I have no idea. I'm not defending these companies, I'm just pointing out that the information in the article does not lead to the conclusion the OP arrived at.
I don't want to scroll through thousands of songs with a 'd-pad'.
I don't want to scroll through thousands of songs, period.
Even though you've got MUCH better tools than a click-wheel for scrolling on the web there's a reason most websites are organized hierarchically, rather than linearly, and it's not just to save on download time: add in the images and CSS and huge blocks of Javascript and the actual content of many pages is a small part of the total.
The click-wheel is there because it looks cool.
There's a reason that the iPod is #1
It looks cool, and Apple keeps the interfaces consistent from one model to the next so there's a viable ecosystem of accessories around it.
And don't discount "it looks cool". Have a look at the competition over the past several years... most of them do well to manage merely "bad".
and there's a reason why you didn't invent it.
I independantly "invented" the iPod Shuffle, though. Not that I had anything to do with creating the actual product, but I was using a Korean flash-based player and a randomly-selected smart playlist in iTunes to get the same effect for a couple of years before the Shuffle came out.
So when you run it on white box PC, our funding goes to some guy which runs OS which was not intended to run on that machine first place.
OK, I'll buy a Mac and a white box PC, and destroy the Mac so I can't run two copies of my one licensed copy of OS X even if I wanted to. Apple got their money.
Go support Linux and great overlooked window managers like WindowMaker
Or FreeBSD? I switched to Mac from FreeBSD/Windowmaker + Windows for the stuff that just doesn't exist for free UNIX. Support? I'm an early 386BSD patchkit-era developer, I did the patchkit that got "make world" to run to completion for the first time. I ran the Windowmaker website mirror back when Windowmaker was young. I use FreeBSD for servers... it still kicks OS X pasty butt there.
But on the desktop there are still only two options if you want to run commercial software: OS X and Windows. Every solution to this problem I've seen eventually comes down to supporting Windows one way or another... dual-booting, two machines with a KVM, VMWare, Wine, it's all sending money to companies that only support Windows by buying their software.
Meanwhile, OS X is a FreeBSD derivitive (don't get on my case about Mach, Mach isn't a complete OS and there's FreeBSD kernel and usermode code all through OS X, and the whole Mach/BSD relationship is incestuous anyway). Apple supports FreeBSD. OS X has the same core API as any other UNIX version. Any solution that lets you run OS X software supports the OS X ecosystem *and* the UNIX ecosystem far better than anything involving Windows executables.... support the projects trying to convince Apple to support OpenSTEP.
URLs? And wouldn't supporting GNUstep be more useful? Oh, that's pretty much dead...
Every cracked OS X on White Box PC is a loss for Linux/FreeBSD desktop in fact.
Do you mean Gnome or KDE? They're dead ends, both of them. The closest thing you can get to a FreeBSD desktop today is OS X.
I'm getting pretty fed up with Apple's hardware. I don't like it. I don't like my Macbook Pro much at all, and if there was a legal way to run OS X on a Thinkpad I'd jump to it. Well, after dealing with bank account issues.
How about buying a Thinkpad and a Mac mini Core Duo, destroying the mini, and running that licensed copy of OS X on the Thinkpad?
Probably still illegal, but should be on firm ethical ground. Apple got their money, and I'm not running the OS on two machines.
I call the 800 number. I explain that I upgraded. The girl with the hard to understand accent asks how many PCs is this copy of windows currently installed on. I say, "One," and she gives me the code.
When I blew my system disk out three times and ran out of activations for iTunes Apple was happy to reset my iTunes account, and I was back authorized in no time.
Luckily I've burned everything to Audio CD and re-ripped it, just in case. And all that's at risk is a fraction of my music library. Because who knows what the requirements will be next time I need to go cap-in-hand to get access to my music again.
I'm not going to spend $15 a pop to build up a movie library if they're going to be hostage to Apple (or Microsoft, or Sony, or Paramount, or anyone). I've bought six episodes of "Eureka", and last night I wanted to let my son watch one on his computer... but we couldn't: the cable modem was down.
I bought a video game once, that had copy protection that involved the timing on the floppy it saved my scoes on. I used it in a drive that was a little bit out of alignment and it never booted again. I found a pirate who was much amused as he burned a cracked copy of the game onto the original gold-foil-labelled master floppy.
And that's just entertainment.
