People assume that a download is worth less than a physical copy because they can't physically hold it, however if you consider the actual cost of a dvd the difference in cost will be a couple of cents at most.
There is also the worry that downloads will be tied to something arbitrary like an account or a single piece of hardware, which you may lose access to and thus lose your games.
Personally i prefer downloaded games that i can store on an HD to the hassles of physical media, then again the only game downloads that don't place arbitrary restrictions on me or price-gouge are the usual pirate sources.
The chrome linux port actually appears to be a focus for google thanks to their work on chromeos and android... The firefox linux version on the other hand appears to be an afterthought, and tends to be considerably slower than the windows version on the same hardware (to the extent that running the linux version under wine can be faster than the native version).
Yes Apple are bad, but i would argue not as bad as MS...
To create anything for their platforms you have to use Apple tools... In order to develop for MS platforms you need to use their tools too, the only difference is that they don't require you to buy their hardware (because they really don't make any), but you still have to buy their software... On the other hand, Apple development tools are based around gcc, whats to stop you taking the apple version of gcc and making a cross compiler to run on say linux?
Artificial barriers - most proprietary software vendors are guilty of artificial barriers, apple are not really the worst offender here... 32bit versions of windows support pae and yet still artificially limit you to 4gb of address space, and lets not forget activation, license keys and all the different versions of windows where the cheaper versions are intentionally crippled in various ways.
Apple and MS are both as bad as each other when it comes to h.264, although the problems with this are patents rather than the format being proprietary...
OSX and iOS both support caldav for calendars, as well as the proprietary ms activesync protocol... ms only supports the proprietary exchange protocol on the desktop and the proprietary activesync protocol on windows mobile...
OSX supports pdf out of the box, MS are trying to push their own XPS format which is completely different...
OSX comes with the ability to edit opendocument text by default, windows doesn't
OSX can mount smb, nfs, webdav and other network filesystems out of the box, windows only supports its own proprietary smb protocols... on disk filesystems are similar too - osx can mount its own formats, windows formats and ufs, windows only supports the ms created formats
apple have a modern standards compliant web browser, for which the core rendering engine is open source... ms have a proprietary browser with a proprietary rendering engine that they have only recently started to improve because they had no other choice.
I do agree that the iphone is too restrictive although the simplicity is actually good for the average user, they should provide an equivalent to jailbreaking for advanced users... same way google did on the nexus one, you have the option to root the phone at your own risk. end users really do need locked down by default products, the complexity of a computer is actually far too much for the average user to cope with, especially on systems like windows or osx without centralised package management... most users are really much better off with a locked down appliance thats effectively controlled by someone else (ie someone who knows what they're doing).
but when you talk about the iphone being locked down, consider games consoles... they are every bit as locked down as the iphone, perhaps more so... modern consoles have an "app store", if you want to publish software for them you need to pay fees to the console manufacturer and you will probably need to buy their specified development environment, and modding them to run homebrew is often considerably harder than jailbreaking an iphone.
Government fucking with free markets is not as bad as a single company becoming too powerful and gaining the ability to fuck with the market...
If you can lock sufficient numbers of customers in to your proprietary products, such that it is unreasonably costly and/or damaging to switch away then the market is far from free. It is simply controlled by a large company instead of the government. Competition becomes extremely limited in such situations, competitors have an unfair burden of having to reverse engineer proprietary formats and protocols, and are always playing catch up to the market leader. The end result is that it's simply not commercially viable to compete with an entrenched player, so the competition either gives up or moves into niche markets.
It's like playing strategy games, once you're past a certain point your resources outstrip the opposition so badly that barring a colossal screwup on your part, your victory is inevitable.
Forcing companies to open up their proprietary protocols while certainly a step in the right direction, probably isn't enough and will almost certainly be abused...
