Get an alarm with some renters insurance. The security on these cameras are pretty trash. I think Ring got hacked , having strangers watch me all day is a scary thought.
>Unlike streaming movies or music, cloud gaming can consume up to 10GB/hr at 1080p
Jesus Christ.
So of I want to go to game on my phone while I take the bus for an hour I've blown 10gbs from my data plan.
The only thing keeping me on Xbox Gamepass is the fact I can download games locally. At first I really liked it, but then connection dropped so much games where unplayable ( on WiFi )
Don't get me wrong, I want this to succeed. I want to be able to play COD or Halo from anywhere with a 5g connection. But with such high data usage it's DOA
Given the mobile connectivity history, I am pretty optimistic the cap is going to increase. It’s not that long ago that I had a few mega bytes per month.
Sounds real fun! Of course unless you do your research you'd never find out how little they care about user safety.
Since I'm ranting, I don't see getting trapped in the Social Media matrix as being good for anyone. The old fashioned way to meet folks was to be active in your community. Since that's now seen as optional we have an entire generation of isolated miserable people.
The Social Media Dilemma ( Netflix movie )goes into greater detail , but you need real life human interaction to function. I know I've had no issue making friends (etc), since I became social media free.
The world is an awesome place. Instead of wasting money on Tinder Passport, you can get a real passport and see new places. A flight to Europe can be as low as 300$ !
Considering Tinder's parent ( The Match Group ) got sued by the FTC for fraud, not very smart to include them. Intentionally making subscriptions hard to cancel is one of the behaviors Apple's payment system seeks to prevent.
As much as I like Tim Sweeney's arguments for lower royalties, he doesn't have half a toe to stand on.
Don't want to pay the Apple tax, make your own phone. This fairness coalition is free to manufacture Android phones with a no royalties store . Hogan's Law on YouTube has done a very good take on this. The government can not compel two companies to engage in a contract. If I set up a newspaper stand and decide anyone who wants to sell news papers needs to cut me in for 30%, you can't demand special treatment.
I could see Apple making an example out of Epic and banning them for life. You don't sneak in hidden functionality, and then flick it on via a server side command
> Don't want to pay the Apple tax, make your own phone.
Oh, so the price of entry to the mobile app market is just: "creating your whole mobile device, mobile hardware, app ecosystem and operating system". Sounds simple and really in line with benefits that free market competition brings to users!
Maybe we should put this in the physical world as well - anyone trying to open a new store on the corner with different margins needs to found its own town, build all the roads, complete all infrastructure and persuade people to mov e to this town.
Bad analogy. All of that stuff is paid for by taxes. All of the stuff offered by Apple is paid for by hardware sales and software fees.
You're closer to suggesting wanting to open a store in a town but refusing to pay property taxes, income taxes, and payroll taxes because you feel they're too high. You're welcome to go open your store somewhere else that doesn't have those taxes but presumably there won't be too many people that live there that would frequent your store and you know that.
> The government can not compel two companies to engage in a contract.
It seems like there ought to be exceptions to prevent certain gatekeeping behavior. As a very extreme example, suppose a company bought up a set of private roads in such a way that without their roads, people in a certain area could not access the rest of the country. One would hope that the government would compel the gatekeeper to do business with everyone! (Perhaps with some reasonable fees, weight limits, etc.)
Apple decided to insert themselves as a gatekeeper between iOS users and developers, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to them that deciding to "not engage" with some parties raises antitrust concerns, since it means blocking users and developers from engaging in mutually beneficial relationships.
But apple didn't buy up anything preexisting -- they created the smartphone market from scratch and grew the user and developer base organically. You could argue that they leveraged their Mac developer base for this, but 1. the first iPhone didn't support third party apps and 2. there was nothing to leverage this developer base against because there was no smartphone market when the iPhone was released.
Also, if we accept that smartphones are a necessity on par with roads, iPhones aren't the only smartphones, and Androids aren't really that inferior. As a user, if you don't like iPhones, get an Android. As a developer, if you don't like developing for iPhones, develop for Android. If either group feels like they can't leave for Android because iPhones are that much better, well, that's Apple's reward for creating a good device and growing its user- and developer bases -- should they really be punished for that success?
You make it sound as if there was no market for phone applications before the iphone, which at least in europe is not true.
