Any admin user can run things as root directly anyway. Basically, by making a user an admin, two things are done - the user is added to the group admin, and to/etc/sudoers so they can do root-only stuff by entering their own passwords in various dialog boxes.
So, unless you're doing hinky stuff by hand, any user that's in admin, is also able to use sudo to run stuff as root right now - no waiting for a reboot.
A possible downside is that an admin user could leave the computer logged in, walk away, and someone else could abuse the privilege of the admin group, without knowing the user's password.
But the that goes for any OS - if you have negligent administrators and your attackers have physical access to the computer, you lose.
The alternative view is that it's not your TV, so you shouldn't be able to turn it off.
The alternative to your alternative view is that if the owner is not there, and nobody is actually watching the TV, you have a right to take nondestructive actions like turning the thing off. You don't have the right to smash it, but that's a different matter.
I mean, if you're in a bar, and you need more tables to accomodate a larger group, do you go "Oh, it's not my table, I don't have the right to move it"? No, you move it because it's not harming anything. You don't have the right to burn it for heat...
Yes, but just turning TVs off at public places if people are watching them...
Yes, but nothing. He just excluded that case. Would you not find it handy to have a remote, so that in a situation where nobody is watching a TV (you just asked, remember, because you are a polite and considerate person), and there is no remote nearby, and you would rather have it off because you want to read, or sleep, or have a conversation without a flickering screen just behind your friend's shoulder to distract you?
Leaving aside the fact that you're ranting for no reason at a perfectly polite poster...
Do you really find it easier to tune it out when both sides of the conversation are there? You're either nosy, or you have some mental issue where your decision to be annoyed by people on a phone makes it impossible for you to treat them like any other person talking somewhere.
He's not the only one then. For whatever reason, cell phone conversations are annoying to nearly everyone.
I suspect it's at least in part because cell connections tend to be bad, so people on cell phones will be talking a lot louder than if the person were right next to them.
And politely ask the person to turn it back on again.
I mean, I wouldn't turn off a TV that someone is obviously watching attentively. But I might just look around, not notice someone who's so slouched in a chair he looks asleep, but is actually watching the news, and turn off the TV.
Now, doing this with no ill intention, I would not take particularly kindly to someone calling me a sanctimonious jackass nor going off on me, with or without asterisks, because I find a TV keeps me from reading or sleeping or whatever.
Really, they should just put the TVs low enough so people can reach the power button, and turn it on or off according to what they want at the time, and not have to resort to carrying around silly gizmos.
i personally have no desire to watch CNN for four hours, but you don't have the right to deny someone else the ability to do so if the TV's already on and that's what they want to do.
OK, let's follow that. If you and I are in an airport terminal, the TV's on, neither of us wants to watch CNN for the next couple of hours, and there's nobody about, we don't have the right to turn the damn thing off, because we might be denying some hypothetical future passing sap the ability to watch drivel for hours to numb himself to the misery of his existence?
At some point, you've got to have some balls, and make choices based on what you want. If you look around, and nobody's watching the TV, and it's annoying you, and nobody has a remote to turn the thing off, act. Be a man. Or a woman for that matter. Take action to make your own life more livable. If you turn out to be wrong, and someone you hadn't noticed gets upset because the TV went dark, then you can turn the frigging thing back on - a toggle can make two sorts of changes, you know.
No, it's not my TV, and it's not my bar, or my airport (well, insofar as I pay taxes to support the municipally owned airport, it is actually mine). But I'm in it, and I will endeavour to make it more pleasant for myself, especially if there's no evidence that doing so will make it less pleasant for others.
You suggest Microsoft could make windows for PPC for the same sort of cost Apple could make OS X for x86. I seriously doubt this.
For one thing, Darwin/x86 already exists. The range of device drivers is limited, but it already exists, you could run it today if you wanted (assuming you have x86 hardware handy, and relatively unremarkable peripherals that need supporting). It's not just the kernel either, it's essentially a complete, if somewhat sparse, BSD distro.
