I'm certainly not a Marketing Genius, but it seems to me that if the iTunes store really did sell $1,000,000 worth of movies in the first week, then maybe other studios will realize that pissing off Wal-Mart isn't such a big deal after all.
If I were in Apple's place, I think I'd wait a while before giving in to any major retailer. On the other hand, I don't know how gift cards sold at retailers work -- if everyone else who sells an iTunes gift card gets some cut off the top of the cost of the card, then I don't see any issue letting Wal-Mart play in that game, too (which, according to the article, they don't at present).
Didn't a lot of studios initially balk at the idea of TV over iTunes, fearing it'd hurt DVD sales? Somehow I think that movies would go the same way, with initial reluctance, phenomenal sales of the initial Disney titles, growing acceptance, and finally becoming just another standard sales channel.
I've been futzing around with iPod integration for the last couple years, trying a couple different solutions and, every 6 months or so, trolling all the various electronics shops looking for new head units, and I've come to one unavoidable conclusion: head units suck. They're screwed up in many ways, not least of which is a useless focus on form over function, but that's a rant for another day. When it comes to iPod integration (or XM, which I've also been playing with), they're totally useless. Many of them only display 8 or 16 characters of the song title!
Both the iPod and the XM SkyFi have good sized windows that display artist, track, and album (the XM doesn't show album, but the screen space is there). Both those windows would fit in a standard-sized head unit, but NOBODY makes a unit with that kind of screen. It's damned annoying.
Anyway, to get to specific integration experience, I used (for a while) one of those "fake CD-changer" Aux inputs on my Ford Explorer, for XM and iPod, and it worked pretty well, until the CD button on my factory radio stopped working. (I could still play a CD, by inserting one and it'd automatically start playing, but if I switched to radio I couldn't get back to CD without ejecting the disc and re-inserting. Because the CD button also switched to the "changer" (the aux input box), I couldn't use that for XM/iPod any more. Now I use a cassette adaptor.)
For our other car, a Toyota Prius, I found a pretty nice system that mostly integrates with the big display: A VAIS Tech system (actually, the predecessor model to the one I've linked here). It also has to fake-out the head unit -- in this case, it pretends to be an MD changer, so I've got 12 "discs" to choose from instead of 6. Each "disc" is a playlist, and it shows the playlist name on the screen. It'll also show the song names as they get played, along with either the playlist, artist, or album (selectable). Most of those limitations are in the way the Toyota screen works. I would like to have thought there'd be a better way to add a new device to the system than this changer-simulation, but I guess that either there isn't or Toyota simply isn't sharing. The other nice thing about this is it's got a second Aux port that I've got connected to the XM radio, so I can pop back and forth between the built-in CD changer, the iPod, and the XM easily. Again, because of the limits of the built-in head unit, it's much easier to use it in "simple mode" whereby it's basically another Aux input and I just use the iPod to control and select music (though the steering-wheel buttons for forward and reverse track still work). (BTW, the "official" Toyota XM interface works almost exactly the same way, so even when Toyota can do better for such an interface, they don't.)
One thing I've definitely noticed, though, is that even if the integation into the multifunction display screen on the Prius were "perfect" (showing everything you'd possibly want to see from the iPod), I'd probably never use it. Most of the time, the display is showing my mileage/efficiency information, or the navigation screen. And when it's doing that, you can't see what's being played (I'm not even sure that it'll show a popup of each song as they start up, though it might). I've really decided that a dedicated screen for music information is required, so you can glance down and see the track, jump ahead, etc.
What I'd *really* like to see is either a head unit or small external unit (like the SkyFi) that can do both XM and iPod, using a full-size SkyFi/iPod like screen, preferably flourescent instead of backlit LCD, with a wheel that works (the SkyFi wheels are notoriously bad). Put that screen into a standard-height head unit, hide the CD slot and some kind of iPod slot behind a pop-down panel, and put a *good* user interface with more than 6 station presets in a bank on the unit (there's that other rant starting up again), and you'd have a real winner.
And it wasn't even that. According to this forum entry, all the hack does is tie into the audio "output" side of iTunes and skim off the decoded AAC stream, writing it to a file. One step above grabbing it at the sound card, but certainly not a crack of the DRM itself.
What's astounding is how many people seem to consider this "a step in the right direction," when it's really a "step in a totally different direction that will do nothing for actually breaking the DRM itself." Then again, maybe I shouldn't be *too* surprised....:(
Personally I'd love to see us progress to the point where it was possible to grow just the meat itself without the animal
I've wondered for a long time whether this isn't coming close. They've made progress with growing specific cell cultures on a dissolvable mesh substrate, which helps ensure the proper structures grow and such. Though I also wonder if meat, simply grown as a culture of cells, might not have the right consistency or taste, since it's only ever sat there. It might actually need to be worked, to actually function as a muscle, in order to be edible / enjoyable.
