First you say people should watch them without the baggage of the rest of the series (implying they aren't, and that's why they hate them), then you say "but it IS Star Wars".
There is a difference between the "baggage of the rest of the series" and the bullshit expectations people draw based off what they want, not what they see or what will be.
Sooo.... Because I don't like the same movies as you and am not afraid to speak up I automatically belong to a social group you consider subordinate to your own. That's mature. I also suggest you examine the definition of "subculture" before telling others to do so.
I know that being a victim is important to you, but in this case I have to burst your bubble. I'm part of a subculture too. Saying it's a subculture wasn't a very bold or insightful statement. I'm surprised you even bothered to take exception to it.
You may find this hard to believe but my comments were directed at movies in general. Apparently, the kool-aid has so affected your judgement you can only discuss three movies.
Yes. Damn this Koolaid! It makes me assume that when you respond to me, you're talking about the same topic. I'm sorry, I didn't want to dismiss your whole post as offtopic rambling. Evidently, according you that respect was a mistake. I'll make a note of that.
But hey, the Koolaid is "Berry Blue." Try some. It's paragraphalicious.
If it helps you sleep better, I only wasted money on the first film, fast forwarded through the second film after a friend INSISTED I see it and loaned me the DVD, and I slept through the middle third of the last film AFTER a friend bought my ticket. Satisfied?
Wow. I feel edified. Have any more answers to questions I didn't ask?
Okay. Paragraphs are your friend. Try them out sometime. Let me show you what I mean:
I don't dislike movies because they are popular or because I belong to some special "subculture". I dislike movies that waste my time and money with dumb dialog, wooden acting, predictable plots and irrelevant special effects.
"Dumb dialog" that fits right in line with all the Star Wars dialog. There was no radical departure. The romantic stuff might have been hard to swallow, but quite frankly it's in line with all three of the movies. Really, the only person who didn't talk in an outrageous fashion was Han Solo.
A bad movie is not just a $10 loss. It also costs time, more money, and lost expectations. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be entertained after setting aside a couple hours of your life, paying exorbitant ticket prices, battling traffic, paying the babysitter, etc.
First of all, no one is responsible for your expectations except you. You made this fantastic movie out of a cosmos of arbitrary expectations in your heard. They were not met. So, you feel like it's their fault?
After a lifetime of watching movie studios cater to the lowest common denominator because the test screening subjects "just didn't get it" I have become incredibly critical of bad movies. It's not MY fault.
Clearly, you are the victim here. I wish we inferior plebeians could arise to your enlightened expectations, that we might not bring wrinkles of frustration to your radiant complexion, Oh Lord!
Here's what puzzles me. You wasted your valuable time and money up to three times. You then claim your time is valuable and that it shouldn't have been wasted on this movie. But, complaining about this movie is an acceptable use of your time?
It's the fault of the studio execs who can't see past their spreadsheets or appreciate the fact that movies are an important part of many people's lives. Believe it or not, some people even appreciate them as the art form they SHOULD be, not just a way to waste some time and money.
Need I remind you that this is Star Wars. Everyone knew pretty much how this was going to go down. The target demographic children and people who liked the original movies. But keep in mind that even people who are experts at analyzing movies find something in this film.
I think people get so offended at the comedic elements of the prequels that they refused to look for the more significant elements.
How can I not help but feel ripped off when I am a quarter of the way into a movie and the entire plot becomes painfully obvious.
The plot was spelled out long before any movie was made. We knew what was going to happen, just not the details. If the general plot was not obvious to you, then you have a learning disability.
Is it too much to ask to be able to become emotionally involved in a movie? Dumb dialog and bad acting only serve to rip a viewer out of the fantasy of a movie and back into reality.
Your expectations did this long before any movie could. Ask yourself what you really expected. It sounds like you didn't actually want them to be Star Wars prequels. You wanted something else.
You are wrong in labeling this a subculture. You are right in recognizing that there are many dissatisfied movie fans.
Even if 90% of people feel exactly like you do, it's still a subculture. Please examine the definition.
As for the dissatisfied movie fans, I can't help but be reminded of the Matrix movies. People decided that the Matrix was going to be some kind of epiphany-inducing movie experience instead of an action movie with some interesting metaphysical background. As a result, the later movies "sucked."
Good argument... There were hecklers, therefore, anyone who didn't like the movie is WRONG.
No. I'm saying that there are people who are heckling the movie because they think it's cool to heckle movies. Or maybe they think it's uncool to like movies. I don't care which. I'm not saying that anyone who has a complaint about the prequels is wrong. I'm saying lots of people here have some unbelievably stupid complaints.
Sorry, no. The prequals were all crappy, with the 3rd just slightly less-so than 2. Even without being "Star Wars", they were simply crappy movies.
No. None of them were crappy. Some of them were average, but none of them were crappy. We can sit down and watch some crappy movies sometime, if you like. I collect bad cinema, it's kind of a masochistic hobby.
In fact, if it wasn't "Star Wars", the studio would have cut-off all funding after EP1.
See? This is the kind of stupid bullshit I'm talking about. "If it wasn't star wars then..." Shoulda, coulda, woulda, right. Get back to me on that. Fact is, the Star Wars movies made outrageous money, and will continue to do so. Not just through box office sales, but through merchandising, licensing, and dvd sales.
Not to mention that despite Padme "Log" Portman and Mace "Motherfucka" Jackson, the movie is full of powerful symbolism and cleverly shot scenes. The whole plot of Star Wars, complete with a seemingly apparent moral ambiguity that changes shape depending on who is examining it, is a beautiful and ambitious thing.
If you don't see that, please look closer. I assure you it's there.
There is a whole subculture these days just for people who dislike movies because they have the potential to be popular, and this entire Slashdot thread seems like the embodiment of that.
When I went to see the movie, my entire experience was completely ruined by hecklers. People who went on opening night with the sole purpose of making fun of the movie. Laughing at Palpatine's makeup, booing when Anakin first appears, shouting "LOG!" whenever Padme shows up.
