What does this mean? That once an organized effort is providing all the starving people with food, private individuals no longer throw money at a lucky few?
It sounds like complaining that the professional firemen push out citizen fire brigades. That's the whole point of it.
I suspect that the lack of Linux games is that no one believes those millions of potential customers actually represent millions of customers.
A significant percentage of Linux users are freedom-only. They are out.
A significant percentage are the older unix-admin turned Linux user. Most of them fall outside the gaming generation.
A significant percentage are the experimental programmer types who are unlikely to have a stable system to target.
So for anything too complex for lowest-common hardware (software rendering won't cut it) or that isn't suitable for allowing the user to recompile themselves (anything with online or competitive play) the visible market is... small.
And the open source model doesn't really work for games. A 90% working beta program is potentialy useful. A 90% working beta game is something that crashes at the load screen and won't let you properly complete the first quest.
Apple wouldn't allow it? There are no mouse adapters because iOS has no cursor. The OS itself is mouse-less. What would you push around the screen? The non-existent cursor graphic?
Anything that involves money coming out of your iTunes account also requires a password. If you have given your 6-year-old the password to a real-money account you deserve whatever you get.
From the description, I suspect the notification was more along the lines of "If you catch a student stealing a laptop, see if they are on this list before you call the cops" and not "sure, they can take whatever they want"
Yeah, just like the 'professional photography' market there is no way a small group of professionals could every justify a market big enough to allow expensive equipment to be sold at a profit... Oh, wait, yes they can.
That's because tv has its roots in radio productions. The style and writing still reflect that. Try the same with a good film and it works the other way. Most well shot films can be followed without sound where as just the audio track is meaningless. That's because films are rooted in silent films which in turn grew out of photography.
Mic's will never work because they fail on this usage case: If you have an accent the software is fucked.
That's one of the reasons Siri is interesting. Apple will posess the largest spoken-word database in the history of English (or any other language). There is all sorts of interesting and fun things that could let them do
Why? It kept their system from being cracked for four years. The Xbox 360 and Wii were both cracked within a year of release. And every indication is that if Sony had not pulled OtherOS support the PS3 would have remained the only current generation console to remain secure.
So why do you consider the initial support a mistake?
Go re-read the background on OtherOS. Or even the PS3 Wikipedia article. PS3 didn't get 'hacked' until after they pulled official support for OtherOS. Until then, the PS3 had been out for four years without a single public method for running unsigned code. All indications are that everyone with the skills to jailbreak the machine to run game backups were perfectly happy playing around with the official third party tools.
Sony had tossed the hacker community a bone and a respectful nod. In return everyone was happy playing nice.
In April 2010, Sony announced they were retroactively pulling support for OtherOS because fuck you, that's why. They were then sued because in much of the civilized word it is illegal to remove advertised features after you sell a product.
By August 2010 the PS3 was broken open like an oyster.
Users didn't like package managers until a couple companies had the bright idea to make versions that were more than a glorified command line.
Steam and the Apple App Store are to dpkg (and similar tools) what an office suite is to notepad. Things like visual previews, robust searches and categories, and comprehensive descriptions are more than cosmetic improvements. They are the difference between a good idea and a mature implementation.
No, Apple thinks they are special and want to pay the publicly stated license terms. Samsung wants them to do what everyone else does and cut a side deal that waives license fees in exchange for patent and IP cross-licensing.
Design patents are hard to enforce. Really, really hard. One of the reasons you don't hear about them much is that they are damn near impossible to violate, except intentionally, and even harder to get a court ruling on. It's one of those things where if the judge doesn't laugh it out of the room int he first five minutes there is probably a good case. This case has been going on for months. At this point I think the better assumption is that the judge has been able to see more evidence and arguments than can be summed up even a dozen Slashdot articles, and he doesn't think it's a waste of his time.
Except that Apple chose to ignore licensing the 3G F/RAND patents for the first several years of the existence of the iPhone, and is now complaining to the courts that they should just be able to pay the same fees that everyone else gets.
Sort of... but not really. Almost none of the big players pay standard F/RAND patent fees. In almost all cases Samsung (or other holders of equivalent licenses) cuts a side deal where in exchange for the fees being waived or lowered Samsung gets to cross-license other patents. Nokia and Motorola do similar things with standards based on their patents. This is business as usual.
So it was a hell of shock when Apple came to market with a completely new product without having ever approached the license holders to set up this sort of agreement. It was just assumed that any company would prefer to do a licensing agreement than pay the standard fees. It had never even crossed their minds that Apple would (or could) just pay the fees up front instead. It's one of the reasons you hear people talking about Apple bringing the iPhone to market before they had negotiated the licenses. Apple didn't need to negotiate anything because standard F/RAND licenses are automatic, the same way you don't need to negotiate before accepting the GPL license on a piece of software. It's just that everyone does negotiate for a better deal in exchange for concessions. Apple didn't ignore the F/RAND licensing, they ignored Samsung's attempts to refuse payment and cut an alternate deal.
And Sumsung doesn't want the license fee. They would much rather have Apple's patent and IP concessions. So they are in the position of trying to force Apple not to accept the publicly available license terms. That's why they are getting their knuckles rapped by the courts here. No different than if a company that released their code under the GPL and then started trying to sue companies who were using it according to the license. Doesn't matter what the other company might have done to provoke them, it's still not going to fly in front of a judge.
This isn't about games being picked out of bargain bin for $5 two or three years after release.
It's about the practice of game stores selling new $60 games, then a couple weeks later buying them back for $8 (or more typically store credit) and re-selling them for $55. It's a practice that sees almost as much money leave consumer pockets but half as much reach the people who actually made the games and is very wide spread. The stores deliberately under-stock new games in order to push people towards the used copies. It's typical to go in a week after release and be told they don't have any new copies, but there are a half dozen used for a couple dollars off.
It's a practice that's bad for the developers, the publishers and fairly bad for the consumers as a whole. Basically bad for everyone but the pawn shops in the middle. It siphons enormous amounts of money out of the industry and is one of the reasons that basically every studio smaller than EA or Ubisoft is forced to sell out or close, regardless of how well liked their games are.
Yes, measures taken to combat this have some nasty collateral damage. No such thing as perfect system in real life.
I don't think they are lying about anything. They are being very clear in what they are doing and why they are doing. People are not happy with what they are doing, but I don't think deception is involved.
That assumes that the average consumer can or should be able to make intelligent decisions about "who he trusts to review and approve apps". In reality it would be the malware company with the biggest marketing budget. The idea that a consumer should first spend weeks getting up to speed in the mapping or racing simulator communities before they can safely try out a couple apps is ridiculous. What you would get instead is friends recommending friends, and all that means is that every person who gets tricked they immediately recommend a few friends to download the same BS.
Because the question in question is not "who can *everyone* trust?", the question is "who can everyone trust not to serve up malware". That is a much easier question to answer. And I think "big company with a lot of resources and a large vested interest in not serving me malware" is a pretty good answer to that question.
Slashdot Mirror
pushes out private charity
What does this mean? That once an organized effort is providing all the starving people with food, private individuals no longer throw money at a lucky few?
It sounds like complaining that the professional firemen push out citizen fire brigades. That's the whole point of it.
I suspect that the lack of Linux games is that no one believes those millions of potential customers actually represent millions of customers.
A significant percentage of Linux users are freedom-only. They are out.
A significant percentage are the older unix-admin turned Linux user. Most of them fall outside the gaming generation.
A significant percentage are the experimental programmer types who are unlikely to have a stable system to target.
So for anything too complex for lowest-common hardware (software rendering won't cut it) or that isn't suitable for allowing the user to recompile themselves (anything with online or competitive play) the visible market is... small.
And the open source model doesn't really work for games. A 90% working beta program is potentialy useful. A 90% working beta game is something that crashes at the load screen and won't let you properly complete the first quest.
Telus does. My father just took a trip to Europe and had Telus unlock his phone first so that he could get a SIM card to use over there. No problem.
That $10 I don't get anymore for turning in the old games no longer goes towards buying new ones.
That's OK. The $40 that someone was going to pay to GameStop for your used copy will.
Apple wouldn't allow it? There are no mouse adapters because iOS has no cursor. The OS itself is mouse-less. What would you push around the screen? The non-existent cursor graphic?
Yeah, and most of those show up on the h.264 supporter lists too. The subset who view this as a either/or choice is a very small subset.
On the one hand, traditional publishing has been dying.
Publishing is always dying. It's famous for how much money it doesn't make.
Because it turns out that it is great for documentation, hence Wikipedia, but a really lousy way to tell a narrative.
Anything that involves money coming out of your iTunes account also requires a password. If you have given your 6-year-old the password to a real-money account you deserve whatever you get.
From the description, I suspect the notification was more along the lines of "If you catch a student stealing a laptop, see if they are on this list before you call the cops" and not "sure, they can take whatever they want"
Yeah, just like the 'professional photography' market there is no way a small group of professionals could every justify a market big enough to allow expensive equipment to be sold at a profit... Oh, wait, yes they can.
That's because tv has its roots in radio productions. The style and writing still reflect that. Try the same with a good film and it works the other way. Most well shot films can be followed without sound where as just the audio track is meaningless. That's because films are rooted in silent films which in turn grew out of photography.
Mic's will never work because they fail on this usage case: If you have an accent the software is fucked.
That's one of the reasons Siri is interesting. Apple will posess the largest spoken-word database in the history of English (or any other language). There is all sorts of interesting and fun things that could let them do
Why? It kept their system from being cracked for four years. The Xbox 360 and Wii were both cracked within a year of release. And every indication is that if Sony had not pulled OtherOS support the PS3 would have remained the only current generation console to remain secure.
So why do you consider the initial support a mistake?
Go re-read the background on OtherOS. Or even the PS3 Wikipedia article. PS3 didn't get 'hacked' until after they pulled official support for OtherOS. Until then, the PS3 had been out for four years without a single public method for running unsigned code. All indications are that everyone with the skills to jailbreak the machine to run game backups were perfectly happy playing around with the official third party tools.
Sony had tossed the hacker community a bone and a respectful nod. In return everyone was happy playing nice.
In April 2010, Sony announced they were retroactively pulling support for OtherOS because fuck you, that's why. They were then sued because in much of the civilized word it is illegal to remove advertised features after you sell a product.
By August 2010 the PS3 was broken open like an oyster.
If I could mod you funny I would...
So then would you care to list the linux package managers that have an interface half as useful as Steam?
Users didn't like package managers until a couple companies had the bright idea to make versions that were more than a glorified command line.
Steam and the Apple App Store are to dpkg (and similar tools) what an office suite is to notepad. Things like visual previews, robust searches and categories, and comprehensive descriptions are more than cosmetic improvements. They are the difference between a good idea and a mature implementation.
No, Apple thinks they are special and want to pay the publicly stated license terms. Samsung wants them to do what everyone else does and cut a side deal that waives license fees in exchange for patent and IP cross-licensing.
Design patents are hard to enforce. Really, really hard. One of the reasons you don't hear about them much is that they are damn near impossible to violate, except intentionally, and even harder to get a court ruling on. It's one of those things where if the judge doesn't laugh it out of the room int he first five minutes there is probably a good case. This case has been going on for months. At this point I think the better assumption is that the judge has been able to see more evidence and arguments than can be summed up even a dozen Slashdot articles, and he doesn't think it's a waste of his time.
Except that Apple chose to ignore licensing the 3G F/RAND patents for the first several years of the existence of the iPhone, and is now complaining to the courts that they should just be able to pay the same fees that everyone else gets.
Sort of... but not really. Almost none of the big players pay standard F/RAND patent fees. In almost all cases Samsung (or other holders of equivalent licenses) cuts a side deal where in exchange for the fees being waived or lowered Samsung gets to cross-license other patents. Nokia and Motorola do similar things with standards based on their patents. This is business as usual.
So it was a hell of shock when Apple came to market with a completely new product without having ever approached the license holders to set up this sort of agreement. It was just assumed that any company would prefer to do a licensing agreement than pay the standard fees. It had never even crossed their minds that Apple would (or could) just pay the fees up front instead. It's one of the reasons you hear people talking about Apple bringing the iPhone to market before they had negotiated the licenses. Apple didn't need to negotiate anything because standard F/RAND licenses are automatic, the same way you don't need to negotiate before accepting the GPL license on a piece of software. It's just that everyone does negotiate for a better deal in exchange for concessions. Apple didn't ignore the F/RAND licensing, they ignored Samsung's attempts to refuse payment and cut an alternate deal.
And Sumsung doesn't want the license fee. They would much rather have Apple's patent and IP concessions. So they are in the position of trying to force Apple not to accept the publicly available license terms. That's why they are getting their knuckles rapped by the courts here. No different than if a company that released their code under the GPL and then started trying to sue companies who were using it according to the license. Doesn't matter what the other company might have done to provoke them, it's still not going to fly in front of a judge.
Well, it has a name that is almost the same as Siri. That makes it a thousand times better! /sarcasm
This isn't about games being picked out of bargain bin for $5 two or three years after release.
It's about the practice of game stores selling new $60 games, then a couple weeks later buying them back for $8 (or more typically store credit) and re-selling them for $55. It's a practice that sees almost as much money leave consumer pockets but half as much reach the people who actually made the games and is very wide spread. The stores deliberately under-stock new games in order to push people towards the used copies. It's typical to go in a week after release and be told they don't have any new copies, but there are a half dozen used for a couple dollars off.
It's a practice that's bad for the developers, the publishers and fairly bad for the consumers as a whole. Basically bad for everyone but the pawn shops in the middle. It siphons enormous amounts of money out of the industry and is one of the reasons that basically every studio smaller than EA or Ubisoft is forced to sell out or close, regardless of how well liked their games are.
Yes, measures taken to combat this have some nasty collateral damage. No such thing as perfect system in real life.
I don't think they are lying about anything. They are being very clear in what they are doing and why they are doing. People are not happy with what they are doing, but I don't think deception is involved.
That assumes that the average consumer can or should be able to make intelligent decisions about "who he trusts to review and approve apps". In reality it would be the malware company with the biggest marketing budget. The idea that a consumer should first spend weeks getting up to speed in the mapping or racing simulator communities before they can safely try out a couple apps is ridiculous. What you would get instead is friends recommending friends, and all that means is that every person who gets tricked they immediately recommend a few friends to download the same BS.
Because the question in question is not "who can *everyone* trust?", the question is "who can everyone trust not to serve up malware". That is a much easier question to answer. And I think "big company with a lot of resources and a large vested interest in not serving me malware" is a pretty good answer to that question.