Towns all over England had all the trappings of Roman civilization, including sophisticated sanitation, plumbing and fine goods built using Roman craftsmanship.
It absolutely horrifies me to think people threw the whole idea of having toilets, baths and hot water out the window and went back to literally crapping in the woods and living in sheds huddled up with the farm animals to keep warm.
With that in mind, I can easily imagine people being happy with stagnant technological growth, and things even slipping a little from time to time (look at Concorde, for example - now we no longer have consumer super-sonic flight, not that it was really all that economically viable in the first place).
While I think our own society is far off stagnation (particularly with regard to medical science and energy/resource management) I can certainly see that happening in a not-unrecognizable future (albeit not in the next 100 years).
It really is awesome. I just more people would play it. If WoW didn't exist, I'm sure LoTR Online would have been mobbed. I feel sorry for the developers that it's so overshadowed. Compared to other MMO's on the market it was really impressive.
Even the PvP system was good - I thought it was inspired that once you get to level 10 or so, you can roll a high level (e.g. 40-50) monster mob, and do monster quests and engage in PvP against higher level human (/hobbit/dwarf) mobs - great for dipping into PvP play without a single player grind (allowing you to enjoy the single player experience).
The environments were emotive and well detailed (the dungeons and the cities). Easily the best story telling experience of any MMO, the quests were actually fun to do for a change.
I really recommend playing it, unfortunately the lack of critical mass of other players means it wasn't able to hold my attention. Sadly, even WoW has that (with existing players flocking to new servers, so they can all level up at once, with many the cities ultimately ending up pretty barren as players are spread out all over the map).
The art assets (graphics, sounds, textures, models) are all superb, and still cut it today. With a new (or significantly updated) engine you could take all those assets and still use them to make a triple-A title.
Unfortunately as it is, the ropey way the animations are stuck together, and the poor handling of things like player placed objects (buildings, etc) don't cut it. Even moving around in SWG is an odd experience, especially in vehicles which have quite crude handling. The handling of the ships in Jump To Lightspeed didn't really cut it either IMO (not after X-Wing & Tie Fighter, which still handle really well today, even if they look very dated).
WoW is an example of an extremely responsive interface, but Age of Conan (setting aside the graphical bugs for minute) handles things in a more "realistic" and interesting manner - I like that players can't walk through each other, for example.
I really agree that no other MMO comes as near to being as customizable or as deep as SWG was. Really dynamic classes, things like weapons modding and a crafting system that were deep and required investment but not boring or overly confusing (compared to WoW, which is too simplistic or EQ which, IMO, is too laborious and not rewarding enough) and of course player cities. It's real shame that nothing has come close to that.
It would really help extend the life of WoW if they created zones where you could have player encampments, and if it have more rewarding crafting. Sadly I don't see that happening as that would deviate from what they seem to be focused on. I really wish someone would though, I think it's inevitable but while the competition remain so inept at delivering a decent MMO and WoW remains so dominant it's hard to see it happening.
Currently, I'm pegging my hopes on Eve Online as delivering that, which has in-station movement and player owned stores planned. They have been steadily growing the game, and keeping the graphics up to date as they go, so they might just be able to pull of a really immersive SWG style experience (though that would be adding a dimension thats very different to the core gameplay at the moment, they seem to be happy with that and be keen to add to it).
Very secure? I thought it was still running Safari, no? And if it was so secure why did it take less than a week to break it?
I hate it when those damn haxxors trick me into opening a webpage on my iPhone that contains subliminal messages in animated GIF's that trick me into connecting my iPhone to a Mac using a USB cable, then downloading and running a desktop application to modify the firmware on my iPhone, having me put the iPhone in restore mode, and then confirming that I want to modify the firmware.
No it did not. You cannot brick an iPhone (or iPod) just by installing customized firmware or messing about with the software on it - even if you try. Some people have a really hard time grasping that.
What happened to some people was it restored the status of the phone to "awaiting activation" from where they could only be used with the original SIM they were bundled with (or, technically, an already activated SIM on the appropriate locales network, taken from another iPhone).
Now that pissed some people off and meant that people who got phones and where using them with other providers couldn't keep using them anymore (as they phones wouldn't get passed activation without an activated SIM on the appropriate network for the locale being inserted).
People liked using the term "bricked" so that's how they described it, not least because many of the people in that camp didn't HAVE an original, already unlocked SIM to insert, because the bought the phones from a 3rd party and so were left with a phone that was of no use to them (but that was really still working just fine, as intended by the vendor - but not as they desired).
People in this category were impatient / foolish enough to rush out and install a largely untested update on a phone they'd already patched the software on. This is happening again with the latest jailbreak with people who have a very limited understanding of what they are doing running into problems they won't be able to fix, and I am sure there will be a lot of tears before bed time when they rush like lemmings to install the next official update over the top of their patched up date in a few weeks or so.
Thankfully the Apple restore functionality for iPods and iPhones is reliable and robust. Even if you fuck one to the point where it won't boot still doesn't mean it's "bricked" - because even after doing that you can still access the restore mode and restore full functionality, loading up factory firmware on the device.
Absolutely - jobs in finance, telecoms or virtually any other private sector organization pay far better, have lower barrier to entries and are less demanding.
Working in games industry may be "living the dream", but when the pay is half what you could be earning elsewhere, doing less work, with less demanding deadlines it's no surprise they can't attract enough good people.