We could solve that by periodically zapping it with electricity, though the image of rows and rows of shallow pans with porterhouse steaks randomly jumping up into the air, while men in white lab coats carrying clipboards walk around and observe, is something that I just find...spooky.
Half of the "help" I read online is voodoo
on
Computer Voodoo?
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· Score: 1
One problem I kept running into when I was still fighting with Windows PCs was that, no matter what odd problem I had, I would always find a half-dozen answers, each different, each saying "Oh, yeah, you have to do/this/" with no real explanation. Half the time, the various answers would even conflict -- "that's an IRQ issue, move it to another slot" or "that's not an IRQ issue, it's a CPU speed issue."
The big problem was that each answer seemed authoritative -- nobody would hedge their response, say "well, I tried this, and it seemed to work, but I don't know why," no efforts were made at explaining it or even testing to see if it wasn't one of a dozen other things that had actually solved the problem.
Really, this points to a larger problem, which is the general inability of people to properly troubleshoot, and the further inability (or lack of time) to properly re-test what they think is the solution, in order to fully understand it.
This isn't as much of a problem in the Linux or especially Mac worlds, becuase inevitably these crazy problems center around hardware, and not software, but there are still some doozies out there.
I suppose this is what you get when anyone, anywhere, can post anything to just about any kind of forum, and said posting becomes easily searchable. It's just a shame that the scientific method is so far removed from so many of those posters...
Honestly, if you're the first person to post the list, and others (such as myself) want to see the list quickly and without having to visit the actual site (which is likely super-ad-ridden), then you're doing a service to the discussion and I don't think you should be afraid of "whoring." You should get credit for it, in my mind. I don't know why people are so concerned about it...
The formatting, though, well, that's a different issue.:)
All the Macs I have are PowerPC, so the announcement doesn't really help me any. But does anyone know if VMWare has considered a fat-binary OSX version of the VMWare Console program? So I can run VMWare Server on my Linux server, and use my older iMac and Minis as consoles with it?
The last time I tried anything like this, having no Console program, I logged directly into a GSX server and tried to run the console there, sending it back to the Mac over X-Windows, but could never get it to work (and it was a couple years ago so I forget the problem, but I seem to recall that I thought it was something endian-related.)
Note that this isn't a Firefox vulnerability. The trojan is opened as a Windows executable from email attachments, and writes itself into the Firefox profile's configuration directory.
While true, perhaps a related problem that actually is a vulnerability is the fact that Firefox (apparently) only checks for a valid signature on the plugin at download/install time. Maybe the Firefox configuration file, or at the very least the binaries for each extension, should be cryptographically verified at runtime.
Of course, this presupposes that Firefox hackers can manage to get their extensions signed, and if that's possible, then the malware authors could do the same. Unless...FF gets distributed with a mozilla.org CA cert, and extensions accepted and published on the mozilla site(s) get signed with that cert, then every "legitimate" extension from the mozilla sites will be verifiable at runtime. The user could opt out of that with an "allow execution [not installation] of unsigned extensions" preference setting, but the majority of users would be protected, so long as the malware doesn't also set that preference for the user.:)
(though even that last bit could be guarded against by creating a personal key to sign the config with, and every time you make a "security relevant configuration change" to the browser's settings, you have to re-sign the file.)
I have even heard ads on XM recently on the music channels. Sat radio was founded on a no-ad policy, but they are sneaking in.
Actually, XM had ads when they first launched, then maybe a year or two afterwards, they dropped ads from all music channels (except, interestingly, the kids channels). Now a half-dozen or so channels, previously XM-programmed, have been given to ClearChannel to do with as they will, and those channels now carry ads. All the other XM-programmed channels (Deep Tracks, Fine Tuning, 80's, etc.) are still ad-free.
I don't know the details as to why CC got those channels, but I've heard rumblings that it was to stop them (ClearChannel) from mucking too much with the other XM channels (CC is a major investor in XM).
I asked a few folks I work with back when the last (actually, the last before the last, the Word 0-day) exploit came out, whether it was feasible in a corporate environment to configure servers to strip attachments from any email where the mail (and the attachment) are not signed by a recognizable, valid cert.
Obviously, this requires a PKI of some sort, but for those companies which already do, it seems this would be a simple, easy way to virtually eliminate the possibility of outside trojans / viruses / whatever getting loose in the internal environment.
In fact, it's so simple, that I'm sure I'm missing something significant. Anyone care to point out what it is?
The Supreme Court (bless them!) ruled that the President only has "extraordinary wartime powers" as a temporary expedient to quickly do things that would take Congress too much time.
I'm not sure I've heard that, though I have heard that such "extraordinary powers" most certainly do not extend to denying constitutional rights, no matter what Hollywood may tell us.