Everyone here is so quick to dismiss the movie on the simple things (like if Samuel delivered his lines well) or tries to focus on bad interpretations of the themes (oh yeah, G. Lucas hates women because Padme is ineffectual in the last movie) or claim that the movie was high-schoolish (erhem, this is Star Wars, what did you expect?). People who complain this movie is campy seem to forget that the Star Wars trilogy is part of what helped us define what campy meant. It wouldn't be true to its roots if it didn't sound campy!
I wish people could just accept movies for what they are, appreciate the hard work that went into them, and enjoy them. Given the cost of movie tickets today. If you aren't ready to enjoy the movie, why fork over your $10 for it in the first place?
Look, I won't deny people know how to use FM radio. That's great. I never said they didn't.
What I am saying is that the iPod user experience and metaphor does not mesh well with FM. The iPod is not terribly good at making playlists (or setting presets) on the fly. It can do it, yes. But its user interface is optimized for browsing, not editing. Traditionally we do our playlist editing in a helper program like iTunes.
Sat. radio is a much nicer fit to the iPod user experience, which is therefore easier than FM to understand on the iPod.
In order to get the machine to go to your inserted branch, you need to get the machine to call blr twice without a segfault or blasting your egg. This means, in general, you can't just smash the stack as freely as you can with an x86 box, you need to care about the saved register contents.
It also means that it's much harder to pull off when a function is called after the function you exploit. This is actually a common idiom too. You copy a buffer from a read, then call a function on it. Hope your egg is on the heap, and doesn't get blasted.
This is harder than on x86 architectures. It doesn't make it impossible.
What I really want from the ipod is OGG support... im sick of closed formats. Which is why im sticking with my iriver:)
Amen on the ogg part. Maybe with QT7 we'll see Apple open up a little. I know the machine is capable of decoding it, and now QuickTime certainly could support the codec.
Satellite stations are discrete, named, require no tuning (the channel is there or it isn't), do not change based on locale.
FM radio stations not, not, not any of these things. You could represent Sat. stations as playlists trivially, and they would conform to the user's expectations. You cannot do the same with FM if you travel more than a few miles in any given direction.
FM radio is an inherently crufty user experience. XM is not. Think about it.
You are three other people do not a target demographic make.
It's not about adding features. If it were all about feature count, Netscape would be the best browser ever.
The iPod serves a simple purpose. It does it well, it is not ugly while doing it, and it is easy to use. Please do not suggest that FM radio would not further complicate the device, because it certainly would.
Besides, why would you want to listen to the utter crap which is today's ClearChannel dominated FM radio landscape? Do you not have enough advertisements and reptition in your life?
Ah well. If an iPod had radio, I might tempted to get one, and I've sworn a holy oath never to give Apple any of my money because of their business practices.:D
Yes. Darn them for trying to make money. Darn them for an excellent service record marred mostly by the intense expectations of their users (call Dell and complain that "your fans are too loud" and expect to be taken seriously. I dare you)! Darn them for being so... so... successful! Here at Slashdot, we don't take kindly to success.
But you know what? keep your iPod money. I'm pretty sure Apple can cope with the loss.
Windows gives these same warnings. If a user ignores the warnings on Windows, they'll likely ignore them on a Mac as well.
No it doesn't. If you download an executable from the web, IE does not tell you not to run it. If your program changes and then tries to re-read the registry for passwords and preferences, Windows doesn't tell you.
OS X does. Heck, OS X also helps your mitigate the problems in the first place by asking for your password to do anything admin-related, even when you're running in an admin account.
The only thing that saves them with the Mac is that there aren't as many "free screensaver"-type applications made for the Mac.
While it may contribute to the effect, it is certainly not the main reason. We have viruses for extremely obscure things out there, like high end, uncommon cellphones.
Linux has huge marketshare in the server world (which is an attractive target for spammers and phishers), and yet it's widely regarded as more secure than Windows (exploits exist). By your logic, it should be riddled with attacks from all angles. Yet, most botnets are still a massive cloud of windows machines in various states of patchdom.
Clearly, there are other factors at work, and market-share is only a small part of a larger equation.
i don't get it- what's so hard about win 2k or xp that these morons have so much trouble? i've got a 2k box at home, and it runs great for days, weeks, months without needing a reboot. the only piece of software that ever crashes is firefox! i don't get spyware, or viruses...
what are these people doing wrong, and, whatever it is, what makes them think that it won't happen on a mac? are they just clueless idiots who click every "yes" button and download everything they see? maybe that's not windows' fault but theirs... using a mac because it's "immune" to most of the malware that people stupidly install themselves simply because macs make up a tiny percentage of the market is security by obscurity, plain and simple
Well, I don't agree that OS X is secure only because of its relative obscurity. That's specious logic at best.
But the key thing to realize here is that the reason you and I can use Windows boxes safely is because we have the experience and context to know what a "stupid" mistake is. If you're like me, you've been using computers full-time for both work and play for years now.
Many people do not have this body of experience to draw upon. What may seem like an incredibly stupid mistake to you or I seems perfectly reasonable to someone who doesn't really know what "Phishing" is or why a free screensaver is a bad idea to download and run. It's only "So Simple" to us because we have built BS detectors into our worldview to keep our computers safe.
What's nice abut OSX is that it comes with a kind of "powered assist and trainer". It gives you quiet but noticable warnings when this sort of thing occurs. "This Download contains an executable. Are you sure you want to open it?" Or maybe, "Running executables directly from email is potentially unsafe and may open you to viruses and malware. Are you sure you want to continue?"
It also gives developers a boost by providing a comprehensive framework for all the normally insecure tasks (P^3 management: preference, password and permission). This helps steer them in the "right" direction when making software.
i realize windows has it's flaws, and has especially had flaws in the past, but it doesn't take a genius to keep an XP or 2000 machine safe and clean, and i'm tired of people blaming windows for their own stupid behavior.
