The more interesting statistic for me is how many of these 10% are subscribers to the paper version who get the internet subscription incidentally. If most of the 10% are internet-only subscribers, that's actually much better than I expected and they're probably profitable, if only 10% of the 10% are internet-only subscribers, it would have probably paid better to keep the ad model running. I still expect them to paint the whole thing as a success over the coming months no matter what, because the only way to really make this work is to get everyone else to sign up to it and they won't do that if they think it's failing.
Exactly, and if readers are going so far as to block ads, I would suggest looking at the reasons why they're blocking ads. It's generally not because they begrudge the site owner earning money, it's more often that the ads are damn annoying and a major distraction to the content. If you can make the ads less distracting, load in a timely fashion and not weigh in at several meg, you may find that's a more sustainable business model on the web than just sticking up a toll booth.
Well, you're not exactly locked in unless you feel some kind of emotional attachment towards an arbitrary bunch of awards and a score - I admit it would be nice to be able to carry them across various platforms and especially handhelds and maybe even mobile devices too, but I don't think it would ever prevent me buying someone else's system (in fact, it already didn't).
On the first point you make - my solution is to only play games I enjoy. If you're playing a game that sucks just to get achievements, that's kind of your own fault, if you're playing a game that you really enjoy and you just happen to get achievements, that's a bonus. On the second point, we could debate all day about the merit of achievements and why people should or should not want those little trinkets, but the very success of the system tells us that, whatever we decide, people do like achievements on the whole - it would have died the death long since if that wasn't the case.
For me, it's often a nice way of tracking my progress in a game. Something like Red Dead Redemption, for instance, is huge and you could easily miss large chunks of the game without some kind of pointer - sure it wouldn't be the end of the world but I like seeing that there's more to explore. It's also nice to compare with friends when you've played the same game - some might have been particularly funny or challenging encounters that you don't want to bore everyone with but don't mind re-living with people who you can see have earned the same achievement.
From that first article, this worries me greatly (much more than the departure or otherwise of Smith):
Writer Stephen Moffat recently admitted he was "so excited" about the upcoming episode, which would include a host of exciting storylines.
He said: "We're going for broke with this one. It's all your favourite Christmas movies at once, in an hour, with monsters and the Doctor and a honeymoon and - oh, you'll see.
No, no, no - has he learned nothing? He ruined the season finale by trying to be too ambitious and throwing everything into the mix, and now he's planning to make the Christmas special more of the same? I know there's probably a big drive from the bosses to make everything bigger and better so they can sell DVDs and toys, but this is not playing to Moffat's strengths at all.
I would love to see the Valeyard in the new series, as tortuous as it might be in the current timeline, as a nod of thanks to the older fans. And at least a stab at explaining away (or even just acknowledging) the 13 regeneration limit. I think they've been hinting pretty heavily in the storyline towards the return of the Time Lords at some point, now we know they're not gone for good - and they've put some big hooks in there that they might want to come back to and expand upon, the mysterious woman - mother, grand-daughter, River? Maybe the Valeyard could be the link that brings them back (maybe the Doctor even has to bring them back to answer the questions around the Valeyard) - by the way, did anyone think maybe the episode with the dream master was perhaps heading down this particular path (and maybe still is)?
Not wishing to introduce a massive spoiler (if you've not seen this series you probably want to stop reading aboooout... now - but 'Doctor, there are three million Daleks outside who want to talk to you about this script for Hamlet they've worked out' buzz from sonic screwdriver 'Not any more' almost sums up the big season finalé (seriously, all the build up the Pandorica received and that was how he escaped, not to mention it was highly implausible and paradox inducing, even for a show where a 900 year old alien travels through space and time in a police box).
I think Steven Moffat's strengths are in the intimate storylines, where it's a handful of characters and it all feels very claustrophobic. The main problem with the most recent series was that it seemed to have too many big blockbuster let's-throw-every-ally-and-enemy-into-the-mix episodes and Moffat doesn't seem to be able to juggle that many characters (and his tying up of the threads from throughout the series was very weak, not to mention it's far too cliched that they try and do this every series now). The weeping angel episodes (both the original by Moffat and the two in this series) and the Beast Below I thought played very well to his strengths, a limited set of characters in a situation with nowhere to run that gave him room to develop their stories. I wonder if the mistakes of this series weren't more about suits at the BBC shouting that they wanted more explosions and aliens for their money (or maybe he just felt the need to try and top the achievements of his predecessor).
