Totally agree - unless you are 100% confident that you know every single thing about every possible question that might arise, it always pays to answer your strongest questions first. That way, if time is limited you've not waste it with useless waffle or spent time you didn't have trying to figure out what they're actually asking (better to do this at the end when you are sure you have time to spare). Once you've been burned by quickly glancing at the number of questions, assuming equal length, allocating X time to each, then finding out the last question asks for a three page essay, you quickly learn to read everything in advance...
In my experience Win7 seems to require fewer resources than Vista - I can't ever imagine Vista on a netbook, but 7 does a nice enough job, and you might not consider all that graphical "bling" to be functionality but it has an overhead (and the Win7 implementation is much better than Vista's was).
It's also possible that Chrome is optimised for Windows as that's the majority share OS - it's where all their benchmarking is going to show up in the marketing metrics for how Chrome is so much faster than everyone else. They likely didn't spend so much time optimising the Linux port because it only had to be fit for purpose.
On a side note, Vista takes almost three minutes to boot to a usable state on my intel core 2 quad core q6600 (overclocked), 4GB desktop PC with a moderate amount of software installed (mostly web development and design tools, apache, a few benchmarking tools, etc). Meanwhile my core 2 duo laptop with 3GB and pretty much the same software installed boots Win7 in around 25 - 30 seconds (when I previously ran XP on the desktop, boot time was probably a minute and a half). It's purely anecdotal I know, but for me Vista is incredibly slow - especially when doing anything with lots of little files.
And this, kids, is why we don't run applications inside of web browsers.
... yet. Besides, you seem to be equating games with apps - there would be a lot of non-game apps that would happily run at 8fps. Graphing or spreadsheet apps don't need killer refresh rates and even something with more animation like powerpoint wouldn't look horrible (well, no more so than the actual product) at that rate. If anything, business apps are likely to drive a more widespread adoption of HTML5-based browsers in corporate environments, which will in turn allow more effort to be devoted to pushing the boundaries of the current technology.
They're not telling people not to choose the device. They're warning people of the potential consequences of throwing away their freedom and accepting lock-in to get their hands on a shiny new toy. Will it fall on deaf ears? Of course. Does that mean they should stop trying? No, probably not.
That's a little unfair considering the average user doesn't really understand the issues. I'm sure if you were to explain to the average joe exactly what vendor lock in was and what the alternative could be, even if he had no intention of fully exploiting the full capabilities of the device, he would naturally choose the less restrictive model. The problem is nobody is allowed to explain the dangers because they're instantly decried as nutjobs or pirates or communists or MS shills, take your pick.
Not buying it is all well and good, but now it seems nobody can even question the policy? I just bought an iPhone for my fiancee so obviously I don't totally object to how Apple do things - I think for a lot of non-technical people it's actually a nice model, usability-wise it's great, but I'd certainly like to see the option of more freedom and I would never tell someone not to question Apple's model or where it might lead in the future. I would hate to see all corporations adopt the same restrictive model (and I honestly can't see why Apple don't give advanced users the ability to do more - badge it as a developer license or whatever, this is obviously not about making things easy for the customer), I guess even then the apologists will be telling people to shut up as they have a choice of whether they want to be locked in with $GLOBAL_CORP_A or $GLOBAL_CORP_B.
Sometimes WEP is the only option (thanks Nintendo), obviously don't ever use it if there is any alternative but if you have to it seems using a WiFi router that at least tries to make WEP more difficult to break than the next guy over is probably a good thing.
There are easier ways of doing this than wasting $4m on a paysite though, surely. If all the readers they care about are on one ISP, just lock out traffic from every other ISP (and maybe send out usernames/passwords if the customers request them so they can still access the site from work, etc). Going to a paid subscription model means a ton of work and regulation and liability around taking payment from people online that they could easily have avoided if they anticipated nobody would even use it.
Having worked on some big name e-commerce sites I can't imagine anyone signing up for all that pain and hassle (and expense) for no good reason.
Couldn't agree more. There's a hugely worrying trend in the media at the moment to sieze on content generated by the masses. I don't tune into the news or buy a newspaper to hear what xxbLoGgAl_83xx thinks about the war in Iraq, with the highly paid anchor acting as an intermediary relaying her l33t speak to me. If they want to retain my attention they need to add something I can't get by hanging around online - higher production values, better quality reporting, unbiased facts, well thought-out and researched opinion pieces instead of regurgitated press releases. If all they're going to do is read Facebook messages to me, I may as well replace them with a text-to-speech app.