See, it had its problems in the past, and you learned to deal with them. Now it's reflexive, like washing your hands or brushing your teeth. It's just something you do without even realizing that it is in fact not common sense.
If the Mac ever regained a significant market share, virus writers would start aiming at the platform and your experiment would show different results.
As I've mentioned before, I don't think that the theory of marketshare fully explains the near-total lack of virus and spyware activity on OS-X based machines.
Part of the reason Macs are so secure is that Apple has designed the system such that it is extremely secure from the lowest level to the top. For example, OSX does not have a root account enabled by default. Everything lives in their own permission space and if you want to break out, you use sudo (and thusly have to enter your password).
Less commonly mentioned, however, is the way Apple encourages secure programming with Keychain and their authorization framework. The Keychain encrypts passwords and makes it very hard for an application to get passwords from other applications, meaning that in order to steal valuable information you'd first have to comprimise another application (which is actually quite tricky to do). Even if you do succeed in altering the application, the Keychain notices this and warns you, saying, "Hey, this application changed since it last used me, are you sure you want to allow it access?"
Add to that that Applications cannot alter themselves, and you have a pretty secure foundation for developers (which also, by the way, provides special UI for password entry that is highly resistant to keylogging).
At the lowest level, the PPC architecture is inherently harder to exploit with classic buffer overflows and printf exploits. The PPC system does not keep the current return address on the stack the way that x86 does. PPC chips have an explicit link register for this purpose.
What that means, in practice, is that in order for you to exploit a single function with a buffer overflow, you must inject your code, overwrite the previous function's (the caller of the current function) saved link register (on the stack, along with other saved registers), and then have both the current and previous function return without segfaulting or overwriting your exploit code.
While doable, this is a huge pain to get just right, and it means that the conditions where a buffer overflow can succeed are less prevalent. Add in the fact that instructions have fixed alignment (but data does not) and are of fixed width, and you have a significantly harder egg to write and deploy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that virus writers can do this stuff. It's just that it's much harder and raises the entry bar.
I understand that OS X is due for at least some Spyware. I'm sure it's gonna happen.
But... this argument that OS X is a smaller market and therefore avoids attention has some flaws. We have viruses for cellphones and viruses for obscure routers.
You'd think that by now we'd have some of this stuff for OSX. Also, by definition most mac users have more money to throw around thatn PC users (costs more). You'd think that people with a higher income would be like a juicy arm that the mosquito-like asses who write virii and spyware would swoop to.
There has to be some other X factor that's sheltered them this long. I suspect that it's much harder to get your spyware onto the machine. Apple bundles about 90% of what everyone wants, and the other 10% is well-established stuff. Also, Apple makes it easy to make lots of things. For example, screensavers that pan across pictures (a major source of spyware in the windows world, free screensaver!) are easy to customize and make on OS X.
No there is not. That is what an operating system is by definition.
Well, it would seem the definition of "Operating System" is not something everyone can agree upon. In fact, you even admit this when you say:
People who program things other than operating systems expanding the idea to be a usable system for THEM and included C libraries and started debating on whether it included pieces on top of that and end users later mistaking thought it was the portion that provided the foundation for THEM.
The Operating System manages the basic tasks of a computer and allows other programs to function without having to duplicate core functionality like disk access, raw memory management and paging, and device management. Thusly, the C library and the core set of programs that boot your machine and get it in working order are very reasonably part of the operating system.
The operating system is the lowest level layer to the hardware, even the C libraries must go through the kernel (at least on a properly designed operating system). The other applications and libraries bundled with the kernel to provide a foundation someone can work with constitute a minimal DISTRIBUTION, not an operating system.
Considering the Linux kernel as an example of this, it cannot even start itself up into a reasonable parody of the services you mentioned without outside assistance, I think your point is elitist and politically or socially motivated.
Continuing with linux as an example, the very core of the OS is not just the kernel, but the basic materials that make the machine more than a complex waste of energy are the OS. By your definition, kernel modules are not part of the OS unless they are compiled into the kernel. Otherwise, they're not really part of the OS, even though with just a simple relocation they are.
Your point? Or did you just feel like ranting about how great you think their gui and the portions they wrote to support their gui are? There is nothing in your entire post that contradicts my point that the only thing of signficance left to Apple as a HARDWARE vendor is the CPU.
Much as I appreciate your rant, I already clearly indicated that I thought Apple had done some nice software work and that they should wake up and realize that it is software that they do well.
Now you're evading my point, and I was angry at you because you said precisely that. In this post you said, "That has little or nothing to do with Apple either. It is a Mach OS, with BSD filling in the blanks to get a usable system. Apple did create the pretty gui I referred to though." That's what I'm talking about.
Even if you take your draconian and dated idea of what an OS is to heart, that statement doesn't hold water. Someone had to meld these parts together, and that took design work and careful thought. Making an OS--even one like XNU that has distinct core parts--is not something you approach without a clear design.
I love your excuse for trolling here though. "I really do like Apple, I'm just going to rail on them and then pretend that I didn't."
Well, you're right in that regard. JavaScript lacks the nice message-sending utilities of other OO languages like Smalltalk, Objective-C, Ruby and Python.
But I disagree with, "This makes it difficult if not impossible to create object oriented applications using MVC and many other OOP design patterns." It's obnoxious, but it's certainly doable. This is one of the many reasons why the Command Pattern was invented.
That has little or nothing to do with Apple either. It is a Mach OS, with BSD filling in the blanks to get a usable system. Apple did create the pretty gui I referred to though.
Bullshit.
First, if you think that the "BSD filling in the blanks" and "usable system" represent non-trivial amounts of work and/or software design, you lack experience in this field. Darwin differentiates itself on several levels, and continues to do so.
Second, there is more to your OS than your raw controller layer and kernel, regardless of what linux folks want to tell you. Apple's system looks less and less like vanilla BSD every day, in a wide variety of ways. Some of this is inheritance from NeXT, but Apple has made huge strides in making thins better. To dismiss that as inconsequential because it's not close enough to the metal to make your arbitrary defintion of "OS" is both unfair and misleading.
