Installing/updating iTunes doesn't require a reboot. That part was entirely optional on your part. I expect you installed some other updates along with iTunes that requested that you reboot in order to finish the installation.
Oh, probably, I accidentally hit enter when Software Update popped up so I have no clue what the hell it installed. (There was a Safari update, at least, but that also shouldn't require a reboot.) So who knows why it required a reboot, but it did.
Download the latest iTunes and re-install it. It should fix any problems you were having with iTunes. At least, it fixed it for me.
The problem is that under Mac OS X, you have to delete a couple of kernel extensions to "really" reinstall iTunes. And the support site is down, so I have no idea what those are. But the end step is rerunning the iTunes installer, so we'll see if it works this time.
...Nope. Exact same (useless) error message telling me to update iTunes.
Re:That didn't take too long to fail
on
iOS 5 Update Available
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I started downloading before the Slashdot story was posted. It was kind of fun to watch the "time remaining" thing slow to a crawl. The last 15 seconds took a good minute.
Also, small update: turns out the phone hadn't crashed, it was just frozen displaying the lock screen with a time 6 minutes in the past. It eventually rebooted on its own. So at least I still have a phone.
Another interesting factoid: you can't just drag iTunes into the trash to delete it. Mac OS X won't let you. Instead you have to open the Applications folder, select it, and press Command-Delete. (I'm doing the complete reinstall off memory, let's see how well this goes!)
That didn't take too long to fail. Click on "Update," and it tells me I have to update iTunes. OK, fine, go do that. Computer reboots.
Take 2. Click on update, it downloads the nearly 700MB iTunes update, and makes a backup.
And then crashes, opening an Apple KB article that tells me I have to update iTunes in order to install the update. Er... I already did that?
I'll just uninstall iTunes and... oh, wait, you can't do that on Mac OS X. You have to follow some magic instructions that involve deleting kernel extensions and rebooting three times. I'll have to look that up and... oh, hey, Apple's support site now 503s.
Awesome.
Oh, hey, it hard-crashed my phone. I'll just pop out the battery to reboot it, and... oh, crap. That's right, the Apple official way to restart a crashed iDevice is to let the battery drain. I'd link to the article, but their support site is down.
And I'm sure this has nothing to do with the stats package mistaking any version of Chrome for Safari. (I was wondering why so many people used Safari until I realized Chrome wasn't even listed and the detailed stats which list user agent strings showed most of the "Safari" hits were really Chrome.)
It wasn't just "Stability and Performance Issues" that caused the game to suck so bad.
Yeah, I'm not sure why they went with that in the article. It's why I included the link to the earlier Slashdot story. I mean, there were performance and stability issues (I guess) but they weren't what killed the game.
It was things like XP rewards (called SP) being awarded at random that did it. Every time you did an action (like attack a monster) there was something like a 10% chance you'd gain XP. This made leveling horrible. It turns out that a Skinner box has the opposite effect if you're more likely to get a shot to the nuts than an actual reward.
To be fair, this was fixed rather quickly: a good two months after release.
Also, this is the edited down version of the "things that were wrong at release." My first draft was waaay over the character limit. No need to go there, though. Suffice it to say that the list of things that have been fixed over the past year is absolutely massive - and despite that, the game is now mediocre at best. (And even that's pushing it.)
I don't know about the first and last photos, but the middle one?
My Barnes and Noble Nook came with one of those (but labeled "nook"), and I know I've seen third party "USB charger" type devices that look just like that.
It's a small AC adapter that outputs power to a USB port. You can use them to charge anything that charges off USB, including things like the iPhone and more useful things like the Nook or PS3 controllers.
Yeah, I have a feeling that Apple is probably legally correct here.
And you know what? I don't give a shit. I want them to lose anyway. But lose in such a way that only Apple loses, and that Samsung can't then go after companies that have been playing fair. (If there are any. Are there any?)
The bottom line is that Samsung patented actual, real, physical technology. Apple patented rounded corners and taking existing PC interfaces and replacing "point" with "touch." (Also, please note that multitouch doesn't even enter into the patent Superken7 is talking about - it's talking about taking the existing thumbnail interface that exists in a million photo applications, and instead of clicking on photos, tapping on them.)
