So, the record label is entitled to 10% of the total yearly revenue of the station for playing songs they distribute, but the artist who actually created those songs still isn't entitled to 10% of the revenue his songs generate.
Technically, it wasn't about renewing the patent as it was keeping the patent alive. If he renewed the patent, it would have been another 20 years. That would have made the patent valid until 2019.
this appears to be incorrect. According to the link you provided, the patent has to be renewed every year after the 4th year to stay active. This can be done until the patent has been active for 20 years. The maximum amount of time a patent can be active under these rules is still 20 years.
I didn't see anything in that link that allowed a person to get another 20 years of protection for their patent.
Is that the competition where the rules required the machine to be taken down with a previously undisclosed vulnerability?
The vast pile of vulnerabilities that were already disclosed for windows actually helped it in that those vulnerabilities were not usable by the contest's rules. I imagine taking down the windows box was was a real challenge considering that if you did find a vulnerability, you needed to vet it against all known issues with windows and make sure it can be used in the competition.
macos X is not infallible or perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but that competition is useless in comparing the relative security of the operating systems involved.
Apple's stock price has been buoyed not by it's PC offerings, but by iPods, and that only happened after they decoupled them from their PCs and let non-fanboys buy them.
For a while that was true. However, in the past year or two Apple's stock price has been riding the earnings created by exploding growth of their computer offerings. For the last year, growth in ipod sales has been pretty flat.
Apple's hardware selection is certainly anaemic. They have, what, half a dozen models? For the vast majority of the market, their offerings just aren't suitable.
I don't know that I agree with that. The growth in the sales of macs suggests that a lot of consumers are either desperate to get away from windows, or have decided that the models offered in the mac lineup are suitable for their needs. In my experience, macs provide everything the majority of home computer owners need and provide it in a simple and attractive way.
The dissatisfaction with their offerings, in my opinion, comes primarily from gamers (a group not served by the mac lineup) and more technical users who have specific hardware desires and generally want to build their own system.
A lot more people would be willing to shell out a few hundred dollars for OS X if Apple would be willing to sell it to them for the hardware they do want.
This will never happen. Doing that would probably destroy Apple as a company. Remember, they are a hardware company first and their software and services exist to support the hardware.
Those people would be police officers. I'm pretty sure there are lots of those in D.C. And if they need help, the FBI headquarters is there too.
And what you appear to be saying is that there are already a lot of guns out there, so we should have more guns out there. Yikes.
I said nothing even remotely like that. What i said was that having a law in place for over 30 years without having any appreciable effect on the crimes it is supposed to help alleviate suggests that that law is a failure.
I also pointed out that criminals don't care if they are committing an additional crime by carrying a gun. The law certainly didn't deter them from doing so. It certainly didn't make it more difficult for criminals to get guns either.
so what you are saying is that outright banning of handguns failed to take the guns off the street and thus gun crime is still really high. It's almost as if the people committing crimes with guns didn't care that possession of the gun itself was also a crime.
Red herring. The point of the handgun ban wasn't to absolutely reduce the number of hand guns to zero, anymore than speed limits mean people don't speed.
Are you trying to say your next sentence is a red herring or that my statement was a red herring? I didn't say anything about the handgun ban being to reduce the number of hand guns to zero. You are responding to an argument i never made.
The point is to reduce the number of guns, just as speed limits are supposed to cut down the amount of speeding.
No. The point is to reduce the amount of gun related crime. Since they still have a ridiculously high rate of gun related crime after 30+ years of the gun ban, I am suggesting that the gun ban failed to do its job.
The reason it failed is something that should be impartially analyzed to determine if the idea itself is bad or if it was just an ineffective implementation of the idea, but considering the state of gun crime in Washington D.C., I don't see how anyone can think their current law was a success.
you are correct that that is not proof it wasn't working.
The fact that they had a gun ban in place for over 30 years and still had one of the highest gun related crime rates in the country shows it wasn't working.