Consider this, a company brings out product using a proprietary protocol or format... They are forced to release the documentation, but they do so slowly, once the documentation is out the format is (intentionally) extremely complex and takes a long time for anyone else to get very far in implementing it.. Eventually flaws in the documentation are discovered, reported, and the vendor is forced to correct the documentation... After months or years, competitors have finally implemented enough of the published documentation to have an interoperable program... The first company brings out a new version of the product, using a different proprietary protocol or format and deprecates the old version.
Instead, companies should be forced to use standards where they already exist, and ONLY if nothing exists to do what is needed then they should be required to develop a new one, or modify an existing standard, in full view of the community... Such standards should also reuse existing published standards wherever possible.
Force companies to compete on product quality and cost, not through lock-in.
Well, when i leave my car idling on the drive (in winter to warm the engine up)... I leave the key in the ignition, leave the vehicle and then use the remote to lock the doors (the remote is a separate fob not attached to the key used for starting the engine).
But stealing a car has no legitimate purpose, setting your own CLI has legitimate reasons, for instance when i make a work related call i want the CLI to show up as the main switchboard - i don't want customers calling me back at home or on my mobile, and i want those customers to see who's calling them.
Also when using voip services to make cheaper personal calls, i want the CLI to show my mobile number, so that the person being called knows who's calling and can call back if they miss my call. If it showed my landline or voip number then i may not be able to receive their return call.
You could plant messages on a voicemail system without having to have access to it, just call it up and leave a message... A good lawyer will point that out in court and it won't go anywhere.
Another thing they do.. Some voicemail systems allow you to redirect to another number, so they will redirect your voicemail to a premium rate line in another country and then dial into your voicemail locally, leaving you liable for the expensive call.
Most insurers will require that you take reasonable measures to protect the items being insured, locking the car is one of those reasonable measures and if you left it unlocked the insurance will likely be declared void and you won't get anything.
The CLI just has a flag on it that says "this is meant to be blocked", the telco usually sees that flag and doesnt forward the cli to the end customer but the telco obviously has the cli still...
Don't complain to the developers or the spoofing services...
Complain to the telco that uses something as insecure as CLI to authenticate you.
The spoofing services are doing you a favor by educating people about how easy it is to spoof CLI. Would you rather be totally naive and completely trusting when you get a call from your banks number and a guy with a nigerian accent cheerfully takes down your account details?
This is only a problem for AT&T, other networks don't have a problem... It's an insecure implementation on the part of AT&T and they need to fix it - like everyone else has.
Attempting to gain unauthorized access is already illegal, wether you do so by spoofing CLI or by breaking down the door with an axe.
If you make spoofing CLI illegal then you won't stop people doing it, you will just decrease the instances of it being done to a small group of hardened criminals.. That way the general public will become even more blindly trusting of the CLI and more likely to fall for criminal activity.
Spoofing CLI is no different than spoofing email, it's easy to do and the real solution is educating the user not to blindly trust the originating number.
Yes and no, some international links dont pass CLI at all, and some operators try to be clever and stamp the country code of where your coming from in front of the number you send (because some cli systems only send the number in local format without the international code)
But MOST systems don't use the CLI (a field which is trivially set) to determine what number you're calling from... There are other systems used for identifying a caller, like ANI which gets routed between telcos but doesn't get shown to end users, this is used for billing of network termination charges etc.
And surely if someone is calling their own number, then the call never has to leave the operators network so they *know* where its from. I can't access my voicemail even from my own phone when i'm roaming for instance.
I don't change my oil simply because of the hassle of disposing of the old oil...
There are plenty of linux based phones out there, and people have no trouble using them... I have seen people using the N900, various android based phones, and various other linux based phones... People also use all kinds of embedded linux devices such as DVRs with no problem.
Having a linux based device doesn't make that device difficult to use. Having a device with a poorly designed UI makes that device difficult to use, what OS that UI runs on top of is largely irrelevant. If anything, windows mobile is much harder to use than typical linux based devices (which is why many windows mobile phones have a third party interface on top).
