Easy answer, don't use ApplePay if you are worried about Apple.
> I'll be DAMNED if I'm going to have every single financial transaction I make, no matter how small, tracked by someone.
Well, banks have been cooperating with the government (or whomever you're worried about) since long before Apple existed. You can of course only deal in cash, but if that's how you work then ApplePay or similar is obviously not for you.
Obviously it is not required. The point the author is making is that if you do have multiple cards (eg, different credit cards, debit cards store-specific cards, etc) then you can use ApplePay to combine them into one.
Agreed, it's the one thing that I keep using Firefox for. What popular Firefox extension features have been ported for Safari generally don't work nearly as well. For example, I don't want to use a system-wide proxy for ad blocking, and as nice as the web inspector is it's not as good as he Web Developer + Firebug extensions for Firefox... not to mention that most Safari tweaks require input manager hacks which are sketchy at best and prone to breaking between Safari releases.
If Safari had a system in place for writing extensions I wouldn't even have Firefox installed on my computer, it's generally painful to use for any period of time in OSX (it's a bad OSX "citizen" and feels like a ported Windows app). Page load performance I really don't care about, what I care about is the 1+ seconds it takes to open a new Firefox window once I have a bunch (~5-10) already open. Safari is instantaneous no matter how many windows I already have open, as it should be on a quad core system with 8 gigs of ram.
I don't think that's anything new, it just means that you can write plugins that can interact with the page via javascript.... and honestly I'm not sure why/how that's a benefit (plugins are not an area I know much of anything about)
1- "Oh damn, so it won't run any of my software?" 2- "Sure it will, we have Wine and Crossover!" 1- "So *if* it does run my software, it will run about 25% as fast as it would in its native environment, and probably buggy as hell?" 2- "Yup! You just wait, 2009 is the year of the Linux desktop!"
Of the 10, 9 are merely updates of existing products - nothing new here.
So? It's not a list of "new OSS projects in 2008".
Android *is* new - but is hardly newsworthy by now.
"by now"?? It's a list of "coolest OSS projects of 2008", not "things that should be making the headlines on 12/31".
Clearly your expectations are a bit out of whack. I don't much care for the list, but that's because I don't much care for top 10 lists. You don't seem to like the list because you don't understand what it's supposed to be a list of.
How the hell did that mess of a comment get modded up to "+5, Insightful"? I expect rapid anti-Apple madness around here, but I don't expect them to get modded up so high.
Apple's products are vastly superior to Microsoft's.
How so? I have run windows xp and several different linuxes on my laptops and desktops, as well as having used Mac OS pretty extensively.
What does linux have to do with it?
Windows XP wins hands down every single time.
What does Windows XP win at, being superior? How so? Doing what?
Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations in federal court. Apple has not.
Courts are now the deciders for quality of tech?
Who said anything about courts being deciders of tech quality? You're pulling nonsense out of thin air. The question was "how are Apple and Microsoft different" and that was one example. Not a great example, but still...
Apple's monopoly power is in the portable music market. Microsoft's is in the desktop operating system market.
Apple's monopoly power is also in the hardware-that-is-allowed-to-run-Mac-OSX department.
Sure, and Microsoft has a monopoly on what hardware you can run the Xbox 360 system on.
Microsofts policy is "Here, do whatever you want with this so long as you buy it".
Yeah right, that's their policy.
Apple's policy is "We are licensing this to you. You have no rights to use it for anything other than what we explicitly declare and you better not fucking try to develop for it because we will sue you in to oblivion."
There is a large community of Apple developers that would disagree with that statement.
How, seriously, is Apple any better than anything else?
Makes me think of how nice it is to run games under Linux, you can run almost nothing but X and the game by creating a new X session for the game, or launching it from.xinitrc with startx... and while I'm on the subject, it's also very nice to have a normal desktop running on:0 and a game on:10 for quicker-than-alt-tab (depending on your driver) switching.
Pity there aren't more games to run... though there *was* that CrossOver business today...
A good fraction of said installed base has money to spend. All of them have a track record of being separated from their money with only moderate effort.
That's some serious trolling, which is to be expected, but some idiots actually modded you to "+5 insightful" for it.
You've gone past the usual "people buy Apple products because they are suckers for marketing and/or bling" nonsense, which I'm sure you wholeheartedly believe, and you've added on an even more asinine implication that they give their purchase little or no consideration. Do so many people actually believe that?
And separating other people from their money is the primary motivation for going into any business
That is an extremely myopic statement. Plenty of businesses start with the primary motivation of providing a product or a service. Of course getting money for your efforts is a requirement to sustaining and growing a business, but your statement makes you sound like a third-rate MBA.
A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw-man argument" is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent.
For example, when you say "He can post whatever he wants on his own blog" it implies that I claimed that he can't post whatever he wants on his blog, which of course I did not because that would be an absurd thing for me to do.
This whole thing is getting a lot of coverage for what basically amounts to "random dude claims OSX vulnerability, produces no evidence to substantiate claim".