If i recall the requirements of that contest correctly, contestants were required to use an unknown vulnerability to compromise the machine. All of the windows vulnerabilities that were being exploited in the wild or had been published by security researchers were not allowed to be used. In that case, the frequency of exploits and their discovery by researchers and bad guys alike probably actually worked to make it harder to win against the windows box.
I'm not taking a position one way or the other on the overall quality of security of any of the operating systems involved in the contest; i'm just saying the rules for the contest seem like they make it not terribly useful in determining the overall security of an operating system.
Read up on the Kodak case. Kodak tried to keep third-party maintenance firms from buying Kodak repair parts. The monopoly was defined as being in spare parts for Kodak copiers, not the entire copier market. That went to the Supreme Court, and Kodak lost.
It seems to me that even in that kind of case, you'd have to define the market as operating systems that can run on intel machines. Even if you narrowed it to just the configuration that psystar is selling, that would still put windows as the dominant os for the market. I think it would be unlikely that anyone would suggest mac os has a monopoly influence over a hardware platform it wont even run on without an emulation layer for the bios.
I'm not trying to be belligerent, i'm just curious what definition of the market you feel would make anti-trust law relevant in this case.
Maybe i'm taking your argument backwards and you are defining the market as hardware platforms that can run mac os?
In the case of an EULA or a subscriber agreement the agreement is with the player, not the bot creator. I don't see any way they can go after him with either of those. They could sue their subscribers with them if they could reliably detect which users are using a bot, which they seem to be asserting they cannot do.
I also like the part where they say it interferes with their design expectations. Who cares? The fact that they didn't accomodate someone playing the game 24/7 doesn't have any bearing on the legality of the bot. The only way i can think that that would be relevant is if the terms of use limited the time a user can play. Even then, they'd have to sue the player, not the bot maker.
I'll be surprised if this doesn't get thrown out of court. I'm a little surprised that after he blew off their legal threat, they didn't try to just buy him out to get rid of it.
I'm not a lawyer though, so i suspect a lot of things happen in court that would surprise me.
You could, as a company, puchase multiple certs. One for developers which, if it gets out and is revoked, won't affect the cert used to publish the software to the online store.
The problem with this is that the developer's certs could be used to publish as well, so the company would have the potential for their developers to publish their own apps, or publish a version of the company's app. Sure, they would be violating their employment contracts, but I would think that would still make the company principals uncomfortable.
So basically it becomes an extra source of revenue for Apple with little added security for end users. Yay! Way to treat your developers...
i disagree with this. I can see it adding security for end users in the sense that it becomes a filter for bad or malicious developers in a similar way to an email blacklist. There's nothing stopping a bad developer from getting another cert through another identity (corporate, or by proxy using a friend or something) if they are willing to spend the money, but it does make it more difficult and will probably weed out the less dedicated malicious individuals.
Also, I didn't mean to suggest that the applications wouldn't be vetted. I suspect the applications will have some kind of process they have to go through before being put in the store. I don't think that will be based on the reputation of the organisation with a product, but on some kind of testing of the product to make sure it does what it is claimed to do.
As far as revenue is concerned, I suspect it will be kind of like the itunes store. It's a support feature for the phone and as such is primarily geared towards covering its costs. The revenue it generates isnt that important because the purpose is to sell phones and that will make Apple a lot more money.
btw... i agree that the developer cert requirement makes life harder for open source developers. I don't think that is necessarily intentional on Apple's part. I wouldn't be surprised to find out general open source projects and development never came up while they were defining how this works
Presumably a corporation isn't giving its cert out to every developer. Or if they do, the developers probably have some formal contract which would hold them legally accountable for leaking the cert. I don't know if you've ever worked on an OSS project before, but it is nothing like a corporation (the big ones like Mozilla being exceptions, of course).
Actually, when i wrote that, i was thinking that the company only needed the cert to publish and not to use the debugging tools. One of my coworkers reminded me later that you actually need the cert to do development, which, i guess, means that companies will have to buy certs for each employee.
Why would the developers publishing through me hold ME accountable if it was someone else who released the problematic software?
This goes back to me screwing up on the need to give the cert to the developer. I was thinking that the publishing organisation would basically act as the interface to the store and be the "company face" for a group of independent developers. This is derailed by the need to give the developers the cert (which would allow them to publish without going through the organisation). In that scenario, the developers would hold the publisher responsible because he was basically the gatekeeper and submitted something to be on the store that got the cert invalidated (thus removing all of their apps from circulation). In the actual scenario that exists, the publishing organisation doesn't seem like it'll work.
It does seem weird to me that development and publishing are tied to the same cert. That seems like it would be problematic for companies who want to have many developers working on applications, but want the company itself to be the interface to the store.
Perhaps not, but Apple can and should be selective about who they think is going to be well behaved in that regard. If your name is Adobe, there'll be no question. If your name is iPhone Confederated Open Source Developers League, there'll probably be some issues.
I agree that some discrimination in that regard will happen and probably should happen, but i think it is more likely that generally anyone who is willing to pay the fee will be allowed to publish anything that doesn't violate one of the rules. If you do something inappropriate, they'll kill your cert. I would suspect that their issues will be reactive more than proactive.
Apparently, you cannot install an application to the phone without the developer's cert. for debugging. So that would make that an unlikely way to distribute applications or for other parties to use your source for their own purposes (unless they had a developer's cert.)
The question about if the apps still work when you unplug from the dev environment still seems to be open.
What good is having the source if you have no way to install it on the device after you modify it and compile it? How do you test your modifications? Do you compile it, buy a $99 cert for yourself and then "distribute" it to yourself through Apple?
Yeah. If only there were a way to know the answers to these questions. Apple really should have said whether or or not you could debug and test on your iphone in the development kit. Ideally, they would have covered this around 10:30 am and had a 6 foot tall slide to accompany it.
I know that's a little bit unnecessarily sarky, but you're asking questions that were answered at the event and on every website reporting on the event and then drawing a conclusion based on your assumption of what those answers are without even a superficial attempt to find out if they are correct.
If you questions had been "can the sdk be used to compile and install apps for general use on the phone? do apps installed via the sdk work normally when not plugged into a mac for development?" you would have had good questions that aren't definitively answered already (at least, i don't remember there being anything about that).
Would Apple allow a single organization with a single cert to proxy for an unknown set of developers?
You mean like a corporation?
Seems like that woudl kind of defeat the purpose of signing the apps. Presumably it is to provide security and accountability, no?
I would say it provides the same security and accountability. If you publish an app under your cert and it is a problem, they'll probably revoke your cert and all of the applications under your cert will probably be removed from the store. I suspect all of the developers publishing through you will hold you accountable for that.
There's fundamentally no way for the store to know that your publishing organisation isn't publishing applications it created or were created by its employees or contractors if you don't tell them.
I bet we'll continue to see hacks to open up the devices to free software.
They own most of the EU's financial computers and could easily out-last the EU itself if it ever came to a standoff.
no matter how much money you have, it is never a good idea to get into a standoff with a sovereign nation (unless you are also a sovereign nation, and then it's only a good idea sometimes).
I don't know what the EU could do to impose the rule of law on Microsoft - suspending business licenses there might be the only thing Microsoft would really notice, and even then, that's not remotely guaranteed.
The EU could invalidate all intellectual property protections for microsoft products in the EU.
Remember that the right of the corporation to even exist as an entity in the EU is at the sufferance of the government.
You could get a mac book pro and run it 2 headed (the built in screen, and a flat panel attached via the dvi port)
Alternately, you could get an iMac and run it 2 headed using the mini-DVI port. You'll need a $20 adaptor to turn it into a regular dvi port, but that's not really that big a deal, is it?
My wife has a 24" iMac and has a second monitor hooked up to it this way. It works just fine.
