Not really. When it comes to iDevices the software distribution is pretty much a walled garden, yes. But on the computer side this isn't the case. And in general Apple is more about selling products and systems that are tightly integrated and designed to "Just Work(tm)". I'm not saying this always works out the way they want it to, but that seems to be what they strive for. They don't sell you a bunch of generic parts put together into a computer that you are supposed to easily be able to replace and toy with (hardware-wise), they sell a product that's supposed to be good enough that you're not supposed to feel the need to pop the case open.
It's not for everyone (or every use-case), but when it works it can be extremely good (myself I use a 27" iMac as my main workstation but I wouldn't want every machine in my home to be a mac).
My point was that it was easier to keep your important data backed up when you only had a few hundred MB or a few GB of data to worry about at any given time. These days if you have say, 2.5 TB of data, it becomes quite a hassle just to find the important data. Even if you know roughly where your important data is. That is, I may know that my important documents are in ~/Documents while random movie rips are in/mnt/bulkstorage/movierips but that's still not good enough if I've got 15+ GB of data in ~/Documents. And let's not forget the 30+ GB of photos in ~/Pictures. And so on...
I can only speak for myself but if anything I had more drives "back in the day". These days I often only have a single disk for a machine with bulk storage in an array accessed over the network. It used to be that I would have multiple hard drives per machine (as an example, what was once my main workstation, a 486DX4-75, had a 210 MB IDE disk, a 540 MB IDE disk, a SCSI controller card and a couple of old SCSI drives I found lying about. What does my current main workstation have then? A single 1 TB SATA disk).
So no, for me your hypothesis does not hold true, I used to have lots of disks, I still have a box somewhere with lots of old disks in the 100 MB to 30 GB range. These days I just don't buy as many disks, I don't use as many disks and despite this it seems that they are more failure-prone.
Sure, a single external drive for backups is one thing but for everyday use I prefer to use RAID-5 or RAID-Z. Sure it's anecdotal but it just seems to me that newer drives fail more often than older ones. Not to mention that losing all the data on a 3 TB disk is a bit worse than losing all the data on a 540 MB or even 9 GB disk was. Sure I had important data on those as well, but it was easier to keep the most important stuff backed up properly.
MD chiming in. Faxes are reliable and verifiable. You get a confirmation that it connected and set. There are no spam filters, no worry about hacked email, no passwords. As long as your put in the correct number, it always lands at exactly the correct place.
Computers can only dream of such simplicity.
You're kidding, right? I can only assume you've never had to deal with a large byzantine corporate fax infrastructure. Putting in the right number had no "just" or "as long as" about it, when they have more than a dozen fax numbers and faxes to the wrong fax (even though most of them are in the same room) are ignored/shredded it gets really annoying.
Compared to this "simplicity" sending an email is dead simple.
Not to mention the "fun" of companies that receive faxes not to a physical fax machine that prints out the fax on paper but rather uploads it as a file somewhere on their internal network only to have all faxes ignored because no one but IT actually knows how to check the faxes since doing so requires the users to first authenticate with some oddball Java applet in their browser in order to open up a firewall enough that they can access \\mediasrv01.corp.com\shared\public\2011\janet\resources\efax2k\incoming\pub01\ or a similarly contrived resource locator using explorer.exe under Windows. And yes I've seen this, I've had phone calls where I've had to tell the person on the other end that it is not my problem if their company hides faxes when they demand we fax them (instead of using email).
I'm not going to speculate on the exact reasons for Jobs resigning as CEO but I suspect it was done now rather than later is so that Tim Cook gets a chance to prove to the rest of the world that he really is capable of running Apple. So should Jobs step down completely/die/whatever in the future the stock price won't tank because everyone has gotten over the whole "Apple needs Jobs to survive" thing.
In that way it's a smart move. If anything, Jobs is 56 years old, even if it wasn't for his illness that sounds like the age at which you'd at least be considering your retirement plan. For all we know he might be perfectly (well as perfect as you can be after a transplant and cancer) healthy but just knows that he doesn't want Apple to go down the drain when he retires and he doesn't want to keep working past 60 or 65.
I know a few people who ran their own companies and they all started putting things into motion for their retirement in similar ways when they were in their mid-50s, it just takes a while to step down when you're The Boss(tm).
