Meego wasn't Intel's Linux stack, it was Intel's and Nokia's. And now that Nokia has *ehem* changed its strategy to become a Microsoft-only vendor, Meego is dead.
Google has reiterated that they do plan to publish Honeycomb source code. And when they say that it's not ready for the prime time, they actually mean that Honeycomb was rushed to please Motorola and was supposed only to be run on Xoom. That both Xoom and Honeycomb are beta-quality at best is another matter. I believe that it's quite smart of Google to keep Honeycomb source closed: this way, we only have one crappy device with an unfinished OS; if they published the source code right now, we would have hundreds of them.
Actually, I do remember the controversy around Spore's launch quite well. Sure, they raised the limit from 3 PCs to 5. A great victory indeed - they just slightly changed the rules to make the most loud guys shut up in a "Do you really own so many computers?" way. The core principles remained unchanged. And yes, I also know about the Steam version, which is another type of DRM (although I admit it makes many people much less nervous than e.g. SecuROM). And it's the same EA that's involved in the controversy around Dragon Age, so it was a lesson wasted, not learned.
They need to know about their customer dissatisfaction
An excellent point, although one could argue that the bosses of the entertainment industry must have somehow already figured it out that people don't like DRM, it's been shown over and over again for many years that not only DRM is ineffective against piracy, it can actually worsen the situation. Since nothing changes, I must conclude that either those guys aren't listening, or they know about the customer dissatisfaction, but want DRM in their products no matter what. In the former case, there is a faint hope that one day they will pay attention if we yell loud enough. In the latter one, complaining about the restrictions is pretty much useless.
P.S. Do everyone a favor and drop your aggressive tone, okay? No one is forcing you to have this conversation, feel free to leave any time.
How often do you go to a game shop not knowing what exactly are you planning to buy? Besides, you do have a smartphone, don't you? But once again, the main problem here is not that you can't access the EULA text: the problem is that even if the staff in the shop could give you a printed copy in 5 seconds, the absolute majority of gamers would not request it, and out of those who did, most wouldn't be educated in the law enough to understand everything that's written there properly. And most of the tiny percentage of those who did understand the license and its implications would most certainly go into "crap, it's just a game, not a house. I'm buying it and will get my fun anyways" mode.
good luck actually understanding what if any of it is actually enforceable in court.
That's a much stronger point than any other one made in this thread. Even an ordinary gamer can read a EULA in the most comfortable conditions, and even if he does read the license, it will do him no good because he is not a lawyer.
Don't know which country you're in, but mine has a law concerning "fitness for purpose" that overrides anything a business puts in its EULA.
So basically all of that banners in FOSS that claim that "this software comes without any implied warranty, not even a warranty of fitness for a particular purpose" have little legal sense, if any? IANAL, just really curious.
Yes. It focuses attention on the problem.
Whose attention? Nerds already know about it, it's not news for nerds. If someone somehow manages to get the attention of the masses and to make them reaaaally hate DRM and refuse to buy anything infested with it, that's quite a feat. However I honestly doubt that it is a realistic goal, because there's an army of specialists in arts, design, and human psychology employed by the entertainment corporations that work to achieve the opposite result.
While I agree with your sentiment, GP did complain on the inability to read the EULA before opening the game's box. My argument here is exclusively to prove him wrong, not to conduct psychiatric research. Still, if you do publish a paper on this subject in a peer-reviewed journal, please post a follow-up story here on Slashdot!
The mighty and terrible Electronic Arts has a whole goddamn page on the intertubes that has links to EULAs of apparently all of their games. You don't even need to go to a game shop to read the license, if you really wanted to. Now did you?
The game corporations will claim that there is no right to play, and maybe even insert a clause that means roughly that into the EULA. It is their right: if you don't agree with their offer, don't buy it! There are more good games around than you can possibly play in your free time, and there is no lack of other entertainment options either, so please stop whining.
There have always been (and there will always be) shitty or crippled products. Or even otherwise wonderful products that have one huge defect. There will always be stupid managers and lazy engineers. Just walk the other way, don't stick to them - life's too short. In this particular case, every single slashdotter knows that DRM is bad (if you don't, please hand in your geek card on your way out). Do we really need to revel in its failure every single time a major game studio screws its customers?
Since the app's precise purpose is texting, it naturally requests and receives these permissions during installation. Think of it as a third-party texting app, like Handcent SMS: it wouldn't be supercool to have to confirm every single SMS you try to send, would it?
That's a good, though unsurprising decision. Bandwidth should be used for the purposes that the infrastructure has been built for. Recreational uses are completely optional, IMO, and no one sane should expect them to be available during a conflict or a crisis. There's job to be done that you signed up to do, so go ahead and do it. And may God stand between you and harm.
Either Larry Ellison is smart beyond my imagination, or he's too stupid to understand that he's basically killing MySQL, OpenOffice and Java - arguably the three most valuable software assets he bought with Sun.
There are plenty of home router manufacturers; if one would insert ads into processed traffic without compensating the user by substantially lowering the router price, people would just stop buying its hardware. Just being able to do something doesn't immediately make it a good business decision.
If done properly, it would be great. However, the potential for misuse is still pretty high: in the "best" case, the CDN's antivirus software may glitch and trigger removal of harmless content, ruining someone's day. In the worst case, war crime reports may be magically cut out or replaced with pictures of rainbows and unicorns.
I think you missed the point in your rush to object. What's the legal difference (IANAL) between optimizing HTML and inserting ads? In both cases X leaves the source, Y arrives at the destination. Opera does something like this for their Opera Mini browser: the content that is delivered to the browser isn't even HTML, it's some proprietary format, although the browser usually correctly renders it to what the HTML would look like. However, in case of Opera Mini, I explicitly agree to such manipulations and to accompanying technical solutions.
Once again, this may be a good move on Cotendo's part that will lower their costs and improve end user experience, but it is a dangerous one, because if ISPs and CDNs automatically receive the right to manipulate transmitted content however they please, it will certainly lead to abuse in some cases.
It doesn't really matter if it's a technically good move; if this sticks, we might be getting lots of ISP-inserted ads, iframed toolbars and other "value-added" stuff in non-encrypted HTTP traffic pretty soon.
I personally find Instant Search an awesome feature. However, it seems to conflict with an experimental search feature I love (namely, the keyboard shortcuts), so until Google introduces a version that supports both Instant and keyboard shortcuts, the latter feature wins.
Slashdot Mirror
Or is it just another case of the editors not bothering to read the article OR research the basic facts ?
You must be new he...errr, nevermind.
Sorry, I must've been in a hurry to bury MeeGo. The correct answer to the question "where is MeeGo" is "in the next article".
Meego wasn't Intel's Linux stack, it was Intel's and Nokia's. And now that Nokia has *ehem* changed its strategy to become a Microsoft-only vendor, Meego is dead.
Google has reiterated that they do plan to publish Honeycomb source code. And when they say that it's not ready for the prime time, they actually mean that Honeycomb was rushed to please Motorola and was supposed only to be run on Xoom. That both Xoom and Honeycomb are beta-quality at best is another matter. I believe that it's quite smart of Google to keep Honeycomb source closed: this way, we only have one crappy device with an unfinished OS; if they published the source code right now, we would have hundreds of them.
Actually, I do remember the controversy around Spore's launch quite well. Sure, they raised the limit from 3 PCs to 5. A great victory indeed - they just slightly changed the rules to make the most loud guys shut up in a "Do you really own so many computers?" way. The core principles remained unchanged. And yes, I also know about the Steam version, which is another type of DRM (although I admit it makes many people much less nervous than e.g. SecuROM). And it's the same EA that's involved in the controversy around Dragon Age, so it was a lesson wasted, not learned.
They need to know about their customer dissatisfaction
An excellent point, although one could argue that the bosses of the entertainment industry must have somehow already figured it out that people don't like DRM, it's been shown over and over again for many years that not only DRM is ineffective against piracy, it can actually worsen the situation. Since nothing changes, I must conclude that either those guys aren't listening, or they know about the customer dissatisfaction, but want DRM in their products no matter what. In the former case, there is a faint hope that one day they will pay attention if we yell loud enough. In the latter one, complaining about the restrictions is pretty much useless.
P.S. Do everyone a favor and drop your aggressive tone, okay? No one is forcing you to have this conversation, feel free to leave any time.
How often do you go to a game shop not knowing what exactly are you planning to buy? Besides, you do have a smartphone, don't you? But once again, the main problem here is not that you can't access the EULA text: the problem is that even if the staff in the shop could give you a printed copy in 5 seconds, the absolute majority of gamers would not request it, and out of those who did, most wouldn't be educated in the law enough to understand everything that's written there properly. And most of the tiny percentage of those who did understand the license and its implications would most certainly go into "crap, it's just a game, not a house. I'm buying it and will get my fun anyways" mode.
good luck actually understanding what if any of it is actually enforceable in court.
