This seems like it would be trivially easy to abuse, I can't believe they are actually using this as a basis for sending out tickets to drivers. Fair enough if the whole purpose was a "name and shame" affair but legal action still required evidence from a trusted source (traffic officer, speed camera, etc), but relying on whatever pictures users post to punish other members of the public is asking for trouble.
On the downside, this would probably kill projects like Google hosting common JavaScript libraries so sites can reference them and decrease page loads as users cache them elsewhere - in fact it would be worse than having no caching at all, it would strip the JavaScript out completely after the 10th site (unless they came up with a system of whitelisting such projects, which would carry management overheads, or ignoring certain files, in which case ad providers would just make their files look like the exceptions, etc).
GGP suggested it's stealing because there was a measurable loss in the form of the bandwidth that the organisers had to pay for, nobody's disupting the cost of the content, but GGP was trying to bypass the arguments about whether content can be "stolen" (and the whole debate about a lost sale versus the lost possibility of a sale, etc), GP was merely demonstrating the tenuousness of this argument when the bandwidth cost is really just an incidental cost (it's like splitting your shopping at the store into two bags when you know it could fit in one, it's costing the store real money but they don't care, it's an incidental cost, what they really care about is whether you pay for your shopping).
I'm not sure what relevance this has to Apple whatsoever. Apple never suggested they were making a budget tablet nor competing on price (there are already higher specified, lower priced machines out there). The company's model has always been to charge a higher price to reflect the aspirational aspect of their projects. They've been undercut with vastly cheaper and more powerful desktops for years but it hasn't affected their price point in that market, so if you imagine they will drop the price of iOS products to try and compete with a cheap tablet I think you are sorely mistaken.
If anything it's likely counter-productive. The only people who would be interested in this are geeks, who find it hard to believe this price is possible, and tablet producers, and they won't want to see their margins slashed to nothing trying to compete with a $35 tablet (and even if it never happens it still makes their products sound expensive). I fail to see how anyone benefits from this unless they can make it happen.
Microsoft gives bigger perks to those who develop games using the "games for windows" moniker, which essentially makes them develop it for the 360 first.
Games for Windows are certainly not always developed for the 360 first - sometimes not at all. I enjoyed Dawn of War II immensely (and really have to pick up the expansion when I have time) and that was both a "Games for Windows" game and PC exclusive.
The sales still offer some great deals though - although the last time I used it they demanded CC payment only and I didn't have a credit card - I think they possibly accept paypal now?
The irony is we've been telling them this for years while they've been droning on about piracy - now if only they'd go the final distance and remove the ridiculous DRM hoops we have to jump through we could rejoice at cheap, quick, convenient gaming.
He probably, like me, bought it with every intention of playing it until real life got in the way and then he suddenly realises he's got a (virtual) shelf full of unplayed stuff. Still, it's quite nice to have unplayed games for when you do happen to unexpectedly find yourself with some free time.
On a serious note, green technologies are one of the few things the West are doing better than the East right now. We can't sell them manufactured goods, they've already cornered that market, and they're at least as close if not edging ahead on banking and perhaps even IT. Anything that relies on IP is a non-starter. Do you didn't think western governments were suddenly supporting green technologies because it's the right thing to do, or because it's one of the few things we have of value right now (not to mention it stifles their industrial growth if we can force them down the same path)?
Bad example, but the point is valid - if it becomes cheaper and easier to get HD content through the tubes than on a disk, it kills this format dead as a delivery mechanism (it might still have some mileage as a storage medium if it's cheap enough). Of course that looks like a big if at the moment (we've a long way to go to even get everyone on broadband, let alone fast enough broadband or even wireless for this to become reality), but if it happens, Youtube won't be delivering that quality HD content for free, but someone will be charging for said content and they only have to undercut the physical (bricks and mortar / post and package) channels to win the price war.
So you think people who haven't yet converted to Blu-ray reading this news will be happy to buy into a format that's going to be superceded in possibly as little as 5 years, or will they just stick with what they know (not to mention what's cheaper)? The point is, this news will impact sales of Blu-ray right now, the format is already struggling to gain any kind of traction against DVD, and telling people there's something better around the corner isn't going to kill off Blu-ray in 5-10 years, it's going to kill it today (okay, overly dramatic but I'd expect it to at least stall or significantly slow the rate of uptake).
