The difference is that Lucas coined the term droid. Apple didn't invent the term "app" - it's been a widely used shortening of "application" for years - since the 80's according to Dictionary.com. If Apple had used, for instance, the "Appli Store" (short for application and because it's Apple-y... sorry) then the two situations would be analogous, since I've never before heard someone refer to an application as an appli, but an app? Please.
The one time it was tested, the court made a summary judgment against MS who panicked over the trademark going generic and paid off the alleged infringer instead. It will be interesting to see what happens here - Apple are as unlikely to want to give up the term "app store" as MS were "windows", but they're going to be up against a company with deep pockets and a history of litigation.
DRM isn't mentioned in the article, nor is it even inferred.
But hey, what better way to get a bunch of hyper-sensitive DRM haters to click a link!?
Line one of the article, in case you missed it (easy to do, it's in 15px and bold):
The Mac App Store has only been open for 24 hours but methods for circumventing Apple's DRM are already hitting the Web.
I agree this actually has nothing to do with DRM amd DRM is not mentioned in the original tutorial, but it's definitely mentioned in the article linked from the summary.
Or the fact that they're working on Angry Birds 2 (someone behind the game was on the radio talking about it recently), the world and his dog who were interested in Angry Birds 1 already bought it, and as you say this is a great way to get the game out to people who wouldn't have bought it and to get everyone talking about Angry Birds just at the time the studio wants them talking about it. Of course, they could have given it away for free but that might eat some of their potential Birds 2 customers - as you say, this way they can give everyone a free taster, make it the hot topic again just as people were getting bored with it, then release the sequel (and patch the hole in the original).
Indeed, in the origins of the popularity of the term hacking (cracking as it was originally) in sources such as Neuromancer, there was often some aspect of gaining physical access/entrance to a computer system in order to make changes that would give you some kind of control (naturally so, since the idea of a global network of computers back then was alien to a lot of people). A cracker in the original meaning could equally be someone who uses a remote exploit to take control of a system in another country or a guy who breaks into the house next door to install a trojan. The original meaning of hacker was more technical and its perhaps only because the two have blended over the years that there's this concept that hacking is all about cleverly circumventing cyber security with coded solutions.
Since when was taking advantage of gaping exploits in software not hacking, regardless of how sloppy the programmers were? Now if it had suggested the App Store was hacked I'd be with you, but saying that merely the app was hacked is entirely accurate, and if people jump from one conclusion to the other that's their misreading of the situation.
Cheap hard drives were the next gen successor to BluRay befoe it came out - it's just that that medium lacks the multi-billion dollar marketing push to make it ubiquitous so it's having to take the long route, but I'm already seeing entirely non-technical people buying streaming media centres, plugging USB drives into their NAS-ready routers, and watching movies stored on servers in other countries. The uptake from VHS to DVD was huge because there was a vastly noticable difference in quality. The uptake from DVD to BD has been slower - the better quality is there, certainly, but for many DVD is still good enough. The next jump will be marginal - even cramming in billions more pixels in resolution won't be too noticable. I'd be surprised if we see another big optical format to replace BD that's not just used for backup and archiving.
But then most of these 'old classics' that are making the jump to "high def" BluRay are just upscales from old laserdisk (sub DVD quality) copies anyway. 'See the movie as you've never seen it before' is likely a byword for 'see the movie with all kind of crappy video artifacts that weren't noticable on your forgiving old 28" cathode ray tube TV but will just be painful to watch in glorious 60" high definition'.
The internet already killed the slow-mo nipple watch - who wants to go to all that effort when they have reams (sorry, poor choice of word) of free pr0n at their fingertips. Ah, the good old days. I'm almost certain pausing videos and trying to see as the noise artifacts and image flicker make the picture jump up and down the screen are the real reason certain myths about certain activities and poor eyesight came to be.
