I don't understand why you people think that any OS can be imprevious to a trojan?
As an OS X user, this is great news. This way I don't have to wonder if my Apple using friends are downloading Photoshop from TPB and getting infected.
But, no, as of yet, there are still no self-propagating viruses or worms for OS X. Even though my snide Windows friends keep sending me the sky is falling emails every month about OS X being just as vulnerable as Windows.
Remember that OSX takes last place by a huge margin each year in pwn2own. OSX is certainly more vulnerable, but it gets attacked a lot less considering the 3.5% market share.
such a BS bash microsoft story. i could spend an hour trying to outline how contrived and flawed the whole article is but i dont have that hour to waste.
I didn't notice that. Granted, I only skimmed the huge summary, but I only saw two things:
1) IE has a better anti-malware feature than anyone else. 2) IE could do even better by combining their own anti-malware set with Google's.
What was left unsaid, unexplored, unpadded, etc. in the original Doug Adams volumes? As a series, they were one book too long as it stood, really.
The creme was in the two BBC radio series, and the material was presented it its most delightful and appealing way in this format.
The books were little more than these programmes, padded with the narrative required to contextualize in written form. It's my belief that they suffered under this treatment. Certainly, they labored the humor - without the excellent timing and auditory cues, which were integral.
So. A good author now contributes a mediocre and unnecessary addition to an entertaining body of work, derived with some encumbrance from a superior and lively original radio play. To reiterate my original question, what had not yet been mined from that vein? What had not yet been wrung and worried from that corpus?
Oh, yes. More publishing revenues.
I think the Python's were quite good at satirizing this sort of thing - and Adams would have a good turn at it, himself: "The Contractual Obligation Beyond the Reasonable End of the Universe", or so.
I don't think the BBC series did the books justice, honestly. I wasn't just reading for humor, though, and if you were focusing on quick laughs I can see how you felt otherwise. Did you, by chance, prefer Planet Earth to Last Chance to See?
Note the giant typo in the slashdot summary versus eldavojohn's (emphasis added). From Slashdot:
only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures.
From eldavojohn
only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox
This is a pretty significant difference, and owing to Slashdot's frequent editorial errors, I'd say trust eldavojohn.
Or you could RTFA! My summary is correct.
"Regardless of everything above, people still love their Xbox 360s. Just 3.8 percent of respondents said they wouldn't buy another Xbox because of system failures, according to Game Informer. And 36.4 percent of people who had an Xbox 360 fail have purchased more than one Xbox."
Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox (due to failures) and the survey found they had rather shoddy customer service."
But yeah, bad indicator for Microsoft and this new information actually caused me to wait to buy an Xbox 360 at the new reduced price. I think the 3.8% figure of repeat business is a good indicator that a lot of people agree.
You made a little mistake with one of your details. The article says that only 3.8% of people would NOT buy another xbox due to hardware failures. That's GREAT news for Microsoft - the message is that people love the 360 regardless of failure. I find that surprising and just downright weird, but that's what the respondents said. It might be that this is a result of how they asked their question, however. If they said "Have hardware failures of Xboxes led you to decide not to buy a new Xbox?" and they might have asked that of all 5000, not just the Xbox owners. In that case, all the people who never even wanted an Xbox wouldn't answer yes. For all we know, 3.8% of respondents said that hardware failure made them decide not to buy an Xbox but only 10% ever considered buying an Xbox in the first place.
I agree that it's not a big deal, but it's true that on several year old WinMo phones you can receive or make a call without leaving your navigation program. That can be occasionally useful.
For those times when you really want to crash your car?
I find GPS to be a lot more useful with a dedicated navigator in the passenger seat.
The GM diesel where sold to people that didn't know how to maintain them and by dealers that really didn't know how to maintain them. People that bought a 300D where used to paying Hans the big bucks.
My dad's 300D from 1982 has never required any sort of engine work. It's driven 300k miles on diesel and now 100k on vegetable oil. It's got the original transmission, the original suspension, the original brakes (this seems crazy to me, but they're in fine shape), etc. It doesn't have the original battery, filters have been replaced, and the vacuum system that controls the locks is leaky so if you shut down the car and lock/unlock cycle the doors a few times the other 3 doors will stop following the driver's door lock.
His 1994 Ford Explorer gets a new transmission every ~4 years, new brakes every 1.5 years, and required him to work on the engine for a week a few years ago. The brakes and transmission are no longer Ford parts - those failed even more often and the new brand has a lifetime warranty that gets a lot of use. The front suspension needed to be replaced, and when the brakes fail ahead of schedule (they do so by falling off while you're driving if you don't watch them closely enough to catch them a month in advance) there's a good chance you'll cause some damage requiring replacement of the axle if you have to tap the brake pedal as you get off the road.