The responses are entertaining to read though. Hoards of morons attacking the Mac platform and users without any evidence that there is anything actually wrong. Lots of straw man arguments (nobody with half a brain ever said OSX was impervious to security issues), lots of hate... so much hate.
I'm not a Microsoft hater at all, its just that I've swum in a different stream. Readers of this blog will know that I have differing views on standards to some Microsoft people at least.
So the author is not a Microsoft fanboy/drone/borg/whatever.
As a regular participant at ISO standards, on and off for more than a decade at my own expense(...)
I know some of the ODF people, I had some nice emails with the ODF editor over Christmas for example, and Jon Bosak asked me to join the original ODF initiative at OASIS (I couldn't due to time, unfortunately.)
So we can assume that the author knows what he is talking about, assuming he isn't lying (and he writes for XML.com so he probably isn't lying).
And after more "I'm no MS fanboy" bits, the author states that he received the Microsoft offer letter and:
I think I'll accept it: FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see.
Sounds fair enough.
Just scanning quickly the Wikipedia entry for OOXML, I see one example straight away(...)
The guy who knows what he's talking about finds an error rather quickly...
(...) So that entry is simply wrong. The same myth comes up in the form "You have to implement all 6000 pages or Microsoft will sue you." Are we idiots?
That one just amuses me, given the Slashdot submission which says:
"Over on the O'Reilly Network, there's an interesting piece about how Microsoft tried to hire people to contribute to Wikipedia. Not wanting to do the edits directly, they were looking for an intermediary to make edits and corrections favorable to them. Why? According to the article, it was apparently both to let people know that Microsoft will not 'enable death squads with their UUIDs' and also to fight the growing consensus that OOXML contains a useless pile of legacy crap which is unfit for standardization."
Or to bring out the key points:
Over on the O'Reilly Network, there's an interesting piece about how Microsoft tried to hire people to contribute to Wikipedia.
Well, they're not trying, they're doing.
Not wanting to do the edits directly, they were looking for an intermediary to make edits and corrections favorable to them.
Even the skeptical author of TFA stated that they seemed to want non-partial editors.
Why? According to the article, it was apparently both to let people know that Microsoft will not 'enable death squads with their UUIDs' and also to fight the growing consensus that OOXML contains a useless pile of legacy crap which is unfit for standardization."
Nice one. In reality it was to correct information in Wikipedia that is just plain wrong.
Microsoft annoys the crap out of me, I use a Mac and before that used Linux for 6 years, but when Slashdot has stories like this it just makes us all look like assholes.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy answer, don't use ApplePay if you are worried about Apple.
> I'll be DAMNED if I'm going to have every single financial transaction I make, no matter how small, tracked by someone.
Well, banks have been cooperating with the government (or whomever you're worried about) since long before Apple existed. You can of course only deal in cash, but if that's how you work then ApplePay or similar is obviously not for you.
Obviously it is not required. The point the author is making is that if you do have multiple cards (eg, different credit cards, debit cards store-specific cards, etc) then you can use ApplePay to combine them into one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/technology/tim-cook-making-apple-his-own.html
Star Trek soap and deodorant would probably be enough
Agreed, it's the one thing that I keep using Firefox for. What popular Firefox extension features have been ported for Safari generally don't work nearly as well. For example, I don't want to use a system-wide proxy for ad blocking, and as nice as the web inspector is it's not as good as he Web Developer + Firebug extensions for Firefox... not to mention that most Safari tweaks require input manager hacks which are sketchy at best and prone to breaking between Safari releases.
If Safari had a system in place for writing extensions I wouldn't even have Firefox installed on my computer, it's generally painful to use for any period of time in OSX (it's a bad OSX "citizen" and feels like a ported Windows app). Page load performance I really don't care about, what I care about is the 1+ seconds it takes to open a new Firefox window once I have a bunch (~5-10) already open. Safari is instantaneous no matter how many windows I already have open, as it should be on a quad core system with 8 gigs of ram.
I don't think that's anything new, it just means that you can write plugins that can interact with the page via javascript.... and honestly I'm not sure why/how that's a benefit (plugins are not an area I know much of anything about)
Source here for the curious:
http://gist.github.com/69810
1- "Oh damn, so it won't run any of my software?"
2- "Sure it will, we have Wine and Crossover!"
1- "So *if* it does run my software, it will run about 25% as fast as it would in its native environment, and probably buggy as hell?"
2- "Yup! You just wait, 2009 is the year of the Linux desktop!"
It's not exactly as straight forward as you make it sound.
Yeah, but I don't think any quad-core chips hit the performance/price sweet spot. More likely you'd get a dual core that is easily over clocked.
A laptop stand + USB keyboard is probably cheaper than any dock would be. I run mine closed with an external monitor hooked up.
You're doing it wrong.
Of the 10, 9 are merely updates of existing products - nothing new here.
So? It's not a list of "new OSS projects in 2008".
Android *is* new - but is hardly newsworthy by now.