So while I expect Apple is probably legally correct, all that means is that the law is clearly wrong and needs fixing - at least as far as preventing "existing technology, but with touch! / on a phone!" type patents.
So they claim that the PS3 supports their streaming subtitles, and yet I haven't seen a single movie that actually offers streaming subtitles.
I've yet to see any movies that do, but I verified that the PS3 does indeed support streaming subtitles before posting (before I was going to mention that as far I could tell the streaming subtitle support was a complete lie) via the TV show Psych. Which has English subtitles. And English audio. (They're really the Closed Captions.)
I think it may have also had Spanish subtitles, so there's that.
But, yeah, anime is basically unwatchable via Netflix streaming, even though they support multiple audio streams and subtitles. (Which, again, I only know from watching episodes of Psych, because the menu option to enable subtitles is just flat-out hidden if the movie doesn't support them.)
I wish there was a feedback button for every originally foreign language movie they have saying something like "Give me subtitles!" Instead I always say that audio/video were out of sync. Somehow I don't think they get it.
Their feedback system is a joke. There's no way to offer real feedback, you just have to use the options provided.
Hopefully they'll be able to look at my history and figure out that I restarted an episode of Psych five times on my TiVo before giving up and streaming from the PS3 because the TiVo kept on screwing up the video stream. (Green bands kept appearing, and it kept missing key frames, causing some really weird effects.)
Somehow, though, I doubt they'll get all that from "video was blurry."
I didn't, that list is straight from Netflix's horrible support site. I think the devices you list fall under the "Google TV" group, but I don't know.
I did notice that the FAQ answer on the controls for the PS3 streaming client was out of date, so it wouldn't surprise me if the list of clients that support subtitles is wrong too. But it's Netflix's list, and if they can't bother to update it...
According to the Netflix FAQ, no Roku device supports streaming subtitles.
I'd link to the FAQ, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do that, so instead, here's the list of devices that support subtitles:
* PC/Mac * PS3 * Wii * Google TV Devices such as Logitech Revue and Sony Internet TV * Boxee Box by D-Link * iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch
Note that on the PS3 at least, you have to turn on subtitles before starting to stream, and if subtitles aren't available, the option is just missing entirely.
Compare that to Bill Gates' notion that the Internet was a fad.
Bill Gates didn't say the Internet as in networking was a fad, he said that he thought that the web was a fad. So all that stuff about IPv4 is kind of irrelevant.
Actually, researching this, it appears he didn't say that either. But it's well known that Microsoft was slow to create a web browser, and wound up buying one from another company to compete with Netscape. So even if he didn't say it, the company still acted like they thought it was a fad. And, hell, in 1994, can you really blame them?
I'm not really sure what this proves, other than both Jobs and Gates are willing to see that they've made a mistake and reverse course.
If you have thought about that it is possible to reload Java web applications, then you would see yourself that the permanent generation is garbage collected as well.
Uh, that right there is the number one way to generate a "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space" error - reloading web applications. The number one cause of that error is when trying to run a Java web server that runs out of PermGen space because the classes loaded into it are never freed.
And I can guarantee that this bug isn't solved in the latest version of Java 1.6, because it still happens to me fairly frequently while writing Java web applications. As far as I know, the only solution is to increase the size of the PermGen space.
This is not a new problem and I still encounter it almost daily, so if you have a solution that magically fixes Java so that reloading web applications doesn't eat up all the PermGen space, I'd love to know about it!
I doubt Gosling has problems managing memory in Java.
I dunno, you've never run into the more infamous "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space"?
This is the error that's generated when the Java VM itself (well, the classloader, I guess) runs out of memory.
Because, unlike Java code itself, the Java classloader never frees memory it uses, which means that if you use a class briefly on startup, that code itself will be kept in memory indefinitely and never freed.
Which wouldn't matter as much, if there weren't this special "PermGen" space that used to default to 1MB. (It's slowly been increased as the versions go on and the size of Java programs continued to bloat, I think the default is now something like 16MB and can, as of five years ago, be user-set via a command line parameter.)
So what does this have to do with SkyNet? Well, if it's written in Java, it will run out of PermGen space well before its self-modifying code can accomplish anything.
And, given that PermGen space is never freed, apparently James Gosling does have problems managing memory in Java.
No, you remember wrong. The Mac commercials say that, unlike a PC, everything just works and you won't get viruses.
Now if I try and access "Important Trade Secrets.pdf" and get told "Access Denied," that's not "just working," is it? So instead, with the new Mac OS X Lion, instead of giving you an "access denied" message when you try and access that file, it just loads it up! It just works!
OK, so I'm really confused as to what the vulnerability actually is. And given that the article starts off with "LDAP servers frequently contain repositories of highly sensitive enterprise data," I'm not exactly convinced the author knows what they're talking about either.
But from what I can gather the bug has to do with using Mac OS X Lion as a file server. Once a user has authenticated with the server once, the server starts blindly accepting any credentials it receives, I guess?
So, yeah, "it just works" if all you want to do is access files. Which is all the ads ever talk about.
If, on the other hand, you don't intend to allow everyone access to (the data on?) your entire computer, then maybe you should consider not using Mac OS X as a server.
Plus I learned that IT is using LDAP wrong where I work! They use it to authenticate user accounts on the various servers that contain "repositories of highly sensitive enterprise data" but apparently those are supposed to be stored on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol server itself.
What do you know - I'll have to fire off an email to IT and ask them to transfer our SVN repository (accessed via SSH) to the LDAP server.
- Making very, very, very sure that they have decent security around any and all personal data they hold.
It's secured by McAfee! How much more secure do you want them to be?
(Actually, I suppose that little badge on us.playstation.com could have predated the whole PSN fiasco. And presumably doesn't apply to the actual PS3 online services, just the PlayStation website. Especially because it's notably missing from the PlayStation blog and forums sites, where you do use your PSN account to log in. Which is more amusing than it being on the PlayStation portal website in the first place, now that I think about it.)
Man, if only you bothered to read the article, you'd have seen this quote:
"It was unbelievable," said Jim Biddle, a manager of Bistro 153 in Beaverton, Ore., which hosted its first Barcraft in July. The 50 gamers in attendance "doubled what I'd normally take in on a normal Sunday night."
So even if they aren't buying drinks, they're buying enough stuff to double the bar's normal take.
Besides, if you've ever hung around gamers, beer (or really any alcoholic beverage) is a large part of the modern adult video gaming experience.
The key word is "again:" iTunes broke. It used to work, and then it broke. Searching for a way to fix it brought up that Apple support article explaining that I'd have to reinstall iTunes, which involves those crazy instructions to actually remove it completely.
What there are two of (well, three if you reinstall) are reboots - once after moving iTunes to the trash, and once again after emptying the trash. (And optionally a third if you decide to reinstall iTunes.)
Under Windows, the process is simply "go to 'uninstall a program,' select 'iTunes,' click 'uninstall,' and then needlessly reboot because Apple can't be bothered to look up how to remove services properly."
Under Mac OS X, you'll need to find that support article I linked to learn about the kernel extension you need to remove. And go through the "drag to trash, reboot, empty trash, reboot" process for some reason.
I taken it you've never had to go registry key hunting in Windows or had to search for DLL's placed all over the Windows directory...
Nope. Especially not with first-party Microsoft software, and especially since Microsoft introduced the Windows Installer. Programs that use that tend to uninstall cleanly - and by "tend to" I mean that I've never had one fail to uninstall properly, or require anything like the ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to get rid of iTunes for Mac OS X.
I don't care if you don't care about being tracked or not. My comment is simply that people were outraged at being "tracked by Apple" and Apple's solution was literally to hide the tracking data from end users, but continue to track them.
You're still being tracked by Apple. But you can't easily see it any more.
Which apparently was enough for people to stop caring, even though they were completely outraged that Apple might be tracking them just days before.
It is pretty impressive how Apple was able to wriggle out of that one. Nope, your phone "isn't tracking you," it's just a cache of cell towers used to speed GPS.
OK, fine. Then why does their privacy policy still allow Apple to collect your location data?
Oh, because that's for sending you local ads if you use an app that uses iAd, and for building Apple's database of Wi-Fi access points and GPS coordinates to allow iDevices without GPS to generate a location. (To provide local ads for apps that use iAd. Also for the user's benefit on occasion.)
