"you simply won't be able to run X11 apps on Mac OS X any more"
This is patently false. Apple is no longer supporting X11, but they are recommending that people install an open source X11 for OS X called XQuartz. So, you will be able to run X11 apps in Mountain Lion.
Don't lay this on Tim Cook. This was Steve Jobs's plan; Tim is just carrying on with it.
Here's my prediction: The version of OS X that comes after Mountain Lion will only let you install applications/software from the App Store. Again, Steve's plan; not Tim's.
If I may, I'd like to address a couple of assumptions in your post:
"I can make an image of the drive, then wipe the machine, and restore it back to its former state if I ever have to return it." You can't guarantee this. I am on the security team at my company. When a person is being let go they called into a meeting and someone collects their laptop or desktop while they are in the meeting. In only one case have we allowed someone to access their system after it was collected, and that was under supervised conditions. We pull the laptop hard drive, label it, and shelve it. If that were your drive, we could have your personal information sitting on a shelf for years, waiting for someone to access it. While this didn't happen to me, a friend of mine was asked to peruse the hard drive of a terminated employee, and what she found led to criminal charges being filed against the ex employee. Not saying you would do anything illegal, but never put yourself in a situation where someone else has unlimited and unrestricted access to your personal data.
Also, this could be a violation of company policy and could be grounds for disciplinary action.
"I can use portable apps off a usb key and browse in private mode." Yes, you can, but that doesn't mean you can bypass any monitoring or filtering software installed on the machine.
"Are there any other precautions I could or should take?" It's just not worth the hassle, and potential employment repercussions, to modify your company owned system. I have two laptops that go with me everywhere. One is my work laptop, the other is my personal laptop. I keep both realms deliberately separated. Buy yourself a Macbook Air, or other maybe just a tablet since you mostly indicate you are browsing. Keep your work and personal life separate.
This 'article' is clearly written by someone who's never had to even think about securing an office network. He's right, I don't want users plugging personal laptops into the network, or checking company email on smart phones that aren't PIN locked, or installing TeamViewer/GoToMyPC on their systems, or countless other 'toys' that put the company at risk for a little extra convenience. What he fails to mention is that circumventing these policies in a corporate environment can be cause for dismissal. If he worked at my company, his badge would already be revoked and his accounts locked out.
Flat out, this person is a threat to his employer, not a role model.
In theory, I prefer FreeBSD. I have been running it as my primary server OS for 16 years. I have 30+ VMs running it right now. At the time they were easy to spin up an configure for my friends for whom I provide hosting.
In reality, the nearly constant state of screwed up dependencies in the ports tree makes it pretty much impossible to keep those 30 systems up to date without serious amounts of manual prodding. Keeping PHP up to date alone has drained my will to keep running FreeBSD.
At my job I maintain several thousand CentOS boxes, via puppet. The ease of keeping these systems patched is like night and day compared to my mere 30 FreeBSD VMs.
The only things keeping me running FreeBSD are nostalgia and inertia. The next time I need to do major updates I plan on swapping them out for CentOS.
Summaries like this irk me. It ends with "These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural." This is a complete invalid conclusion.
"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming is not happening." is a more reasonable statement based on the facts presented.
As to proving that it is not natural, that is a different argument that needs to be made by demonstrating the causes not reciting the symptoms.
You definitely weren't the only one watching it.:)
Total Recall 2070 was half the reason I bought a Tivo. It ran after-hours, along with The Crow: Stairway to Heaven. (Another short lived show that deserved to survive longer.) I missed a pair of episodes one week, and the next day I went out and bought a Tivo. Sadly, the Tivo outlasted them both.
It was short lived, but Total Recall 2070 was set in a hybrid Phillip K Dick universe that combined Blade Runner and Total Recall. It took place 20 years after the events of Blade Runner, kept a fair chunk of the aesthetic, and was pretty damn cool. It was a shame it only survived one season.
Motherboards are essentially epoxy bound fiberglass. If you are going to be sawing it up, you need gear that is designed for extremely fine stiff fibers. You need filtration equipment suitable for removing fiberglass, or better yet asbestos, particles from the air.
No, your example posits a situation where you are privately sending your physical keys to a known individual in a 1:1 transaction. Apples to oranges.
The situation being described is where people build server images, and them publish them to share, without first having striped them of their security keys.
A better comparison is if you wrote up an email for your dog walker with very detailed instructions on how to take care of your dog and you included the security code for your alarm. Then, you thought it would be a terrific idea to share your great dog walking tips with an email list and forwarded your original email without editing out your security code. Now anyone who accesses your dog walking tips has access to your house.
Scarcity does not apply to 'copies', but it does apply to licenses. I would like to be able to reward authors for their work as well as retain some level of ownership over my purchases.
Over the next few years we are absolutely going to see an evolution in the way digital media is licensed/sold/treated. All I am trying to offer is a reasonable next step from where things are now.
There would be one incentive to pay for a 'new' eBook over a 'used' eBook: Lack of availability. If Amazon implemented the method I described, there would have to be 'previously owned licenses' in the pool for you to be able to buy a 'used' copy. On day one of release of a new book, there would be zero 'used' versions. If nobody put theirs up for sale, there would be zero 'used' versions. If the resale rate is low, there may be no 'used' copies when you decided to purchase, leaving 'new' licenses as your only option.
No less underhanded than dropping the price o the iPhone two months after it came out. The question is, did Apple have a plan in the works with AT&T to do this, or did AT&T just stab Apple in the back after a HUGE product launch in which the data plans were a significant talking point?
This sounds a lot like what Blizzard is doing with Starcraft 2. Don't like it? Don't buy it. That is the route I am taking. It's a game, not a necessity.
$500 million is what BART wants to spend to build a 3.2 mile stretch of elevated rail to connect the Oakland Coliseum to the Oakland Airport, and this boondoggle of a project is already funded. Imagine the progress we would make towards space travel if we spent the same amount of money on technology that will move cargo into space as opposed to moving people too lazy to take the already existing BART Shuttle to the airport?
As a sysadmin-for-hire who works for an IT outsourcing company, my suggestion is to make them work within your comfort level. My company will work on-site, or remotely, at the client's discretion; and I believe we offer a discounted rate if we are able to work remotely.
You are the customer. If they won't write up a contract that meets your requirements they are not the right company for you.
When an employer asks me to do something to which I strongly object, I ask them to give me the instruction in writing and to spell out my concerns and the consequences and their acceptance of responsibility. I very much doubt the controller of your company will sign a written document acknowledging that he is asking you to break the law, and agreeing to take responsibility for the act.
I have had to do this four times in my career. Twice they signed, and twice they backed off; and either way I kept my ass out of the fire.
> Baen proved that free Baen books increase Baen sales enormously. > > How reflective of the general population are their customers?
Reflective of the general population? Probably not very.
But... Baen sells primarily Science Fiction, which is not the staple of the general population. Readers of science fiction tend to me more educated and more computer literate. So, Baen's core market is the very same people who are smart enough to break DRM. (My mother or sister couldn't decrypt a DVD and put it on their iPods to save their lives.) Baen has proven that the very people smart enough to walk around DRM are the ones who download their free books and then pay for the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
"you simply won't be able to run X11 apps on Mac OS X any more"
This is patently false. Apple is no longer supporting X11, but they are recommending that people install an open source X11 for OS X called XQuartz. So, you will be able to run X11 apps in Mountain Lion.
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/17/apple-removes-x11-in-os-x-mountain-lion-shifts-support-to-open-source-xquartz/
http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki
Don't lay this on Tim Cook. This was Steve Jobs's plan; Tim is just carrying on with it.
Here's my prediction: The version of OS X that comes after Mountain Lion will only let you install applications/software from the App Store. Again, Steve's plan; not Tim's.
