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There's no problem installing any browser I like on my Mac.

And as for iOS? Let's see... Google Chrome and, Opera are both available on iOS.

Microsoft (unsurprisingly) doesn't make a browser for Mac/iOS, nor for Linux/Android.

As for Microsoft putting IE in their OS - that was the least of their crimes. The only thing you're doing is proving your rank ignorance in Microsoft's behavior in the 1990's. Microsoft had a nasty tendency to change entire API's so a competitor's product wouldn't run. A popular saying was "Windows ain't done until (Lotus, WordPerfect) won't run." Microsoft was fond of extorting any non-Microsoft software vendors, and creating entirely new Windows-only proprietary technologies (DirectX, Windows Audio, Windows Video, Active Directory... the list is huge) to thwart adoption of standards. Microsoft was (and still is) famously hostile to open source software, even going so far as lobbying politicians to make open source software illegal.

In contrast, Apple supports many major open source projects: CUPS, WebKit, LLVM, and Clang. Apple also has released the source code (ie. their modifications) for over 200 other projects they use. Apple even releases the source for the OS Kernel, and other technologies such as Launchd, Grand Central Dispatch, mDNS/Bonjour, Apple Lossless Audio Codec, and their calendar and contacts server.

Apple is a lot better than Microsoft, even now that Microsoft has "reformed" somewhat. But claiming that Apple is worse than Microsoft only shows you have no fraking clue what you're talking about.

1/3 is overstating the case. A lot of it is because Macs all include hardware that I couldn't care less about.

Let's take their cheapest offering, the $599 mac mini. Intel i5 2.5 ghz dual core, 500 GB hard drive, Intel HD graphics, 4 GB ram. This combo from newegg has better graphics (caveat: not familiar enough with intel HD graphics to be certain on this point, but I'd bet it's at least comparable), better hard drive, better processor for $303. Call it $403 once you add windows, so about 2/3. That's not necessarily the best one to use for comparison, just the first I came to. This one for instance is another $100, with a better processor and builtin graphics. If you don't think that qualifies as a gaming rig, throw on an actual graphics card to either combo and disable the onboard video.Might not be top end, but it should cover your gaming needs.

Try installing Chrome on iOS.

Oh, you can? Here it is:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...

The bug didn't make iOS "wide open" even by a stretch, and it's not years, it's about months - the bug was introduced in iOS 7 and OS X 10.9. It's not present in iOS 6 or OS X 10.8.x.

It was present in the latest versions of iOS 6. This was why Apple released iOS 6.1.6. That said, it is telling that a phone released 4.5 years ago still got a security update - while many Android phones ship on obsolete versions and never gets any updates. And even in the best case, updates stops after a year or two.

It's the Linux kernel, for chrissakes. Why you would count embedded Linux installs and not Android is beyond me.

Then why not count OS X as another *nix and really blow the doors off, well, Windows would be the only other OS left? Oh, right, because it's not open source, except it is. And, it's as open as Android seems to really be. Customized underpinnings and a GUI customized on top. You can do that with Darwin.

"Bias" is the name of one of my indispensable music performance and recording applications. :-)

From Positive Grid.

When did Apple steal credit? Apple explicitly lists all their open source contributions.

Apple didn't invent Webkit, the forked it from KHTML.

When did Apple claim otherwise? In fact, Jobs has said they started WebKit from an open source project "For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products."

And stealing credit is expressly verboten by the GPL.

Again, when did Apple actually do that? Apple may not name every single open source contribution every single time in every press release when they mention code. Probably because they make so many contributions that this is not novel thing. In code releases, everything follows what the GPL requires if you've evey checked out the code

When did Apple steal credit? Apple explicitly lists all their open source contributions.

Apple didn't invent Webkit, the forked it from KHTML.

When did Apple claim otherwise? In fact, Jobs has said they started WebKit from an open source project "For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products."

And stealing credit is expressly verboten by the GPL.

Again, when did Apple actually do that? Apple may not name every single open source contribution every single time in every press release when they mention code. Probably because they make so many contributions that this is not novel thing. In code releases, everything follows what the GPL requires if you've evey checked out the code

Says who? Apple bought CUPS - it's still going strong at http://www.cups.org/

Apple uses FreeBSD as it core, and still pushes patches back to FreeBSD. Apple did fork KDE's browser, but KDE itself is now using the fork, WebKit. LLVM, etc.

