This really doesn't require Microsoft to force it, it will happen anyway.

I have an HP machine of a certain age with a chip with perfectly good VM extensions that are locked out by the BIOS. They can't be enabled. Sony also did this on 'consumer' machines.

There's no good reason to lock it out. It saves them implementing one option in the BIOS setup and that's it. Frankly, there's no obvious reason why you would disable it at all, but hey.

So, Microsoft aside - and their decision, aside from possible and so-far unfounded concerns, is a technically sensible one - we will still see machines that are incapable of booting 3rd party OSes, and the support lines will simply say they're unsupported.

(Better still, this will encourage people to crack MS's install key. Criminals will want to anyway, but it's much more likely to happen i the wider hacking community puts its might behind it.)

50-60Mbps is a lowball estimate.

I have a 150Mbps wireless-N setup here (cheap and somewhat dated gigabit Sitecom router acting as a bridge and with WPA2; slightly outdated Macbook), and I get 10MB/s over AFP in a quick, repeatable test (with a wired server). That's at least 80Mbps of useful bandwidth, excluding all protocol overhead, running a network that's nominally half the speed the OP proposes. Adding in TCP/IP and AFP overhead I might possibly be seeing 100Mbps AP->client throughput on the wireless (though I'm guessing it's actually a bit less).

If you actually had a working 300Mbps setup I would, naturally, expect higher numbers. However, I don't think I possess a 300Mbps capable laptop and if your hardware is more than a year old you may find the same.

Given the repeated blocks terminated in 'e' it could be a one-time pad with the blocks as symbols.

That said, I wonder about substituting 'e' for a space.

But this isn't a pseudonym, it's my real name. And I'm fairly sure your Dad wasn't called Mr Kristopeit402.

Exchanging incompletely authorised credit for fungible goods is like cashing a cheque - you're buying the rights to a debt from a known bad debtor at full face value.

Some day in the distant future the internet will learn this.

Mum? Is that you?

That one certainly was.

Depends if you have a cat that likes to leave little gifts around the place.

What seems to be missing here is any sort of motive. Both the game developer and Apple should be worried - running down a competitor's reputation is a fairly poor motive for this, getting refunds doesn't seem to be it, so why are they picking on this app and why are spending other people's money with no hope of retrieving it?

You think you're being funny, but this is precisely how it works. Car dealers will charge full price to people who will pay, discount to people who won't pay full price, and occasionally give away a car in a promotion (typically some sort of competition, but it's still a free car). What you consider insanity is simply the way it is.

I wonder about 3% + 25c. I don't think they'd do it for that; I also suspect that if anyone would negotiate a bulk discount on dealing, they would. It's not like they have to go through some intermediary for CC processing like your average Mom and Pop website would, after all.

So, so dangerous in an online world. "Oh look, my app's free, time to get all my friends to set up fake accounts and buy it"...

That could be turned into a marketing point in their favour.

If you're a serious development business you'd go for some other app store, or you'd negotiate a different contract with Amazon, knowing that you know more about pricing your software than they do. Look at TomTom, for instance. They wouldn't wear receiving only 20% of their MSRP at Amazon's discretion, and they wouldn't claim their MSRP is $400 for an app with a previously accepted pricing level around the $100 mark; they're big enough to dictate that to Amazon or go elsewhere to Amazon's detriment - i.e. they have a negotiating position - and they get business because they advertise themselves, not simply because they're in a store that people browse.

However, if you're one guy sitting at home working on apps, then Amazon's sales tactics may be better than anything that you can come up with, so in some sense you're getting an extra service by selling your app via Amazon, for which Amazon can justify taking a larger cut. *If* they turn out to be any good at it, anyway.

It will be interesting to see what the exclusivity arrangements are (both whether the deal *is* exclusive, and, if so, for how long that lasts), and whether Amazon truly are better at maximising profit than your average guy setting his own prices. I'd bet Amazon have already considered how they're going to prove to potential developers that theirs is the most profitable way.

I am a developer, I want $2 per sale, so I set the price at $10 knowing it will never sell at that price.

Amazon will then have it almost permanently on sale at $2.85, "70% off!" - which is coincidentally the 70% return mark.

The basic premise seems to me to be that Amazon will be able to offer huge discounts on apps because the developer nominally 'agrees' that their recommended sale price is offensively high - because the pricing strategy compels them to. But the developer gets decent money, so neither party loses. The only loser is the consumer who are being deceived into thinking they're getting a huge discount.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays in different countries - for instance the UK has no great respect for recommended prices and insists that items on sale are actually sold at full price for some (small, admittedly) proportion of the time. I imagine the rules vary by country, too.

Or should that be "me too"?