Don't Sony profit from DVD sales as well? I'm not sure exactly how the licensing for DVDs is structured so I may be wrong, but I know they were one of the founding members of the DVD Forum which is responsible, through the DVD Format Logo/Licensing Corp for collecting license fees for use of the DVD logo/specification, so I'd be surprised if they're not getting some income from that. They've had their sticky fingers in most of the media pies over the years.
I've noticed a fair few movies lately in multiple formats - you get the DVD, BD and a digital copy on the disk. I don't know what kind of DRM crud is on there or what crappy quality they're compressed to as I don't own a BluRay player so have no interest in supporting yet another new format. If they were sold DRM unencumbered then theoretically that allows you to format shift as much as you want, I suspect that's not the case, anyone bought one of these to find out?
Blu-Ray is big enough that they could have all the variations (most of them will be the same anyway, they'd just need to have the differences on the disk and let you stream your chosen flavour together), but of course that would be a one-time sale so it'll never happen.
Hmm, I don't have much prior experience of Rapidshare but I've downloaded a few patches from there in the last couple of weeks and I got none of that - just a link to a page with two BIG buttons, one for premium (click for immediate download) and one for free (have to wait like 30 seconds or something but then I think the download started by itself), so one click or no click and a short wait - I just switched tabs until it was ready to download. Admittedly this wasn't for large files (all under 2mb, they only hosted in the first place to get around some aggressive email firewall) and not for "illegal" material (but I imagine the process would be the same, after all, they can hardly claim "we have no way to know which content is illegal" if they show different screens already for illegal stuff).
Those dirt simple heuristic methods took you five minutes to think of because they'd take five seconds for the warez community to skew into uselessness. Is a file getting more than 100 downloads an hour? What if they just upload 100 versions of the file and iterate through the link URLs they display on their sites - heuristic skewed. Most of the referers come from warez forums? Host a link on the warez site to a legitimate site and put the download link there, or have your community spend a little time clicking legitimate download files to bury the warez in noise, or simply configure your server to not send the referer in the header - heuristic skewed. Big rar archive, same thing, upload a bunch of legitimate files in big rar archives, or put all the files into one single encrypted download, or upload the 30 parts with randomly generated names so there's no easy way to identify that they're part of the same archive and just give out instructions (or a patch application the users can run) to piece them back together - heuristic skewed.
Rapidshare are fighting precisely because they don't want to be in the position of playing whack-a-mole with the thousands of warez sites out there. It would be basically pouring money down a bottomless pit. All the cash that the music and movie and games industries have poured into this already going on over a decade now, with ridiculously expensive solutions like DRM hasn't put an end to file sharing, what makes you think Rapidshare can manage it. More to the point, what makes you think that even if they did such a thing out of the goodness of their own hearts, rather than being forced to in court, that a competitor who didn't care wouldn't just spring up and take their place?
Only in the same way as Ford are guilty of bank robbery when they sell a car that's used as a getaway vehicle. Companies providing goods or services which can be abused (as most can) can only be expected to comply with the law insofar as they are aware of the wrongdoing - holding them to account for illegal activities done without their knowledge when they have shown nothing but willing in complying in the past where things have been brought to their attention is a bit much. You'd never be able to sell cars with that kind of ruling, never mind hosting legitimate files.
Even then, if you totally ignore the ranters, in their eyes that's validation of their view and others may feel the same. If you respond to them reasonably, people have a chance to hear both sides. If they carry on ranting at that point they start to look unreasonable.
There's a big gap between refusing to implement your fanbase's suggestions and refusing to engage with them at all, though. In many cases people are more than satisfied with a "that's a great idea but unfortunately it wouldn't work for us because X, Y, Z" kind of reply that shows at least you're thinking about what they're telling you. If they spend their time and effort explaining on a forum you set up for discussion of your game how they think you could improve said game and you just refuse to even acknowledge they exist, you're just going to disappoint a lot of people. You might say who cares about a minority of users, but if I as a potential customer considering buying their game visit the forum and see everyone bitching about flaws and issues and lack of response, I'm instantly put off. Equally if the devs moderate negative discussion with an iron fist I'm instantly put off. If I see a few legitimate complains with reasonable responses from the people who have all the facts and are not afraid to engage with their audience, I'd be much more likely to part with some money.
