I however will not lock myself into a single vendor model, so sorry iTunes, you lost my online business. I would rather choose to use my Zen M if I want. I also like software that doesn't crash every 5 minutes and has wonderful new daily holes via its Quicktime reliance.
I use iTunes, and I use eMusic, and I buy music directly from band websites, and I buy CDs from Amazon, and all of this music plays on any player, including my car's CD player, without DRM. The DRM in iTunes is barely "honor system" quality, everyone knows that, Apple even tells you explicitly how to get rid of it. Using iTunes doesn't lock you in to anything.
And if you're worried about security holes in software, then you better worry about Windows Media Player and Real's music players. All of them use Microsoft's HTML control to display content... and that's been the premier attack vector for malware for the past decade, due to its deliberately insecure and unsecurable "active content" design.
You're refusing to shake hands with someone who's got the flu, then going to bed with an Ebola patient.
Please don't link to PhysOrg. They're a link tarpit... their business model is to take press releases from elsewhere on the net and post them without linking back to the original article, so that searches terminate there among their ad banners. It's usually not *hard* to find the article they copied, it does usually have non-hypertext attribution, so using PhysOrg's tarpit is just laziness.
I'm still running Windows 2000. Only hardware that isn't supported without scrounging is Bluetooth - you need to get a card compatible with the Widcomm stack. And sometimes you have to disable the checks for XP in the installer... the drivers still work (kind of like websites checking for Internet Explorer whether they need to or not).
I'm assuming that as a condition of allowing Macs to play Blu-Ray disks, Sony will require Apple to make Leopard require all drivers to be digitally signed so that fake device drivers can't be used to break the DRM.
I guess we'll see whether XNU for Darwin 9 gets released. I was half expecting Darwin 8 to go on hold indefinitely to protect the MPAA's precious bodily fluids.
Do you want to? Why? If you write code for.NET your code runs on Windows. If you write code for open systems APIs your code runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, any UNIX, VMS, IBM's mainframe operating systems (whatever they're calling them thise week).
(not that you can't lock yourself into a particular variant of any of the above, but it's really not that hard to write portable open systems code instead)
why wouldn't you use Linux on commodity hardware?
Applications. Mac combines an OS that doesn't suck with actual applications.
Windows market share didn't increase several thousand percent in 1997. What increased Windows virus load so dramatically in 1997 was the desktop-browser integration.
Which is still in there.
If you avoid using browsers and mail software using the HTML control, your exposure to malware drops dramatically.
Microsoft seems to have noticed this... Outlook 2007 doesn't use the HTML control. Hopefully this will lead to fewer email worms as it's taken up. Unfortunately the pushback from the "how dare you stop me from making your email look like a web page" crowd may lead to Microsoft backing down on this, or duplicating the same kinds of security holes in the new rendering engine to keep them happy.:(
If your comparing the basic brick phones to the iPhone your comparing Apples to Oranges.
The original poster asked "who wouldn't want one". No qualifications. No "only answer this if you're a geekphone fetishist". I'm not a geekphone fetishist, I prefer basic phones to fancy ones so it doesn't matter if the iPhone's problems are no worse than other geekphones... I still don't want one.
It's not a matter of "belief". It's just a matter of how the theory describes the universe.
I'm not saying anything about what it means, just pointing out that terms like "Observation" and "The collapse of the state vector" don't have their classical meaning. You can't treat them as analogies for things like "measurements".
Again, measuring apparatus would fall within this definition, and yet clearly they aren't observers.
Whether measuring apparatus is complex enough to be treated classically or not depends on the apparatus. A single grain of silver in a photographic plate or a few molecules of dye in a rod in your retina count as "measuring apparatus", but either are sensitive enough to respond to a small number of photons, and can't necessarily be treated classically. Just think, what happens if your measurement device is a turing-complete quantum computer? You can't treat *that* classically.