That would leave only the closed source part of OS X to port. Basically of this is user programs and libraries - file browsers and text editors and preference managers and such. That's not the sort of stuff you typically code in assembler. There were rumours a while back that Apple was actually building the entirety of OS X on x86 every once in a while, just as a sanity check - to make sure that no hardware specific code was creeping into the higher levels of software where it doesn't belong.
The same cannot be said of Windows. Work on the ppc kernel was presumably more or less abandoned since NT4 (which was, what, 11 years ago?). And as for the higher level utilities and libraries, one somehow gets the impression that they're considerably cobwebbier than the equivalent OS X code. Hardware abstractions have probably been broken in a lot of places, all of which would need fixing, over the years since the original notepad was written...
And, as for the overall premise of abandoning OS X for Windows/PPC - are you kidding? People who want to run Windows, are running it. The only ones using an OS they don't want, are doing so because they thought (rightly or wrongly) that x86 hardware was the only affordable way to go.
I mean, there might be the odd MS zealot who got an iMac for Christmas, and can't sell it because Auntie Anne's feelings would be hurt, but other than that... People who just buy a random computer because they don't know what they want don't just somehow end up with a Mac - they end up with the beigeish PC the greasy man at UltraCompuMaxiLand recommended.
It says I need to be more vigilant. Funny thing is, I'm employed in infosec. It's a pretty laughable survey - it pretty much assumes the worst, so the best you can do is slightly better than the worst.
I guess the answers their scoring system didn't like were
I don't have antivirus software (when someone comes out with an OS X virus, maybe I'll think about it). Actually I lie - I just remembered I have clamav, although it's not integrated into the system - doesn't automatically do anything at all, I just use it to scan the odd "important message" email attachment. Ah well.
When I get unexpected attachments, I open them to see what they are. Of course, I don't double-click them; I run file, strings, maybe clamav, a text editor if it's written in a scripting language. What blows my mind is, people get infected by trojans that arrive as password protected zip files - I mean, even the malware is user-unfriendly and people still manage to get bit.
I use file sharing. I chose to interpret that liberally - I run sshd, and occasionally need to transfer files via sftp.
I don't disconnect the computer from the internet when I'm not using it - like I said, I run sshd.
I haven't made backups recently. I admit it, I'm a slacker in that regard.
I don't have the phone number of my cousin, the computer guru, next to the computer in case something weird happens. Right.
The security of my "Internet browser software" is not set to high - that one cracked me up. I mean, why pretend you don't mean IE? No other browser has that "low/medium/high" security interface.
While most of their publicity these days is for their evil and/or incompetent voting machine design, their main business is bank machines.
No bank would buy an ATM that didn't reliably print out two paper receipts for every transaction - one for the customer, one for the bank. They've been making machines that do precisely what they claim not to be able to do, for years now. Which makes the whole thing extra fishy...
As to your objections 3 and 4 - they are valid, but not insurmountable. Here are some suggestions to counter them:
3 - errors in barcode scanning: the voting machine counts the results and sends them to a counting server, much as Diebold's systems do now, getting result A. The ballots are scanned by a separate set of machinery, getting result B. For a randomly selected (say) 10% of voting places, the ballots are hand counted, getting result C.
Then, as long as total A = total B = (where applicable) total C, we consider the valid results to be the sum of all totals A/B. If there are appreciable discrepancies, then all results are hand counted, so there will be a complete set of results C, and these are the authoritative results.
The contracts with the makers of voting machinery might stipulate that if a full recount of the remaining 90% of polling places is required due to any discrepancies between results A, B, and C, then the makers of the polling equipment will be liable for, say, half the costs of those extra manual counts. This would give them an extremely strong incentive to test the entire process to make sure everything works correctly.
As compared to Canada (I know, you've probably heard this a bazillion times). AFAIK, there is not a single private company involved in the Federal elections here.
Say what you will about the relative scale of the elections in the two countries, one thing is certain - the elections work here. The results are in very quickly, the security protocols surrounding voting and counting are simple enough to be comprehensible and auditable by just about anyone, and the whole thing is done with exemplary transparency.
I guess it's not the for-profitness, it's the proprietariness.
