The lack of these services outside the US is one of the major problems caused by the copyright cartels. They are blithely ignoring this fact trying to pretend that territorial licensing schemes still make sense - as a result, outside of the US we're months or years behind where you guys are in terms of these sorts of services.
There's no technical reason for it - it's just bullshit licensing schemes that make it impossible to have services like these. Shit, even if they did what software publishers and try to rape people in certain territories depending on the relative value of international currencies (examples: 2K Games are always significantly more expensive on Steam; Adobe products are almost 2x as much here as they are in the USA when you convert dollars), at least we'd have the option.
Maybe because if they did block Wikipedia from Verizon users with a message saying "you have been blocked from this service because Verizon [boring technical or sociological problem that people won't see because by the time their eyes hit the word 'Verizon', they'll be on the phone]", there is a belief that their support costs will go up because of the masses of people complaining and having to deal with those people according to their support process. No idea what Verizon's support is like, maybe they just bin all their support requests anyway.
I cannot belieeeeeeeeeeeve how quickly gamers fell for DLC. Or maybe I should say, I can't belieeeeeeeve how quickly I have turned into one of those old codgers saying, "back in my day..." - but a lot of the guys I grew up playing games with are now in the DLC trap, so it's not just a case of newbie gamers not knowing any better.
Remember when you'd get a game, and then there'd be a level editor and maybe some mod tools? And then a few weeks after the game was out and you'd played the shit out of it, the first crappy maps would come out? And maybe a proof-of-concept mod?
Then a month or so later, a mate would tell you about this great new map, and you'd fire it up together and play it. Then someone would tell you about some crazy new mod with a funny name like "Team Fortress" or "Counter-Strike" or "Desert Combat" that was a bit hacky, but still really good fun. Then more people would play, and it would grow, and change, and mature, and turn into a solid product all of its own.
All the new school games just don't follow this model. They're cutting out almost any possibility of this process occurring by closing their development environments and charging $5 for every map under the guise of premium DLC, when they could create an ecosystem of nearly unlimited potential that would not only virtually enslave their player base and lead to more sales, but also lead to these entire amazing new brands for them to cash in on.
Team Fortress started as a free mod and turned into TF2 (with a very long lead time), one of Valve's most successful brands now. Counter-strike is still ludicrously popular. Desert Combat (mod for BF1942) evolved into Battlefield 2. Red Orchestra turned into a successful standalone game.
Sure, not every mod turns into a huge amazing thing, but if you create a remotely decent game with well-thought out multiplayer and throw in decent development tools, you can STILL create premium DLC and sell it to users, but you'll also get vast amounts of free content for your game. And as long as you have a vaguely decent management system for your online CD keys, pretty much each game will be a sale.
No official link given in the OP, but here's the Red Hat blog post, titled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: A Technical Look at Red Hat’s Defining New Operating Platform", which gives a good look at some of the changes.
The less-interesting press releases are here (Red Hat Enables Expanded Deployment Flexibility and Application Portability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6) and here (Red Hat Sets a New Standard for the Next Generation of Operating Systems).
If you ever talk to a lawyer about a contract in which the other party has left a clause in there that says "oh, this is just something we need to keep in there, but don't worry - we'd never actually USE it", I guarantee your lawyer will advise you that if that's what they're saying, then you should get that clause removed. Because if they're saying now they're never going to draw on it, but they want to leave it in anyway, it's because one day, they want to have the ability to use it.
Our lawyers have always advised us in contract negotiations to keep an eye out for anything like this and make sure those things are removed - the entire point of a legal contract is to clearly outline what you can and can't do, so we ensure people we sign contracts with put their money where their mouth is and that we don't have to rely on their "word" when it comes to enforcing selective clauses.
The prison system in the US is heavily privatised, is it not? I wonder how much of a difference that makes, when there's a strong commercial incentive to have more criminals (assuming that private jails get paid more from the government to house more inmates)?