DVD was released in 1996. The PS2 came out in (IIRC) 2002, 8 years later, it didn't make the format popular it just cemented an already popular format. Blu-ray was released in 2006 and even with help from the PS3 released in 2007 it's still not been enough to make a significant impact.
As for the PC market argument, that's just bad logic - I remember seeing burners for the PC in the early days costing £2,000, and disks were ridiculously expensive per unit, nobody rushed to buy them back then and it certainly did little to increase the popularity of DVDs among regular buyers. It was only when the prices of these fell dramatically that they became widespread in PCs. I can see how it might feel like the two were connected because there was such a short time-frame between the release of and the rise to popularity of the DVD, but the price falling dramatically was a direct consequence of the format becoming incredibly popular (and I very much doubt this was in any way driven by the handful of people back then playing DVD games on the PC - I got my first PC DVD drive in '98 and it was difficult to find stores carrying games on DVD instead of CD, but it was already easy to find cheap DVD movies).
Not only that, but the price of DVDs dropped incredibly quickly, from being £20 when first released to being £8-10 for a new release and plenty of places were selling them off for £4-5 for relatively recent (released in the previous 5 years) movies by 1999/2000 - I remember it well as I got my first PC DVD drive in '98 when I had no TV and I bought a ton of cheap movies to watch on it over the next two years. To go from being unheard of in '96 to widespread enough to be filling bargain baskets in '99 shows how quickly the format spread and how popular uptake was - and this was before the PS2 and XBOX made it so that almost anyone who had a games console had a DVD player. I don't see anywhere near the same uptake so far for Blu-ray, which has already been around for 4 years now, and for 3 of those years has also been pushed via the PS3 channel. In-store prices are still around the £20 price mark, and I've yet to see a basket full of budget disks, or any discounted disks in store for less than around about the £8-10 mark. I think, even with high definition television, the difference for someone only casually watching movies is not noticable enough to make them go out and buy a new player and spend more on movies, and that's pretty much the only benefit they offer over DVD (although they offer plenty of disadvantages). The only way this entrenched position will change in the near future is if retailers decide to take a hit by offering Blu-ray so cheap, or increasing DVD prices so much, that it's financially preferable to buy the higher quality product.
They'd just compress it. A Blu-ray disk compressed to 10GB still looks fantastic, I'm guessing one of these disks compressed to the same file size wouldn't look any worse, only hard core videofiles or people with 60"+ TVs would likely need anything better (and assuming the cost of the disks and burners fell in line with every format that's gone before, and that hard drives don't take a sudden leap forward in the interim, people could always just go back to burning to one of these disks).
I haven't played the game but from the video it looks like there's a radar that might help to offset this a little, especially if you have a good group for co-op who can cover each other effectively.
Maybe it's to do with the consistency or reliability of service (if Google decide to take their service offline for 6 hours for maintenance and you're relying on it, you're out of luck - dedicated satnav providers have a financial incentive not to do that), or redundant backup (if you have a dedicated satnav and it fails and your phone can also handle satnav duty, you have an instant backup plan, if you rely solely on your phone and it fails, you're screwed).
In the UK Garmin seems to have the reputation of being less expensive but also lacking some of the fancier bells and whistles of the Tom Tom (I'm not sure if that's fair, people I've spoken to who have Garmins seem happy enough with them, but it does seem to be a common perception). I guess from the fact that they chose a pretty high spec Tom Tom, they didn't want to give people the opportunity to claim that Google only came out on top because they chose a device with fewer features.
The results are not entirely surprising as it appears Google is using its needed data connection to feed data back into its traffic routing/monitoring which one hopes they use for routing calculations. The lack of this connection on a stand alone unit make it a problem.
My Tom Tom has this ability, but it's a paid service and quite pricey for someone who doesn't do an awful lot of driving, but I did get it free for the first three months (when I was commuting a few hundred miles some days) and it was great. If they could offer this service for free (I believe they charge because it requires a data connection in the unit, but I have a data package on my phone they could hook into if they wanted to remove the cost element) it would remove the only thing Google probably does better right now. Everything else about the device seems slick - the number of features, the fact that I can change the voice or have it read road names rather than just basic directions, the fact that it will adjust the volume to the environment so it doesn't shout when I'm stationary or speak too quietly when I'm roaring along the motorway with the stereo on, the fact that it's much more intuitive to use my phone through the Tom Tom with bluetooth than it is to take a call on the phone itself while I'm using it as a satnav, all of these features just feel so well designed while the phone feels like a very good compromise, but a compromise nonetheless.
