That's almost certainly too low. People seem to forget that the iPhone dev kit still comes with an NDA that prevents you talking about rejection. The fact that there's a constant flow of stories despite that indicates that the rejection rate is almost certainly far higher than anyone suspects.
And no I don't believe Apples 95% figure. Why should I? They have put apps into a "not rejected yet not accepted" state before, so as far as I'm concerned anything they say about the app store has to be treated with a huge pinch of salt.
How do you get money from people who wouldn't spend it regardless of DRM. That's the core problem right?
No. If you believe that, it's not surprising that DRM seems mysterious and stupid to you, for you have failed to understand the business rationale underlying it.
The "core problem" is to get money from people who want something yet are basically lazy and cheap. This sadly describes the majority of consumers. DRM can work because most people are not infinitely cheap. Even students will look at a large investment of time vs a small investment of money and probably choose the money, if the time is large enough. So if you make it a lot of effort to obtain a low quality, crappy version of a movie that has Hungarian subtitles and the best lines obscured by somebody coughing, then a non-trivial percentage of people will go and buy it from their local store. This effect is quite measurable, although I've mostly seen public stats about video games, I know the movie industry has some stats on this too.
Designing working DRM is incredibly difficult, very few organizations have achieved it. But ultimately, it's actually pretty cheap. Relative to the cost of making a movie, designing yet another funny DVD menu hack to disrupt rippers for a few weeks is pretty low. And if it lasts a week or two past the time of release, a whole lot of people will see the ads on billboards, want the movie, discover that the only downloads on LimeWire are viruses in disguise and go buy the DVD rather than wait and check back later. If this happens the cost of the DRM can easily pay for itself.
By the way, if you do pirate stuff today you've got to to be insane. I've seen stats on how much stuff on big torrent trackers like TPB are infected and it's just nuts. You get tens of thousands of downloads on torrents that contain keyloggers and then people blame Microsoft for the prevalence of million-strong botnets, online bank fraud etc.
Lets see here, Zombieland made $102,297,496 with a budget of $23.6 million
The vast majority of movies either lose money or break even, so the big studios subsidize them with the profits made by the big hits. Picking a single very successful movie and trying to make an argument about the entire industry then isn't going to work.
Can you show me a great movie/game/etc that really -has- been killed off by "piracy"
No obviously not, because something has to be made before it can be pirated, so piracy cannot "kill" a game or movie. It can significantly reduce the probability of a sequel, presumably, but as we're talking about probably and decisions made behind closed doors that's tough to prove.
What we do know is that from time to time a loose lipped game company executive mentions that they de-prioritize PC ports of games because of piracy. This usually leads to widespread condemnation from PC gamers of course so it's not surprising that mostly they prefer not to discuss it. But I frequently read on Slashdot that "PC gaming is dying" and it's being killed by consoles.
Business is not, entirely, about rational financial decisions. If a team of people work on a big, complex project for 3-4 years and when it launches, 90% of players are pirates, that takes a serious emotional toll as well as a financial one. The next project, whoever is in charge may well look at PC game development, the piracy rates, the extra server and support costs involved in supporting the pirates etc and say "fuck that".
Technology is coming along at such a fast pace that you don't need a studio to make a movie
What a load of crap. Film technology has been advancing rapidly for more than three decades, but I fail to see movies produced in peoples bedrooms taking over the cinemas. After all, isn't the most successful movie yet made also one of the most expensive?
Actually what you need for successful DRM is any sufficiently strong/complex protection (it can be purely software too), combined with aligned incentives in all the needed parties and most crucially a content experience that isn't the same for everyone. One of the reasons that DRM fails again and again with things like movies and music is the analog hole. The reason it has worked very well on the PS3 (and to a lesser extent the xbox) is that there is no analogue hole. It's a digital copy or bust.
Could you link to an explanation of how this PS3 cracking works? Your post contradicts the original post saying it's not been cracked. I keep half an eye on the DRM world and I didn't hear of any copy protection breaks on the PS3. I'd be interested to know how they pulled it off, if it's true.
If Apple only rejected apps that violated a simple and clear developer agreement that'd be one thing. The problem is that they don't. I'm not sure what part of this is hard to understand.
It's not like anybody is going to confuse a site on bp.com with real news.