To be clear, mostly I was thinking about the ESRB site and how it could be more useful. Currently it shows only rating and a list of descriptors. I think it should also contain or link to a synopsis (or trailer, or site, or something) so that parents have something more substantive to evaluate, and can learn about video game content from a central, trustable source.
I think the ESRB site for a game including a synopsis of the game and a link to a game trailer, if one is available, would be useful and convenient, but i wonder if they are worried about the mutability of the games. The ESRB might be unwilling to provide more detailed information for a product that can be altered with patches and user mods. If their summary goes out of date, it is not inconceivable that someone would sue them for misrepresenting the content of the game. Jack Thompson already does that with the small amount of information they provide now.
And, yes, I do think this would be a valuable service - a lot of parents, especially non-gamers, are going to have more difficulty judging the content of a game than the content of a movie or book, and could use the help.
I agree that that would be a useful service and convenient, I'm just not sure the ESRB are the ones to provide it. I would expect the media to provide that kind of service similar to movie and book reviews, imdb, and yahoo movies. Unfortunately, the gaming news is a corrupted environment whose revenue is too closely tied to the products they review. Until computer gaming becomes mainstream enough that newspapers have a review section like they do for movies and books, it will always be more difficult for parents to know what the content of a game is.
Perhaps this is a service that a group like Consumer Reports could provide (they already do some software).
Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Simulated Gambling Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Blood, Language, Violence
looks pretty similar to the descriptions on movie ratings.
From just that, you might think these are comparable games.
One has gambling, the other has violence and profanity. I'm not sure why you would think they are comparable.
To get context on a movie's content, people typically watch a trailer or read reviews. The same can be done for games. Most game companies are providing trailers for their games now, and even the ones that don't have a web page with a synopsis. Even if the trailer or review is biased, it will still give you an idea of what kind of game it is.
I don't accept that anyone can walk into a game store, buy a game named after a felony that has an M rating, and turn around and legitimately say "i had no idea".
I agree that good sales people should be able to help parents make good purchasing decisions...I just dont think the one word description needs to be on the ESRB rating. (you'd think the game box would provide that context itself anyway)
MyMiniCity should allow us to create a negative link. Take the original and apply some algorithm to get the link that subtracts resources/points/money or adds to the chance/intensity/duration of a natural disaster hitting the city. Then you might have to be careful where you decide to spam your links...
Actually, this is a pretty brilliant idea from the game owner's perspective. It would allow them to generate ad impressions on people retaliating against people spamming their own links. It would also create a meta-game where players could snipe each other with negative links. The game owner would probably triple their ad views from that. Of course, from the perspective of people reading slashdot articles who aren't playing the game, it would probably also double the amount of spam crap we have to deal with.
If they really wanted to discourage spamming, they should include a complaint link on the page it sends you to that aggregates the complaints against the referrer (or something) to determine the obnoxiousness level of spam link. Then it hammers the user with permanent negative points based on that value. That would encourage people to click the spam (and generate ad views) so they could click the complaint link and harm the spammer, and it would keep other players from being able to spam negative links about their competitors.
I'm sure there are flaws in that idea too, that was just something i thought of while typing this and thought i'd include for the hell of it.
If I recall correctly, with the 802.11n addition, the reason it was an issue was because it was enabling hardware that was shipped as part of the product but wasn't initially activated. So the issue was that the entire product wouldn't be considered to be shipped while that piece of hardware was disabled.
I don't know if there's anything similar with the iphone, but they are probably interpreting the requirement conservatively on the theory that it is better to err on the side of caution than to end up being investigated over it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the record label is entitled to 10% of the total yearly revenue of the station for playing songs they distribute, but the artist who actually created those songs still isn't entitled to 10% of the revenue his songs generate.
Technically, it wasn't about renewing the patent as it was keeping the patent alive. If he renewed the patent, it would have been another 20 years. That would have made the patent valid until 2019.
this appears to be incorrect. According to the link you provided, the patent has to be renewed every year after the 4th year to stay active. This can be done until the patent has been active for 20 years.