I've had to work on computers in places where there's no phone, no cell service, no cable. I've had to work on a computer remotely over a 300 baud modem that went through the only telephone in the entire plant... we had to get someone who spoke the local language to say "put the phone in the rubber cups and don't answer when it rings next".
There is NO WAY I'm going to risk being unable to get to the rest of the stuff on my computer, by depending on an OS with a boobytrap in it, for anything. Not unless I can get a cracked unlocked version to stick in the box next to the never-to-be-unsealed master disc.
Microsoft is not going to stop pushing the envelope of how much they can hurt their users until their users start hurting them back.
If you don't like this, then don't buy Vista, don't buy XP, don't buy Office, don't buy an XBox, and get your friends to do the same. The invisible hand of the market only works if you put your money where your mouth is. If you don't, all you'll get from Microsoft is the invisible finger of the monopolist.
why would anyone pay the asking price of just under a hundred quid for a minor revision?
I don't know... I don't normally bother upgrading unless I need to, I'm still using Panther at home and the only reason I upgraded from Jaguar was that I bought new hardware.
There were some major major differences between XP and 2000
I'm still using 2000 because I've yet to find anything in XP that I actually need. The only thing that I've even missed is Bluetooth support. If they'd put a full Citrix server in there instead of ripping so much out that it's basically a low-bandwidth VNC plus virtual consoles... maybe.
And the icing on the cake is: XP Pro *upgrade* costs as much as OS X, and is still bundled with a remote destruct switch in Microsoft's hands.
I can also understand Apple charging for the jump from 9.x to 10.x. But from 10.4 to 10.5?
The jump from 9.x to 10.x was like the jump from Windows 9x/Me to Windows NT/2000. Whole new OS, from the ground up.
The jump from 10.x to 10.y is much more like the jumps from NT4 to 2000 to XP to Vista. New frosting on the same cake. If you need the new features, get them. If you don't, don't. You don't need to jump if you don't want to.
Seamonkey has exactly the same extensions vulnerability as Firefox.
I'm talking about a browser that uses the Gecko or KHTML rendering engine but uses a native user interface, so it's not open to privilege escalation attacks, or at least requires that you download and explicitly install extensions rather than having special magic in the browser to decide whether to trust a document or not - and so avoids the possibility of a cross-zone privilege escalation attack.
It's a music player, not a PDA. It should be designed so you can operate it blindfolded.
The Shuffle has it right. A D-Pad with the five important controls: forward, back, volume-up, volume-down, and play/pause. Additional controls can be added for devices that have a display. That bit can even be touch-sensitive, but the basic controls have to be usable by feel even when the display controls are locked.
It's a pity there's no good Gecko (or for that matter KHTML) based browser for Windows other than Firefox, because XUL has a huge potential for exploits, and on top of that the mechanism for installing XPI files is just begging for attacks (and in fact there's been at least one vulnerability fixed there).
On the Mac there's a plethora of browsers using both engines. Why on Windows is there only Firefox and KMelion?
You can, in theory, guarantee that your OS has not been compromised.
You can guarantee that it has not been modified through direct manipulation of the executable files. You can not guarantee that it hasn't been compromised by (for example) a buffer overflow attack in the current session. Unless you remove all interpreters from the system or require that all interpreted code (including configuration files!) be signed, it's not much harder to run arbitrary code even on a TPM-protected system than to devise an exploit in the first place.
You can't even guarantee that it's clean at boot, since a secondary exploit could be hidden in a data file, database, or configuration file to be re-run at boot.
And by making it impossible to replace the binaries without devising a similar exploit yourself you prevent people from fixing the problem... you have to wait for the manufacturer to do it. We can see how well that has worked for Microsoft.
Unless you're running code that's pushing hard against the limits of 4GB of RAM (well, 2GB on Windows), in which case you already know it and you're almost certainly not using OS X or Windows anyway (unless you're some kind of masochist, or you're Oracle), the only reason to run 64 bit is to take advantage of the larger register file on an AMD 64-bit processors. AMD pulled a very clever trick here, and used 64-bit processing as an excuse to introduce an ABI that exposed a larger register file to the compiler, which gave them a performance edge over Intel. Intel doesn't seem to have really taken advantage of this on their new rev of the old P6 core... they're just depending on their better process to make up for the overhead.