That's a much stronger point than any other one made in this thread. Even an ordinary gamer can read a EULA in the most comfortable conditions, and even if he does read the license, it will do him no good because he is not a lawyer.
Don't know which country you're in, but mine has a law concerning "fitness for purpose" that overrides anything a business puts in its EULA.
So basically all of that banners in FOSS that claim that "this software comes without any implied warranty, not even a warranty of fitness for a particular purpose" have little legal sense, if any? IANAL, just really curious.
Yes. It focuses attention on the problem.
Whose attention? Nerds already know about it, it's not news for nerds. If someone somehow manages to get the attention of the masses and to make them reaaaally hate DRM and refuse to buy anything infested with it, that's quite a feat. However I honestly doubt that it is a realistic goal, because there's an army of specialists in arts, design, and human psychology employed by the entertainment corporations that work to achieve the opposite result.
While I agree with your sentiment, GP did complain on the inability to read the EULA before opening the game's box. My argument here is exclusively to prove him wrong, not to conduct psychiatric research. Still, if you do publish a paper on this subject in a peer-reviewed journal, please post a follow-up story here on Slashdot!
The mighty and terrible Electronic Arts has a whole goddamn page on the intertubes that has links to EULAs of apparently all of their games. You don't even need to go to a game shop to read the license, if you really wanted to. Now did you?
The game corporations will claim that there is no right to play, and maybe even insert a clause that means roughly that into the EULA. It is their right: if you don't agree with their offer, don't buy it! There are more good games around than you can possibly play in your free time, and there is no lack of other entertainment options either, so please stop whining.
There have always been (and there will always be) shitty or crippled products. Or even otherwise wonderful products that have one huge defect. There will always be stupid managers and lazy engineers. Just walk the other way, don't stick to them - life's too short. In this particular case, every single slashdotter knows that DRM is bad (if you don't, please hand in your geek card on your way out). Do we really need to revel in its failure every single time a major game studio screws its customers?
Since the app's precise purpose is texting, it naturally requests and receives these permissions during installation. Think of it as a third-party texting app, like Handcent SMS: it wouldn't be supercool to have to confirm every single SMS you try to send, would it?
That's a good, though unsurprising decision. Bandwidth should be used for the purposes that the infrastructure has been built for. Recreational uses are completely optional, IMO, and no one sane should expect them to be available during a conflict or a crisis. There's job to be done that you signed up to do, so go ahead and do it. And may God stand between you and harm.
Can't wait for this thing to get hooked to App Engine once they are both stable enough. The results will likely be breathtaking, to say the least.
As user narkoz @ habr.ru put it, "you don't get 200,000 classified documents without making a few enemies"
Symbian is dead. No need to wait for Netcraft to confirm it.
It might be an interesting development if in 5 years we abandon both KDE and Gnome, and use ChromiumOS or its forks instead
Thank you for the explanation. I stand corrected.
Either Larry Ellison is smart beyond my imagination, or he's too stupid to understand that he's basically killing MySQL, OpenOffice and Java - arguably the three most valuable software assets he bought with Sun.
There are plenty of home router manufacturers; if one would insert ads into processed traffic without compensating the user by substantially lowering the router price, people would just stop buying its hardware. Just being able to do something doesn't immediately make it a good business decision.
If done properly, it would be great. However, the potential for misuse is still pretty high: in the "best" case, the CDN's antivirus software may glitch and trigger removal of harmless content, ruining someone's day. In the worst case, war crime reports may be magically cut out or replaced with pictures of rainbows and unicorns.
I think you missed the point in your rush to object. What's the legal difference (IANAL) between optimizing HTML and inserting ads? In both cases X leaves the source, Y arrives at the destination. Opera does something like this for their Opera Mini browser: the content that is delivered to the browser isn't even HTML, it's some proprietary format, although the browser usually correctly renders it to what the HTML would look like. However, in case of Opera Mini, I explicitly agree to such manipulations and to accompanying technical solutions.
Once again, this may be a good move on Cotendo's part that will lower their costs and improve end user experience, but it is a dangerous one, because if ISPs and CDNs automatically receive the right to manipulate transmitted content however they please, it will certainly lead to abuse in some cases.
It doesn't really matter if it's a technically good move; if this sticks, we might be getting lots of ISP-inserted ads, iframed toolbars and other "value-added" stuff in non-encrypted HTTP traffic pretty soon.
I personally find Instant Search an awesome feature. However, it seems to conflict with an experimental search feature I love (namely, the keyboard shortcuts), so until Google introduces a version that supports both Instant and keyboard shortcuts, the latter feature wins.