Bill Gates is far more of a proponent of open systems than Steve Jobs ever will be.
Please, it was with Gates at the helm that MS put into standard practice to either not use open standards or to extend them and break compatibility. From what I've seen Apple doesn't do that, they may put a dumbed-down pretty GUI on top of it but underneath it tends to be fairly standards-compliant.
Oh, and how much of Windows is open source? Because last I checked most of Darwin was open source and Apple has contributed back to a whole bunch of open source projects (although some people like to compare lines of code or number of commits to show that MS have contributed more to open source because they spent a lot of resources making sure Linux is compatible with their own hypervisor tech and similar things).
I'm not saying Apple is all sunshine and unicorns while MS is evil and depraved. I just think the whole "MS is more open than Apple" argument is a classic pro-Windows troll staple that always gets pulled out yet rarely backed by facts...
Let me explain the process for copying music downloaded from anywhere in mp3 format onto a random $30 mp3 player:
"Huh, my computer doesn't recognize the player as a storage device. Oh, now I see why the tiny label claimed it was "optimized" (or whatever word they used) for Windows, it requires some random proprietary "driver" that also adds some sort of extension to explorer.exe". I even found one where the "driver" converted all your music to wma, you know, just because.
Not to mention a couple of brand-name mp3 players I've owned (as in, non-Apple but still from a larger manufacturer) where you could just copy files after installing their driver but the music would only show up in and be played from the player's weird file manager. If you wanted your music sorted by album or any other "advanced" feature you had to use their bloated standalone management panel application. Did I mention neither of these two players had support for Mac OS X or Linux? Only Windows and Mac OS 9(!), and yes, this was only a few years ago yet the box claimed it worked with macs, if by worked with macs you took that to mean "works with macs that are at least several years old, based on a CPU architecture that Apple is phasing out and running a version of Mac OS that saw its last major release more than half a decade ago".
Oh I forgot, this was one of those "let's all hate on Apple and not mention that other manufacturers out there may very well be worse" posts.
The difference between an iPod and a random cheap no-name mp3 player seems to be that when you buy an iPod you know what you're getting, with the cheap no-name player you could get a good player or you could get one that makes the iTunes experience seem extremely painless and simple by comparison, and don't expect them to tell you before you buy it...
Back then, people cared even less about security than they do today, what they wanted was an IT infrastructure that works.
Of course, I've seen ISP environments that used FTP heavily (as well as TFTP for a bunch of automated stuff). Why? Because when you're running an encrypted tunnel through another encrypted tunnel that runs between two trusted hosts on a segment of the network that does not allow incoming traffic from anywhere but the NOC it just seems silly to add another layer of encryption and the potential issues that could come with that for daily log transfers...
I'm no fan of Apple, but what business is it of the governments what price I put on my goods. If people don't like my price, they're free to buy someone else's.
"Maximized profit" isn't a human right. Also, governments are supposed to look out for the people of their country as well as the best interests of the country. If a foreign company is adding 30-50% to the price of their products exported to your country just for the hell of it then this would be bad in the eyes of most people and politicians.
There are lots of silly things like this, I remember a couple of years ago when I was looking to purchase a new copy of Adobe Photoshop. The English-language version when purchased directly from Adobe's Swedish website cost a lot more than it did when purchased from the US store (and this was not including shipping). Even after discounting sales tax there was a pretty damn big price difference. If it was the Swedish-language version I would've been more forgiving since translation costs money but this was the US English version, the Swedish version cost even more...
Also, here in Sweden there even used to be a joke among mac users that the "Apple dollar" exchange rate was fixed at 15 SEK for one "Apple dollar" (while the actual exchange rate was closer to 7 SEK for 1 USD). When the Macbook Pro first came out there was one guy on a forum that I used to visit who simply paid for a ticket to NYC and a night in a hotel and purchased his Macbook Pro there, it was still cheaper than buying it in Sweden.
Basically, a lot of companies do this and if you're on the receiving end it really sucks because your money isn't worth as much as the other guy's money.
WoW has always had two sets of gear (one for PVE and the other for PVP) - not sure what you are talking about there.