For example, I'm pretty sure that the Supreme Court later determined that Lincoln's suspension of Habeus Corpus was, in fact, unconstitutional. Also, the Supreme Court determined that the suspension in 1942 of civillian rule in favor of military courts in Hawaii was also unconstitutional (and this was a territory, not yet a state, that had just been attacked by a foreign power's military, and even under those incredibly exceptional circumstances the constitution wasn't permitted to be suspended).
Here are some remarks by the former Chief Justice in 2000, and again in 2002, that address the question of civilian versus military judical authority in wartime.
Can anyone provide clear case evidence of the court determining that the President *can* suspend certain civil rights or federal laws in wartime? So far as I've ever been able to ascertain, every single time a President has gone "too far" with the wartime powers argument, he's been rebuffed years later by the Supreme Court, which tells me, at least, that any argument that a president has special lattitude in wartime is a crock, at least from a legal perspective. From a practical perspective, though, since it's always taken the Court years to get around to it, it's certainly been proven true. (though if the Court can decide a presidential election question in a matter of days, you'd think they could handle these other serious issues more quickly, too...)
I know this is probably asking a lot, but has anyone actually tried these betas and watched the traffic to see what they're doing?
Is it as simple as adding "@yahoo" or "msn:" to your buddy names, and from there all traffic is magically routed at the server side? That is, you'd use a Yahoo protocol with your yahoo client to send a message to the yahoo server, where it'll see that the destination buddy's name starts with "msn:" and so routes it to the MSN server, where it's then sent to yoru buddy?
'cause if it's *that* simple, then it'd be no time at all before this works its way into the other clients.
They still don't have (that I've seen) a VMWare Console for the Mac. A while back I tried remotely launching the X-windows VMWare console to a mac, but there was some kind of display issue and it wouldn't work (I don't recall the specific errors, but I think it might have even been a simple endian problem. As I always thought X is X, this never made much sense to me, either.)
Anyway, that'd be the one thing keeping me from using this at home for a simple W95 sandbox that I could use for those really few sites that simply refuse to support anything beyond IE (XM's account management, for one, and the DelTek timesheet system used by my wife's employer, for another). We have Mac desktops, and Linux servers, but no windows boxes anywhere in the house.
OFX DirectConnect which can directly retrieve and import account statements over the Internet
I've been using MoneyDance for a while now (www.moneydance.com), and recently the OFX DirectConnect support has stopped working for Bank of America. And, naturally, all they tell me is "we don't support Moneydance" or "we don't support Macs," even though the app is using what should be well-defined, open standards.
So what've been people's experiences with the OFX features of GnuCash, and does anyone have any "magic words" they can share that've helped get customer service to properly enable/activate OFX features for non-supported money apps?
So if I've got Mail.app running in the den and I log in upstairs to check mail just before I go to bed, things could get messed up.
Things like this can be fixed by setting applications up properly. In this situation, I would be using IMAP, not NFS.
I do use IMAP, and Mail.app talks to it just fine. The problem arises when I'm using Mail.app to read email from two boxes at once, both operating out of a network-based home folder. The app has some cache/index files that don't play well in a sharing environment.
I'm slowly coming to the unhappy conclusion that, at least for home folders, I'm going to have to keep everything local to each box and just make it easier to copy documents, etc., to a network-based home. Downside: all prefs, etc., will be local to the box. Upside: I can leave myself logged in on two different levels of the house w/out worrying about one copy of an app trashing temporary/"local" files and crashing the other copy.
To answer the question about filing bug reports: 1, I'm skeptical about it even doing any good, and 2, I haven't really gotten around to taking careful measurement of exactly what's going on. Maybe some day I will, but for now, I've got way too many other things on my plate.
As for Coda -- interesting filesystem, but I'm really not ready to put a research project on my network as the primary way for moving files around.:)
I just wish we could come up with a network file system that's worth the trouble. Right now, I'm using a Linux server with three Macs (two Tiger, one Panther), and everything is over NFS. Most of the time, it works fine, but if there's a weird hiccup, then the Mac will freeze solid and has to be hard power-cycled. Also, some apps simply won't run from a network share (or they'll run, but one thing or another won't be right). Install that app to a local drive, and it works fine. And this isn't even to mention security issues.
I've looked at AFP, but that essentially mounts the remote system as if it were an external drive, and assigns everything to the logged in user, so ownership, permissions, etc., are all really screwy. Plus that gets even worse if you use fast user switching -- now two people are independently trying to mount the same network drive, each claiming to own it outright. And it doesn't look as seamless as, say, simply going to/Server/Shared or/Server/Apps.
SMB isn't much better.
There's always AFS, but that's so bloody complicated that I'd take a lot of convincing before I seriously considered it.
