If you were only selling 2-3 copies of the app per day, honestly it could have been anything that made the company fold. There are plenty of anecdotes from larger companies where even quite weak copy protection increased sales.
It'll be available as open source. You obviously won't be able to fork it and brand it "Google ChromeOS" if you don't meet the requirements of the trademark however.
The story has no credibility by itself. It comes from an anonymous source. It could just be made up, or some heavily garbled version of the truth.
Nonetheless, anonymous sources are useful in reporting. When they are used, the author of the story is making an implicit request to the reader - you can't trust my source, but you can trust me instead. You need a high degree of trust for this to work - we are being asked to transitively trust the source through the reporter. Some reporters have enough integrity, neutrality and respect to do this. Most don't.
Cory Doctorow in particular (a) has a very strong agenda and (b) has a habit of reporting stories about Evil Government Plans from anonymous sources, probably because they drive traffic. He isn't a respected journalist or otherwise highly trustable figure. He is most noted for writing some fairly far out sci-fi, and working for the EFF.
In short, this appears to be a repeat of the ACTA situation. Somebody says some government employees are planning something evil, but the exact nature of who or what cannot be reliably pinned down. Doctorow then reports it as fact.
Boils down to who do I trust less - Mandelson or Doctorow? That's tough. Neither of them can be trusted.
I don't hear anyone complaining about security breaches, viruses, spyware, and malware in general on the iPhone
Then you haven't been paying attention. Any iPhone app can read your entire contacts list and upload it to the internet, including your own phone number and details. This hasn't just happened once. It's happened more than once. Who knows how many of those 100,000 apps do this?
It's a fallacy that the app stores approval process can catch malware. Apples inspections aren't deep or focussed enough to do that and there are examples of this problem in action. Contrast this to Android. If an app reads your phones data Android tells you that up front when you install it. Apps cannot access that data if they don't have permission to it. That's how real security works - the idea that overworked reviewers who spend less than an hour on any given app are a replacement for sandboxing is crazy.
What's the relationship between being slavishly dedicated to one platform and being good at what you do? All of the excellent programmers I know are fluent in multiple technologies, and most of them have a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each one.
Hewitt is the one man band behind the most popular app for the iPhone. Not a random app, not a popular app, the most popular app. As many have pointed out, not all apps are created equal. One Facebook app is worth 1000 fart apps.
BTW the article says Hewitts departure was due to something he can't talk about. Remember Apple forbids you to discuss rejected apps. Perhaps Facebook was working on some cool new app or feature that Apple rejected? We'll never know. Would we know the story behind the Latitude and Google Voice rejections if not for the FCC?
Actually I read that they may have chosen Polonium under the belief that it could not be detected, unaware that in fact western countries could find it. Given that it took even doctors in London a long time to figure it out, this theory seems to hold some water. The whole "sending a message" theory doesn't seem to hold water to me.
Not possible with the 360. You'd have to be able to run unsigned code and that isn't possible with the latest updates (it might be possible with a LOT of effort if you are able to find a machine that wasn't updated to the latest software version).
And don't think about trying to emulate the Live servers either. It's all protected by IPSec and there's two way authentication - network authenticates that it's a real xbox, xbox authenticates that it's really xbox live.
Why do you think it's less sophisticated than Punkbuster? Do you even know what you're talking about? Cheats on the PC do all kinds of interesting things by rewriting memory and hooking the games internals, or even replacing the graphics driver. Cheating on Xbox Live boils down to exploiting bugs in the game logic (which can be patched) or DoSing your opponents to make them lag out of the match. You can't make the 360 run unsigned code so any cheaters room for maneuver is highly restricted.
Cheating isn't really an issue on XBL. I'm sure 99% of these bans were due to reflashed DVD drives.
Games companies who have every reason to study this issue carefully have almost universally concluded that strong DRM is good, so asking for academic "studies" isn't going to achieve much. Unless you believe that every big budget game producer in the world has failed to do even basic homework on this issue, which isn't the case....
So, assuming this is still correct (haven't had a a 360 for over a year), what can you possibly do on a modded xbox 360 if you aren't copying games?
This is still correct and the answer is there is nothing you can do with a modded xbox except play pirated games. End of story.
Some people are confusing the two because this wasn't the case with the original gen 1 xbox, others are confusing them because they don't know the full story and I guess a few are deliberately blurring the issue because they want to believe in the nobility of modding consoles or something. However MS make a pretty sophisticated (.NET based) dev kit available for free so you can write your own software, and will even help you sell them to a huge worldwide audience. You don't have hypervisor level access but then you don't need it to write your own software.