And the punishment would not be because a company succeeds, but because a company abuses its success position to stiffle competition and artificially placing their other offerings in a better place.
In the world I inhabit, Apple is the one that intentionally makes it really hard to cancel subscriptions. You literally cannot cancel a subscription to an iOS app from an Android phone or Linux PC.
You can't subscribe without an IOS Device , Mac or Windows PC.
If your in some strange edge case where your subscribing to services and then discarding your IOS devices before canceling , that's on you. In a worst case scenario you could borrow a friend's Windows PC. As much as I love Linux I can't imagine most Linux users don't have at least one windows PC or Mac.
If we really want to get technical, spin up an AWS instance, RDP into it, install iCloud for windows and then cancel your subscription.
There are a few services you can sign up for without any of those... but Apple has a support page telling you how to unsubscribe from those from the devices you signed up from: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211011
Said support page also says you can contact Apple Support about it, which I imagine would also work for the "canceling an arbitrary in-app subscription" issue.
It's not an intentional trick to force you to keep paying.
The vast vast majority of people have access to a Windows PC or Apple product. How you ended up in this edge case I'll never know.
To take this to it's logical conclusion, what if you don't run JavaScript on your browsers. Would they also need to give you a cancelation page which doesn't require JavaScript.
How many users as a percentage do you think are signing up for IOS services , discarding their IOS devices and then don't have access to a Mac or Windows PC ?
Very few people use Linux as their desktop is. To be honest they should allow you to reply to the email and allow a cancelation, but you following into an edge case isn't deliberate.
Good point. I stand corrected. I still don't think Apple is doing this intentionally, but rather as a side effect of it's ecosystem. Thanks for your insight
>This means that thousands of high-quality games go completely unnoticed and die a quiet death. Unless you have that star power to get people paying attention in the first place, or you win the social media lottery and go viral, you're probably toast.
Games can take thousands of people to make, from coding to marketing. Maybe one or two will be able to start a new company with any success. I do really like John Romero's smaller projects though.
They must have seriously screwed up marketing. I loved Halo, Portal, Titanfall. I liked those games on Facebook. I read the usual game magazine websites. I watch SciFi let's plays on YouTube. This game looks like I'll very much enjoy it, yet I had literally never heard of it until you mentioned it.
How come with all this data collection and targeted advertisement, I never saw an ad for this? Google and Facebook should know that I'm interested in a Halo-like new game.
Like the article mentioned, it had terrible reviews. It's a game in which the 'new and fun hybrid gameplay' ambition doesn't match the reality. They didn't screw up the marketing (lots of 'iterative' or 'persistent' shooters have become massive hits almost organically), they screwed up the game.
I don't think the premise upthread - that there are zillions of high quality games that nobody notices is really true. Yes, it's a crowded market but it's also absolutely mobbed with people looking for the next big or interesting thing - to play, to stream, to make a catchy review of, etc.
The problem games face is that most games, small or big, are reasonably well-produced but ultimately settle on doing more-of-the-same things, commoditizing themselves into a position where they can't address any market in particular, so instead of getting a "fair share" they get almost nothing because all attention goes to a path-dependent established best in the category. Big productions can break through that with spend, but only somewhat. And any time there is a breakout hit it gets followed by a sea of clones.
And as a whole the industry remains stuck on the problem of how to run the production, since it's still challenging to ship anything even now.
We have Micky Mouse laws in the US. Legally mega corps have to do whatever ensures rising profits. If they pollute the local river, causing birth defects and cancers, it's often more profitable than not polluting in the first place.
Push come to shove you can just shut the company down when you get sued.
The only thing you can do is be a smart consumer. Know who owns your data, and be mindful of what your actually buying.
I really want a VR headset, not a Facebook Advertisement delivery device .
The EU has been doing a great job when it comes to safeguarding user privacy. Tons of apps that require your location for one purpose, end up selling it to third-party brokers for other reasons. The EU was able to find this in one of their reports.
I really hope all nations start to implement serious controls here. In my opinion you should need a license store user location data and they should be revoked immediately if you're found not protecting it, or retaining it longer than you need to.
For example a rideshare service should only store your location for the duration of your ride and then should delete it within 10 days or so. I love ridesharing, but I don't like the idea of someone being able to know everywhere I've been for the last 2 years.
