Way back in the dark ages, before the Internet had cast dial-up online services from the home, Prodigy lost a case over content because they chose to moderate a forum.
They didn't even argue that controlling content meant responsibility for that content: their defense was that a volunteer paid in kind was not an agent because they were not an employee.
The MagSafe cables actually take about the same force to break the magnetic connection as required to pull out the old cables.
By "the old cables" I assume you mean the old iBook/Powerbook cables.
I'm not comparing them to those cables, I'm comparing them to the typical positively-locking barrel connectors that most laptops come with.
It's a nice idea and definitely not the issue you're thinking it might be.
I got my Macbook about as early as you could get one, to replace a Thinkpad T23. This isn't a matter of what I "think it may be", this is two years of real live experience with the bloody stupid things.
(they go to sleep when it reaches 10% or something)
Theoretically, yes. But the difference between theory and practice in practice is bigger than the difference between theory and practice in practice.
I've also had the magsafe cable fall out when I popped the battery out to charge my spare.
More recently I've started encoding movies, with iMovie, and I need to remove the battery while I'm encoding because the damn thing overheats if I don't. This is typical for the 1st gen Macbook Pro, but it's not been enough to convince Apple to replace it. I was already pretty ticked off at the Magsafe connector before that point, but as you can imagine the issue's gone non-linear since then.
And despite 20 years as a network/system admin I still have yet to see a laptop pulled off a desk by the power cable. I've seen plenty dropped for other reasons, but with the power cable connected to the docking station instead of directly to the laptop I just can't see how that could happen.
Of course Apple is about the only company making laptops that doesn't provide docking stations or port replicators for them. Why, I have no idea, but this seems to be one of many places where Apple seems to lack the common sense gene. It's particularly a shame now, because a port replicator would sure as hell resolve most of the other problems with the Macbook Air.
The metasploit attack, because that's a remote execute attack.
The rest of the stories are all things like "oh my god, the iPhone is vulnerable to social engineering too!". Or "iPhone apps run as root, just like Pocket PC and Palm apps!".
If the guy who submitted this article to Slashdot had the first bloody clue about security he'd have put the metasploit attack on the title and left everything else out.
What's next? Apple's already established a cut-out between programmers and OpenGL with Core Graphics and related technologies. Are they going to dump OpenGL next?
Don't say it can't happen... they just shipped the first Mac without Firewire.
and MagSafe, so you're less likely to pull it off a desk.
I'd rather the infinitesimally higher risk of pulling my laptop off the desk with the very real (as in it's happened) risk of the stupid MagSafe cable falling out without my noticing it, and my battery going dead.
MagSafe is an overreaction to Apple's previous horrible power connectors. My Thinkpad had a generic concentric power connector that never came out by accident and never pulled my Thinkpad off the desk.
Also, let's admit it, ThinkPads are ugly.
Why should I admit it? I like the looks of most Thinkpads. They're industrial-style rather than Mac-style, but de gustibus non est disputandum.
My experience with using speech recognition for commands is, well, not good. You really need *better* accuracy than you do for transcription. But if that's what you want, it'd be trivial to implement. You could possibly do it with Applescript and the existing tools.
Personally, I want it for transcription of recorded speech, not real-time transcription.
Those are all impressive tests, but they're all testing things they know they're watching for, or they're testing things that are specific to ZFS. It doesn't represent real life. Only the last of those tests, or maybe the last two, is really applicable to a traditional file system, and only the last one really represents any kind of "real life" abuse.
Try having a customer running it for six months on a system with bad RAM that's randomly corrupting the file system, crashing, and then recovering and running FSCK using the same bad RAM, over and over again, until the customer finally notices and ships the corpse to you to recover.
I wasn't able to get everything back, but I can't imagine any "advanced" file system surviving that kind of abuse even vaguely intact. Now if they were randomly corrupting BOTH sides of the mirror and surviving...
I don't know how much point to home use of Plan 9 there is, in any case. I had a talk with Dennis Ritchie about that at Usenix a few years back, and that was his conclusion too... Plan 9 doesn't make a lot of sense without a pretty substantial computing facility. I've had a substantial (for the time) multi-user shared environment at home since the early '90s, starting with a used System V box, and I'm only now getting to the point where I've got multiple file and compute servers... and that's really for business.
The Air costs a lot more. My X61 came in at about $1400, whereas the air starts out at $1800! That's $400 for a brand identity on slightly inferior hardware.
You can get a Lenovo Thinkpad comparable (pretty much chip for chip) to the $1200 Macbook for under $900. The Mac mini is under $400 worth of hardware for $600. This is the "Mac Tax", it's what you pay for the ability to run OS X. Mac fanatics will come up with a fantasy price comparison that will make the difference go away, or claim that the Wintel boxes aren't as reliable, but the difference is real. But the difference is also worth it - it's not "brand identity" that we're getting, it's the ability to run applications that don't suck on an OS that doesn't suck.
Oh, by the way: "GMA X3100 (which is the best *embedded* card on the market)"? It may be better than the execrable GMA 950, but if I was getting a Thinkpad I'd still pay the extra $200 to get an nVidia or ATI GPU... even if it was embedded. Intel GPUs have been SO bad for SO long that there's no way I'll trust them to get it right until they've established a solid track record.
What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software.
Yes, that started happening around 1992, and Intel even called it the "RISC Core" at the time.
These days a huge chunk of any 80x86-compatible CPU is effectively a hardware-accelerated just-in-time translator that converts 80x86 codes to a RISC or VLIW internal instruction set that the actual processor core really runs. One company, Transmeta, even tried doing it without the hardware acceleration, but that turned out to be a bit of a false economy.
The way the previous post was formed, it seemed to imply that it is all Linux's fault for not being compatible with Solaris.
It would be nice if Linus had picked a license that allowed more flexibility. On the other hand I really admire how far he's gone to keep the Linux kernel open to GPL-incompatible code (such as the nVidia drivers) despite pressure from people to take a hard line on the GPL.
I'm actually not sure that it would really be impossible to come up with a way to incorporate ZFS in the Linux kernel. It would require a lot of care, and cooperation from the Linux side, but stranger things have happened.
NTFS support would be really nice, since then I could use an OS that didn't suck to fix broken Windows file systems.
But what about the plethora of Windows partitioning schemes? Does OS X handle primary and secondary and extended partitions, and the new Dynamic disks?
On the other hand, it can't be much LESS reliable than HFS+. Just filling HFS+ up can corrupt its on-disk data structures to the point that you have to backup and restore or use a payware third-party application to fix it.
On the gripping hand, they *do* have some UFS support. And UFS is a well understood and by now extremely reliable FS.
I started setting my system up with UFS because I was tired of the reliability problems of HFS+, but too many applications had too many problems with it, so I eventually gave up.
Mostly older applications, both Classic and Carbon-based, including Office.
What are you running, and what kind of adaptations have you had to make? I might give it another try.
UFS might not have all the bells and whistles of ZFS, but it's still been the most reliable and robust file system I've used in the past 25 years. It's got decades of work on making it stable and solid, and thanks to the tools available to work with it and the redundancy in the format I've even been able to recover data from UFS partitions that had been partially reformatted.
HFS? I've had HFS partitions get corrupted just be letting them get too full. That's just nuts.
ZFS? Sun says ZFS doesn't need file system check and repair tools, it can't fail. That's what DEC said about AdvFS, than then later on came up with salvage tools to pull data out of a damaged AdvFS file system. That's what the Linux folks used to say about Reiser FS, too. Even before the Hans Reiser incident it had become clear that it wasn't true, and I've got no reason to assume that ZFS will be any better, not over the long term.
The only journalled file system I've found that has come anywhere near that goal has been Network Appliance's, and they have complete control over the hardware and software and no third-party applications and drivers running on the hardware. And, of course, few places have very many NetApps (we certainly never had more than 4 at a time) so I can't say that the apparent stability of our boxes isn't due to the fact that we simply never had many of them...
Apple refreshed UFS for Panther, bringing in SoftUpdates to give it the performance advantages of journalling, then dropped it.
Apple has created layers that run over network file systems that implement almost all of the application-visible differences between HFS and remote CIFS and NFS shares, but you can't take full advantage of these for local UFS file systems. Why not? Don't ask me, ask Apple.
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It's much safer, legally, to be a leech.
All he did was read the house numbers on your street.
Crikey, mate, I better stay out of North Dakota. I started a whole BOFH network.
Way back in the dark ages, before the Internet had cast dial-up online services from the home, Prodigy lost a case over content because they chose to moderate a forum.
They didn't even argue that controlling content meant responsibility for that content: their defense was that a volunteer paid in kind was not an agent because they were not an employee.
The MagSafe cables actually take about the same force to break the magnetic connection as required to pull out the old cables.