That's true of many people, however, there is still a sizable number of people in the world for whom gas is a large fraction of their living costs. These people will be very unhappy when their bills no longer balance due to factors outside their control. Some of them will get violent. See what happens in developing countries when oil prices rise or subsidies are reduced (eg the riots in Burma).
Peak oil isn't exactly a conspiracy. There's lots of detailed information on it all over the net, some of the best comes from IEA reports in fact. The reason there are now "whistleblowers" is that the IEA has been providing advice that doesn't quite line up with its own figures for some time now. Undoubtably this has been frustrating some of its staff.
Uh, right. The Saudis "target" whatever the price currently is. They like to think they have more power than they really do these days. For instance their target was $30 throughout the 90s. The idea that they like high prices is nonsense, they fought pretty hard to keep it below $30 until it went over $50 about 5 years ago and they discovered they couldn't bring it down any more.
I can't imagine a reality where the IEA "downplaying" peak oil today translates into an imminent oil shortage being completely unknown and unanticipated up to the very moment it happens "xx" years in the future.
So, it's been a while since I was really following peak oil theory, but unfortunately such a scenario is plausible.
The main problem is that most of our oil comes from a small collection of really huge fields discovered around the same time in the mid 20th century (between the 50s and 70s).
These fields have all been heavily worked with advanced technology that pushes oil out of the field at the fastest rate possible. The net result is that when a field starts to get exhausted, production from it drops at a truly eye-bleeding speed. The Cantarell field in Mexico is the latest example of this, seeing a collapse in production of as much as 40% per year. This is many times higher than anyone predicted. The CEO of Schlumberger was throwing around figures of 8%/annum (as a very high end figure) not so many years ago.
So the fear is, well, all these major fields have been processed in the same way. They were found within 10-20 years of each other. What if their production starts to fall off a cliff at around the same time? The sheer scale of the oil industry is staggering. The amount of new production you'd need to bring online every year to offset 20-40% annual declines in the major "elephant" fields is extremely scary.
The net result would be a sudden and dramatic increase in oil prices without any moderating influence to bring them back down.
This scenario is close enough to "sudden shortage" that it makes sense to abbreviate it as such in common discussion.
Indeed. And in fact Kuwait has already been caught lying about its reserves red handed. Anyone who runs the numbers on Saudi Arabia also finds they are highly suspicious. It's almost certain in fact that OPEC members routinely lie about the size of their reserves and this is acknowledged by the IEA as well.
It's very hard to know what the IEA really thinks. Their own reports are contradictory and confusing, the head of the IEA has said things that don't seem to reflect the agencies official view. Read this interview with the chief of the IEA, Fatih Birol. In it he says
If Iraqi production does not rise exponentially by 2015, we have a very big problem, even if Saudi Arabia fulfills all its promises. The numbers are very simple, there's no need to be an expert
So what's going on here? One obvious explanation is that the IEA is riven with disagreement, or has internal consensus but feels pressure to not reveal it externally. Given the IEAs history of knife-switching its views without warning and its staff apparently holding quite different ideas to those in its official reports, I am inclined to believe crmarvin42s explanation - it's a deeply confused organization that is under a lot of different pressures, and what comes out is not coherent as a result.
Well, Fischer-Tropsch capacity doesn't grow on trees. We've spent decades building infrastructure to suck crude out of the ground at high speeds. If all major fields deplete at the same speeds that Cantarell and the North Sea did, then it's highly questionable whether we can scale up coal-to-liquid plants quickly enough to make up for the loss in the old system.
For instance we didn't see CTL/FT balance out the 30->$90/barrel runup we saw after 2004 even though prices nearly tripled. So I'm sceptical that it's the answer to all our problems. That's a heck of a lot of coal you need to convert!
So try Mass Effect then. It's by the same company and has the same trademarks - mind-blowingly huge world, great and ubiquitous voice acting, well written plot. It really feels like the 90s dream of an "interactive movie" actually came true. And it's classic space opera.
Or for a modern world, GTA4. Though I found GTA4 couldn't hold my interest for some reason, but I completed Mass Effect (I rarely bother to complete games).
What? Seriously? Why does this never come up in iPhone vs Android reviews? The Android security system isn't perfect, but it does at least tell you what an app will be able to do ahead of time. If I install a game and it wants to read my address book, I think twice.
Re:Just to start us off with a car analogy...
on
Lulu Introduces DRM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Dude, try a substitution - "the police" are a tool to punish innocent people who annoyed those in power. Supposedly they prevent crime as well but there's always collateral damage on legitimate behavior.