Having a linux based device just means that extra flexibility is available to those who want it and know how to use it, the fact that a command line is available to those of us who understand what it is doesn't mean that a typical user would ever have to use it.
There is also an important reason why linux based help forums and mailing lists etc, supply command line instructions and that's because it's simply the most efficient way. Supplying a list of commands for a user to paste is MUCH easier than trying to explain to a user how to navigate through a GUI... It's not that there aren't graphical ways of doing the same thing, it's simply more efficient and easier all round to supply CLI based instructions.
Voipraider (www.voipraider.com) offer free calls to several destinations including the US and Canada if you top up GBP10 of credit every 3 months... You still have the GBP10 of credit to use calling other numbers, or after the 3 months when your free calls expire you can use it to make chargeable calls to your destinations until the credit runs out (so i usually last 4-5 months before i need to buy more credit)... There are a whole bunch of other providers you can choose from, you can shop around - thats the beauty of open standards - they allow competition to take place.
I don't see why, Skype are pretty expensive compared to the various SIP providers out there which Asterisk already supports natively... And with an open protocol like SIP you actually have a choice of providers.
Why does anyone use a proprietary system like Skype, when open standards such as SIP and Jingle (used by google talk) exist? Isn't skype just another closed system to get locked into?
Yes, inefficiency is the problem with government organisations... If it's not their money, then the people running the show don't care about wasting it. That said, when organisations like this have been privatised the company taking over quickly makes huge profits by cutting costs, but often they also massively slash service to do so.
In theory, the non profit wholesale provider should recover their costs, not making a profit but not making a loss either.
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People assume that a download is worth less than a physical copy because they can't physically hold it, however if you consider the actual cost of a dvd the difference in cost will be a couple of cents at most.
There is also the worry that downloads will be tied to something arbitrary like an account or a single piece of hardware, which you may lose access to and thus lose your games.
Personally i prefer downloaded games that i can store on an HD to the hassles of physical media, then again the only game downloads that don't place arbitrary restrictions on me or price-gouge are the usual pirate sources.
You don't need root to install libraries, put them in a dir and set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to point to it...
The chrome linux port actually appears to be a focus for google thanks to their work on chromeos and android...
The firefox linux version on the other hand appears to be an afterthought, and tends to be considerably slower than the windows version on the same hardware (to the extent that running the linux version under wine can be faster than the native version).
Technically much longer even, since firefox is based on mozilla, which is based on netscape, which is based on mosaic...
And yet they are and have been using windows, from a much longer standing and traditionally more dangerous competitor than google...
Mostly the choice to go with firefox will be down to maturity, firefox is a tried and tested platform at this point while chrome is relatively new.
Yes Apple are bad, but i would argue not as bad as MS...
To create anything for their platforms you have to use Apple tools...
In order to develop for MS platforms you need to use their tools too, the only difference is that they don't require you to buy their hardware (because they really don't make any), but you still have to buy their software...
On the other hand, Apple development tools are based around gcc, whats to stop you taking the apple version of gcc and making a cross compiler to run on say linux?
Artificial barriers - most proprietary software vendors are guilty of artificial barriers, apple are not really the worst offender here... 32bit versions of windows support pae and yet still artificially limit you to 4gb of address space, and lets not forget activation, license keys and all the different versions of windows where the cheaper versions are intentionally crippled in various ways.
Apple and MS are both as bad as each other when it comes to h.264, although the problems with this are patents rather than the format being proprietary...
OSX and iOS both support caldav for calendars, as well as the proprietary ms activesync protocol... ms only supports the proprietary exchange protocol on the desktop and the proprietary activesync protocol on windows mobile...
OSX supports pdf out of the box, MS are trying to push their own XPS format which is completely different...
