Considering how central Red Hat is to GNOME development, and with GNOME being the default desktop of RHEL (still GNOME 2, last I heard, but of course RHEL is extremely conservative) the central tendency of any Red Hat employee is going to be to use GNOME. Most Red Hat software is GTK/GNOME based, after all. It shows much about how broken for many people GNOME 3 has been that even a Red Hat employee was using KDE. If GNOME 3 now has a mode built-in that's usable by him (as opposed back when the GNOME developers were publicly decrying the Extensions folks and saying they'd never integrate such features), the implicit pressure will be for him to use it.
But tens or hundreds of thousands of phone miners would. Finally, a step #2 for the classic
1. Hack big company's website
2. ???
3. Profit!
And considering how bloated most big companies' websites are, nobody would even notice.
Your example of Valve proves a different point, however. In the cases where it works, it can be extremely effective, but it takes a high calibre of talent (and much of that talent is interpersonal communications and self-awareness) to pull it off.
NPR's Planet Money had a great story about it just a few months ago.
Dealers contribute a big share of state sales tax revenues — as much as 20 percent in some states — and they tend to be big local employers. That makes state and local legislators listen.
It's definitely worth listening to the story, as there's a rich and interesting history that leads to the rather broken present reality in the States.
It's apparently the graphical design that's at issue, not the name. According to Wikipedia, "Gene Roddenberry's contract included a clause allowing any company able to create functioning technology to use the name". Now that GR is dead, I guess CBS believes they own swoopy curves.
Since I don't have legal weasels of my own, or the time to deal with this, that's it for Tricorder.
It's far from clear that CBS has any copyright on LCARS, it's more that any entity like CBS with enough money to throw at the legal system can get away with claiming such, and random people just have to go along with it thanks to the way our legal system works.
I swear that when they demonstrated voice search with Google Now on desktops during Google I/O last week, the computer read out the resulting query in Majel Barrett's voice.
AOL reads your messages. Google reads your messages. Facebook reads your messages. Apple reads your messages. Microsoft reads your messages.
How is this news? The price for free IM is that they read your messages and sell the info they gather to advertisers.
I'd be more okay with it if all these vendors offering free services didn't leverage-out the ability of a person to run their own IM servers. They lock down interoperability (with the partial exception of Google) and promote their proprietary-but-"free" IM solutions. I don't know about you, but I happen to want to talk to people who aren't bearded FOSS hippies like myself, and most people use these services . . . so it's not just "you didn't pay for it, so you're the product, shut up."
As far as I understand it, DRM in HTML5 would be like the Video tag; no actual specific format specified, just a standardized method for declaring its existence. Just as people can put proprietary, patent-encumbered video formats in an html video tag, so too could they with the DRM standard in HTML5. Folks would still have to install or have proprietary DRM blobs/programs of sorts for any of this to work. Ironically, this puts DRM in webpages potentially even less tied to web technologies, as they'll be passed through to OS-provided methods.
I'll get an Aura if I can strip out the damn Kobo software (which, for several generations, hasn't worked for me; I've literally made Kobos crash with random PDFs and such, and the interface in general has seemed atrocious). But there are some decent launchers and apps out there, hell just on F-Droid so I wouldn't even need to get Google services on, just a hack-to-stock mod and a few pieces of custom software like ReLaunch and FBReader perhaps. Then ownCloud or whatever to sync my books et voila, side-loaded synced e-ink tablet with a great screen. So I hope to hell somebody roots this.
Foisting the interface-formerly-known-as-Metro on everybody is a good idea for the same fundamental reason it's a bad idea: people use what they're familiar with.
(TL;DR: Microsoft is sacrificing their classic market---which they probably rightfully assume will dwindle significantly sooner or later---to forcibly kickstart their "post-PC" (ughh) market.)