For example, did you know part of the core distribution of OSX is a high-performance LAPACK library, complete with hand-tuned Altivec-saavy BLAS routines? Apple uses these routines all over the place, from the obvious places like their imaging library and Quicktime to obscure places like Mail.app. Did you know that Apple worked long and hard to make an Objective-C runtime that is one of the fastest ever made, without sacrificing functionality and making it possible to integrate C++?
And that "pretty gui" represents ground-breaking work in usability. Not all of it is perfect, yet, but they're getting there. It's also usable from a programmer's point of view. There is nothing like developing for Mac OSX. It's painless and quick, and you get amazing results. They give away an amazing developer kit with tools for working from the metal all the way up to their window server.
All this is part of the OS, all of this is designed and implemented in some part by Apple. It represents one of the more impressive success stories of software engineering to date, when you take the timeframe into account. When you buy a machine equipped with OSX, you're buying into a whole set of technologies from the metal on up.
Simply waving your hand and saying, "Ahh, they didn't design anything" is grossly inaccurate.
One way is AJAX. To make it work well, you essentially have to write a version of the page for each major browser - which is a lot of work. Of course, there are development tools that make this substantially easier.
One such tool is the ever growing and popular Prototype Library. Cross platform, has eye candy, Ajax and a good OO interface.
but is less suited than Flash or Java for real applications
Err, what? Unless you have some truly intense UI requirements (spreadsheet, for example), it's good for most online applications. Unless of course you want smoothly animated rollovers (eye candy) or punch-the-monkey games.
- like a game or any other datadriven mouse-interactive thing. I don't believe there is no OOP Javascript in a browser.
I can only guess at what your mangled sentance is saying. Either you're implying that browsers do not use OO methods in their JavaScript implementation, or you're implying that OOP is inferior for said applications (data driven or games).
Both are false. JavaScript is a prototype-based language, which means it's as OO as a langugae can get. JavaScript is as OO as Smalltalk, Self, and Ruby, and moreso than Python, Java or C++. OOP is a sound technique for developing data-driven designs and for developing games. Don't believe me? Check out the game code for any modern game, especially around the physics and rules enginers. Objects everywhere.
But here's the thing. Sure, you may pay less right now for that work. But what about the long term cost?
My father, who's highly placed in a company that makes medical devices, has told me that they've sworn off outsourcing to India and instead are preferring consultants now (at less-than-stellar consulting rates). The simple truth is they tried twice to get outsourcing working, and every single time the communication obstacles hit them hard and significantly delayed schedules.
Not to mention that the code they made and the hardware interfaces they designed were way under the company's quality standards. This was less than a year and a half ago, so the experience is fairly current. They also tried two significant companies when doing this. So it's not like it was a single bad experience. In both cases, they had to scrap the work almost entirely. It cost them nearly 150% the original non-outsourcing estimate to fix.
I know there are a lot of smart Indian folks out there, but the simple truth is that in India, lots of people are jumping on the coder bandwagon to make money, just like during the dotcom bubble here. As that happens, the number of well-trained and intelligent workers per unit sample will drop.
If IBM moves the jobs elsewhere and they end up getting a crappy product that they spend a bunch of maintenance budget on, then did they really save money? Were they really justified in firing those people? Not ethically justfied, I mean justified in the eyes on the shareholders who want to make money.
Okay. I understand everyone had high hopes for Spotlight, but where exactly did you get the expectation that the Rev1 of this software would be the ultimate soltuion to all search-related problems?
Really, I want to know, because I know Apple didn't give you this impression. I know that I didn't (and I wrote a ton of rants about how cool Spotlight would be), and I've never seen such an amazingly aggressive outlook on it. So where?
But the downside is that Spotlight apparently refuses to index files it doesn't think it knows about. On the surface this seems like a good choice - who wants a bunch of (seemingly) random binary data cluttering up the index? It would significantly bloat the database, and potentially produce lots of irrelevant results.
Unfortunately I think they took this too far. Or else maybe I just stumbled upon a bug. Actually, either way I consider it a bug. I wanted to see if I could search for one of my perl scripts (see below) based on its content. I entered a few keywords that exist inside the script and came up with nothing. Boo! I entered the file's name, and sure enough, there it was. So Spotlight knew about it, but simply did not index its contents. It said, "I don't know you, so I'll ignore you."
This is not a bug. All you need is an importer. Let me tell you what would happen if Spotlight indexed every file as plain text, or even gave you the option to do so. I can do so with one word:
Chaos.
Without the context of what a file is and what data about is is worthwhile to a content search, it's a madhouse. Imagine if it searched.html files without knowing anything about them. You enter in one > or < and you get the entire set of html files on your disk. This is alsmost assuredly not what you asked for.
Spotlight is not meant to be a replacement to UNIX's grep. Spotlight does content-searching, which is a significantly more difficult beast to slay. So, it ignores things it doesn't understand by design.
And all someone needs to do is write an importer for you, and blam, you're good. But that importer is where the human direction on what "content" is for a shell script, and what kind of type it should be interpreted as.
You may not realize you want it this way, but I assure you that you do, and you'd be far more upset if it was done the way you pine for above.
No. I tried every possible tool and every possible option, using every possible way of mounting my networked shares. In some cases it flat out refused to enable indexing on the networked volumes. In other cases, it dutifully went through the motions of indexing them without actually doing anything. At no time was I able to type in a search and see results residing on a different machine. Why, Apple, why? Why must you torture me so? Why must you tantalize with the greatness that could be, and then take it away?
This complaint is valid, although dripping with melodrama. Please give Apple a revision or two to work this out. It's a much harder problem than you realize, and has some unqiue considerations at the edge cases (what kind of mounted drive is "too small" to index? Should machines share indexes? How do you secure this service?)
Apple wants this to happen, I'm sure of it. It'll be here soon enough. Don't expect it to work with windows drives, though.