Well, maybe I'm just hallucinating but I seem to recall that "back in the day" those wearing PvE gear actually had a chance a surviving an encounter with someone wearing PvP gear (or even winning a lot of times for that matter), these days PvP v PvE gear almost certainly results in the PvE gear-wearing character getting beaten badly since PvE gear is useless.
This is made worse by the fact that a lot of people who were win-trading in Tol Barad just as Cata had come out basically acquired a good set of PvP gear in a few days while those who didn't do the win-trading thing there found themselves at a serious disadvantage. And guess what, it's a lot more fun and easy to get better PvP gear if you already have good PvP gear..
It's not about ganking quest givers, it's about actually being able to fight in and around towns. Interestingly enough the only world PvP still left in the game seems to be ganking for shits and giggles, always seems to happen in the middle of nowhere and against players with no ability to fight back (while I was leveling my latest alt I ran into a lvl 85 undead rogue (what a surprising race:class combo...) in full PvP gear who followed me around for almost an hour until I switched to my main and killed him a few times.
So yeah, killing quest givers is part of the world PvP experience but it is also what incites (incited) the larger battles, these days this doesn't happen, instead there are just random asshats following lone lower-level or non-PvP-geared players around killing them over and over again (which definitely can be considered ganking).
EVE Online has a huge interesting world where everything goes, and is tailored much more towards PVP. World of Warcraft is just too much about PVE and grinding that environment, which really isn't that fun, especially considering it's an MMO
Actually, WoW has become more and more about PvP. The problem though, from my point of view as someone who's played since "vanilla" but recently just kind of lost interest, is that most WoW players used to be primarily PvE players who enjoyed world PvP and the occasional battleground match. These days more and more players are "kids" who just care about the organized and ranked PvP, Blizzard even crippled world PvP on PvP realms (quickly respawning elite lvl 85 NPCs kind of take the fun out of the old-style world PvP in and around towns).
I miss the fights in Hillsbrad or the horde invasions of Darkshire. Of course, back then there was also less of a gap between someone who was still leveling his/her character and someone at the level cap. If you were level 25 and in Darkshire when the shit hit the fan you could still put up a fight, these days when world PvP does happen it's always a bunch of lvl 85s with maxed out PvP gear who are able to tear through anyone but others who are also lvl 85 and in full PvP gear (PvE gear is useless for PvP these days).
Of course, I merely pointed out that if you approach the problem from the "never trust the client" angle you will generally be able to avoid a lot of the problems that may crop up. In this case you should obviously not rely on client-supplied coordinates for security or anything involving money unless you have also separately verified that the client is trusted (i.e. a large company giving phones on-campus access to certain services only if the client has logged in with a company-supplied account first).
Where you get the coordinates varies. For a mobile client with GPS, yes you'll probably want to use the client-supplied data a lot of times. But it can make sense to do a server-side check against the IP address, if it's a supposedly static IP somewhere completely different from where the client claims to be the client may be lying...
True, I'm just saying that if geolocation is truly important to you then maybe you should at least attempt to verify it server-side (by looking up the IP address of the user, if it shows the user in Germany while the client is reporting that it's in Egypt then maybe there's a problem somewhere).
My point was that as long as you don't blindly trust the client you won't have these problems. Of course, it used to be worse, I remember the good old days of the late 90s when it wasn't uncommon for websites to use JavaScript to verify logins on the client (I have no idea who thought that was a good idea but it seemed to spread like wildfire).
For example, if people use bold text all the time, then why shouldn't we be able to bold-text? Why should we have to , or worse, write up a crazy "semantic" document and then add the XLST? Isn't that overkill?
Maybe it's just me but I'd rather do <span class="bold">. Using <b>, <center> and so on may work fine but overall using CSS to style your page is the way to go anyway.
Basically, you'll still end up with css for b, center and all those other elements because you don't want the default look of them.
Seriously, how is this hard? Don't trust the client, store things like geolocation data and other such things server-side.
Sure, not everything can be stored server-side but something like coordinates can easily be stored server-side (preferably linked to your current session in case you are logged in from more than one location so posts from your cellphone don't show up as posts from your home and vice-versa).
Yes, DSL tends to take a hit from various types of overhead. It's been a while since I dealt with it on a daily basis but I believe that a regular g.dmt connection (8/0.8 Mbps) loses around 15% from overhead when using Ethernet over ATM and TCP. So you'll never see more than 5.9 Mbps or so downstream with TCP...