That's assuming the bloggers don't work/go to school at those universities. If the news is noteworthy, it'll be spread, if not by the source then by someone close enough as to make no difference.
I don't think a newspaper has to be entirely irrelevant. There's little news so vital to me that I can't wait a few hours to hear it, one area traditional media could compete is quality. Well-written, thought-out articles with fact checking (remember that?) would be a value proposition that many of the internet sources, with their rush to be first to publish couldn't afford. If you're not going to print for several hours, use that time to make what you print much better than everyone else and I would happily consume your product because I only have to read it once, not read countless rumours, counter-claims, retractions, etc.
Unfortunately this type of quality reporting was dead even before the internet came along. There just wasn't a suitable alternative at the time to eat their lunch, the 'net just happened to be the first one that came along and fit the bill. The internet didn't kill traditional newspapers, they committed suicide a long time ago.
To kill netbooks it needs to not be £1,000 when it lands, otherwise it's not going to compete with a £150 netbook with a real keyboard.
To kill e-readers it'll need something technologically revolutionary to make it easy on the eyes for prolonged usage and easy on the battery (apparently they go for a couple of weeks without a charge with WiFi disabled, considering the very best netbook battery life I've seen is 10 hours, I don't think they're going to get anywhere near that with a tablet PC no matter what they do with the backlight levels). I'm not completely ruling out the revolutionary technology to compete with e-ink, but I can't help thinking if that was the big secret it would have been too big even for Apple to keep the wraps on and we'd have heard something.
I don't think it will kill anything, I think its aim is to sit in the overlap between desktops, laptops and netbooks, if it runs OSX, has some variation of the app store and ideally some built in functionality to control various devices around the home then that'll probably be good enough.
Yeah, with a dock for the office I can think of a bunch of niche areas this could fill nicely. I can't see how it could fully replace a significant portion of the desktop or laptop markets, but maybe that's the idea (since Apple already sell into both markes, it's likely just an attempt to close down on anyone else capturing that niche in the middle and a few stragglers from either market). Of course, a bunch of people will also buy it because of who made it, and a few more to use for couch surfing / as a remote interface for other devices in their home. I've seen dozens of articles saying it will revolutionise the e-book market, that claim I'm quite dubious about. Having tried to read books on big screen PDAs and laptops, it just doesn't feel right - some combination of e-ink and transparent OLED seems to be the right answer there, and if this was that I'm sure we'd already know about it.
I should imagine that the hardware for a tablet (assuming it IS a tablet they're announcing and that it doesn't do something astoundingly revolutionary with the hardware beyond giving it nice rounded corners) is pretty stable by now, it will be in the software that the potential gains will lie. What can they do with the UI and functionality to allow it to succeed where so many tablets have failed, that will be the big question.
Definitely. In fact I'd be surprised if a lot of sites haven't already done the write up and are just waiting to add in a few keywords from the speech so they can be first to publish. I love that Apple are thinking about style and usability, but at this rate they won't even need to try pretty soon (maybe today is that tipping point, we'll see).
Exactly, what it often comes down to is convenience. To get the maximum number of people paying for your product, your security has to not inconvenience them in any way (beyond maybe keying in some code when you install). The second you start making people's lives harder, they will avoid your product. If someone else then offers them your product without the inconvenience (or with the lesser inconvenience), you can see the temptation.
Oh don't get me wrong, there will be a core of pirates who won't ever buy games no matter what the cost, but then securing your product up to the eyes achieves nothing beyond making you feel smug for defeating the pirates for a while (and the costs associated with that are non-trivial). It's the wavering people in between you should be courting by offering the right product at the right price and hassle free.
If games developers want people to keep buying their games, they should listen to the people who are giving them money. We are saying: kill the DRM crap, stop making us jump through hoops, take the money you're wasting, money WE give you and use it to make a better product that people are happy to pay for. Stop being greedy and make your customers happy.
When I buy a car I don't expect the dealer to stitch razor blades into the seat lining just in case a thief tries to break in, and when I buy a game I don't want it encumbered with onerous DRM just in case a pirate copies it. In both cases I'll tend towards the solution that provides the best deal for me, the customer, not the most draconian solution for the producer.
Remember when Amiga died in large part due to piracy, and all the gaming moved to PC?
Um, no, I don't. I remember when the Amiga died in large part due to mismanagement by Commodore. Did it die more than once? 'Cause I totally missed the piracy death.