But apparently that's OK, because we poor peons no longer have access to the location data Apple's recording, which includes a unique identifier so that they can track iDevices.
About the only exception is if it's blatantly obvious that you're being recorded, which has been taken to mean "news team" - in other words, an absolutely gigantic, impossible-to-miss camera, or a large microphone, like TV reporters carry with the station logo on it.
Otherwise, it's "wire tapping."
Ridiculous? You bet. Going to change? Hah!
Incidentally, as far as I know, you're allowed to take video of people in public places. Just not the audio.
Yep, that's great help if you don't work on Firefox, but rather with, say, an addon for Firefox or a website in Firefox.
"Your site doesn't work in Firefox." "Huh. It works for me. What version are you using?" "Uh... Windows 7?" "No, I mean, what version of Firefox does it say in the About dialog?" "There are no numbers in the About dialog." "What? See, when I go to About, it says,... oh, right, fuck."
Wait, you mean you don't constantly restart Firefox? My good sir, you are clearly doing it wrong!
By which I mean that Firefox no longer checks for addon updates while Firefox is running. As of Firefox "Several Months Ago, I think, I dunno" (previously known as "Firefox 4") Firefox only bothers checking for addon updates when you start Firefox.
Or maybe it only bothers mentioning that there are updates when you restart, but will happily and silently download them in the background. I dunno.
Clearly, the proper and intended way to run Firefox is to constantly close and reopen it to make sure your addons and plugins are kept up to date.
Slashdot Mirror
Installing/updating iTunes doesn't require a reboot. That part was entirely optional on your part. I expect you installed some other updates along with iTunes that requested that you reboot in order to finish the installation.
Oh, probably, I accidentally hit enter when Software Update popped up so I have no clue what the hell it installed. (There was a Safari update, at least, but that also shouldn't require a reboot.) So who knows why it required a reboot, but it did.
iTunes did bork on me after running the iTunes update. To fix this, go to: http://www.apple.com/itunes/
Download the latest iTunes and re-install it. It should fix any problems you were having with iTunes. At least, it fixed it for me.
The problem is that under Mac OS X, you have to delete a couple of kernel extensions to "really" reinstall iTunes. And the support site is down, so I have no idea what those are. But the end step is rerunning the iTunes installer, so we'll see if it works this time.
I started downloading before the Slashdot story was posted. It was kind of fun to watch the "time remaining" thing slow to a crawl. The last 15 seconds took a good minute.
Also, small update: turns out the phone hadn't crashed, it was just frozen displaying the lock screen with a time 6 minutes in the past. It eventually rebooted on its own. So at least I still have a phone.
Another interesting factoid: you can't just drag iTunes into the trash to delete it. Mac OS X won't let you. Instead you have to open the Applications folder, select it, and press Command-Delete. (I'm doing the complete reinstall off memory, let's see how well this goes!)
That didn't take too long to fail. Click on "Update," and it tells me I have to update iTunes. OK, fine, go do that. Computer reboots.
Take 2. Click on update, it downloads the nearly 700MB iTunes update, and makes a backup.
And then crashes, opening an Apple KB article that tells me I have to update iTunes in order to install the update. Er... I already did that?
I'll just uninstall iTunes and ... oh, wait, you can't do that on Mac OS X. You have to follow some magic instructions that involve deleting kernel extensions and rebooting three times. I'll have to look that up and ... oh, hey, Apple's support site now 503s.
Awesome.
Oh, hey, it hard-crashed my phone. I'll just pop out the battery to reboot it, and ... oh, crap. That's right, the Apple official way to restart a crashed iDevice is to let the battery drain. I'd link to the article, but their support site is down.
Well, my website for one.
And I'm sure this has nothing to do with the stats package mistaking any version of Chrome for Safari. (I was wondering why so many people used Safari until I realized Chrome wasn't even listed and the detailed stats which list user agent strings showed most of the "Safari" hits were really Chrome.)
It wasn't just "Stability and Performance Issues" that caused the game to suck so bad.