Ahh, who am I kidding? Jobs is an egomaniac and Apple is not a perfect company. Not by a long shot. I had a small hope that these features would be included in Spotlight, but perhaps I was simply deluding myself. I mean, it seemed so obvious to me. Where is searching most difficult? Offline files! How are important archived files often stored? Compressed! It was a no-brainer that Spotlight should handle these situations. When you insert a new disc for the first time, it should ask if you want it to index the disc. Imagine, after intially loading all my backup discs
WinFS. Avalon. Longhorn. Windows Security. Good desktop search. A better IE. A SCCS that doesn't require blood rituals.
MS has promised a lot of stuff, and instead of saying, "Whoops, our bad!" they say, "Oh, it's delayed." Yeah, that's it. After a year or three of "delay," we catch on.
Apple and the Linux community are on a roll because they are delivering on their promises for software and features. Sometimes they're late, sometimes they're early, but they do what they say they're going to do. They make it happen.
Unless MS shapes up and catches up, they're the ones who are going to go extinct.
Yes, you are correct, if you are still writing the software, and you notice the security and correctness are being compromised.
In my experience, correctness is caught here, but security tends to slip through the cracks. It can be very hard to unit test for security (although, a well tested system tends to have fewer buffer overflows and whatnot).
If you're doing final testing (say, 3 weeks before gold cd goes out), or if you've already sent the software out, you can't just rush out a fix, especially without seriously sitting down and thinking things through.
Two problems. First, when you find the bug is irrelevant. It's the bug's value that matters. If your secure server is shipping tomorrow and you find a show-stopper buffer-overflow, you fix it. If that delays your ship date for a day or two, such is the price of developing software. Use a process that helps minimize the cost of change (I know I have a favorite). If you don't, you're asking for trouble.
Part of these kinds of priorities is that you need to weigh the cost benefit of each change. You are suggesting that the size of the change has some kind of weight in this equation. My claim is that it does not. The customer doesn't care about how many lines you have to change, they care about if your software is safe, correct, secure and fast.
Using pithy excuses like, "I know it doesn't do what we said it would, but we only caught the bug 3 weeks before shipping," is an excellent way to show your customer how incompetant you are at software engineering and project management.
Far better to take the honest route, give them what they paid for, and not ship a bogus version. Unless, of course, your customer decides otherwise.
That's pretty much what I've been saying. Linus is doing the correct thing and Colin Percival is being too hasty with things.
That's not what you said, and it's not what Linus is saying. Linus is saying, "It's not a problem. The bug is too hard to exploit, and I like hyperthreading." Maybe you've confused him with Alan Cox, who is saying that you can't ignore security bugs of this class, even if they're in hardware, and so he suggests that hyperthreading be turned off.
From what I've learned in software writing, is that it's preferrable to wait and see how much and how bad your software runs or has problems before you start charging into the situation to fix it.
Wait. Wait wait wait. Who taught you this? This isn't XP. This isn't sound software practicies. Maybe you're thinking of the infamous quote by Car Hoare, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil," perhaps?
Potential performance problems are things you should defer on until proper profiling can be done (unless they're total show stoppers). Security and correctness are things you cannot ignore except in extreme cases. Security is particularly important to nail down, because it can result in your customers losing data (even data not pertaining to your app), which is the first no-no of software.
Application software has four priorities, in this order:
Safety (shouldn't destroy data)
Correctness (do what it says it does)
Security (don't do anything else)
Performance (do it fast)
YMMV, of course, sometimes correctness falls below security, and occasionally performance goes above correctness in some mathmatical functions (if doing it correctly would take a decade and doing a close approximation would take a day, obviously you want the approximation and then a heuristic).
Especially something as low level as this, which could have unseen side effects. Especially since this (to me, at least) seems to be more of a hardware problem than software, per se. (But, of course, I could be wrong.)
In this case, I'd say proper fix is to disable hyperthreading by default, and make sure the user is aware of the hardware bug/consequence of using HT when they decide to turn it on. You need to let the user decide if they're willing to accept the security risk or not.
The Linux Kernel Developers may decide otherwise, but that's how I'd call it if it was in my shop. It's a hardware problem and the software fix is not obvious.
The myth that Windows Auto Updates work without intervention is a beautiful and compelling story, but sadly it is just that for the vast majority of people.
The truth is, updating your OS can be a hassle, no matter what machine you use. Apple has a fairly good track record, but that doesn't mean it's always going to be painless.
What does DX9 do for a PC? Well, DX9 is an API that allows games to run. Wouldn't it be nice if gaming on a mac was just a reboot away?
I guess I could own a PC for gaming, instead of for doing real work like my Mac.
Or I could get a console and enjoy a wider selection of games, and not be pigeonholed into dozens of boring FPS rehashes (now you're in WWII! Now you're in WWII in space! Now you're in WWII in space as a SpaceNazi!) or a bunch of repetitive MMORPGS (Now you're fighting monsters for experience! Now you're doing it in space!).
Wouldn't it be nice if the PC gaming industry could be rebooted and start producing more interesting content instead of boring rehashes of the same game over and over? How many Diablo clones, Doom Clones and Warcraft clones can you take before your gag reflex kicks in?
Slashdot Mirror
"Dumb dialog" that fits right in line with all the Star Wars dialog. There was no radical departure. The romantic stuff might have been hard to swallow, but quite frankly it's in line with all three of the movies. Really, the only person who didn't talk in an outrageous fashion was Han Solo.
First of all, no one is responsible for your expectations except you. You made this fantastic movie out of a cosmos of arbitrary expectations in your heard. They were not met. So, you feel like it's their fault?
Clearly, you are the victim here. I wish we inferior plebeians could arise to your enlightened expectations, that we might not bring wrinkles of frustration to your radiant complexion, Oh Lord!
Here's what puzzles me. You wasted your valuable time and money up to three times. You then claim your time is valuable and that it shouldn't have been wasted on this movie. But, complaining about this movie is an acceptable use of your time?
Need I remind you that this is Star Wars. Everyone knew pretty much how this was going to go down. The target demographic children and people who liked the original movies. But keep in mind that even people who are experts at analyzing movies find something in this film.
I think people get so offended at the comedic elements of the prequels that they refused to look for the more significant elements.
The plot was spelled out long before any movie was made. We knew what was going to happen, just not the details. If the general plot was not obvious to you, then you have a learning disability.
Your expectations did this long before any movie could. Ask yourself what you really expected. It sounds like you didn't actually want them to be Star Wars prequels. You wanted something else.
Even if 90% of people feel exactly like you do, it's still a subculture. Please examine the definition.
As for the dissatisfied movie fans, I can't help but be reminded of the Matrix movies. People decided that the Matrix was going to be some kind of epiphany-inducing movie experience instead of an action movie with some interesting metaphysical background. As a result, the later movies "sucked."
Not to mention that despite Padme "Log" Portman and Mace "Motherfucka" Jackson, the movie is full of powerful symbolism and cleverly shot scenes. The whole plot of Star Wars, complete with a seemingly apparent moral ambiguity that changes shape depending on who is examining it, is a beautiful and ambitious thing.
If you don't see that, please look closer. I assure you it's there.
There is a whole subculture these days just for people who dislike movies because they have the potential to be popular, and this entire Slashdot thread seems like the embodiment of that.
When I went to see the movie, my entire experience was completely ruined by hecklers. People who went on opening night with the sole purpose of making fun of the movie. Laughing at Palpatine's makeup, booing when Anakin first appears, shouting "LOG!" whenever Padme shows up.
Everyone here is so quick to dismiss the movie on the simple things (like if Samuel delivered his lines well) or tries to focus on bad interpretations of the themes (oh yeah, G. Lucas hates women because Padme is ineffectual in the last movie) or claim that the movie was high-schoolish (erhem, this is Star Wars, what did you expect?). People who complain this movie is campy seem to forget that the Star Wars trilogy is part of what helped us define what campy meant. It wouldn't be true to its roots if it didn't sound campy!
I wish people could just accept movies for what they are, appreciate the hard work that went into them, and enjoy them. Given the cost of movie tickets today. If you aren't ready to enjoy the movie, why fork over your $10 for it in the first place?
Look, I won't deny people know how to use FM radio. That's great. I never said they didn't.
What I am saying is that the iPod user experience and metaphor does not mesh well with FM. The iPod is not terribly good at making playlists (or setting presets) on the fly. It can do it, yes. But its user interface is optimized for browsing, not editing. Traditionally we do our playlist editing in a helper program like iTunes.
Sat. radio is a much nicer fit to the iPod user experience, which is therefore easier than FM to understand on the iPod.
Uhh... dude.
I said exactly that.
In order to get the machine to go to your inserted branch, you need to get the machine to call blr twice without a segfault or blasting your egg. This means, in general, you can't just smash the stack as freely as you can with an x86 box, you need to care about the saved register contents.
It also means that it's much harder to pull off when a function is called after the function you exploit. This is actually a common idiom too. You copy a buffer from a read, then call a function on it. Hope your egg is on the heap, and doesn't get blasted.
This is harder than on x86 architectures. It doesn't make it impossible.
Amen on the ogg part. Maybe with QT7 we'll see Apple open up a little. I know the machine is capable of decoding it, and now QuickTime certainly could support the codec.
Satellite stations are discrete, named, require no tuning (the channel is there or it isn't), do not change based on locale.
FM radio stations not, not, not any of these things. You could represent Sat. stations as playlists trivially, and they would conform to the user's expectations. You cannot do the same with FM if you travel more than a few miles in any given direction.
FM radio is an inherently crufty user experience. XM is not. Think about it.
It's not about adding features. If it were all about feature count, Netscape would be the best browser ever.
The iPod serves a simple purpose. It does it well, it is not ugly while doing it, and it is easy to use. Please do not suggest that FM radio would not further complicate the device, because it certainly would.
Besides, why would you want to listen to the utter crap which is today's ClearChannel dominated FM radio landscape? Do you not have enough advertisements and reptition in your life?
Yes. Darn them for trying to make money. Darn them for an excellent service record marred mostly by the intense expectations of their users (call Dell and complain that "your fans are too loud" and expect to be taken seriously. I dare you)! Darn them for being so... so... successful! Here at Slashdot, we don't take kindly to success.But you know what? keep your iPod money. I'm pretty sure Apple can cope with the loss.
OS X does. Heck, OS X also helps your mitigate the problems in the first place by asking for your password to do anything admin-related, even when you're running in an admin account.
While it may contribute to the effect, it is certainly not the main reason. We have viruses for extremely obscure things out there, like high end, uncommon cellphones.Linux has huge marketshare in the server world (which is an attractive target for spammers and phishers), and yet it's widely regarded as more secure than Windows (exploits exist). By your logic, it should be riddled with attacks from all angles. Yet, most botnets are still a massive cloud of windows machines in various states of patchdom.
Clearly, there are other factors at work, and market-share is only a small part of a larger equation.
Well, I don't agree that OS X is secure only because of its relative obscurity. That's specious logic at best.
But the key thing to realize here is that the reason you and I can use Windows boxes safely is because we have the experience and context to know what a "stupid" mistake is. If you're like me, you've been using computers full-time for both work and play for years now.
Many people do not have this body of experience to draw upon. What may seem like an incredibly stupid mistake to you or I seems perfectly reasonable to someone who doesn't really know what "Phishing" is or why a free screensaver is a bad idea to download and run. It's only "So Simple" to us because we have built BS detectors into our worldview to keep our computers safe.
What's nice abut OSX is that it comes with a kind of "powered assist and trainer". It gives you quiet but noticable warnings when this sort of thing occurs. "This Download contains an executable. Are you sure you want to open it?" Or maybe, "Running executables directly from email is potentially unsafe and may open you to viruses and malware. Are you sure you want to continue?"
It also gives developers a boost by providing a comprehensive framework for all the normally insecure tasks (P^3 management: preference, password and permission). This helps steer them in the "right" direction when making software.