The original Counter Strike game featured slow running (at least Beta 5,6,7 and 1.0).
However, it was plagued by the half-hearted realism you mentioned. On one hand you ran slow, on the other hand bunny hopping was commonly used to avoid getting shot (combined with various exploits of glitches like jump-duck-shoot-jump-duck-shoot to instantly steady your aim). Not to mention when they crippled a bunch of the "regular" weapons while still leaving the game in a state that favored snipers. Or knife running (you ran a lot faster when holding a knife than any other weapon, one favorite trick was to have a macro for the left mouse button that instantly switched to your main weapon, fired and then switched back to the knife). Or flashbang grenades that would blind you even though you were on the other side of a wall and looking away from it. Or (on programmable mice) macro-ing so holding the left mouse button equaled clicking it really fast (since popping off one round at a time as fast as auto fire was extremely accurate while auto fire immediately sprayed bullets everywhere but where you wanted them to go).
So yes, half-hearted realism, and the slow running was the biggest thing you noticed in terms of "realism".
[...] (how one would be wronged in a game with fairly inflexible rules I still don't understand) [...]
Well, there are a lot of games out there that have various flaws that can be exploited to your advantage which is generally considered to be something you don't do outside of a strictly competitive environment. Then there are "house rules" (one I remember fondly was playing various RTS games 2v2 on maps that had one or more rivers crossing the map with a stated rule that no one was allowed to cross the river within the first n minutes of the game, really cut down on the number of games that just turned into tank/zerg rush wins in a few minutes) that aren't coded into the game but which are agreed upon by the participants (and there's always that one ass who sends half a dozen tanks and a couple of APCs loaded with engineers across the river a little early).
Apple isn't a hardware company, they're a systems company. An easy mistake to make these days though since there really aren't a lot of those left. Apple's thing is integration, to make sure everything fits together nicely (not saying it's ever 100% but it sure tends to beat the average Wintel OEM box).
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Not really. When it comes to iDevices the software distribution is pretty much a walled garden, yes. But on the computer side this isn't the case. And in general Apple is more about selling products and systems that are tightly integrated and designed to "Just Work(tm)". I'm not saying this always works out the way they want it to, but that seems to be what they strive for. They don't sell you a bunch of generic parts put together into a computer that you are supposed to easily be able to replace and toy with (hardware-wise), they sell a product that's supposed to be good enough that you're not supposed to feel the need to pop the case open.
It's not for everyone (or every use-case), but when it works it can be extremely good (myself I use a 27" iMac as my main workstation but I wouldn't want every machine in my home to be a mac).
My point was that it was easier to keep your important data backed up when you only had a few hundred MB or a few GB of data to worry about at any given time. These days if you have say, 2.5 TB of data, it becomes quite a hassle just to find the important data. Even if you know roughly where your important data is. That is, I may know that my important documents are in ~/Documents while random movie rips are in /mnt/bulkstorage/movierips but that's still not good enough if I've got 15+ GB of data in ~/Documents. And let's not forget the 30+ GB of photos in ~/Pictures. And so on...
I can only speak for myself but if anything I had more drives "back in the day". These days I often only have a single disk for a machine with bulk storage in an array accessed over the network. It used to be that I would have multiple hard drives per machine (as an example, what was once my main workstation, a 486DX4-75, had a 210 MB IDE disk, a 540 MB IDE disk, a SCSI controller card and a couple of old SCSI drives I found lying about. What does my current main workstation have then? A single 1 TB SATA disk).
So no, for me your hypothesis does not hold true, I used to have lots of disks, I still have a box somewhere with lots of old disks in the 100 MB to 30 GB range. These days I just don't buy as many disks, I don't use as many disks and despite this it seems that they are more failure-prone.
Sure, a single external drive for backups is one thing but for everyday use I prefer to use RAID-5 or RAID-Z. Sure it's anecdotal but it just seems to me that newer drives fail more often than older ones. Not to mention that losing all the data on a 3 TB disk is a bit worse than losing all the data on a 540 MB or even 9 GB disk was. Sure I had important data on those as well, but it was easier to keep the most important stuff backed up properly.