What I meant was that the "collapse" isn't an event but a recognition that the effects of QM quickly become too complex to calculate (even in primciple) as the complexity of the state vector increases exponentially with every additional particle that can be effected... as this happens, the behaviour of the system quickly approximates the classical case. If you design an experiment so that the state vector is deliberately kept simple, then the distinction between measurement and observation can be seen.
The terms "observation" and "collapse" both carry around a lot of unfortunate baggage.
How's that "enterprise"? That's not the "enterprise" market. That's the same "people with too much disposable income" market that they were after to begin with.
If Apple wanted to target the enterprise, they'd make hard drives in Macbooks field-replacable with advance replacement under Applecare, they'd make a "Mini Pro", get professional-quality on-site support, have a small pro notebook without a video camera, bring back the missing UNIX APIs (like/dev/tape), and quit being passive-aggressive about piddly stuff like mouse buttons.
The "collapse" of a system into one or another of two states is not an actual event. Nothing actually happens when a system "collapses", it would be just as accurate to say that the larger system of the observor and the photon is in a superposition of two unimaginably complex states. In fact you can build a consistent theory of QM on that basis. It's not very practical, but it's consistent.
The problem is that it's immeasurably harder to make predictions based on treating a 200 pound experimenter as a quantum system rather than a classical one, and the results would be identical to the ones you get from collapsing the state vector, so once you have more than a few particles involved you pretty much have to simplify things.
There's no "infinite regress" here. Anything that might be effected by the "collapse" of the state vector and is complex enough that you have to treat it classically is an "observer". Any random chunk of space junk will do.
Even if they implemented full mandatory access control (MAC) and made Vista a B2 or better OS, and ran each application in its own trust domain, this would still not prevent an exploited copy of Internet Explorer from:
1. Attacking other computers on the local network. 2. Attacking websites. 3. Sending spam. 4. Stealing website passwords. 5. Stealing credit card numbers and other personal information. 6. Piggybacking money transfers on your banking website. 7. Infecting downloaded applications and files as they pass through.
Microsoft needs to work on the fundamental security of the browser. They can start by backing out of the browser-desktop merge... it'll take a while, they have 10 years worth of applications that depend on this broken design... and eliminating ActiveX and "insecurity zones".
"In 1981, a tabbed visual interface would have been groundbreaking."
In 1981, the HP 2621 smart terminal had a visual interface for configuring the terminal in which a set of tabs across the bottom of the screen, selected by function keys, displayed views of related configuration pages that retained their state and settings and you could jump back and forth between them.
Apple has bypassed this in a simple manner, with a simple question: why have your enterprise apps on the phone when you have a live browser connection?
Perhaps OT, but curious. A lot of people are complaining that the iPhone sucks because it doesnt have a SDK or free development environment. Since when has any phone?
Any smartphone does, whether it's running Symbian, Palm OS, or Pocket PC phone edition.
I don't know that there are to many companies that write apps for phones directly.
When you include third party applications? Plenty...
When we did the rollout for iPaqs at our division we had half a dozen applications that ended up getting distributed with them because there were enough people using each to make it worth while.
1. Companies write apps that run on websites. 2. The iPhone can browse websites with a fully-functional web browser. 3. This is the absolutely most airtime-intensive way to write applications. 4. PROFIT!
But implementing these would hose the user experience for any system.
Not at all, it would improve it considerably.
What exactly is the difference between what Safari does with "Open Safe files after downloading" and what IE or FireFox does with their download managers?
Internet Explorer is the poster child for "bad defaults".
Firefox isn't perfect, but it's better than Safari. When I download a file in Firefox or Camino (which is a better example) it saves it to disk, and keeps a reference to it visible in the download manager. In most cases the option to open the file in place isn't even presented. In Camino it's *only* saved to disk, there's no dialog at all.
The difference between this and what Safari does is:
* A web page can not request a file be downloaded and opened without user interaction. * In most cases, the user is not presented with the necessity to make a choice about whether to open the file immediately. * The options available in the download manager include viewing the file in Finder, where it can be examined before opening, or simply deleted.