See, it had its problems in the past, and you learned to deal with them. Now it's reflexive, like washing your hands or brushing your teeth. It's just something you do without even realizing that it is in fact not common sense.
Part of the reason Macs are so secure is that Apple has designed the system such that it is extremely secure from the lowest level to the top. For example, OSX does not have a root account enabled by default. Everything lives in their own permission space and if you want to break out, you use sudo (and thusly have to enter your password).
Less commonly mentioned, however, is the way Apple encourages secure programming with Keychain and their authorization framework. The Keychain encrypts passwords and makes it very hard for an application to get passwords from other applications, meaning that in order to steal valuable information you'd first have to comprimise another application (which is actually quite tricky to do). Even if you do succeed in altering the application, the Keychain notices this and warns you, saying, "Hey, this application changed since it last used me, are you sure you want to allow it access?"
Add to that that Applications cannot alter themselves, and you have a pretty secure foundation for developers (which also, by the way, provides special UI for password entry that is highly resistant to keylogging).
At the lowest level, the PPC architecture is inherently harder to exploit with classic buffer overflows and printf exploits. The PPC system does not keep the current return address on the stack the way that x86 does. PPC chips have an explicit link register for this purpose.
What that means, in practice, is that in order for you to exploit a single function with a buffer overflow, you must inject your code, overwrite the previous function's (the caller of the current function) saved link register (on the stack, along with other saved registers), and then have both the current and previous function return without segfaulting or overwriting your exploit code.
While doable, this is a huge pain to get just right, and it means that the conditions where a buffer overflow can succeed are less prevalent. Add in the fact that instructions have fixed alignment (but data does not) and are of fixed width, and you have a significantly harder egg to write and deploy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that virus writers can do this stuff. It's just that it's much harder and raises the entry bar.
I understand that OS X is due for at least some Spyware. I'm sure it's gonna happen.
But... this argument that OS X is a smaller market and therefore avoids attention has some flaws. We have viruses for cellphones and viruses for obscure routers.
You'd think that by now we'd have some of this stuff for OSX. Also, by definition most mac users have more money to throw around thatn PC users (costs more). You'd think that people with a higher income would be like a juicy arm that the mosquito-like asses who write virii and spyware would swoop to.
There has to be some other X factor that's sheltered them this long. I suspect that it's much harder to get your spyware onto the machine. Apple bundles about 90% of what everyone wants, and the other 10% is well-established stuff. Also, Apple makes it easy to make lots of things. For example, screensavers that pan across pictures (a major source of spyware in the windows world, free screensaver!) are easy to customize and make on OS X.
Continuing with linux as an example, the very core of the OS is not just the kernel, but the basic materials that make the machine more than a complex waste of energy are the OS. By your definition, kernel modules are not part of the OS unless they are compiled into the kernel. Otherwise, they're not really part of the OS, even though with just a simple relocation they are.
Now you're evading my point, and I was angry at you because you said precisely that. In this post you said, "That has little or nothing to do with Apple either. It is a Mach OS, with BSD filling in the blanks to get a usable system. Apple did create the pretty gui I referred to though." That's what I'm talking about.Even if you take your draconian and dated idea of what an OS is to heart, that statement doesn't hold water. Someone had to meld these parts together, and that took design work and careful thought. Making an OS--even one like XNU that has distinct core parts--is not something you approach without a clear design.
I love your excuse for trolling here though. "I really do like Apple, I'm just going to rail on them and then pretend that I didn't."
Well, you're right in that regard. JavaScript lacks the nice message-sending utilities of other OO languages like Smalltalk, Objective-C, Ruby and Python.
But I disagree with, "This makes it difficult if not impossible to create object oriented applications using MVC and many other OOP design patterns." It's obnoxious, but it's certainly doable. This is one of the many reasons why the Command Pattern was invented.
First, if you think that the "BSD filling in the blanks" and "usable system" represent non-trivial amounts of work and/or software design, you lack experience in this field. Darwin differentiates itself on several levels, and continues to do so.
Second, there is more to your OS than your raw controller layer and kernel, regardless of what linux folks want to tell you. Apple's system looks less and less like vanilla BSD every day, in a wide variety of ways. Some of this is inheritance from NeXT, but Apple has made huge strides in making thins better. To dismiss that as inconsequential because it's not close enough to the metal to make your arbitrary defintion of "OS" is both unfair and misleading.
For example, did you know part of the core distribution of OSX is a high-performance LAPACK library, complete with hand-tuned Altivec-saavy BLAS routines? Apple uses these routines all over the place, from the obvious places like their imaging library and Quicktime to obscure places like Mail.app. Did you know that Apple worked long and hard to make an Objective-C runtime that is one of the fastest ever made, without sacrificing functionality and making it possible to integrate C++?
And that "pretty gui" represents ground-breaking work in usability. Not all of it is perfect, yet, but they're getting there. It's also usable from a programmer's point of view. There is nothing like developing for Mac OSX. It's painless and quick, and you get amazing results. They give away an amazing developer kit with tools for working from the metal all the way up to their window server.
All this is part of the OS, all of this is designed and implemented in some part by Apple. It represents one of the more impressive success stories of software engineering to date, when you take the timeframe into account. When you buy a machine equipped with OSX, you're buying into a whole set of technologies from the metal on up.
Simply waving your hand and saying, "Ahh, they didn't design anything" is grossly inaccurate.
Both are false. JavaScript is a prototype-based language, which means it's as OO as a langugae can get. JavaScript is as OO as Smalltalk, Self, and Ruby, and moreso than Python, Java or C++. OOP is a sound technique for developing data-driven designs and for developing games. Don't believe me? Check out the game code for any modern game, especially around the physics and rules enginers. Objects everywhere.
But here's the thing. Sure, you may pay less right now for that work. But what about the long term cost?
My father, who's highly placed in a company that makes medical devices, has told me that they've sworn off outsourcing to India and instead are preferring consultants now (at less-than-stellar consulting rates). The simple truth is they tried twice to get outsourcing working, and every single time the communication obstacles hit them hard and significantly delayed schedules.
