No, it's a case of a binary with permissions being able to access public APIs (as intended). Most platforms currently have this problem in some form - if you run an authorised program you must trust the author to some extent, though I think Android has some better controls. So they really need a chance in policy rather than to fix a bug (though perhaps filesystem access to user prefs could be considered a bug).
Apple have sandboxed apps, so they can't access data from other apps or the main system (save user prefs) unless it's through public APIs.
What this article points out is that those public APIs provide access (because it is useful, and sometimes essential for apps tp function) to your address book, phone number etc. and also to the file system for your user, under 'var/private/mobile' which lets you see the system prefs (most of which are accessible via private apis anyway). The keyboard cache (though without passwords) is worrying though, so this is a hole that needs fixed.
What Apple could do is offer more fine grained control (as they do with location services for example) so that apps cannot access data like phone numbers without explicit permission from the user. Obviously this needs some thought, as the last thing you want is a forest of permission dialogs for each app when it starts up, but it's certainly doable without much trouble. The file system access to system preferences would probably need to be locked down too.
However this is not some new security breach or bug - it's been known about since day one, but it is something that needs to be pointed out repeatedly until Apple fixes it, because most users will not be aware of it, and it does have privacy implications.
Note that apps we run on our desktop systems (Mac, Windows, Linux) currently have few such controls and have access to a lot of data about us which we might prefer to keep private - similar sandboxing is required there too.
So you think Apple should just accept every fart-app hack, poorly written, buggy piece of scrap code a developer ships their way?
They currently do accept such crap, so what is your point?
I submit to you as evidence the hundreds of flashlight apps which simply light up the screen, the copies of Apple demo apps, iFart Mobile and the many copies, IAmRich (only removed after customer complaints), the appalling UI of 'TripLog/1040', etc etc. There are thousands of apps which can in no sense be rated as quality apps on the store right now.
The app store vetting is not about quality (as evidenced by all the crap-ware on the store), it is about control of competitors like Google and the purse-strings for the platform. They want to collect money on each transaction, and exclude any apps which they feel compete too closely with Apple products, and if that wastes months of time/money for third-party developers, or even their close partners like Google, well that's just too bad. The current policy certainly won't lead to more quality apps on the store - quite the reverse.
Apple are of course legally within their rights to restrict competition on their platform, whether it is in the interests of their customers, or indeed Apple long term, is debatable.
Nah. Just don't behave rudely, and people will know you're one of the decent Americans.
Heartily agree. The only way to change such a reputation is to behave politely and reasonably when abroad, not trying to hide your nationality, and usually you'll be treated well as a result. Otherwise ignorant people who think that all Americans are stupid/loud/insert your stereotype here will never be disabused of their prejudices.
Frequenting the pubs is a key survival tip, it's the only place where you have any chance of getting something edible for a reasonable price.
Sorry, I have to disagree here. There are loads of great places to eat in London, here's some examples off the top of my head:
Woodlands, Marylebone High Street (Great, central, cheap South Indian food) Rasa Sayang, Chinatown (Cheap but good Malaysian) Tayyabs, East end (Great but cheap Pakistani food, behind the mosque, big queues most of the time) Royal China, all over town (Pricey but good Chinese, good for dim sum, big queues weekends) Meson Don Felipe, The Cut (yes, that's the name of a street) (Spanish Tapas, cheap, good wine, good atmosphere) Hafez, Hereford Road (Great Iranian food) Tas, all over town (Acceptable Turkish food) Gordons Wine Bar - wine bar dive in the middle of town for a change from pubs, of which there are few good ones in the center Princess Garden, Mayfair (Moderately priced dim sum) Mildred's, Soho (Moderately priced veggie)
Avoid Convent Garden, Leicester Square, Brick Lane, and other touristy spots for eating/drinking (though Chinatown/soho is OK) and you should do fine. Most pubs will serve rubbish food in my experience, though there are some gastro pubs which do quite good food - if it's a trendy pub it might do quality food, otherwise probably not. Don't rely on reviews on google maps, which are often completely off base, ask a local.
As for geeky things, don't forget the observatory in Greenwich, on the top of the hill in a lovely park with great views of London, plus the foot-passage under the river Thames which leads from Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs - worth a day trip on the DLR if you have the time.
The problem is a lot of mainstream news sites have reported all the cool apps you can get by jailbreaking, and a lot of people have found jailbreaking as one way to pirate apps.
Bear in mind that those pirate apps could easily contain malicious code - some probably already do. People don't need a virus or default SSH password to access your phone if you are willing to run arbitrary binaries from untrustworthy websites. The only advantage for this one is it can easily spread between phones if they haven't been secured.
The SSH server is required for installing apps - it's not optional, but people should be changing the password.