That sucks. Do you have any rights to request an audit of their accounts (without actually suing them)? If your ebook is out in the wild and you're confident it's not pirated (did a quick Google and it certainly doesn't look like it's readily available) it certainly seems like they're screwing you. I'm sure this happens all the time with all sorts of things like this.
Probably unlikely, but some of our contracts have stipulations like that (as retailers of a service we onsell, the service creators want to be able to audit us to make sure what we're paying them matches what we're actually selling).
If that Aussie provider doesn't want to end up in court, let him advertise what he's actually offering. This isn't about the quality of service, it's about their quality of ethics.
This story caught me by surprised; at first I was like "what's the big deal?", because ISPs shaping/limiting connections after you've passed your monthly download limit is standard operating procedure here, and has been for years.
The big thing here is apparently the ISP in question was advertising this service as 'unlimited' and not clearly stating that it was, in fact, limited. This, too, was a bridge we crossed years ago with the ACCC stomping down, hard, on the practice - I haven't seen the word 'unlimited' used in ISP advertising for years. They have all been very clear and very upfront about their limits.
I suspect this is just a really bad marketing fail where they came up with a campaign and forgot to run it past anyone with a clue, or anyone with a memory of more than a few years. The reality is though the ACCC has done a great job - much better than in the US, say - about stomping on people that advertise 'unlimited' (or put other vague non-limits down) and have ensured that, in general, Australians have been pretty clear about what they're getting when they're signing up to an ISP.
Hey, a Xen book! I just forwarded that to the lead developer on our VPS platform (we have a Xen-based VPS service here in Australia called Mammoth VPS). He was talking this morning about this book he just bought: http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780132349666/Running-Xen so I'm sure it's the sort of thing he'd find interesting.
Yep, totally - there's people in my office for whom it would be a killer app. But I was just pointing out that whichever poster above was saying that for the vast vast majority of users, it is definitely not.
I am very tempted to try to install this mod thing on my Nexus One, but OpenVPN isn't the driving motiviation - for me it's just a nice addition.
Yeh as someone else pointed out, OpenVPN is a different type of VPN setup that seems quite popular over the 'regular' VPN stuff. I don't know the technical differences; all I know is we ditched the 'regular' VPN stuff that most things support in favour of OpenVPN.
Uh, I assume the GP was referring to the fact that the previous user described the VPN component as a 'killer app'.
I consider myself a pretty nerdy Android user - I'm probably in the 1% of Android users who a) actually know what OpenVPN is and b) would actually use it.
I sure would like to have OpenVPN but I certainly can't be bothered figuring out how to mod my phone to get it. So I think the GP was merely saying that for the vast, vast majority of people, it is pretty irrelevant when compared to something like having the Facebook application working.
I'm sorry, what? I cannot imagine anywhere here in Australia ever willingly handing over money to a politician for a photo or an autograph. Is that a normal thing for an American politician to do?
I can understand people paying actors, celebs, writers, artists etc at a ComicCon for that sort of thing. I personally wouldn't do it (and I say that as a pretty avid comic fan), but I can understand why people would. But politicians?
Re:Not remotely similar to the Microsoft situation
on
The Case For Oracle
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· Score: 1
It's a platform that you can write code for in the Java language, yes, but this is a world away from claiming you're shipping "Java", and virtually no end users are under the impression Java has anything to do with the Java platform. Be very clear about this: no applications shipped as.jar (or.class) files for J2ME, J2SE, or J2EE, will run under Android, and nobody thinks they will.
I have to say - I am fairly technically savvy. I have an Android phone, I know what Java is, I know a little bit about software development, etc. And I was actually under the impression it was a Java platform, before this whole thing erupted and I bothered to learn more about the details. I wasn't sure if you could just take any old 'Java'-labeled application and run it on Android, but I certainly thought that it would be basically trivial to take any Java app and adapt it to Android with very little effort.
Of course since reading more about the issue I now understand it's basically not like that at all. But definitely from the fact the word 'Java' was used, I certainly thought Android was a Java-based device.