God forbid someone should use technology to make their lives easier. I guess you do all your 150km journeys on horseback? With a paper map I have to spend a lot more time planning my route, planning where I'll likely need to stop, where I can refuel, etc. - sometimes that can be part of the fun, if it's a commuter trip for work it's just more effort - with a satnav I can just grab the device and go. Need petrol? The satnav will tell me where the local stations are - it will even tell me which is the cheapest. Need to eat? The satnav will recommend places based on people's votes and by food preference. It will also alert me if traffic is heavy on my current route and suggest faster alternatives, a paper map certainly can't do that. I can also be reasonably sure that the routes are up to date (in fact, the model I have allows people to submit route changes, details of temporary roadworks/diversions etc that wouldn't appear in a traditional map and I can choose to receive information about these too). It just makes life a lot easier.
I don't have anything against planning, and I always carry a paper map with me as backup, but for the mundane stuff I don't want to plan for (what if I've planned to eat late but I get hungry early, what if I want to take a bathroom break that I hadn't planned for etc) it makes life easier, and for the unplanned issues it can be a lifesaver (if you've ever been driving at night in a thunderstorm and had to take a diversion through unfamiliar territory because a road is out you'd be really grateful for a satnav). It's also great peace of mind when I let my partner use it, since her map reading is not the best but I know the satnav will get her there and back okay!
Having spent some time on the HTC Desire forums it seems a lot of people are suffering the issue that the phone loses charge while plugged in and being used as a sat nav device. Part of the problem seems to be that most of the micro usb car chargers are only delivering 500ma, and keeping that big display turned on with sound and locking onto a signal is burning a lot of power. Apparently some cables do provide closer to the 1000ma charge and this seems to help (I can't speak for any of this personally, never tried to use mine as a sat nav, but it's come up enough times independently for me to believe there's some validity to the claims).
Slashdot Mirror
"Two robots enter, one robot leaves... Then later the other robot leaves, after being declared the winner."
This seems like it would be trivially easy to abuse, I can't believe they are actually using this as a basis for sending out tickets to drivers. Fair enough if the whole purpose was a "name and shame" affair but legal action still required evidence from a trusted source (traffic officer, speed camera, etc), but relying on whatever pictures users post to punish other members of the public is asking for trouble.
On the downside, this would probably kill projects like Google hosting common JavaScript libraries so sites can reference them and decrease page loads as users cache them elsewhere - in fact it would be worse than having no caching at all, it would strip the JavaScript out completely after the 10th site (unless they came up with a system of whitelisting such projects, which would carry management overheads, or ignoring certain files, in which case ad providers would just make their files look like the exceptions, etc).
GGP suggested it's stealing because there was a measurable loss in the form of the bandwidth that the organisers had to pay for, nobody's disupting the cost of the content, but GGP was trying to bypass the arguments about whether content can be "stolen" (and the whole debate about a lost sale versus the lost possibility of a sale, etc), GP was merely demonstrating the tenuousness of this argument when the bandwidth cost is really just an incidental cost (it's like splitting your shopping at the store into two bags when you know it could fit in one, it's costing the store real money but they don't care, it's an incidental cost, what they really care about is whether you pay for your shopping).
I'm not sure what relevance this has to Apple whatsoever. Apple never suggested they were making a budget tablet nor competing on price (there are already higher specified, lower priced machines out there). The company's model has always been to charge a higher price to reflect the aspirational aspect of their projects. They've been undercut with vastly cheaper and more powerful desktops for years but it hasn't affected their price point in that market, so if you imagine they will drop the price of iOS products to try and compete with a cheap tablet I think you are sorely mistaken.
If anything it's likely counter-productive. The only people who would be interested in this are geeks, who find it hard to believe this price is possible, and tablet producers, and they won't want to see their margins slashed to nothing trying to compete with a $35 tablet (and even if it never happens it still makes their products sound expensive). I fail to see how anyone benefits from this unless they can make it happen.
Microsoft gives bigger perks to those who develop games using the "games for windows" moniker, which essentially makes them develop it for the 360 first.