Not to mention the lack of a real upgrade path at a time when upgradable computers were starting to take off (buy a new computer every 18 months just to keep up? No thanks...) and cheap consoles quickly surpassed the quality of the games while adding the convenience and "cool" qualities of a non-computer form factor.
I'm one of the people who are actually a "useful, contributing part of society" by your metric, I buy maybe two, sometimes three games a month (I don't have as much free time to play as I'd like or it would be more), yet I was forced to abandon the PC as a platform for gaming because so many games just wouldn't work, the copy protection would stop them loading or crash at some random point during the game, or some combination of drivers/config settings would have the same result. When it takes as much time to set up and legitimately play a game as it does to pirate and play (not to mention the games that just wouldn't work at all due to copy protection that probably would have worked had I gone down the pirate route) then things have just gone too far. I do not have time, I have money, that's why I am PAYING for this product, don't make me jump through fifty hoops first.
In the end, after two weeks of trying to get Oblivion to run on my system, chasing up every possible lead on obscure forums, installing and removing patches, even wiping my OS and starting from scratch I went out and bought a 360 and I've had no problems of this kind since. I guess, ultimately, that's what the game companies would prefer - developing for a closed system is much easier for them so they're happy to see the PC market shrink so long as those customers are migrating to other systems they develop for, but make no mistake, if PC gaming dies it won't be due to piracy (which has always existed since PC year zero), it will be due to idiocy and greed on behalf of the people making the games.
There will always be people who are time-rich and cash-poor and these people will always go out of their way to get something for nothing because it only costs them the resource they have in abundance. Then there are people who are cash-rich and time-poor, this is the end of the market games companies should target. Just accept the people with too much time on their hands who couldn't afford your game even if they couldn't pirate it are not and never will be your customers, but if you stop treating everyone so badly they could be your advertisers. Meanwhile people with jobs and families pay money because they don't want to dick around with config files and server connections and copy protection just to play a game, do not punish these people for trying to hand over their money in return for your product. The only thing driving the anti-piracy movement is greed, they see raw figures and they want a slice of a pie that likely just doesn't exist.
In this case the innovation involves a lot of waste effort circumventing overly restrictive legal practice when it could instead be innovation which benefits everyone directly.
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agree - unless you are 100% confident that you know every single thing about every possible question that might arise, it always pays to answer your strongest questions first. That way, if time is limited you've not waste it with useless waffle or spent time you didn't have trying to figure out what they're actually asking (better to do this at the end when you are sure you have time to spare). Once you've been burned by quickly glancing at the number of questions, assuming equal length, allocating X time to each, then finding out the last question asks for a three page essay, you quickly learn to read everything in advance...
In my experience Win7 seems to require fewer resources than Vista - I can't ever imagine Vista on a netbook, but 7 does a nice enough job, and you might not consider all that graphical "bling" to be functionality but it has an overhead (and the Win7 implementation is much better than Vista's was).
I'll let Penny Arcade sum up my Win7 experience to date.
It's also possible that Chrome is optimised for Windows as that's the majority share OS - it's where all their benchmarking is going to show up in the marketing metrics for how Chrome is so much faster than everyone else. They likely didn't spend so much time optimising the Linux port because it only had to be fit for purpose.
On a side note, Vista takes almost three minutes to boot to a usable state on my intel core 2 quad core q6600 (overclocked), 4GB desktop PC with a moderate amount of software installed (mostly web development and design tools, apache, a few benchmarking tools, etc). Meanwhile my core 2 duo laptop with 3GB and pretty much the same software installed boots Win7 in around 25 - 30 seconds (when I previously ran XP on the desktop, boot time was probably a minute and a half). It's purely anecdotal I know, but for me Vista is incredibly slow - especially when doing anything with lots of little files.
only eight frames per second
And this, kids, is why we don't run applications inside of web browsers.
... yet. Besides, you seem to be equating games with apps - there would be a lot of non-game apps that would happily run at 8fps. Graphing or spreadsheet apps don't need killer refresh rates and even something with more animation like powerpoint wouldn't look horrible (well, no more so than the actual product) at that rate. If anything, business apps are likely to drive a more widespread adoption of HTML5-based browsers in corporate environments, which will in turn allow more effort to be devoted to pushing the boundaries of the current technology.
The one that doesn't get firewalled by the government for failure to comply with their censorship laws?
They're not telling people not to choose the device. They're warning people of the potential consequences of throwing away their freedom and accepting lock-in to get their hands on a shiny new toy. Will it fall on deaf ears? Of course. Does that mean they should stop trying? No, probably not.