This isn't even to mention the problems that most apps have in working in a networked environment -- applications simply aren't designed for, say, networked home directories, and *especially* aren't designed to be running simultaneously on multiple systems. So if I've got Mail.app running in the den and I log in upstairs to check mail just before I go to bed, things could get messed up.
I'm not sure there's even been a new network file system since the mid 90's, has there? Certainly, nothing with broad support that fixes some of these issues? All I want is UNIX filesystem features -- simple locking (I guess), owners, regular permissions. Doesn't even need to do ACLs. Transparently mounted so it looks like it's part of the local filesystem. And at least reasonably tolerant of network glitches, so a momentary drop at the server (or whatever else happens to screw NFS connections to the wall) doesn't put all apps which have even heard of the mount point into an uninterruptible kernel-level deep-freeze (what's the point of kill -9, dammit?). Is that so difficult?
I can't understand why he is "best known for Solaris" when it is far from his best work
well, there was that movie (and I mean the original, not the remake). I saw it back in college and loved it...got it at home but haven't gotten around to watching it yet. (I also have the clooney film, was a $5 xmas gift, just for completness' sake).
Anyway, could part of the problem with Solaris be that the translation isn't as good as his others? As far as I know, the only English translation of Solaris was based on an intermediate French translation.
Has Michael Kandal translated Solaris, and if so, is it available (maybe) in europe or somewhere?
That all sounds a lot like the way NeXTSTEP network booted -- all over bootp and such.
Anyway, the MythTV wiki has an entry on this: Diskless Mac Mini Howto that looks, at least at first glance, to be what the OP was asking for... (though interestingly, it looks like they're not booting OSX over the net, but Linux. Hm.)
oops, sorry.:) Of course, I wasn't responding to you so much as just in general...
I never claimed to enjoy DaVinci's Code. In fact, I think it was a suck book. Not because of the "inaccuracies" but because it simply wasn't that good. Transparent plot, basic whodunit.
Yeah, I agree, but again, sometimes I'm ready for exactly that kind of pulp reading. It's the same reason I watch Family Guy.
Another interesting book, in the techno-thriller genre, is No Outward Sign. Sort of a blend of silly thriller and Neal Stephenson. And I swear I actually worked with one of the characters. It's sort of a pulpy read, but most of the technobabble is plausible or even dead right (with one or two exceptions that I can live with). Written by a geek who plays in the infosec world.
Apparently they're having difficulty believing that a book can be fiction.
Yes, there are certainly those who've had trouble remembering "it's fiction, stuipid," but there are also plenty of people who actually believe the "Everything in this book is accurate" statement at the beginning of the book.
It's not that Dan Brown's books are bad -- I enjoy reading bad books, at times, and enjoyed all four of Brown's books, the same way I enjoy Family Guy or South Park. It's that they're bad, and claim to be accurate in their premises or details.
One big problem is the way that "facts" are tossed around in his books. Little bits of trivia that don't really affect the story significantly, but add to the "realism" of the story and make you think the author had done all sorts of research. For example, if the book says: "The helicopter fired up its engines." Great, sure, whatever. But if he writes "The BH-160 helicopter fired up its twin Binford 6100 TurboJet Engines," then if the BH-160 helicopter really exists, it better damn well have Binford 6100 engines.
His books are full of stupid little factoids like this, most of which end up being dead wrong. And many of which could have been corrected by a college intern spending an hour surfing the web. I'm not even going to go into all the specifics for the Da Vinci Code and how messed up it is, even aside from the religious questions. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary on it.
And if you're a geek, and loved the Da Vinci Code and think Brown's a great author, read his two more techie books -- Digital Fortress and Deception Point. Then re-read Da Vinci and Angels & Demons with a more critical eye.
Here's an example, from Wiki: In Digital Fortress, he says "Enigma was history's most famous code-writing machine--the Nazis' twelve-ton encryption beast." Of course, Enigma boxes were the size of typewriters. Unless they were made entirely of depleted uranium, it's unlikely they weighed 12 tons.
This is not to say that I haven't enjoyed his books. I have. And when in England a couple years ago, we made side trips to the Templar Temple in London and Rosslyn Chapel (which is a beautiful little church). And I'll almost certainly read his next book, too, just because.
Another note -- someone else suggested Umberto Eco's Foccult's Pendulum. that's a great book in a similar genre, but damn, it can be tough reading. sort of like Illuminatus!, but not quite as accessible.
[re: toyota nav hack to enable while-driving input]
That's a fantastic hack, and we use it all the time when my wife's sitting in the passenger seat. Two points:
Don't screw with the other items on that menu, at least on a Prius. There are a few items in there that if you change, could cause your Nav system to totally break down, requiring a service visit (really!) (I think it screws with boot code or something stupid...)