Not to mention massive spending and inconvenience that is security theatre. Remember, the aim of terrorism isn't necessarily to cause physical harm, it's just to spread terror. If they can do that without lifting a finger, that's a major win. A nation in fear, or being forced to jump through security hoops, is already suffering the effects of terrorist actions, regardless of when the last real attack took place.
This is the major problem - too many people on both sides of the argument evagelising their point of view. We get a few photographs with little supporting data (even the most basic of measurements such as time of year, and you'd really want photos for each of the interim years to see if this is natural variation, etc) and even on a site with a heavily scientific skew there are people claiming it supports everything that's been said about climate change, instantly forgetting the old rule of correlation != causation. And both sides are equally guilty of this - I'm singling out the pro-climate change viewpoint as that's the story here, but there have been plenty of instances of the anti- viewpoint doing the same thing. Meanwhile there are regular people in the middle trying to sort the facts from the emotional outpourings and they'd just like more actual data to do so. Won't somebody please think of the science! I know it's frustrating to have actual data denied by frothing madmen on the opposing side, but the way to counter that is to explain to the sensible people why the data is accurate, not to roll out your own New and Improved Frothing Madmen (now with 30% more shoutiness).
I agree - the argument over whether climate change is man-made or environmental just clouds the real issue. The earth's climate is changing and what we need to focus on are ways to allow us to deal with that change (unless we cling to the faint hope that the change is reversable). Of course that doesn't mean we can't also try and reduce consumtion and waste, or introduce more green technologies - even if you disregard climate change completely, there are a whole raft of reasons to do these things anyway, scarcity of resource and massive population growth being the key ones, but I think too much focus at the moment is on proving that humans are/aren't to blame and on how we reverse the trend. If the history of the Earth tells us anything it's that we're almost certainly not going to be able to (if not now, then at some point we'll have to face up to this), our efforts are better spent elsewhere in finding new ways to adapt.
Arguing about who or what is to blame is about as effective as standing in a burning house with your spouse arguing about who left the lit cigrette lying around - you might score some points but it doesn't nothing to solve the problem and ultimately both sides are going to be screwed unless they start doing something productive.
Agreed, I don't think anyone here, even the hard core doubters, are willing this to fail, I'd love to be able to log into my entire games catalogue and play it from pretty much any computer I happen to be sat at, it's just that people recognise the massive limitations at the moment and find it incredibly difficult to believe this will take off. There would have to be a sea change in the availability of cheap, high speed, uncapped or at least very high capped broadband before this could be viable (even then it leaves the latency question, but it would be suitable for a number of genres that don't require twitch responses), and whether that will happen before OnLive's investors lose interest is the big question.
Good post. I'd like to add that OnLive is not out in Britain until the end of 2011...so about 16-17 months. That said, the sluggishness in UK broadband compared with services offered in parts of the European continent is well documented, and the lacklustre broadband situation is likely to stay as such for Britons: We are charged about £35 GBP/40 Euro monthly for a connection not even half as good as say...a Swedish ISP or an ISP located in a 'less rich' country like Turkey that is cheaper meg for meg.
And the government announced this week that it wants Britain to be the broadband capital of Europe in the next five years. But it's not prepared to invest a penny of public money in meeting the estimated £2bn costs. I really can't see our position on broadband improving drastically in the near future.
The one thing which struck me as the initial hype of this OnLive service happened was my thinking: 'Well what's wrong with Steam?' - OnLive doesn't offer anymore freedom from DRM than Steam. It doesn't offer enough titles to merit using alongside Steam. Like you said the economics of buying games there are non-existant...just walk into a shop and buy one for cheaper. I also bet that despite this initial demand they won't be able to match the frequency and allure of Valve's offers that happen every couple of weeks.