The difference between this and what IE or Safari does is profound. It gives the user an environment that is conducive to reflection and learning, not reflex and habit. I have been a system administrator for 20 years, and over the past decade I have had the SAME people come to me with infected computers multiple times saying they had opened a file from the "approval dialog" IE presents, I've never had the same person tell me they downloaded a file and then opened it and got infected more than once.
Changing the premise of URL/file handlers for a browser is an interesting premise, one that was essentially done with Internet Config back in the OS 8/9 days.
There is no need to require the user to engage in detailed control of this any more than there is to present the user with the detailed control of the application bindings in Finder. You let applications register themselves or their sandboxed versions in "WebServices", just as they register themselves as handlers in LaunchServices right now.
Any document you get from anyone but yourself should be treated as untrusted, and since the app can't know that it should always assume the worst and be defensive.
Absolutely. But since you, as a user, can not trust any application to be defensive, you should be the ONLY entity requesting an unsafe file be opened by an arbitrary desktop application. And some applications can *not* sandbox the files they display... consider any general purpose scripting engine.
All these changes do is make the browser follow good habits by default. You can always override them, by opening the file from Finder, IF you choose to. But you can't do it by reflex or by habit because you've become used to clicking "Open" or "OK" or "Accept" or "Install" because you get the same dialog so often you're conditioned to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I however will not lock myself into a single vendor model, so sorry iTunes, you lost my online business. I would rather choose to use my Zen M if I want. I also like software that doesn't crash every 5 minutes and has wonderful new daily holes via its Quicktime reliance.
I use iTunes, and I use eMusic, and I buy music directly from band websites, and I buy CDs from Amazon, and all of this music plays on any player, including my car's CD player, without DRM. The DRM in iTunes is barely "honor system" quality, everyone knows that, Apple even tells you explicitly how to get rid of it. Using iTunes doesn't lock you in to anything.
And if you're worried about security holes in software, then you better worry about Windows Media Player and Real's music players. All of them use Microsoft's HTML control to display content... and that's been the premier attack vector for malware for the past decade, due to its deliberately insecure and unsecurable "active content" design.
You're refusing to shake hands with someone who's got the flu, then going to bed with an Ebola patient.
Please don't link to PhysOrg. They're a link tarpit... their business model is to take press releases from elsewhere on the net and post them without linking back to the original article, so that searches terminate there among their ad banners. It's usually not *hard* to find the article they copied, it does usually have non-hypertext attribution, so using PhysOrg's tarpit is just laziness.
This appears to be the original article: at Ziff Davis' C|net.
Errr, the only thing on the status page is a link to to http://svn.reactos.com/api/ which is 404-compliant.
I Am Not Impressed.
I'm still running Windows 2000. Only hardware that isn't supported without scrounging is Bluetooth - you need to get a card compatible with the Widcomm stack. And sometimes you have to disable the checks for XP in the installer... the drivers still work (kind of like websites checking for Internet Explorer whether they need to or not).
I'm assuming that as a condition of allowing Macs to play Blu-Ray disks, Sony will require Apple to make Leopard require all drivers to be digitally signed so that fake device drivers can't be used to break the DRM.
I guess we'll see whether XNU for Darwin 9 gets released. I was half expecting Darwin 8 to go on hold indefinitely to protect the MPAA's precious bodily fluids.
Can you do *real* .NET programming on a Mac?
.NET your code runs on Windows. If you write code for open systems APIs your code runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, any UNIX, VMS, IBM's mainframe operating systems (whatever they're calling them thise week).
Do you want to? Why? If you write code for
(not that you can't lock yourself into a particular variant of any of the above, but it's really not that hard to write portable open systems code instead)
why wouldn't you use Linux on commodity hardware?
Applications. Mac combines an OS that doesn't suck with actual applications.
Windows market share didn't increase several thousand percent in 1997. What increased Windows virus load so dramatically in 1997 was the desktop-browser integration.
:(
Which is still in there.
If you avoid using browsers and mail software using the HTML control, your exposure to malware drops dramatically.
