It's not so much about anonomized data being sent to advertisers. It's when you pick up an iphone/android you can look at the device and answer the question of "where was this user last night at 2am?" iphone had a location cache with no limit. I understand that android caches the last 50 locations. I've heard win phone only caches the current location. I don't think people would expect that the police could figure out where they were at a specific time three months ago simply based on data cached on their phone. That's the big privacy implication people are concerned about. The "can I be caught cheating because of my phone" concern.
Could just be a hardware issue. Those wrt54s aren't exactly the highest quality routers. My wrt54g ran fine for a couple years but the wireless is now unusable. I suspect the hardware in most of these craps out over time.
It's a bit more complicated. I believe the pressure to do something is coming mostly from the US, citing treaties canada has signed on copyright-enforcement alliances. So right now, Canada isn't living up to its treaty obligations. Unfortunately, I don't know much about those obligations. So hell, I could be wrong on that actually. I'm all for avoiding DMCA-like law. I'm just saying the politicians may be in a bit of a tough spot trying to satisfy both the people and the existing treaty obligations. Often stuff like this is held hostage before other agreements can be made. So it could cost Canada in terms of completely unrelated trade issues.
I signed up recently to get the NHL GameCenter app. Basically it would let me stream games. My laptop didn't quite handle the high quality stream smoothly. I was hooking that to the TV previously. Since ps3/nhl had an exclusive agreement, this was the only way to go. Well, a week after buying the app, a new console firmware is released. That breaks the app. So it was a good month before that started working again. Now, ignoring the fact that the quality was actually worse than with my laptop, that really sucked. Now the network is down so, again, it doesn't work. And bonus, my information is compromised. I'm starting to get a little annoyed!
The main target for ARM will be touch-tablets. It's likely that emulation would be fast enough to handle the old legacy apps. They were built for slower computers after all. If you were to put win8 on a ipad like device, the app-store could sandbox things in the same way that win phone 7's x-app system does. For native stuff, If MS releases a decent compiler, I don't see any reason why companies like adobe wouldn't offer arm versions as well to avoid the emulation layer. And besides, it's hard to know how well a comparatively slow ARM chip will be at emulating x86 code. One advantage is they'll typically be paired with SSDs rather than traditional hard disks. By the time win8 ships, a dual-core ARM with an SSD will probably be mid-level hardware. They aren't doing this to target the very high-end. I'd consider the original ipad to be a mid-grade device now, and perhaps a good min-level target for win8. We know that IO heavy apps perform orders of magnitude better with an SSD. That might be enough of a boost that most any event-driven legacy x86 app will still feel pretty quick and responsive, even with that emulation overhead. And hopefully the JIT/natively-compiled and sandboxed games perform well as well!
Since when has public/private key encryption been consider obfuscation? The protocol is shared with companies building airplay products. Presumably different products get different but valid keys. If you want to emulate a device, you need to reverse-engineer the hardware to find the key. Since it's a consumer product, eventually someone will be able to extract the key. It's about protecting the product from duplication. Making it open doesn't exactly stop people from making cheap knockoffs.
You can get a cheap USB sound card for $15 that'll give you outputs. Presumably if you're running a linux-based firmware, there should be some acceptable driver/hardware combination for this. I have a switch behind my stereo to split things up for the 360, ps3, etc. It'd be rather nice to have airplay support going directly from the router into the receiver. I can't wait to see someone hack this together!
Let's see someone add airplay support to the ps3. See how many companies can get pissed off at once. If you play it right, they could be goaded into fighting each other. Fingers crossed! Maybe these companies will finally deliver something entertaining to watch:)
I'd say a more likely time would be when PCs have parity with the console in terms of the ecosystem. That'll happen when software can be released on the PC without rampant piracy. I don't know what it will take for that to happen. Perhaps graphics cards will be "xbox compatible" and have the added ability of handling an encrypted game. I'm not thrilled about that in many ways. But also, having a full end-to-end and secure ecosystem is a massive money maker (I work in software). I would imagine something like this might show up in the Windows 9 time frame, something that will align with a new console launch. The PC can still do everything it can now, but unless you can lock down an ecosystem, with a few notable exceptions, there's absolutely no reason for developers to release a blockbuster on the PC.