However if I were writing a virus for iPhones, I'd concentrate on adding subtle malicious code to a popular game, then release it in the wild as a free download. Greed wins out over caution every time.
That tiny syntactic change -- which you describe as line noise -- moves variable scoping out of the realm of heuristics you have to guess about because they depend highly on containing context.
I agree that's one use for it, but I'd prefer to strictly use objects to scope variables which need controlled, and get rid of all the $. Much like the ; at the end of the line, it's not necessary (IMHO) and just means more typing. I haven't run into many problems scoping variables in Ruby, whereas in Javascript the var is obligatory because of the strange scoping rules, and the odd rules still trip me up. So I'd say it depends on the rules of the language whether scoping will become an issue.
Unlike many people, including yourself, I came to JavaScript after years of programming with much better languages.
Heh heh. It would have made a more interesting troll if you had stated your preferred languages and the reasons for their superiority rather than hiding behind vague comparisons to 'much better languages', and explain *why* you feel Javascript/Ruby/EvilLanguageX are so impoverished, and what is better about other languages. There are plenty of things to criticise in all of them.
The fact you think Perl, which has many faults of its own, and still hasn't fully integrated oo, among other things, is clearly a greater language, does strike me as at odds with your swagger as a language expert. I don't claim to be an expert but have used all the languages you discuss, and your analysis, such as it was, was simplistic, one-sided, and seeded with juvenile put-downs. Not a very good troll.
You clearly make *far* too many assumptions predicated on a misplaced sense of superiority.
That all said, I didn't bother to read more than the first sentence of your post. I know that you're just a college student, and thus
I take it you don't know what 'sic' means. The gist of it is that he is reproducing someone else's text who [sic] has the spelling error in it.
Yes, I do. Please reread the comment I replied to, and note the misuse of who's, which prompted me to quote the comment and use sic to indicate the error (it doesn't have to be a spelling mistake, it just means 'this is exactly as it was written motherfuckers'). Though I must thank you for giving me another opportunity to use sic.
I love how the righteous link to wikipedia earned you several insightful mod points.
Faggot, I've had the misfortune of using both JavaScript and Ruby (for web development and scripting) more than you likely ever have, and ever will.
Or perhaps you're just some internet blowhard who likes to play to the peanut gallery? As you demonstrate very little in the way of knowledge in your posts, we'll never know. Your silly pronouncements of superiority in spite of very little knowledge of your interlocutor certainly make this a distinct possibility.
Have you looked at the syntax of Perl and Ruby? The vast similarities should be pretty clear to everyone but the stupidest of mental retards...then fuck off. You'll need to use both Ruby and Perl to experience Ruby's weak semantics compared to Perl.
You claimed that Ruby kept most of the syntax of Perl, but not the 'semantics' whatever that means in this context. Care to explain what you think it means, because you haven't so far?
I've used both, and there are similarities, but there are also many significant differences. The object system in Ruby is far less a tacked on afterthought, you don't have to declare variables with a prefix so there is less line noise, everything is an object, nicer blocks, etc. There is also quite a tradition of choosing the way which seems least surprising and sticking to it, as opposed to 'There is more than one way to do it' in Perl - that means radically different library classes.
The syntax of Ruby encourages legibility but keeps most of the shortcuts (in regexp for example) of Perl, while avoiding the horrific write-once possibilities of Perl which you seem to be so proud of (i.e. stuff can be done in fraction of a line of code); just because it can be done in half a line doesn't mean it should.
There is a spectrum from code which is far too verbose to code which is far too succinct (i.e. unintelligible even to the creator after a certain period), and I'd say Perl can be pushed too far to the succinct side, but that's personal preference really. It's quite possible to write good Perl code, but that doesn't make it the be all and end all of scripting languages, indeed several other languages are now more suitable for scripting if you prefer an object-oriented approach.
While I must agree with the sentiment that people who cheerlead for a certain language as radically different from all others need an education in the history and diversity of computer languages, to claim that Ruby is a bad copy of Perl without qualifying the statement betrays your lack of knowledge of the language, nothing more.
So I'm assuming you don't trust surveys sponsored by rivals of MS either, right? No? I thought so. You just don't like the results.
Do you often argue with yourself?
What makes you jump to the conclusion that someone who mistrusts this bullshit report wouldn't also mistrust bullshit reports from companies with ties to other browser vendors?
This study covers 2 quarters (a statistically meaningless sample), runs against all verifiable statistcs from the likes of CERT, gives no basis for its figures, and contains just one pie chart to back up its conclusions. It's patent nonsense.
You clearly haven't looked very closely at the survey, and are subject to the same happy ignorance you accuse the poster above of.
It seems pretty legitimate to me but I haven't exactly scruitinized it either.
your tirade should be pointed at apple as well then. they are closed source AND had a shitload of vulnerabilities, as well as having a record of not rolling out patches quickly. whats your excuse for them?
Why should the grandparent have an excuse for Apple? What they are pointing out is that Microsoft have links to the article sponsors, who depend on Microsoft for a living, they have a history of this sort of FUD, and have recently seen a very serious drive-by vulnerability in all versions of IE. Any argument that IE is more secure than Safari or Firefox is laughable given the number of in the wild exploits for the relevant programs in the past, and the likely pattern of the future. I'm sure Microsoft will continue to churn out statistics showing that their software has always been more secure, and if you believe these made up statistics, more fool you - it's easy to massage the figures, and there's no way I'd trust a set of statistics from anyone with close links to a browser vendor, be that Apple, MS or Mozilla.
To pick a small problem with the statistics - this report covers two quarters in 2009, hardly enough to make any kind of meaningful comparison.
Also, Safari is not closed source in the way that IE is, almost all of it is open source.
maybe you should take a good hard look at OSS supposed security prowess, if you really were so confident firefox is more secure then IE, you wouldn't get so defensive.
Just like the article, this argument is content-free fluff.
If there really isn't much oil left, then oil will slowly become more and more expensive as the remaining oil becomes harder and harder to extract.
You assume a rational market, not one dominated by cartels, price fixing, stockpiling, short-termism and all the other corollaries of unfettered capitalism. Find a graph of the price of oil over the last few decades, and revisit your prediction of a slow ramp up in prices as demand rises and supply falters- rational markets are a myth.
The outcome of shortages of oil (or the expectation of such) will be huge price fluctuations like those of last year, as panic spreads and recedes in waves, booms and busts in the rest of the economy triggered by unpredictable transportation and manufacturing costs, and huge hardship for ordinary people caught in the middle of the huge adjustment necessary to wean ourselves off our addiction to fast cheap energy. Better to start preparing now and invest more in fusion or some other sources of power which have some prospect of lasting longer than the next 50 years.
News organizations actually have a lot of experience in collecting and collating data.
Most news organisations nowadays simply repeat stories, or echoes of stories, which a reporter from another organisation originally reported. The data is taken on trust, and often turns out to be completely inaccurate or misleading after the fact. I'm not so sure I share your confidence in the ability or desire of most news organisations to objectively collate and present data.
The ones that do are the exception rather than the rule.
I suspect that news will morph into something that one person can easily do, particularly if they devote themselves to a particular topic and only report on that, rather than trying to report all news, most of which they don't understand fully. General news may well become the province of search engines like Google.
Ask a sucker why they think they weren't scammed and you'll get similar bullshit.
Your vitriol is quite undeserved in this case, there is no scam going on with Apple products - you may not like them, you may not appreciate them, but that doesn't mean other people are being fooled if they buy them, they just have a different set of priorities from you. Is that so hard to accept?
tied into the rest of their product line in unacceptably anti-competitive ways.
Just as art does not equal a con, so holistic design is not about tie-ins - I meant the integration of hardware and software, and if you knew that, shame on you for trying to twist the words to mean something else.
As it happens, I agree with you on that unrelated topic - Apple sometimes tie their product line in unacceptably anti-competitive ways, as many companies do. As a customer, I try to steer them away from doing that by (for example) refusing to buy DRM music. You may disagree with what they do and refuse to buy their products, in which case, bravo!, but that doesn't excuse sneering at their attention to design as if it means nothing.
And if they break you will discover their customer service is horrid.
Actually, I had an iPhone break last year and they replaced it within 30 minutes of walking into their store. They also score consistently highly in all the consumer satisfaction surveys I've seen, but don't let facts get in the way of your hatred.
The great thing about declaring something "art" is that no-one can deny your claim.
People can certainly deny it, as you have. That doesn't mean it holds no value for others. If you don't like Apple products, or value them, that's fine by me. However you are intellectually impoverished by your stance that everything they produce is tat dressed up as gold and everyone who likes it are idiots. If you did pay attention to why people actually do like and use their products, you might expand your conception of what is useful and what is not, and of the relation of form to function.
Your sig is:
Slashdot doesn't have to be full of retards. Moderate discriminately!
and yet your posts full of quick judgements and sweeping generalisations encourage the very atmosphere that you deplore. May I suggest you post discriminately instead.
Everyone has a perspective. ANYTIME you start dropping perspective into a news piece, you are slanting it. When you take the slant out of that, you get this:
News reporting at its heart is commentary, analysis, opinion. There is no such thing as a bald objective fact, because by reporting one such fact you are neglecting all the others which clamour for your attention. Now you can adopt a style which pretends to objectivity, but all you are really doing is adopting a style of presentation. That's not to say that it is necessary for journalists to try to twist reality to fit their base conceptions of it, but to select which story to tell your readers/viewers, and which parts of that story are important, is already twisting reality to some extent, and this should be recognised.
In your example, the fact that the party was loud is lost in your 'objective' version, as is the fact that the man slept soundly (as opposed to fitfully) - both might have a bearing on the news. You've just edited the story by removing words as much as you would by adding them. Objectivity is not only an unattainable shibboleth, it is also another force which distorts the story told.
Here's an apt quote from Dickens:
'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, - nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, - all helped the emphasis.
The more you Idiot-Proof a system, the smarter the Idiots become.
Did you ever consider that the users were trying to tell you something by entering bogus data? I consistently enter bogus data when I feel that a form is asking for data that I don't want to provide (i.e. almost every time I fill in a form online there is some unnecessary field which I will fill in with bogus data). They're trying to tell you they don't feel you need that information about them.
The correct response would not be to denigrate the users, but to consider why they refuse to enter their phone number.
By "artistically inclined" you mean he's a slick talking con artist right?
No, I believe they mean that Jobs has taste and considerable insight; even if he is not technically inclined himself, he recognises talent and good work. Perhaps you don't understand what that means, but equating artistic taste with 'slick talking con artist' as a joke simply demonstrates your ignorance.
Marketing or tricks are not at the heart of Apple's success - they sell because the products are of good quality, holistically designed, and have a good UI. They have other faults, and are not a good choice for everyone, but to dismiss Jobs as a con-man is to completely misunderstand the reasons people buy Apple products.
Hmm. As I read their terms they are quite clear on this - you are not allowed to cache tiles except temporarily, and in limited amounts, and also you're not allowed to let people use them outside the web service.
10. License Restrictions. Except as expressly permitted under the Terms, or unless you have received prior written authorization from Google (or, as applicable, from the provider of particular Content), Google's licenses above are subject to your adherence to all of the restrictions below. Except as explicitly permitted in Section 7 or the Maps APIs Documentation, you must not (nor may you permit anyone else to): 10.3 pre-fetch, cache, or store any Content, except that you may store limited amounts of Content for the purpose of improving the performance of your Maps API Implementation if you do so temporarily, securely, and in a manner that does not permit use of the Content outside of the Service;
For fiction books and literary works the changes might not mean much, but what of a legal book, or financial book? Or any book where the shades of meaning can mean quite a lot and the exact word matters.
I'm sure most authors would differ with you there - good fiction often has a lot of thought going into exactly which words are used. It might mean a great deal to change some words. To suggest that changing a few words would be just fine is equally absurd for literature/fiction. Instead of:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
We could end up with:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of ages
Thus changing the mood, the tempo, and the meaning of the phrase.
I'd never buy an ebook from any company which even considered changing the text as some sort of bizarre watermarking scheme - it's insane and the apotheosis of philistinism to suggest you can just change a few words here and there without changing meaning.
For any one of the gazillion or so home and office apps released for the MSDOS and Windows platform since 1980?
Which will not run on ARM.
Also, most of them won't even run on Windows 7 without modification.
I'd take the odds that MS Office lies at or near the core of any adult education program within your reach.
Those skills are transferrable to any comparable program. Word processing et al are not fundamentally difficult or tied to using products from Microsoft, whatever Microsoft would have you believe. If you feel unable to transfer skills learned using one brand of word processor to another, then PEBCAK.
The geek re-invents the net appliance every other year or so --- and gets his butt kicked the moment a more capable product enters the market.
Windows doesn't even compete in this space currently, and it is debatable whether they ever will. Their current mobile effort (Windows Mobile or whatever they call it now) is very low quality, and certainly not more capable than competitors like Android or Maemo, which are also moving into the net appliance space with very capable offerings.
If there were viable alternatives, but for the most part there aren't. In large part because Apple uses iTunes to hold people's music collections hostage.
iTunes itself does not hold your music hostage in any way - my files are sitting on disk in a neat folder structure by Artist, as plain MP3 and AAC (no DRM). I could switch to another program or use them elsewhere whenever I wish.
I agree their lockdown of the iPod/iPhone ecosystem is disturbing and annoying for users who know what they're doing, but it does allow them to move fast and completely update both sides of the syncing chain without having to worry about third parties and how they interact with the devices. Older iPods have many options for syncing, but the new ones are far more locked down (mostly probably to try to prevent people copying apps and protect the app DRM (so far a Sisyphean task)).
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's a case of a binary with permissions being able to access public APIs (as intended). Most platforms currently have this problem in some form - if you run an authorised program you must trust the author to some extent, though I think Android has some better controls. So they really need a chance in policy rather than to fix a bug (though perhaps filesystem access to user prefs could be considered a bug).
Apple have sandboxed apps, so they can't access data from other apps or the main system (save user prefs) unless it's through public APIs.
What this article points out is that those public APIs provide access (because it is useful, and sometimes essential for apps tp function) to your address book, phone number etc. and also to the file system for your user, under 'var/private/mobile' which lets you see the system prefs (most of which are accessible via private apis anyway). The keyboard cache (though without passwords) is worrying though, so this is a hole that needs fixed.
What Apple could do is offer more fine grained control (as they do with location services for example) so that apps cannot access data like phone numbers without explicit permission from the user. Obviously this needs some thought, as the last thing you want is a forest of permission dialogs for each app when it starts up, but it's certainly doable without much trouble. The file system access to system preferences would probably need to be locked down too.
However this is not some new security breach or bug - it's been known about since day one, but it is something that needs to be pointed out repeatedly until Apple fixes it, because most users will not be aware of it, and it does have privacy implications.
Note that apps we run on our desktop systems (Mac, Windows, Linux) currently have few such controls and have access to a lot of data about us which we might prefer to keep private - similar sandboxing is required there too.
So you think Apple should just accept every fart-app hack, poorly written, buggy piece of scrap code a developer ships their way?
They currently do accept such crap, so what is your point?
I submit to you as evidence the hundreds of flashlight apps which simply light up the screen, the copies of Apple demo apps, iFart Mobile and the many copies, IAmRich (only removed after customer complaints), the appalling UI of 'TripLog/1040', etc etc. There are thousands of apps which can in no sense be rated as quality apps on the store right now.
The app store vetting is not about quality (as evidenced by all the crap-ware on the store), it is about control of competitors like Google and the purse-strings for the platform. They want to collect money on each transaction, and exclude any apps which they feel compete too closely with Apple products, and if that wastes months of time/money for third-party developers, or even their close partners like Google, well that's just too bad. The current policy certainly won't lead to more quality apps on the store - quite the reverse.
Apple are of course legally within their rights to restrict competition on their platform, whether it is in the interests of their customers, or indeed Apple long term, is debatable.
By the way, stick with Indian food in London, the chinese food is terrible, though the poor brits don't seem to realize just how bad it is.
Nonsense. There is some great Chinese food in London, though there is also some of the worst available in some restaurants of Chinatown.
Nah. Just don't behave rudely, and people will know you're one of the decent Americans.
Heartily agree. The only way to change such a reputation is to behave politely and reasonably when abroad, not trying to hide your nationality, and usually you'll be treated well as a result. Otherwise ignorant people who think that all Americans are stupid/loud/insert your stereotype here will never be disabused of their prejudices.
Frequenting the pubs is a key survival tip, it's the only place where you have any chance of getting something edible for a reasonable price.
Sorry, I have to disagree here. There are loads of great places to eat in London, here's some examples off the top of my head:
Woodlands, Marylebone High Street (Great, central, cheap South Indian food)
Rasa Sayang, Chinatown (Cheap but good Malaysian)
Tayyabs, East end (Great but cheap Pakistani food, behind the mosque, big queues most of the time)
Royal China, all over town (Pricey but good Chinese, good for dim sum, big queues weekends)
Meson Don Felipe, The Cut (yes, that's the name of a street) (Spanish Tapas, cheap, good wine, good atmosphere)
Hafez, Hereford Road (Great Iranian food)
Tas, all over town (Acceptable Turkish food)
Gordons Wine Bar - wine bar dive in the middle of town for a change from pubs, of which there are few good ones in the center
Princess Garden, Mayfair (Moderately priced dim sum)
Mildred's, Soho (Moderately priced veggie)
Avoid Convent Garden, Leicester Square, Brick Lane, and other touristy spots for eating/drinking (though Chinatown/soho is OK) and you should do fine. Most pubs will serve rubbish food in my experience, though there are some gastro pubs which do quite good food - if it's a trendy pub it might do quality food, otherwise probably not. Don't rely on reviews on google maps, which are often completely off base, ask a local.
As for geeky things, don't forget the observatory in Greenwich, on the top of the hill in a lovely park with great views of London, plus the foot-passage under the river Thames which leads from Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs - worth a day trip on the DLR if you have the time.
The problem is a lot of mainstream news sites have reported all the cool apps you can get by jailbreaking, and a lot of people have found jailbreaking as one way to pirate apps.
Bear in mind that those pirate apps could easily contain malicious code - some probably already do. People don't need a virus or default SSH password to access your phone if you are willing to run arbitrary binaries from untrustworthy websites. The only advantage for this one is it can easily spread between phones if they haven't been secured.
The SSH server is required for installing apps - it's not optional, but people should be changing the password.
However if I were writing a virus for iPhones, I'd concentrate on adding subtle malicious code to a popular game, then release it in the wild as a free download. Greed wins out over caution every time.
Thanks for the cogent response.
That tiny syntactic change -- which you describe as line noise -- moves variable scoping out of the realm of heuristics you have to guess about because they depend highly on containing context.
I agree that's one use for it, but I'd prefer to strictly use objects to scope variables which need controlled, and get rid of all the $. Much like the ; at the end of the line, it's not necessary (IMHO) and just means more typing. I haven't run into many problems scoping variables in Ruby, whereas in Javascript the var is obligatory because of the strange scoping rules, and the odd rules still trip me up. So I'd say it depends on the rules of the language whether scoping will become an issue.
Unlike many people, including yourself, I came to JavaScript after years of programming with much better languages.
Heh heh. It would have made a more interesting troll if you had stated your preferred languages and the reasons for their superiority rather than hiding behind vague comparisons to 'much better languages', and explain *why* you feel Javascript/Ruby/EvilLanguageX are so impoverished, and what is better about other languages. There are plenty of things to criticise in all of them.
The fact you think Perl, which has many faults of its own, and still hasn't fully integrated oo, among other things, is clearly a greater language, does strike me as at odds with your swagger as a language expert. I don't claim to be an expert but have used all the languages you discuss, and your analysis, such as it was, was simplistic, one-sided, and seeded with juvenile put-downs. Not a very good troll.
You clearly make *far* too many assumptions predicated on a misplaced sense of superiority.
That all said, I didn't bother to read more than the first sentence of your post. I know that you're just a college student, and thus
QED.
I take it you don't know what 'sic' means. The gist of it is that he is reproducing someone else's text who [sic] has the spelling error in it.
Yes, I do. Please reread the comment I replied to, and note the misuse of who's, which prompted me to quote the comment and use sic to indicate the error (it doesn't have to be a spelling mistake, it just means 'this is exactly as it was written motherfuckers'). Though I must thank you for giving me another opportunity to use sic.
I love how the righteous link to wikipedia earned you several insightful mod points.
Faggot, I've had the misfortune of using both JavaScript and Ruby (for web development and scripting) more than you likely ever have, and ever will.
Or perhaps you're just some internet blowhard who likes to play to the peanut gallery? As you demonstrate very little in the way of knowledge in your posts, we'll never know. Your silly pronouncements of superiority in spite of very little knowledge of your interlocutor certainly make this a distinct possibility.
Have you looked at the syntax of Perl and Ruby? The vast similarities should be pretty clear to everyone but the stupidest of mental retards...then fuck off. You'll need to use both Ruby and Perl to experience Ruby's weak semantics compared to Perl.
You claimed that Ruby kept most of the syntax of Perl, but not the 'semantics' whatever that means in this context. Care to explain what you think it means, because you haven't so far?
I've used both, and there are similarities, but there are also many significant differences. The object system in Ruby is far less a tacked on afterthought, you don't have to declare variables with a prefix so there is less line noise, everything is an object, nicer blocks, etc. There is also quite a tradition of choosing the way which seems least surprising and sticking to it, as opposed to 'There is more than one way to do it' in Perl - that means radically different library classes.
The syntax of Ruby encourages legibility but keeps most of the shortcuts (in regexp for example) of Perl, while avoiding the horrific write-once possibilities of Perl which you seem to be so proud of (i.e. stuff can be done in fraction of a line of code); just because it can be done in half a line doesn't mean it should.
There is a spectrum from code which is far too verbose to code which is far too succinct (i.e. unintelligible even to the creator after a certain period), and I'd say Perl can be pushed too far to the succinct side, but that's personal preference really. It's quite possible to write good Perl code, but that doesn't make it the be all and end all of scripting languages, indeed several other languages are now more suitable for scripting if you prefer an object-oriented approach.
While I must agree with the sentiment that people who cheerlead for a certain language as radically different from all others need an education in the history and diversity of computer languages, to claim that Ruby is a bad copy of Perl without qualifying the statement betrays your lack of knowledge of the language, nothing more.
Can't we get someone who's [sic motherfucker] first language is English to proof-read these things?
It's whose, motherfucker, not who's.
--
Brought to you by the department of abusive language correction.
So I'm assuming you don't trust surveys sponsored by rivals of MS either, right? No? I thought so. You just don't like the results.
Do you often argue with yourself?
What makes you jump to the conclusion that someone who mistrusts this bullshit report wouldn't also mistrust bullshit reports from companies with ties to other browser vendors?
This study covers 2 quarters (a statistically meaningless sample), runs against all verifiable statistcs from the likes of CERT, gives no basis for its figures, and contains just one pie chart to back up its conclusions. It's patent nonsense.
You clearly haven't looked very closely at the survey, and are subject to the same happy ignorance you accuse the poster above of.
It seems pretty legitimate to me but I haven't exactly scruitinized it either.
QED
your tirade should be pointed at apple as well then. they are closed source AND had a shitload of vulnerabilities, as well as having a record of not rolling out patches quickly. whats your excuse for them?
Why should the grandparent have an excuse for Apple? What they are pointing out is that Microsoft have links to the article sponsors, who depend on Microsoft for a living, they have a history of this sort of FUD, and have recently seen a very serious drive-by vulnerability in all versions of IE. Any argument that IE is more secure than Safari or Firefox is laughable given the number of in the wild exploits for the relevant programs in the past, and the likely pattern of the future. I'm sure Microsoft will continue to churn out statistics showing that their software has always been more secure, and if you believe these made up statistics, more fool you - it's easy to massage the figures, and there's no way I'd trust a set of statistics from anyone with close links to a browser vendor, be that Apple, MS or Mozilla.
To pick a small problem with the statistics - this report covers two quarters in 2009, hardly enough to make any kind of meaningful comparison.
Also, Safari is not closed source in the way that IE is, almost all of it is open source.
maybe you should take a good hard look at OSS supposed security prowess, if you really were so confident firefox is more secure then IE, you wouldn't get so defensive.
Just like the article, this argument is content-free fluff.
If there really isn't much oil left, then oil will slowly become more and more expensive as the remaining oil becomes harder and harder to extract.
You assume a rational market, not one dominated by cartels, price fixing, stockpiling, short-termism and all the other corollaries of unfettered capitalism. Find a graph of the price of oil over the last few decades, and revisit your prediction of a slow ramp up in prices as demand rises and supply falters- rational markets are a myth.
The outcome of shortages of oil (or the expectation of such) will be huge price fluctuations like those of last year, as panic spreads and recedes in waves, booms and busts in the rest of the economy triggered by unpredictable transportation and manufacturing costs, and huge hardship for ordinary people caught in the middle of the huge adjustment necessary to wean ourselves off our addiction to fast cheap energy. Better to start preparing now and invest more in fusion or some other sources of power which have some prospect of lasting longer than the next 50 years.
News organizations actually have a lot of experience in collecting and collating data.
Most news organisations nowadays simply repeat stories, or echoes of stories, which a reporter from another organisation originally reported. The data is taken on trust, and often turns out to be completely inaccurate or misleading after the fact. I'm not so sure I share your confidence in the ability or desire of most news organisations to objectively collate and present data.
The ones that do are the exception rather than the rule.
I suspect that news will morph into something that one person can easily do, particularly if they devote themselves to a particular topic and only report on that, rather than trying to report all news, most of which they don't understand fully. General news may well become the province of search engines like Google.
Ask a sucker why they think they weren't scammed and you'll get similar bullshit.
Your vitriol is quite undeserved in this case, there is no scam going on with Apple products - you may not like them, you may not appreciate them, but that doesn't mean other people are being fooled if they buy them, they just have a different set of priorities from you. Is that so hard to accept?
tied into the rest of their product line in unacceptably anti-competitive ways.
Just as art does not equal a con, so holistic design is not about tie-ins - I meant the integration of hardware and software, and if you knew that, shame on you for trying to twist the words to mean something else.
As it happens, I agree with you on that unrelated topic - Apple sometimes tie their product line in unacceptably anti-competitive ways, as many companies do. As a customer, I try to steer them away from doing that by (for example) refusing to buy DRM music. You may disagree with what they do and refuse to buy their products, in which case, bravo!, but that doesn't excuse sneering at their attention to design as if it means nothing.
And if they break you will discover their customer service is horrid.
Actually, I had an iPhone break last year and they replaced it within 30 minutes of walking into their store. They also score consistently highly in all the consumer satisfaction surveys I've seen, but don't let facts get in the way of your hatred.
The great thing about declaring something "art" is that no-one can deny your claim.
People can certainly deny it, as you have. That doesn't mean it holds no value for others. If you don't like Apple products, or value them, that's fine by me. However you are intellectually impoverished by your stance that everything they produce is tat dressed up as gold and everyone who likes it are idiots. If you did pay attention to why people actually do like and use their products, you might expand your conception of what is useful and what is not, and of the relation of form to function.
Your sig is:
Slashdot doesn't have to be full of retards. Moderate discriminately!
and yet your posts full of quick judgements and sweeping generalisations encourage the very atmosphere that you deplore. May I suggest you post discriminately instead.
Everyone has a perspective. ANYTIME you start dropping perspective into a news piece, you are slanting it. When you take the slant out of that, you get this:
News reporting at its heart is commentary, analysis, opinion. There is no such thing as a bald objective fact, because by reporting one such fact you are neglecting all the others which clamour for your attention. Now you can adopt a style which pretends to objectivity, but all you are really doing is adopting a style of presentation. That's not to say that it is necessary for journalists to try to twist reality to fit their base conceptions of it, but to select which story to tell your readers/viewers, and which parts of that story are important, is already twisting reality to some extent, and this should be recognised.
In your example, the fact that the party was loud is lost in your 'objective' version, as is the fact that the man slept soundly (as opposed to fitfully) - both might have a bearing on the news. You've just edited the story by removing words as much as you would by adding them. Objectivity is not only an unattainable shibboleth, it is also another force which distorts the story told.
Here's an apt quote from Dickens:
'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, - nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, - all helped the emphasis.
The more you Idiot-Proof a system, the smarter the Idiots become.
Did you ever consider that the users were trying to tell you something by entering bogus data? I consistently enter bogus data when I feel that a form is asking for data that I don't want to provide (i.e. almost every time I fill in a form online there is some unnecessary field which I will fill in with bogus data). They're trying to tell you they don't feel you need that information about them.
The correct response would not be to denigrate the users, but to consider why they refuse to enter their phone number.
By "artistically inclined" you mean he's a slick talking con artist right?
No, I believe they mean that Jobs has taste and considerable insight; even if he is not technically inclined himself, he recognises talent and good work. Perhaps you don't understand what that means, but equating artistic taste with 'slick talking con artist' as a joke simply demonstrates your ignorance.
Marketing or tricks are not at the heart of Apple's success - they sell because the products are of good quality, holistically designed, and have a good UI. They have other faults, and are not a good choice for everyone, but to dismiss Jobs as a con-man is to completely misunderstand the reasons people buy Apple products.
Hmm. As I read their terms they are quite clear on this - you are not allowed to cache tiles except temporarily, and in limited amounts, and also you're not allowed to let people use them outside the web service.
10. License Restrictions. Except as expressly permitted under the Terms, or unless you have received prior written authorization from Google (or, as applicable, from the provider of particular Content), Google's licenses above are subject to your adherence to all of the restrictions below. Except as explicitly permitted in Section 7 or the Maps APIs Documentation, you must not (nor may you permit anyone else to):
10.3 pre-fetch, cache, or store any Content, except that you may store limited amounts of Content for the purpose of improving the performance of your Maps API Implementation if you do so temporarily, securely, and in a manner that does not permit use of the Content outside of the Service;
For fiction books and literary works the changes might not mean much, but what of a legal book, or financial book? Or any book where the shades of meaning can mean quite a lot and the exact word matters.
I'm sure most authors would differ with you there - good fiction often has a lot of thought going into exactly which words are used. It might mean a great deal to change some words. To suggest that changing a few words would be just fine is equally absurd for literature/fiction. Instead of:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
We could end up with:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of ages
Thus changing the mood, the tempo, and the meaning of the phrase.
I'd never buy an ebook from any company which even considered changing the text as some sort of bizarre watermarking scheme - it's insane and the apotheosis of philistinism to suggest you can just change a few words here and there without changing meaning.
With the Internet, it is everyone's right to destroy the revenue model of any business they choose to target.
I'm curious. What does the word 'right' mean to you in this context?
At first I thought you were joking, but apparently someone is taking you seriously (moderated Insightful).
For any one of the gazillion or so home and office apps released for the MSDOS and Windows platform since 1980?
Which will not run on ARM.
Also, most of them won't even run on Windows 7 without modification.
I'd take the odds that MS Office lies at or near the core of any adult education program within your reach.
Those skills are transferrable to any comparable program. Word processing et al are not fundamentally difficult or tied to using products from Microsoft, whatever Microsoft would have you believe. If you feel unable to transfer skills learned using one brand of word processor to another, then PEBCAK.
The geek re-invents the net appliance every other year or so --- and gets his butt kicked the moment a more capable product enters the market.
Windows doesn't even compete in this space currently, and it is debatable whether they ever will. Their current mobile effort (Windows Mobile or whatever they call it now) is very low quality, and certainly not more capable than competitors like Android or Maemo, which are also moving into the net appliance space with very capable offerings.
There are already PDA map applications that pre-download google maps at multiple zoom levels along your planned route.
Doesn't that violate Google's terms of service? You are not allowed direct access to tiles on Google's servers so far as I know.
Certainly possible with map tiles from openstreetmap.org though.
If there were viable alternatives, but for the most part there aren't. In large part because Apple uses iTunes to hold people's music collections hostage.
iTunes itself does not hold your music hostage in any way - my files are sitting on disk in a neat folder structure by Artist, as plain MP3 and AAC (no DRM). I could switch to another program or use them elsewhere whenever I wish.
I agree their lockdown of the iPod/iPhone ecosystem is disturbing and annoying for users who know what they're doing, but it does allow them to move fast and completely update both sides of the syncing chain without having to worry about third parties and how they interact with the devices. Older iPods have many options for syncing, but the new ones are far more locked down (mostly probably to try to prevent people copying apps and protect the app DRM (so far a Sisyphean task)).