Lost me at "renowned".
452 karma · joined February 19, 2010
EDIT: Sorry for scaring people. Listen, I HATE keyloggers and other invasive software. Here:
My point was that I can see a legit need for low-level auditing by whoever owns the PC. Including such a package that's turned off by default, might be better than forcing a worried parent to sift through 12 keyloggers on Google, half of which are malware, a quarter of which don't work, in order to find out if her 12-year-old is composing YouTube dances and uploading them to 4chan.
It would add a little oomph if you could add some sort of subtle visual tracking (in the CSS for example) to highlight the stuff that moves. Between refreshes it's often hard to see what's changing.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/06/full-an...
Relevant quote:
That number times $1.95 per paid app gives the 'most typical app' the total revenues in its lifetime - the full two years of App Store existence - of $1,948 dollars. This is before Apple takes its cut of 30%, so we are left with $1,363 over two years or $682 per year. This is so 'successful' that half of all of the developers of the 164,250 apps - will actually earn LESS THAN THIS. Before you start to cry, remember, there is that Angry Bird game that had 4 million paid downloads and the Bewelled 2 game with 3 million paid downloads. Thats your math there, they are totally skewing the averages, and you are stuck in the 'long tail' indeed. Half of all developers will earn less than $682 per year. Do you still think this is a good business idea?
EDIT: The mathematics are a little depressing, just something to keep in mind. Certainly a successful app is a successful app. Getting there on iOS seems to be a lottery proposition.
And the "only" solution is hardly getting them onto a new browser. Moving them to say, Firefox, is only one solution. Another solution would be for MS to produce a standards-compliant browser. IE8 and IE9 are both major steps in this direction. Of course, Chrome itself isn't 100% compliant, and had the advantage of being developed much later in the game, against a well-framed open source stack. And of course, Chrome borrowed all sorts of tricks from IE...
Anyway, there are at least 3 or 4 good solutions for that crowd, only one of which involves Chrome. By the way, I use Chrome and Firefox exclusively. I dislike the piling-on against IE for piling on's sake. To represent IE8 as another IE6 is a little disingenuous, IMO. For what it's worth.
This. iOS remains, by the numbers, one of the worst places for freelance developers to spend their time. Profits are diminutive in the average case, and app store policies impose additional risks that have forced entire shops to leave the iOS ecosystem or change how they do business inside it.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_neve...
...should be interpreted with a grain of salt.
Think of a world in which, instead of shipping binary executable code to users, we shipped them full source code. They'd be able to go in and selectively edit out the "licensing" stuff, remove the lines where the app dials home, etc.
This is actually the world we live in, but we call this source code "executable code". Now we pretend that executable code is "obfuscated" or "cryptic" or "difficult to understand" but that's just so we can keep our sanity. Executable code is transparently open, well documented, and perfectly editable on any major OS, including Win and *nix, regardless of what sort of checksums or digital signing you do to ensure local files haven't been changed, all the security experts in the world can't put Humpty Dumpty back together on the client side, or keep him from shattering to a million pieces in the first place.
Maybe this used to be the case. Speaking as a user of and developer for both iOS and Android devices, I think this argument is a little outdated. It just doesn't bear out in practice. I think this has become a mantra that iOS developers and users tell themselves because they think, wrongly, that Android poses a threat to them. It does not. Not to them.
Anyway, it's usually easier to get an app released for Android, by far, than to release the equivalent app for iOS. Everything from the development language to the approval process conspires to make this so. (If you think you can get an Objective C app to market quicker than an equivalent programmer can get a Java app to market, you're either a genius or you're in for a rude awakening. Add App Store woes on top of that. Arbitrary bannings. And the like. These things matter. They cost you time and energy. And they're much more prevalent on iOS than Android.)
What about the user being able to find, purchase, and download apps? It's painless on Android, and it's painless on iOS.
Number of apps? There you may have a point. Android doesn't have the number of apps that iPhone has - merely tens of thousands rather than a hundred or two. And counting.
Fragmentation. Eh. There's less of this than you might think. Developing for Android is very similar to developing for a PC. You're never 100% sure about the hardware you're running on, and yet, most PC applications manage to run just fine. This is what hardware abstraction is all about. Android does an excellent job of it, and most of the time, you program without worrying about the hardware.
So while I think the author has some interesting observations about Google's larger strategy, the "Android app store is broken" argument doesn't really hold water anymore, at least not for me. If anything, Android apps are a breath of fresh air.
Probably because business efforts behind these domains are rather transparently profit-seeking and wired for the short-term, make a quick buck, approach.
Also there's a good amount of technological quackery that goes on in the hyping of these domains to not-so-tech-savvy investors who don't realize that a typical 14yo kid understands intuitively that "sex.com" is probably a crap parked site or link directory, whereas pornhub.com, on the other hand, provides a service that 14yo will love.
"..and we've got a GREAT domain name, pets.com, I mean, if you want a pet, where you gonna go? We're right there."
Labors of love are what win and enable you to eventually fleece your customers and have them thank you for doing it -- not having a 13 million dollar domain.
If a human can view it, you can always, always, always copy it, reproduce it, and share it. No matter how much HDCP you throw at it, no matter what specialized hardware you devote to it...in the words of Mr. Universe..."you can't stop the signal."
(And all the King's horses, and all the King's men, couldn't put the industry's shitty paranoid ineffective wannabe DRM back together again.)
This is night and day different from what Hollywood wants to do, and what Intel is trying to enable them to do: force consumers to buy physical discs, or force consumers to rent from a hardware-enforced DRM'd digital kiosk.
"Tomorrow's Mega Millions jackpot is $208 million; the odds of winning are 1 in 176 million ∴ the EV for each $1 ticket is positive 18¢!"
...because (as the later tweets point out) you don't know how many tickets will be sold, and the math needs to take into account the possibility of "split jackpots" in which two or more people win the big prize(s).
A more rigorous analysis of "when is it rational to purchase a lotto ticket" in the general case can be found here: