What they should really do, is consider the number of sales and ignore the pirates, and then consider if the sales numbers alone make android worth supporting. If you make a thousand sales, and ten thousand people pirate the app that's still a thousand sales, not to mention ten thousand eyeballs who are now aware that you exist.
Another thing to consider, is that iOS only runs on high end phones, while Android runs on a whole range of handsets. Users of high end handsets are more likely to have disposable income and thus buy apps.
Most other such letters i've seen are openly hostile and threatening and tend to assume that the person in question is being intentionally malicious when it may just be an honest mistake.
I host a number of forums, and every now and again we get a complaint that someone has posted something to the forum, wether its infringing a trademark, copyright or offensive to someone... If we get a nice email pointing this out i'm more than happy to remove it and usually do so quickly, but some of the hostile mails making all manner of threats and accusing us of all sorts or making wild assumptions just make me want to move the server hosting to china and tell them where to stick their nastygram.
Really, is it all that much effort to write a nice polite email? Do they really think they will be more successful by making threats?
What "meaningful state" ? To what level is risk reduced? Are you saying that something should be labelled "secure" because someone has made a minimal token effort to put even the most trivial level of authentication on it? This is a misused marketing word, aiming to imply that the competitor's products are somehow massively insecure, even when the reality could be completely different. I have seen many products advertised as "secure" with gaping holes, similarly there are many products with no such advertising which are quite well done and while obviously not perfect, are a lot better than some of those heavily marketed as "secure".
Security is a process, your product is not magically "secure" because you say it is, or because you now use a password (which might be password)... The term is misleading, and generally does more harm than good.
What it usually boils down to in terms of a VPN is "a vpn that uses authentication", and i'm not really aware of any vpn that doesn't require some form of authentication...
Another problem is that many of the people making purchasing decisions are what you would call noobs, so they buy into the marketing hook line and sinker.. I have even heard people say they don't need to change default passwords or configure anything because "the product is secure".
Most of the NAS boxes are embedded linux boxes, usually running on a low power CPU of some kind...
With most of these its possible to get shell access and install whatever you want on them, although for things like setting up a vpn on it you will probably need kernel level support which may or may not be present in the stock kernel supplied with the device. That said, presumably you have some kind of router or nat device too, which will almost certainly have some level of vpn capability by default.
Running a DNS server should be trivial.. I personally run a couple of buffalo 4-drive nas boxes, and just looking through the package list i see bind and dnsmasq, both perfectly capable dns servers depending on your requirements.
I do take issue with the term "secure vpn", nothing is totally secure as such a name implies.
If you make it expensive to patch, then there will be no patches... That doesn't mean games will actually be released any less buggy, just that there will never be any patches for them.
When you have one large overwhelming competitor who has the entire market locked in, competing with them commercially is pointless... The amount of cash you would need to burn for years on end before you made any inroads makes the entire idea business suicide. It's not enough to have a better product, you have to be able to reverse engineer the proprietary formats and protocols, and convince third parties who have written addons that require other proprietary products etc.
Linux only really exists at all because of the open source model, any new commercial os introduced today would simply be doomed to failure irrespective of quality, just look at beos.
On the other hand, if MS weren't around then there would actually be a market for alternatives and it would be worth while investing in them, so you would see rapid improvements from several competing companies...
As opposed to a mobile os made by a wannabe advertising company, which is designed to keep you in the ms world and more importantly, to limit the advancement of smartphones so they don't encroach on traditional markets.
It's funny that you mention the iPad, though. The other day, my boss couldn't review a document I sent him (just, you know... open the document and read it; no changes from him required) because "I just have my iPad with me, and I can't open it here". So... yeah... here, have an anecdote. Make of it what you will.
So either he doesn't know how to use his ipad, or you sent it in a weird format... Send him a PDF and show him how to view it on the ipad, and he can sit back comfortably and relax reading it.
I've actually been trying to buy a Loongson-3, but they don't seem to be available anywhere... They published pictures of various motherboards, but none of them seem to be available to buy.
Geeks enjoy learning with computers because somewhere along the lines we were encouraged to do so at a young age...
Kids are naturally inquisitive, and when given the opportunity to explore what something is capable of that's exactly what they will do.