I couldn't agree more, particularly on the thick skin front - there's nothing difficult about scanning a forum for good ideas, even if people are being nasty, unless you have the sensibilities of a 12 year old school girl. This
"Forums contain a cacophony of people telling you to do diametrically opposite things, very loudly, often for bad reasons. There will be plenty of good ideas, but picking them out from the bad ones is unreliable and a lot of work. If you try to make too many people happy at once, you will drive yourself mad. You have to be very, very careful who you let into your head."
Sounds like plenty of development planning meetings I've attended. There's nothing special or mystical about forums, just like any other gathering of people you have to ignore the idiots, realise which people have their own agenda and have a modicum of talent for picking out the good ideas and discarding the bad in such a way that you don't look like you're trashing people for trying to help. If you can't manage that then having a forum which makes it look like you're prepared to engage just sends mixed signals - at worst it looks like you're trying to manage negative reaction. A lot of companies have forums specifically because it allows their customers to vent their frustrations, but the results can be buried/hidden from search engines in a way that wouldn't be possible with third party forums.
Indeed, the mistake is ever assuming you'll be a WoW killer out of the box. That's a mistake exactly because WoW don't have to develop a WoW beating game, just cherry pick the best bits of their competitors into their release schedule, which is always going to be cheaper and quicker. Anyone who is serious about being a WoW beater needs to take a very long term approach, almost soft-launch their game, get some community feedback, build on that and once they have a solid base, then start adding the innovation. You almost want as few subscribers as possible initially because you don't want your grand scheme nerfed by talk of bugs which would have been ironed out way before the big launch. What developer/producer is willing to take on that level of risk these days? From what I can see, none of them. The best they can manage is to make big claims, rake in a few months of subs then move on (always hoping of course that something will stick but never counting on it). If you're risk averse, marketing seems to deliver much bigger returns than innovation.
MS make most of their consumer profits from their OS and Office offerings. Office has already had competition from free packages like OOo and Google docs for a while, it's not changed their market dominance. For everything else (games for Windows licensing and whatnot) there is already a mountain of free competition out there, it's clearly still viable or they'd have stopped doing it. I don't see how penny pincher apps will change that - if anything it'd be another revenue stream for MS if they had their own version of the App Store and took a slice off each sale. Much as I'd love to see Windows and Office selling for pocket money prices, I really don't see this happening as a result of a new distribution channel for (largely cheap independently produced) applications.
Not to mention desktop systems lack the locked down environments of phones, so there are already lots of free games - this isn't going to be App Store applications competing with the A-listers, it's going to be App Store applications competing with free. I suspect they'll still do reasonably well because of the novelty factor combined with relative cheapness, but Armageddon for traditional desktop applications is just dreaming.
CS5 caters to too specialised a market to sell it cheap enough to take advantage of economies of scale. Instead it relies on being pricey, being the go to tool for professionals and getting the vast majority of its revenue from selling business licenses (since most businesses would rather pay the $$$ price tag than the $$$$$ fine). How cheap would they have to make it in order to generate enough interest to return the same profits? Even at a tenth of the price it's not going to catch much of the casual, curious market (I tried to show my mum Photoshop once, her eyes glazed over about five seconds in). At 100th of it's price it's about the same as a coffee, still more expensive than the average App Store application, and they'd have to shift huge volumes of their software at those prices just to maintain the status quo - I just can't see this ever happening. The real issue is that CS lacks competition, but their customers are pretty well locked in which keeps competition locked out (if you're in the industry already all your files are in Adobe formats and you already have rolling licenses, if you're new to the industry good luck succeeding with a an alternative whose files are unsupported by all your clients, competition, third part publishers, etc). The App Store isn't going to change any of that.