This doesn't work on '06 Prius, according to what I've read
Slashdot Mirror
I'm certainly not a Marketing Genius, but it seems to me that if the iTunes store really did sell $1,000,000 worth of movies in the first week, then maybe other studios will realize that pissing off Wal-Mart isn't such a big deal after all.
If I were in Apple's place, I think I'd wait a while before giving in to any major retailer. On the other hand, I don't know how gift cards sold at retailers work -- if everyone else who sells an iTunes gift card gets some cut off the top of the cost of the card, then I don't see any issue letting Wal-Mart play in that game, too (which, according to the article, they don't at present).
Didn't a lot of studios initially balk at the idea of TV over iTunes, fearing it'd hurt DVD sales? Somehow I think that movies would go the same way, with initial reluctance, phenomenal sales of the initial Disney titles, growing acceptance, and finally becoming just another standard sales channel.
I've been futzing around with iPod integration for the last couple years, trying a couple different solutions and, every 6 months or so, trolling all the various electronics shops looking for new head units, and I've come to one unavoidable conclusion: head units suck. They're screwed up in many ways, not least of which is a useless focus on form over function, but that's a rant for another day. When it comes to iPod integration (or XM, which I've also been playing with), they're totally useless. Many of them only display 8 or 16 characters of the song title!
Both the iPod and the XM SkyFi have good sized windows that display artist, track, and album (the XM doesn't show album, but the screen space is there). Both those windows would fit in a standard-sized head unit, but NOBODY makes a unit with that kind of screen. It's damned annoying.
Anyway, to get to specific integration experience, I used (for a while) one of those "fake CD-changer" Aux inputs on my Ford Explorer, for XM and iPod, and it worked pretty well, until the CD button on my factory radio stopped working. (I could still play a CD, by inserting one and it'd automatically start playing, but if I switched to radio I couldn't get back to CD without ejecting the disc and re-inserting. Because the CD button also switched to the "changer" (the aux input box), I couldn't use that for XM/iPod any more. Now I use a cassette adaptor.)
For our other car, a Toyota Prius, I found a pretty nice system that mostly integrates with the big display: A VAIS Tech system (actually, the predecessor model to the one I've linked here). It also has to fake-out the head unit -- in this case, it pretends to be an MD changer, so I've got 12 "discs" to choose from instead of 6. Each "disc" is a playlist, and it shows the playlist name on the screen. It'll also show the song names as they get played, along with either the playlist, artist, or album (selectable). Most of those limitations are in the way the Toyota screen works. I would like to have thought there'd be a better way to add a new device to the system than this changer-simulation, but I guess that either there isn't or Toyota simply isn't sharing. The other nice thing about this is it's got a second Aux port that I've got connected to the XM radio, so I can pop back and forth between the built-in CD changer, the iPod, and the XM easily. Again, because of the limits of the built-in head unit, it's much easier to use it in "simple mode" whereby it's basically another Aux input and I just use the iPod to control and select music (though the steering-wheel buttons for forward and reverse track still work). (BTW, the "official" Toyota XM interface works almost exactly the same way, so even when Toyota can do better for such an interface, they don't.)
One thing I've definitely noticed, though, is that even if the integation into the multifunction display screen on the Prius were "perfect" (showing everything you'd possibly want to see from the iPod), I'd probably never use it. Most of the time, the display is showing my mileage/efficiency information, or the navigation screen. And when it's doing that, you can't see what's being played (I'm not even sure that it'll show a popup of each song as they start up, though it might). I've really decided that a dedicated screen for music information is required, so you can glance down and see the track, jump ahead, etc.
What I'd *really* like to see is either a head unit or small external unit (like the SkyFi) that can do both XM and iPod, using a full-size SkyFi/iPod like screen, preferably flourescent instead of backlit LCD, with a wheel that works (the SkyFi wheels are notoriously bad). Put that screen into a standard-height head unit, hide the CD slot and some kind of iPod slot behind a pop-down panel, and put a *good* user interface with more than 6 station presets in a bank on the unit (there's that other rant starting up again), and you'd have a real winner.
I think there'd be
iTunes wasn't cracked. Fairplay DRM was cracked.
:(
And it wasn't even that. According to this forum entry, all the hack does is tie into the audio "output" side of iTunes and skim off the decoded AAC stream, writing it to a file. One step above grabbing it at the sound card, but certainly not a crack of the DRM itself.
What's astounding is how many people seem to consider this "a step in the right direction," when it's really a "step in a totally different direction that will do nothing for actually breaking the DRM itself." Then again, maybe I shouldn't be *too* surprised....
Personally I'd love to see us progress to the point where it was possible to grow just the meat itself without the animal
I've wondered for a long time whether this isn't coming close. They've made progress with growing specific cell cultures on a dissolvable mesh substrate, which helps ensure the proper structures grow and such. Though I also wonder if meat, simply grown as a culture of cells, might not have the right consistency or taste, since it's only ever sat there. It might actually need to be worked, to actually function as a muscle, in order to be edible / enjoyable.