The problem is when people are exposed at the wrong age, or to devices which are too limited, or to devices which discourage people from taking them apart and experimenting (either with dire warnings, or too easily breaking and too difficult to repair)... In that respect, compare windows which is easily broken and contains warnings scaring people away from system files etc, to the C64 where BASIC was in rom and was easily restored to a working default state by hitting the power.
On the C64 you were encouraged to experiment with BASIC both by the literature supplied with the system and magazines of the time, safe in the knowledge that you couldn't break it... Windows makes no such encouragement, and has users fearful of breaking it, especially if the machine is shared with others who would be angry if the box were rendered unbootable.
Give kids the right start, and many will become geeks.
For MS, "support" has always meant "Will probably run but might have problems or break shit"... Windows has always been well known for being buggy, so much so that people have actually got used to bugs and kludgy workarounds as if they were normal. It's so bad infact, that MS have given the whole industry a reputation for being unreliable and insecure... Ask the average guy on the street his perception of computers, and that's all down to MS.
Aside from a few niche areas, support contracts generally aren't as valuable as you seem to think... The vast majority of organisations i've been to pay ridiculous sums for the software and still don't get any support... Those that do pay extra for support never seem to use it, or if they do they still don't get a satisfactory response.. In most cases the "support" seems to be no better than what your own IT department provides and just allows them to slack off instead of doing what they're supposed to.
And if you're talking about business requirements, what ever happened to second sourcing and business continuity? Buying a product and associated support which is only available from a single supplier is not good business sense, what if the product is discontinued or the supplier goes under?
1, nat and stateful firewalls are not the same thing (although you generally need a stateful firewall to implement nat), theres no reason you cant configure a stateful ipv6 firewall to block inbound connections and allow outgoing. the stateful firewall aspect is where the apparent "security" (or in reality, hiding) comes in, nat itself is just a nuisance which breaks things.
2, and this is a problem with ipv6 how? ipv4 doesn't have such features at all, and to enable it on v6 you only need support at either end, the routers along the way dont need support so its entirely up to you.
3, annoying yes, but only your prefix changes not your local address, with with stateless autoconfig its not a huge problem.
4, and there could be 0day holes in ipv4 stacks, or in all manner of other software... ipv6 is not exactly new either, its been around for well over 10 years. microsoft actually reintroduced the land vulnerability in windows 2003 not so long ago. incidentally the design of ipv6 makes smurf impractical and syn flooding much easier to track down since a v6 stack should not allow routing of spoofed packets by default while v4 does.
As ARM moves higher end, MIPS would be better placed... While ARM is only just coming up with a 64bit variant, MIPS has had one for years and which already has support from linux/gcc/etc.
Going after the cheapest end of the market is probably not the best choice, going after the low power server and highend tablet/smartphone market would make a lot more sense.
One advantage MIPS has over ARM, is that while higher end and server class chips are new to ARM, MIPS was doing 64bit server-class chips and massive multiprocessing years ago... There is already a well defined MIPS64 architecture, complete with mature compilers and OS support.
Instead of targeting cheap and lowend, they should be going after low power servers...
I spend a lot of time travelling for work, most of which is spent travelling with like minded colleagues... We might have to spend hours on a plane, or train, where either there is no internet available at all or its very slow/unreliable and/or expensive. When we arrive, we also spend time in hotels.. Again, internet access in hotels is often slow/unreliable, expensive and often restrictive.
If LAN play is allowed, then i can play with my colleagues over an adhoc wifi network or via an ethernet crossover cable or small portable switch...
If play is only allowed online it's pretty useless, when i am in front of a fast low latency internet connection i am usually either working, or have other things to do... Most of my free time is spent with slow or no internet connectivity.
There is still nothing to address latency, peak vs offpeak etc... And even if your local connection is fast, if the servers are far away your gameplay experience will be poor anyway.
Such a setup is also often not fair, since everyone will have different connections and different levels of latency to the servers...
There really is no excuse not to implement lan play, and i won't buy (or download) any games which don't.
Apple don't have a dominant position in the cellphone market... There are millions of Android devices out there, and still a fair few symbian and blackberry devices.
MS is the only one with sufficient weight to unduly influence the market... MS is also the only non embedded os which doesn't allow you to remove the default browser (you can hide it, but its still there).