OSX comes with the ability to edit opendocument text by default, windows doesn't
OSX can mount smb, nfs, webdav and other network filesystems out of the box, windows only supports its own proprietary smb protocols... on disk filesystems are similar too - osx can mount its own formats, windows formats and ufs, windows only supports the ms created formats
apple have a modern standards compliant web browser, for which the core rendering engine is open source... ms have a proprietary browser with a proprietary rendering engine that they have only recently started to improve because they had no other choice.
I do agree that the iphone is too restrictive although the simplicity is actually good for the average user, they should provide an equivalent to jailbreaking for advanced users... same way google did on the nexus one, you have the option to root the phone at your own risk.
end users really do need locked down by default products, the complexity of a computer is actually far too much for the average user to cope with, especially on systems like windows or osx without centralised package management... most users are really much better off with a locked down appliance thats effectively controlled by someone else (ie someone who knows what they're doing).
but when you talk about the iphone being locked down, consider games consoles... they are every bit as locked down as the iphone, perhaps more so... modern consoles have an "app store", if you want to publish software for them you need to pay fees to the console manufacturer and you will probably need to buy their specified development environment, and modding them to run homebrew is often considerably harder than jailbreaking an iphone.
Government fucking with free markets is not as bad as a single company becoming too powerful and gaining the ability to fuck with the market...
If you can lock sufficient numbers of customers in to your proprietary products, such that it is unreasonably costly and/or damaging to switch away then the market is far from free. It is simply controlled by a large company instead of the government. Competition becomes extremely limited in such situations, competitors have an unfair burden of having to reverse engineer proprietary formats and protocols, and are always playing catch up to the market leader. The end result is that it's simply not commercially viable to compete with an entrenched player, so the competition either gives up or moves into niche markets.
It's like playing strategy games, once you're past a certain point your resources outstrip the opposition so badly that barring a colossal screwup on your part, your victory is inevitable.
Forcing companies to open up their proprietary protocols while certainly a step in the right direction, probably isn't enough and will almost certainly be abused...
Consider this, a company brings out product using a proprietary protocol or format...
They are forced to release the documentation, but they do so slowly, once the documentation is out the format is (intentionally) extremely complex and takes a long time for anyone else to get very far in implementing it.. Eventually flaws in the documentation are discovered, reported, and the vendor is forced to correct the documentation...
After months or years, competitors have finally implemented enough of the published documentation to have an interoperable program...
The first company brings out a new version of the product, using a different proprietary protocol or format and deprecates the old version.
Instead, companies should be forced to use standards where they already exist, and ONLY if nothing exists to do what is needed then they should be required to develop a new one, or modify an existing standard, in full view of the community... Such standards should also reuse existing published standards wherever possible.
Force companies to compete on product quality and cost, not through lock-in.
If they weren't top in the office suite and desktop os world they wouldn't have enough money to be able to afford all this lurching around...
It's fine on my 3GS, i tend to read it on the train...
How long was the first xbox around for tho? I seem to remember it getting dropped very quickly after a lot less than 5 years...
Well, when i leave my car idling on the drive (in winter to warm the engine up)...
I leave the key in the ignition, leave the vehicle and then use the remote to lock the doors (the remote is a separate fob not attached to the key used for starting the engine).
But stealing a car has no legitimate purpose, setting your own CLI has legitimate reasons, for instance when i make a work related call i want the CLI to show up as the main switchboard - i don't want customers calling me back at home or on my mobile, and i want those customers to see who's calling them.
Also when using voip services to make cheaper personal calls, i want the CLI to show my mobile number, so that the person being called knows who's calling and can call back if they miss my call. If it showed my landline or voip number then i may not be able to receive their return call.
You could plant messages on a voicemail system without having to have access to it, just call it up and leave a message... A good lawyer will point that out in court and it won't go anywhere.
Another thing they do..
Some voicemail systems allow you to redirect to another number, so they will redirect your voicemail to a premium rate line in another country and then dial into your voicemail locally, leaving you liable for the expensive call.