Microsoft could have the tablets default to Notro and the desktops/laptops default to Desktop, but then people would just keep on buying Windows for their mouse+keyboard computers and iOS and Android devices for their personal touchscreen computers. Eventually, as the overwhelming majority of users switched over to touchscreen devices for their intensive Facebook posting and YouTube watching (not to mention Pinterest pinning and Twitter tweeting), they'd stop buying Windows PCs and move over exclusively to what I'll doggedly insist on calling Android and iOS "personal computers".
So (assuming they're realistic instead of naive) Microsoft is taking a hit now, figuring that the blow Windows 8 receives is at worst just a slow speedup of the migration away from the "desktop", but more likely just less people buying newer Windows PCs in the short term. Of the people that do buy Windows 8 computers, they'll (mostly against their will) become familiar with the why-didn't-they-think-of-a-replacement-name-for-Metro interface, which gives Windows Phone and Windows RT a better chance of adoption as casual computer users (ie. most) migrate to systems that are both literally and conceptually lighter-weight.
The only way DRM can work if if you make the decrypted video uncaptureable. So on any system where the root user can read the frame buffer there is no point. HTML5 DRM will only work on systems that have DRM build in to the OS, which is pretty much the same systems that have silverlight.
The only way i can see it ever getting to linux is if the encrypted stream can be passed to rights managed hardware on a GPU. but then if i have a GPU that can effectively play the encrypted stream, why would i ever worry about decrypting it in the first place, i could dump the network stream to disk, and play back through GPU whenever I wanted.
All companies like Netflix need to be able to say is "look, it's DRM'd!" and the content industry suits will breathe a sigh of relief, and continue under the assumption that DRM ever does anything. That is as long as people like you don't shout from the rooftops that it won't work, sheesh! Stop ruining it for the rest of us.
Why the hell does TheOldReader not have an API? "We're working on an iOS app" just doesn't cut it for the kind of crazy weirdos (like me) that use Google Reader.
I mean, hell, even on my Nokia N9---a platform stabbed and left to die bleeding by the side of the road---there are multiple Google Reader syncing RSS clients. That's what I want Google Reader for, as a central sync repository for my RSS feed reading (some on a desktop at home, some on a desktop at work, some on a tablet, some on a phone, some on my e-reader, etc etc). If sites like TheOldReader are just a website and, at best, an app or two they write themselves for a few of the largest platforms then they're nearly as useless to me as Google Reader will soon be.
NewsBlur seems slightly better in that their apps for the mainstream platforms already exist, but that's still extremely weak compared to the flexibility of interface and location that the current Google Reader + APIs have allowed for.
Wait, what? My Telus DSL line has no cap whatsoever; my cell service with Wind has a soft-cap at 5GB (ie. no extra charges, but traffic is de-prioritized). I guess I'm just living in a bubble with exceptional no-longer-offered plans . . . or maybe most people don't try hard enough to find a decent plan. Okay, fair enough.
P.S. I think most people lock their wifi because they think that 'damn thiefs' are why their youtubes are so slow. Ironically though it's only recently that I've seen WEP starting to disappear . . . only to be replaced by WiFi Protected Setup networks, which in many respects are even *less* secure. Now, I doubt you're going to have injection-capable drivers on a Microsoft tablet, but you'd better believe I'd take advantage of that if I didn't just have a $35 unlimited data plan for my cell anyways. Hell, I've used it a few times since Google annoyingly locked non-Infrastructure-mode networking out of Android, so my Nexus 7 could never connect to my cellphone, but I'm starting to ramble now.
Point is, things aren't *so* bad. Hell, having broken my N7 by tripping over my roommate's cat, I'm tempted to get one of the new HSPA+ Nexus 7s, and just pay the $35 for a mobile data plan with a 10GB-down soft-cap. That'd put me at 5GB soft on my phone, 10GB soft on my tablet, and unlimited on my (admittedly only 700KBps in practice) DSL line. In principle the telecommunications industry here in Canada is atrocious, but in practice I don't have anything directly to complain about.
