Slashdot has never successfully slashdotted Apple; they have more bandwidth than slashdot dreams of. Apple successfully streams realtime full-motion video to tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers a couple of times a year, I think they can handle a few trailer downloads.
If we weren't such nazis about protecting copyright, you'd be able to stick the Shawshank Redemption CD in your Mac and produce an edited copy using iMovie that's missing all of the "evil" parts in a couple of hours, then burn it back to DVD. (Substitute your system of choice for "Mac" as desired.) Sadly, taking out "bad language" from one of the greatest movies of all time so you can show it to a high school class is a Federal offense if you do it in your home, unless you use the VHS version.
Suicide (the act of killing oneself) Caught (recorded) on Surveillance (cameras in public to catch and prevent crime) Tape (a magnetic medium used to record video) Appears (arrives, shows up, can be found) Online (on the internet).
That doesn't provide any protection. While UFS doesn't support any of the HFS+ metadata, OS X fakes it. Find a monolithic-file Carbon app and stick it on your UFS drive; you'll notice an extra dot file showing up in the directory where it's stored. This is where OS X keeps the resource fork and stuff like the type and creator codes on filesystems that don't support them directly.
It only opens files once. It doesn't then open what the files produce. There are two exceptions to this; one is that anything that's gzipped is un-gzipped and then opened or not based on the contents, the other is that stuffit will automatically mount a disk image contained in a.sit archive. Neither of these exceptions poses any danger.
One thing to keep in mind is that this trick only tricks the user. If the Finder knows it's an executable application, any other app on the system can find out too.
This is not an exploit of anything, it's just a cleverly designed application that looks like a music file to a human being. It can't be run without active participation by the user.
That isn't the speed limit, but there is a speed limit. If something goes too fast, then it will escape into interstellar space. The only way for something to be going faster inside the solar system is if it came from interstellar space and is headed back out; this is, understandably, an extremely rare event. As another poster said, at our distance from the Sun, the max speed (when combined with Earth's orbital speed in a worst-case scenario) is around 72km/sec, and past that the object goes out and never comes back.
1) Avoid getting infected. Don't open mysterious files that come in your e-mail. Don't execute random applications downloaded from disreputable web sites.
2) Avoid being a carrier. Don't forward.doc,.zip,.exe, or similar files that come in your e-mail. They can't hurt you, but they can hurt your Windows-using "friends".
Really, that's all you need. In the fifteen or so years that I've been using Apple computers, I've never even so much as heard of somebody who got infected with a virus.
It's not executed when you open it in a music player, it's executed when you open it in Finder.
I haven't looked at this trojan, but I participated in a theoretical discussion of the possibility on usenet a couple of weeks ago (interesting timing, that) and the theory isn't that strange anyway.
The way it works is that it's actually a full-blown application. It's a Carbon CFM application, which is stored as a single file. There's a resource in the resource fork of the file which tells the OS where the actual executable code can be found; this allows the application's code to be embedded inside a larger chunk of data. The whole thing is then typed APPL with the HFS+ metadata filetype, but given a.mp3 extension; apparently the HFS+ filetype takes precedence over the file's extension on OS X.
If you open the file from your music player, it's a real MP3 that just happens to have a bunch of junk (trojan code) in an ID3 tag. It plays, nothing else happens. If you double-click it in the Finder, though, the Finder sees that it's an application and launches it, and then you're doomed. The app can do whatever it wants at that point. Presumably one of the very first things it does is open itself with your MP3 player so as to give the appearance of functioning like a regular MP3 file, and then it can go around infecting or deleting files at will.
This isn't a particularly dangerous trojan. Because of the dependence on HFS+ metadata and resource forks, the app can't be transported raw, it has to be encoded. So you absolutely cannot be infected by double-clicking an MP3 you got from Kazaa. You have to download an archive file, like a Stuffit archive, a disk image, a.zip file with Mac metadata extensions, an xtar archive, a MacBinary file, etc., then decode it, then double-click the MP3 inside. Since there is basically no legitimate reason to encode an MP3 with one of those archivers when transmitting it over the internet, this trojan is extremely easy to avoid; don't double-click MP3s that were extracted from Stuffit archives and similar places.
For a successful internet worm to result from this, the recipients have to do two steps. First they would have to decompress the file that was sent to them, then they'd have to find the results and open it. Of course, we know from the example of Windows worms that enough users will go through the trouble of opening an encrypted.zip with a password supplied in the e-mail and then running the contents to enable a worm to spread, so it's not entirely implausible. I'd like to think that Mac users have a higher average intelligence when it comes to virus safety, but I'm not too confident.
My 2.5-year-old PowerBook still runs for three hours or more on a single charge of the original battery during light use (browsing the web on WiFi qualifies; building XFree86 while playing Civ3 doesn't).
GNUStep is very marginalized and difficult to install. If you can convince your Linux users to install GNUStep just to use your application, great, but otherwise having a GNUStep version doesn't get you much in the way of additional users. Unfortunately it's just not a serious contender for the Linux desktop at the moment.
FTP is evil, because it's all crusty and old and ugly, and also because it sends your password in the clear. Use SFTP if at all possible. Fugu is a great SFTP client. Combined with SubEthaEdit, you can transparently edit files on the server, which is really nice.
(Yeah, I know, sometimes you can't use SFTP. IMO, you should ditch whoever doesn't allow it and find someplace that does!)
If you're writing command-line tools, servers, or X11 apps, it's basically a slightly-strange BSD. A lot of code compiles and runs with no modification, and a lot more just requires some small tweaks.
However, if you're writing a GUI application, the APIs are totally different. Mac OS X doesn't use X11 for "normal" apps. You can use standard Java APIs, and some toolkits like Qt have been ported, but for the most part they don't produce an app that feels like a native application. If you're writing programs for the desktop, there's a big difference. But even then, unix experience can come in handy for the non-GUI parts of the application.
Films do not respresent books fully. Shock. Horror.
You'll never hear me argue otherwise, and I'm first in line to challenge people who disapprove of e.g. Jackson's changes in LotR. But the only things that Starship Troopers the movie shares with Starship Troopers the book are the title, some character names, and the general theme of war. Given that, why bother getting the rights to the book? Some people understandably interpret that action as a nefarious plot to trick Heinlein fans into theaters.
I don't know why this happens, but it's not just Air Canada.
This past summer I was pricing flights from Wisconsin to Beijing. Normally it's cheapest to fly out of Chicago on United, as they have a daily direct flight, and everybody else makes you change planes and pay more. But Chicago is five hours by car away from where I was at the time, so I thought I'd see how much it was to fly out of Madison. I found a ticket that just flew from Madison to Chicago to Beijing (a highly ironic path because the flight path from Chicago to Beijing passes directly over Madison, to where you can look out the window and see the damned city) for $42 less than the direct Chicago-Beijing flight. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me either. Maybe it's worth the money to reduce check-in or security congestion? It doesn't seem likely, though.
Not all restrictions are lawful. If the music comes with terms saying that you must sell your first born into slavery if you listen to the music, those terms are null and void. Terms saying that you can't remove DRM are not very clear cut at this point, but I don't see why we should automatically assume they're 100% valid.
Microsoft illegally leveraged their desktop OS monopoly into a browser monopoly by bundling the browser as part of their OS and using that advantage to crush the competition. KDE is not a convicted violator of antitrust laws, and they don't have any kind of monopoly.
Then, they became a benevolent monopoly, which we broke up so that we could have lots more phone ads, calling plans, and more expensive phones than ever.
What color is the sky on your planet? On my planet, with a blue sky, I can call the other side of the planet for less than 4 cents a minute, which would have been ridiculously low even for calling another state before AT&T was broken up.
Can we make the computer smart enough to avoid the child, even though it will hit something else, like the skateboard or dog he is chasing?
I'd be shocked if more than a few percent of human drivers could make this decision correctly and execute it without making a mistake, so why does the robot need to?
Re:A thick atmosphere in low gravity?
on
Titanic Saturn
·
· Score: 1
I did a bit of research, and I decided that I probably picked up the idea from an explanation of the situation in the book The Integral Trees, because that's almost all I found. (Odd; if I post to usenet, I always do research first if I'm doubtful, but if it's slashdot I just post.) One page which mentions it is http://members.optushome.com.au/guests/PhysicsinSF.html. So apparently this was something resembling a prevailing theory at some point, but maybe people changed their minds. Lots of usenet mentions, but nothing beyond unsubstantiated arguing, as usual.
So, I defer to your knowledge.
Re:A thick atmosphere in low gravity?
on
Titanic Saturn
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's because of the gas torus effect. When atmosphere leaks away from Titan, it's still in roughly the same orbit about Saturn. When a lot of the atmosphere has leaked into that same orbit, it builds up and starts to form a torus of gas around Titan's orbit which helps keep the moon's atmosphere replenished. It's the presence of Saturn which allows this effect; rather than just getting blown into interstellar space like atmosphere escaping from, say, Mars does, it goes around Saturn and more or less comes back.
Re:color me ignorant, but...
on
Titanic Saturn
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It depends on what you mean by "important".
If by "important", you mean "discovery of indicators of something I can either talk to or eat", it's not important. Almost certainly, nothing Cassini produces will be important according to that definition. You may as well stop paying attention now.
Slashdot Mirror
So buy a phone with a black-and-white screen and long battery life. Nothing's stopping you.
Slashdot has never successfully slashdotted Apple; they have more bandwidth than slashdot dreams of. Apple successfully streams realtime full-motion video to tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers a couple of times a year, I think they can handle a few trailer downloads.
If we weren't such nazis about protecting copyright, you'd be able to stick the Shawshank Redemption CD in your Mac and produce an edited copy using iMovie that's missing all of the "evil" parts in a couple of hours, then burn it back to DVD. (Substitute your system of choice for "Mac" as desired.) Sadly, taking out "bad language" from one of the greatest movies of all time so you can show it to a high school class is a Federal offense if you do it in your home, unless you use the VHS version.
I just tried it out and you're right. I stand corrected.
Suicide (the act of killing oneself) Caught (recorded) on Surveillance (cameras in public to catch and prevent crime) Tape (a magnetic medium used to record video) Appears (arrives, shows up, can be found) Online (on the internet).
Clear?
That doesn't provide any protection. While UFS doesn't support any of the HFS+ metadata, OS X fakes it. Find a monolithic-file Carbon app and stick it on your UFS drive; you'll notice an extra dot file showing up in the directory where it's stored. This is where OS X keeps the resource fork and stuff like the type and creator codes on filesystems that don't support them directly.
Safari just opens the archive in that case.
.sit archive. Neither of these exceptions poses any danger.
It only opens files once. It doesn't then open what the files produce. There are two exceptions to this; one is that anything that's gzipped is un-gzipped and then opened or not based on the contents, the other is that stuffit will automatically mount a disk image contained in a
One thing to keep in mind is that this trick only tricks the user. If the Finder knows it's an executable application, any other app on the system can find out too.
This is not an exploit of anything, it's just a cleverly designed application that looks like a music file to a human being. It can't be run without active participation by the user.
That isn't the speed limit, but there is a speed limit. If something goes too fast, then it will escape into interstellar space. The only way for something to be going faster inside the solar system is if it came from interstellar space and is headed back out; this is, understandably, an extremely rare event. As another poster said, at our distance from the Sun, the max speed (when combined with Earth's orbital speed in a worst-case scenario) is around 72km/sec, and past that the object goes out and never comes back.
Mac antivirus:
.doc, .zip, .exe, or similar files that come in your e-mail. They can't hurt you, but they can hurt your Windows-using "friends".
1) Avoid getting infected. Don't open mysterious files that come in your e-mail. Don't execute random applications downloaded from disreputable web sites.
2) Avoid being a carrier. Don't forward
Really, that's all you need. In the fifteen or so years that I've been using Apple computers, I've never even so much as heard of somebody who got infected with a virus.
It's not executed when you open it in a music player, it's executed when you open it in Finder.
.mp3 extension; apparently the HFS+ filetype takes precedence over the file's extension on OS X.
.zip file with Mac metadata extensions, an xtar archive, a MacBinary file, etc., then decode it, then double-click the MP3 inside. Since there is basically no legitimate reason to encode an MP3 with one of those archivers when transmitting it over the internet, this trojan is extremely easy to avoid; don't double-click MP3s that were extracted from Stuffit archives and similar places.
.zip with a password supplied in the e-mail and then running the contents to enable a worm to spread, so it's not entirely implausible. I'd like to think that Mac users have a higher average intelligence when it comes to virus safety, but I'm not too confident.
I haven't looked at this trojan, but I participated in a theoretical discussion of the possibility on usenet a couple of weeks ago (interesting timing, that) and the theory isn't that strange anyway.
The way it works is that it's actually a full-blown application. It's a Carbon CFM application, which is stored as a single file. There's a resource in the resource fork of the file which tells the OS where the actual executable code can be found; this allows the application's code to be embedded inside a larger chunk of data. The whole thing is then typed APPL with the HFS+ metadata filetype, but given a
If you open the file from your music player, it's a real MP3 that just happens to have a bunch of junk (trojan code) in an ID3 tag. It plays, nothing else happens. If you double-click it in the Finder, though, the Finder sees that it's an application and launches it, and then you're doomed. The app can do whatever it wants at that point. Presumably one of the very first things it does is open itself with your MP3 player so as to give the appearance of functioning like a regular MP3 file, and then it can go around infecting or deleting files at will.
This isn't a particularly dangerous trojan. Because of the dependence on HFS+ metadata and resource forks, the app can't be transported raw, it has to be encoded. So you absolutely cannot be infected by double-clicking an MP3 you got from Kazaa. You have to download an archive file, like a Stuffit archive, a disk image, a
For a successful internet worm to result from this, the recipients have to do two steps. First they would have to decompress the file that was sent to them, then they'd have to find the results and open it. Of course, we know from the example of Windows worms that enough users will go through the trouble of opening an encrypted
Yeah, seriously. It took weeks to write a browser? I can make one in about ten seconds just using Interface Builder!
You could use a portable that doesn't suck.
My 2.5-year-old PowerBook still runs for three hours or more on a single charge of the original battery during light use (browsing the web on WiFi qualifies; building XFree86 while playing Civ3 doesn't).
You're probably joking, but it's like this:
<a href="http://link.goes.here/page.html">Put the link text here, or a copy of the URL</a>
End result:
Put the link text here, or a copy of the URL
GNUStep is very marginalized and difficult to install. If you can convince your Linux users to install GNUStep just to use your application, great, but otherwise having a GNUStep version doesn't get you much in the way of additional users. Unfortunately it's just not a serious contender for the Linux desktop at the moment.
FTP is evil, because it's all crusty and old and ugly, and also because it sends your password in the clear. Use SFTP if at all possible. Fugu is a great SFTP client. Combined with SubEthaEdit, you can transparently edit files on the server, which is really nice.
(Yeah, I know, sometimes you can't use SFTP. IMO, you should ditch whoever doesn't allow it and find someplace that does!)
It depends on what you're writing.
If you're writing command-line tools, servers, or X11 apps, it's basically a slightly-strange BSD. A lot of code compiles and runs with no modification, and a lot more just requires some small tweaks.
However, if you're writing a GUI application, the APIs are totally different. Mac OS X doesn't use X11 for "normal" apps. You can use standard Java APIs, and some toolkits like Qt have been ported, but for the most part they don't produce an app that feels like a native application. If you're writing programs for the desktop, there's a big difference. But even then, unix experience can come in handy for the non-GUI parts of the application.
Films do not respresent books fully. Shock. Horror.
You'll never hear me argue otherwise, and I'm first in line to challenge people who disapprove of e.g. Jackson's changes in LotR. But the only things that Starship Troopers the movie shares with Starship Troopers the book are the title, some character names, and the general theme of war. Given that, why bother getting the rights to the book? Some people understandably interpret that action as a nefarious plot to trick Heinlein fans into theaters.
I don't know why this happens, but it's not just Air Canada.
This past summer I was pricing flights from Wisconsin to Beijing. Normally it's cheapest to fly out of Chicago on United, as they have a daily direct flight, and everybody else makes you change planes and pay more. But Chicago is five hours by car away from where I was at the time, so I thought I'd see how much it was to fly out of Madison. I found a ticket that just flew from Madison to Chicago to Beijing (a highly ironic path because the flight path from Chicago to Beijing passes directly over Madison, to where you can look out the window and see the damned city) for $42 less than the direct Chicago-Beijing flight. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me either. Maybe it's worth the money to reduce check-in or security congestion? It doesn't seem likely, though.
Not all restrictions are lawful. If the music comes with terms saying that you must sell your first born into slavery if you listen to the music, those terms are null and void. Terms saying that you can't remove DRM are not very clear cut at this point, but I don't see why we should automatically assume they're 100% valid.
Come on, this isn't that hard.
Microsoft illegally leveraged their desktop OS monopoly into a browser monopoly by bundling the browser as part of their OS and using that advantage to crush the competition. KDE is not a convicted violator of antitrust laws, and they don't have any kind of monopoly.
Then, they became a benevolent monopoly, which we broke up so that we could have lots more phone ads, calling plans, and more expensive phones than ever.
What color is the sky on your planet? On my planet, with a blue sky, I can call the other side of the planet for less than 4 cents a minute, which would have been ridiculously low even for calling another state before AT&T was broken up.
Can we make the computer smart enough to avoid the child, even though it will hit something else, like the skateboard or dog he is chasing?
I'd be shocked if more than a few percent of human drivers could make this decision correctly and execute it without making a mistake, so why does the robot need to?
I did a bit of research, and I decided that I probably picked up the idea from an explanation of the situation in the book The Integral Trees, because that's almost all I found. (Odd; if I post to usenet, I always do research first if I'm doubtful, but if it's slashdot I just post.) One page which mentions it is http://members.optushome.com.au/guests/PhysicsinSF .html. So apparently this was something resembling a prevailing theory at some point, but maybe people changed their minds. Lots of usenet mentions, but nothing beyond unsubstantiated arguing, as usual.
So, I defer to your knowledge.
It's because of the gas torus effect. When atmosphere leaks away from Titan, it's still in roughly the same orbit about Saturn. When a lot of the atmosphere has leaked into that same orbit, it builds up and starts to form a torus of gas around Titan's orbit which helps keep the moon's atmosphere replenished. It's the presence of Saturn which allows this effect; rather than just getting blown into interstellar space like atmosphere escaping from, say, Mars does, it goes around Saturn and more or less comes back.
It depends on what you mean by "important".
If by "important", you mean "discovery of indicators of something I can either talk to or eat", it's not important. Almost certainly, nothing Cassini produces will be important according to that definition. You may as well stop paying attention now.