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The difference is that Lucas coined the term droid. Apple didn't invent the term "app" - it's been a widely used shortening of "application" for years - since the 80's according to Dictionary.com. If Apple had used, for instance, the "Appli Store" (short for application and because it's Apple-y... sorry) then the two situations would be analogous, since I've never before heard someone refer to an application as an appli, but an app? Please.
The one time it was tested, the court made a summary judgment against MS who panicked over the trademark going generic and paid off the alleged infringer instead. It will be interesting to see what happens here - Apple are as unlikely to want to give up the term "app store" as MS were "windows", but they're going to be up against a company with deep pockets and a history of litigation.
Ostrich is okay, the downside is the inevitable fight over who gets the drumsticks, though.
DRM isn't mentioned in the article, nor is it even inferred.
But hey, what better way to get a bunch of hyper-sensitive DRM haters to click a link!?
Line one of the article, in case you missed it (easy to do, it's in 15px and bold):
The Mac App Store has only been open for 24 hours but methods for circumventing Apple's DRM are already hitting the Web.
I agree this actually has nothing to do with DRM amd DRM is not mentioned in the original tutorial, but it's definitely mentioned in the article linked from the summary.
Or the fact that they're working on Angry Birds 2 (someone behind the game was on the radio talking about it recently), the world and his dog who were interested in Angry Birds 1 already bought it, and as you say this is a great way to get the game out to people who wouldn't have bought it and to get everyone talking about Angry Birds just at the time the studio wants them talking about it. Of course, they could have given it away for free but that might eat some of their potential Birds 2 customers - as you say, this way they can give everyone a free taster, make it the hot topic again just as people were getting bored with it, then release the sequel (and patch the hole in the original).
Indeed, in the origins of the popularity of the term hacking (cracking as it was originally) in sources such as Neuromancer, there was often some aspect of gaining physical access/entrance to a computer system in order to make changes that would give you some kind of control (naturally so, since the idea of a global network of computers back then was alien to a lot of people). A cracker in the original meaning could equally be someone who uses a remote exploit to take control of a system in another country or a guy who breaks into the house next door to install a trojan. The original meaning of hacker was more technical and its perhaps only because the two have blended over the years that there's this concept that hacking is all about cleverly circumventing cyber security with coded solutions.
Since when was taking advantage of gaping exploits in software not hacking, regardless of how sloppy the programmers were? Now if it had suggested the App Store was hacked I'd be with you, but saying that merely the app was hacked is entirely accurate, and if people jump from one conclusion to the other that's their misreading of the situation.
Cheap hard drives were the next gen successor to BluRay befoe it came out - it's just that that medium lacks the multi-billion dollar marketing push to make it ubiquitous so it's having to take the long route, but I'm already seeing entirely non-technical people buying streaming media centres, plugging USB drives into their NAS-ready routers, and watching movies stored on servers in other countries. The uptake from VHS to DVD was huge because there was a vastly noticable difference in quality. The uptake from DVD to BD has been slower - the better quality is there, certainly, but for many DVD is still good enough. The next jump will be marginal - even cramming in billions more pixels in resolution won't be too noticable. I'd be surprised if we see another big optical format to replace BD that's not just used for backup and archiving.
But then most of these 'old classics' that are making the jump to "high def" BluRay are just upscales from old laserdisk (sub DVD quality) copies anyway. 'See the movie as you've never seen it before' is likely a byword for 'see the movie with all kind of crappy video artifacts that weren't noticable on your forgiving old 28" cathode ray tube TV but will just be painful to watch in glorious 60" high definition'.
The internet already killed the slow-mo nipple watch - who wants to go to all that effort when they have reams (sorry, poor choice of word) of free pr0n at their fingertips. Ah, the good old days. I'm almost certain pausing videos and trying to see as the noise artifacts and image flicker make the picture jump up and down the screen are the real reason certain myths about certain activities and poor eyesight came to be.
Don't Sony profit from DVD sales as well? I'm not sure exactly how the licensing for DVDs is structured so I may be wrong, but I know they were one of the founding members of the DVD Forum which is responsible, through the DVD Format Logo/Licensing Corp for collecting license fees for use of the DVD logo/specification, so I'd be surprised if they're not getting some income from that. They've had their sticky fingers in most of the media pies over the years.
