I hear this all the time. I thought PC's were dirt cheap (I always hear this compared to Mac prices anyway). How much cash can you sink into a $800 machine anyway? External peripherals probably have a good shot of transferring to a Mac. Anything that doesn't...sell it on E-Bay.
You must have a Garmin. I recently went GPS shopping and compared Garmin to Magellan units. The Garmin (ETrex line) is much smaller, has cooler features, etc...but their antenna sucks. Doesn't even work under tree cover, much less in a house...so what's the point. The Magellan Meridian/SporTrak line work MUCH better is less than ideal conditions, even though they are clunkier and have a much worse display and UI.
Ok, I'll spell it out. Being an 'admin' means you are in the admin Unix group. This gives you the ability to write to/Library/StartupItems, since it is writable by the admin group.
From here, you can install any script you feel like, and get it automatically run as root the next time the machine boots...all without a single authentication dialog being required.
It just takes a trojan horse program that looks like it does something interesting enough for someone to launch it once.
You could wipe their drive (just shove rm -fr / in your script).
You could get clever and use niutil to insert a new account on the system, and then enable SSH to let you get in. Really, the sky is the limit once you can get root to run scripts for you.
However, on 99% of OS X installations, it is trivially easy for a trojan program to gain root access. How? Well, most installations are single-user auto-login style machines (the default account that is created when you install the OS). Notice that this account IS an admin account. While it's not root, it's damn near as dangerous and has free reign to write to many parts of your drive that you probably wouldn't like it to.
Apple probably should have made the default account a non-admin account. At least that way you would have to go through explicit authorization before writing to dangerous parts of the drive.
Wow, the AudioTron is almost a match for what I've been looking for. Now, if they just supported 802.11b networking, I'd seriously consider buying one. I went wireless expressly because I DIDN'T want to have to deal with running ethernet all throughout my house (it's a bitch in a two-story house).
A friend of mine was bored at work one day and did something similar.
He wrote (in raw machine code) a program to uudecode a text file. If that wasn't impressive enough, he limited his op-code usage to only bytes that had a text representation (32-127), so you could simply paste some text at the begging of the uuencoded data, rename it to foo.com and run it!
He's one of the few truly amazing programmers I have met.
Re:Funny, they were OK with $ for FireWire
on
More on MPEG4
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course, you don't have to pay $0.02 for every hour your Firewire port is active. As I understand the MPEG4 licensing, this would be the analog of what they are trying to push on the market.
Re:This brings up an interesting point
on
iWarez
·
· Score: 1
Maybe it wasn't the full version. Maybe it was this. Why go through the risk if Microsoft allows you to download it directly from their website?
I'm actually kind of glad that it's on Showtime. At least there is *SOME* hope that it will be broadcast in Dolby Digital (SG-1 is). Also, at least via DirecTV, Sci-Fi looks pretty crappy because they overcompress it. The show will most likely look better on Showtime.
Actually it never ran on the UltraSPARC...only on the 32-bit Sparcs that predated the Ultra.
We had an Ultra 1 Creator at the office that I would have loved to put NeXTStep on, but instead had to use Suns abortion of an OpenStep implementation.
Finally, someone has found a use for American beer:-)
Re:Blech. Most of them are pretty bad.
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 1
If Java isn't good enough to make an IDE, then why is it good enough for the project that you want the IDE *FOR*?
My benchmark for when it's time to switch to Java is when the Java tool developers feel that the language is good enough to actually use.
Re:Why does Gates get the credit ?
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
What's so bad about AIX? I much prefer it's disk space management scheme to things like Solaris.
If your / partition is too small in Solaris...tough. Rebuild the box. In AIX, it's trivial to grow a filesystem. You can even do it live without users even being aware that it happened.
> Ooh, you're running on the dull, rusty edge of technology, huh.;>
Necessary evil. Nothing newer was capable of running Mac OS X Server 1.2, and until 10.1, I was unable to migrate my code to Mac OS X, because they were lacking Objective-C++ support. As soon as Apple release a PowerBook without the crappy Rage 128 card, I'll upgrade in a heartbeat now that 10.1 is out. I was hoping for some hardware announcements today... oh well:-(
I agree...where are the speedups? I was expecting major improvements out of 10.1.
On my Wallstreet G3/300 with 256MB of RAM:
- slightly faster, but not drastically so.
- Launching IS much faster, but this is due to
two-level namespace linkage, not due to any
innate optimization.
- OpenGL still is not implemented for Rage Pro.
- Skyline/Lucent wireless cards still do not work.