So if you're looking at a $40,000 electric vehicle which has depreciated to something like $20,000 after three years and still requires $10,000-$15,000 of new batteries for the next owner, I don't understand why they expect a used market to develop at all
I recall reading in another thread here about the price of the Prius replacement battery pack dropping significantly since launch - down from $6k to $2k (here's the post - no citation but a quick google seems to indicate its in the right ballpark.
I wonder if any of that cost is subsidized by Toyota to try to make the car more appealing, or if it is is the 'true' market value.
Limiting people to a specific quantity of data is just stupid and greedy. If someone downloads tons of stuff during off-hours, making use of bandwidth that would otherwise go unused, this does not cost the company anything, nor does it inconvenience other customers.
What some ISPs do here in Australia (where limited bandwidth plans are the norm, usually between 20-50gb / month) is offer "off peak" downloads - extra download quota that you can use in off-peak hours (eg, 2am-8am).
I actually prefer limited download models, because - while I understand your premise about the costs on the ISP if noone is using the line, etc - in practice, what happens when people have 'unlimited' traffic is that they have no respect for that data. There's no attempts made to download reasonable as people don't put any effort into moderating their use of what is a shared resource. Thus, the system is abused - by a small minority, no doubt, but abused nonetheless, because there's no reason not to do it. And more and more people are happy to queue up a zillion torrents and run them all the time.
I would much prefer to be on an ISP where I knew that other people using it would be using the service in a reasonable manner and that I will be able to use the service with no interruptions at all time.
I don't think putting bandwidth limits on data hogs is fair. If they have been sold a service with no data limits, then its within their rights to use as much as they want. If they feel they need to download 24/7, then they should be able to. The only fair sort of data limit is one that is transparent and applicable to everyone BEFORE they sign up for an ISP service. ISPs in Australia tried this sort of thing, called it an "acceptable use policy" which was a vague legalese attempt to be able to disconnect anyone they felt was downloading too much. Our regulatory commission shot it down very quickly, thankfully.
Except for the fact that our quota system here in Australia is comparably low to the rest of the world I feel that it is a good, workable system. I have 60gb a month and very rarely use it all (often don't even go near it - I'm at 31gb at the moment and I reset in 2 days), but I know that bandwidth is there when I need it. And I know that everyone on my network is paying for what they use:)
....remember first that Facebook is a company, beholden to its shareholders.
If you think that this was a douche move and want to send a message that this sort of thing shouldn't be done, then the best way to do it is to send a message in terms they'll understand - stop using your Facebook account.
I suspect most people wouldn't bother because the usefulness of Facebook as a tool to them certainly outweighs the occasional douche thing they do - shit, if they are prepared to sell your privacy to the highest bidder and people still don't bat an eye, I can't see why they'd care about this.
Shit, I love AwesomeBar. It took me a few weeks of constant use to get over the learning curve, because it was so different to the previous experience. Now I've migrated to Chrome and I have no fucking idea how the address bar in there works any more. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but the AwesomeBar was fantastic - I could type partial URLs, separated by spaces, and it would happily figure out where I wanted to go. Not having that functionality is killing me in Chrome.
While I don't intend any sexism, the fact is that parallel parking is difficult, and many women would rather have the car do it than try it themselves. Parking assist (without the tire-scorching 180) is going to be a very popular feature among the minivan crowd.
heh every girl I know is awesome at parallel parking. I (male) have done it a grand total of twice in the more than ten years since I got my license; I would rather drive another few metres and walk a bit further than embarrass myself trying and hold up traffic.
I know it's the sort of thing I would learn with practice, but I drive infrequently and its just not a skill I need where I live, so I just can't do it.
For me, driving is a painful chore that I must do to get from point A to point B. I know some people enjoy it but I find it tiresome, boring, and a waste of time. I cannot wait for the day that I can get in my car and punch in a destination and sit back and read a book or idly stare out the window!
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Spoken like a true American!
The lack of these services outside the US is one of the major problems caused by the copyright cartels. They are blithely ignoring this fact trying to pretend that territorial licensing schemes still make sense - as a result, outside of the US we're months or years behind where you guys are in terms of these sorts of services.