We could solve that by periodically zapping it with electricity, though the image of rows and rows of shallow pans with porterhouse steaks randomly jumping up into the air, while men in white lab coats carrying clipboards walk around and observe, is something that I just find...spooky.
One problem I kept running into when I was still fighting with Windows PCs was that, no matter what odd problem I had, I would always find a half-dozen answers, each different, each saying "Oh, yeah, you have to do /this/" with no real explanation. Half the time, the various answers would even conflict -- "that's an IRQ issue, move it to another slot" or "that's not an IRQ issue, it's a CPU speed issue."
The big problem was that each answer seemed authoritative -- nobody would hedge their response, say "well, I tried this, and it seemed to work, but I don't know why," no efforts were made at explaining it or even testing to see if it wasn't one of a dozen other things that had actually solved the problem.
Really, this points to a larger problem, which is the general inability of people to properly troubleshoot, and the further inability (or lack of time) to properly re-test what they think is the solution, in order to fully understand it.
This isn't as much of a problem in the Linux or especially Mac worlds, becuase inevitably these crazy problems center around hardware, and not software, but there are still some doozies out there.
I suppose this is what you get when anyone, anywhere, can post anything to just about any kind of forum, and said posting becomes easily searchable. It's just a shame that the scientific method is so far removed from so many of those posters...
Honestly, if you're the first person to post the list, and others (such as myself) want to see the list quickly and without having to visit the actual site (which is likely super-ad-ridden), then you're doing a service to the discussion and I don't think you should be afraid of "whoring." You should get credit for it, in my mind. I don't know why people are so concerned about it...
:)
The formatting, though, well, that's a different issue.
Ah, okay, I'll give that a whirl sometime. Thanks! (it's been a while since I'd tried this....)
All the Macs I have are PowerPC, so the announcement doesn't really help me any. But does anyone know if VMWare has considered a fat-binary OSX version of the VMWare Console program? So I can run VMWare Server on my Linux server, and use my older iMac and Minis as consoles with it?
The last time I tried anything like this, having no Console program, I logged directly into a GSX server and tried to run the console there, sending it back to the Mac over X-Windows, but could never get it to work (and it was a couple years ago so I forget the problem, but I seem to recall that I thought it was something endian-related.)
Note that this isn't a Firefox vulnerability. The trojan is opened as a Windows executable from email attachments, and writes itself into the Firefox profile's configuration directory.
:)
While true, perhaps a related problem that actually is a vulnerability is the fact that Firefox (apparently) only checks for a valid signature on the plugin at download/install time. Maybe the Firefox configuration file, or at the very least the binaries for each extension, should be cryptographically verified at runtime.
Of course, this presupposes that Firefox hackers can manage to get their extensions signed, and if that's possible, then the malware authors could do the same. Unless...FF gets distributed with a mozilla.org CA cert, and extensions accepted and published on the mozilla site(s) get signed with that cert, then every "legitimate" extension from the mozilla sites will be verifiable at runtime. The user could opt out of that with an "allow execution [not installation] of unsigned extensions" preference setting, but the majority of users would be protected, so long as the malware doesn't also set that preference for the user.
(though even that last bit could be guarded against by creating a personal key to sign the config with, and every time you make a "security relevant configuration change" to the browser's settings, you have to re-sign the file.)
I have even heard ads on XM recently on the music channels. Sat radio was founded on a no-ad policy, but they are sneaking in.
Actually, XM had ads when they first launched, then maybe a year or two afterwards, they dropped ads from all music channels (except, interestingly, the kids channels). Now a half-dozen or so channels, previously XM-programmed, have been given to ClearChannel to do with as they will, and those channels now carry ads. All the other XM-programmed channels (Deep Tracks, Fine Tuning, 80's, etc.) are still ad-free.
I don't know the details as to why CC got those channels, but I've heard rumblings that it was to stop them (ClearChannel) from mucking too much with the other XM channels (CC is a major investor in XM).
Links to porn.
I asked a few folks I work with back when the last (actually, the last before the last, the Word 0-day) exploit came out, whether it was feasible in a corporate environment to configure servers to strip attachments from any email where the mail (and the attachment) are not signed by a recognizable, valid cert.
Obviously, this requires a PKI of some sort, but for those companies which already do, it seems this would be a simple, easy way to virtually eliminate the possibility of outside trojans / viruses / whatever getting loose in the internal environment.
In fact, it's so simple, that I'm sure I'm missing something significant. Anyone care to point out what it is?
The Supreme Court (bless them!) ruled that the President only has "extraordinary wartime powers" as a temporary expedient to quickly do things that would take Congress too much time.