Most insurers will require that you take reasonable measures to protect the items being insured, locking the car is one of those reasonable measures and if you left it unlocked the insurance will likely be declared void and you won't get anything.
The CLI just has a flag on it that says "this is meant to be blocked", the telco usually sees that flag and doesnt forward the cli to the end customer but the telco obviously has the cli still...
Don't complain to the developers or the spoofing services...
Complain to the telco that uses something as insecure as CLI to authenticate you.
The spoofing services are doing you a favor by educating people about how easy it is to spoof CLI. Would you rather be totally naive and completely trusting when you get a call from your banks number and a guy with a nigerian accent cheerfully takes down your account details?
This is only a problem for AT&T, other networks don't have a problem... It's an insecure implementation on the part of AT&T and they need to fix it - like everyone else has.
Attempting to gain unauthorized access is already illegal, wether you do so by spoofing CLI or by breaking down the door with an axe.
If you make spoofing CLI illegal then you won't stop people doing it, you will just decrease the instances of it being done to a small group of hardened criminals.. That way the general public will become even more blindly trusting of the CLI and more likely to fall for criminal activity.
Spoofing CLI is no different than spoofing email, it's easy to do and the real solution is educating the user not to blindly trust the originating number.
Can you spoof CID internationally?
Yes and no, some international links dont pass CLI at all, and some operators try to be clever and stamp the country code of where your coming from in front of the number you send (because some cli systems only send the number in local format without the international code)
But MOST systems don't use the CLI (a field which is trivially set) to determine what number you're calling from...
There are other systems used for identifying a caller, like ANI which gets routed between telcos but doesn't get shown to end users, this is used for billing of network termination charges etc.
And surely if someone is calling their own number, then the call never has to leave the operators network so they *know* where its from. I can't access my voicemail even from my own phone when i'm roaming for instance.
I don't change my oil simply because of the hassle of disposing of the old oil...
There are plenty of linux based phones out there, and people have no trouble using them... I have seen people using the N900, various android based phones, and various other linux based phones... People also use all kinds of embedded linux devices such as DVRs with no problem.
Having a linux based device doesn't make that device difficult to use.
Having a device with a poorly designed UI makes that device difficult to use, what OS that UI runs on top of is largely irrelevant. If anything, windows mobile is much harder to use than typical linux based devices (which is why many windows mobile phones have a third party interface on top).
Having a linux based device just means that extra flexibility is available to those who want it and know how to use it, the fact that a command line is available to those of us who understand what it is doesn't mean that a typical user would ever have to use it.
There is also an important reason why linux based help forums and mailing lists etc, supply command line instructions and that's because it's simply the most efficient way. Supplying a list of commands for a user to paste is MUCH easier than trying to explain to a user how to navigate through a GUI... It's not that there aren't graphical ways of doing the same thing, it's simply more efficient and easier all round to supply CLI based instructions.
Voipraider (www.voipraider.com) offer free calls to several destinations including the US and Canada if you top up GBP10 of credit every 3 months... You still have the GBP10 of credit to use calling other numbers, or after the 3 months when your free calls expire you can use it to make chargeable calls to your destinations until the credit runs out (so i usually last 4-5 months before i need to buy more credit)...
There are a whole bunch of other providers you can choose from, you can shop around - thats the beauty of open standards - they allow competition to take place.
I don't see why, Skype are pretty expensive compared to the various SIP providers out there which Asterisk already supports natively... And with an open protocol like SIP you actually have a choice of providers.
Why does anyone use a proprietary system like Skype, when open standards such as SIP and Jingle (used by google talk) exist? Isn't skype just another closed system to get locked into?
Yes, inefficiency is the problem with government organisations... If it's not their money, then the people running the show don't care about wasting it. That said, when organisations like this have been privatised the company taking over quickly makes huge profits by cutting costs, but often they also massively slash service to do so.
In theory, the non profit wholesale provider should recover their costs, not making a profit but not making a loss either.