The maximum amount of time a patent can be active under these rules is still 20 years.
I didn't see anything in that link that allowed a person to get another 20 years of protection for their patent.
Is that the competition where the rules required the machine to be taken down with a previously undisclosed vulnerability?
The vast pile of vulnerabilities that were already disclosed for windows actually helped it in that those vulnerabilities were not usable by the contest's rules. I imagine taking down the windows box was was a real challenge considering that if you did find a vulnerability, you needed to vet it against all known issues with windows and make sure it can be used in the competition.
macos X is not infallible or perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but that competition is useless in comparing the relative security of the operating systems involved.
Apple's stock price has been buoyed not by it's PC offerings, but by iPods, and that only happened after they decoupled them from their PCs and let non-fanboys buy them.
For a while that was true. However, in the past year or two Apple's stock price has been riding the earnings created by exploding growth of their computer offerings. For the last year, growth in ipod sales has been pretty flat.
Apple's hardware selection is certainly anaemic. They have, what, half a dozen models? For the vast majority of the market, their offerings just aren't suitable.
I don't know that I agree with that. The growth in the sales of macs suggests that a lot of consumers are either desperate to get away from windows, or have decided that the models offered in the mac lineup are suitable for their needs. In my experience, macs provide everything the majority of home computer owners need and provide it in a simple and attractive way.
The dissatisfaction with their offerings, in my opinion, comes primarily from gamers (a group not served by the mac lineup) and more technical users who have specific hardware desires and generally want to build their own system.
A lot more people would be willing to shell out a few hundred dollars for OS X if Apple would be willing to sell it to them for the hardware they do want.
This will never happen. Doing that would probably destroy Apple as a company. Remember, they are a hardware company first and their software and services exist to support the hardware.
Laws do nothing without people who enforce them.
Those people would be police officers. I'm pretty sure there are lots of those in D.C.
And if they need help, the FBI headquarters is there too.
And what you appear to be saying is that there are already a lot of guns out there, so we should have more guns out there. Yikes.
I said nothing even remotely like that.
What i said was that having a law in place for over 30 years without having any appreciable effect on the crimes it is supposed to help alleviate suggests that that law is a failure.
I also pointed out that criminals don't care if they are committing an additional crime by carrying a gun. The law certainly didn't deter them from doing so. It certainly didn't make it more difficult for criminals to get guns either.
In what way was that law a success?
so what you are saying is that outright banning of handguns failed to take the guns off the street and thus gun crime is still really high. It's almost as if the people committing crimes with guns didn't care that possession of the gun itself was also a crime.
The law was a failure.
Red herring. The point of the handgun ban wasn't to absolutely reduce the number of hand guns to zero, anymore than speed limits mean people don't speed.
Are you trying to say your next sentence is a red herring or that my statement was a red herring?
I didn't say anything about the handgun ban being to reduce the number of hand guns to zero. You are responding to an argument i never made.
The point is to reduce the number of guns, just as speed limits are supposed to cut down the amount of speeding.
No. The point is to reduce the amount of gun related crime. Since they still have a ridiculously high rate of gun related crime after 30+ years of the gun ban, I am suggesting that the gun ban failed to do its job.
The reason it failed is something that should be impartially analyzed to determine if the idea itself is bad or if it was just an ineffective implementation of the idea, but considering the state of gun crime in Washington D.C., I don't see how anyone can think their current law was a success.
you are correct that that is not proof it wasn't working.
The fact that they had a gun ban in place for over 30 years and still had one of the highest gun related crime rates in the country shows it wasn't working.
If i recall the requirements of that contest correctly, contestants were required to use an unknown vulnerability to compromise the machine. All of the windows vulnerabilities that were being exploited in the wild or had been published by security researchers were not allowed to be used. In that case, the frequency of exploits and their discovery by researchers and bad guys alike probably actually worked to make it harder to win against the windows box.