Sure, the ballots are probably printed by commercial printing companies (although maybe not - after all, the printing of banknotes isn't contracted out to the lowest bidder). But, the design of the ballots is open - the bidding will be to produce X million ballots exactly like this sample, etc. Not, "This is kind of what we're thinking of, please tender bids. The selected company will interpret our vague specifications, then make something, not let us know exactly what it is, and convince us what they've made is what we want."
Those things have no crumple zones at all. You get into a crash, they stop suddenly, and none of the energy is absorbed by the car - it all gets transferred to the people in the car. Squish.
And I'm supposed to leave for work five minutes ago.
I saw an adorable photo of a lynx kitten - looked just like a tiny little domestic kitten, but its claw were already about triple the size of a house cat's. Makes you wonder how people manage to keep pet lynx. Maybe they just resign themselves to only buying cheap furniture, and replacing it twice a year...
takes a foreigner to remind you, that "No, no, you got it right!"
Except apparently we didn't, quite. Because we can't seem to go half an hour without one American (possibly drunk) shooting another in a dumb argument, or a hunting accident, or a jealous rage or something.
I stepped on the kitten's foot once. I was at the minor emergency room an hour later. No kidding.
She will face down a dog much larger than herself, rather than back down and leave one of us to the dog. Not that the dogs in question would actually do anything to us, but she doesn't know that...
I mean - if you have big unfriendly barbed wire fences around the place, you obviously don't want anyone there.
But come on, there's lots of stupid people around, some functionally illiterate ones. And they're the ones most likely to be looking through your garbage for deposit bottles. A nuisance if they make a mess, certainly, but it shouldn't be a capital offence.
If by "property" you mean "house" - that's a different matter. But someone walking up your walk and knocking on the front door (not noticing your signs, or being foreign, illiterate, nearsighted, or otherwise unable to read them) is not a threat.
In one scenario - the judge sides with IBM that by refuting the GPL, SCO lost their right to distribute IBM's copyrighted code under it, so SCO are the ones violating copyright - their UNIX branch could be basically hosed very soon anyway.
So, they have to pull their Linux distro, which they've probably already done by now. No biggy to them (though they'd have to start negotiating royalties to be able to support their existing customers)
But, consider this - it's not just IBM's copyrighted works they lose the rights to. Based on that precedent, they could soon be hit with a massive class action lawsuit by thousands of people who have written software under the GPL, demanding that they stop distributing it with UnixWare, as they have no license (and possibly pay damages for copyright violation, if they have any money left by then). Imagine - a commercial UNIX, where if you want any GPL'ed software, you'll have to install it from source yourself, and track and deploy your own updates. Their UNIX would go from a more or less enterprise class OS, to something not quite as useful as DOS overnight.
Incident response is by Mandia, Procise and Pepe. Tao of NSM is by Bejtlich.
Has someone gotten married in some unknown country where men take their wives' family names? Or are was your comment in response to a parent that has been modded into oblivion?
At any rate, Incident Response is an excellent book, whoever it's by.
The fucking kids couldn't comprehend that it was easier to get things done on this machine
Do you mean, they couldn't grasp, even when faced with the fact, that it was indeed easier to get stuff done? Or, that they couldn't figure out how it could be easier, not accepting the argument that a quieter computer is an easier computer?
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Any admin user can run things as root directly anyway. Basically, by making a user an admin, two things are done - the user is added to the group admin, and to /etc/sudoers so they can do root-only stuff by entering their own passwords in various dialog boxes.
So, unless you're doing hinky stuff by hand, any user that's in admin, is also able to use sudo to run stuff as root right now - no waiting for a reboot.
A possible downside is that an admin user could leave the computer logged in, walk away, and someone else could abuse the privilege of the admin group, without knowing the user's password.
But the that goes for any OS - if you have negligent administrators and your attackers have physical access to the computer, you lose.
The alternative to your alternative view is that if the owner is not there, and nobody is actually watching the TV, you have a right to take nondestructive actions like turning the thing off. You don't have the right to smash it, but that's a different matter.
I mean, if you're in a bar, and you need more tables to accomodate a larger group, do you go "Oh, it's not my table, I don't have the right to move it"? No, you move it because it's not harming anything. You don't have the right to burn it for heat...
Yes, but just turning TVs off at public places if people are watching them...
Yes, but nothing. He just excluded that case. Would you not find it handy to have a remote, so that in a situation where nobody is watching a TV (you just asked, remember, because you are a polite and considerate person), and there is no remote nearby, and you would rather have it off because you want to read, or sleep, or have a conversation without a flickering screen just behind your friend's shoulder to distract you?
Do you really find it easier to tune it out when both sides of the conversation are there? You're either nosy, or you have some mental issue where your decision to be annoyed by people on a phone makes it impossible for you to treat them like any other person talking somewhere.
He's not the only one then. For whatever reason, cell phone conversations are annoying to nearly everyone.
I suspect it's at least in part because cell connections tend to be bad, so people on cell phones will be talking a lot louder than if the person were right next to them.
I mean, I wouldn't turn off a TV that someone is obviously watching attentively. But I might just look around, not notice someone who's so slouched in a chair he looks asleep, but is actually watching the news, and turn off the TV.
Now, doing this with no ill intention, I would not take particularly kindly to someone calling me a sanctimonious jackass nor going off on me, with or without asterisks, because I find a TV keeps me from reading or sleeping or whatever.
Really, they should just put the TVs low enough so people can reach the power button, and turn it on or off according to what they want at the time, and not have to resort to carrying around silly gizmos.
OK, let's follow that. If you and I are in an airport terminal, the TV's on, neither of us wants to watch CNN for the next couple of hours, and there's nobody about, we don't have the right to turn the damn thing off, because we might be denying some hypothetical future passing sap the ability to watch drivel for hours to numb himself to the misery of his existence?
At some point, you've got to have some balls, and make choices based on what you want. If you look around, and nobody's watching the TV, and it's annoying you, and nobody has a remote to turn the thing off, act. Be a man. Or a woman for that matter. Take action to make your own life more livable. If you turn out to be wrong, and someone you hadn't noticed gets upset because the TV went dark, then you can turn the frigging thing back on - a toggle can make two sorts of changes, you know.
No, it's not my TV, and it's not my bar, or my airport (well, insofar as I pay taxes to support the municipally owned airport, it is actually mine). But I'm in it, and I will endeavour to make it more pleasant for myself, especially if there's no evidence that doing so will make it less pleasant for others.
Intimidating. You Internet tough guy, you.
For one thing, Darwin/x86 already exists. The range of device drivers is limited, but it already exists, you could run it today if you wanted (assuming you have x86 hardware handy, and relatively unremarkable peripherals that need supporting). It's not just the kernel either, it's essentially a complete, if somewhat sparse, BSD distro.
That would leave only the closed source part of OS X to port. Basically of this is user programs and libraries - file browsers and text editors and preference managers and such. That's not the sort of stuff you typically code in assembler. There were rumours a while back that Apple was actually building the entirety of OS X on x86 every once in a while, just as a sanity check - to make sure that no hardware specific code was creeping into the higher levels of software where it doesn't belong.
The same cannot be said of Windows. Work on the ppc kernel was presumably more or less abandoned since NT4 (which was, what, 11 years ago?). And as for the higher level utilities and libraries, one somehow gets the impression that they're considerably cobwebbier than the equivalent OS X code. Hardware abstractions have probably been broken in a lot of places, all of which would need fixing, over the years since the original notepad was written...
And, as for the overall premise of abandoning OS X for Windows/PPC - are you kidding? People who want to run Windows, are running it. The only ones using an OS they don't want, are doing so because they thought (rightly or wrongly) that x86 hardware was the only affordable way to go.
I mean, there might be the odd MS zealot who got an iMac for Christmas, and can't sell it because Auntie Anne's feelings would be hurt, but other than that... People who just buy a random computer because they don't know what they want don't just somehow end up with a Mac - they end up with the beigeish PC the greasy man at UltraCompuMaxiLand recommended.
I guess the answers their scoring system didn't like were
Dude - that's me. You just quoted me in support of my own statements ;)
No bank would buy an ATM that didn't reliably print out two paper receipts for every transaction - one for the customer, one for the bank. They've been making machines that do precisely what they claim not to be able to do, for years now. Which makes the whole thing extra fishy...
As to your objections 3 and 4 - they are valid, but not insurmountable. Here are some suggestions to counter them:
3 - errors in barcode scanning: the voting machine counts the results and sends them to a counting server, much as Diebold's systems do now, getting result A. The ballots are scanned by a separate set of machinery, getting result B. For a randomly selected (say) 10% of voting places, the ballots are hand counted, getting result C.
Then, as long as total A = total B = (where applicable) total C, we consider the valid results to be the sum of all totals A/B. If there are appreciable discrepancies, then all results are hand counted, so there will be a complete set of results C, and these are the authoritative results.
The contracts with the makers of voting machinery might stipulate that if a full recount of the remaining 90% of polling places is required due to any discrepancies between results A, B, and C, then the makers of the polling equipment will be liable for, say, half the costs of those extra manual counts. This would give them an extremely strong incentive to test the entire process to make sure everything works correctly.
Say what you will about the relative scale of the elections in the two countries, one thing is certain - the elections work here. The results are in very quickly, the security protocols surrounding voting and counting are simple enough to be comprehensible and auditable by just about anyone, and the whole thing is done with exemplary transparency.
Sure, the ballots are probably printed by commercial printing companies (although maybe not - after all, the printing of banknotes isn't contracted out to the lowest bidder). But, the design of the ballots is open - the bidding will be to produce X million ballots exactly like this sample, etc. Not, "This is kind of what we're thinking of, please tender bids. The selected company will interpret our vague specifications, then make something, not let us know exactly what it is, and convince us what they've made is what we want."
Those things have no crumple zones at all. You get into a crash, they stop suddenly, and none of the energy is absorbed by the car - it all gets transferred to the people in the car. Squish.
I saw an adorable photo of a lynx kitten - looked just like a tiny little domestic kitten, but its claw were already about triple the size of a house cat's. Makes you wonder how people manage to keep pet lynx. Maybe they just resign themselves to only buying cheap furniture, and replacing it twice a year...
Except apparently we didn't, quite. Because we can't seem to go half an hour without one American (possibly drunk) shooting another in a dumb argument, or a hunting accident, or a jealous rage or something.
I stepped on the kitten's foot once. I was at the minor emergency room an hour later. No kidding.
She will face down a dog much larger than herself, rather than back down and leave one of us to the dog. Not that the dogs in question would actually do anything to us, but she doesn't know that...
I mean, who's going to mess with your pet cougar, or puma?
But come on, there's lots of stupid people around, some functionally illiterate ones. And they're the ones most likely to be looking through your garbage for deposit bottles. A nuisance if they make a mess, certainly, but it shouldn't be a capital offence.
If by "property" you mean "house" - that's a different matter. But someone walking up your walk and knocking on the front door (not noticing your signs, or being foreign, illiterate, nearsighted, or otherwise unable to read them) is not a threat.
www.macosx.com is a pretty good forum. Very high signal to noise.
I guess for clarity we should specify:
$43M cash - $31M legal fees - $11,999,988 legal awards against them = $12 for operations
So, they have to pull their Linux distro, which they've probably already done by now. No biggy to them (though they'd have to start negotiating royalties to be able to support their existing customers)
But, consider this - it's not just IBM's copyrighted works they lose the rights to. Based on that precedent, they could soon be hit with a massive class action lawsuit by thousands of people who have written software under the GPL, demanding that they stop distributing it with UnixWare, as they have no license (and possibly pay damages for copyright violation, if they have any money left by then). Imagine - a commercial UNIX, where if you want any GPL'ed software, you'll have to install it from source yourself, and track and deploy your own updates. Their UNIX would go from a more or less enterprise class OS, to something not quite as useful as DOS overnight.
Been done - it's called economics.
Has someone gotten married in some unknown country where men take their wives' family names? Or are was your comment in response to a parent that has been modded into oblivion?
At any rate, Incident Response is an excellent book, whoever it's by.
So you put it in the kitchen - never mind greasy fingerprints, try on cheese-sauce fingerprints for size!
Do you mean, they couldn't grasp, even when faced with the fact, that it was indeed easier to get stuff done? Or, that they couldn't figure out how it could be easier, not accepting the argument that a quieter computer is an easier computer?