By "the old cables" I assume you mean the old iBook/Powerbook cables.
I'm not comparing them to those cables, I'm comparing them to the typical positively-locking barrel connectors that most laptops come with.
It's a nice idea and definitely not the issue you're thinking it might be.
I got my Macbook about as early as you could get one, to replace a Thinkpad T23. This isn't a matter of what I "think it may be", this is two years of real live experience with the bloody stupid things.
(they go to sleep when it reaches 10% or something)
Theoretically, yes. But the difference between theory and practice in practice is bigger than the difference between theory and practice in practice.
I've also had the magsafe cable fall out when I popped the battery out to charge my spare.
More recently I've started encoding movies, with iMovie, and I need to remove the battery while I'm encoding because the damn thing overheats if I don't. This is typical for the 1st gen Macbook Pro, but it's not been enough to convince Apple to replace it. I was already pretty ticked off at the Magsafe connector before that point, but as you can imagine the issue's gone non-linear since then.
And despite 20 years as a network/system admin I still have yet to see a laptop pulled off a desk by the power cable. I've seen plenty dropped for other reasons, but with the power cable connected to the docking station instead of directly to the laptop I just can't see how that could happen.
Of course Apple is about the only company making laptops that doesn't provide docking stations or port replicators for them. Why, I have no idea, but this seems to be one of many places where Apple seems to lack the common sense gene. It's particularly a shame now, because a port replicator would sure as hell resolve most of the other problems with the Macbook Air.
The metasploit attack, because that's a remote execute attack.
The rest of the stories are all things like "oh my god, the iPhone is vulnerable to social engineering too!". Or "iPhone apps run as root, just like Pocket PC and Palm apps!".
If the guy who submitted this article to Slashdot had the first bloody clue about security he'd have put the metasploit attack on the title and left everything else out.
Dragon Naturally Speaking on the iPaq Pocket PC.
The only command I could get it to reliably recognize was "Power Off".
I imagine it would work better for people from New York or San Jose, but my accent defeated it.
What's next? Apple's already established a cut-out between programmers and OpenGL with Core Graphics and related technologies. Are they going to dump OpenGL next?
Don't say it can't happen... they just shipped the first Mac without Firewire.
and MagSafe, so you're less likely to pull it off a desk.
I'd rather the infinitesimally higher risk of pulling my laptop off the desk with the very real (as in it's happened) risk of the stupid MagSafe cable falling out without my noticing it, and my battery going dead.
MagSafe is an overreaction to Apple's previous horrible power connectors. My Thinkpad had a generic concentric power connector that never came out by accident and never pulled my Thinkpad off the desk.
Also, let's admit it, ThinkPads are ugly.
Why should I admit it? I like the looks of most Thinkpads. They're industrial-style rather than Mac-style, but de gustibus non est disputandum.
My experience with using speech recognition for commands is, well, not good. You really need *better* accuracy than you do for transcription. But if that's what you want, it'd be trivial to implement. You could possibly do it with Applescript and the existing tools.
Personally, I want it for transcription of recorded speech, not real-time transcription.
Those are all impressive tests, but they're all testing things they know they're watching for, or they're testing things that are specific to ZFS. It doesn't represent real life. Only the last of those tests, or maybe the last two, is really applicable to a traditional file system, and only the last one really represents any kind of "real life" abuse.
Try having a customer running it for six months on a system with bad RAM that's randomly corrupting the file system, crashing, and then recovering and running FSCK using the same bad RAM, over and over again, until the customer finally notices and ships the corpse to you to recover.
I wasn't able to get everything back, but I can't imagine any "advanced" file system surviving that kind of abuse even vaguely intact. Now if they were randomly corrupting BOTH sides of the mirror and surviving...
"If it can't be forked, it's not open source".
I don't know how much point to home use of Plan 9 there is, in any case. I had a talk with Dennis Ritchie about that at Usenix a few years back, and that was his conclusion too... Plan 9 doesn't make a lot of sense without a pretty substantial computing facility. I've had a substantial (for the time) multi-user shared environment at home since the early '90s, starting with a used System V box, and I'm only now getting to the point where I've got multiple file and compute servers... and that's really for business.
The Air costs a lot more. My X61 came in at about $1400, whereas the air starts out at $1800! That's $400 for a brand identity on slightly inferior hardware.
You can get a Lenovo Thinkpad comparable (pretty much chip for chip) to the $1200 Macbook for under $900. The Mac mini is under $400 worth of hardware for $600. This is the "Mac Tax", it's what you pay for the ability to run OS X. Mac fanatics will come up with a fantasy price comparison that will make the difference go away, or claim that the Wintel boxes aren't as reliable, but the difference is real. But the difference is also worth it - it's not "brand identity" that we're getting, it's the ability to run applications that don't suck on an OS that doesn't suck.
Oh, by the way: "GMA X3100 (which is the best *embedded* card on the market)"? It may be better than the execrable GMA 950, but if I was getting a Thinkpad I'd still pay the extra $200 to get an nVidia or ATI GPU... even if it was embedded. Intel GPUs have been SO bad for SO long that there's no way I'll trust them to get it right until they've established a solid track record.
False analogies, the lot. We are after all talking about an institute of higher learning, a place that teaches reading!
:p
If you ever had to do tech support for PhD programmers you would be less certain about just what the hell a university teaches.
I thought that was Network Appliance. :p
What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software.
Yes, that started happening around 1992, and Intel even called it the "RISC Core" at the time.
These days a huge chunk of any 80x86-compatible CPU is effectively a hardware-accelerated just-in-time translator that converts 80x86 codes to a RISC or VLIW internal instruction set that the actual processor core really runs. One company, Transmeta, even tried doing it without the hardware acceleration, but that turned out to be a bit of a false economy.
That's really great. It sounds like Stallman is getting a lot mellower, which I guess is natural. Nobody could keep that kind of intensity up forever.
The way the previous post was formed, it seemed to imply that it is all Linux's fault for not being compatible with Solaris.
It would be nice if Linus had picked a license that allowed more flexibility. On the other hand I really admire how far he's gone to keep the Linux kernel open to GPL-incompatible code (such as the nVidia drivers) despite pressure from people to take a hard line on the GPL.
I'm actually not sure that it would really be impossible to come up with a way to incorporate ZFS in the Linux kernel. It would require a lot of care, and cooperation from the Linux side, but stranger things have happened.
Just what is the latest licensing scheme for Plan 9 anyway? I lost track.
NTFS support would be really nice, since then I could use an OS that didn't suck to fix broken Windows file systems.
But what about the plethora of Windows partitioning schemes? Does OS X handle primary and secondary and extended partitions, and the new Dynamic disks?
UFS with SoftUpdates has extremely good performance deleting files.
And BSDL is GPL-compatible.
On the other hand, it can't be much LESS reliable than HFS+. Just filling HFS+ up can corrupt its on-disk data structures to the point that you have to backup and restore or use a payware third-party application to fix it.
On the gripping hand, they *do* have some UFS support. And UFS is a well understood and by now extremely reliable FS.
I started setting my system up with UFS because I was tired of the reliability problems of HFS+, but too many applications had too many problems with it, so I eventually gave up.
Mostly older applications, both Classic and Carbon-based, including Office.
What are you running, and what kind of adaptations have you had to make? I might give it another try.
UFS might not have all the bells and whistles of ZFS, but it's still been the most reliable and robust file system I've used in the past 25 years. It's got decades of work on making it stable and solid, and thanks to the tools available to work with it and the redundancy in the format I've even been able to recover data from UFS partitions that had been partially reformatted.
HFS? I've had HFS partitions get corrupted just be letting them get too full. That's just nuts.
ZFS? Sun says ZFS doesn't need file system check and repair tools, it can't fail. That's what DEC said about AdvFS, than then later on came up with salvage tools to pull data out of a damaged AdvFS file system. That's what the Linux folks used to say about Reiser FS, too. Even before the Hans Reiser incident it had become clear that it wasn't true, and I've got no reason to assume that ZFS will be any better, not over the long term.
The only journalled file system I've found that has come anywhere near that goal has been Network Appliance's, and they have complete control over the hardware and software and no third-party applications and drivers running on the hardware. And, of course, few places have very many NetApps (we certainly never had more than 4 at a time) so I can't say that the apparent stability of our boxes isn't due to the fact that we simply never had many of them...
Apple refreshed UFS for Panther, bringing in SoftUpdates to give it the performance advantages of journalling, then dropped it.
Apple has created layers that run over network file systems that implement almost all of the application-visible differences between HFS and remote CIFS and NFS shares, but you can't take full advantage of these for local UFS file systems. Why not? Don't ask me, ask Apple.
I blame corporate ADHD.