Microsoft seems to have noticed this... Outlook 2007 doesn't use the HTML control. Hopefully this will lead to fewer email worms as it's taken up. Unfortunately the pushback from the "how dare you stop me from making your email look like a web page" crowd may lead to Microsoft backing down on this, or duplicating the same kinds of security holes in the new rendering engine to keep them happy.
No, drongo, I'm bitching because you're ragging on me for giving a straight answer.
Sheesh.
If your comparing the basic brick phones to the iPhone your comparing Apples to Oranges.
The original poster asked "who wouldn't want one". No qualifications. No "only answer this if you're a geekphone fetishist". I'm not a geekphone fetishist, I prefer basic phones to fancy ones so it doesn't matter if the iPhone's problems are no worse than other geekphones... I still don't want one.
It's not a matter of "belief". It's just a matter of how the theory describes the universe.
I'm not saying anything about what it means, just pointing out that terms like "Observation" and "The collapse of the state vector" don't have their classical meaning. You can't treat them as analogies for things like "measurements".
Again, measuring apparatus would fall within this definition, and yet clearly they aren't observers.
Whether measuring apparatus is complex enough to be treated classically or not depends on the apparatus. A single grain of silver in a photographic plate or a few molecules of dye in a rod in your retina count as "measuring apparatus", but either are sensitive enough to respond to a small number of photons, and can't necessarily be treated classically. Just think, what happens if your measurement device is a turing-complete quantum computer? You can't treat *that* classically.
What I meant was that the "collapse" isn't an event but a recognition that the effects of QM quickly become too complex to calculate (even in primciple) as the complexity of the state vector increases exponentially with every additional particle that can be effected... as this happens, the behaviour of the system quickly approximates the classical case. If you design an experiment so that the state vector is deliberately kept simple, then the distinction between measurement and observation can be seen.
The terms "observation" and "collapse" both carry around a lot of unfortunate baggage.
Camino already does most of that stuff, and it doesn't have the buggy and insecure XPI problem.
If that were true, then the measuring appartus, would cause a collapse. But it doesn't, as shown by putting certain detectors behind other detectors.
That's the point, there's no "collapse" to "cause".
It's a convention. There's no reason to assume that the "collapse of the state vector" represents an event that "happens" in any physical sense.
And Nokia is any better? Stated standby time on my N95 (their crack at the iPhone) is 8.5 days.
Did I say I'd go for a Nokia smartphone either?
Nokia also sells less bloated phones that aren't battery-sucking laptop-wannabes.
How's that "enterprise"? That's not the "enterprise" market. That's the same "people with too much disposable income" market that they were after to begin with.
/dev/tape), and quit being passive-aggressive about piddly stuff like mouse buttons.
If Apple wanted to target the enterprise, they'd make hard drives in Macbooks field-replacable with advance replacement under Applecare, they'd make a "Mini Pro", get professional-quality on-site support, have a small pro notebook without a video camera, bring back the missing UNIX APIs (like
But that's not what they're interested in.
The "collapse" of a system into one or another of two states is not an actual event. Nothing actually happens when a system "collapses", it would be just as accurate to say that the larger system of the observor and the photon is in a superposition of two unimaginably complex states. In fact you can build a consistent theory of QM on that basis. It's not very practical, but it's consistent.
The problem is that it's immeasurably harder to make predictions based on treating a 200 pound experimenter as a quantum system rather than a classical one, and the results would be identical to the ones you get from collapsing the state vector, so once you have more than a few particles involved you pretty much have to simplify things.
There's no "infinite regress" here. Anything that might be effected by the "collapse" of the state vector and is complex enough that you have to treat it classically is an "observer". Any random chunk of space junk will do.
Even if they implemented full mandatory access control (MAC) and made Vista a B2 or better OS, and ran each application in its own trust domain, this would still not prevent an exploited copy of Internet Explorer from:
1. Attacking other computers on the local network.
2. Attacking websites.
3. Sending spam.
4. Stealing website passwords.
5. Stealing credit card numbers and other personal information.
6. Piggybacking money transfers on your banking website.
7. Infecting downloaded applications and files as they pass through.
Microsoft needs to work on the fundamental security of the browser. They can start by backing out of the browser-desktop merge... it'll take a while, they have 10 years worth of applications that depend on this broken design... and eliminating ActiveX and "insecurity zones".