Notice noone is complaining that MS bundles a browser with windows phone? This is because they don't have enough share of the phone market to influence it.
When the case was started, IE had a dominant marketshare... Other browsers were only able to claw back share because of two very important factors.
1, MS stopped updating IE for years, so it was no longer "good enough".. 2, MS were thankfully never able to make the web proprietary enough that a competing browser would stand no chance, except in south korea and certain corporate intranets where IE still holds 90%+ market share...
Well the cost depends on how cross platform your original code (and the third party engine it uses - if any) were, if you write a windows-only game using windows-specific apis then you will have a much harder job of porting than if you wrote it using opengl and sdl etc...
And also on what other platforms you intend to support, windows and xbox pretty much stand alone with their own proprietary apis as everything else (ios, android, ps3, wii, linux, macos) have far more similarities, a port to macos is already part of the way towards a port for linux.
There shouldn't be any arbitrary limits... Take a game like quake, it can do local multiplayer, it can do online, it can use third party tools like gamespy for finding servers to play on, you can host an (albeit small) server on the same system your playing the game on or you can run a dedicated server (preferably somewhere with fast connectivity)...
If you only have online multiplayer, especially one where you require a centralised server controlled by the publisher your limited to:
1, people who like that game 2, who want to play that game 3, playing with a fast low latency connection (which still aren't available everywhere, and are sometimes prohibitively expensive). 4, that want to play at the same time you want to 5, that are able to play at the same time as you (network congestion, peak time usage charges etc) 6, playing against players who are latency-wise fairly close to you, or suffering slow/unfair gameplay. 7, subject to the centralised server being online 8, subject to the centralised server being local enough to you that the game is playable 9, subject to the centralised server not being overloaded
online games are often impractical, there is no reason not to implement lan play and it would also be far preferable if you were able to run your own dedicated service
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There is plenty of piracy on iOS too...
What they should really do, is consider the number of sales and ignore the pirates, and then consider if the sales numbers alone make android worth supporting. If you make a thousand sales, and ten thousand people pirate the app that's still a thousand sales, not to mention ten thousand eyeballs who are now aware that you exist.
Another thing to consider, is that iOS only runs on high end phones, while Android runs on a whole range of handsets. Users of high end handsets are more likely to have disposable income and thus buy apps.
If only more companies were like this...
Most other such letters i've seen are openly hostile and threatening and tend to assume that the person in question is being intentionally malicious when it may just be an honest mistake.
I host a number of forums, and every now and again we get a complaint that someone has posted something to the forum, wether its infringing a trademark, copyright or offensive to someone... If we get a nice email pointing this out i'm more than happy to remove it and usually do so quickly, but some of the hostile mails making all manner of threats and accusing us of all sorts or making wild assumptions just make me want to move the server hosting to china and tell them where to stick their nastygram.
Really, is it all that much effort to write a nice polite email? Do they really think they will be more successful by making threats?
What "meaningful state" ? To what level is risk reduced? Are you saying that something should be labelled "secure" because someone has made a minimal token effort to put even the most trivial level of authentication on it?
This is a misused marketing word, aiming to imply that the competitor's products are somehow massively insecure, even when the reality could be completely different. I have seen many products advertised as "secure" with gaping holes, similarly there are many products with no such advertising which are quite well done and while obviously not perfect, are a lot better than some of those heavily marketed as "secure".
Security is a process, your product is not magically "secure" because you say it is, or because you now use a password (which might be password)... The term is misleading, and generally does more harm than good.
What it usually boils down to in terms of a VPN is "a vpn that uses authentication", and i'm not really aware of any vpn that doesn't require some form of authentication...
Another problem is that many of the people making purchasing decisions are what you would call noobs, so they buy into the marketing hook line and sinker.. I have even heard people say they don't need to change default passwords or configure anything because "the product is secure".
Most of the NAS boxes are embedded linux boxes, usually running on a low power CPU of some kind...
With most of these its possible to get shell access and install whatever you want on them, although for things like setting up a vpn on it you will probably need kernel level support which may or may not be present in the stock kernel supplied with the device.
That said, presumably you have some kind of router or nat device too, which will almost certainly have some level of vpn capability by default.