"They have to", eh? So that's why they're suing the Apfelkind cafe in Bonn, Germany? Despite its logo in no way (other than being an apple...what a shock) the Apple logo? And despite the fact that under German trademark law, you don't have to aggressively (or, in fact, at all) enforce a trademark to keep your right to it?
Honestly, at this point I'm starting to think that the legal department is looking at the tends of billions of dollars Apple has in the bank and trying to be as aggressive as possible to get as much of that flow of wealth directed towards themselves. I don't even entirely blame them, it's human nature. But then again, so is being a dick.
I want a desktop environment that plays well with multiple monitors and several open applications (each of which having multiple windows that I will want on screen at the same time, and selectable from a central location in the fewest clicks possible, with the task of exact identification handled without needing a click on most instances).
You know, what Gnome 2 did quite well and what MS/Explorer has handled fine enough for over a decade.
KDE 4 does this perfectly fine (KDE 3.5 did too, and KDE 4.0->~4.3 had some issues, but modern KDE 4 does all this easily with multiple monitors (which is good for me, since of the three main computers I use, all three have at least two monitors; it's what made me hold on to KDE 3.5 as long as I did).
And indeed, that's why Android doesn't really interest me much at the moment. If they open up the source code again, I might become interested again. In the meantime, it doesn't really "integrate" with my "ecosystem" (to use the terminology the popular kids are using these days) so whatever. Meanwhile the KDE folk have just released the first version of their tablet-oriented variant, now THAT's a tablet OS I can get behind (ie. Linux with a sane and standard userland).
After releasing Linux versions of all their previous engine versions, and claiming beforehand that they would for Unreal Engine 3 as well, there's still been no movement on UE3 for Linux. For years now. At first it was also out for PS3, and I thought that was insulting enough (also using an OpenGL renderer, etc). Then it came out for iOS, all UNIX-like and such, and I thought it couldn't get more insulting. Then OSX, despite the original OSX version of UE2 being essentially a port from Linux. OSX and Linux are so damn similar from a game engine standpoint, and back in the days of UT2004 the Linux userbase was over double the OSX userbase, so I figured this OSX port was the most insulting this could get. Then the Android port came along, and I was like, "Jesus Carmack they've literally ported it PAST desktop Linux now." THAT, I figured, was finally the absolute most insulting and demeaning way they could treat their former Linux-using fans.
You'll notice a pattern; despite my cynicism (I never quite believed them that they'd release that promised Linux version, and after they stopped affirming the possibility I entirely gave up hope), each time they ported it to a new platform I foolishly assumed that it was the most insulting overlooking of Linux that they could do. Each time afterwards they found another way to push it even further. I have no idea what could be even MORE ridiculous than continuing to ignore Linux while porting it all the way to Adobe goddamn FLASH but at this point I think it's clear that they'll find something. Probably Silverlight.
Back when the development branch first added VDPAU support, I got a cheap passively-cooled GeForce 8400GS PCI card and slapped it into an old PIII 600-mHz (overclocked to 733, yeeeaahhhh boyyy!), booting directly into XBMC without any desktop environment. Runs like a charm, outputting 720p over the DVI output fed into the HDMI input on my projector (which is natively 720p, hence no higher res used), the only annoying bit was that at first I was having to compile it from source, which believe me, takes quite a long time on a PIII, haha. Luckily these days it's all packaged in the official PPA.
Someone already linked to the source in the comments here, but I missed it my first read through. I guess we'll see if CBS goes after them for this, but I'm tempted to host the source myself if they do . . . I mean, seriously now, preventing someone from distributing a legitimately working (albeit far from the in-canon capabilities) Tricorder seems pretty contrary to Gene Roddenberry's wishes.
Having the APK is all well and good, but what about the source? Sadly it's already down from http://code.google.com/p/moonblink/wiki/Tricorder but we need to preserve the source code in case future Android revisions necessitate code changes . . . and this app is on of the few "apps" in the world that actually makes a case for apps existing.