I've noticed a fair few movies lately in multiple formats - you get the DVD, BD and a digital copy on the disk. I don't know what kind of DRM crud is on there or what crappy quality they're compressed to as I don't own a BluRay player so have no interest in supporting yet another new format. If they were sold DRM unencumbered then theoretically that allows you to format shift as much as you want, I suspect that's not the case, anyone bought one of these to find out?
Blu-Ray is big enough that they could have all the variations (most of them will be the same anyway, they'd just need to have the differences on the disk and let you stream your chosen flavour together), but of course that would be a one-time sale so it'll never happen.
Hmm, I don't have much prior experience of Rapidshare but I've downloaded a few patches from there in the last couple of weeks and I got none of that - just a link to a page with two BIG buttons, one for premium (click for immediate download) and one for free (have to wait like 30 seconds or something but then I think the download started by itself), so one click or no click and a short wait - I just switched tabs until it was ready to download. Admittedly this wasn't for large files (all under 2mb, they only hosted in the first place to get around some aggressive email firewall) and not for "illegal" material (but I imagine the process would be the same, after all, they can hardly claim "we have no way to know which content is illegal" if they show different screens already for illegal stuff).
That just proves that copyright is useless for its primary purpose as well as beggaring society in the long run as a secondary consequence.
Those dirt simple heuristic methods took you five minutes to think of because they'd take five seconds for the warez community to skew into uselessness. Is a file getting more than 100 downloads an hour? What if they just upload 100 versions of the file and iterate through the link URLs they display on their sites - heuristic skewed. Most of the referers come from warez forums? Host a link on the warez site to a legitimate site and put the download link there, or have your community spend a little time clicking legitimate download files to bury the warez in noise, or simply configure your server to not send the referer in the header - heuristic skewed. Big rar archive, same thing, upload a bunch of legitimate files in big rar archives, or put all the files into one single encrypted download, or upload the 30 parts with randomly generated names so there's no easy way to identify that they're part of the same archive and just give out instructions (or a patch application the users can run) to piece them back together - heuristic skewed.
Rapidshare are fighting precisely because they don't want to be in the position of playing whack-a-mole with the thousands of warez sites out there. It would be basically pouring money down a bottomless pit. All the cash that the music and movie and games industries have poured into this already going on over a decade now, with ridiculously expensive solutions like DRM hasn't put an end to file sharing, what makes you think Rapidshare can manage it. More to the point, what makes you think that even if they did such a thing out of the goodness of their own hearts, rather than being forced to in court, that a competitor who didn't care wouldn't just spring up and take their place?
Only in the same way as Ford are guilty of bank robbery when they sell a car that's used as a getaway vehicle. Companies providing goods or services which can be abused (as most can) can only be expected to comply with the law insofar as they are aware of the wrongdoing - holding them to account for illegal activities done without their knowledge when they have shown nothing but willing in complying in the past where things have been brought to their attention is a bit much. You'd never be able to sell cars with that kind of ruling, never mind hosting legitimate files.
If you lived in England you'd realise how rare buses are, here. To spot one most days is definitely an accomplishment.
Even then, if you totally ignore the ranters, in their eyes that's validation of their view and others may feel the same. If you respond to them reasonably, people have a chance to hear both sides. If they carry on ranting at that point they start to look unreasonable.
There's a big gap between refusing to implement your fanbase's suggestions and refusing to engage with them at all, though. In many cases people are more than satisfied with a "that's a great idea but unfortunately it wouldn't work for us because X, Y, Z" kind of reply that shows at least you're thinking about what they're telling you. If they spend their time and effort explaining on a forum you set up for discussion of your game how they think you could improve said game and you just refuse to even acknowledge they exist, you're just going to disappoint a lot of people. You might say who cares about a minority of users, but if I as a potential customer considering buying their game visit the forum and see everyone bitching about flaws and issues and lack of response, I'm instantly put off. Equally if the devs moderate negative discussion with an iron fist I'm instantly put off. If I see a few legitimate complains with reasonable responses from the people who have all the facts and are not afraid to engage with their audience, I'd be much more likely to part with some money.
