Posts by Solar 5 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Feb 2012
It's rubbish. If the BBC wanted to enforce the licensing why would they engage in a complex hardware solution when instead they could implement log in / account functionality? Such an approach is 'well understood' to say the least.
This was what my non-technical wife asked me when I was trying to rationalise how the detector vans could work.
As a peddler of 'cloud backup solutions' I can fully understand the authors concerns. Unsurprisingly, we use Amazon Web Services as our backend because it'd be sheer madness to make our own infrastructure for only one or two products. No one is going to invest in doing that themselves and if they did, it wouldn't be as good as Amazon. Data loss is a very unlikely scenario. You're much more likely to suffer an Internet outage than Amazon going down at the moment you want to restore your backup.
The main problems we face are: a) people don't trust third parties with their private data (encrypted or not) b) most countries won't let you store certain types of data on foreign servers and Amazon's DCs are all over the world. c) our service is tailored for databases and some people want a unified solution for all their stuff.
I don't want to come off as insincere since I'm somewhat invested in this industry, but cloud backup isn't that bad. It's much better than shipping tapes around..
I think damages to the amount of all in-app purchase turnover is going too far. There are many people who are happy to pay for software and know what they're doing. Apple are, of course, entitled to conduct business as they see fit.
However, I think it is unacceptable that Apple tolerates third parties from scamming their customers. The whole point of the 'walled garden' app store is to protect the users.
There is absolutely nothing defensible in taking a 30% kickback from $59 of Smerfberries. If they can argue how this is good value for money, and what the total cost to play the game should be relative to the market / quality of the game, then sure, I'll by a bucket of berries and choke myself to death on them.
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