I'm not taking a position one way or the other on the overall quality of security of any of the operating systems involved in the contest; i'm just saying the rules for the contest seem like they make it not terribly useful in determining the overall security of an operating system.
you left off :
6. Get sued into oblivion by hordes of parents when some jackass creates the "Find the ancient cock sculpture of Algernon" quest.
The idea could work, but there'd need to be a gatekeeper on the content flowing into the game and that would be very hard to implement effectively.
Read up on the Kodak case. Kodak tried to keep third-party maintenance firms from buying Kodak repair parts. The monopoly was defined as being in spare parts for Kodak copiers, not the entire copier market. That went to the Supreme Court, and Kodak lost.
It seems to me that even in that kind of case, you'd have to define the market as operating systems that can run on intel machines. Even if you narrowed it to just the configuration that psystar is selling, that would still put windows as the dominant os for the market. I think it would be unlikely that anyone would suggest mac os has a monopoly influence over a hardware platform it wont even run on without an emulation layer for the bios.
I'm not trying to be belligerent, i'm just curious what definition of the market you feel would make anti-trust law relevant in this case.
Maybe i'm taking your argument backwards and you are defining the market as hardware platforms that can run mac os?
In the case of an EULA or a subscriber agreement the agreement is with the player, not the bot creator. I don't see any way they can go after him with either of those. They could sue their subscribers with them if they could reliably detect which users are using a bot, which they seem to be asserting they cannot do.
I also like the part where they say it interferes with their design expectations. Who cares? The fact that they didn't accomodate someone playing the game 24/7 doesn't have any bearing on the legality of the bot. The only way i can think that that would be relevant is if the terms of use limited the time a user can play. Even then, they'd have to sue the player, not the bot maker.
I'll be surprised if this doesn't get thrown out of court. I'm a little surprised that after he blew off their legal threat, they didn't try to just buy him out to get rid of it.
I'm not a lawyer though, so i suspect a lot of things happen in court that would surprise me.
No wooden knob needed.
No, you'd still need the audiophile.
(i kid because i care... ok, you caught me. I don't really care)
You could, as a company, puchase multiple certs. One for developers which, if it gets out and is revoked, won't affect the cert used to publish the software to the online store.
The problem with this is that the developer's certs could be used to publish as well, so the company would have the potential for their developers to publish their own apps, or publish a version of the company's app. Sure, they would be violating their employment contracts, but I would think that would still make the company principals uncomfortable.
So basically it becomes an extra source of revenue for Apple with little added security for end users. Yay! Way to treat your developers...
i disagree with this. I can see it adding security for end users in the sense that it becomes a filter for bad or malicious developers in a similar way to an email blacklist. There's nothing stopping a bad developer from getting another cert through another identity (corporate, or by proxy using a friend or something) if they are willing to spend the money, but it does make it more difficult and will probably weed out the less dedicated malicious individuals.
Also, I didn't mean to suggest that the applications wouldn't be vetted. I suspect the applications will have some kind of process they have to go through before being put in the store. I don't think that will be based on the reputation of the organisation with a product, but on some kind of testing of the product to make sure it does what it is claimed to do.
As far as revenue is concerned, I suspect it will be kind of like the itunes store. It's a support feature for the phone and as such is primarily geared towards covering its costs. The revenue it generates isnt that important because the purpose is to sell phones and that will make Apple a lot more money.
btw... i agree that the developer cert requirement makes life harder for open source developers. I don't think that is necessarily intentional on Apple's part. I wouldn't be surprised to find out general open source projects and development never came up while they were defining how this works
Presumably a corporation isn't giving its cert out to every developer. Or if they do, the developers probably have some formal contract which would hold them legally accountable for leaking the cert. I don't know if you've ever worked on an OSS project before, but it is nothing like a corporation (the big ones like Mozilla being exceptions, of course).