Probably the reason is that reporting of the oil spill cleanup efforts are riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods. I was reading several news organizations reports on the "top hat" approach a month or so ago and the amount of variability was insane, given that all they had to do was accurately re-print what BP Engineering had published. Some papers actually claimed it was "ice" clogging up the device for goodness sake.
People like to make out that corporate PR is some kind of money-based mind control mechanism. And a small amount actually is that (typically the dedicated PR firms). But having seen in-house corporate PR men do their work first hand, it became apparent that 99% of the effort is just trying to ensure journalists don't screw up basic facts.
Now if BP are publishing things on their landing pages that are verifiably false then my argument doesn't stand, but I doubt that. Even the how-much-oil-spills debacle seems likely to be genuine disagreement rather than a real attempt to mislead.
The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is
+"[language] programming"
From this I conclude that the results are meaningless. At best it shows that Objective-C programming has resulted in more discussions and questions. Whether it is "popular" or not is a bit more subjective.
Nothing says it has to replace your existing laptop or workstation.
I'm quite looking forward to ChromeOS. I work there so I'm hoping the big G will give me one for testing, but if not then I might buy one myself if they review well.
See ChromeOS as kind of like an "extreme" version of the Mac or iPad value proposition. The hardware and software are very closely integrated so you won't get much of the benefit if you're running it in a virtual machine. But if you're running it on hardware designed for it in mind, you get a number of benefits.
If I look at what I do today with my old MacBook, 90% of my time is spent in Chrome anyway. MacOS' shitty window management just gets in the way, frankly. The only other apps I use are iTunes (for internet radio and occasionally movies rented online), and the terminal emulator. Fortunately shellinabox provides easy access to remote terminals without needing a local ssh or terminal emulator. I have it set up on a colo box I rent from Linode and it works pretty well.
ChromeOS promises watertight security (as opposed to MacOS/Windows/Linux), an end to stupid update nags, extremely good and consistent performance, simple and efficient window management.... lots more. The downside is that I'll need to use a separate machine occasionally for more power user stuff like programming, at least until a web based IDE like Bespin starts getting good. Other things, like word processing/spreadsheets/PDF viewing/chat/etc can be done via web apps already.
Also, at some point the promise of NativeClient will arrive and then porting existing native apps (like maybe emacs) to be runnable in Chrome will become possible.
All that remains is a good multimedia experience really. I can listen to most net radio stations today using Flash, but it wouldn't be as nicely integrated as iTunes. And as for renting movies, well I keep hoping Microsoft will stop sitting on its ass and make Xbox Live movie store work here in Switzerland, but it's been years so I'm not holding my breath. International media licensing is such a disaster zone.
Basically, I think ChromeOS will deliver a lot of the benfits people see in an iPad but without the obnoxious tablet form factor. It's a clean break, a fresh new OS but with things that actually matter for getting things done, like "keyboards".
ChromeOS will update automatically like Chrome does, so at some point you just have to decide if you trust Google or not. If not then I'm sure Apple and Microsoft will happily take control of your computer instead.
Mind if I ask how you were logging in? You're supposed to see the SMS verification screen after entering your username and password. It sounds like that didn't happen for you. Are you using Gmail only by POP/IMAP by any chance?
Sure, we'd like to do that. I was discussing it with management quite recently actually. There are a bunch of tricky issues specific to the case of dealing with abuse disables that we still need to think through fully and figure out good answers for, but I won't be surprised to see something like this happen in the longer term.
or at least give an answer as to how customers broke the Terms of Use so that they can correct such behavior in the future.
Unfortunately there's no way to explain what triggered an abuse check to good users without also explaining it to spammers, and obviously that would reduce the anti-abuse systems effectiveness very quickly.
So, full disclosure, I work on abuse at Google. False positives are obviously a problem and we try to minimize them. When they do occur, there's usually a way to appeal it, either automatically by using SMS/phone verification or by writing into support and getting a manual review (contrary to what you might read we do have free support for our products and large numbers of people use it every day). It sounds like in this case Groups did not provide an appeal path, or at least didn't do so three years ago. I'll check to see if this is still the case.
Finding a way to improve the appeals process without letting through large amounts of spammers is a tricky problem and we know we could do a better job of it today. Throwing up a call center isn't quite as trivial as it sounds for a bunch of reasons.
Google doesn't respond to its own abuse either. Via their cache they often do requests (to check if the pages still exist?) on our servers. These sometimes trigger our www-burglar-alarm (they actually do something that is not allowed). When you send an abuse mailing you never hear again.
Hello, a Googler here. I'm not sure what your specific issue is, but if you want to prevent the crawler (GoogleBot) from doing things, you need to set up the robots.txt file appropriately. If you still see the bad requests, they are being triggered by some kind of human action and you'd need to figure out what (the headers sent with the request should tell you).
Oh yes that's a great idea. Send a powerful message to the oil industry..... working in this business was already dangerous and now it's even more so. You do realize we depend on these guys to go and drill big fucking holes in the middle of the ocean to keep food in our supermarkets right?
The industry already suffers a severe skills shortage that pushes up the price of oil in very real ways. If you think petrol is expensive today, just imagine how much it's going to cost when oil rig employees have to be compensated well enough to offset not only the risk of death but also imprisonment at the hands of an angry mob.
Well...... yes. You could theoretically forcibly liquidate BP with an act of law. What would it achieve though? The people running these operations don't grow on trees. Engineers stopped going into the oil business in the 70s and the industry faces a massive skills shortage. If you liquidated BP and all the staff were fired, not only would it be an immense disruption to world oil supplies and thus prices, but the very same people who made the proceed/don't proceed calls at BP will get hired by their competitors and go right back to work!
It's too early to say exactly what the problem was at Macondo Prospect. Whether it was BP management problems, or (more likely) a murky and complex story involving errors of judgement by multiple people at multiple levels, it's too early to say "the fix is to kill off BP". In fact it's very unlikely to be the solution.
If they'd been represented their representation would probably have told them they had no case and to stop wasting the courts time, thus saving everyone money. I mean, I read the article and I just don't see how the case was a "fiasco" for McDonalds. Some people made up a lot of shit about them which ultimately they had no evidence for, and the court agreed.
Well, this accident was sort of the worst case scenario in that every fail-safe mechanism failed. I'm sure there are more blowouts than we hear about, but the systems in place to stop them (the BOPs etc) actually work.
That's not correct. The versioning scheme is a little complex, but suffice it to say that you can target 1.5 and use features from 2.1 by dynamically loading classes and such. It's not quite as convenient as having a fixed dependency on the higher version as you obviously have to provide graceful fallbacks, but it can be done.
It's not likely to happen because apt-get is a pretty terrible model for end-user facing software.
The Android software distribution and versioning model is pretty much exactly what I spent a couple of years campaigning for in the desktop Linux world about 5-6 years ago. Some of the core ideas of apt are there - a central repository of software that vends package files which can be obtained via other means if you want.
But Android nails so many things the desktop Linux guys just never understood. For one, apps depend on the platform and nothing else. Some apps can gain additional functionality when other apps are present and the OS makes that easy to code up, but those dependencies are always optional. The market doesn't have any concept of "dependency resolution" because otherwise you'd rapidly end up with what you get in the Linux world - uninstallable applications with no good way to explain why to the end user.
The Android model allows software dependencies on a strongly versioned platform, and also allows hardware dependencies because they do vary by device (I'll note that apt has no concept of a hardware dependency). The versioning of the Android platform is "correct" in that it's what I always wanted Linux to move to - a single number that identifies a large range of APIs that are revved together every so often. GNOME follows this model most closely in the Linux world. But GNOME misses some key pieces. Firstly the Android dev tools make it easy to target old versions, so easy it's actually the default. Now try compiling an app on your up to date developer workstation that targets GNOME 2.0 - you'll find it's not possible. The development tools will conspire to stop you (typically header files). I complained about this several times and was told, basically, that there was no interest in fixing this.
It's unsurprising then that the Linux model has collapsed into chaos so quickly, a chaos so profound that the only way to tackle it is to try and "stop the world" every 6 months. People might bitch about Android fragmentation today, but they'd bitch a lot more if only one version of their app was offered to each user, tied to OS upgrades!
Do you have any evidence that this is even remotely the case? Who are these "internet hacking people" and how do they plan to "monetize the traffic they sniff"? Do they own an ad network? Do they have network taps in major internet exchanges?
It doesn't matter. Adobe have said they're going to put VP8/WebM into Flash. As Flash auto-upgrades around the world, eventually everyone will be able to play this video format regardless of what browser they use.
Slashdot Mirror
That's almost certainly too low. People seem to forget that the iPhone dev kit still comes with an NDA that prevents you talking about rejection. The fact that there's a constant flow of stories despite that indicates that the rejection rate is almost certainly far higher than anyone suspects.
And no I don't believe Apples 95% figure. Why should I? They have put apps into a "not rejected yet not accepted" state before, so as far as I'm concerned anything they say about the app store has to be treated with a huge pinch of salt.
No. If you believe that, it's not surprising that DRM seems mysterious and stupid to you, for you have failed to understand the business rationale underlying it.
The "core problem" is to get money from people who want something yet are basically lazy and cheap. This sadly describes the majority of consumers. DRM can work because most people are not infinitely cheap. Even students will look at a large investment of time vs a small investment of money and probably choose the money, if the time is large enough. So if you make it a lot of effort to obtain a low quality, crappy version of a movie that has Hungarian subtitles and the best lines obscured by somebody coughing, then a non-trivial percentage of people will go and buy it from their local store. This effect is quite measurable, although I've mostly seen public stats about video games, I know the movie industry has some stats on this too.
Designing working DRM is incredibly difficult, very few organizations have achieved it. But ultimately, it's actually pretty cheap. Relative to the cost of making a movie, designing yet another funny DVD menu hack to disrupt rippers for a few weeks is pretty low. And if it lasts a week or two past the time of release, a whole lot of people will see the ads on billboards, want the movie, discover that the only downloads on LimeWire are viruses in disguise and go buy the DVD rather than wait and check back later. If this happens the cost of the DRM can easily pay for itself.
By the way, if you do pirate stuff today you've got to to be insane. I've seen stats on how much stuff on big torrent trackers like TPB are infected and it's just nuts. You get tens of thousands of downloads on torrents that contain keyloggers and then people blame Microsoft for the prevalence of million-strong botnets, online bank fraud etc.
The vast majority of movies either lose money or break even, so the big studios subsidize them with the profits made by the big hits. Picking a single very successful movie and trying to make an argument about the entire industry then isn't going to work.
No obviously not, because something has to be made before it can be pirated, so piracy cannot "kill" a game or movie. It can significantly reduce the probability of a sequel, presumably, but as we're talking about probably and decisions made behind closed doors that's tough to prove.
What we do know is that from time to time a loose lipped game company executive mentions that they de-prioritize PC ports of games because of piracy. This usually leads to widespread condemnation from PC gamers of course so it's not surprising that mostly they prefer not to discuss it. But I frequently read on Slashdot that "PC gaming is dying" and it's being killed by consoles.
Business is not, entirely, about rational financial decisions. If a team of people work on a big, complex project for 3-4 years and when it launches, 90% of players are pirates, that takes a serious emotional toll as well as a financial one. The next project, whoever is in charge may well look at PC game development, the piracy rates, the extra server and support costs involved in supporting the pirates etc and say "fuck that".
What a load of crap. Film technology has been advancing rapidly for more than three decades, but I fail to see movies produced in peoples bedrooms taking over the cinemas. After all, isn't the most successful movie yet made also one of the most expensive?
Actually what you need for successful DRM is any sufficiently strong/complex protection (it can be purely software too), combined with aligned incentives in all the needed parties and most crucially a content experience that isn't the same for everyone. One of the reasons that DRM fails again and again with things like movies and music is the analog hole. The reason it has worked very well on the PS3 (and to a lesser extent the xbox) is that there is no analogue hole. It's a digital copy or bust.
Could you link to an explanation of how this PS3 cracking works? Your post contradicts the original post saying it's not been cracked. I keep half an eye on the DRM world and I didn't hear of any copy protection breaks on the PS3. I'd be interested to know how they pulled it off, if it's true.
If Apple only rejected apps that violated a simple and clear developer agreement that'd be one thing. The problem is that they don't. I'm not sure what part of this is hard to understand.
It's not like anybody is going to confuse a site on bp.com with real news.
Probably the reason is that reporting of the oil spill cleanup efforts are riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods. I was reading several news organizations reports on the "top hat" approach a month or so ago and the amount of variability was insane, given that all they had to do was accurately re-print what BP Engineering had published. Some papers actually claimed it was "ice" clogging up the device for goodness sake.