Steam is great mostly for cheap games that they have on offer, classic games hard to come by in the stores, and also the simplistic, hassle-free purchase and browsing interface. OnLive embodies none of these key principles except partly the latter one...and these principles are a big part of Steam's success that keeps gamers checking the store often.
As far as I could tell, the only thing the service ever offered was not having to have a cutting edge gaming rig. The fact that it's hardly offering taxing games and they're at a pretty low resolution anyway, coupled with the fact that PC gaming over the last few years has slowed down (due to both consoles and the slow down in tech advancements generally with a focus on smaller, less powerful consumer PCs) already renders its only selling point completely moot. Couple that with not owning the games but still paying an extra chunk per game to be able to play on a subscription service with all the other concerns (latency, etc) and it seems like the only reason they're still trying to sell this is because they've invested too much to walk away.
They likely wouldn't uprade capacity anyway, they'd just give higher caps but throttle the service so much that OnLive games (and pretty much everything beyond basic web browsing) would be unusable.
Exactly, personally I already knew their service was not for me, but if I was one of the people considering it, I'd rather be told up front that they'll support the game for a minimum 3 years and there's every chance it will go offline at that point than them keep quiet, build up a big subscriber based then enact a few clauses buried in the terms and conditions to the same effect. It was always obvious this would be the case anyway (to anyone who understands how games can be tied to a particular era's architecture), the only surprise for me is that there's any sense of ownership of titles at all - I'd have thought it would be a full subscription with access to all the games included, I'm a little surprised to learn that you pay an amount to "own" the game, that's just going to cause confusion.
It's not so much the owning as the proving you don't use. For a few years I didn't watch TV - I had a set (it was a rented house and the TV belonged to the owner), so I wrapped it in a blanket and dumped it in the garage. Originally I left it in situ in the living room, but then the inspectors came poking around, peering through the windows to see if there was a TV set (the assumption seems to be if you own one that you must watch it) and we got a letter querying this. The easiest thing to do was to remove the thing instead of trying to argue with them. Of course, soldering up the ports is one (perhaps little extreme?) way of proving you don't watch it, but even if you do that and it's still on display, you have to go through the hassle of contacting them and explaining the situation and waiting in to demonstrate and if they still don't believe you, you get to argue about it in court. I don't begrudge paying for the licence at all when I'm using the TV, I think the BBC is a good idea and generally provides some of the better quality shows in this country, but I wish they didn't have this automatic assumption of guilt if you genuinely don't own a TV.
My first thought on seeing this was that perhaps it's deliberate spin - leak some stories about the whole thing being a miserable failure, and then when subscription figures are anounced which are only quite disappointing, it suddenly looks like the scheme did much better than everyone thought. Maybe I'm too used to big media being able to control the story to instantly believe this one is genuine.
They screwed up, and they're going to pay for it, I'm sure, all of it. However, to allege it's some weird quasi-government conspiracy, or that they wanted the leak to happen just seems silly and uninformed.
In the same week that we found out how much Goldman Sachs are being "made to pay" for their deliberate fraud (here's a clue, analysts are calling it a victory for GS), you expect us to believe BP will be made to fully pay for what you consider just a "screw up"? I'm afraid it just doesn't work that way, and if you believe it does then you're clearly the ranting fool who refuses to acknowledge the mountain of prior evidence to the contrary.
Actually Google is a good example of a company that's specifically traded on the "do no evil" motto and has grown so big partly because of that. Of course this affects a company's bottom line. We've seen a massive rush of companies to prove their green credentials in the last decade - do you think they just came to this decision on a purely philanthropic basis, entirely coincidentally at the time when consumers were taking more of an interest in green affairs? It's a cynical profit generating move and nothing more. Of course that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the benefits, but if it paid a company to devastate the planet you can be sure it would do so. It's difficult for humans to talk about such emotive subjects without using terms such as "evil", really that's wrong but the end results are close enough that it probably doesn't matter, a company is a mindless entity with one goal and largely no compunctions about how they attain said goal - it's up to humans (either on the inside, or on the outside, even in the form of protestors, or through enactment of legislation) to define the parameters of how a company should behave (and that can be rewarding the good as much as punishing the bad).