Actually, when i wrote that, i was thinking that the company only needed the cert to publish and not to use the debugging tools. One of my coworkers reminded me later that you actually need the cert to do development, which, i guess, means that companies will have to buy certs for each employee.
Why would the developers publishing through me hold ME accountable if it was someone else who released the problematic software?
This goes back to me screwing up on the need to give the cert to the developer. I was thinking that the publishing organisation would basically act as the interface to the store and be the "company face" for a group of independent developers. This is derailed by the need to give the developers the cert (which would allow them to publish without going through the organisation).
In that scenario, the developers would hold the publisher responsible because he was basically the gatekeeper and submitted something to be on the store that got the cert invalidated (thus removing all of their apps from circulation).
In the actual scenario that exists, the publishing organisation doesn't seem like it'll work.
It does seem weird to me that development and publishing are tied to the same cert. That seems like it would be problematic for companies who want to have many developers working on applications, but want the company itself to be the interface to the store.
Perhaps not, but Apple can and should be selective about who they think is going to be well behaved in that regard. If your name is Adobe, there'll be no question. If your name is iPhone Confederated Open Source Developers League, there'll probably be some issues.
I agree that some discrimination in that regard will happen and probably should happen, but i think it is more likely that generally anyone who is willing to pay the fee will be allowed to publish anything that doesn't violate one of the rules. If you do something inappropriate, they'll kill your cert. I would suspect that their issues will be reactive more than proactive.
Further information:
Apparently, you cannot install an application to the phone without the developer's cert. for debugging. So that would make that an unlikely way to distribute applications or for other parties to use your source for their own purposes (unless they had a developer's cert.)
The question about if the apps still work when you unplug from the dev environment still seems to be open.
That's what they get for buying all that sub-prime debt. If more of these banks went out of business over it, maybe they'd learn something.
p.s. I'm kidding. I know this is about radio astronomy and not about a financial institution.
What good is having the source if you have no way to install it on the device after you modify it and compile it? How do you test your modifications? Do you compile it, buy a $99 cert for yourself and then "distribute" it to yourself through Apple?
Yeah. If only there were a way to know the answers to these questions. Apple really should have said whether or or not you could debug and test on your iphone in the development kit. Ideally, they would have covered this around 10:30 am and had a 6 foot tall slide to accompany it.
I know that's a little bit unnecessarily sarky, but you're asking questions that were answered at the event and on every website reporting on the event and then drawing a conclusion based on your assumption of what those answers are without even a superficial attempt to find out if they are correct.
If you questions had been "can the sdk be used to compile and install apps for general use on the phone? do apps installed via the sdk work normally when not plugged into a mac for development?" you would have had good questions that aren't definitively answered already (at least, i don't remember there being anything about that).
Would Apple allow a single organization with a single cert to proxy for an unknown set of developers?
You mean like a corporation?
Seems like that woudl kind of defeat the purpose of signing the apps. Presumably it is to provide security and accountability, no?
I would say it provides the same security and accountability. If you publish an app under your cert and it is a problem, they'll probably revoke your cert and all of the applications under your cert will probably be removed from the store. I suspect all of the developers publishing through you will hold you accountable for that.
There's fundamentally no way for the store to know that your publishing organisation isn't publishing applications it created or were created by its employees or contractors if you don't tell them.
I bet we'll continue to see hacks to open up the devices to free software.
I also have no doubt that this will continue.
They own most of the EU's financial computers and could easily out-last the EU itself if it ever came to a standoff.
no matter how much money you have, it is never a good idea to get into a standoff with a sovereign nation (unless you are also a sovereign nation, and then it's only a good idea sometimes).
I don't know what the EU could do to impose the rule of law on Microsoft - suspending business licenses there might be the only thing Microsoft would really notice, and even then, that's not remotely guaranteed.
The EU could invalidate all intellectual property protections for microsoft products in the EU.
Remember that the right of the corporation to even exist as an entity in the EU is at the sufferance of the government.