Yeah, I'm not sure why they went with that in the article. It's why I included the link to the earlier Slashdot story. I mean, there were performance and stability issues (I guess) but they weren't what killed the game.
It was things like XP rewards (called SP) being awarded at random that did it. Every time you did an action (like attack a monster) there was something like a 10% chance you'd gain XP. This made leveling horrible. It turns out that a Skinner box has the opposite effect if you're more likely to get a shot to the nuts than an actual reward.
To be fair, this was fixed rather quickly: a good two months after release.
Also, this is the edited down version of the "things that were wrong at release." My first draft was waaay over the character limit. No need to go there, though. Suffice it to say that the list of things that have been fixed over the past year is absolutely massive - and despite that, the game is now mediocre at best. (And even that's pushing it.)
I don't know about the first and last photos, but the middle one?
My Barnes and Noble Nook came with one of those (but labeled "nook"), and I know I've seen third party "USB charger" type devices that look just like that.
It's a small AC adapter that outputs power to a USB port. You can use them to charge anything that charges off USB, including things like the iPhone and more useful things like the Nook or PS3 controllers.
(Disclaimer: I own an iPhone.)
Yeah, I have a feeling that Apple is probably legally correct here.
And you know what? I don't give a shit. I want them to lose anyway. But lose in such a way that only Apple loses, and that Samsung can't then go after companies that have been playing fair. (If there are any. Are there any?)
The bottom line is that Samsung patented actual, real, physical technology. Apple patented rounded corners and taking existing PC interfaces and replacing "point" with "touch." (Also, please note that multitouch doesn't even enter into the patent Superken7 is talking about - it's talking about taking the existing thumbnail interface that exists in a million photo applications, and instead of clicking on photos, tapping on them.)
So while I expect Apple is probably legally correct, all that means is that the law is clearly wrong and needs fixing - at least as far as preventing "existing technology, but with touch! / on a phone!" type patents.
So they claim that the PS3 supports their streaming subtitles, and yet I haven't seen a single movie that actually offers streaming subtitles.
I've yet to see any movies that do, but I verified that the PS3 does indeed support streaming subtitles before posting (before I was going to mention that as far I could tell the streaming subtitle support was a complete lie) via the TV show Psych. Which has English subtitles. And English audio. (They're really the Closed Captions.)
I think it may have also had Spanish subtitles, so there's that.
But, yeah, anime is basically unwatchable via Netflix streaming, even though they support multiple audio streams and subtitles. (Which, again, I only know from watching episodes of Psych, because the menu option to enable subtitles is just flat-out hidden if the movie doesn't support them.)
I wish there was a feedback button for every originally foreign language movie they have saying something like "Give me subtitles!" Instead I always say that audio/video were out of sync. Somehow I don't think they get it.
Their feedback system is a joke. There's no way to offer real feedback, you just have to use the options provided.
Hopefully they'll be able to look at my history and figure out that I restarted an episode of Psych five times on my TiVo before giving up and streaming from the PS3 because the TiVo kept on screwing up the video stream. (Green bands kept appearing, and it kept missing key frames, causing some really weird effects.)
Somehow, though, I doubt they'll get all that from "video was blurry."
I didn't, that list is straight from Netflix's horrible support site. I think the devices you list fall under the "Google TV" group, but I don't know.
I did notice that the FAQ answer on the controls for the PS3 streaming client was out of date, so it wouldn't surprise me if the list of clients that support subtitles is wrong too. But it's Netflix's list, and if they can't bother to update it...
According to the Netflix FAQ, no Roku device supports streaming subtitles.
I'd link to the FAQ, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do that, so instead, here's the list of devices that support subtitles:
* PC/Mac
* PS3
* Wii
* Google TV Devices such as Logitech Revue and Sony Internet TV
* Boxee Box by D-Link
* iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch
Note that on the PS3 at least, you have to turn on subtitles before starting to stream, and if subtitles aren't available, the option is just missing entirely.
Compare that to Bill Gates' notion that the Internet was a fad.
Bill Gates didn't say the Internet as in networking was a fad, he said that he thought that the web was a fad. So all that stuff about IPv4 is kind of irrelevant.