Skyline is Farallon's fault, but the Lucent *SHOULD* work, since it worked under OS 9 without
any 3rd party drivers.
- Still cannot eject PCMCIA cards without shutting down. Though it no longer kernel panics when you
manually remove one.
- PCMCIA-based hard drives still are not recognized.
- Still won't play DVD. Apparently they don't support the hardware DVD decoder cards (this IS an officially supported machine...where's the official support?)
- The compiler is godawful slow. I took a project
that built in 58 seconds under OSX Server 1.2, and it takes over 5 minutes to build on OS X 10.1 (on a G4/400 with 1.5GB of RAM!)
- On the plus side, sleep FINALLY works. It used
to turn on the fan when I put the machine to sleep, which would promply drain my batteries dry.
10.1 is finally USABLE, but it's still not what I wonder consider great.
Continue waiting. This update doesn't exist yet. My Wallstreet is still as sluggish today as it was yesterday. I can't run product announcements on it...I need 10.1 to be released. My machine is as upgraded as it can possibly get, and it still has barely enough horsepower to read e-mail and browse the web....it's pathetic.
I think the stock price jump was completely justified. Apple has essentially killed off all sales until September with these announcements...that can't be great for this quarter's profitability. I was all set to buy a TiBook or iBook this week...but what's the point now...I'd only be able to run the horribly slow 10.0.4 on it. I may as well sit on my money and wait some more.
I could definitely make use of it. Think memory mapped files. With 32-bit address space, you're limited to 4gig files. Realistically 2gig is more common, because the upper 2gig of addressable memory is commonly reserved for the kernel. I currently have a file that I memory map that will be about a gig. This steals half of my available addressing space before my application even gets around to doing anything. Sure, it's not fully mapped and stealing real RAM, but it steals from my available virtual memory. If I had to map 2 of these files for some reason (say a compare), I wouldn't have much address space left for my program to use.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear this all the time. I thought PC's were dirt cheap (I always hear this compared to Mac prices anyway). How much cash can you sink into a $800 machine anyway? External peripherals probably have a good shot of transferring to a Mac. Anything that doesn't...sell it on E-Bay.
You must have a Garmin. I recently went GPS shopping and compared Garmin to Magellan units. The Garmin (ETrex line) is much smaller, has cooler features, etc...but their antenna sucks. Doesn't even work under tree cover, much less in a house...so what's the point. The Magellan Meridian/SporTrak line work MUCH better is less than ideal conditions, even though they are clunkier and have a much worse display and UI.
Ok, I'll spell it out. Being an 'admin' means you are in the admin Unix group. This gives you the ability to write to /Library/StartupItems, since it is writable by the admin group.
From here, you can install any script you feel like, and get it automatically run as root the next time the machine boots...all without a single authentication dialog being required.
It just takes a trojan horse program that looks like it does something interesting enough for someone to launch it once.
You could wipe their drive (just shove rm -fr / in your script).
You could get clever and use niutil to insert a new account on the system, and then enable SSH to let you get in. Really, the sky is the limit once you can get root to run scripts for you.
However, on 99% of OS X installations, it is trivially easy for a trojan program to gain root access. How? Well, most installations are single-user auto-login style machines (the default account that is created when you install the OS). Notice that this account IS an admin account. While it's not root, it's damn near as dangerous and has free reign to write to many parts of your drive that you probably wouldn't like it to.
Apple probably should have made the default account a non-admin account. At least that way you would have to go through explicit authorization before writing to dangerous parts of the drive.
I wouldn't mind this if they would also LOWER the costs for people that don't actually use all of their allocated bandwidth in a month.
> We did not allow programmer is to even make their own copy of the code, nor make a backup copy.
You guys must have a pretty magical compiler that can build without even having a copy of the source.
Wow, the AudioTron is almost a match for what I've been looking for. Now, if they just supported 802.11b networking, I'd seriously consider buying one. I went wireless expressly because I DIDN'T want to have to deal with running ethernet all throughout my house (it's a bitch in a two-story house).
A friend of mine was bored at work one day and did something similar.
He wrote (in raw machine code) a program to uudecode a text file. If that wasn't impressive enough, he limited his op-code usage to only bytes that had a text representation (32-127), so you could simply paste some text at the begging of the uuencoded data, rename it to foo.com and run it!
He's one of the few truly amazing programmers I have met.
Of course, you don't have to pay $0.02 for every hour your Firewire port is active. As I understand the MPEG4 licensing, this would be the analog of what they are trying to push on the market.
Maybe it wasn't the full version. Maybe it was this. Why go through the risk if Microsoft allows you to download it directly from their website?
I'm actually kind of glad that it's on Showtime. At least there is *SOME* hope that it will be broadcast in Dolby Digital (SG-1 is). Also, at least via DirecTV, Sci-Fi looks pretty crappy because they overcompress it. The show will most likely look better on Showtime.
Actually it never ran on the UltraSPARC...only on the 32-bit Sparcs that predated the Ultra.
We had an Ultra 1 Creator at the office that I would have loved to put NeXTStep on, but instead had to use Suns abortion of an OpenStep implementation.
It is NOT expensive. My *MORTGAGE* is less than a friend of mine pays for RENT in the Bay Area!
Objective C has a dynamic runtime, C++ does not. This one difference makes ObjectiveC a much more powerful language.
Finally, someone has found a use for American beer :-)
If Java isn't good enough to make an IDE, then why is it good enough for the project that you want the IDE *FOR*?
My benchmark for when it's time to switch to Java is when the Java tool developers feel that the language is good enough to actually use.
What's so bad about AIX? I much prefer it's disk space management scheme to things like Solaris.
If your / partition is too small in Solaris...tough. Rebuild the box. In AIX, it's trivial to grow a filesystem. You can even do it live without users even being aware that it happened.
Actually there is Objective-C++. It was reintroduced in the 10.1 update. Unfortunately, it seems to be pretty buggy.
Is anyone interested in buying one? I have an ANS 700 if someone is interested. RDU area only, as this beast would be a bitch to ship.
> Ooh, you're running on the dull, rusty edge of technology, huh. ;>
:-(
Necessary evil. Nothing newer was capable of running Mac OS X Server 1.2, and until 10.1, I was unable to migrate my code to Mac OS X, because they were lacking Objective-C++ support. As soon as Apple release a PowerBook without the crappy Rage 128 card, I'll upgrade in a heartbeat now that 10.1 is out. I was hoping for some hardware announcements today... oh well
I agree...where are the speedups? I was expecting major improvements out of 10.1.
On my Wallstreet G3/300 with 256MB of RAM:
- slightly faster, but not drastically so.
- Launching IS much faster, but this is due to
two-level namespace linkage, not due to any
innate optimization.
- OpenGL still is not implemented for Rage Pro.
- Skyline/Lucent wireless cards still do not work.
Skyline is Farallon's fault, but the Lucent *SHOULD* work, since it worked under OS 9 without
any 3rd party drivers.
- Still cannot eject PCMCIA cards without shutting down. Though it no longer kernel panics when you
manually remove one.
- PCMCIA-based hard drives still are not recognized.
- Still won't play DVD. Apparently they don't support the hardware DVD decoder cards (this IS an officially supported machine...where's the official support?)
- The compiler is godawful slow. I took a project
that built in 58 seconds under OSX Server 1.2, and it takes over 5 minutes to build on OS X 10.1 (on a G4/400 with 1.5GB of RAM!)
- On the plus side, sleep FINALLY works. It used
to turn on the fan when I put the machine to sleep, which would promply drain my batteries dry.
10.1 is finally USABLE, but it's still not what I wonder consider great.
Continue waiting. This update doesn't exist yet. My Wallstreet is still as sluggish today as it was yesterday. I can't run product announcements on it...I need 10.1 to be released. My machine is as upgraded as it can possibly get, and it still has barely enough horsepower to read e-mail and browse the web....it's pathetic. I think the stock price jump was completely justified. Apple has essentially killed off all sales until September with these announcements...that can't be great for this quarter's profitability. I was all set to buy a TiBook or iBook this week...but what's the point now...I'd only be able to run the horribly slow 10.0.4 on it. I may as well sit on my money and wait some more.
I could definitely make use of it. Think memory mapped files. With 32-bit address space, you're limited to 4gig files. Realistically 2gig is more common, because the upper 2gig of addressable memory is commonly reserved for the kernel. I currently have a file that I memory map that will be about a gig. This steals half of my available addressing space before my application even gets around to doing anything. Sure, it's not fully mapped and stealing real RAM, but it steals from my available virtual memory. If I had to map 2 of these files for some reason (say a compare), I wouldn't have much address space left for my program to use.
Actually From NeXTStep through OpenStep 4.2, it was only BSD 4.3 based, not 4.4-lite. It didn't get up-to-date BSD 4.4 until Rhapsody DR1.
Application UI's aren't dead until something with the GUI richness of PhotoShop can be
done entirely in a browser. I don't see that any time soon.