That's not entirely true. They're not just a group of people. If a group of people were responsible for the kind of ecological disaster BP are responsible for, they'd be facing serious jail time. If you or I dumped several million barrels of oil in the ocean do you think bad publicity and a fine would be all we'd have to worry about? The fact is that a corporation shields those people so that they have some ability to negate the consequences of their actions knowing, in most cases, the worst that will happen is that the corporation will take a hit. It makes as little sense to judge the psychology of people in such a situation to be the same as just a "group of people" as it does to assume a corporation has a psyche.
More often than not they'll leave with a golden parachute or a massive pension, so there's no real incentive for them to act responsibly. We know humans need rules and consequences to play nicely with each other, yet GP expects companies to behave as paragons of society without the same rules or consequences to govern their actions.
He's saying that if you install an unauthorized, unsupported, version of iOS on your phone, using a set of convoluted hacks, you can run applications that were developed specifically for people who have installed an unauthorized, unsupported, version of iOS on their phones, using a set of convoluted hacks. Unlike the Droid X, where you can't install an unauthorized, unsupported, operating system on your phone, and so can only install any application you want.
How did you get that when he was specifically talking about Mac OSX? He even said "which allows me to install whatever I want without having to jailbreak, root, break bootloaders, etc". I don't disagree with your point but I'm not sure it's the point GGP was making (or even that he had one other than not all "Apple OSs prevent you installing what you want").
Yes, it's nothing new for phone manufacturers to team up with networks to try to prevent you messing with the bundled software. The only new part is that they're not just voiding the warranty, they're deliberately nuking the hardware (allegedly). I hope the contracts are bullet proof, it's one thing to say I lose my warranty cover if I modify the contents of a handset I own, quite another to say I don't actually own it in the first place (and honestly, if they want to knock a few hundred pounds off the phone contract because I'm no longer buying the handset, I'd be okay with that!)
Slashdot Mirror
The more interesting statistic for me is how many of these 10% are subscribers to the paper version who get the internet subscription incidentally. If most of the 10% are internet-only subscribers, that's actually much better than I expected and they're probably profitable, if only 10% of the 10% are internet-only subscribers, it would have probably paid better to keep the ad model running. I still expect them to paint the whole thing as a success over the coming months no matter what, because the only way to really make this work is to get everyone else to sign up to it and they won't do that if they think it's failing.
Exactly, and if readers are going so far as to block ads, I would suggest looking at the reasons why they're blocking ads. It's generally not because they begrudge the site owner earning money, it's more often that the ads are damn annoying and a major distraction to the content. If you can make the ads less distracting, load in a timely fashion and not weigh in at several meg, you may find that's a more sustainable business model on the web than just sticking up a toll booth.
Well, you're not exactly locked in unless you feel some kind of emotional attachment towards an arbitrary bunch of awards and a score - I admit it would be nice to be able to carry them across various platforms and especially handhelds and maybe even mobile devices too, but I don't think it would ever prevent me buying someone else's system (in fact, it already didn't).
On the first point you make - my solution is to only play games I enjoy. If you're playing a game that sucks just to get achievements, that's kind of your own fault, if you're playing a game that you really enjoy and you just happen to get achievements, that's a bonus. On the second point, we could debate all day about the merit of achievements and why people should or should not want those little trinkets, but the very success of the system tells us that, whatever we decide, people do like achievements on the whole - it would have died the death long since if that wasn't the case.
For me, it's often a nice way of tracking my progress in a game. Something like Red Dead Redemption, for instance, is huge and you could easily miss large chunks of the game without some kind of pointer - sure it wouldn't be the end of the world but I like seeing that there's more to explore. It's also nice to compare with friends when you've played the same game - some might have been particularly funny or challenging encounters that you don't want to bore everyone with but don't mind re-living with people who you can see have earned the same achievement.
From that first article, this worries me greatly (much more than the departure or otherwise of Smith):
Writer Stephen Moffat recently admitted he was "so excited" about the upcoming episode, which would include a host of exciting storylines. He said: "We're going for broke with this one. It's all your favourite Christmas movies at once, in an hour, with monsters and the Doctor and a honeymoon and - oh, you'll see.