There's no technical reason for it - it's just bullshit licensing schemes that make it impossible to have services like these. Shit, even if they did what software publishers and try to rape people in certain territories depending on the relative value of international currencies (examples: 2K Games are always significantly more expensive on Steam; Adobe products are almost 2x as much here as they are in the USA when you convert dollars), at least we'd have the option.
Maybe because if they did block Wikipedia from Verizon users with a message saying "you have been blocked from this service because Verizon [boring technical or sociological problem that people won't see because by the time their eyes hit the word 'Verizon', they'll be on the phone]", there is a belief that their support costs will go up because of the masses of people complaining and having to deal with those people according to their support process. No idea what Verizon's support is like, maybe they just bin all their support requests anyway.
I cannot belieeeeeeeeeeeve how quickly gamers fell for DLC. Or maybe I should say, I can't belieeeeeeeve how quickly I have turned into one of those old codgers saying, "back in my day..." - but a lot of the guys I grew up playing games with are now in the DLC trap, so it's not just a case of newbie gamers not knowing any better.
Remember when you'd get a game, and then there'd be a level editor and maybe some mod tools? And then a few weeks after the game was out and you'd played the shit out of it, the first crappy maps would come out? And maybe a proof-of-concept mod?
Then a month or so later, a mate would tell you about this great new map, and you'd fire it up together and play it. Then someone would tell you about some crazy new mod with a funny name like "Team Fortress" or "Counter-Strike" or "Desert Combat" that was a bit hacky, but still really good fun. Then more people would play, and it would grow, and change, and mature, and turn into a solid product all of its own.
All the new school games just don't follow this model. They're cutting out almost any possibility of this process occurring by closing their development environments and charging $5 for every map under the guise of premium DLC, when they could create an ecosystem of nearly unlimited potential that would not only virtually enslave their player base and lead to more sales, but also lead to these entire amazing new brands for them to cash in on.
Team Fortress started as a free mod and turned into TF2 (with a very long lead time), one of Valve's most successful brands now. Counter-strike is still ludicrously popular. Desert Combat (mod for BF1942) evolved into Battlefield 2. Red Orchestra turned into a successful standalone game.
Sure, not every mod turns into a huge amazing thing, but if you create a remotely decent game with well-thought out multiplayer and throw in decent development tools, you can STILL create premium DLC and sell it to users, but you'll also get vast amounts of free content for your game. And as long as you have a vaguely decent management system for your online CD keys, pretty much each game will be a sale.
GET OFF MY LAWN
No official link given in the OP, but here's the Red Hat blog post, titled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: A Technical Look at Red Hat’s Defining New Operating Platform", which gives a good look at some of the changes.
The less-interesting press releases are here (Red Hat Enables Expanded Deployment Flexibility and Application Portability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6) and here (Red Hat Sets a New Standard for the Next Generation of Operating Systems).
If you ever talk to a lawyer about a contract in which the other party has left a clause in there that says "oh, this is just something we need to keep in there, but don't worry - we'd never actually USE it", I guarantee your lawyer will advise you that if that's what they're saying, then you should get that clause removed. Because if they're saying now they're never going to draw on it, but they want to leave it in anyway, it's because one day, they want to have the ability to use it.
Our lawyers have always advised us in contract negotiations to keep an eye out for anything like this and make sure those things are removed - the entire point of a legal contract is to clearly outline what you can and can't do, so we ensure people we sign contracts with put their money where their mouth is and that we don't have to rely on their "word" when it comes to enforcing selective clauses.
The prison system in the US is heavily privatised, is it not? I wonder how much of a difference that makes, when there's a strong commercial incentive to have more criminals (assuming that private jails get paid more from the government to house more inmates)?
That sucks. Do you have any rights to request an audit of their accounts (without actually suing them)? If your ebook is out in the wild and you're confident it's not pirated (did a quick Google and it certainly doesn't look like it's readily available) it certainly seems like they're screwing you. I'm sure this happens all the time with all sorts of things like this.
Probably unlikely, but some of our contracts have stipulations like that (as retailers of a service we onsell, the service creators want to be able to audit us to make sure what we're paying them matches what we're actually selling).