And the fact is even if WOW is less detailed, does it matter? I can't say I ever look at WOW and think "Man that looks crap". Blizz have always been good at writing engines that scale nicely IMO Yeah, very true. I think they've played very well by not only coming up with a game that requires fairly modest specs (by MMO standards, at least) and still managing to pull off environments that look great and, as you say, never make you think "this looks like crap" - even years after release and without any graphics updates.
(( I wish more developers would do what CCP did with EVE and refresh the graphics after a few years - frankly I think SOE would have been wise to have done that with the original EQ in order to keep and expand on the player base, rather than doing what they did and try and move everyone to EQ2, which I actually really liked more than WoW as far as the game mechanics went, but I think suffered because people went straight to WoW from EQ, or just decided to avoid SOE after they messed up the handling of SWG. ))
LOTR was up for a harder job in not going for a slightly cartoony feel (which it was seems to work so well in WoW's favour) but I think given that it did really well of convincing a 'serious'/'credible' environment - at least when running in high detail. I wonder if it's very sensitive to some things (such as specific feature or chipset support, and if it doesn't play well with some cards).
I'm not sure what developers are thinking when they release MMO engines that are clearly too bug ridden to be successful. It's hard for me to tell if they know it's crappy and will try and fix it later (as seems to be the case with AoC, and as CCP seem to have taken on board with regard to large battles in EVE), or the companies have no idea their products are defective (as seemed to be the case with SOE).
Things like the constantly morphing terrain in SWG and it's lack of caching for items in the environment always bugged me about it and was enough to put me off. It would have played just fine WITHOUT any 'level of detail' on the terrain - it just made it look crappy and perform marginally worse, can't see why they thought that was a good idea. The lack of caching of even 'static' player owned objects meant I could turn around outside of town and 50 plus player owned buildings will all just vanish in front of my eyes (only to re-appear when I got within 150 yards, where they would remain visible as long as I didn't turn round, or get really far away).
I think that's a prime example of some great ideas and vision wrecked by a curiously bad implementation of some specific, but crucial, elements (i.e. the terrain engine and the handling of player placed structures, which were everywhere in SWG). The game otherwise performed alright (although was frame rate limited to 30 FPS, IIRC - presumably because they didn't want to spend time fixing issues that would occur when rendering at > 30 FPS).
From personal experience, the failure to get basic features down pat is something I tend to associate with companies that don't have staff at the top who really understand the business they are in. That has got to be the fault of bad management. That certainly seems to sum up SOE to me with EQ, SWG, PlanetSide - where they have either had great games they screwed up, or left to decline when they could have reasonably easily been maintained and remained profitable for a much long period - or, as CCP have shown with their handling of EVE - steadily grown over time in a maintainable fashion.
WoW has very basic graphics, and not really much of a benchmark (although it helps to have a health amount of VRAM). It's nothing like as demanding LoTR Online because the models are not as detailed and it's using *much* simpler and less demanding effects.
LoTR ran very nicely @ 1920x1200 on my 2+ year old system (the one I was using when I played it was an AMD FX-57, 2 x 7900 GT, 2 GB RAM) and really had zero stuttering on mine at all. I don't think they fucked up the LoTR engine at all, it seems just fine (and handled dynamic loading and draw distance really well IMO - better than any game I've seen).
In comparison, Age of Conan still has serious loading issues in major cities (it doesn't seem to pre-cache at all, and it doesn't cache all that well) even on a new system with 2 x 9600 GT's (although they seem to be aware of that and have announced a patch is coming).
Tabula Rasa has constant low level streaming all the time - whenever you move your character in the world - resulting in mild stuttering regardless of system specs, resolution or quality level. It annoyed me so much I quit playing in the first month.
Enemy Territory : Quake Wars seems to not to be all that smooth for some reason, regardless of resolution or quality level - not really acceptable for a twitch shooter IMO. The likes of the latest version of Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty 4 run just fine at high detail at 1920x1200 with FSAA and AF on the same system so am included to think there is just something up with ET:QW (which still seems less than smooth even at the lowest resolution and the lowest detail level).
It's been out since last year, which in Mac OS X release terms is quite a while (10.6 seeds are just being released). It would be wise to upgrade when updates for Mac OS X are available, there is a real point to upgrading, both for developers and end users, particularly because of the number of under the hod improvements each release has seen.
An extremely high-end gaming machine can be put together for $1,000 including a 20" monitor and all required peripherals. After buying two 9800 GX2's and a motherboard (no processor, no display, no RAM, no peripherals at all) you'd already be over 1,000 USD - with a fully loaded motherboard (3 x 9800 GX2's) you'd be well over 2000 USD after adding 2-4 GB of RAM, A CPU and a PSU... and that's before you even include a display or any peripherals.
Beyond that price-point you begin hemhoraging money for practically no gain. That's true once you pass about the 3,000 USD mark for a system, not the 1,000 USD mark.
If you are regularly playing games like Call of Duty 4, Crysis or Gears of War on your PC your are going to easily notice the difference, especially if you are playing at native resolutions for larger displays (e.g. 1920x1200).
For me, compromises on texture quality through lower AF levels (in particular x8 AF) and not being able to use FSAA is really noticeable (although at high native resolutions 2xFSAA is enough to take the edge of it being distracting most of the time, 4x FSAA being preferable).
Remember no encryption is so good that it can't be cracked, given sufficient compute power and sufficient time, and that the profits from identity fraud are now sufficient to make it worth criminal gangs while to put significant resource into cracking encryption. "Criminal gangs" are not going around cracking 2048 bit RSA or 256 bit AES encryption, not even the ones led by villains that live in hollowed out volcanoes or in orbiting moon bases.