DRM is only necessary because piracy is so widespread that it's impossible for humans to police it. If piracy was as rare as murder, then it'd be possible to have humans investigate every case and make a nuanced decision on whether it was legitimate and beneficial or criminal. This is an extremely sad state of affairs, but it's the reality in which we live.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were only selling 2-3 copies of the app per day, honestly it could have been anything that made the company fold. There are plenty of anecdotes from larger companies where even quite weak copy protection increased sales.
It'll be available as open source. You obviously won't be able to fork it and brand it "Google ChromeOS" if you don't meet the requirements of the trademark however.
Chrome[OS] will support NativeClient that allows you to securely execute native code. I guess the GUIs will still be interpreted though.
The story has no credibility by itself. It comes from an anonymous source. It could just be made up, or some heavily garbled version of the truth.
Nonetheless, anonymous sources are useful in reporting. When they are used, the author of the story is making an implicit request to the reader - you can't trust my source, but you can trust me instead. You need a high degree of trust for this to work - we are being asked to transitively trust the source through the reporter. Some reporters have enough integrity, neutrality and respect to do this. Most don't.
Cory Doctorow in particular (a) has a very strong agenda and (b) has a habit of reporting stories about Evil Government Plans from anonymous sources, probably because they drive traffic. He isn't a respected journalist or otherwise highly trustable figure. He is most noted for writing some fairly far out sci-fi, and working for the EFF.
In short, this appears to be a repeat of the ACTA situation. Somebody says some government employees are planning something evil, but the exact nature of who or what cannot be reliably pinned down. Doctorow then reports it as fact.
Boils down to who do I trust less - Mandelson or Doctorow? That's tough. Neither of them can be trusted.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Any iPhone app can read your entire contacts list and upload it to the internet, including your own phone number and details. This hasn't just happened once. It's happened more than once. Who knows how many of those 100,000 apps do this?
It's a fallacy that the app stores approval process can catch malware. Apples inspections aren't deep or focussed enough to do that and there are examples of this problem in action. Contrast this to Android. If an app reads your phones data Android tells you that up front when you install it. Apps cannot access that data if they don't have permission to it. That's how real security works - the idea that overworked reviewers who spend less than an hour on any given app are a replacement for sandboxing is crazy.
What's the relationship between being slavishly dedicated to one platform and being good at what you do? All of the excellent programmers I know are fluent in multiple technologies, and most of them have a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each one.
Hewitt is the one man band behind the most popular app for the iPhone. Not a random app, not a popular app, the most popular app. As many have pointed out, not all apps are created equal. One Facebook app is worth 1000 fart apps.
BTW the article says Hewitts departure was due to something he can't talk about. Remember Apple forbids you to discuss rejected apps. Perhaps Facebook was working on some cool new app or feature that Apple rejected? We'll never know. Would we know the story behind the Latitude and Google Voice rejections if not for the FCC?
Actually I read that they may have chosen Polonium under the belief that it could not be detected, unaware that in fact western countries could find it. Given that it took even doctors in London a long time to figure it out, this theory seems to hold some water. The whole "sending a message" theory doesn't seem to hold water to me.
All Danish mothers should be required by law to watch 2 hours of Chuck Norris per day during pregnancy.
Not possible with the 360. You'd have to be able to run unsigned code and that isn't possible with the latest updates (it might be possible with a LOT of effort if you are able to find a machine that wasn't updated to the latest software version).
And don't think about trying to emulate the Live servers either. It's all protected by IPSec and there's two way authentication - network authenticates that it's a real xbox, xbox authenticates that it's really xbox live.
Why do you think it's less sophisticated than Punkbuster? Do you even know what you're talking about? Cheats on the PC do all kinds of interesting things by rewriting memory and hooking the games internals, or even replacing the graphics driver. Cheating on Xbox Live boils down to exploiting bugs in the game logic (which can be patched) or DoSing your opponents to make them lag out of the match. You can't make the 360 run unsigned code so any cheaters room for maneuver is highly restricted.
Cheating isn't really an issue on XBL. I'm sure 99% of these bans were due to reflashed DVD drives.
Yeah but that sort of thing is trivial to defeat with game patches, which XBL fully supports. I really doubt anyone is losing sleep over such tricks.
Games companies who have every reason to study this issue carefully have almost universally concluded that strong DRM is good, so asking for academic "studies" isn't going to achieve much. Unless you believe that every big budget game producer in the world has failed to do even basic homework on this issue, which isn't the case ....
This is still correct and the answer is there is nothing you can do with a modded xbox except play pirated games. End of story.
Some people are confusing the two because this wasn't the case with the original gen 1 xbox, others are confusing them because they don't know the full story and I guess a few are deliberately blurring the issue because they want to believe in the nobility of modding consoles or something. However MS make a pretty sophisticated (.NET based) dev kit available for free so you can write your own software, and will even help you sell them to a huge worldwide audience. You don't have hypervisor level access but then you don't need it to write your own software.