I'm not sure I've heard that, though I have heard that such "extraordinary powers" most certainly do not extend to denying constitutional rights, no matter what Hollywood may tell us.
For example, I'm pretty sure that the Supreme Court later determined that Lincoln's suspension of Habeus Corpus was, in fact, unconstitutional. Also, the Supreme Court determined that the suspension in 1942 of civillian rule in favor of military courts in Hawaii was also unconstitutional (and this was a territory, not yet a state, that had just been attacked by a foreign power's military, and even under those incredibly exceptional circumstances the constitution wasn't permitted to be suspended).
Here are some remarks by the former Chief Justice in 2000, and again in 2002, that address the question of civilian versus military judical authority in wartime.
Can anyone provide clear case evidence of the court determining that the President *can* suspend certain civil rights or federal laws in wartime? So far as I've ever been able to ascertain, every single time a President has gone "too far" with the wartime powers argument, he's been rebuffed years later by the Supreme Court, which tells me, at least, that any argument that a president has special lattitude in wartime is a crock, at least from a legal perspective. From a practical perspective, though, since it's always taken the Court years to get around to it, it's certainly been proven true. (though if the Court can decide a presidential election question in a matter of days, you'd think they could handle these other serious issues more quickly, too...)
I know this is probably asking a lot, but has anyone actually tried these betas and watched the traffic to see what they're doing?
Is it as simple as adding "@yahoo" or "msn:" to your buddy names, and from there all traffic is magically routed at the server side? That is, you'd use a Yahoo protocol with your yahoo client to send a message to the yahoo server, where it'll see that the destination buddy's name starts with "msn:" and so routes it to the MSN server, where it's then sent to yoru buddy?
'cause if it's *that* simple, then it'd be no time at all before this works its way into the other clients.
They still don't have (that I've seen) a VMWare Console for the Mac. A while back I tried remotely launching the X-windows VMWare console to a mac, but there was some kind of display issue and it wouldn't work (I don't recall the specific errors, but I think it might have even been a simple endian problem. As I always thought X is X, this never made much sense to me, either.)
Anyway, that'd be the one thing keeping me from using this at home for a simple W95 sandbox that I could use for those really few sites that simply refuse to support anything beyond IE (XM's account management, for one, and the DelTek timesheet system used by my wife's employer, for another). We have Mac desktops, and Linux servers, but no windows boxes anywhere in the house.
OFX DirectConnect which can directly retrieve and import account statements over the Internet
I've been using MoneyDance for a while now (www.moneydance.com), and recently the OFX DirectConnect support has stopped working for Bank of America. And, naturally, all they tell me is "we don't support Moneydance" or "we don't support Macs," even though the app is using what should be well-defined, open standards.
So what've been people's experiences with the OFX features of GnuCash, and does anyone have any "magic words" they can share that've helped get customer service to properly enable/activate OFX features for non-supported money apps?
So if I've got Mail.app running in the den and I log in upstairs to check mail just before I go to bed, things could get messed up.
:)
Things like this can be fixed by setting applications up properly. In this situation, I would be using IMAP, not NFS.
I do use IMAP, and Mail.app talks to it just fine. The problem arises when I'm using Mail.app to read email from two boxes at once, both operating out of a network-based home folder. The app has some cache/index files that don't play well in a sharing environment.
I'm slowly coming to the unhappy conclusion that, at least for home folders, I'm going to have to keep everything local to each box and just make it easier to copy documents, etc., to a network-based home. Downside: all prefs, etc., will be local to the box. Upside: I can leave myself logged in on two different levels of the house w/out worrying about one copy of an app trashing temporary/"local" files and crashing the other copy.
To answer the question about filing bug reports: 1, I'm skeptical about it even doing any good, and 2, I haven't really gotten around to taking careful measurement of exactly what's going on. Maybe some day I will, but for now, I've got way too many other things on my plate.
As for Coda -- interesting filesystem, but I'm really not ready to put a research project on my network as the primary way for moving files around.
I just wish we could come up with a network file system that's worth the trouble. Right now, I'm using a Linux server with three Macs (two Tiger, one Panther), and everything is over NFS. Most of the time, it works fine, but if there's a weird hiccup, then the Mac will freeze solid and has to be hard power-cycled. Also, some apps simply won't run from a network share (or they'll run, but one thing or another won't be right). Install that app to a local drive, and it works fine. And this isn't even to mention security issues.
/Server/Shared or /Server/Apps.
I've looked at AFP, but that essentially mounts the remote system as if it were an external drive, and assigns everything to the logged in user, so ownership, permissions, etc., are all really screwy. Plus that gets even worse if you use fast user switching -- now two people are independently trying to mount the same network drive, each claiming to own it outright. And it doesn't look as seamless as, say, simply going to
SMB isn't much better.
There's always AFS, but that's so bloody complicated that I'd take a lot of convincing before I seriously considered it.