You could get a mac book pro and run it 2 headed (the built in screen, and a flat panel attached via the dvi port)
Alternately, you could get an iMac and run it 2 headed using the mini-DVI port. You'll need a $20 adaptor to turn it into a regular dvi port, but that's not really that big a deal, is it?
My wife has a 24" iMac and has a second monitor hooked up to it this way. It works just fine.
Bioware announced their next game, expected to be released in early 2010, Madden Effect 2k10.
To be clear, mostly I was thinking about the ESRB site and how it could be more useful. Currently it shows only rating and a list of descriptors. I think it should also contain or link to a synopsis (or trailer, or site, or something) so that parents have something more substantive to evaluate, and can learn about video game content from a central, trustable source.
I think the ESRB site for a game including a synopsis of the game and a link to a game trailer, if one is available, would be useful and convenient, but i wonder if they are worried about the mutability of the games. The ESRB might be unwilling to provide more detailed information for a product that can be altered with patches and user mods. If their summary goes out of date, it is not inconceivable that someone would sue them for misrepresenting the content of the game. Jack Thompson already does that with the small amount of information they provide now.
And, yes, I do think this would be a valuable service - a lot of parents, especially non-gamers, are going to have more difficulty judging the content of a game than the content of a movie or book, and could use the help.
I agree that that would be a useful service and convenient, I'm just not sure the ESRB are the ones to provide it. I would expect the media to provide that kind of service similar to movie and book reviews, imdb, and yahoo movies.
Unfortunately, the gaming news is a corrupted environment whose revenue is too closely tied to the products they review. Until computer gaming becomes mainstream enough that newspapers have a review section like they do for movies and books, it will always be more difficult for parents to know what the content of a game is.
Perhaps this is a service that a group like Consumer Reports could provide (they already do some software).
Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Simulated Gambling
Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Blood, Language, Violence
looks pretty similar to the descriptions on movie ratings.
From just that, you might think these are comparable games.
One has gambling, the other has violence and profanity. I'm not sure why you would think they are comparable.
To get context on a movie's content, people typically watch a trailer or read reviews. The same can be done for games. Most game companies are providing trailers for their games now, and even the ones that don't have a web page with a synopsis. Even if the trailer or review is biased, it will still give you an idea of what kind of game it is.
I don't accept that anyone can walk into a game store, buy a game named after a felony that has an M rating, and turn around and legitimately say "i had no idea".
I agree that good sales people should be able to help parents make good purchasing decisions...I just dont think the one word description needs to be on the ESRB rating. (you'd think the game box would provide that context itself anyway)
MyMiniCity should allow us to create a negative link. Take the original and apply some algorithm to get the link that subtracts resources/points/money or adds to the chance/intensity/duration of a natural disaster hitting the city. Then you might have to be careful where you decide to spam your links ...
Actually, this is a pretty brilliant idea from the game owner's perspective. It would allow them to generate ad impressions on people retaliating against people spamming their own links. It would also create a meta-game where players could snipe each other with negative links. The game owner would probably triple their ad views from that. Of course, from the perspective of people reading slashdot articles who aren't playing the game, it would probably also double the amount of spam crap we have to deal with.
If they really wanted to discourage spamming, they should include a complaint link on the page it sends you to that aggregates the complaints against the referrer (or something) to determine the obnoxiousness level of spam link. Then it hammers the user with permanent negative points based on that value. That would encourage people to click the spam (and generate ad views) so they could click the complaint link and harm the spammer, and it would keep other players from being able to spam negative links about their competitors.
I'm sure there are flaws in that idea too, that was just something i thought of while typing this and thought i'd include for the hell of it.
If I recall correctly, with the 802.11n addition, the reason it was an issue was because it was enabling hardware that was shipped as part of the product but wasn't initially activated. So the issue was that the entire product wouldn't be considered to be shipped while that piece of hardware was disabled.
I don't know if there's anything similar with the iphone, but they are probably interpreting the requirement conservatively on the theory that it is better to err on the side of caution than to end up being investigated over it.