Games for Windows are certainly not always developed for the 360 first - sometimes not at all. I enjoyed Dawn of War II immensely (and really have to pick up the expansion when I have time) and that was both a "Games for Windows" game and PC exclusive.
The sales still offer some great deals though - although the last time I used it they demanded CC payment only and I didn't have a credit card - I think they possibly accept paypal now?
The irony is we've been telling them this for years while they've been droning on about piracy - now if only they'd go the final distance and remove the ridiculous DRM hoops we have to jump through we could rejoice at cheap, quick, convenient gaming.
He probably, like me, bought it with every intention of playing it until real life got in the way and then he suddenly realises he's got a (virtual) shelf full of unplayed stuff. Still, it's quite nice to have unplayed games for when you do happen to unexpectedly find yourself with some free time.
On a serious note, green technologies are one of the few things the West are doing better than the East right now. We can't sell them manufactured goods, they've already cornered that market, and they're at least as close if not edging ahead on banking and perhaps even IT. Anything that relies on IP is a non-starter. Do you didn't think western governments were suddenly supporting green technologies because it's the right thing to do, or because it's one of the few things we have of value right now (not to mention it stifles their industrial growth if we can force them down the same path)?
Bad example, but the point is valid - if it becomes cheaper and easier to get HD content through the tubes than on a disk, it kills this format dead as a delivery mechanism (it might still have some mileage as a storage medium if it's cheap enough). Of course that looks like a big if at the moment (we've a long way to go to even get everyone on broadband, let alone fast enough broadband or even wireless for this to become reality), but if it happens, Youtube won't be delivering that quality HD content for free, but someone will be charging for said content and they only have to undercut the physical (bricks and mortar / post and package) channels to win the price war.
So you think people who haven't yet converted to Blu-ray reading this news will be happy to buy into a format that's going to be superceded in possibly as little as 5 years, or will they just stick with what they know (not to mention what's cheaper)? The point is, this news will impact sales of Blu-ray right now, the format is already struggling to gain any kind of traction against DVD, and telling people there's something better around the corner isn't going to kill off Blu-ray in 5-10 years, it's going to kill it today (okay, overly dramatic but I'd expect it to at least stall or significantly slow the rate of uptake).
*sorry, 6 years later - total brain fart.
DVD was released in 1996. The PS2 came out in (IIRC) 2002, 8 years later, it didn't make the format popular it just cemented an already popular format. Blu-ray was released in 2006 and even with help from the PS3 released in 2007 it's still not been enough to make a significant impact.
As for the PC market argument, that's just bad logic - I remember seeing burners for the PC in the early days costing £2,000, and disks were ridiculously expensive per unit, nobody rushed to buy them back then and it certainly did little to increase the popularity of DVDs among regular buyers. It was only when the prices of these fell dramatically that they became widespread in PCs. I can see how it might feel like the two were connected because there was such a short time-frame between the release of and the rise to popularity of the DVD, but the price falling dramatically was a direct consequence of the format becoming incredibly popular (and I very much doubt this was in any way driven by the handful of people back then playing DVD games on the PC - I got my first PC DVD drive in '98 and it was difficult to find stores carrying games on DVD instead of CD, but it was already easy to find cheap DVD movies).
Not only that, but the price of DVDs dropped incredibly quickly, from being £20 when first released to being £8-10 for a new release and plenty of places were selling them off for £4-5 for relatively recent (released in the previous 5 years) movies by 1999/2000 - I remember it well as I got my first PC DVD drive in '98 when I had no TV and I bought a ton of cheap movies to watch on it over the next two years. To go from being unheard of in '96 to widespread enough to be filling bargain baskets in '99 shows how quickly the format spread and how popular uptake was - and this was before the PS2 and XBOX made it so that almost anyone who had a games console had a DVD player. I don't see anywhere near the same uptake so far for Blu-ray, which has already been around for 4 years now, and for 3 of those years has also been pushed via the PS3 channel. In-store prices are still around the £20 price mark, and I've yet to see a basket full of budget disks, or any discounted disks in store for less than around about the £8-10 mark. I think, even with high definition television, the difference for someone only casually watching movies is not noticable enough to make them go out and buy a new player and spend more on movies, and that's pretty much the only benefit they offer over DVD (although they offer plenty of disadvantages). The only way this entrenched position will change in the near future is if retailers decide to take a hit by offering Blu-ray so cheap, or increasing DVD prices so much, that it's financially preferable to buy the higher quality product.