If I may, I'd like to address a couple of assumptions in your post:
"I can make an image of the drive, then wipe the machine, and restore it back to its former state if I ever have to return it."
You can't guarantee this. I am on the security team at my company. When a person is being let go they called into a meeting and someone collects their laptop or desktop while they are in the meeting. In only one case have we allowed someone to access their system after it was collected, and that was under supervised conditions. We pull the laptop hard drive, label it, and shelve it. If that were your drive, we could have your personal information sitting on a shelf for years, waiting for someone to access it. While this didn't happen to me, a friend of mine was asked to peruse the hard drive of a terminated employee, and what she found led to criminal charges being filed against the ex employee. Not saying you would do anything illegal, but never put yourself in a situation where someone else has unlimited and unrestricted access to your personal data.
Also, this could be a violation of company policy and could be grounds for disciplinary action.
"I can use portable apps off a usb key and browse in private mode."
Yes, you can, but that doesn't mean you can bypass any monitoring or filtering software installed on the machine.
"Are there any other precautions I could or should take?"
It's just not worth the hassle, and potential employment repercussions, to modify your company owned system. I have two laptops that go with me everywhere. One is my work laptop, the other is my personal laptop. I keep both realms deliberately separated. Buy yourself a Macbook Air, or other maybe just a tablet since you mostly indicate you are browsing. Keep your work and personal life separate.
This 'article' is clearly written by someone who's never had to even think about securing an office network. He's right, I don't want users plugging personal laptops into the network, or checking company email on smart phones that aren't PIN locked, or installing TeamViewer/GoToMyPC on their systems, or countless other 'toys' that put the company at risk for a little extra convenience. What he fails to mention is that circumventing these policies in a corporate environment can be cause for dismissal. If he worked at my company, his badge would already be revoked and his accounts locked out.
Flat out, this person is a threat to his employer, not a role model.
Yesterday's Slashdot, to be exact: http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/14/225204/the-four-fallacies-of-it-metrics
In theory, I prefer FreeBSD. I have been running it as my primary server OS for 16 years. I have 30+ VMs running it right now. At the time they were easy to spin up an configure for my friends for whom I provide hosting.
In reality, the nearly constant state of screwed up dependencies in the ports tree makes it pretty much impossible to keep those 30 systems up to date without serious amounts of manual prodding. Keeping PHP up to date alone has drained my will to keep running FreeBSD.
At my job I maintain several thousand CentOS boxes, via puppet. The ease of keeping these systems patched is like night and day compared to my mere 30 FreeBSD VMs.
The only things keeping me running FreeBSD are nostalgia and inertia. The next time I need to do major updates I plan on swapping them out for CentOS.
Summaries like this irk me. It ends with "These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural." This is a complete invalid conclusion.
"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming is not happening." is a more reasonable statement based on the facts presented.
As to proving that it is not natural, that is a different argument that needs to be made by demonstrating the causes not reciting the symptoms.
You definitely weren't the only one watching it. :)
Total Recall 2070 was half the reason I bought a Tivo. It ran after-hours, along with The Crow: Stairway to Heaven. (Another short lived show that deserved to survive longer.) I missed a pair of episodes one week, and the next day I went out and bought a Tivo. Sadly, the Tivo outlasted them both.
It was short lived, but Total Recall 2070 was set in a hybrid Phillip K Dick universe that combined Blade Runner and Total Recall. It took place 20 years after the events of Blade Runner, kept a fair chunk of the aesthetic, and was pretty damn cool. It was a shame it only survived one season.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Total_Recall_2070
Motherboards are essentially epoxy bound fiberglass. If you are going to be sawing it up, you need gear that is designed for extremely fine stiff fibers. You need filtration equipment suitable for removing fiberglass, or better yet asbestos, particles from the air.
Good luck. Try not to give yourself lung cancer.
It's a good thing Ford Prefect left home.
No, your example posits a situation where you are privately sending your physical keys to a known individual in a 1:1 transaction. Apples to oranges.
The situation being described is where people build server images, and them publish them to share, without first having striped them of their security keys.
A better comparison is if you wrote up an email for your dog walker with very detailed instructions on how to take care of your dog and you included the security code for your alarm. Then, you thought it would be a terrific idea to share your great dog walking tips with an email list and forwarded your original email without editing out your security code. Now anyone who accesses your dog walking tips has access to your house.
My brand new MBP 17" locked up three times last night, and I don't have SMCFanControl installed.
Scarcity does not apply to 'copies', but it does apply to licenses. I would like to be able to reward authors for their work as well as retain some level of ownership over my purchases.
Over the next few years we are absolutely going to see an evolution in the way digital media is licensed/sold/treated. All I am trying to offer is a reasonable next step from where things are now.
There would be one incentive to pay for a 'new' eBook over a 'used' eBook: Lack of availability. If Amazon implemented the method I described, there would have to be 'previously owned licenses' in the pool for you to be able to buy a 'used' copy. On day one of release of a new book, there would be zero 'used' versions. If nobody put theirs up for sale, there would be zero 'used' versions. If the resale rate is low, there may be no 'used' copies when you decided to purchase, leaving 'new' licenses as your only option.
This is what Amazon needs to do to make the Kindle a worthy replacement for physical books:
http://www.ghostwheel.com/merlin/Personal/notes/2009/03/05/open-letter-how-amazon-can-fix-kindle-drm/
As soon as the news story broke that Zuckerberg was richer than Jobs, Apple launched EMP weapons at the Facebook datacenters.
Just wait until publishers of physical books and magazines add a 'license agreement' to the first page.
This ruling has the potential to strip the right of first sale from all future books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, etc.
No less underhanded than dropping the price o the iPhone two months after it came out. The question is, did Apple have a plan in the works with AT&T to do this, or did AT&T just stab Apple in the back after a HUGE product launch in which the data plans were a significant talking point?
This sounds a lot like what Blizzard is doing with Starcraft 2. Don't like it? Don't buy it. That is the route I am taking. It's a game, not a necessity.
$500 million is what BART wants to spend to build a 3.2 mile stretch of elevated rail to connect the Oakland Coliseum to the Oakland Airport, and this boondoggle of a project is already funded. Imagine the progress we would make towards space travel if we spent the same amount of money on technology that will move cargo into space as opposed to moving people too lazy to take the already existing BART Shuttle to the airport?
As a sysadmin-for-hire who works for an IT outsourcing company, my suggestion is to make them work within your comfort level. My company will work on-site, or remotely, at the client's discretion; and I believe we offer a discounted rate if we are able to work remotely.
You are the customer. If they won't write up a contract that meets your requirements they are not the right company for you.
-Chris
"Am I the only person that had the sudden urge to register hockeydot.org and have it redirect to Slashdot?"
Registered. I'll have it redirecting to this story shortly.
-Chris
When an employer asks me to do something to which I strongly object, I ask them to give me the instruction in writing and to spell out my concerns and the consequences and their acceptance of responsibility. I very much doubt the controller of your company will sign a written document acknowledging that he is asking you to break the law, and agreeing to take responsibility for the act.
I have had to do this four times in my career. Twice they signed, and twice they backed off; and either way I kept my ass out of the fire.
-Chris Knight
> Baen proved that free Baen books increase Baen sales enormously.
>
> How reflective of the general population are their customers?
Reflective of the general population? Probably not very.
But... Baen sells primarily Science Fiction, which is not the staple of the general population. Readers of science fiction tend to me more educated and more computer literate. So, Baen's core market is the very same people who are smart enough to break DRM. (My mother or sister couldn't decrypt a DVD and put it on their iPods to save their lives.) Baen has proven that the very people smart enough to walk around DRM are the ones who download their free books and then pay for the rest.