Anecdotes, but along with similar experiences on 2 other Mercedes and 3 other American cars in this period, they're enough to make him look to the Germans when he wants a new car.
I own the media, but I can't rip it to my hard drive, so I'm forced to bring optical discs with me if I want to watch videos on my laptop. Windows 7 fails at multimedia. I can't imagine the media center features will let you actually do what you want with your media, which relegates Windows 7 to a game loader on my box.
I call BS. Ripping isn't any easier on any other platform.
but if you receive a call while you're driving then the app does cut out -- it will restart once you've finished the conversation
My Garmin, when connected to my phone (any phone, not just iPhone) via bluetooth does exactly the same thing. It supresses the nav prompts until you complete the call. I don't understand why this is a complaint? Especially for this particular situation since you're running this app on a PHONE whose primary purpose is to receive CALLS. Or have I missed something obvious?
No, because TFA actually says "For those of you wondering what happens when you get a call, the app turns off but restarts as soon as you finish the call, so it's not too bad."
I agree that it's not a big deal, but it's true that on several year old WinMo phones you can receive or make a call without leaving your navigation program. That can be occasionally useful.
From TFA, 1680 minutes per year is considered high use. Really? Two hours twenty minutes per month.
Also stated is that same-network free calls and such aren't considered in the data, which skews prices higher in the US than is realistic. I pay $67 a month after taxes for unlimited everything but mid-day calls made out of network, with nights and weekends beginning at 7 PM. That's not great from a global perspective, but it's not the worst in the world, either, considering that I get 3-4k minutes of use and a few hundred pictures and videos sent in that interval.
Anyway, my real problem with European cell phones is how much is costs to call them. If I'm in Italy and I use a calling card to call an American land line, I'll pay around $0.02/minute. If I call an American cell, I'll pay exactly the same amount. If instead I'm in America and I call an Italian land line, I'll pay $0.01/minute, while a calling an Italian cell will cost me $0.15/minute on the same calling card.
On another note, I'm glad that my cell plan includes unlimited skype usage.
As for why this is a good move, it has already been discussed several times. You either understand what monopoly is or you don't.
Best argument ever. "If you don't agree with me it's because you don't understand the concept!" I do not think that word means what you think it means.
It's a valid point that there are similar abuses here. However, the key difference is one of scale: here you're also bombarded with anti-US messages and almost every single protests goes smoothly and doesn't provoke a reaction from the state. This makes for a vastly different experience.
The issue [...] involves a fairly arcane process used to check for problems in a particular disk.
So chkdsk is an 'arcane' process now? I've gotten used to the mainstream press always trying to dumb down anything even remotely technical, but shouldn't cnet be a little bit better? Guess not.
Well it is specific to running chkdsk/r on a secondary hard drive, but you're right.
The two real reasons it's not a problem are Windows Update and the fact that this is caused by a buggy Intel chipset driver that's already been fixed.
Not entirely true. Ask the recent defendant who now has to cough up close to $700,000 for his piracy. While being a nice customer might not pay, breaking the law might cost a lot more. Yes, yes, the law might be stupid, but it's still the law.
To date, I have never been able to get out of a speeding ticket by telling the magistrate that the speed limit should be 65 instead of 55 on that highway.
In the US that's actually one of the easiest ways to get out of a speeding ticket (a family member of mine just did it, and has done it before). If you can prove that the speed limit on a non-highway should be higher than it is (based on state guidelines for deciding speed limits) and a review of that speed limit hasn't been done in X years (X= 2 or 3, I think), you can get out of the ticket and force the police to collect data on driving habits on that road in order to define a new speed limit.
2) It is uses to allow poeple to follow people that are interesting to them. Not just gossip, but science information, events.
3) Nearly instant knowledge of world events.
4) Allows protesters to disseminate information
5) Is allowing for a deeper understanding od human nature in large societies.
6) It's another tool for expression.
So I would say that it does have value.
You need to look at opportunity cost: what is lost in order to gain these benefits?
1) Millions of people could be using something else. 2) "Following" people on Twitter is necessarily superficial compared to other media, which offer the same benefits without the message size limit. 3) Instant knowledge of world events is available in many media, with Twitter again being more superficial than the others. 4) No, it's a means by which protesters disseminate information. It worked in Iran because it's new and the government didn't know how to block it as well as other services at first. It has no inherent advantage in this area. 5) Your point is preposterous. It allows for a deeper understanding of how people use Twitter, sure, but that's not valuable. 6) And an inferior one at that.
Macbooks are essentially the same hardware as Windows machines, down to battery capacity. It is unlikely that a "bloated codebase" would chew through the battery like nobody's business on one x86 machine and suddenly become perfectly benign on a practically identical x86 machine. Bloat doesn't magically appear when you put an Apple logo on something.
It's (probably) not perfectly benign on an identical x86 machine. Anandtech broke this story in October 2008 (http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13), so Slashdot is picking things like this up about as quickly as usual. Have you ever wondered why Macbooks often have 50-100% more battery life than a similar non-Mac with very similar specs, including a battery of the same capacity? It's the OS. This is the one area where OSX is the unequivocal champion. Somehow its power savings are vastly better than those in Windows.
Anand has also made some mistakes, I think, like talking about the 6 hour battery life on new Macbooks and claiming that there are no PCs that can match that time, which is absolutely false. What he needs to do to finish investigating this power difference is install OSX on, say, a Lenovo laptop and see whether battery life improves dramatically. Of course, I think that he won't publish about something that breaks a license agreement, so we'll have to wait for another site with fewer legal worries does it.
Paint.net is 1.6 megabytes and does everything most people need, even people who take a lot of photos but don't need to go into professional-level editing. It's one of the most impressive programs on any platform.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why you people think that any OS can be imprevious to a trojan?
As an OS X user, this is great news.
This way I don't have to wonder if my Apple using friends are downloading Photoshop from TPB and getting infected.
But, no, as of yet, there are still no self-propagating viruses or worms for OS X.
Even though my snide Windows friends keep sending me the sky is falling emails every month about OS X being just as vulnerable as Windows.
Remember that OSX takes last place by a huge margin each year in pwn2own. OSX is certainly more vulnerable, but it gets attacked a lot less considering the 3.5% market share.
The Best Space programme to Mars
Designed by Apple
As long as stylish, minimalistic interiors of ships that explode are your thing.
such a BS bash microsoft story. i could spend an hour trying to outline how contrived and flawed the whole article is but i dont have that hour to waste.
I didn't notice that. Granted, I only skimmed the huge summary, but I only saw two things:
1) IE has a better anti-malware feature than anyone else.
2) IE could do even better by combining their own anti-malware set with Google's.
"Thanks for the baby shoes...is this supposed to be an unsubtle message that it's time I start having children?"
This is a fairly big deal. It really changes how the economy handles equipment through the auction house, etc.
I wonder how much changing is possible can you go from +30 spirit to +15 agility +15 Stamina for instance.
How often can I do this reforging, can I reforge my PVP gear into raiding gear and back again?
Enchanters DEing gear that doesn't have much in the way of usefulness changes because all gear will be much more useful
and if its not what you'd like you can just reforge it into more of your liking.
It'll be interesting to see how all this plays out.
Knowing B, it will go like this:
Spirit 30 can be reforged once to Spirit 15 + Something Else 15. That's the extent of the mechanic. Enjoy.
Really,
What was left unsaid, unexplored, unpadded, etc. in the original Doug Adams volumes? As a series, they were one book too long as it stood, really.
The creme was in the two BBC radio series, and the material was presented it its most delightful and appealing way in this format.
The books were little more than these programmes, padded with the narrative required to contextualize in written form. It's my belief that they suffered under this treatment. Certainly, they labored the humor - without the excellent timing and auditory cues, which were integral.
So. A good author now contributes a mediocre and unnecessary addition to an entertaining body of work, derived with some encumbrance from a superior and lively original radio play. To reiterate my original question, what had not yet been mined from that vein? What had not yet been wrung and worried from that corpus?
Oh, yes. More publishing revenues.
I think the Python's were quite good at satirizing this sort of thing - and Adams would have a good turn at it, himself: "The Contractual Obligation Beyond the Reasonable End of the Universe", or so.
I don't think the BBC series did the books justice, honestly. I wasn't just reading for humor, though, and if you were focusing on quick laughs I can see how you felt otherwise. Did you, by chance, prefer Planet Earth to Last Chance to See?
Note the giant typo in the slashdot summary versus eldavojohn's (emphasis added). From Slashdot:
only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures.
From eldavojohn
only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox
This is a pretty significant difference, and owing to Slashdot's frequent editorial errors, I'd say trust eldavojohn.
Or you could RTFA! My summary is correct.
"Regardless of everything above, people still love their Xbox 360s. Just 3.8 percent of respondents said they wouldn't buy another Xbox because of system failures, according to Game Informer. And 36.4 percent of people who had an Xbox 360 fail have purchased more than one Xbox."
Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox (due to failures) and the survey found they had rather shoddy customer service."
But yeah, bad indicator for Microsoft and this new information actually caused me to wait to buy an Xbox 360 at the new reduced price. I think the 3.8% figure of repeat business is a good indicator that a lot of people agree.
You made a little mistake with one of your details. The article says that only 3.8% of people would NOT buy another xbox due to hardware failures. That's GREAT news for Microsoft - the message is that people love the 360 regardless of failure. I find that surprising and just downright weird, but that's what the respondents said. It might be that this is a result of how they asked their question, however. If they said "Have hardware failures of Xboxes led you to decide not to buy a new Xbox?" and they might have asked that of all 5000, not just the Xbox owners. In that case, all the people who never even wanted an Xbox wouldn't answer yes. For all we know, 3.8% of respondents said that hardware failure made them decide not to buy an Xbox but only 10% ever considered buying an Xbox in the first place.
I agree that it's not a big deal, but it's true that on several year old WinMo phones you can receive or make a call without leaving your navigation program. That can be occasionally useful.
For those times when you really want to crash your car?
I find GPS to be a lot more useful with a dedicated navigator in the passenger seat.
The GM diesel where sold to people that didn't know how to maintain them and by dealers that really didn't know how to maintain them. People that bought a 300D where used to paying Hans the big bucks.
My dad's 300D from 1982 has never required any sort of engine work. It's driven 300k miles on diesel and now 100k on vegetable oil. It's got the original transmission, the original suspension, the original brakes (this seems crazy to me, but they're in fine shape), etc. It doesn't have the original battery, filters have been replaced, and the vacuum system that controls the locks is leaky so if you shut down the car and lock/unlock cycle the doors a few times the other 3 doors will stop following the driver's door lock.
His 1994 Ford Explorer gets a new transmission every ~4 years, new brakes every 1.5 years, and required him to work on the engine for a week a few years ago. The brakes and transmission are no longer Ford parts - those failed even more often and the new brand has a lifetime warranty that gets a lot of use. The front suspension needed to be replaced, and when the brakes fail ahead of schedule (they do so by falling off while you're driving if you don't watch them closely enough to catch them a month in advance) there's a good chance you'll cause some damage requiring replacement of the axle if you have to tap the brake pedal as you get off the road.
Anecdotes, but along with similar experiences on 2 other Mercedes and 3 other American cars in this period, they're enough to make him look to the Germans when he wants a new car.
I own the media, but I can't rip it to my hard drive, so I'm forced to bring optical discs with me if I want to watch videos on my laptop. Windows 7 fails at multimedia. I can't imagine the media center features will let you actually do what you want with your media, which relegates Windows 7 to a game loader on my box.
I call BS. Ripping isn't any easier on any other platform.
but if you receive a call while you're driving then the app does cut out -- it will restart once you've finished the conversation
My Garmin, when connected to my phone (any phone, not just iPhone) via bluetooth does exactly the same thing. It supresses the nav prompts until you complete the call. I don't understand why this is a complaint? Especially for this particular situation since you're running this app on a PHONE whose primary purpose is to receive CALLS. Or have I missed something obvious?
No, because TFA actually says "For those of you wondering what happens when you get a call, the app turns off but restarts as soon as you finish the call, so it's not too bad."
I agree that it's not a big deal, but it's true that on several year old WinMo phones you can receive or make a call without leaving your navigation program. That can be occasionally useful.
Here on Earth, 1680 minutes == 28 hours
But in a black hole, who knows...
And reading comprehension is priceless. It's 1680 minutes per YEAR, not month.
From TFA, 1680 minutes per year is considered high use. Really? Two hours twenty minutes per month.
Also stated is that same-network free calls and such aren't considered in the data, which skews prices higher in the US than is realistic. I pay $67 a month after taxes for unlimited everything but mid-day calls made out of network, with nights and weekends beginning at 7 PM. That's not great from a global perspective, but it's not the worst in the world, either, considering that I get 3-4k minutes of use and a few hundred pictures and videos sent in that interval.
Anyway, my real problem with European cell phones is how much is costs to call them. If I'm in Italy and I use a calling card to call an American land line, I'll pay around $0.02/minute. If I call an American cell, I'll pay exactly the same amount. If instead I'm in America and I call an Italian land line, I'll pay $0.01/minute, while a calling an Italian cell will cost me $0.15/minute on the same calling card.
On another note, I'm glad that my cell plan includes unlimited skype usage.
You seem to equate "features" with quality of the search engine.
Some value
- speed
- a clean interface and
- relevance of the search results (which can be improved by analyzing my previous searches)
If you want to surf the web anonymously, use TOR. Trusting the site saying "we don't have server logs, PROMISE" is silly.
Use http://www.scroogle.org/ if you like Google results but don't want to feed the evil empire. There's even an SSL search plugin for it.
Just when we were about to figure out free energy!
G(T,p) = U + pV â' TS
A(T,V) = U â' TS
What else is there to figure out?
As for why this is a good move, it has already been discussed several times. You either understand what monopoly is or you don't.
Best argument ever. "If you don't agree with me it's because you don't understand the concept!" I do not think that word means what you think it means.
It's a valid point that there are similar abuses here. However, the key difference is one of scale: here you're also bombarded with anti-US messages and almost every single protests goes smoothly and doesn't provoke a reaction from the state. This makes for a vastly different experience.
From TFA:
The issue [...] involves a fairly arcane process used to check for problems in a particular disk.
So chkdsk is an 'arcane' process now? I've gotten used to the mainstream press always trying to dumb down anything even remotely technical, but shouldn't cnet be a little bit better? Guess not.
Well it is specific to running chkdsk /r on a secondary hard drive, but you're right.
The two real reasons it's not a problem are Windows Update and the fact that this is caused by a buggy Intel chipset driver that's already been fixed.
Not entirely true. Ask the recent defendant who now has to cough up close to $700,000 for his piracy. While being a nice customer might not pay, breaking the law might cost a lot more. Yes, yes, the law might be stupid, but it's still the law.
To date, I have never been able to get out of a speeding ticket by telling the magistrate that the speed limit should be 65 instead of 55 on that highway.
In the US that's actually one of the easiest ways to get out of a speeding ticket (a family member of mine just did it, and has done it before). If you can prove that the speed limit on a non-highway should be higher than it is (based on state guidelines for deciding speed limits) and a review of that speed limit hasn't been done in X years (X= 2 or 3, I think), you can get out of the ticket and force the police to collect data on driving habits on that road in order to define a new speed limit.
1) Millions of people use it
2) It is uses to allow poeple to follow people that are interesting to them. Not just gossip, but science information, events.
3) Nearly instant knowledge of world events.
4) Allows protesters to disseminate information
5) Is allowing for a deeper understanding od human nature in large societies.
6) It's another tool for expression.
So I would say that it does have value.
You need to look at opportunity cost: what is lost in order to gain these benefits?
1) Millions of people could be using something else.
2) "Following" people on Twitter is necessarily superficial compared to other media, which offer the same benefits without the message size limit.
3) Instant knowledge of world events is available in many media, with Twitter again being more superficial than the others.
4) No, it's a means by which protesters disseminate information. It worked in Iran because it's new and the government didn't know how to block it as well as other services at first. It has no inherent advantage in this area.
5) Your point is preposterous. It allows for a deeper understanding of how people use Twitter, sure, but that's not valuable.
6) And an inferior one at that.
Macbooks are essentially the same hardware as Windows machines, down to battery capacity. It is unlikely that a "bloated codebase" would chew through the battery like nobody's business on one x86 machine and suddenly become perfectly benign on a practically identical x86 machine. Bloat doesn't magically appear when you put an Apple logo on something.
It's (probably) not perfectly benign on an identical x86 machine. Anandtech broke this story in October 2008 (http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13), so Slashdot is picking things like this up about as quickly as usual. Have you ever wondered why Macbooks often have 50-100% more battery life than a similar non-Mac with very similar specs, including a battery of the same capacity? It's the OS. This is the one area where OSX is the unequivocal champion. Somehow its power savings are vastly better than those in Windows.
Anand has also made some mistakes, I think, like talking about the 6 hour battery life on new Macbooks and claiming that there are no PCs that can match that time, which is absolutely false. What he needs to do to finish investigating this power difference is install OSX on, say, a Lenovo laptop and see whether battery life improves dramatically. Of course, I think that he won't publish about something that breaks a license agreement, so we'll have to wait for another site with fewer legal worries does it.
While we're at it, shouldn't we be spending this money on feeding the starving?
Money doesn't feed people. We already have more than enough food to feed everyone on earth. The problem is the lack of a will to do so.
Paint.net is 1.6 megabytes and does everything most people need, even people who take a lot of photos but don't need to go into professional-level editing. It's one of the most impressive programs on any platform.
Bungie was a Mac gaming company. Blizzard just makes games with Mac support, but it's not like the Mac is their priority.