They'd just compress it. A Blu-ray disk compressed to 10GB still looks fantastic, I'm guessing one of these disks compressed to the same file size wouldn't look any worse, only hard core videofiles or people with 60"+ TVs would likely need anything better (and assuming the cost of the disks and burners fell in line with every format that's gone before, and that hard drives don't take a sudden leap forward in the interim, people could always just go back to burning to one of these disks).
If only we could train sharks to throw fricken' chairs...
I haven't played the game but from the video it looks like there's a radar that might help to offset this a little, especially if you have a good group for co-op who can cover each other effectively.
Maybe it's to do with the consistency or reliability of service (if Google decide to take their service offline for 6 hours for maintenance and you're relying on it, you're out of luck - dedicated satnav providers have a financial incentive not to do that), or redundant backup (if you have a dedicated satnav and it fails and your phone can also handle satnav duty, you have an instant backup plan, if you rely solely on your phone and it fails, you're screwed).
In the UK Garmin seems to have the reputation of being less expensive but also lacking some of the fancier bells and whistles of the Tom Tom (I'm not sure if that's fair, people I've spoken to who have Garmins seem happy enough with them, but it does seem to be a common perception). I guess from the fact that they chose a pretty high spec Tom Tom, they didn't want to give people the opportunity to claim that Google only came out on top because they chose a device with fewer features.
The results are not entirely surprising as it appears Google is using its needed data connection to feed data back into its traffic routing/monitoring which one hopes they use for routing calculations. The lack of this connection on a stand alone unit make it a problem.
My Tom Tom has this ability, but it's a paid service and quite pricey for someone who doesn't do an awful lot of driving, but I did get it free for the first three months (when I was commuting a few hundred miles some days) and it was great. If they could offer this service for free (I believe they charge because it requires a data connection in the unit, but I have a data package on my phone they could hook into if they wanted to remove the cost element) it would remove the only thing Google probably does better right now. Everything else about the device seems slick - the number of features, the fact that I can change the voice or have it read road names rather than just basic directions, the fact that it will adjust the volume to the environment so it doesn't shout when I'm stationary or speak too quietly when I'm roaring along the motorway with the stereo on, the fact that it's much more intuitive to use my phone through the Tom Tom with bluetooth than it is to take a call on the phone itself while I'm using it as a satnav, all of these features just feel so well designed while the phone feels like a very good compromise, but a compromise nonetheless.
But... but Tom Tom have Yoda!
God forbid someone should use technology to make their lives easier. I guess you do all your 150km journeys on horseback? With a paper map I have to spend a lot more time planning my route, planning where I'll likely need to stop, where I can refuel, etc. - sometimes that can be part of the fun, if it's a commuter trip for work it's just more effort - with a satnav I can just grab the device and go. Need petrol? The satnav will tell me where the local stations are - it will even tell me which is the cheapest. Need to eat? The satnav will recommend places based on people's votes and by food preference. It will also alert me if traffic is heavy on my current route and suggest faster alternatives, a paper map certainly can't do that. I can also be reasonably sure that the routes are up to date (in fact, the model I have allows people to submit route changes, details of temporary roadworks/diversions etc that wouldn't appear in a traditional map and I can choose to receive information about these too). It just makes life a lot easier.
I don't have anything against planning, and I always carry a paper map with me as backup, but for the mundane stuff I don't want to plan for (what if I've planned to eat late but I get hungry early, what if I want to take a bathroom break that I hadn't planned for etc) it makes life easier, and for the unplanned issues it can be a lifesaver (if you've ever been driving at night in a thunderstorm and had to take a diversion through unfamiliar territory because a road is out you'd be really grateful for a satnav). It's also great peace of mind when I let my partner use it, since her map reading is not the best but I know the satnav will get her there and back okay!
Having spent some time on the HTC Desire forums it seems a lot of people are suffering the issue that the phone loses charge while plugged in and being used as a sat nav device. Part of the problem seems to be that most of the micro usb car chargers are only delivering 500ma, and keeping that big display turned on with sound and locking onto a signal is burning a lot of power. Apparently some cables do provide closer to the 1000ma charge and this seems to help (I can't speak for any of this personally, never tried to use mine as a sat nav, but it's come up enough times independently for me to believe there's some validity to the claims).