MD chiming in. Faxes are reliable and verifiable. You get a confirmation that it connected and set. There are no spam filters, no worry about hacked email, no passwords. As long as your put in the correct number, it always lands at exactly the correct place. Computers can only dream of such simplicity.
You're kidding, right? I can only assume you've never had to deal with a large byzantine corporate fax infrastructure. Putting in the right number had no "just" or "as long as" about it, when they have more than a dozen fax numbers and faxes to the wrong fax (even though most of them are in the same room) are ignored/shredded it gets really annoying.
Compared to this "simplicity" sending an email is dead simple.
Not to mention the "fun" of companies that receive faxes not to a physical fax machine that prints out the fax on paper but rather uploads it as a file somewhere on their internal network only to have all faxes ignored because no one but IT actually knows how to check the faxes since doing so requires the users to first authenticate with some oddball Java applet in their browser in order to open up a firewall enough that they can access \\mediasrv01.corp.com\shared\public\2011\janet\resources\efax2k\incoming\pub01\ or a similarly contrived resource locator using explorer.exe under Windows. And yes I've seen this, I've had phone calls where I've had to tell the person on the other end that it is not my problem if their company hides faxes when they demand we fax them (instead of using email).
It's an apple.
I'm not going to speculate on the exact reasons for Jobs resigning as CEO but I suspect it was done now rather than later is so that Tim Cook gets a chance to prove to the rest of the world that he really is capable of running Apple. So should Jobs step down completely/die/whatever in the future the stock price won't tank because everyone has gotten over the whole "Apple needs Jobs to survive" thing.
In that way it's a smart move. If anything, Jobs is 56 years old, even if it wasn't for his illness that sounds like the age at which you'd at least be considering your retirement plan. For all we know he might be perfectly (well as perfect as you can be after a transplant and cancer) healthy but just knows that he doesn't want Apple to go down the drain when he retires and he doesn't want to keep working past 60 or 65.
I know a few people who ran their own companies and they all started putting things into motion for their retirement in similar ways when they were in their mid-50s, it just takes a while to step down when you're The Boss(tm).
Apple does allow any application on their computers. It's the phones and other iDevices that are locked down.
Bill Gates is far more of a proponent of open systems than Steve Jobs ever will be.
Please, it was with Gates at the helm that MS put into standard practice to either not use open standards or to extend them and break compatibility. From what I've seen Apple doesn't do that, they may put a dumbed-down pretty GUI on top of it but underneath it tends to be fairly standards-compliant.
Oh, and how much of Windows is open source? Because last I checked most of Darwin was open source and Apple has contributed back to a whole bunch of open source projects (although some people like to compare lines of code or number of commits to show that MS have contributed more to open source because they spent a lot of resources making sure Linux is compatible with their own hypervisor tech and similar things).
I'm not saying Apple is all sunshine and unicorns while MS is evil and depraved. I just think the whole "MS is more open than Apple" argument is a classic pro-Windows troll staple that always gets pulled out yet rarely backed by facts...
Let me explain the process for copying music downloaded from anywhere in mp3 format onto a random $30 mp3 player:
"Huh, my computer doesn't recognize the player as a storage device. Oh, now I see why the tiny label claimed it was "optimized" (or whatever word they used) for Windows, it requires some random proprietary "driver" that also adds some sort of extension to explorer.exe". I even found one where the "driver" converted all your music to wma, you know, just because.
Not to mention a couple of brand-name mp3 players I've owned (as in, non-Apple but still from a larger manufacturer) where you could just copy files after installing their driver but the music would only show up in and be played from the player's weird file manager. If you wanted your music sorted by album or any other "advanced" feature you had to use their bloated standalone management panel application. Did I mention neither of these two players had support for Mac OS X or Linux? Only Windows and Mac OS 9(!), and yes, this was only a few years ago yet the box claimed it worked with macs, if by worked with macs you took that to mean "works with macs that are at least several years old, based on a CPU architecture that Apple is phasing out and running a version of Mac OS that saw its last major release more than half a decade ago".
Oh I forgot, this was one of those "let's all hate on Apple and not mention that other manufacturers out there may very well be worse" posts.