Actually, researching this, it appears he didn't say that either. But it's well known that Microsoft was slow to create a web browser, and wound up buying one from another company to compete with Netscape. So even if he didn't say it, the company still acted like they thought it was a fad. And, hell, in 1994, can you really blame them?
I'm not really sure what this proves, other than both Jobs and Gates are willing to see that they've made a mistake and reverse course.
If you have thought about that it is possible to reload Java web applications, then you would see yourself that the permanent generation is garbage collected as well.
Uh, that right there is the number one way to generate a "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space" error - reloading web applications. The number one cause of that error is when trying to run a Java web server that runs out of PermGen space because the classes loaded into it are never freed.
And I can guarantee that this bug isn't solved in the latest version of Java 1.6, because it still happens to me fairly frequently while writing Java web applications. As far as I know, the only solution is to increase the size of the PermGen space.
This is not a new problem and I still encounter it almost daily, so if you have a solution that magically fixes Java so that reloading web applications doesn't eat up all the PermGen space, I'd love to know about it!
I doubt Gosling has problems managing memory in Java.
I dunno, you've never run into the more infamous "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space"?
This is the error that's generated when the Java VM itself (well, the classloader, I guess) runs out of memory.
Because, unlike Java code itself, the Java classloader never frees memory it uses, which means that if you use a class briefly on startup, that code itself will be kept in memory indefinitely and never freed.
Which wouldn't matter as much, if there weren't this special "PermGen" space that used to default to 1MB. (It's slowly been increased as the versions go on and the size of Java programs continued to bloat, I think the default is now something like 16MB and can, as of five years ago, be user-set via a command line parameter.)
So what does this have to do with SkyNet? Well, if it's written in Java, it will run out of PermGen space well before its self-modifying code can accomplish anything.
And, given that PermGen space is never freed, apparently James Gosling does have problems managing memory in Java.
No, you remember wrong. The Mac commercials say that, unlike a PC, everything just works and you won't get viruses.
Now if I try and access "Important Trade Secrets.pdf" and get told "Access Denied," that's not "just working," is it? So instead, with the new Mac OS X Lion, instead of giving you an "access denied" message when you try and access that file, it just loads it up! It just works!
OK, so I'm really confused as to what the vulnerability actually is. And given that the article starts off with "LDAP servers frequently contain repositories of highly sensitive enterprise data," I'm not exactly convinced the author knows what they're talking about either.
But from what I can gather the bug has to do with using Mac OS X Lion as a file server. Once a user has authenticated with the server once, the server starts blindly accepting any credentials it receives, I guess?
So, yeah, "it just works" if all you want to do is access files. Which is all the ads ever talk about.
If, on the other hand, you don't intend to allow everyone access to (the data on?) your entire computer, then maybe you should consider not using Mac OS X as a server.
I think. Who knows. The article is awful.
Plus I learned that IT is using LDAP wrong where I work! They use it to authenticate user accounts on the various servers that contain "repositories of highly sensitive enterprise data" but apparently those are supposed to be stored on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol server itself.
What do you know - I'll have to fire off an email to IT and ask them to transfer our SVN repository (accessed via SSH) to the LDAP server.
- Making very, very, very sure that they have decent security around any and all personal data they hold.
It's secured by McAfee! How much more secure do you want them to be?
(Actually, I suppose that little badge on us.playstation.com could have predated the whole PSN fiasco. And presumably doesn't apply to the actual PS3 online services, just the PlayStation website. Especially because it's notably missing from the PlayStation blog and forums sites, where you do use your PSN account to log in. Which is more amusing than it being on the PlayStation portal website in the first place, now that I think about it.)
Man, if only you bothered to read the article, you'd have seen this quote:
"It was unbelievable," said Jim Biddle, a manager of Bistro 153 in Beaverton, Ore., which hosted its first Barcraft in July. The 50 gamers in attendance "doubled what I'd normally take in on a normal Sunday night."
So even if they aren't buying drinks, they're buying enough stuff to double the bar's normal take.
Besides, if you've ever hung around gamers, beer (or really any alcoholic beverage) is a large part of the modern adult video gaming experience.
The key word is "again:" iTunes broke. It used to work, and then it broke. Searching for a way to fix it brought up that Apple support article explaining that I'd have to reinstall iTunes, which involves those crazy instructions to actually remove it completely.
Oh wow, two passes at the trash! How horrific!
Wrong - there's only one pass at the trash.
What there are two of (well, three if you reinstall) are reboots - once after moving iTunes to the trash, and once again after emptying the trash. (And optionally a third if you decide to reinstall iTunes.)
Under Windows, the process is simply "go to 'uninstall a program,' select 'iTunes,' click 'uninstall,' and then needlessly reboot because Apple can't be bothered to look up how to remove services properly."
Under Mac OS X, you'll need to find that support article I linked to learn about the kernel extension you need to remove. And go through the "drag to trash, reboot, empty trash, reboot" process for some reason.
I taken it you've never had to go registry key hunting in Windows or had to search for DLL's placed all over the Windows directory...
Nope. Especially not with first-party Microsoft software, and especially since Microsoft introduced the Windows Installer. Programs that use that tend to uninstall cleanly - and by "tend to" I mean that I've never had one fail to uninstall properly, or require anything like the ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to get rid of iTunes for Mac OS X.
Except that won't actually work. Trust me on this, because I had to reinstall iTunes under Mac OS X 10.6 just to get my iPhone to sync with it again.
The process starts by dragging iTunes into the trash. But you're not done yet!
Next, delete /System/Library/AppleMobileService.kext and /Library/Receipts/AppleMobileDeviceSupport.pkg.
Reboot. Empty the trash to remove iTunes, and reboot again (according to Apple, I suspect this reboot is unnecessary, but what do I know).
That finally removes iTunes, and has your Mac back to a state where you can reinstall iTunes and possibly get it to work again.
Yep, Mac OS X sure is easy compared to Windows.
Do I have to explain this in small words?
I don't care if you don't care about being tracked or not. My comment is simply that people were outraged at being "tracked by Apple" and Apple's solution was literally to hide the tracking data from end users, but continue to track them.
You're still being tracked by Apple. But you can't easily see it any more.
Which apparently was enough for people to stop caring, even though they were completely outraged that Apple might be tracking them just days before.
It is pretty impressive how Apple was able to wriggle out of that one. Nope, your phone "isn't tracking you," it's just a cache of cell towers used to speed GPS.
OK, fine. Then why does their privacy policy still allow Apple to collect your location data?
Oh, because that's for sending you local ads if you use an app that uses iAd, and for building Apple's database of Wi-Fi access points and GPS coordinates to allow iDevices without GPS to generate a location. (To provide local ads for apps that use iAd. Also for the user's benefit on occasion.)
But apparently that's OK, because we poor peons no longer have access to the location data Apple's recording, which includes a unique identifier so that they can track iDevices.
No problem at all with that, apparently.
He'll win, easily.
It's illegal to record audio of people without their express permission in Massachusetts. Period. Doesn't matter where.
About the only exception is if it's blatantly obvious that you're being recorded, which has been taken to mean "news team" - in other words, an absolutely gigantic, impossible-to-miss camera, or a large microphone, like TV reporters carry with the station logo on it.
Otherwise, it's "wire tapping."
Ridiculous? You bet. Going to change? Hah!
Incidentally, as far as I know, you're allowed to take video of people in public places. Just not the audio.
Yep, that's great help if you don't work on Firefox, but rather with, say, an addon for Firefox or a website in Firefox.
"Your site doesn't work in Firefox." ... oh, right, fuck."
"Huh. It works for me. What version are you using?"
"Uh... Windows 7?"
"No, I mean, what version of Firefox does it say in the About dialog?"
"There are no numbers in the About dialog."
"What? See, when I go to About, it says,
Wait, you mean you don't constantly restart Firefox? My good sir, you are clearly doing it wrong!
By which I mean that Firefox no longer checks for addon updates while Firefox is running. As of Firefox "Several Months Ago, I think, I dunno" (previously known as "Firefox 4") Firefox only bothers checking for addon updates when you start Firefox.
Or maybe it only bothers mentioning that there are updates when you restart, but will happily and silently download them in the background. I dunno.
Clearly, the proper and intended way to run Firefox is to constantly close and reopen it to make sure your addons and plugins are kept up to date.