No, no, no - has he learned nothing? He ruined the season finale by trying to be too ambitious and throwing everything into the mix, and now he's planning to make the Christmas special more of the same? I know there's probably a big drive from the bosses to make everything bigger and better so they can sell DVDs and toys, but this is not playing to Moffat's strengths at all.
I would love to see the Valeyard in the new series, as tortuous as it might be in the current timeline, as a nod of thanks to the older fans. And at least a stab at explaining away (or even just acknowledging) the 13 regeneration limit. I think they've been hinting pretty heavily in the storyline towards the return of the Time Lords at some point, now we know they're not gone for good - and they've put some big hooks in there that they might want to come back to and expand upon, the mysterious woman - mother, grand-daughter, River? Maybe the Valeyard could be the link that brings them back (maybe the Doctor even has to bring them back to answer the questions around the Valeyard) - by the way, did anyone think maybe the episode with the dream master was perhaps heading down this particular path (and maybe still is)?
Not wishing to introduce a massive spoiler (if you've not seen this series you probably want to stop reading aboooout... now - but 'Doctor, there are three million Daleks outside who want to talk to you about this script for Hamlet they've worked out' buzz from sonic screwdriver 'Not any more' almost sums up the big season finalé (seriously, all the build up the Pandorica received and that was how he escaped, not to mention it was highly implausible and paradox inducing, even for a show where a 900 year old alien travels through space and time in a police box).
I think Steven Moffat's strengths are in the intimate storylines, where it's a handful of characters and it all feels very claustrophobic. The main problem with the most recent series was that it seemed to have too many big blockbuster let's-throw-every-ally-and-enemy-into-the-mix episodes and Moffat doesn't seem to be able to juggle that many characters (and his tying up of the threads from throughout the series was very weak, not to mention it's far too cliched that they try and do this every series now). The weeping angel episodes (both the original by Moffat and the two in this series) and the Beast Below I thought played very well to his strengths, a limited set of characters in a situation with nowhere to run that gave him room to develop their stories. I wonder if the mistakes of this series weren't more about suits at the BBC shouting that they wanted more explosions and aliens for their money (or maybe he just felt the need to try and top the achievements of his predecessor).
Not to mention massive spending and inconvenience that is security theatre. Remember, the aim of terrorism isn't necessarily to cause physical harm, it's just to spread terror. If they can do that without lifting a finger, that's a major win. A nation in fear, or being forced to jump through security hoops, is already suffering the effects of terrorist actions, regardless of when the last real attack took place.
He's clearly never played Dwarf Fortress - for someone working in the games industry, it's equal parts sad and telling.
The only winning move is not to play.
This is the major problem - too many people on both sides of the argument evagelising their point of view. We get a few photographs with little supporting data (even the most basic of measurements such as time of year, and you'd really want photos for each of the interim years to see if this is natural variation, etc) and even on a site with a heavily scientific skew there are people claiming it supports everything that's been said about climate change, instantly forgetting the old rule of correlation != causation. And both sides are equally guilty of this - I'm singling out the pro-climate change viewpoint as that's the story here, but there have been plenty of instances of the anti- viewpoint doing the same thing. Meanwhile there are regular people in the middle trying to sort the facts from the emotional outpourings and they'd just like more actual data to do so. Won't somebody please think of the science! I know it's frustrating to have actual data denied by frothing madmen on the opposing side, but the way to counter that is to explain to the sensible people why the data is accurate, not to roll out your own New and Improved Frothing Madmen (now with 30% more shoutiness).
</rant>
I agree - the argument over whether climate change is man-made or environmental just clouds the real issue. The earth's climate is changing and what we need to focus on are ways to allow us to deal with that change (unless we cling to the faint hope that the change is reversable). Of course that doesn't mean we can't also try and reduce consumtion and waste, or introduce more green technologies - even if you disregard climate change completely, there are a whole raft of reasons to do these things anyway, scarcity of resource and massive population growth being the key ones, but I think too much focus at the moment is on proving that humans are/aren't to blame and on how we reverse the trend. If the history of the Earth tells us anything it's that we're almost certainly not going to be able to (if not now, then at some point we'll have to face up to this), our efforts are better spent elsewhere in finding new ways to adapt.