"by now"?? It's a list of "coolest OSS projects of 2008", not "things that should be making the headlines on 12/31".
Clearly your expectations are a bit out of whack. I don't much care for the list, but that's because I don't much care for top 10 lists. You don't seem to like the list because you don't understand what it's supposed to be a list of.
The average Joe will run into DRM restrictions, and;(...)
The average Joe iTunes user won't eve know the DRM is there.
From everything I have seen (playing the game), read and heard, you hold a fairly extreme minority view here.
How the hell did that mess of a comment get modded up to "+5, Insightful"? I expect rapid anti-Apple madness around here, but I don't expect them to get modded up so high.
Apple's products are vastly superior to Microsoft's.
How so? I have run windows xp and several different linuxes on my laptops and desktops, as well as having used Mac OS pretty extensively.
What does linux have to do with it?
Windows XP wins hands down every single time.
What does Windows XP win at, being superior? How so? Doing what?
Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations in federal court. Apple has not.
Courts are now the deciders for quality of tech?
Who said anything about courts being deciders of tech quality? You're pulling nonsense out of thin air. The question was "how are Apple and Microsoft different" and that was one example. Not a great example, but still...
Apple's monopoly power is in the portable music market. Microsoft's is in the desktop operating system market.
Apple's monopoly power is also in the hardware-that-is-allowed-to-run-Mac-OSX department.
Sure, and Microsoft has a monopoly on what hardware you can run the Xbox 360 system on.
Microsofts policy is "Here, do whatever you want with this so long as you buy it".
Yeah right, that's their policy.
Apple's policy is "We are licensing this to you. You have no rights to use it for anything other than what we explicitly declare and you better not fucking try to develop for it because we will sue you in to oblivion."
There is a large community of Apple developers that would disagree with that statement.
How, seriously, is Apple any better than anything else?
So now they're the worst "anything"? Right.
Makes me think of how nice it is to run games under Linux, you can run almost nothing but X and the game by creating a new X session for the game, or launching it from .xinitrc with startx... and while I'm on the subject, it's also very nice to have a normal desktop running on :0 and a game on :10 for quicker-than-alt-tab (depending on your driver) switching.
Pity there aren't more games to run... though there *was* that CrossOver business today...
A good fraction of said installed base has money to spend. All of them have a track record of being separated from their money with only moderate effort.
That's some serious trolling, which is to be expected, but some idiots actually modded you to "+5 insightful" for it.
You've gone past the usual "people buy Apple products because they are suckers for marketing and/or bling" nonsense, which I'm sure you wholeheartedly believe, and you've added on an even more asinine implication that they give their purchase little or no consideration. Do so many people actually believe that?
And separating other people from their money is the primary motivation for going into any business
That is an extremely myopic statement. Plenty of businesses start with the primary motivation of providing a product or a service. Of course getting money for your efforts is a requirement to sustaining and growing a business, but your statement makes you sound like a third-rate MBA.
So basically the people who they want to watch the most can avoid the surveillance relatively easily while everyone else is treated like a criminal.
Typical.
Raster has always had interesting projects, but come on, comparing him to ESR and Stallman? That's some serious reaching.
I mean, really, that's out there.
Not even the first successful mp3 player; Linux Journal had one on the cover (IIRC) a couple of years before the first iPod was launched.
That doesn't mean it was successful.
You're not going to get far with your argument if you label anyone who sides with Apple as a "fanboi"
Company claims rival technology is no good, causes cancer, and impregnates young women.
Just to clarify:
For example, when you say "He can post whatever he wants on his own blog" it implies that I claimed that he can't post whatever he wants on his blog, which of course I did not because that would be an absurd thing for me to do.
In short all I said was that there was a lot of ruckus for the unverified claim of an OSX worm. Really, argent said it better right before me (just above my initial post: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=252457&c id=19913487 )
This whole thing is getting a lot of coverage for what basically amounts to "random dude claims OSX vulnerability, produces no evidence to substantiate claim".
The responses are entertaining to read though. Hoards of morons attacking the Mac platform and users without any evidence that there is anything actually wrong. Lots of straw man arguments (nobody with half a brain ever said OSX was impervious to security issues), lots of hate... so much hate.
Like a bunch of catty middle school girls...
So the author is not a Microsoft fanboy/drone/borg/whatever.
So we can assume that the author knows what he is talking about, assuming he isn't lying (and he writes for XML.com so he probably isn't lying).
And after more "I'm no MS fanboy" bits, the author states that he received the Microsoft offer letter and:
Sounds fair enough.
The guy who knows what he's talking about finds an error rather quickly...
That one just amuses me, given the Slashdot submission which says:
Or to bring out the key points:
Well, they're not trying, they're doing.
Even the skeptical author of TFA stated that they seemed to want non-partial editors.
Nice one. In reality it was to correct information in Wikipedia that is just plain wrong.
Microsoft annoys the crap out of me, I use a Mac and before that used Linux for 6 years, but when Slashdot has stories like this it just makes us all look like assholes.