People like to make out that corporate PR is some kind of money-based mind control mechanism. And a small amount actually is that (typically the dedicated PR firms). But having seen in-house corporate PR men do their work first hand, it became apparent that 99% of the effort is just trying to ensure journalists don't screw up basic facts.
Now if BP are publishing things on their landing pages that are verifiably false then my argument doesn't stand, but I doubt that. Even the how-much-oil-spills debacle seems likely to be genuine disagreement rather than a real attempt to mislead.
From this I conclude that the results are meaningless. At best it shows that Objective-C programming has resulted in more discussions and questions. Whether it is "popular" or not is a bit more subjective.
Nothing says it has to replace your existing laptop or workstation.
I'm quite looking forward to ChromeOS. I work there so I'm hoping the big G will give me one for testing, but if not then I might buy one myself if they review well.
See ChromeOS as kind of like an "extreme" version of the Mac or iPad value proposition. The hardware and software are very closely integrated so you won't get much of the benefit if you're running it in a virtual machine. But if you're running it on hardware designed for it in mind, you get a number of benefits.
If I look at what I do today with my old MacBook, 90% of my time is spent in Chrome anyway. MacOS' shitty window management just gets in the way, frankly. The only other apps I use are iTunes (for internet radio and occasionally movies rented online), and the terminal emulator. Fortunately shellinabox provides easy access to remote terminals without needing a local ssh or terminal emulator. I have it set up on a colo box I rent from Linode and it works pretty well.
ChromeOS promises watertight security (as opposed to MacOS/Windows/Linux), an end to stupid update nags, extremely good and consistent performance, simple and efficient window management .... lots more. The downside is that I'll need to use a separate machine occasionally for more power user stuff like programming, at least until a web based IDE like Bespin starts getting good. Other things, like word processing/spreadsheets/PDF viewing/chat/etc can be done via web apps already.
Also, at some point the promise of NativeClient will arrive and then porting existing native apps (like maybe emacs) to be runnable in Chrome will become possible.
All that remains is a good multimedia experience really. I can listen to most net radio stations today using Flash, but it wouldn't be as nicely integrated as iTunes. And as for renting movies, well I keep hoping Microsoft will stop sitting on its ass and make Xbox Live movie store work here in Switzerland, but it's been years so I'm not holding my breath. International media licensing is such a disaster zone.
Basically, I think ChromeOS will deliver a lot of the benfits people see in an iPad but without the obnoxious tablet form factor. It's a clean break, a fresh new OS but with things that actually matter for getting things done, like "keyboards".
ChromeOS will update automatically like Chrome does, so at some point you just have to decide if you trust Google or not. If not then I'm sure Apple and Microsoft will happily take control of your computer instead.
Mind if I ask how you were logging in? You're supposed to see the SMS verification screen after entering your username and password. It sounds like that didn't happen for you. Are you using Gmail only by POP/IMAP by any chance?
Yeah, we do that for most products. Totally agreed that Groups should provide/have provided a more helpful error than a 403 Forbidden.
Sure, we'd like to do that. I was discussing it with management quite recently actually. There are a bunch of tricky issues specific to the case of dealing with abuse disables that we still need to think through fully and figure out good answers for, but I won't be surprised to see something like this happen in the longer term.
Unfortunately there's no way to explain what triggered an abuse check to good users without also explaining it to spammers, and obviously that would reduce the anti-abuse systems effectiveness very quickly.
So, full disclosure, I work on abuse at Google. False positives are obviously a problem and we try to minimize them. When they do occur, there's usually a way to appeal it, either automatically by using SMS/phone verification or by writing into support and getting a manual review (contrary to what you might read we do have free support for our products and large numbers of people use it every day). It sounds like in this case Groups did not provide an appeal path, or at least didn't do so three years ago. I'll check to see if this is still the case.
Finding a way to improve the appeals process without letting through large amounts of spammers is a tricky problem and we know we could do a better job of it today. Throwing up a call center isn't quite as trivial as it sounds for a bunch of reasons.
Hello, a Googler here. I'm not sure what your specific issue is, but if you want to prevent the crawler (GoogleBot) from doing things, you need to set up the robots.txt file appropriately. If you still see the bad requests, they are being triggered by some kind of human action and you'd need to figure out what (the headers sent with the request should tell you).
Oh yes that's a great idea. Send a powerful message to the oil industry ..... working in this business was already dangerous and now it's even more so. You do realize we depend on these guys to go and drill big fucking holes in the middle of the ocean to keep food in our supermarkets right?
The industry already suffers a severe skills shortage that pushes up the price of oil in very real ways. If you think petrol is expensive today, just imagine how much it's going to cost when oil rig employees have to be compensated well enough to offset not only the risk of death but also imprisonment at the hands of an angry mob.
Well ...... yes. You could theoretically forcibly liquidate BP with an act of law. What would it achieve though? The people running these operations don't grow on trees. Engineers stopped going into the oil business in the 70s and the industry faces a massive skills shortage. If you liquidated BP and all the staff were fired, not only would it be an immense disruption to world oil supplies and thus prices, but the very same people who made the proceed/don't proceed calls at BP will get hired by their competitors and go right back to work!
It's too early to say exactly what the problem was at Macondo Prospect. Whether it was BP management problems, or (more likely) a murky and complex story involving errors of judgement by multiple people at multiple levels, it's too early to say "the fix is to kill off BP". In fact it's very unlikely to be the solution.
If they'd been represented their representation would probably have told them they had no case and to stop wasting the courts time, thus saving everyone money. I mean, I read the article and I just don't see how the case was a "fiasco" for McDonalds. Some people made up a lot of shit about them which ultimately they had no evidence for, and the court agreed.
Well, this accident was sort of the worst case scenario in that every fail-safe mechanism failed. I'm sure there are more blowouts than we hear about, but the systems in place to stop them (the BOPs etc) actually work.
That's not correct. The versioning scheme is a little complex, but suffice it to say that you can target 1.5 and use features from 2.1 by dynamically loading classes and such. It's not quite as convenient as having a fixed dependency on the higher version as you obviously have to provide graceful fallbacks, but it can be done.
It's not likely to happen because apt-get is a pretty terrible model for end-user facing software.
The Android software distribution and versioning model is pretty much exactly what I spent a couple of years campaigning for in the desktop Linux world about 5-6 years ago. Some of the core ideas of apt are there - a central repository of software that vends package files which can be obtained via other means if you want.
But Android nails so many things the desktop Linux guys just never understood. For one, apps depend on the platform and nothing else. Some apps can gain additional functionality when other apps are present and the OS makes that easy to code up, but those dependencies are always optional. The market doesn't have any concept of "dependency resolution" because otherwise you'd rapidly end up with what you get in the Linux world - uninstallable applications with no good way to explain why to the end user.
The Android model allows software dependencies on a strongly versioned platform, and also allows hardware dependencies because they do vary by device (I'll note that apt has no concept of a hardware dependency). The versioning of the Android platform is "correct" in that it's what I always wanted Linux to move to - a single number that identifies a large range of APIs that are revved together every so often. GNOME follows this model most closely in the Linux world. But GNOME misses some key pieces. Firstly the Android dev tools make it easy to target old versions, so easy it's actually the default. Now try compiling an app on your up to date developer workstation that targets GNOME 2.0 - you'll find it's not possible. The development tools will conspire to stop you (typically header files). I complained about this several times and was told, basically, that there was no interest in fixing this.
It's unsurprising then that the Linux model has collapsed into chaos so quickly, a chaos so profound that the only way to tackle it is to try and "stop the world" every 6 months. People might bitch about Android fragmentation today, but they'd bitch a lot more if only one version of their app was offered to each user, tied to OS upgrades!
Well, they will when they plug in and sync with iTunes. If they don't do that for a while they'll just never get the upgrade at all.
If you read the FAQ it says the referer header is being stripped. Not sure how, but apparently it is.
Do you have any evidence that this is even remotely the case? Who are these "internet hacking people" and how do they plan to "monetize the traffic they sniff"? Do they own an ad network? Do they have network taps in major internet exchanges?
No, because they don't exist.
It doesn't matter. Adobe have said they're going to put VP8/WebM into Flash. As Flash auto-upgrades around the world, eventually everyone will be able to play this video format regardless of what browser they use.