Arguing about who or what is to blame is about as effective as standing in a burning house with your spouse arguing about who left the lit cigrette lying around - you might score some points but it doesn't nothing to solve the problem and ultimately both sides are going to be screwed unless they start doing something productive.
Agreed, I don't think anyone here, even the hard core doubters, are willing this to fail, I'd love to be able to log into my entire games catalogue and play it from pretty much any computer I happen to be sat at, it's just that people recognise the massive limitations at the moment and find it incredibly difficult to believe this will take off. There would have to be a sea change in the availability of cheap, high speed, uncapped or at least very high capped broadband before this could be viable (even then it leaves the latency question, but it would be suitable for a number of genres that don't require twitch responses), and whether that will happen before OnLive's investors lose interest is the big question.
Good post. I'd like to add that OnLive is not out in Britain until the end of 2011...so about 16-17 months. That said, the sluggishness in UK broadband compared with services offered in parts of the European continent is well documented, and the lacklustre broadband situation is likely to stay as such for Britons: We are charged about £35 GBP/40 Euro monthly for a connection not even half as good as say...a Swedish ISP or an ISP located in a 'less rich' country like Turkey that is cheaper meg for meg.
And the government announced this week that it wants Britain to be the broadband capital of Europe in the next five years. But it's not prepared to invest a penny of public money in meeting the estimated £2bn costs. I really can't see our position on broadband improving drastically in the near future.
The one thing which struck me as the initial hype of this OnLive service happened was my thinking: 'Well what's wrong with Steam?' - OnLive doesn't offer anymore freedom from DRM than Steam. It doesn't offer enough titles to merit using alongside Steam. Like you said the economics of buying games there are non-existant...just walk into a shop and buy one for cheaper. I also bet that despite this initial demand they won't be able to match the frequency and allure of Valve's offers that happen every couple of weeks.
Steam is great mostly for cheap games that they have on offer, classic games hard to come by in the stores, and also the simplistic, hassle-free purchase and browsing interface. OnLive embodies none of these key principles except partly the latter one...and these principles are a big part of Steam's success that keeps gamers checking the store often.
As far as I could tell, the only thing the service ever offered was not having to have a cutting edge gaming rig. The fact that it's hardly offering taxing games and they're at a pretty low resolution anyway, coupled with the fact that PC gaming over the last few years has slowed down (due to both consoles and the slow down in tech advancements generally with a focus on smaller, less powerful consumer PCs) already renders its only selling point completely moot. Couple that with not owning the games but still paying an extra chunk per game to be able to play on a subscription service with all the other concerns (latency, etc) and it seems like the only reason they're still trying to sell this is because they've invested too much to walk away.
They likely wouldn't uprade capacity anyway, they'd just give higher caps but throttle the service so much that OnLive games (and pretty much everything beyond basic web browsing) would be unusable.
Exactly, personally I already knew their service was not for me, but if I was one of the people considering it, I'd rather be told up front that they'll support the game for a minimum 3 years and there's every chance it will go offline at that point than them keep quiet, build up a big subscriber based then enact a few clauses buried in the terms and conditions to the same effect. It was always obvious this would be the case anyway (to anyone who understands how games can be tied to a particular era's architecture), the only surprise for me is that there's any sense of ownership of titles at all - I'd have thought it would be a full subscription with access to all the games included, I'm a little surprised to learn that you pay an amount to "own" the game, that's just going to cause confusion.