The difference between an iPod and a random cheap no-name mp3 player seems to be that when you buy an iPod you know what you're getting, with the cheap no-name player you could get a good player or you could get one that makes the iTunes experience seem extremely painless and simple by comparison, and don't expect them to tell you before you buy it...
Back then, people cared even less about security than they do today, what they wanted was an IT infrastructure that works.
Of course, I've seen ISP environments that used FTP heavily (as well as TFTP for a bunch of automated stuff). Why? Because when you're running an encrypted tunnel through another encrypted tunnel that runs between two trusted hosts on a segment of the network that does not allow incoming traffic from anywhere but the NOC it just seems silly to add another layer of encryption and the potential issues that could come with that for daily log transfers...
I'm no fan of Apple, but what business is it of the governments what price I put on my goods. If people don't like my price, they're free to buy someone else's.
"Maximized profit" isn't a human right. Also, governments are supposed to look out for the people of their country as well as the best interests of the country. If a foreign company is adding 30-50% to the price of their products exported to your country just for the hell of it then this would be bad in the eyes of most people and politicians.
There are lots of silly things like this, I remember a couple of years ago when I was looking to purchase a new copy of Adobe Photoshop. The English-language version when purchased directly from Adobe's Swedish website cost a lot more than it did when purchased from the US store (and this was not including shipping). Even after discounting sales tax there was a pretty damn big price difference. If it was the Swedish-language version I would've been more forgiving since translation costs money but this was the US English version, the Swedish version cost even more...
Also, here in Sweden there even used to be a joke among mac users that the "Apple dollar" exchange rate was fixed at 15 SEK for one "Apple dollar" (while the actual exchange rate was closer to 7 SEK for 1 USD). When the Macbook Pro first came out there was one guy on a forum that I used to visit who simply paid for a ticket to NYC and a night in a hotel and purchased his Macbook Pro there, it was still cheaper than buying it in Sweden.
Basically, a lot of companies do this and if you're on the receiving end it really sucks because your money isn't worth as much as the other guy's money.
WoW has always had two sets of gear (one for PVE and the other for PVP) - not sure what you are talking about there.
Well, maybe I'm just hallucinating but I seem to recall that "back in the day" those wearing PvE gear actually had a chance a surviving an encounter with someone wearing PvP gear (or even winning a lot of times for that matter), these days PvP v PvE gear almost certainly results in the PvE gear-wearing character getting beaten badly since PvE gear is useless.
This is made worse by the fact that a lot of people who were win-trading in Tol Barad just as Cata had come out basically acquired a good set of PvP gear in a few days while those who didn't do the win-trading thing there found themselves at a serious disadvantage. And guess what, it's a lot more fun and easy to get better PvP gear if you already have good PvP gear..
It's not about ganking quest givers, it's about actually being able to fight in and around towns. Interestingly enough the only world PvP still left in the game seems to be ganking for shits and giggles, always seems to happen in the middle of nowhere and against players with no ability to fight back (while I was leveling my latest alt I ran into a lvl 85 undead rogue (what a surprising race:class combo...) in full PvP gear who followed me around for almost an hour until I switched to my main and killed him a few times.
So yeah, killing quest givers is part of the world PvP experience but it is also what incites (incited) the larger battles, these days this doesn't happen, instead there are just random asshats following lone lower-level or non-PvP-geared players around killing them over and over again (which definitely can be considered ganking).
EVE Online has a huge interesting world where everything goes, and is tailored much more towards PVP. World of Warcraft is just too much about PVE and grinding that environment, which really isn't that fun, especially considering it's an MMO
Actually, WoW has become more and more about PvP. The problem though, from my point of view as someone who's played since "vanilla" but recently just kind of lost interest, is that most WoW players used to be primarily PvE players who enjoyed world PvP and the occasional battleground match. These days more and more players are "kids" who just care about the organized and ranked PvP, Blizzard even crippled world PvP on PvP realms (quickly respawning elite lvl 85 NPCs kind of take the fun out of the old-style world PvP in and around towns).
I miss the fights in Hillsbrad or the horde invasions of Darkshire. Of course, back then there was also less of a gap between someone who was still leveling his/her character and someone at the level cap. If you were level 25 and in Darkshire when the shit hit the fan you could still put up a fight, these days when world PvP does happen it's always a bunch of lvl 85s with maxed out PvP gear who are able to tear through anyone but others who are also lvl 85 and in full PvP gear (PvE gear is useless for PvP these days).