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Considering how central Red Hat is to GNOME development, and with GNOME being the default desktop of RHEL (still GNOME 2, last I heard, but of course RHEL is extremely conservative) the central tendency of any Red Hat employee is going to be to use GNOME. Most Red Hat software is GTK/GNOME based, after all. It shows much about how broken for many people GNOME 3 has been that even a Red Hat employee was using KDE. If GNOME 3 now has a mode built-in that's usable by him (as opposed back when the GNOME developers were publicly decrying the Extensions folks and saying they'd never integrate such features), the implicit pressure will be for him to use it.
Outnumbered, sure.
Outgunned, err, not so much.
But tens or hundreds of thousands of phone miners would. Finally, a step #2 for the classic 1. Hack big company's website 2. ??? 3. Profit! And considering how bloated most big companies' websites are, nobody would even notice.
Your example of Valve proves a different point, however. In the cases where it works, it can be extremely effective, but it takes a high calibre of talent (and much of that talent is interpersonal communications and self-awareness) to pull it off.
It's definitely worth listening to the story, as there's a rich and interesting history that leads to the rather broken present reality in the States.
The original post about the takedown request can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20111130013603/http://code.google.com/p/moonblink/wiki/Tricorder. It says in part,
It's far from clear that CBS has any copyright on LCARS, it's more that any entity like CBS with enough money to throw at the legal system can get away with claiming such, and random people just have to go along with it thanks to the way our legal system works.
I swear the demonstration of Google Now voice search at Google I/O last week had Majel Barrett's voice reading back the search query.
I swear that when they demonstrated voice search with Google Now on desktops during Google I/O last week, the computer read out the resulting query in Majel Barrett's voice.
AOL reads your messages. Google reads your messages. Facebook reads your messages. Apple reads your messages. Microsoft reads your messages. How is this news? The price for free IM is that they read your messages and sell the info they gather to advertisers.
I'd be more okay with it if all these vendors offering free services didn't leverage-out the ability of a person to run their own IM servers. They lock down interoperability (with the partial exception of Google) and promote their proprietary-but-"free" IM solutions. I don't know about you, but I happen to want to talk to people who aren't bearded FOSS hippies like myself, and most people use these services . . . so it's not just "you didn't pay for it, so you're the product, shut up."
I was with you until the Unicode error...you posting from Windows? Pot, kettle?
...emphasis on the "-ish"?
FTFY.
As far as I understand it, DRM in HTML5 would be like the Video tag; no actual specific format specified, just a standardized method for declaring its existence. Just as people can put proprietary, patent-encumbered video formats in an html video tag, so too could they with the DRM standard in HTML5. Folks would still have to install or have proprietary DRM blobs/programs of sorts for any of this to work. Ironically, this puts DRM in webpages potentially even less tied to web technologies, as they'll be passed through to OS-provided methods.
I'll get an Aura if I can strip out the damn Kobo software (which, for several generations, hasn't worked for me; I've literally made Kobos crash with random PDFs and such, and the interface in general has seemed atrocious). But there are some decent launchers and apps out there, hell just on F-Droid so I wouldn't even need to get Google services on, just a hack-to-stock mod and a few pieces of custom software like ReLaunch and FBReader perhaps. Then ownCloud or whatever to sync my books et voila, side-loaded synced e-ink tablet with a great screen. So I hope to hell somebody roots this.
Foisting the interface-formerly-known-as-Metro on everybody is a good idea for the same fundamental reason it's a bad idea: people use what they're familiar with.
(TL;DR: Microsoft is sacrificing their classic market---which they probably rightfully assume will dwindle significantly sooner or later---to forcibly kickstart their "post-PC" (ughh) market.)