This isn't even to mention the problems that most apps have in working in a networked environment -- applications simply aren't designed for, say, networked home directories, and *especially* aren't designed to be running simultaneously on multiple systems. So if I've got Mail.app running in the den and I log in upstairs to check mail just before I go to bed, things could get messed up.
I'm not sure there's even been a new network file system since the mid 90's, has there? Certainly, nothing with broad support that fixes some of these issues? All I want is UNIX filesystem features -- simple locking (I guess), owners, regular permissions. Doesn't even need to do ACLs. Transparently mounted so it looks like it's part of the local filesystem. And at least reasonably tolerant of network glitches, so a momentary drop at the server (or whatever else happens to screw NFS connections to the wall) doesn't put all apps which have even heard of the mount point into an uninterruptible kernel-level deep-freeze (what's the point of kill -9, dammit?). Is that so difficult?
After 20 seconds with google, I present this proof of prior art: (yes, it's work safe)
I can't understand why he is "best known for Solaris" when it is far from his best work
well, there was that movie (and I mean the original, not the remake). I saw it back in college and loved it...got it at home but haven't gotten around to watching it yet. (I also have the clooney film, was a $5 xmas gift, just for completness' sake).
Anyway, could part of the problem with Solaris be that the translation isn't as good as his others? As far as I know, the only English translation of Solaris was based on an intermediate French translation.
Has Michael Kandal translated Solaris, and if so, is it available (maybe) in europe or somewhere?
That all sounds a lot like the way NeXTSTEP network booted -- all over bootp and such.
Anyway, the MythTV wiki has an entry on this: Diskless Mac Mini Howto that looks, at least at first glance, to be what the OP was asking for... (though interestingly, it looks like they're not booting OSX over the net, but Linux. Hm.)
I mentioned Foucalt's Pendulum.
:) Of course, I wasn't responding to you so much as just in general...
oops, sorry.
I never claimed to enjoy DaVinci's Code. In fact, I think it was a suck book. Not because of the "inaccuracies" but because it simply wasn't that good. Transparent plot, basic whodunit.
Yeah, I agree, but again, sometimes I'm ready for exactly that kind of pulp reading. It's the same reason I watch Family Guy.
Another interesting book, in the techno-thriller genre, is No Outward Sign. Sort of a blend of silly thriller and Neal Stephenson. And I swear I actually worked with one of the characters. It's sort of a pulpy read, but most of the technobabble is plausible or even dead right (with one or two exceptions that I can live with). Written by a geek who plays in the infosec world.
Apparently they're having difficulty believing that a book can be fiction.
Yes, there are certainly those who've had trouble remembering "it's fiction, stuipid," but there are also plenty of people who actually believe the "Everything in this book is accurate" statement at the beginning of the book.
It's not that Dan Brown's books are bad -- I enjoy reading bad books, at times, and enjoyed all four of Brown's books, the same way I enjoy Family Guy or South Park. It's that they're bad, and claim to be accurate in their premises or details.
One big problem is the way that "facts" are tossed around in his books. Little bits of trivia that don't really affect the story significantly, but add to the "realism" of the story and make you think the author had done all sorts of research. For example, if the book says: "The helicopter fired up its engines." Great, sure, whatever. But if he writes "The BH-160 helicopter fired up its twin Binford 6100 TurboJet Engines," then if the BH-160 helicopter really exists, it better damn well have Binford 6100 engines.
His books are full of stupid little factoids like this, most of which end up being dead wrong. And many of which could have been corrected by a college intern spending an hour surfing the web. I'm not even going to go into all the specifics for the Da Vinci Code and how messed up it is, even aside from the religious questions. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary on it.
And if you're a geek, and loved the Da Vinci Code and think Brown's a great author, read his two more techie books -- Digital Fortress and Deception Point. Then re-read Da Vinci and Angels & Demons with a more critical eye.
Here's an example, from Wiki: In Digital Fortress, he says "Enigma was history's most famous code-writing machine--the Nazis' twelve-ton encryption beast." Of course, Enigma boxes were the size of typewriters. Unless they were made entirely of depleted uranium, it's unlikely they weighed 12 tons.
This is not to say that I haven't enjoyed his books. I have. And when in England a couple years ago, we made side trips to the Templar Temple in London and Rosslyn Chapel (which is a beautiful little church). And I'll almost certainly read his next book, too, just because.
Another note -- someone else suggested Umberto Eco's Foccult's Pendulum. that's a great book in a similar genre, but damn, it can be tough reading. sort of like Illuminatus!, but not quite as accessible.
Is anybody outside of this university's administration concerned about this?
Yes. Scientifically illiterate risk-averse crackpots with their heads in the sand.
That's a fantastic hack, and we use it all the time when my wife's sitting in the passenger seat. Two points: