Assassin's Creed II on the PC was released around the start of March 2010, but a working crack was only available at the end of April. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands on the PC was released on 12 June 2010, and the crack released on 28 June 2010. That is a bit more than a few days.

Consoles are different story of course. They last much much longer relatively speaking before they are cracked.

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Simon

And in particular it is worth reading the section about Project Blue Book Special Report No 14 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book#Project_Blue_Book_Special_Report_No._14 ) which contained the most interesting statistics and some conclusions which were in direct conflict with their own data.

Quoting from wikipedia:

The main results of the statistical analysis were:

• About 69% of the cases were judged known or identified (38% were considered conclusively identified while 31% were still "doubtfully" explained); about 9% fell into insufficient information. About 22% were deemed "unknown", down from the earlier 28% value of the Air Force studies.
• In the known category, 86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations. Only 1.5% of all cases were judged to be psychological or "crackpot" cases. A "miscellaneous" category comprised 8% of all cases and included possible hoaxes.
• The higher the quality of the case, the more likely it was to be classified unknown. 35% of the excellent cases were deemed unknowns, whereas only 18% of the poorest cases. This was the exact opposite result predicted by skeptics, who usually argued unknowns were poorer quality cases involving unreliable witnesses that could be solved if only better information were available.
• In all six studied sighting characteristics, the unknowns were different from the knowns at a highly statistically significant level: in five of the six measures the odds of knowns differing from unknowns by chance was only 1% or less. When all six characteristics were considered together, the probability of a match between knowns and unknowns was less than 1 in a billion.

Despite this, the summary section of the Battelle Institute's final report declared it was "highly improbable that any of the reports of unidentified aerial objects... represent observations of technological developments outside the range of present-day knowledge." A number of researchers, including Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who extensively reviewed the data, have noted that the conclusions of the analysts were usually at odds with their own statistical results, displayed in 240 charts, tables, graphs and maps.

Of course it is cheaper. The shipping companies take out insurance for this situation, and the pirates are careful to keep their demands high enough to make a profit, but low enough that they don't scare the ships away, or force the ships to take a different route or escalate the situation into an armed conflict with the west. It is a straight business decision.

NPR's Planet Money blog did a good podcast a while ago about how the pirating business operates.

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Simon

Probably because although the crews may be 'terrorised', or at least frightened, the crews aren't being brutalised or murdered. How often do you hear of crews being murdered? I've been googling and I can't find any reports of crews being killed. I do find reports of the US Navy and British forces killing pirates though.

These pirates are in this to make money and get the hell out of there. They aren't doing this to brutalise and kill. That is totally counterproductive to their real goals.

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Simon

yep, and that is why Riverbank developed their binding tool SIP. Because SWIG wasn't good enough. That's also why the name SIP was chosen. A sip is a little swig.

I agree with you 100% that games are a soft target. But the obvious 'hard' target which they ignored in this case isn't tobacco, but the television and film industries, aka the media. The reasons are obvious. As a government you don't offend the media industry when it has such powerful control over the airwaves and public opinion.

Actually that rule applies to everyone in the west. Millions of people from all parts of the population spend countless hours of the day parked on the couch, motionless, staring at a box each day. When was the last time you heard anyone suggest in public (or private) that maybe that might not be such a good thing?

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Simon

I don't think that is really the case. I remember being at a Java conference for work once and there being a show of hands. Half of the developers attending were server side (and web), and other client side.

The main reason why Jambi probably didn't catch on, IMHO, is that Swing is standard in Java and is much much more established, regardless of its flaws.

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Simon

PyQt is developed as a commercial product which is available under a closed source license and under the GPL plus the other FOSS licenses that Qt itself used before the recent change to LGPL.

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Simon

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebindings/csharp/

The C# support has been steadily worked on for the last few years and should be quite mature by now.

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Simon

...and now without needing a Qt license, I imagine PyQt becomes a much cheaper proposition for most closed source developers.

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Simon

The kind of web based applications that Chrome aims at making possible don't make a lot sense on a mobile platform. I'm talking about things like Google Docs etc. These are applications which require large screens, a keyboard and are generally used for extended periods of time (usually while sitting down too).

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Simon