I couldn't agree more, particularly on the thick skin front - there's nothing difficult about scanning a forum for good ideas, even if people are being nasty, unless you have the sensibilities of a 12 year old school girl. This
"Forums contain a cacophony of people telling you to do diametrically opposite things, very loudly, often for bad reasons. There will be plenty of good ideas, but picking them out from the bad ones is unreliable and a lot of work. If you try to make too many people happy at once, you will drive yourself mad. You have to be very, very careful who you let into your head."
Sounds like plenty of development planning meetings I've attended. There's nothing special or mystical about forums, just like any other gathering of people you have to ignore the idiots, realise which people have their own agenda and have a modicum of talent for picking out the good ideas and discarding the bad in such a way that you don't look like you're trashing people for trying to help. If you can't manage that then having a forum which makes it look like you're prepared to engage just sends mixed signals - at worst it looks like you're trying to manage negative reaction. A lot of companies have forums specifically because it allows their customers to vent their frustrations, but the results can be buried/hidden from search engines in a way that wouldn't be possible with third party forums.
Indeed, the mistake is ever assuming you'll be a WoW killer out of the box. That's a mistake exactly because WoW don't have to develop a WoW beating game, just cherry pick the best bits of their competitors into their release schedule, which is always going to be cheaper and quicker. Anyone who is serious about being a WoW beater needs to take a very long term approach, almost soft-launch their game, get some community feedback, build on that and once they have a solid base, then start adding the innovation. You almost want as few subscribers as possible initially because you don't want your grand scheme nerfed by talk of bugs which would have been ironed out way before the big launch. What developer/producer is willing to take on that level of risk these days? From what I can see, none of them. The best they can manage is to make big claims, rake in a few months of subs then move on (always hoping of course that something will stick but never counting on it). If you're risk averse, marketing seems to deliver much bigger returns than innovation.
MS make most of their consumer profits from their OS and Office offerings. Office has already had competition from free packages like OOo and Google docs for a while, it's not changed their market dominance. For everything else (games for Windows licensing and whatnot) there is already a mountain of free competition out there, it's clearly still viable or they'd have stopped doing it. I don't see how penny pincher apps will change that - if anything it'd be another revenue stream for MS if they had their own version of the App Store and took a slice off each sale. Much as I'd love to see Windows and Office selling for pocket money prices, I really don't see this happening as a result of a new distribution channel for (largely cheap independently produced) applications.
Not to mention desktop systems lack the locked down environments of phones, so there are already lots of free games - this isn't going to be App Store applications competing with the A-listers, it's going to be App Store applications competing with free. I suspect they'll still do reasonably well because of the novelty factor combined with relative cheapness, but Armageddon for traditional desktop applications is just dreaming.
CS5 caters to too specialised a market to sell it cheap enough to take advantage of economies of scale. Instead it relies on being pricey, being the go to tool for professionals and getting the vast majority of its revenue from selling business licenses (since most businesses would rather pay the $$$ price tag than the $$$$$ fine). How cheap would they have to make it in order to generate enough interest to return the same profits? Even at a tenth of the price it's not going to catch much of the casual, curious market (I tried to show my mum Photoshop once, her eyes glazed over about five seconds in). At 100th of it's price it's about the same as a coffee, still more expensive than the average App Store application, and they'd have to shift huge volumes of their software at those prices just to maintain the status quo - I just can't see this ever happening. The real issue is that CS lacks competition, but their customers are pretty well locked in which keeps competition locked out (if you're in the industry already all your files are in Adobe formats and you already have rolling licenses, if you're new to the industry good luck succeeding with a an alternative whose files are unsupported by all your clients, competition, third part publishers, etc). The App Store isn't going to change any of that.