Certainly FTP is not appropriate (there is no reason not to use SFTP/SCP/HTTPS) and depending on the level of security required a VPN layer may also be appropriate, but splitting the data into chunks with separate keys is of little value (and silly, frankly).
It's liable to cause more maintenance issues (and quite possibly result in corruption if their is an error in the joining operation - which could be VERY problematic), take longer for both parties to implement and if you are writing a script to re-integrate the data (e.g. in the case of a routine operation) the keys and pass phrases are going to be all in the same place anyway. And of course, the data will all be joined together unencrypted at the other end in any case.
The weak points you to worry about are not movie villains cracking VPN, SSL and GPG encryption - but rather something more like a dolt leaving the unencrypted data on a laptop then leaving the laptop in a minicab.
Encrypting the data, encrypting the transfer and authenticating the user (which may or may not also including confirming their source IP as part of the authentication check) is sufficient. You don't need to also split the data up and hide it all over the place like it's something from a Dan Brown novel.
I think the point is that SCP/SFTP on it's own (or an HTTPS resource with authentication, for that matter) is sufficient in all cases most/.'ers will ever encounter.
With iptables (or a separate firewall) to block connections from hosts even connecting from non allowed IP blocks, that's a fairly robust solution. A VPN on top of that is of little real value.
Of course this assumes the database dump on the server is encrypted (e.g. with GPG).
This is not least in case people are tempted to leave it around unencrypted in directories on the server / on a laptop, as while it can't prevent people from doing that it can positively reenforce the idea they shouldn't be doing that (and so encourage appropriate behavior) - as well as protecting the data from exposure by application vulnerabilities on the server.
What AKAImBatman wrote made perfect sense to me. I'm not sure why you had a problem understanding it, it was clearly in kWh in the posters earlier comment.
I've no idea how your electricity company quotes it's figures, but every one I've ever been with has used kWh when quoting price and on bills. This is quite common around the world, and is typically the sort of rating you'll find on electrical goods (where stated).
It's perfectly standard and entirely appropriate as far as measuring the amount of energy used by a consumer device such as a home console goes. Measuring the unit in Joules would be obtuse in this instance - consumer electricity usage (both on electricity usage statements and on equipment) is rarely, if ever, measured in Joules (I've seen it on the back, in small print, but that's it).
They could simply mean by that, quite reasonably, that while they have a series of scripts which look at the content on other hosts, the software is not written in such a way as to be able to target specific hosts by IP.
While it's easily possible to add that sort of functionality (with the aid of a cached copy of the ARIN WHOIS IP allocation DB) that doesn't mean they have written software which works that way, and so technically they don't currently have the means to.
I can imagine they intentionally don't have the means to, because then they have plausible deniability. I say that as I've been asked not to provide functionality on some network solutions, for a similar reason (so that the local authority / company cannot be accused of monitoring or targeting specific individuals, for example - because they are afraid of legal challenges).
Any format that has patent strings attached is proprietary. Note that ECMA only provides for RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) licensing. That's not good enough to qualify as an open standard. If you think "Any format that has patent strings attached is proprietary. " then you are counting a large number of common standards from the W3C, IETF, IEEE, ISO, ECMA and a host of other bodies as such and include them as "not good enough to quality as open standards" under your own rules.
I am curious to know how you develop without using any "proprietary" technologies. It must be tough without using technologies like Ethernet and USB or software such as a POSIX compliant operating system.
Novell != Linux. Microsoft expects people to buy Linux from companies that have entered into patent agreements with them. That's not GPL. Moonlight (and Mono) are made by Novell, if you are using either, you are a downstream recipient. It has nothing to do with what Linux distribution you are using, it is not conditional in that respect (but neither does it mean Microsoft are giving up all rights to pursue the protection of other unrelated patents they may hold, but I don't see why on earth it should).
And actually, it is released under the GPL. Saying "That's not GPL." doesn't change reality, just because it doesn't fit in with your world view. Microsoft digitally signed the releases. They publicly provided assistance to the development team. It's not like they don't know what's going on.
Given C#Âand the Common Language Infrastructure are ECMA and ISO standards I don't think you can credulously call them "proprietary formats".
It would be fair to point out that Silverlight itself is not a standard in the same vein, but the GPL'd implementation of Moonlight (part of Mono) is being developed with active collaboration from Microsoft
To quote:
Microsoft, on behalf of itself and its Subsidiaries, hereby covenants not to sue Downstream Recipients of Novell and its Subsidiaries for infringement under Necessary Claims of Microsoft on account of such Downstream Recipientsâ(TM) use of Moonlight Implementations to the extent originally provided by Novell during the Term
They go on to note they may choose not to extend such license on future implementations, but that if they chose not to re-extent that agreement they confirm it would not retroactively apply to any software using a previously released version of Moonlight Plug-In.
It is perhaps of note that they not granting immunity to libraries which implement proprietary Microsoft functions which are not part of the standard - which also impacts C# developers using Mono.
Now all that may not sit comfortably with you - I can't say I like it either - but in fairness it's better than the situation with Flash, and the situation as-was with Java, but never the less I still really like C# and the CLR (thank you Mono, and dotGNU) and that's true regardless of what Microsoft are up to.
Microsoft could choose to do all sorts of weird proprietary stuff with future versions, as Sun could with Java, or Apple with Objective-C, but I'm not worried about them either, for the same reason. Namely that if a vendor goes down that route, I wouldn't follow them down it - because it's standardized and their is an open source implementation released under the GPL, I'm not under any obligation to. If they started doing things they didn't like, I'd continue using an existing open source version, free of vendor interference.
To quote me (and you, quoting me, so clearly you read it):
To put it this way, can you imagine writing something like GIMP, Abiword, Entourage or Firefox in Flash?
I ask again, which one of your examples is "like GIMP, Abiword, Entourage or Firefox"? It doesn't seem like you even understand the difference between those applications (and what's possible with platforms like Silverlight and Java) and the limited Flash applets you've just cited.
The Flash applet "Photoshop Express" is only marginally more like GIMP than Microsoft Paint is (though Paint performs like a native application, is responsive and is implemented using existing native libraries, unlike the Flash applets you've mentioned). It might look "impressive" to you, but the ability to do a few image transforms (and handle video) is as good as it gets, it doesn't make up for all the basic stuff it doesn't have.
Again, it's great if your a designer who likes to design "funky" Flash applets and multimedia presentations to "wow" marketing people with. However, that doesn't help if you are a developer interested in writing software of significance - i.e. something that actually does neat stuff (not just "_looks_ like it does neat stuff"), but I've said all that already, so I guess we can move on.
As to why it's not impressive: It's possible to do image transforms (such scaling, rotation, blending and alpha transparency) and Microsoft Paint style functionality (drawing primitives, with anti aliasing) with only Javascript and Canvas, and of course there is SVG. All of the things I've just mentioned are possible today, without any sort of plugin for in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer using W3C standards*. In practice, Flash is BETTER at those things, but that's really neither here nor their given it doesn't make up for it's limitations.
They don't even come close to being enough to make it more than a multimedia tool - from a functional perspective it's essentially still just Director from 1993 (but "now with Ajax" although I remember that you could do TCP/IP sockets with Director, but its "trendy" and big business now). As I've already noted, everyone who makes a webpage seems to regard themselves as a "software developer" now, when 10 years ago they would have been a designer who could do multimedia, I guess that's job title inflation for you.
The reality is that Flex, for example, is just allowing you to run Director... err Flash... back on the desktop. A truly amazing innovation! It's not just re-hashing old ideas in any way. It's new, and exciting, and web 2.0! That's why it doesn't have any new _application development_ functionality (in fact it has LESS extensibility than the old Director did, but pointing that out would be just unkind not to mention unfashionable).
* Of course with MSIE you need to use equivalent non-standard functions, which ExplorerCanvas helps with.
Note the absence of *a single* significant Silverlight application.
There are plenty of.NET applications and libraries, and - as you can with Java - you can use your code from them in your Silverlight applications. The same code, not just "other stuff written in ActionScript". That code could be written in pretty much whatever language you like (C#, VB, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc). As well as being written in them, Silverlight applications can also run scripting languages (including PHP, Python and Ruby) on the client side, in the browser. You can have multiple targets for your project, a desktop application, a server application and a Silverlight applet and not have to worry about widely different behaviors between them.
You can of course do much of this in Java, but really in practice (.NET's inferior native Mac OS GUI support aside).NET is even more flexible as the implementation is more polished in a number of areas, and it has wider support for a range of languages. Flash is not even in the same ball pa
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You mock, but have you checked out the operator run "App Store" equivalents?
They consist of primarily rubbish mobile versions of established titles by EA - who even managed to screw up something as simple as Tetris royally with numerous bugs - and direct ports of old 16 bit games that are totally unsuited to being played on most phones.
If you want non-lowest-common-denominator software like Opera or a VoIP app you'll usually have to download that yourself on you computer - unlike with Apple they are not interested in distributing applications that don't have an upfront cost they can take a cut of and in dealing with major publishers who they can form "strategic partnerships".
There is nothing to stop Opera, P2P software or a VoIP app being written for the iPhone, in fact IIRC Apple have confirmed the latter as being in the works - although the chances of a VoIP app that works over 3G as well as WiFi appearing on the App Store are not much above nill I would imagine.
Having used VoIP over 3G with iChat and Gizmo, with a Nokia E60/E61i* and N95 on Vodafone 3G, it's not something I'd even be interested in, the sound quality really was awful and the delay was significant (as bad as with a portable sat phone).
My 3G modem (on Three) is alright for VoIP, even for a camera, if I'm in an area with good reception, but that that's with the laptop doing the encoding and decoding, and the 3G modem gets better reception than my phone (not least because I'm not covering it with my hands while I'm using it).
I haven't had a Pocket PC in a while, so I don't know what Skype is like over 3G on a Windows Mobile Smartphone. I'd be interested in hearing what the call quality is like from someone who has tried that. I am curious if part of the problem on the Nokia is the performance of the encoding/decoding being limited by the hardware.
* Can't remember which one I was using at the time.
*glances at account history*
Well Mr Toll,
But AT&T is not imposing a quota, or propsing to bill by the gigabyte.
That's exactly what they do. The exception is the default data plan exclusively offered with the iPhone, but you can still use another SIM with different AT&T plan on the iPhone and do all the tethering you can afford.
It's pretty important to make sure those damn poor people don't have access to good entertainment, eh?
All the "poor people" who have laptops they want to tether their iPhones to so they can download large files while away from home? Honestly, that's not a definition of "poor" I'm familiar with.
Cruder (mostly web based) implementations of the iPhones "App Store" already exist with other operators.
I know that Vodafone, for example, distribute an application on their branded S60 Nokia phones that links to a small portal site, where you can read news and buy access to premium content, including TV shows and games.
The application is a small web based one and doesn't have feature the "App Store" has such as the ability to track updates for applications nor does it recognize if you've already made a purchase. I don't recall seeing any significant free applications on their either, almost all the applications were games from major publishers (e.g. branded as EA or Sega titles) and most were consistently priced.
For me, a major strength of the App Store is that it has a wide range of applications at a range of price points and from a range of developers - I think that's what attracts so many people to it.
I think mobile operators will struggle to understand the importance of having a wide range of applications (including free ones) and they will continue to take a short sighted view of focusing on doing business with major publishers like EA at the expense of independent developers - pushing to the market what they mistakenly think people want - ultimately to their own detriment.
So far, I've spent about 25 GBP on the App Store since July I've bought a couple of apps at about 5 GBP, one at about 10 GBP and a few at between 50p to 1.50 GBP. I'm sure I will buy more. I've been with Vodafone for about 8 years, and in that time only bought two applications from them (both games, at around 2.50-4.50 each I think).
I don't think mobile operators understand the importance of good software enough to replicate the success of the App Store on other devices. If good software was important to them there wouldn't have been a gap big enough for Apple to exploit in the first place.
I think you'll find 3G bandwith is expensive because it very much is still a limited resource. Unlike, say text message handling, it's not just pure greed on the part of the operators.
The thing about making 3G bandwidth cheap and affordable to everyone (as it is rapidly becoming in Europe) is that very quickly a small number of jerks will start grossly over utilizing it (e.g. by using it to download movies or large amounts of data, even using it at home, just so it doesn't ). Hence, their get quota limits with 3G - essentially because people are greedy and unable to exercise reasonable self control.
These same very small number of idiots - who would use up all the available bandwidth with P2P software to download films and games they are too cheap to pay for - will then moan when quota and contention ratios take effect that providers are shafting them by not providing them with "the service they have paid for".
Providers (wired or wireless) can't win. It's either a rip off because it's "too expensive" (i.e. when people are asked to pay for what they are using) or because "they are not getting the service [they imagine] they are entitled to" (i.e. when there are quotas or contention ratios in effect).
Except the S60 Nokia's have a really crappy operating system, that's sluggish (often fails to respond/repaint properly), and has considerably inferior map, mail and web browser applications. I gave up using them they were so crappy.
The text message handling on Nokia S60 phones is good, and the IMAP/POP client wasn't the worst, but it's nowhere near as responsive or functional as on the iPhone (which does a much better job of attachments).
The web browser on the Nokia is utterly crap compared to the browser on the iPhone they just happen to share SOME of the same code in the rendering engine but it's not the same browser by a long shot. IMO you are better running Opera on the S60 than the built in browser (and I'm not normally a fan of Opera).
The turn-by-turn navigation for the built in map app was nice (though costs extra to activate on Nokias - the money goes to Nokia directly) but this is negated as the GPS on the Nokia is utterly useless in built up areas, and takes a good 10 minutes or more to get a signal even out in the open, largely due to a lack of AGPS signal support by carriers.
Some of the hardware on some models - like the N95 - is technically very good, and arguably better than on the iPhone (save the screen size). I liked the N95's 5 MP camera, for example. Unfortunately the software is a total let down - the camera would frequently fail to initialize when I tried to take a picture and I'd have to restart the phone, or at least open and close the camera app. When it did start, it would often take a while to respond.
Something like the the S60 based Nokia E61 (which I owned two of, after losing the first) is a great Blackberry alternative with it's Qwerty keyboard and better screen layout for browsing - I think it's miles better than the Blackberry - but it's still inferior to the iPhone at pretty much everything (arguably it's better at text message/email sending - not as great at reading emails though).
Windows Mobile is flakey beyond belief and not even in the running - I'm not touching that again with a barge pole - it's as stable as a ropey install of WIndows 98.
Serious question: why do you rip to mp3 instead of to wma or ogg or some other more efficient format?
Really, that's a serious question?
Neither AAC or WMA currently have the same level widespread support in players as the MP3 format (although it's getting better). Support for Ogg by vendors is very limited to the point of being almost non-existent.
And of course they brought that technology with them to other countries. Certainly there were Roman baths, temples and villas in the UK, and towns with large open stone floored forums surrounded by Roman buildings.
Towns all over England had all the trappings of Roman civilization, including sophisticated sanitation, plumbing and fine goods built using Roman craftsmanship.
It absolutely horrifies me to think people threw the whole idea of having toilets, baths and hot water out the window and went back to literally crapping in the woods and living in sheds huddled up with the farm animals to keep warm.
With that in mind, I can easily imagine people being happy with stagnant technological growth, and things even slipping a little from time to time (look at Concorde, for example - now we no longer have consumer super-sonic flight, not that it was really all that economically viable in the first place).
While I think our own society is far off stagnation (particularly with regard to medical science and energy/resource management) I can certainly see that happening in a not-unrecognizable future (albeit not in the next 100 years).
It really is awesome. I just more people would play it. If WoW didn't exist, I'm sure LoTR Online would have been mobbed. I feel sorry for the developers that it's so overshadowed. Compared to other MMO's on the market it was really impressive.
Even the PvP system was good - I thought it was inspired that once you get to level 10 or so, you can roll a high level (e.g. 40-50) monster mob, and do monster quests and engage in PvP against higher level human (/hobbit/dwarf) mobs - great for dipping into PvP play without a single player grind (allowing you to enjoy the single player experience).
The environments were emotive and well detailed (the dungeons and the cities). Easily the best story telling experience of any MMO, the quests were actually fun to do for a change.
I really recommend playing it, unfortunately the lack of critical mass of other players means it wasn't able to hold my attention. Sadly, even WoW has that (with existing players flocking to new servers, so they can all level up at once, with many the cities ultimately ending up pretty barren as players are spread out all over the map).
The art assets (graphics, sounds, textures, models) are all superb, and still cut it today. With a new (or significantly updated) engine you could take all those assets and still use them to make a triple-A title.
Unfortunately as it is, the ropey way the animations are stuck together, and the poor handling of things like player placed objects (buildings, etc) don't cut it. Even moving around in SWG is an odd experience, especially in vehicles which have quite crude handling. The handling of the ships in Jump To Lightspeed didn't really cut it either IMO (not after X-Wing & Tie Fighter, which still handle really well today, even if they look very dated).
WoW is an example of an extremely responsive interface, but Age of Conan (setting aside the graphical bugs for minute) handles things in a more "realistic" and interesting manner - I like that players can't walk through each other, for example.
I really agree that no other MMO comes as near to being as customizable or as deep as SWG was. Really dynamic classes, things like weapons modding and a crafting system that were deep and required investment but not boring or overly confusing (compared to WoW, which is too simplistic or EQ which, IMO, is too laborious and not rewarding enough) and of course player cities. It's real shame that nothing has come close to that.
It would really help extend the life of WoW if they created zones where you could have player encampments, and if it have more rewarding crafting. Sadly I don't see that happening as that would deviate from what they seem to be focused on. I really wish someone would though, I think it's inevitable but while the competition remain so inept at delivering a decent MMO and WoW remains so dominant it's hard to see it happening.
Currently, I'm pegging my hopes on Eve Online as delivering that, which has in-station movement and player owned stores planned. They have been steadily growing the game, and keeping the graphics up to date as they go, so they might just be able to pull of a really immersive SWG style experience (though that would be adding a dimension thats very different to the core gameplay at the moment, they seem to be happy with that and be keen to add to it).
Very secure? I thought it was still running Safari, no? And if it was so secure why did it take less than a week to break it?
I hate it when those damn haxxors trick me into opening a webpage on my iPhone that contains subliminal messages in animated GIF's that trick me into connecting my iPhone to a Mac using a USB cable, then downloading and running a desktop application to modify the firmware on my iPhone, having me put the iPhone in restore mode, and then confirming that I want to modify the firmware.
Damn you Apple for making it so insecure!
Upgrade 1.1 irreversibly bricked phones.
No it did not. You cannot brick an iPhone (or iPod) just by installing customized firmware or messing about with the software on it - even if you try. Some people have a really hard time grasping that.
What happened to some people was it restored the status of the phone to "awaiting activation" from where they could only be used with the original SIM they were bundled with (or, technically, an already activated SIM on the appropriate locales network, taken from another iPhone).
Now that pissed some people off and meant that people who got phones and where using them with other providers couldn't keep using them anymore (as they phones wouldn't get passed activation without an activated SIM on the appropriate network for the locale being inserted).
People liked using the term "bricked" so that's how they described it, not least because many of the people in that camp didn't HAVE an original, already unlocked SIM to insert, because the bought the phones from a 3rd party and so were left with a phone that was of no use to them (but that was really still working just fine, as intended by the vendor - but not as they desired).
People in this category were impatient / foolish enough to rush out and install a largely untested update on a phone they'd already patched the software on. This is happening again with the latest jailbreak with people who have a very limited understanding of what they are doing running into problems they won't be able to fix, and I am sure there will be a lot of tears before bed time when they rush like lemmings to install the next official update over the top of their patched up date in a few weeks or so.
Thankfully the Apple restore functionality for iPods and iPhones is reliable and robust. Even if you fuck one to the point where it won't boot still doesn't mean it's "bricked" - because even after doing that you can still access the restore mode and restore full functionality, loading up factory firmware on the device.
Absolutely - jobs in finance, telecoms or virtually any other private sector organization pay far better, have lower barrier to entries and are less demanding.
Working in games industry may be "living the dream", but when the pay is half what you could be earning elsewhere, doing less work, with less demanding deadlines it's no surprise they can't attract enough good people.
(( I wish more developers would do what CCP did with EVE and refresh the graphics after a few years - frankly I think SOE would have been wise to have done that with the original EQ in order to keep and expand on the player base, rather than doing what they did and try and move everyone to EQ2, which I actually really liked more than WoW as far as the game mechanics went, but I think suffered because people went straight to WoW from EQ, or just decided to avoid SOE after they messed up the handling of SWG. ))
LOTR was up for a harder job in not going for a slightly cartoony feel (which it was seems to work so well in WoW's favour) but I think given that it did really well of convincing a 'serious'/'credible' environment - at least when running in high detail. I wonder if it's very sensitive to some things (such as specific feature or chipset support, and if it doesn't play well with some cards).
I'm not sure what developers are thinking when they release MMO engines that are clearly too bug ridden to be successful. It's hard for me to tell if they know it's crappy and will try and fix it later (as seems to be the case with AoC, and as CCP seem to have taken on board with regard to large battles in EVE), or the companies have no idea their products are defective (as seemed to be the case with SOE).
Things like the constantly morphing terrain in SWG and it's lack of caching for items in the environment always bugged me about it and was enough to put me off. It would have played just fine WITHOUT any 'level of detail' on the terrain - it just made it look crappy and perform marginally worse, can't see why they thought that was a good idea. The lack of caching of even 'static' player owned objects meant I could turn around outside of town and 50 plus player owned buildings will all just vanish in front of my eyes (only to re-appear when I got within 150 yards, where they would remain visible as long as I didn't turn round, or get really far away).
I think that's a prime example of some great ideas and vision wrecked by a curiously bad implementation of some specific, but crucial, elements (i.e. the terrain engine and the handling of player placed structures, which were everywhere in SWG). The game otherwise performed alright (although was frame rate limited to 30 FPS, IIRC - presumably because they didn't want to spend time fixing issues that would occur when rendering at > 30 FPS).
From personal experience, the failure to get basic features down pat is something I tend to associate with companies that don't have staff at the top who really understand the business they are in. That has got to be the fault of bad management. That certainly seems to sum up SOE to me with EQ, SWG, PlanetSide - where they have either had great games they screwed up, or left to decline when they could have reasonably easily been maintained and remained profitable for a much long period - or, as CCP have shown with their handling of EVE - steadily grown over time in a maintainable fashion.
WoW has very basic graphics, and not really much of a benchmark (although it helps to have a health amount of VRAM). It's nothing like as demanding LoTR Online because the models are not as detailed and it's using *much* simpler and less demanding effects.
LoTR ran very nicely @ 1920x1200 on my 2+ year old system (the one I was using when I played it was an AMD FX-57, 2 x 7900 GT, 2 GB RAM) and really had zero stuttering on mine at all. I don't think they fucked up the LoTR engine at all, it seems just fine (and handled dynamic loading and draw distance really well IMO - better than any game I've seen).
In comparison, Age of Conan still has serious loading issues in major cities (it doesn't seem to pre-cache at all, and it doesn't cache all that well) even on a new system with 2 x 9600 GT's (although they seem to be aware of that and have announced a patch is coming).
Tabula Rasa has constant low level streaming all the time - whenever you move your character in the world - resulting in mild stuttering regardless of system specs, resolution or quality level. It annoyed me so much I quit playing in the first month.
Enemy Territory : Quake Wars seems to not to be all that smooth for some reason, regardless of resolution or quality level - not really acceptable for a twitch shooter IMO. The likes of the latest version of Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty 4 run just fine at high detail at 1920x1200 with FSAA and AF on the same system so am included to think there is just something up with ET:QW (which still seems less than smooth even at the lowest resolution and the lowest detail level).
In Mac OS X 10.5 downloads are placed in ~/Downloads, and a shortcut to the downloads folder is automatically created in the Dock.
You can read about this functionality here.
It's been out since last year, which in Mac OS X release terms is quite a while (10.6 seeds are just being released). It would be wise to upgrade when updates for Mac OS X are available, there is a real point to upgrading, both for developers and end users, particularly because of the number of under the hod improvements each release has seen.
If you are regularly playing games like Call of Duty 4, Crysis or Gears of War on your PC your are going to easily notice the difference, especially if you are playing at native resolutions for larger displays (e.g. 1920x1200).
For me, compromises on texture quality through lower AF levels (in particular x8 AF) and not being able to use FSAA is really noticeable (although at high native resolutions 2xFSAA is enough to take the edge of it being distracting most of the time, 4x FSAA being preferable).
Good point - to which I'd like to add that IIRC "High" isn't even the highest setting in Crysis.
Certainly FTP is not appropriate (there is no reason not to use SFTP/SCP/HTTPS) and depending on the level of security required a VPN layer may also be appropriate, but splitting the data into chunks with separate keys is of little value (and silly, frankly).
It's liable to cause more maintenance issues (and quite possibly result in corruption if their is an error in the joining operation - which could be VERY problematic), take longer for both parties to implement and if you are writing a script to re-integrate the data (e.g. in the case of a routine operation) the keys and pass phrases are going to be all in the same place anyway. And of course, the data will all be joined together unencrypted at the other end in any case.
The weak points you to worry about are not movie villains cracking VPN, SSL and GPG encryption - but rather something more like a dolt leaving the unencrypted data on a laptop then leaving the laptop in a minicab.
Encrypting the data, encrypting the transfer and authenticating the user (which may or may not also including confirming their source IP as part of the authentication check) is sufficient. You don't need to also split the data up and hide it all over the place like it's something from a Dan Brown novel.
I think the point is that SCP/SFTP on it's own (or an HTTPS resource with authentication, for that matter) is sufficient in all cases most /.'ers will ever encounter.
With iptables (or a separate firewall) to block connections from hosts even connecting from non allowed IP blocks, that's a fairly robust solution. A VPN on top of that is of little real value.
Of course this assumes the database dump on the server is encrypted (e.g. with GPG).
This is not least in case people are tempted to leave it around unencrypted in directories on the server / on a laptop, as while it can't prevent people from doing that it can positively reenforce the idea they shouldn't be doing that (and so encourage appropriate behavior) - as well as protecting the data from exposure by application vulnerabilities on the server.
Perhaps you could go one better, do some of us favor and stop posting altogether.
What AKAImBatman wrote made perfect sense to me. I'm not sure why you had a problem understanding it, it was clearly in kWh in the posters earlier comment.
I've no idea how your electricity company quotes it's figures, but every one I've ever been with has used kWh when quoting price and on bills. This is quite common around the world, and is typically the sort of rating you'll find on electrical goods (where stated).
It's perfectly standard and entirely appropriate as far as measuring the amount of energy used by a consumer device such as a home console goes. Measuring the unit in Joules would be obtuse in this instance - consumer electricity usage (both on electricity usage statements and on equipment) is rarely, if ever, measured in Joules (I've seen it on the back, in small print, but that's it).
They could simply mean by that, quite reasonably, that while they have a series of scripts which look at the content on other hosts, the software is not written in such a way as to be able to target specific hosts by IP.
While it's easily possible to add that sort of functionality (with the aid of a cached copy of the ARIN WHOIS IP allocation DB) that doesn't mean they have written software which works that way, and so technically they don't currently have the means to.
I can imagine they intentionally don't have the means to, because then they have plausible deniability. I say that as I've been asked not to provide functionality on some network solutions, for a similar reason (so that the local authority / company cannot be accused of monitoring or targeting specific individuals, for example - because they are afraid of legal challenges).
I am curious to know how you develop without using any "proprietary" technologies. It must be tough without using technologies like Ethernet and USB or software such as a POSIX compliant operating system. Novell != Linux. Microsoft expects people to buy Linux from companies that have entered into patent agreements with them. That's not GPL. Moonlight (and Mono) are made by Novell, if you are using either, you are a downstream recipient. It has nothing to do with what Linux distribution you are using, it is not conditional in that respect (but neither does it mean Microsoft are giving up all rights to pursue the protection of other unrelated patents they may hold, but I don't see why on earth it should).
And actually, it is released under the GPL. Saying "That's not GPL." doesn't change reality, just because it doesn't fit in with your world view. Microsoft digitally signed the releases. They publicly provided assistance to the development team. It's not like they don't know what's going on.
Given C#Âand the Common Language Infrastructure are ECMA and ISO standards I don't think you can credulously call them "proprietary formats".
It would be fair to point out that Silverlight itself is not a standard in the same vein, but the GPL'd implementation of Moonlight (part of Mono) is being developed with active collaboration from Microsoft
To quote:
Microsoft, on behalf of itself and its Subsidiaries, hereby covenants not to sue Downstream Recipients of Novell and its Subsidiaries for infringement under Necessary Claims of Microsoft on account of such Downstream Recipientsâ(TM) use of Moonlight Implementations to the extent originally provided by Novell during the Term
They go on to note they may choose not to extend such license on future implementations, but that if they chose not to re-extent that agreement they confirm it would not retroactively apply to any software using a previously released version of Moonlight Plug-In.
It is perhaps of note that they not granting immunity to libraries which implement proprietary Microsoft functions which are not part of the standard - which also impacts C# developers using Mono.
Now all that may not sit comfortably with you - I can't say I like it either - but in fairness it's better than the situation with Flash, and the situation as-was with Java, but never the less I still really like C# and the CLR (thank you Mono, and dotGNU) and that's true regardless of what Microsoft are up to.
Microsoft could choose to do all sorts of weird proprietary stuff with future versions, as Sun could with Java, or Apple with Objective-C, but I'm not worried about them either, for the same reason. Namely that if a vendor goes down that route, I wouldn't follow them down it - because it's standardized and their is an open source implementation released under the GPL, I'm not under any obligation to. If they started doing things they didn't like, I'd continue using an existing open source version, free of vendor interference.
To put it this way, can you imagine writing something like GIMP, Abiword, Entourage or Firefox in Flash?
I ask again, which one of your examples is "like GIMP, Abiword, Entourage or Firefox"? It doesn't seem like you even understand the difference between those applications (and what's possible with platforms like Silverlight and Java) and the limited Flash applets you've just cited.
... err Flash ... back on the desktop. A truly amazing innovation! It's not just re-hashing old ideas in any way. It's new, and exciting, and web 2.0! That's why it doesn't have any new _application development_ functionality (in fact it has LESS extensibility than the old Director did, but pointing that out would be just unkind not to mention unfashionable).
The Flash applet "Photoshop Express" is only marginally more like GIMP than Microsoft Paint is (though Paint performs like a native application, is responsive and is implemented using existing native libraries, unlike the Flash applets you've mentioned). It might look "impressive" to you, but the ability to do a few image transforms (and handle video) is as good as it gets, it doesn't make up for all the basic stuff it doesn't have.
Again, it's great if your a designer who likes to design "funky" Flash applets and multimedia presentations to "wow" marketing people with. However, that doesn't help if you are a developer interested in writing software of significance - i.e. something that actually does neat stuff (not just "_looks_ like it does neat stuff"), but I've said all that already, so I guess we can move on.
As to why it's not impressive: It's possible to do image transforms (such scaling, rotation, blending and alpha transparency) and Microsoft Paint style functionality (drawing primitives, with anti aliasing) with only Javascript and Canvas, and of course there is SVG. All of the things I've just mentioned are possible today, without any sort of plugin for in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer using W3C standards*. In practice, Flash is BETTER at those things, but that's really neither here nor their given it doesn't make up for it's limitations.
They don't even come close to being enough to make it more than a multimedia tool - from a functional perspective it's essentially still just Director from 1993 (but "now with Ajax" although I remember that you could do TCP/IP sockets with Director, but its "trendy" and big business now). As I've already noted, everyone who makes a webpage seems to regard themselves as a "software developer" now, when 10 years ago they would have been a designer who could do multimedia, I guess that's job title inflation for you.
The reality is that Flex, for example, is just allowing you to run Director
* Of course with MSIE you need to use equivalent non-standard functions, which ExplorerCanvas helps with.
Note the absence of *a single* significant Silverlight application.
There are plenty of .NET applications and libraries, and - as you can with Java - you can use your code from them in your Silverlight applications. The same code, not just "other stuff written in ActionScript". That code could be written in pretty much whatever language you like (C#, VB, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc). As well as being written in them, Silverlight applications can also run scripting languages (including PHP, Python and Ruby) on the client side, in the browser. You can have multiple targets for your project, a desktop application, a server application and a Silverlight applet and not have to worry about widely different behaviors between them.
.NET is even more flexible as the implementation is more polished in a number of areas, and it has wider support for a range of languages. Flash is not even in the same ball pa
You can of course do much of this in Java, but really in practice (.NET's inferior native Mac OS GUI support aside)