It's not so much the owning as the proving you don't use. For a few years I didn't watch TV - I had a set (it was a rented house and the TV belonged to the owner), so I wrapped it in a blanket and dumped it in the garage. Originally I left it in situ in the living room, but then the inspectors came poking around, peering through the windows to see if there was a TV set (the assumption seems to be if you own one that you must watch it) and we got a letter querying this. The easiest thing to do was to remove the thing instead of trying to argue with them. Of course, soldering up the ports is one (perhaps little extreme?) way of proving you don't watch it, but even if you do that and it's still on display, you have to go through the hassle of contacting them and explaining the situation and waiting in to demonstrate and if they still don't believe you, you get to argue about it in court. I don't begrudge paying for the licence at all when I'm using the TV, I think the BBC is a good idea and generally provides some of the better quality shows in this country, but I wish they didn't have this automatic assumption of guilt if you genuinely don't own a TV.
My first thought on seeing this was that perhaps it's deliberate spin - leak some stories about the whole thing being a miserable failure, and then when subscription figures are anounced which are only quite disappointing, it suddenly looks like the scheme did much better than everyone thought. Maybe I'm too used to big media being able to control the story to instantly believe this one is genuine.
They screwed up, and they're going to pay for it, I'm sure, all of it. However, to allege it's some weird quasi-government conspiracy, or that they wanted the leak to happen just seems silly and uninformed.
In the same week that we found out how much Goldman Sachs are being "made to pay" for their deliberate fraud (here's a clue, analysts are calling it a victory for GS), you expect us to believe BP will be made to fully pay for what you consider just a "screw up"? I'm afraid it just doesn't work that way, and if you believe it does then you're clearly the ranting fool who refuses to acknowledge the mountain of prior evidence to the contrary.
Actually Google is a good example of a company that's specifically traded on the "do no evil" motto and has grown so big partly because of that. Of course this affects a company's bottom line. We've seen a massive rush of companies to prove their green credentials in the last decade - do you think they just came to this decision on a purely philanthropic basis, entirely coincidentally at the time when consumers were taking more of an interest in green affairs? It's a cynical profit generating move and nothing more. Of course that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the benefits, but if it paid a company to devastate the planet you can be sure it would do so. It's difficult for humans to talk about such emotive subjects without using terms such as "evil", really that's wrong but the end results are close enough that it probably doesn't matter, a company is a mindless entity with one goal and largely no compunctions about how they attain said goal - it's up to humans (either on the inside, or on the outside, even in the form of protestors, or through enactment of legislation) to define the parameters of how a company should behave (and that can be rewarding the good as much as punishing the bad).
That's not entirely true. They're not just a group of people. If a group of people were responsible for the kind of ecological disaster BP are responsible for, they'd be facing serious jail time. If you or I dumped several million barrels of oil in the ocean do you think bad publicity and a fine would be all we'd have to worry about? The fact is that a corporation shields those people so that they have some ability to negate the consequences of their actions knowing, in most cases, the worst that will happen is that the corporation will take a hit. It makes as little sense to judge the psychology of people in such a situation to be the same as just a "group of people" as it does to assume a corporation has a psyche.
More often than not they'll leave with a golden parachute or a massive pension, so there's no real incentive for them to act responsibly. We know humans need rules and consequences to play nicely with each other, yet GP expects companies to behave as paragons of society without the same rules or consequences to govern their actions.
He's saying that if you install an unauthorized, unsupported, version of iOS on your phone, using a set of convoluted hacks, you can run applications that were developed specifically for people who have installed an unauthorized, unsupported, version of iOS on their phones, using a set of convoluted hacks. Unlike the Droid X, where you can't install an unauthorized, unsupported, operating system on your phone, and so can only install any application you want.
How did you get that when he was specifically talking about Mac OSX? He even said "which allows me to install whatever I want without having to jailbreak, root, break bootloaders, etc". I don't disagree with your point but I'm not sure it's the point GGP was making (or even that he had one other than not all "Apple OSs prevent you installing what you want").
Yes, it's nothing new for phone manufacturers to team up with networks to try to prevent you messing with the bundled software. The only new part is that they're not just voiding the warranty, they're deliberately nuking the hardware (allegedly). I hope the contracts are bullet proof, it's one thing to say I lose my warranty cover if I modify the contents of a handset I own, quite another to say I don't actually own it in the first place (and honestly, if they want to knock a few hundred pounds off the phone contract because I'm no longer buying the handset, I'd be okay with that!)