Microsoft could have the tablets default to Notro and the desktops/laptops default to Desktop, but then people would just keep on buying Windows for their mouse+keyboard computers and iOS and Android devices for their personal touchscreen computers. Eventually, as the overwhelming majority of users switched over to touchscreen devices for their intensive Facebook posting and YouTube watching (not to mention Pinterest pinning and Twitter tweeting), they'd stop buying Windows PCs and move over exclusively to what I'll doggedly insist on calling Android and iOS "personal computers".
So (assuming they're realistic instead of naive) Microsoft is taking a hit now, figuring that the blow Windows 8 receives is at worst just a slow speedup of the migration away from the "desktop", but more likely just less people buying newer Windows PCs in the short term. Of the people that do buy Windows 8 computers, they'll (mostly against their will) become familiar with the why-didn't-they-think-of-a-replacement-name-for-Metro interface, which gives Windows Phone and Windows RT a better chance of adoption as casual computer users (ie. most) migrate to systems that are both literally and conceptually lighter-weight.
The only way DRM can work if if you make the decrypted video uncaptureable. So on any system where the root user can read the frame buffer there is no point. HTML5 DRM will only work on systems that have DRM build in to the OS, which is pretty much the same systems that have silverlight.
The only way i can see it ever getting to linux is if the encrypted stream can be passed to rights managed hardware on a GPU. but then if i have a GPU that can effectively play the encrypted stream, why would i ever worry about decrypting it in the first place, i could dump the network stream to disk, and play back through GPU whenever I wanted.
All companies like Netflix need to be able to say is "look, it's DRM'd!" and the content industry suits will breathe a sigh of relief, and continue under the assumption that DRM ever does anything. That is as long as people like you don't shout from the rooftops that it won't work, sheesh! Stop ruining it for the rest of us.
Why the hell does TheOldReader not have an API? "We're working on an iOS app" just doesn't cut it for the kind of crazy weirdos (like me) that use Google Reader.
I mean, hell, even on my Nokia N9---a platform stabbed and left to die bleeding by the side of the road---there are multiple Google Reader syncing RSS clients. That's what I want Google Reader for, as a central sync repository for my RSS feed reading (some on a desktop at home, some on a desktop at work, some on a tablet, some on a phone, some on my e-reader, etc etc). If sites like TheOldReader are just a website and, at best, an app or two they write themselves for a few of the largest platforms then they're nearly as useless to me as Google Reader will soon be.
NewsBlur seems slightly better in that their apps for the mainstream platforms already exist, but that's still extremely weak compared to the flexibility of interface and location that the current Google Reader + APIs have allowed for.
Wait, what? My Telus DSL line has no cap whatsoever; my cell service with Wind has a soft-cap at 5GB (ie. no extra charges, but traffic is de-prioritized). I guess I'm just living in a bubble with exceptional no-longer-offered plans . . . or maybe most people don't try hard enough to find a decent plan. Okay, fair enough.
P.S. I think most people lock their wifi because they think that 'damn thiefs' are why their youtubes are so slow. Ironically though it's only recently that I've seen WEP starting to disappear . . . only to be replaced by WiFi Protected Setup networks, which in many respects are even *less* secure. Now, I doubt you're going to have injection-capable drivers on a Microsoft tablet, but you'd better believe I'd take advantage of that if I didn't just have a $35 unlimited data plan for my cell anyways. Hell, I've used it a few times since Google annoyingly locked non-Infrastructure-mode networking out of Android, so my Nexus 7 could never connect to my cellphone, but I'm starting to ramble now.
Point is, things aren't *so* bad. Hell, having broken my N7 by tripping over my roommate's cat, I'm tempted to get one of the new HSPA+ Nexus 7s, and just pay the $35 for a mobile data plan with a 10GB-down soft-cap. That'd put me at 5GB soft on my phone, 10GB soft on my tablet, and unlimited on my (admittedly only 700KBps in practice) DSL line. In principle the telecommunications industry here in Canada is atrocious, but in practice I don't have anything directly to complain about.