Not to mention that the code they made and the hardware interfaces they designed were way under the company's quality standards. This was less than a year and a half ago, so the experience is fairly current. They also tried two significant companies when doing this. So it's not like it was a single bad experience. In both cases, they had to scrap the work almost entirely. It cost them nearly 150% the original non-outsourcing estimate to fix.
I know there are a lot of smart Indian folks out there, but the simple truth is that in India, lots of people are jumping on the coder bandwagon to make money, just like during the dotcom bubble here. As that happens, the number of well-trained and intelligent workers per unit sample will drop.
If IBM moves the jobs elsewhere and they end up getting a crappy product that they spend a bunch of maintenance budget on, then did they really save money? Were they really justified in firing those people? Not ethically justfied, I mean justified in the eyes on the shareholders who want to make money.
Really, I want to know, because I know Apple didn't give you this impression. I know that I didn't (and I wrote a ton of rants about how cool Spotlight would be), and I've never seen such an amazingly aggressive outlook on it. So where?
This is not a bug. All you need is an importer. Let me tell you what would happen if Spotlight indexed every file as plain text, or even gave you the option to do so. I can do so with one word:
Chaos.
Without the context of what a file is and what data about is is worthwhile to a content search, it's a madhouse. Imagine if it searched .html files without knowing anything about them. You enter in one > or < and you get the entire set of html files on your disk. This is alsmost assuredly not what you asked for.
Spotlight is not meant to be a replacement to UNIX's grep. Spotlight does content-searching, which is a significantly more difficult beast to slay. So, it ignores things it doesn't understand by design.
And all someone needs to do is write an importer for you, and blam, you're good. But that importer is where the human direction on what "content" is for a shell script, and what kind of type it should be interpreted as.
You may not realize you want it this way, but I assure you that you do, and you'd be far more upset if it was done the way you pine for above.
This complaint is valid, although dripping with melodrama. Please give Apple a revision or two to work this out. It's a much harder problem than you realize, and has some unqiue considerations at the edge cases (what kind of mounted drive is "too small" to index? Should machines share indexes? How do you secure this service?)
Apple wants this to happen, I'm sure of it. It'll be here soon enough. Don't expect it to work with windows drives, though.
WinFS. Avalon. Longhorn. Windows Security. Good desktop search. A better IE. A SCCS that doesn't require blood rituals.
MS has promised a lot of stuff, and instead of saying, "Whoops, our bad!" they say, "Oh, it's delayed." Yeah, that's it. After a year or three of "delay," we catch on.
Apple and the Linux community are on a roll because they are delivering on their promises for software and features. Sometimes they're late, sometimes they're early, but they do what they say they're going to do. They make it happen.
Unless MS shapes up and catches up, they're the ones who are going to go extinct.
In my experience, correctness is caught here, but security tends to slip through the cracks. It can be very hard to unit test for security (although, a well tested system tends to have fewer buffer overflows and whatnot).
Two problems. First, when you find the bug is irrelevant. It's the bug's value that matters. If your secure server is shipping tomorrow and you find a show-stopper buffer-overflow, you fix it. If that delays your ship date for a day or two, such is the price of developing software. Use a process that helps minimize the cost of change (I know I have a favorite). If you don't, you're asking for trouble.
Part of these kinds of priorities is that you need to weigh the cost benefit of each change. You are suggesting that the size of the change has some kind of weight in this equation. My claim is that it does not. The customer doesn't care about how many lines you have to change, they care about if your software is safe, correct, secure and fast.
Using pithy excuses like, "I know it doesn't do what we said it would, but we only caught the bug 3 weeks before shipping," is an excellent way to show your customer how incompetant you are at software engineering and project management.
Far better to take the honest route, give them what they paid for, and not ship a bogus version. Unless, of course, your customer decides otherwise.
That's not what you said, and it's not what Linus is saying. Linus is saying, "It's not a problem. The bug is too hard to exploit, and I like hyperthreading." Maybe you've confused him with Alan Cox, who is saying that you can't ignore security bugs of this class, even if they're in hardware, and so he suggests that hyperthreading be turned off.
I seem to have hurt your feelings. Did I hit too close to home, here?
Potential performance problems are things you should defer on until proper profiling can be done (unless they're total show stoppers). Security and correctness are things you cannot ignore except in extreme cases. Security is particularly important to nail down, because it can result in your customers losing data (even data not pertaining to your app), which is the first no-no of software.
Application software has four priorities, in this order:
- Safety (shouldn't destroy data)
- Correctness (do what it says it does)
- Security (don't do anything else)
- Performance (do it fast)
YMMV, of course, sometimes correctness falls below security, and occasionally performance goes above correctness in some mathmatical functions (if doing it correctly would take a decade and doing a close approximation would take a day, obviously you want the approximation and then a heuristic). In this case, I'd say proper fix is to disable hyperthreading by default, and make sure the user is aware of the hardware bug/consequence of using HT when they decide to turn it on. You need to let the user decide if they're willing to accept the security risk or not.The Linux Kernel Developers may decide otherwise, but that's how I'd call it if it was in my shop. It's a hardware problem and the software fix is not obvious.
The truth is, updating your OS can be a hassle, no matter what machine you use. Apple has a fairly good track record, but that doesn't mean it's always going to be painless.
I guess I could own a PC for gaming, instead of for doing real work like my Mac.
Or I could get a console and enjoy a wider selection of games, and not be pigeonholed into dozens of boring FPS rehashes (now you're in WWII! Now you're in WWII in space! Now you're in WWII in space as a SpaceNazi!) or a bunch of repetitive MMORPGS (Now you're fighting monsters for experience! Now you're doing it in space!).
Wouldn't it be nice if the PC gaming industry could be rebooted and start producing more interesting content instead of boring rehashes of the same game over and over? How many Diablo clones, Doom Clones and Warcraft clones can you take before your gag reflex kicks in?