Running a DNS server should be trivial.. I personally run a couple of buffalo 4-drive nas boxes, and just looking through the package list i see bind and dnsmasq, both perfectly capable dns servers depending on your requirements.
I do take issue with the term "secure vpn", nothing is totally secure as such a name implies.
If you make it expensive to patch, then there will be no patches... That doesn't mean games will actually be released any less buggy, just that there will never be any patches for them.
One option is much worse than none...
When you have one large overwhelming competitor who has the entire market locked in, competing with them commercially is pointless... The amount of cash you would need to burn for years on end before you made any inroads makes the entire idea business suicide.
It's not enough to have a better product, you have to be able to reverse engineer the proprietary formats and protocols, and convince third parties who have written addons that require other proprietary products etc.
Linux only really exists at all because of the open source model, any new commercial os introduced today would simply be doomed to failure irrespective of quality, just look at beos.
On the other hand, if MS weren't around then there would actually be a market for alternatives and it would be worth while investing in them, so you would see rapid improvements from several competing companies...
As opposed to a mobile os made by a wannabe advertising company, which is designed to keep you in the ms world and more importantly, to limit the advancement of smartphones so they don't encroach on traditional markets.
It's funny that you mention the iPad, though. The other day, my boss couldn't review a document I sent him (just, you know... open the document and read it; no changes from him required) because "I just have my iPad with me, and I can't open it here". So... yeah... here, have an anecdote. Make of it what you will.
So either he doesn't know how to use his ipad, or you sent it in a weird format... Send him a PDF and show him how to view it on the ipad, and he can sit back comfortably and relax reading it.
I've actually been trying to buy a Loongson-3, but they don't seem to be available anywhere... They published pictures of various motherboards, but none of them seem to be available to buy.
Geeks enjoy learning with computers because somewhere along the lines we were encouraged to do so at a young age...
Kids are naturally inquisitive, and when given the opportunity to explore what something is capable of that's exactly what they will do.
The problem is when people are exposed at the wrong age, or to devices which are too limited, or to devices which discourage people from taking them apart and experimenting (either with dire warnings, or too easily breaking and too difficult to repair)... In that respect, compare windows which is easily broken and contains warnings scaring people away from system files etc, to the C64 where BASIC was in rom and was easily restored to a working default state by hitting the power.
On the C64 you were encouraged to experiment with BASIC both by the literature supplied with the system and magazines of the time, safe in the knowledge that you couldn't break it... Windows makes no such encouragement, and has users fearful of breaking it, especially if the machine is shared with others who would be angry if the box were rendered unbootable.
Give kids the right start, and many will become geeks.
For MS, "support" has always meant "Will probably run but might have problems or break shit"... Windows has always been well known for being buggy, so much so that people have actually got used to bugs and kludgy workarounds as if they were normal.
It's so bad infact, that MS have given the whole industry a reputation for being unreliable and insecure... Ask the average guy on the street his perception of computers, and that's all down to MS.
There are a few very important differences:
You can run GTK2 (or even 3) on your 10yr old linux.
Upgrading to a current version of linux won't cost you anything.
The system is modular, so you can upgrade the components you need while leaving the others at their original outdated versions if you so desire.
People hate change, even when that change brings benefits. That's also one of the main factors deterring adoption of linux.
Aside from a few niche areas, support contracts generally aren't as valuable as you seem to think...
The vast majority of organisations i've been to pay ridiculous sums for the software and still don't get any support... Those that do pay extra for support never seem to use it, or if they do they still don't get a satisfactory response.. In most cases the "support" seems to be no better than what your own IT department provides and just allows them to slack off instead of doing what they're supposed to.
And if you're talking about business requirements, what ever happened to second sourcing and business continuity? Buying a product and associated support which is only available from a single supplier is not good business sense, what if the product is discontinued or the supplier goes under?
1, nat and stateful firewalls are not the same thing (although you generally need a stateful firewall to implement nat), theres no reason you cant configure a stateful ipv6 firewall to block inbound connections and allow outgoing. the stateful firewall aspect is where the apparent "security" (or in reality, hiding) comes in, nat itself is just a nuisance which breaks things.
2, and this is a problem with ipv6 how? ipv4 doesn't have such features at all, and to enable it on v6 you only need support at either end, the routers along the way dont need support so its entirely up to you.