That's true of many people, however, there is still a sizable number of people in the world for whom gas is a large fraction of their living costs. These people will be very unhappy when their bills no longer balance due to factors outside their control. Some of them will get violent. See what happens in developing countries when oil prices rise or subsidies are reduced (eg the riots in Burma).
Peak oil isn't exactly a conspiracy. There's lots of detailed information on it all over the net, some of the best comes from IEA reports in fact. The reason there are now "whistleblowers" is that the IEA has been providing advice that doesn't quite line up with its own figures for some time now. Undoubtably this has been frustrating some of its staff.
Uh, right. The Saudis "target" whatever the price currently is. They like to think they have more power than they really do these days. For instance their target was $30 throughout the 90s. The idea that they like high prices is nonsense, they fought pretty hard to keep it below $30 until it went over $50 about 5 years ago and they discovered they couldn't bring it down any more.
I guess you missed Chevrons advertising campaign that says oil is running out?
So, it's been a while since I was really following peak oil theory, but unfortunately such a scenario is plausible.
The main problem is that most of our oil comes from a small collection of really huge fields discovered around the same time in the mid 20th century (between the 50s and 70s) .
These fields have all been heavily worked with advanced technology that pushes oil out of the field at the fastest rate possible. The net result is that when a field starts to get exhausted, production from it drops at a truly eye-bleeding speed. The Cantarell field in Mexico is the latest example of this, seeing a collapse in production of as much as 40% per year. This is many times higher than anyone predicted. The CEO of Schlumberger was throwing around figures of 8%/annum (as a very high end figure) not so many years ago.
So the fear is, well, all these major fields have been processed in the same way. They were found within 10-20 years of each other. What if their production starts to fall off a cliff at around the same time? The sheer scale of the oil industry is staggering. The amount of new production you'd need to bring online every year to offset 20-40% annual declines in the major "elephant" fields is extremely scary.
The net result would be a sudden and dramatic increase in oil prices without any moderating influence to bring them back down.
This scenario is close enough to "sudden shortage" that it makes sense to abbreviate it as such in common discussion.
Indeed. And in fact Kuwait has already been caught lying about its reserves red handed. Anyone who runs the numbers on Saudi Arabia also finds they are highly suspicious. It's almost certain in fact that OPEC members routinely lie about the size of their reserves and this is acknowledged by the IEA as well.
It's very hard to know what the IEA really thinks. Their own reports are contradictory and confusing, the head of the IEA has said things that don't seem to reflect the agencies official view. Read this interview with the chief of the IEA, Fatih Birol. In it he says
So what's going on here? One obvious explanation is that the IEA is riven with disagreement, or has internal consensus but feels pressure to not reveal it externally. Given the IEAs history of knife-switching its views without warning and its staff apparently holding quite different ideas to those in its official reports, I am inclined to believe crmarvin42s explanation - it's a deeply confused organization that is under a lot of different pressures, and what comes out is not coherent as a result.
Well, Fischer-Tropsch capacity doesn't grow on trees. We've spent decades building infrastructure to suck crude out of the ground at high speeds. If all major fields deplete at the same speeds that Cantarell and the North Sea did, then it's highly questionable whether we can scale up coal-to-liquid plants quickly enough to make up for the loss in the old system.
For instance we didn't see CTL/FT balance out the 30->$90/barrel runup we saw after 2004 even though prices nearly tripled. So I'm sceptical that it's the answer to all our problems. That's a heck of a lot of coal you need to convert!
So try Mass Effect then. It's by the same company and has the same trademarks - mind-blowingly huge world, great and ubiquitous voice acting, well written plot. It really feels like the 90s dream of an "interactive movie" actually came true. And it's classic space opera.
Or for a modern world, GTA4. Though I found GTA4 couldn't hold my interest for some reason, but I completed Mass Effect (I rarely bother to complete games).
What? Seriously? Why does this never come up in iPhone vs Android reviews? The Android security system isn't perfect, but it does at least tell you what an app will be able to do ahead of time. If I install a game and it wants to read my address book, I think twice.
Dude, try a substitution - "the police" are a tool to punish innocent people who annoyed those in power. Supposedly they prevent crime as well but there's always collateral damage on legitimate behavior.
DRM is only necessary because piracy is so widespread that it's impossible for humans to police it. If piracy was as rare as murder, then it'd be possible to have humans investigate every case and make a nuanced decision on whether it was legitimate and beneficial or criminal. This is an extremely sad state of affairs, but it's the reality in which we live.