But the upshot is, I see a future where the PC can replace the console in the living room. It would sure reduce my hardware costs if I wasn't maintaining several PCs, a laptop, a 360, a ps3, and a wii. Or at least, there would be a lot less redundancy in my living room. I could probably justify a few extra panels rather than consoles in there:)
Did you not notice that the companies here license their technology? When Epic makes a blockbuster game, they're proving their technology for others to follow. You can expect them to dive into state of the art PC development as a proving ground for the next generation of consoles. Similarly, you can see them working on projects targeting the next generation of mobile devices. But they will always be looking at the most recent top of the line PCs. That's how they get people interested in licensing their technology for the next console generation.
It's a neat benchmark of our progress in robotics but humans have never been fast runners. Our advantage is that we can maintain a decent pace for extended periods of time. Many animals which are much faster sprinters would completely fail to keep up with humans over large distances. So while I'm impressed, it's more of a neat fact than a major milestone.
"Cell phones will be automatically registered at cell towers as soon as they are switched on."... err, as they usually do? Since otherwise, how would the cell company know how to route a call for you?
Sort of. I think the new part of this is the aggregation of the data. Taking data from multiple companies, doing it live, anonymized, and into a central database/server farm for analytics. It takes a lot of work from a technical and political perspective to make that all work without huge privacy questions. But the improvements to traffic monitoring, route-finding, civil engineering, academic research, etc are huge. I hope they're able to do great things.
Well McAfee was just purchased by Intel. I'm sure they realize the software market is being squeezed by MSE/forefront. But on the other hand, they have the unique position of being able to look at things from the hardware side. Perhaps there will be a need/market for core AV strengths in the new world of mobile devices and cloud computing hardware. Perhaps hardware encryption, better app sandboxing, etc will play a role. Tighter hardware/software integration could be a key feature in moving towards safer environments. Perhaps these AV engineers will still be in demand and needed to develop and manage solutions for the cloud. Take something like hotmail or gmail as an example. I would never recommend a free email service to someone if I didn't trust them to maintain high quality spam/virus filtering.
There's a lot of room for these companies. I just hope we get away from installing crappy trials on new PCs. But the way things are going, I would imagine we'll see a near-term increase as more and more companies fight for subscribers in a new cloud world. And that fight will mostly be waged with advertising dollars. Sigh:)
While I find the term "web-powered" quite painful, we do call plenty of things "web services." In this case, I would assume that's how this is implemented. These days, services are beginning to unify their APIs. Rich clients and ajax-based browser app are starting to share the same web service APIs. So if it's implemented as a web service, I wouldn't take offense to the term "web-powered," even though it reeks of marketing.
Well, here's a difference. Mobile is different because a faster consumer alternative exists. If phones did more to preload content over wifi at home, we wouldn't be so bored on the go. For example, instead of the youtube app streaming everything, cache your subscriptions, reddit frontpage videos, etc while on wifi. Dedicating say 1GB of phone storage and 5GB/month of broadband to caching would probably cut the average user's mobile consumption by half. Perhaps more in some cases. In addition, it would really improve the user's experience. Instead of staring at loading bars on the bus, you'll find your phone cached a bunch of stuff overnight or at work/school. Honestly, it'd be a nice feature. As far as I'm concerned, the less I have to transfer over mobile, the better. Because when I do have to transfer media, it's basically a last resort. I honestly hate high-bandwidth applications on my phone. The experience always sucks.
And I think that's a fair thing to do. I just wish the mobile operators would focus on improving efficiency rather than limiting plans.
I think it comes down to a level of understanding. Perhaps one solution is to make many administrator functions require user authorization. For example, if I worked at an accounting company and had a ton of sensitive documents, an administrator might need a sponsor's permission to view those files. Perhaps the documents are not ACLed for them or my manager, but combined, they could access them. I think the threat is data security. At the moment, any domain admin can access anything on my machine. Since they really don't need access to anything in my user folder, I think it'd be fair to limit that. The people with physical access to data-center machines are all screened by serious background checks. They're trusted about as much as possible. But down the road, I can see full disk encryption with distributed services making physical access much less of a concern. At that point, if a user can understand what an administrator is doing, they can self-audit what people have done/looked at on their work machine. After all, the end-user is the best person to evaluate if something should have been done. It's just that logs and authorization requests are too vague and technical for those users. In most cases, a plain english explanation exists. If the system could phrase access requests in a task oriented fashion, that'd be much easier. A dialog asking for permission to 500 random files vs a "install latest version of Word" or "gathering documents for legal audit" would be a huge change.
Well, only the 2nd paragraph in seems block a good number of people from even applying.
"The regulations also specify punishments in case of violations. These include the obligatory publishing of corrections, fines and bans for various time periods, including total bans. Applicants for licenses need to be Saudi, no less than 20 years of age, have high school certificates in the least and documents testifying to their good behavior. Online newspapers also need to employ editors in chief who have been approved by the Ministry of Information and Culture."
What you say is in line with my traditional view of alpha/beta. I think you need to accept that it's a lot more complicated than that in large software projects. Often betas are released to get customer feedback. That's an important feedback loop if you really want to nail your scenarios. Sometimes you're simply missing something.
But in this case, yea, I'd tend to agree that a lot of features are landing late. If they were being stabilized and turned on by default, that would be a lot different. Oh well.
Microsoft already has an app store for windows mobile. This isn't the win phone 7 / iphone / android / blackberry market.
In other words, Microsoft is entering into the "feature phone / messaging phone / multimedia phone" market. Prior to this, they've only been making a smart phone OS.
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It's not so much about anonomized data being sent to advertisers. It's when you pick up an iphone/android you can look at the device and answer the question of "where was this user last night at 2am?" iphone had a location cache with no limit. I understand that android caches the last 50 locations. I've heard win phone only caches the current location. I don't think people would expect that the police could figure out where they were at a specific time three months ago simply based on data cached on their phone. That's the big privacy implication people are concerned about. The "can I be caught cheating because of my phone" concern.
Could just be a hardware issue. Those wrt54s aren't exactly the highest quality routers. My wrt54g ran fine for a couple years but the wireless is now unusable. I suspect the hardware in most of these craps out over time.
It's a bit more complicated. I believe the pressure to do something is coming mostly from the US, citing treaties canada has signed on copyright-enforcement alliances. So right now, Canada isn't living up to its treaty obligations. Unfortunately, I don't know much about those obligations. So hell, I could be wrong on that actually. I'm all for avoiding DMCA-like law. I'm just saying the politicians may be in a bit of a tough spot trying to satisfy both the people and the existing treaty obligations. Often stuff like this is held hostage before other agreements can be made. So it could cost Canada in terms of completely unrelated trade issues.
Although your ISP's service agreement probably explicitly states that you're not permitted to do this..
I signed up recently to get the NHL GameCenter app. Basically it would let me stream games. My laptop didn't quite handle the high quality stream smoothly. I was hooking that to the TV previously. Since ps3/nhl had an exclusive agreement, this was the only way to go. Well, a week after buying the app, a new console firmware is released. That breaks the app. So it was a good month before that started working again. Now, ignoring the fact that the quality was actually worse than with my laptop, that really sucked. Now the network is down so, again, it doesn't work. And bonus, my information is compromised. I'm starting to get a little annoyed!
No one has.
The main target for ARM will be touch-tablets. It's likely that emulation would be fast enough to handle the old legacy apps. They were built for slower computers after all. If you were to put win8 on a ipad like device, the app-store could sandbox things in the same way that win phone 7's x-app system does. For native stuff, If MS releases a decent compiler, I don't see any reason why companies like adobe wouldn't offer arm versions as well to avoid the emulation layer. And besides, it's hard to know how well a comparatively slow ARM chip will be at emulating x86 code. One advantage is they'll typically be paired with SSDs rather than traditional hard disks. By the time win8 ships, a dual-core ARM with an SSD will probably be mid-level hardware. They aren't doing this to target the very high-end. I'd consider the original ipad to be a mid-grade device now, and perhaps a good min-level target for win8. We know that IO heavy apps perform orders of magnitude better with an SSD. That might be enough of a boost that most any event-driven legacy x86 app will still feel pretty quick and responsive, even with that emulation overhead. And hopefully the JIT/natively-compiled and sandboxed games perform well as well!
Since when has public/private key encryption been consider obfuscation? The protocol is shared with companies building airplay products. Presumably different products get different but valid keys. If you want to emulate a device, you need to reverse-engineer the hardware to find the key. Since it's a consumer product, eventually someone will be able to extract the key. It's about protecting the product from duplication. Making it open doesn't exactly stop people from making cheap knockoffs.
You can get a cheap USB sound card for $15 that'll give you outputs. Presumably if you're running a linux-based firmware, there should be some acceptable driver/hardware combination for this. I have a switch behind my stereo to split things up for the 360, ps3, etc. It'd be rather nice to have airplay support going directly from the router into the receiver. I can't wait to see someone hack this together!
Let's see someone add airplay support to the ps3. See how many companies can get pissed off at once. If you play it right, they could be goaded into fighting each other. Fingers crossed! Maybe these companies will finally deliver something entertaining to watch :)
I'd say a more likely time would be when PCs have parity with the console in terms of the ecosystem. That'll happen when software can be released on the PC without rampant piracy. I don't know what it will take for that to happen. Perhaps graphics cards will be "xbox compatible" and have the added ability of handling an encrypted game. I'm not thrilled about that in many ways. But also, having a full end-to-end and secure ecosystem is a massive money maker (I work in software). I would imagine something like this might show up in the Windows 9 time frame, something that will align with a new console launch. The PC can still do everything it can now, but unless you can lock down an ecosystem, with a few notable exceptions, there's absolutely no reason for developers to release a blockbuster on the PC.
But the upshot is, I see a future where the PC can replace the console in the living room. It would sure reduce my hardware costs if I wasn't maintaining several PCs, a laptop, a 360, a ps3, and a wii. Or at least, there would be a lot less redundancy in my living room. I could probably justify a few extra panels rather than consoles in there :)
Did you not notice that the companies here license their technology? When Epic makes a blockbuster game, they're proving their technology for others to follow. You can expect them to dive into state of the art PC development as a proving ground for the next generation of consoles. Similarly, you can see them working on projects targeting the next generation of mobile devices. But they will always be looking at the most recent top of the line PCs. That's how they get people interested in licensing their technology for the next console generation.
It's a neat benchmark of our progress in robotics but humans have never been fast runners. Our advantage is that we can maintain a decent pace for extended periods of time. Many animals which are much faster sprinters would completely fail to keep up with humans over large distances. So while I'm impressed, it's more of a neat fact than a major milestone.
"Cell phones will be automatically registered at cell towers as soon as they are switched on." ... err, as they usually do? Since otherwise, how would the cell company know how to route a call for you?
Sort of. I think the new part of this is the aggregation of the data. Taking data from multiple companies, doing it live, anonymized, and into a central database/server farm for analytics. It takes a lot of work from a technical and political perspective to make that all work without huge privacy questions. But the improvements to traffic monitoring, route-finding, civil engineering, academic research, etc are huge. I hope they're able to do great things.
Well McAfee was just purchased by Intel. I'm sure they realize the software market is being squeezed by MSE/forefront. But on the other hand, they have the unique position of being able to look at things from the hardware side. Perhaps there will be a need/market for core AV strengths in the new world of mobile devices and cloud computing hardware. Perhaps hardware encryption, better app sandboxing, etc will play a role. Tighter hardware/software integration could be a key feature in moving towards safer environments. Perhaps these AV engineers will still be in demand and needed to develop and manage solutions for the cloud. Take something like hotmail or gmail as an example. I would never recommend a free email service to someone if I didn't trust them to maintain high quality spam/virus filtering.