That's a little unfair considering the average user doesn't really understand the issues. I'm sure if you were to explain to the average joe exactly what vendor lock in was and what the alternative could be, even if he had no intention of fully exploiting the full capabilities of the device, he would naturally choose the less restrictive model. The problem is nobody is allowed to explain the dangers because they're instantly decried as nutjobs or pirates or communists or MS shills, take your pick.
Not buying it is all well and good, but now it seems nobody can even question the policy? I just bought an iPhone for my fiancee so obviously I don't totally object to how Apple do things - I think for a lot of non-technical people it's actually a nice model, usability-wise it's great, but I'd certainly like to see the option of more freedom and I would never tell someone not to question Apple's model or where it might lead in the future. I would hate to see all corporations adopt the same restrictive model (and I honestly can't see why Apple don't give advanced users the ability to do more - badge it as a developer license or whatever, this is obviously not about making things easy for the customer), I guess even then the apologists will be telling people to shut up as they have a choice of whether they want to be locked in with $GLOBAL_CORP_A or $GLOBAL_CORP_B.
So why have the restriction at all if all it adds is inconvenience to customers?
Sometimes WEP is the only option (thanks Nintendo), obviously don't ever use it if there is any alternative but if you have to it seems using a WiFi router that at least tries to make WEP more difficult to break than the next guy over is probably a good thing.
There are easier ways of doing this than wasting $4m on a paysite though, surely. If all the readers they care about are on one ISP, just lock out traffic from every other ISP (and maybe send out usernames/passwords if the customers request them so they can still access the site from work, etc). Going to a paid subscription model means a ton of work and regulation and liability around taking payment from people online that they could easily have avoided if they anticipated nobody would even use it.
Having worked on some big name e-commerce sites I can't imagine anyone signing up for all that pain and hassle (and expense) for no good reason.
Couldn't agree more. There's a hugely worrying trend in the media at the moment to sieze on content generated by the masses. I don't tune into the news or buy a newspaper to hear what xxbLoGgAl_83xx thinks about the war in Iraq, with the highly paid anchor acting as an intermediary relaying her l33t speak to me. If they want to retain my attention they need to add something I can't get by hanging around online - higher production values, better quality reporting, unbiased facts, well thought-out and researched opinion pieces instead of regurgitated press releases. If all they're going to do is read Facebook messages to me, I may as well replace them with a text-to-speech app.
That's assuming the bloggers don't work/go to school at those universities. If the news is noteworthy, it'll be spread, if not by the source then by someone close enough as to make no difference.
I don't think a newspaper has to be entirely irrelevant. There's little news so vital to me that I can't wait a few hours to hear it, one area traditional media could compete is quality. Well-written, thought-out articles with fact checking (remember that?) would be a value proposition that many of the internet sources, with their rush to be first to publish couldn't afford. If you're not going to print for several hours, use that time to make what you print much better than everyone else and I would happily consume your product because I only have to read it once, not read countless rumours, counter-claims, retractions, etc.
Unfortunately this type of quality reporting was dead even before the internet came along. There just wasn't a suitable alternative at the time to eat their lunch, the 'net just happened to be the first one that came along and fit the bill. The internet didn't kill traditional newspapers, they committed suicide a long time ago.
To kill netbooks it needs to not be £1,000 when it lands, otherwise it's not going to compete with a £150 netbook with a real keyboard.
To kill e-readers it'll need something technologically revolutionary to make it easy on the eyes for prolonged usage and easy on the battery (apparently they go for a couple of weeks without a charge with WiFi disabled, considering the very best netbook battery life I've seen is 10 hours, I don't think they're going to get anywhere near that with a tablet PC no matter what they do with the backlight levels). I'm not completely ruling out the revolutionary technology to compete with e-ink, but I can't help thinking if that was the big secret it would have been too big even for Apple to keep the wraps on and we'd have heard something.
I don't think it will kill anything, I think its aim is to sit in the overlap between desktops, laptops and netbooks, if it runs OSX, has some variation of the app store and ideally some built in functionality to control various devices around the home then that'll probably be good enough.
Yeah, with a dock for the office I can think of a bunch of niche areas this could fill nicely. I can't see how it could fully replace a significant portion of the desktop or laptop markets, but maybe that's the idea (since Apple already sell into both markes, it's likely just an attempt to close down on anyone else capturing that niche in the middle and a few stragglers from either market). Of course, a bunch of people will also buy it because of who made it, and a few more to use for couch surfing / as a remote interface for other devices in their home. I've seen dozens of articles saying it will revolutionise the e-book market, that claim I'm quite dubious about. Having tried to read books on big screen PDAs and laptops, it just doesn't feel right - some combination of e-ink and transparent OLED seems to be the right answer there, and if this was that I'm sure we'd already know about it.
I should imagine that the hardware for a tablet (assuming it IS a tablet they're announcing and that it doesn't do something astoundingly revolutionary with the hardware beyond giving it nice rounded corners) is pretty stable by now, it will be in the software that the potential gains will lie. What can they do with the UI and functionality to allow it to succeed where so many tablets have failed, that will be the big question.
Definitely. In fact I'd be surprised if a lot of sites haven't already done the write up and are just waiting to add in a few keywords from the speech so they can be first to publish. I love that Apple are thinking about style and usability, but at this rate they won't even need to try pretty soon (maybe today is that tipping point, we'll see).
Exactly, what it often comes down to is convenience. To get the maximum number of people paying for your product, your security has to not inconvenience them in any way (beyond maybe keying in some code when you install). The second you start making people's lives harder, they will avoid your product. If someone else then offers them your product without the inconvenience (or with the lesser inconvenience), you can see the temptation.
Oh don't get me wrong, there will be a core of pirates who won't ever buy games no matter what the cost, but then securing your product up to the eyes achieves nothing beyond making you feel smug for defeating the pirates for a while (and the costs associated with that are non-trivial). It's the wavering people in between you should be courting by offering the right product at the right price and hassle free.
If games developers want people to keep buying their games, they should listen to the people who are giving them money. We are saying: kill the DRM crap, stop making us jump through hoops, take the money you're wasting, money WE give you and use it to make a better product that people are happy to pay for. Stop being greedy and make your customers happy.
When I buy a car I don't expect the dealer to stitch razor blades into the seat lining just in case a thief tries to break in, and when I buy a game I don't want it encumbered with onerous DRM just in case a pirate copies it. In both cases I'll tend towards the solution that provides the best deal for me, the customer, not the most draconian solution for the producer.
Um, no, I don't. I remember when the Amiga died in large part due to mismanagement by Commodore. Did it die more than once? 'Cause I totally missed the piracy death.
Not to mention the lack of a real upgrade path at a time when upgradable computers were starting to take off (buy a new computer every 18 months just to keep up? No thanks...) and cheap consoles quickly surpassed the quality of the games while adding the convenience and "cool" qualities of a non-computer form factor.
I'm one of the people who are actually a "useful, contributing part of society" by your metric, I buy maybe two, sometimes three games a month (I don't have as much free time to play as I'd like or it would be more), yet I was forced to abandon the PC as a platform for gaming because so many games just wouldn't work, the copy protection would stop them loading or crash at some random point during the game, or some combination of drivers/config settings would have the same result. When it takes as much time to set up and legitimately play a game as it does to pirate and play (not to mention the games that just wouldn't work at all due to copy protection that probably would have worked had I gone down the pirate route) then things have just gone too far. I do not have time, I have money, that's why I am PAYING for this product, don't make me jump through fifty hoops first.
In the end, after two weeks of trying to get Oblivion to run on my system, chasing up every possible lead on obscure forums, installing and removing patches, even wiping my OS and starting from scratch I went out and bought a 360 and I've had no problems of this kind since. I guess, ultimately, that's what the game companies would prefer - developing for a closed system is much easier for them so they're happy to see the PC market shrink so long as those customers are migrating to other systems they develop for, but make no mistake, if PC gaming dies it won't be due to piracy (which has always existed since PC year zero), it will be due to idiocy and greed on behalf of the people making the games.
There will always be people who are time-rich and cash-poor and these people will always go out of their way to get something for nothing because it only costs them the resource they have in abundance. Then there are people who are cash-rich and time-poor, this is the end of the market games companies should target. Just accept the people with too much time on their hands who couldn't afford your game even if they couldn't pirate it are not and never will be your customers, but if you stop treating everyone so badly they could be your advertisers. Meanwhile people with jobs and families pay money because they don't want to dick around with config files and server connections and copy protection just to play a game, do not punish these people for trying to hand over their money in return for your product. The only thing driving the anti-piracy movement is greed, they see raw figures and they want a slice of a pie that likely just doesn't exist.
Just like you would get a "little bit" longer sentence if you beat up millions of people.
You'd get some badass bragging rights, though.
In this case the innovation involves a lot of waste effort circumventing overly restrictive legal practice when it could instead be innovation which benefits everyone directly.