If that Aussie provider doesn't want to end up in court, let him advertise what he's actually offering. This isn't about the quality of service, it's about their quality of ethics.
This story caught me by surprised; at first I was like "what's the big deal?", because ISPs shaping/limiting connections after you've passed your monthly download limit is standard operating procedure here, and has been for years.
The big thing here is apparently the ISP in question was advertising this service as 'unlimited' and not clearly stating that it was, in fact, limited. This, too, was a bridge we crossed years ago with the ACCC stomping down, hard, on the practice - I haven't seen the word 'unlimited' used in ISP advertising for years. They have all been very clear and very upfront about their limits.
I suspect this is just a really bad marketing fail where they came up with a campaign and forgot to run it past anyone with a clue, or anyone with a memory of more than a few years. The reality is though the ACCC has done a great job - much better than in the US, say - about stomping on people that advertise 'unlimited' (or put other vague non-limits down) and have ensured that, in general, Australians have been pretty clear about what they're getting when they're signing up to an ISP.
Hey, a Xen book! I just forwarded that to the lead developer on our VPS platform (we have a Xen-based VPS service here in Australia called Mammoth VPS). He was talking this morning about this book he just bought: http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780132349666/Running-Xen so I'm sure it's the sort of thing he'd find interesting.
The price point is too high
Debatable
the author's last few works have not been up to his previous standard
Subjective
and leisure reading at my computer is simply not possible.
Agree, but the intent is clearly to have this on iPods/iPhones/Kindles etc.
Yep, totally - there's people in my office for whom it would be a killer app. But I was just pointing out that whichever poster above was saying that for the vast vast majority of users, it is definitely not.
I am very tempted to try to install this mod thing on my Nexus One, but OpenVPN isn't the driving motiviation - for me it's just a nice addition.
Yeh as someone else pointed out, OpenVPN is a different type of VPN setup that seems quite popular over the 'regular' VPN stuff. I don't know the technical differences; all I know is we ditched the 'regular' VPN stuff that most things support in favour of OpenVPN.
Uh, I assume the GP was referring to the fact that the previous user described the VPN component as a 'killer app'.
I consider myself a pretty nerdy Android user - I'm probably in the 1% of Android users who a) actually know what OpenVPN is and b) would actually use it.
I sure would like to have OpenVPN but I certainly can't be bothered figuring out how to mod my phone to get it. So I think the GP was merely saying that for the vast, vast majority of people, it is pretty irrelevant when compared to something like having the Facebook application working.
I'm sorry, what? I cannot imagine anywhere here in Australia ever willingly handing over money to a politician for a photo or an autograph. Is that a normal thing for an American politician to do?
I can understand people paying actors, celebs, writers, artists etc at a ComicCon for that sort of thing. I personally wouldn't do it (and I say that as a pretty avid comic fan), but I can understand why people would. But politicians?
It's a platform that you can write code for in the Java language, yes, but this is a world away from claiming you're shipping "Java", and virtually no end users are under the impression Java has anything to do with the Java platform. Be very clear about this: no applications shipped as .jar (or .class) files for J2ME, J2SE, or J2EE, will run under Android, and nobody thinks they will.
I have to say - I am fairly technically savvy. I have an Android phone, I know what Java is, I know a little bit about software development, etc. And I was actually under the impression it was a Java platform, before this whole thing erupted and I bothered to learn more about the details. I wasn't sure if you could just take any old 'Java'-labeled application and run it on Android, but I certainly thought that it would be basically trivial to take any Java app and adapt it to Android with very little effort.
Of course since reading more about the issue I now understand it's basically not like that at all. But definitely from the fact the word 'Java' was used, I certainly thought Android was a Java-based device.
Great read. Only comment:
So if you're looking at a $40,000 electric vehicle which has depreciated to something like $20,000 after three years and still requires $10,000-$15,000 of new batteries for the next owner, I don't understand why they expect a used market to develop at all
I recall reading in another thread here about the price of the Prius replacement battery pack dropping significantly since launch - down from $6k to $2k (here's the post - no citation but a quick google seems to indicate its in the right ballpark.