"In 1981, a tabbed visual interface would have been groundbreaking."
In 1981, the HP 2621 smart terminal had a visual interface for configuring the terminal in which a set of tabs across the bottom of the screen, selected by function keys, displayed views of related configuration pages that retained their state and settings and you could jump back and forth between them.
Give me the choice of an iPhone and a plain black-and-white nokia bar-of-soap... I'll take the Nokia.
Look at the iPhone's battery life on apple.com.
Apply an adjustment for pre-release optimism.
Apply a reality adjustment - the only way to get listed standby times is to run your tests next to a tower.
You're gonna want two extra chargers, for the car and the office, because that's pitiful battery life even BEFORE you apply those adjustments.
Apple has bypassed this in a simple manner, with a simple question: why have your enterprise apps on the phone when you have a live browser connection?
Airtime.
Perhaps OT, but curious. A lot of people are complaining that the iPhone sucks because it doesnt have a SDK or free development environment. Since when has any phone?
Any smartphone does, whether it's running Symbian, Palm OS, or Pocket PC phone edition.
At our division, we have maybe 4 or 5 people you could class as "executives", and 150 others, of whom about 50 get company-supplied cellphones.
The market for "executive" phones is a fraction of the business market.
I don't know that there are to many companies that write apps for phones directly.
When you include third party applications? Plenty...
When we did the rollout for iPaqs at our division we had half a dozen applications that ended up getting distributed with them because there were enough people using each to make it worth while.
1. Companies write apps that run on websites.
2. The iPhone can browse websites with a fully-functional web browser.
3. This is the absolutely most airtime-intensive way to write applications.
4. PROFIT!
(for AT&T anyway)
But implementing these would hose the user experience for any system.
Not at all, it would improve it considerably.
What exactly is the difference between what Safari does with "Open Safe files after downloading" and what IE or FireFox does with their download managers?
Internet Explorer is the poster child for "bad defaults".
Firefox isn't perfect, but it's better than Safari. When I download a file in Firefox or Camino (which is a better example) it saves it to disk, and keeps a reference to it visible in the download manager. In most cases the option to open the file in place isn't even presented. In Camino it's *only* saved to disk, there's no dialog at all.
The difference between this and what Safari does is:
* A web page can not request a file be downloaded and opened without user interaction.
* In most cases, the user is not presented with the necessity to make a choice about whether to open the file immediately.
* The options available in the download manager include viewing the file in Finder, where it can be examined before opening, or simply deleted.
The difference between this and what IE or Safari does is profound. It gives the user an environment that is conducive to reflection and learning, not reflex and habit. I have been a system administrator for 20 years, and over the past decade I have had the SAME people come to me with infected computers multiple times saying they had opened a file from the "approval dialog" IE presents, I've never had the same person tell me they downloaded a file and then opened it and got infected more than once.
Changing the premise of URL/file handlers for a browser is an interesting premise, one that was essentially done with Internet Config back in the OS 8/9 days.
There is no need to require the user to engage in detailed control of this any more than there is to present the user with the detailed control of the application bindings in Finder. You let applications register themselves or their sandboxed versions in "WebServices", just as they register themselves as handlers in LaunchServices right now.
Any document you get from anyone but yourself should be treated as untrusted, and since the app can't know that it should always assume the worst and be defensive.
Absolutely. But since you, as a user, can not trust any application to be defensive, you should be the ONLY entity requesting an unsafe file be opened by an arbitrary desktop application. And some applications can *not* sandbox the files they display... consider any general purpose scripting engine.
All these changes do is make the browser follow good habits by default. You can always override them, by opening the file from Finder, IF you choose to. But you can't do it by reflex or by habit because you've become used to clicking "Open" or "OK" or "Accept" or "Install" because you get the same dialog so often you're conditioned to it.