3, annoying yes, but only your prefix changes not your local address, with with stateless autoconfig its not a huge problem.
4, and there could be 0day holes in ipv4 stacks, or in all manner of other software... ipv6 is not exactly new either, its been around for well over 10 years. microsoft actually reintroduced the land vulnerability in windows 2003 not so long ago. incidentally the design of ipv6 makes smurf impractical and syn flooding much easier to track down since a v6 stack should not allow routing of spoofed packets by default while v4 does.
As ARM moves higher end, MIPS would be better placed... While ARM is only just coming up with a 64bit variant, MIPS has had one for years and which already has support from linux/gcc/etc.
Going after the cheapest end of the market is probably not the best choice, going after the low power server and highend tablet/smartphone market would make a lot more sense.
Or handle it at the market stage, and only send/store the appropriate binaries based on the device installing it...
One advantage MIPS has over ARM, is that while higher end and server class chips are new to ARM, MIPS was doing 64bit server-class chips and massive multiprocessing years ago... There is already a well defined MIPS64 architecture, complete with mature compilers and OS support.
Instead of targeting cheap and lowend, they should be going after low power servers...
Well to put it another way..
I spend a lot of time travelling for work, most of which is spent travelling with like minded colleagues...
We might have to spend hours on a plane, or train, where either there is no internet available at all or its very slow/unreliable and/or expensive.
When we arrive, we also spend time in hotels.. Again, internet access in hotels is often slow/unreliable, expensive and often restrictive.
If LAN play is allowed, then i can play with my colleagues over an adhoc wifi network or via an ethernet crossover cable or small portable switch...
If play is only allowed online it's pretty useless, when i am in front of a fast low latency internet connection i am usually either working, or have other things to do... Most of my free time is spent with slow or no internet connectivity.
There is still nothing to address latency, peak vs offpeak etc... And even if your local connection is fast, if the servers are far away your gameplay experience will be poor anyway.
Such a setup is also often not fair, since everyone will have different connections and different levels of latency to the servers...
There really is no excuse not to implement lan play, and i won't buy (or download) any games which don't.
Apple don't have a dominant position in the cellphone market... There are millions of Android devices out there, and still a fair few symbian and blackberry devices.
MS is the only one with sufficient weight to unduly influence the market...
MS is also the only non embedded os which doesn't allow you to remove the default browser (you can hide it, but its still there).
Notice noone is complaining that MS bundles a browser with windows phone? This is because they don't have enough share of the phone market to influence it.
When the case was started, IE had a dominant marketshare... Other browsers were only able to claw back share because of two very important factors.
1, MS stopped updating IE for years, so it was no longer "good enough"..
2, MS were thankfully never able to make the web proprietary enough that a competing browser would stand no chance, except in south korea and certain corporate intranets where IE still holds 90%+ market share...
Well the cost depends on how cross platform your original code (and the third party engine it uses - if any) were, if you write a windows-only game using windows-specific apis then you will have a much harder job of porting than if you wrote it using opengl and sdl etc...
And also on what other platforms you intend to support, windows and xbox pretty much stand alone with their own proprietary apis as everything else (ios, android, ps3, wii, linux, macos) have far more similarities, a port to macos is already part of the way towards a port for linux.
There shouldn't be any arbitrary limits...
Take a game like quake, it can do local multiplayer, it can do online, it can use third party tools like gamespy for finding servers to play on, you can host an (albeit small) server on the same system your playing the game on or you can run a dedicated server (preferably somewhere with fast connectivity)...
If you only have online multiplayer, especially one where you require a centralised server controlled by the publisher your limited to:
1, people who like that game
2, who want to play that game
3, playing with a fast low latency connection (which still aren't available everywhere, and are sometimes prohibitively expensive).
4, that want to play at the same time you want to
5, that are able to play at the same time as you (network congestion, peak time usage charges etc)
6, playing against players who are latency-wise fairly close to you, or suffering slow/unfair gameplay.
7, subject to the centralised server being online
8, subject to the centralised server being local enough to you that the game is playable
9, subject to the centralised server not being overloaded
online games are often impractical, there is no reason not to implement lan play and it would also be far preferable if you were able to run your own dedicated service
Forego the journals and publish on the internet?