I wonder if any of that cost is subsidized by Toyota to try to make the car more appealing, or if it is is the 'true' market value.
Niven and Pournelle's "Oath of Fealty" had a similar concept as the main system for getting around the giant arcology that was the focus of the book!
Presumably though, sites that registered a name that was a trademark of another company, they would be open to legal assault?
The potential for getting stricken with blindness by some idiot kid waving something like this around terrifies me.
Limiting people to a specific quantity of data is just stupid and greedy. If someone downloads tons of stuff during off-hours, making use of bandwidth that would otherwise go unused, this does not cost the company anything, nor does it inconvenience other customers.
What some ISPs do here in Australia (where limited bandwidth plans are the norm, usually between 20-50gb / month) is offer "off peak" downloads - extra download quota that you can use in off-peak hours (eg, 2am-8am).
I actually prefer limited download models, because - while I understand your premise about the costs on the ISP if noone is using the line, etc - in practice, what happens when people have 'unlimited' traffic is that they have no respect for that data. There's no attempts made to download reasonable as people don't put any effort into moderating their use of what is a shared resource. Thus, the system is abused - by a small minority, no doubt, but abused nonetheless, because there's no reason not to do it. And more and more people are happy to queue up a zillion torrents and run them all the time.
I would much prefer to be on an ISP where I knew that other people using it would be using the service in a reasonable manner and that I will be able to use the service with no interruptions at all time.
I don't think putting bandwidth limits on data hogs is fair. If they have been sold a service with no data limits, then its within their rights to use as much as they want. If they feel they need to download 24/7, then they should be able to. The only fair sort of data limit is one that is transparent and applicable to everyone BEFORE they sign up for an ISP service. ISPs in Australia tried this sort of thing, called it an "acceptable use policy" which was a vague legalese attempt to be able to disconnect anyone they felt was downloading too much. Our regulatory commission shot it down very quickly, thankfully.
Except for the fact that our quota system here in Australia is comparably low to the rest of the world I feel that it is a good, workable system. I have 60gb a month and very rarely use it all (often don't even go near it - I'm at 31gb at the moment and I reset in 2 days), but I know that bandwidth is there when I need it. And I know that everyone on my network is paying for what they use :)
....remember first that Facebook is a company, beholden to its shareholders.
If you think that this was a douche move and want to send a message that this sort of thing shouldn't be done, then the best way to do it is to send a message in terms they'll understand - stop using your Facebook account.
I suspect most people wouldn't bother because the usefulness of Facebook as a tool to them certainly outweighs the occasional douche thing they do - shit, if they are prepared to sell your privacy to the highest bidder and people still don't bat an eye, I can't see why they'd care about this.
Shit, I love AwesomeBar. It took me a few weeks of constant use to get over the learning curve, because it was so different to the previous experience. Now I've migrated to Chrome and I have no fucking idea how the address bar in there works any more. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but the AwesomeBar was fantastic - I could type partial URLs, separated by spaces, and it would happily figure out where I wanted to go. Not having that functionality is killing me in Chrome.
The official Android developers blog post is probably more interesting than blogspam
Those damn liberals, making sure textbooks are filled with useless things like 'facts'
While I don't intend any sexism, the fact is that parallel parking is difficult, and many women would rather have the car do it than try it themselves. Parking assist (without the tire-scorching 180) is going to be a very popular feature among the minivan crowd.
heh every girl I know is awesome at parallel parking. I (male) have done it a grand total of twice in the more than ten years since I got my license; I would rather drive another few metres and walk a bit further than embarrass myself trying and hold up traffic.
I know it's the sort of thing I would learn with practice, but I drive infrequently and its just not a skill I need where I live, so I just can't do it.
For me, driving is a painful chore that I must do to get from point A to point B. I know some people enjoy it but I find it tiresome, boring, and a waste of time. I cannot wait for the day that I can get in my car and punch in a destination and sit back and read a book or idly stare out the window!