Apple wrote Grand Central Dispatch themselves, and open sourced it as well.

http://opensource.apple.com/

You say that as if Foxconn wasn't the largest contract manufacturer in the world, manufacturing for all the top brands.

The vast majority of consumer hardware products from every brand are manufacturer under contract in Asia.

Apple has the highest standards in the business, and was the first to use the Fair Labor Association to do independant audits of their suppliers factories.

By that measure, as well as by their green standards, Apple is one of the most moral companies there is.

http://www.apple.com/uk/suppli...

Don't forget that once Apple switched to the Lightning connector, they also didn't release any sort of adapter that would let a person connect to a 30-pin device, nor did anyone else

Don't forget that once Apple switched to the Lightning connector, they also didn't release any sort of adapter that would let a person connect to a 30-pin device, nor did anyone else

Remember this:
http://petewarden.github.io/iP...

Better than you it seems. That stupid controversy was about nothing more than cache files on the iPhone. Backing up to your PC with iTunes made a copy of the cache along with all the other files. Nothing was uploaded to Apple.

The iPhone scans everything around adds the GPS data and uploads it to Apples server.

Yes, but anonymously. You are not identified.

It's all explained here.
http://www.apple.com/uk/pr/lib...

As a head of a company with possibly millions of bosses, I would think that not insulting any of them would be impossible. If you read more about the NCPPR it would appear that this boss has a specific political agenda and the truth is what they say it is. For example, what Tim Cook actually said:

"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI. . . If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."

What they claim: "Mr. Cook made it very clear to me that if I, or any other investor, was more concerned with return on investment than reducing carbon dioxide emissions, my investment is no longer welcome at Apple," said Justin Danhof, Esq.

Notice that nowhere do they publish his actual comments but their slant on it. Also if you read further:

Danhof went on to ask if Cook was willing to amend Apple's corporate documents to indicate that the company would not pursue environmental initiatives that have some sort of reasonable return on investment - similar to the concession the National Center recently received from General Electric. This question was greeted by boos and hisses from the Al gore contingency in the room.

But Business Insider reports it differently: "The second, in which the representative asked Cook to commit on the spot to only making moves that were profitable for the company, drew the most intense comeback we've heard from the executive."

So according to a reporter, the NCPPR wanted Apple, right then and there, to commit to do things that only show profit.

Of course, they are not done but insinuate hidden moves by Apple:

"Rather than opting for transparency, Apple opposed the National Center's resolution," noted Danhof.

I'm not sure what the company the NCPPR is following but a simple google search came up with Apple's very public environmental reports.

Yes, because Apple hides these feature descriptions in out of sight places called public websites. I'm sorry if you didn't rtfm. Why is that a problem for anyone but those stupid enough to buy and use a device without reading or knowing how it works?

http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/...
http://www.apple.com/ios/messa...

I love how stupid people get mad at others when they do something stupid.

Yes, because Apple hides these feature descriptions in out of sight places called public websites. I'm sorry if you didn't rtfm. Why is that a problem for anyone but those stupid enough to buy and use a device without reading or knowing how it works?

http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/...
http://www.apple.com/ios/messa...

I love how stupid people get mad at others when they do something stupid.

try right-clicking the "Upgrade to Mavericks!" and it will give a drop down option to hide the upgrade ;)

Oh and there is a version of Security Update 2014-001 for Mountain Lion. If your App store still doesn't show it you can go to http://support.apple.com/downl... and download/install manually.

That's not how it works.

Good. Please explain how it does work.

Per this old article:
http://asia.cnet.com/faq-whats...

It seems to work like this.
You go to the messaging app. This is the default messaging app. It does text messages (SMS), and it does iMessages. So far so good.

You enter a number or directly a contact. It checks if that contact is believed to use iMessage by way of the phone number. If it believes the contact uses iMessage, it will send it as an iMessage, otherwise it will send it as a text message.

Still so far so good.

Now that contact stops using iMessage - the example given being that they switch devices, keeping the same number. They didn't "turn iMessage off", because why on Earth does that seem like a logical thing to have to do? Especially if, say, they switched devices because their iPhone died; in which case, they can't turn it off (or can they? Oh yes, they can contact Apple Support; http://support.apple.com/kb/TS... ).

Now you send them a message. The iMessage app is clueless and sends an iMessage because hey, nobody ever told it that the contact is no longer using iMessage. iMessage will eventually come back and say that it failed, and you as the sender either send again or shrug it off, but it might not occur to you to send as a text message instead. If you even can. Yes, if it already failed, you can hold the text and force that to send as text message. But the very next one you send is going to be an iMessage again. Of course, you can disable iMessage on your end, but that disables sending iMessage to all of your contacts. Short of deleting pre-existing iMessages for a given contact, it doesn't seem there's a way to just flip the "this contact uses iMessage" bit.

But here's the rub.. they shouldn't have to explicitly set anything at all.
A. Receive iMessage from contact -> set iMessage bit on contact.
B. Receive text message from contact -> clear iMessage bit on contact if present.
C. Failed iMessage -> re-send. Failed again? -> re-send as text. Delivered? (if supported by the networks) -> clear iMessage bit. Otherwise, see A/B.
D. User enables / disables iMessage explicitly -> set state in central registry (Apple ID is involved, right?).
E. Every once in a while, send as an iMessage anyway if the central registry suggests that the user really should have iMessage because they never turned it off. Worst case: the send ends up with situation C said 'every once in a while', which would be transparent to them. Best case: after a few of those, even the central registry could get a clue and disable the iMessage bit on their end, allowing it to propagate.
Having the onus of 'iMessage bit' state at the sender's side be solely on the end of the recipient is stupid.

I wouldn't say that it is a case of lock-in, though. Just a suboptimal approach. (And yes, I realize there's potential issues with A-E above as well). The bit that makes it peculiar, to say the least, is that this problem has been complained about since at least the end of 2011. Just not by enough people for it to be "an actual story", I guess.

Correct me if any of the above is wrong - I'm certainly not an iPhone user so I've only got the most basic of google search results as my sources.

There's a support page for that.

Wrong. Lion requires 64-bit CPUs but can run with 32-bit EFIs. Mountain Lion and Mavericks require 64-bit EFIs.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht...

The summary provided some related news, but isn't the fact that Apple just published a white paper about the security of iOS a bit more relevant to comments from Android's chief about its security than what the summary provided?

For example, consider the contrast in how the two companies approach the topic of security:
Google's Android chief: "We can not guarantee that Android is designed to be safe, the format was designed to give more freedom."
Apple's white paper: "Apple designed the iOS platform with security at its core. [...] The tight integration of hardware and software on iOS devices ensures that each component of the system is trusted, and validates the system as a whole."

The two approaches are practically polar opposites of each other, which I find horribly fascinating. As with pretty much everything, there are tradeoffs to either side. Android enjoys a load of benefits from being more open, and Apple enjoys a load of benefits from being more closed. Pick which works best for you and appreciate the differences.

Apple's publically stated support time for their products.

Ahhh, the magical AC with all the answers. Why did you not link to this publicly stated support time so we wouldn't have wasted 4 hours of work trying to find it!!
 
All I could find was a list of obsolete products, where software is not a product.

It is true. You're thinking of some machine with a Core 2 Duo.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...

The last time Apple sold a Mac that couldn't upgrade to 10.7 was back in 2007, when they discontinued their final 32-bit Mac. Apple is not Microsoft, and if you look back at support life cycles, you'll see that they've already provided support for 10.6 longer than they typically do, even releasing security updates for 10.6-compatible software as recently as last month. It also continues to get updates to XProtect, OS X's built-in anti-malware tool.

If you're still running 10.6 for some reason, your computer is either a low-end one from at least 7 years ago, or you've made an intentional choice to remain on 10.6 for some reason (likely because it was the last release that could run Rosetta, OS X's tool for running PowerPC apps), in which case you knew what you were getting yourself into when you chose not to upgrade.

Data Security

Available for: OS X Mavericks 10.9 and 10.9.1

Impact: An attacker with a privileged network position may capture or modify data in sessions protected by SSL/TLS
Description: Secure Transport failed to validate the authenticity of the connection. This issue was addressed by restoring missing validation steps.
CVE-ID
CVE-2014-1266

This update had one security fix. The fix for the recent SSL bug. This bug did not affect OSX Snow Leopard or earlier, therefore this update is not needed.

Right so far...

It's not at all a sign that Apple no longer supports Snow Leopard.

But very wrong about this one. This table says that OS X Mavericks is indeed a security update for OS X v10.6.8 and later (18th row in the table). Also, the issue has been discussed before

RT.

This is not accurate. Only Mavericks (v10.9.x) was vulnerable to the SSL issue - the security updates to Mavericks, Mountain Lion (10.8.x) and Lion (10.7.x) contained a ton of security updates in them - at least a good chunk of which would affect Snow Leopard.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT...

Please do not try to fight the reality distortion field.

This is not accurate. Only Mavericks (v10.9.x) was vulnerable to the SSL issue - the security updates to Mavericks, Mountain Lion (10.8.x) and Lion (10.7.x) contained a ton of security updates in them - at least a good chunk of which would affect Snow Leopard.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT...

All modern mobile browsers have API to access location services on smartphones

So the site can see where you are in order to return a list of hotspots near you that the site already knows about. But where did the site get the list in the first place? I don't see anything in Apple's page about geolocation in Safari that lets a site see the list of hotspots that your device can see in order to help fill out the list.

It runs on iOS, therefore it's an IOS app

Not until its approved by Apple.

not understanding tablets are suitable for creation

Because they weren't designed for it. They were designed for three-year-olds to watch cartoons on. Creating anything on an iPad is like trying to do plumbing repairs with nothing but a pair of pliers.

and since smartphones are inherently networked devices it's kind of silly to complain about size of local storage.

At 2 to 5 GB per month, how long does it take to move files off local storage onto the cloud and off the cloud onto local storage? And how much can one store in the cloud without paying a substantial chunk of change annually to lease remote storage? Apple quotes $2 per GB per year.

          You have WIFI connections available in most restaurants and stores including Lowe's and Home Depot
          Some carriers offer the option of unlimited 4g speeds for an extra 20/month with no overages.
          I currently have a 500MB @ 4G speeds then throttled to 3g plan, no overages, ever.
          Oh, I'm in the U.S. before you say it's not available here.

Often the PC web browsing has been exactly that when I was in a hotel room - until I tethered through my smart phone

Provided that 1. you spend a lot of time in hotels, 2. your plan doesn't forbid tethering, and 3. your plan has enough MB left.

          1. The option of tethering exists outside of hotel rooms.
          2. Even if your plan forbids tethering, there are free apps that support it. My carrier allows tethering, but, I have an app that worked fine on Sprint with no complaints.
          3. Again, no overages on my plan, maybe shop around some

It's also obviously superior to use touch over tiny physical keyboards, or there would still be a lot of devices sold with tiny physical keyboards instead of virtually none.

There are still plenty of mobile devices sold with tiny physical nonalphabetic keyboards, namely PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS. This is because touch is not optimal for games in genres that use directional rather than positional input.

          Can't argue here, I personally hate touchscreen keyboards.

Other than that, all your points are wrong

Not "all"; you forgot to mention external storage.

with AirPlay it's easy to take advantage of a larger TV.

Provided you buy the $99 adapter to use AirPlay with a TV.

            Bluray is only good if you buy a Tv that supports HDMI, new technologies can require upgrades for people to use them.
          Also, A lot of newer A/V receivers have AirPlay support built in

It's easy to print to any WiFi supporting printer with iOS

Provided you replace an otherwise-working printer with a printer that both speaks Wi-Fi and speaks Apple's protocol over Wi-Fi.

          It's hard to find the list of supported printers these days...

and it's easy to make use of any network I like

So long as it's wireless.

          here's a USB Ethernet adapter that works with Android and Apple

Well I say, I want everyone to benefit from the power of computation

So long as an app doesn't do anything that Apple doesn't want an app to do, such as contribute to a catalog of open Wi-Fi hotspots.

and since smartphones are inherently networked devices it's kind of silly to complain about size of local storage.

At 2 to 5 GB per month, how long does it take to move files off local storage onto the cloud and off the cloud onto local storage? And how much can one store in the cloud without paying a substantial chunk of change annually to lease remote storage? Apple quotes $2 per GB per year.

          You have WIFI connections available in most restaurants and stores including Lowe's and Home Depot
          Some carriers offer the option of unlimited 4g speeds for an extra 20/month with no overages.
          I currently have a 500MB @ 4G speeds then throttled to 3g plan, no overages, ever.
          Oh, I'm in the U.S. before you say it's not available here.

Often the PC web browsing has been exactly that when I was in a hotel room - until I tethered through my smart phone

Provided that 1. you spend a lot of time in hotels, 2. your plan doesn't forbid tethering, and 3. your plan has enough MB left.

          1. The option of tethering exists outside of hotel rooms.
          2. Even if your plan forbids tethering, there are free apps that support it. My carrier allows tethering, but, I have an app that worked fine on Sprint with no complaints.
          3. Again, no overages on my plan, maybe shop around some

It's also obviously superior to use touch over tiny physical keyboards, or there would still be a lot of devices sold with tiny physical keyboards instead of virtually none.

There are still plenty of mobile devices sold with tiny physical nonalphabetic keyboards, namely PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS. This is because touch is not optimal for games in genres that use directional rather than positional input.

          Can't argue here, I personally hate touchscreen keyboards.

Other than that, all your points are wrong

Not "all"; you forgot to mention external storage.

with AirPlay it's easy to take advantage of a larger TV.

Provided you buy the $99 adapter to use AirPlay with a TV.

            Bluray is only good if you buy a Tv that supports HDMI, new technologies can require upgrades for people to use them.
          Also, A lot of newer A/V receivers have AirPlay support built in

It's easy to print to any WiFi supporting printer with iOS

Provided you replace an otherwise-working printer with a printer that both speaks Wi-Fi and speaks Apple's protocol over Wi-Fi.

          It's hard to find the list of supported printers these days...

and it's easy to make use of any network I like

So long as it's wireless.

          here's a USB Ethernet adapter that works with Android and Apple

Well I say, I want everyone to benefit from the power of computation

So long as an app doesn't do anything that Apple doesn't want an app to do, such as contribute to a catalog of open Wi-Fi hotspots.

and since smartphones are inherently networked devices it's kind of silly to complain about size of local storage.

At 2 to 5 GB per month, how long does it take to move files off local storage onto the cloud and off the cloud onto local storage? And how much can one store in the cloud without paying a substantial chunk of change annually to lease remote storage? Apple quotes $2 per GB per year.

          You have WIFI connections available in most restaurants and stores including Lowe's and Home Depot
          Some carriers offer the option of unlimited 4g speeds for an extra 20/month with no overages.
          I currently have a 500MB @ 4G speeds then throttled to 3g plan, no overages, ever.
          Oh, I'm in the U.S. before you say it's not available here.

Often the PC web browsing has been exactly that when I was in a hotel room - until I tethered through my smart phone

Provided that 1. you spend a lot of time in hotels, 2. your plan doesn't forbid tethering, and 3. your plan has enough MB left.

          1. The option of tethering exists outside of hotel rooms.
          2. Even if your plan forbids tethering, there are free apps that support it. My carrier allows tethering, but, I have an app that worked fine on Sprint with no complaints.
          3. Again, no overages on my plan, maybe shop around some

It's also obviously superior to use touch over tiny physical keyboards, or there would still be a lot of devices sold with tiny physical keyboards instead of virtually none.

There are still plenty of mobile devices sold with tiny physical nonalphabetic keyboards, namely PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS. This is because touch is not optimal for games in genres that use directional rather than positional input.

          Can't argue here, I personally hate touchscreen keyboards.

Other than that, all your points are wrong

Not "all"; you forgot to mention external storage.

with AirPlay it's easy to take advantage of a larger TV.

Provided you buy the $99 adapter to use AirPlay with a TV.

            Bluray is only good if you buy a Tv that supports HDMI, new technologies can require upgrades for people to use them.
          Also, A lot of newer A/V receivers have AirPlay support built in

It's easy to print to any WiFi supporting printer with iOS

Provided you replace an otherwise-working printer with a printer that both speaks Wi-Fi and speaks Apple's protocol over Wi-Fi.

          It's hard to find the list of supported printers these days...

and it's easy to make use of any network I like

So long as it's wireless.

          here's a USB Ethernet adapter that works with Android and Apple

Well I say, I want everyone to benefit from the power of computation

So long as an app doesn't do anything that Apple doesn't want an app to do, such as contribute to a catalog of open Wi-Fi hotspots.

and since smartphones are inherently networked devices it's kind of silly to complain about size of local storage.

At 2 to 5 GB per month, how long does it take to move files off local storage onto the cloud and off the cloud onto local storage? And how much can one store in the cloud without paying a substantial chunk of change annually to lease remote storage? Apple quotes $2 per GB per year.

Often the PC web browsing has been exactly that when I was in a hotel room - until I tethered through my smart phone

Provided that 1. you spend a lot of time in hotels, 2. your plan doesn't forbid tethering, and 3. your plan has enough MB left.

It's also obviously superior to use touch over tiny physical keyboards, or there would still be a lot of devices sold with tiny physical keyboards instead of virtually none.

There are still plenty of mobile devices sold with tiny physical nonalphabetic keyboards, namely PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS. This is because touch is not optimal for games in genres that use directional rather than positional input.

Other than that, all your points are wrong

Not "all"; you forgot to mention external storage.

with AirPlay it's easy to take advantage of a larger TV.

Provided you buy the $99 adapter to use AirPlay with a TV.

It's easy to print to any WiFi supporting printer with iOS

Provided you replace an otherwise-working printer with a printer that both speaks Wi-Fi and speaks Apple's protocol over Wi-Fi.

and it's easy to make use of any network I like

So long as it's wireless.

Well I say, I want everyone to benefit from the power of computation

So long as an app doesn't do anything that Apple doesn't want an app to do, such as contribute to a catalog of open Wi-Fi hotspots.

All the carriers have to do is to ban the IMEI number of the phone when it is reported stolen and the phone can't be activated on the network.

I realize people can't be bothered to do a Google search, but the USA has had a national IMEI blacklist since October 31st, 2012. See this CTIA press release. It's also not difficult to check if a phone is blacklisted, this site is one place that does ESN/IMEI checks for free.

We've lived with this situation long enough to know what the outcome has been. People still steal phones because they have value as parts. Also, they're bought up by scammers that re-sell them to people on Craigslist who don't know any better. It's also worth mentioning not all of these phones are stolen, it's generally a mix of phones that were lost, traded in without disabling the phone's lock, insurance fraud and some that are blocked by the carrier for a defaulted payment plan or wireless contract.

There's absolutely nothing stopping a criminal from forcing the person they're mugging to sign out/disable a phone's locking feature. Apple even has a helpful guide (ostensibly for people looking to give away, trade-in or resell their old iDevice) explaining the process. Are you really going to tell a criminal "no" when they've got a gun pointed at you? If your city has a mugging problem, then something needs to be done about the crime. If it's not cell phones, it will be good, old fashioned wallets, purses and jewelry.

It's pretty darn open: http://opensource.apple.com/so...

http://store.apple.com/

If you're going to have to replace it anyway, might as well get one that works.

in
http://opensource.apple.com/so...

    if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)
                                goto fail;
                                goto fail;

That looks to be the result of a bad patch - anyone who uses git probably can see what happens if you don't rebase patches properly - you end up with patches that apply in very strange and very wierd ways. Especially if the patch in question contains a lot of repeated statements such that the context diff doesn't contain enough context.

Either that, or it was a patch that was being applied manually (because it wasn't rebased properly) and someone forgot to delete an extra line

(It's great fun when code gets so similar that the patch really can apply almost anywhere - it's resulted in some very strange device trees after patching the Linux kernel).

?! Any decent compiler would throw up a warning for unreachable code. I know that the whole "many eyes" thing is a miss and an audit of any open source code will usually pick up trivial problems, but that one doesn't even make any sense unless Apple coding practices are so poor that no sensible person would touch their products.

The problem is it's really easy to miss warnings when a build is in progress - the compiler may produce a ton of warnings, but it's all intermixed and interspersed during the build (especially during multicore builds) that it's hard to see or even find.

Especially in builds for a large system - people are likely to just kick off the main build and miss warnings on the bit that they fixed.

Heck, I do that when fixing code in Android - I'd fix a bug, kick off the build and it'll scroll by way too fast. Even finding an error can be a chore because of all the output - it can be hundreds of lines behind the prompt.

No.
Just access:
http://opensource.apple.com/so...

So I guess that it can have been exploited for some time.

Snow Leopard (10.6) is not vulnerable to this bug, since Apple did not switch from OpenSSL to their own SSL/TLS library back then yet. Just verified on my 10.6 box (to verify visit https://www.imperialviolet.org... )

On the other hand, iOS 6.1.5 is - and now I have a choice of using insecure iPhone or upgrading to 7.x.

Or, perhaps upgrading to iOS 6.1.6 which corrects that bug.

C and C++ still haven't fixed this egregarious bug in the standard. There is no reason for single line, un-braced blocks. People use them to show off how "cool" they are that they don't need to brace because it's only one line. It makes for difficult to spot bugs like this. We need to actually yell at the people on the standards committees to FIX THE BUGS in the standard. There are other really obvious ones and they all should be fixed before adding more new features. YES I'M LOOKING AT YOU C++14! There are plenty of ways you can make a new standard still work alongside code from an old one (compile old, broke, brittle, stupid code with a compiler flag indicating the old standard and new, beter files (yes "translation units c++") with the new one. Introduce a #THIS_FILE_IS_STUPID pragma to disable sanity on old code compiled with the new standard and plenty of others. Pick one, bless, it, implement it and FIX THIS CRAP http://opensource.apple.com/so... The 35th and 36th incidences of the words "goto fail;" in that file are the problem, not easy to spot until you look really closely and it's a bug that a sane standard would make impossible. FIX IT!!

Where can I download my free copy of OSX?

right here.

They do require that you have an existing Intel Mac to put it in and a free App Store account to download it with,

That's not exactly free, is it?

Where can I download my free copy of OSX?

right here.

They do require that you have an existing Intel Mac to put it in and a free App Store account to download it with, but I paid $0.00 to upgrade my MBP with it.

Hell, I can even download the source code for almost all of it in one spot.

Where can I download my free copy of OSX?

right here.

They do require that you have an existing Intel Mac to put it in and a free App Store account to download it with, but I paid $0.00 to upgrade my MBP with it.

Hell, I can even download the source code for almost all of it in one spot.

The bug was not in the 10.8.5 sources, so it was introduced later than that. Would have been interesting to see the git/svn repo to see who did...

in
http://opensource.apple.com/so...

  if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)
                goto fail;
                goto fail;

he iphone 3GS was discontinued in september 2012 (as in up until sep 2012 people were still buying them new on 2 year contracts usually "free") and it isn't supported with ios7 released in september 2013 one year later.

True, but Apple does still release security patches for the 3GS......

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT...

http://9to5mac.com/2014/02/21/...

However, as long as the right legal systems and enterprising businesses exist, ventures like Android will keep popping up to balance out (and eventually crush?) 'monopolies' like iOS.

Then where's the 4" Wi-Fi-only tablet that can run applications designed for recent versions of Android as a competitor to the iPod touch? Or are people supposed to just buy a phone, not activate cellular data service on it, and pay for a GSM radio that they'll never use?

[In an App Store world,] how will high school students enrolled in an introductory programming class complete their homework?

As for young aspiring coders, they can use a free student certificate

Since when? This page states that only accredited postsecondary degree-granting institutions, not high schools, are allowed to participate. Besides, the parents would still need to buy the student a Mac on which to run Xcode; it does not run on an iPad even with a Bluetooth keyboard.

The real issue in this regard will be the effect on the open-source market. Then again, even Linux users are heavily dependent on online centralised package repositories, which could start adopting screening schemes.

Official repos already have screening schemes. But Linux distros also give system administrators the power to add third-party repos that someone other than the distro publisher screens. Ubuntu has PPAs, Android has Amazon Appstore and F-Droid, etc.

Or should people live according to their means

These "means" themselves are hard to compare between countries. Developers in the developed world expect to get paid on an exchange rate basis, while people earn wages on a purchasing power parity basis. The Balassa-Samuelson model predicts that currencies of markets without an established export industry will have disadvantageous exchange rates with more industrialized markets. Do a corrupt judicial branch and an economy oriented towards locally consumed goods and services go hand-in-hand?

It has zip to do with DNS caching other than storing what services are being made available on your machine to your network. It binds on a multicast IP.

False. mDNSResponder is also used for unicast. The command to flush the DNS cache given by the GP is exactly how Apple tells you to do it using Mountain Lion.