"They have to", eh? So that's why they're suing the Apfelkind cafe in Bonn, Germany? Despite its logo in no way (other than being an apple...what a shock) the Apple logo? And despite the fact that under German trademark law, you don't have to aggressively (or, in fact, at all) enforce a trademark to keep your right to it?
Honestly, at this point I'm starting to think that the legal department is looking at the tends of billions of dollars Apple has in the bank and trying to be as aggressive as possible to get as much of that flow of wealth directed towards themselves. I don't even entirely blame them, it's human nature. But then again, so is being a dick.
I want a desktop environment that plays well with multiple monitors and several open applications (each of which having multiple windows that I will want on screen at the same time, and selectable from a central location in the fewest clicks possible, with the task of exact identification handled without needing a click on most instances). You know, what Gnome 2 did quite well and what MS/Explorer has handled fine enough for over a decade.
KDE 4 does this perfectly fine (KDE 3.5 did too, and KDE 4.0->~4.3 had some issues, but modern KDE 4 does all this easily with multiple monitors (which is good for me, since of the three main computers I use, all three have at least two monitors; it's what made me hold on to KDE 3.5 as long as I did).
And indeed, that's why Android doesn't really interest me much at the moment. If they open up the source code again, I might become interested again. In the meantime, it doesn't really "integrate" with my "ecosystem" (to use the terminology the popular kids are using these days) so whatever. Meanwhile the KDE folk have just released the first version of their tablet-oriented variant, now THAT's a tablet OS I can get behind (ie. Linux with a sane and standard userland).
After releasing Linux versions of all their previous engine versions, and claiming beforehand that they would for Unreal Engine 3 as well, there's still been no movement on UE3 for Linux. For years now. At first it was also out for PS3, and I thought that was insulting enough (also using an OpenGL renderer, etc). Then it came out for iOS, all UNIX-like and such, and I thought it couldn't get more insulting. Then OSX, despite the original OSX version of UE2 being essentially a port from Linux. OSX and Linux are so damn similar from a game engine standpoint, and back in the days of UT2004 the Linux userbase was over double the OSX userbase, so I figured this OSX port was the most insulting this could get. Then the Android port came along, and I was like, "Jesus Carmack they've literally ported it PAST desktop Linux now." THAT, I figured, was finally the absolute most insulting and demeaning way they could treat their former Linux-using fans.
You'll notice a pattern; despite my cynicism (I never quite believed them that they'd release that promised Linux version, and after they stopped affirming the possibility I entirely gave up hope), each time they ported it to a new platform I foolishly assumed that it was the most insulting overlooking of Linux that they could do. Each time afterwards they found another way to push it even further. I have no idea what could be even MORE ridiculous than continuing to ignore Linux while porting it all the way to Adobe goddamn FLASH but at this point I think it's clear that they'll find something. Probably Silverlight.
Back when the development branch first added VDPAU support, I got a cheap passively-cooled GeForce 8400GS PCI card and slapped it into an old PIII 600-mHz (overclocked to 733, yeeeaahhhh boyyy!), booting directly into XBMC without any desktop environment. Runs like a charm, outputting 720p over the DVI output fed into the HDMI input on my projector (which is natively 720p, hence no higher res used), the only annoying bit was that at first I was having to compile it from source, which believe me, takes quite a long time on a PIII, haha. Luckily these days it's all packaged in the official PPA.
Someone already linked to the source in the comments here, but I missed it my first read through. I guess we'll see if CBS goes after them for this, but I'm tempted to host the source myself if they do . . . I mean, seriously now, preventing someone from distributing a legitimately working (albeit far from the in-canon capabilities) Tricorder seems pretty contrary to Gene Roddenberry's wishes.
Having the APK is all well and good, but what about the source? Sadly it's already down from http://code.google.com/p/moonblink/wiki/Tricorder but we need to preserve the source code in case future Android revisions necessitate code changes . . . and this app is on of the few "apps" in the world that actually makes a case for apps existing.