There's a lot of room for these companies. I just hope we get away from installing crappy trials on new PCs. But the way things are going, I would imagine we'll see a near-term increase as more and more companies fight for subscribers in a new cloud world. And that fight will mostly be waged with advertising dollars. Sigh :)
While I find the term "web-powered" quite painful, we do call plenty of things "web services." In this case, I would assume that's how this is implemented. These days, services are beginning to unify their APIs. Rich clients and ajax-based browser app are starting to share the same web service APIs. So if it's implemented as a web service, I wouldn't take offense to the term "web-powered," even though it reeks of marketing.
Well, here's a difference. Mobile is different because a faster consumer alternative exists. If phones did more to preload content over wifi at home, we wouldn't be so bored on the go. For example, instead of the youtube app streaming everything, cache your subscriptions, reddit frontpage videos, etc while on wifi. Dedicating say 1GB of phone storage and 5GB/month of broadband to caching would probably cut the average user's mobile consumption by half. Perhaps more in some cases. In addition, it would really improve the user's experience. Instead of staring at loading bars on the bus, you'll find your phone cached a bunch of stuff overnight or at work/school. Honestly, it'd be a nice feature. As far as I'm concerned, the less I have to transfer over mobile, the better. Because when I do have to transfer media, it's basically a last resort. I honestly hate high-bandwidth applications on my phone. The experience always sucks.
And I think that's a fair thing to do. I just wish the mobile operators would focus on improving efficiency rather than limiting plans.
I think it comes down to a level of understanding. Perhaps one solution is to make many administrator functions require user authorization. For example, if I worked at an accounting company and had a ton of sensitive documents, an administrator might need a sponsor's permission to view those files. Perhaps the documents are not ACLed for them or my manager, but combined, they could access them. I think the threat is data security. At the moment, any domain admin can access anything on my machine. Since they really don't need access to anything in my user folder, I think it'd be fair to limit that. The people with physical access to data-center machines are all screened by serious background checks. They're trusted about as much as possible. But down the road, I can see full disk encryption with distributed services making physical access much less of a concern. At that point, if a user can understand what an administrator is doing, they can self-audit what people have done/looked at on their work machine. After all, the end-user is the best person to evaluate if something should have been done. It's just that logs and authorization requests are too vague and technical for those users. In most cases, a plain english explanation exists. If the system could phrase access requests in a task oriented fashion, that'd be much easier. A dialog asking for permission to 500 random files vs a "install latest version of Word" or "gathering documents for legal audit" would be a huge change.
Well, only the 2nd paragraph in seems block a good number of people from even applying.
"The regulations also specify punishments in case of violations. These include the obligatory publishing of corrections, fines and bans for various time periods, including total bans. Applicants for licenses need to be Saudi, no less than 20 years of age, have high school certificates in the least and documents testifying to their good behavior. Online newspapers also need to employ editors in chief who have been approved by the Ministry of Information and Culture."
all the marketplace crash logs :)
Nope, the rules are different if you have a monopoly in a given market.
What you say is in line with my traditional view of alpha/beta. I think you need to accept that it's a lot more complicated than that in large software projects. Often betas are released to get customer feedback. That's an important feedback loop if you really want to nail your scenarios. Sometimes you're simply missing something.
But in this case, yea, I'd tend to agree that a lot of features are landing late. If they were being stabilized and turned on by default, that would be a lot different. Oh well.
Testers don't write product code.
Microsoft already has an app store for windows mobile. This isn't the win phone 7 / iphone / android / blackberry market.
In other words, Microsoft is entering into the "feature phone / messaging phone / multimedia phone" market. Prior to this, they've only been making a smart phone OS.
I feel disconnected when I forget my phone when I go to the bathroom. A full weekend? I'd probably kill myself.