So you're suggesting that everyone just ignore security concerns in favor of the "ooh, shiny!" factor? Or just what is it you are trying to say?
Of course, I merely pointed out that if you approach the problem from the "never trust the client" angle you will generally be able to avoid a lot of the problems that may crop up. In this case you should obviously not rely on client-supplied coordinates for security or anything involving money unless you have also separately verified that the client is trusted (i.e. a large company giving phones on-campus access to certain services only if the client has logged in with a company-supplied account first).
Where you get the coordinates varies. For a mobile client with GPS, yes you'll probably want to use the client-supplied data a lot of times. But it can make sense to do a server-side check against the IP address, if it's a supposedly static IP somewhere completely different from where the client claims to be the client may be lying...
True, I'm just saying that if geolocation is truly important to you then maybe you should at least attempt to verify it server-side (by looking up the IP address of the user, if it shows the user in Germany while the client is reporting that it's in Egypt then maybe there's a problem somewhere).
My point was that as long as you don't blindly trust the client you won't have these problems. Of course, it used to be worse, I remember the good old days of the late 90s when it wasn't uncommon for websites to use JavaScript to verify logins on the client (I have no idea who thought that was a good idea but it seemed to spread like wildfire).
For example, if people use bold text all the time, then why shouldn't we be able to bold-text? Why should we have to , or worse, write up a crazy "semantic" document and then add the XLST? Isn't that overkill?
Maybe it's just me but I'd rather do <span class="bold">. Using <b>, <center> and so on may work fine but overall using CSS to style your page is the way to go anyway.
Basically, you'll still end up with css for b, center and all those other elements because you don't want the default look of them.
Seriously, how is this hard? Don't trust the client, store things like geolocation data and other such things server-side.
Sure, not everything can be stored server-side but something like coordinates can easily be stored server-side (preferably linked to your current session in case you are logged in from more than one location so posts from your cellphone don't show up as posts from your home and vice-versa).
Yes, DSL tends to take a hit from various types of overhead. It's been a while since I dealt with it on a daily basis but I believe that a regular g.dmt connection (8/0.8 Mbps) loses around 15% from overhead when using Ethernet over ATM and TCP. So you'll never see more than 5.9 Mbps or so downstream with TCP...
The original Counter Strike game featured slow running (at least Beta 5,6,7 and 1.0).
However, it was plagued by the half-hearted realism you mentioned. On one hand you ran slow, on the other hand bunny hopping was commonly used to avoid getting shot (combined with various exploits of glitches like jump-duck-shoot-jump-duck-shoot to instantly steady your aim). Not to mention when they crippled a bunch of the "regular" weapons while still leaving the game in a state that favored snipers. Or knife running (you ran a lot faster when holding a knife than any other weapon, one favorite trick was to have a macro for the left mouse button that instantly switched to your main weapon, fired and then switched back to the knife). Or flashbang grenades that would blind you even though you were on the other side of a wall and looking away from it. Or (on programmable mice) macro-ing so holding the left mouse button equaled clicking it really fast (since popping off one round at a time as fast as auto fire was extremely accurate while auto fire immediately sprayed bullets everywhere but where you wanted them to go).
So yes, half-hearted realism, and the slow running was the biggest thing you noticed in terms of "realism".
[...] (how one would be wronged in a game with fairly inflexible rules I still don't understand) [...]
Well, there are a lot of games out there that have various flaws that can be exploited to your advantage which is generally considered to be something you don't do outside of a strictly competitive environment. Then there are "house rules" (one I remember fondly was playing various RTS games 2v2 on maps that had one or more rivers crossing the map with a stated rule that no one was allowed to cross the river within the first n minutes of the game, really cut down on the number of games that just turned into tank/zerg rush wins in a few minutes) that aren't coded into the game but which are agreed upon by the participants (and there's always that one ass who sends half a dozen tanks and a couple of APCs loaded with engineers across the river a little early).
Apple isn't a hardware company, they're a systems company. An easy mistake to make these days though since there really aren't a lot of those left. Apple's thing is integration, to make sure everything fits together nicely (not saying it's ever 100% but it sure tends to beat the average Wintel OEM box).