1. The source is still there. They've pulled one version, similar to what they did the last time someone used it to run OS X on non-Apple machines. They put it back, eventually. Until they announce they're not making any more releases I think it's way premature too say that they've "closed it".
This isn't illegal, unethical, or surprising. It's interesting and encouraging, that OpenDarwin's frustration and shutdown hasn't stalled the continued support of Darwin on non-Apple hardware, but people have been turning Apple's open source releases into bootable operating systems for years.
What's the big deal? That if you take things a few steps further you can use this to run the GUI on top of Darwin on Intel instead of just Power PC? Well, yes, that's a big deal, but that's not possible with what this guy's released. It's not XPostFacto.
Um, they *did* make the operating system (Darwin) OSS. How did you think the source you're looking at was released in the first place? This hasn't been news for five years at least.
They haven't made the GUI shell (Quartz, Aqua, etc...) that runs on top of it OSS, but then neither have all the companies that make accelerated X servers and other system software for Linux made their software OSS.
which means there's going to be some sad people getting their ipods hacked.
That doesn't follow.
There's no reason they couldn't have more than two states:
* WiFi off * WiFi passive - track SSIDs but don't register on any network or open listening connections * WiFi online - regsiter on the network but don't open any listening connections * WiFi notify - allow connections to start but don't complete the handshake, just give the user an audible notification that there's a stream or message available * WiFi active * WiFi sharing - share playlists and music
In addition, you can download music from the Internet. OK, that would mean it would go to Wifi online if it was in off or passive, and then drop back to the previous state when you're done.
Personally, I'd leave mine in WiFi Off just to save battery power.
The first iPods were formatted in HFS. HFS has an "alias" mechanism that bypasses the file hierarchy and name already, and for a special purpose device the alias could simply be an index into the catalog. For FAT formatted ipods, the first extent of the file could be used. The actual file name could be kept in a non-memory-resident file indexed by this pointer that was only referenced if the pointer failed to find the file. This would save even more space.
iTunes could reliably maintain this database, which means that most people would still want to use iTunes, but if you didn't mind having your iPod spend a minute or so "indexing..." after you load files into it you could do that too.
I doubt it would play just anything you were walking by, or at least this would be something you could disable. It would be more sensible for it to give you an audible cue that information was available, and let you choose to stream or download the music.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, 1.6 GHz, not 2 GHz. Still, that doesn't look bad... the Radeon X200 is a cut above the typical cheap integrated laptop chipset.
I have no idea. I'm not defending these companies, I'm just pointing out that the information in the article does not lead to the conclusion the OP arrived at.
Walmart will soon be selling a real Compaq 2GHz laptop for $349. Why would somebody pay $300 for this other untested thingy?
URL?
I think a better question is, what have they done now these particular domains have been pointed out to them?
There's a difference between "we don't proactively do XXX" and "we don't do XXX after we find out about it".
The other examples you give are the latter.
I don't want to scroll through thousands of songs with a 'd-pad'.
I don't want to scroll through thousands of songs, period.
Even though you've got MUCH better tools than a click-wheel for scrolling on the web there's a reason most websites are organized hierarchically, rather than linearly, and it's not just to save on download time: add in the images and CSS and huge blocks of Javascript and the actual content of many pages is a small part of the total.
The click-wheel is there because it looks cool.
There's a reason that the iPod is #1
It looks cool, and Apple keeps the interfaces consistent from one model to the next so there's a viable ecosystem of accessories around it.
And don't discount "it looks cool". Have a look at the competition over the past several years... most of them do well to manage merely "bad".
and there's a reason why you didn't invent it.
I independantly "invented" the iPod Shuffle, though. Not that I had anything to do with creating the actual product, but I was using a Korean flash-based player and a randomly-selected smart playlist in iTunes to get the same effect for a couple of years before the Shuffle came out.
I'm sitting just a few miles from George Bush Sr.'s house. Can't get more "in the US" than that. :)
So when you run it on white box PC, our funding goes to some guy which runs OS which was not intended to run on that machine first place.
... support the projects trying to convince Apple to support OpenSTEP.
OK, I'll buy a Mac and a white box PC, and destroy the Mac so I can't run two copies of my one licensed copy of OS X even if I wanted to. Apple got their money.
Go support Linux and great overlooked window managers like WindowMaker
Or FreeBSD? I switched to Mac from FreeBSD/Windowmaker + Windows for the stuff that just doesn't exist for free UNIX. Support? I'm an early 386BSD patchkit-era developer, I did the patchkit that got "make world" to run to completion for the first time. I ran the Windowmaker website mirror back when Windowmaker was young. I use FreeBSD for servers... it still kicks OS X pasty butt there.
But on the desktop there are still only two options if you want to run commercial software: OS X and Windows. Every solution to this problem I've seen eventually comes down to supporting Windows one way or another... dual-booting, two machines with a KVM, VMWare, Wine, it's all sending money to companies that only support Windows by buying their software.
Meanwhile, OS X is a FreeBSD derivitive (don't get on my case about Mach, Mach isn't a complete OS and there's FreeBSD kernel and usermode code all through OS X, and the whole Mach/BSD relationship is incestuous anyway). Apple supports FreeBSD. OS X has the same core API as any other UNIX version. Any solution that lets you run OS X software supports the OS X ecosystem *and* the UNIX ecosystem far better than anything involving Windows executables.
URLs? And wouldn't supporting GNUstep be more useful? Oh, that's pretty much dead...
Every cracked OS X on White Box PC is a loss for Linux/FreeBSD desktop in fact.
Do you mean Gnome or KDE? They're dead ends, both of them. The closest thing you can get to a FreeBSD desktop today is OS X.
I'm getting pretty fed up with Apple's hardware. I don't like it. I don't like my Macbook Pro much at all, and if there was a legal way to run OS X on a Thinkpad I'd jump to it. Well, after dealing with bank account issues.
How about buying a Thinkpad and a Mac mini Core Duo, destroying the mini, and running that licensed copy of OS X on the Thinkpad?
Probably still illegal, but should be on firm ethical ground. Apple got their money, and I'm not running the OS on two machines.
I call the 800 number. I explain that I upgraded. The girl with the hard to understand accent asks how many PCs is this copy of windows currently installed on. I say, "One," and she gives me the code.
When I blew my system disk out three times and ran out of activations for iTunes Apple was happy to reset my iTunes account, and I was back authorized in no time.
Luckily I've burned everything to Audio CD and re-ripped it, just in case. And all that's at risk is a fraction of my music library. Because who knows what the requirements will be next time I need to go cap-in-hand to get access to my music again.
I'm not going to spend $15 a pop to build up a movie library if they're going to be hostage to Apple (or Microsoft, or Sony, or Paramount, or anyone). I've bought six episodes of "Eureka", and last night I wanted to let my son watch one on his computer... but we couldn't: the cable modem was down.
I bought a video game once, that had copy protection that involved the timing on the floppy it saved my scoes on. I used it in a drive that was a little bit out of alignment and it never booted again. I found a pirate who was much amused as he burned a cracked copy of the game onto the original gold-foil-labelled master floppy.
And that's just entertainment.
I've had to work on computers in places where there's no phone, no cell service, no cable. I've had to work on a computer remotely over a 300 baud modem that went through the only telephone in the entire plant... we had to get someone who spoke the local language to say "put the phone in the rubber cups and don't answer when it rings next".
There is NO WAY I'm going to risk being unable to get to the rest of the stuff on my computer, by depending on an OS with a boobytrap in it, for anything. Not unless I can get a cracked unlocked version to stick in the box next to the never-to-be-unsealed master disc.
Microsoft is not going to stop pushing the envelope of how much they can hurt their users until their users start hurting them back.
If you don't like this, then don't buy Vista, don't buy XP, don't buy Office, don't buy an XBox, and get your friends to do the same. The invisible hand of the market only works if you put your money where your mouth is. If you don't, all you'll get from Microsoft is the invisible finger of the monopolist.
Don't forget F-Script, which lets you write Cocoa applications in a Smalltalk-like language and environment.
F-Script is free and open-source.
why would anyone pay the asking price of just under a hundred quid for a minor revision?
I don't know... I don't normally bother upgrading unless I need to, I'm still using Panther at home and the only reason I upgraded from Jaguar was that I bought new hardware.
There were some major major differences between XP and 2000
I'm still using 2000 because I've yet to find anything in XP that I actually need. The only thing that I've even missed is Bluetooth support. If they'd put a full Citrix server in there instead of ripping so much out that it's basically a low-bandwidth VNC plus virtual consoles... maybe.
And the icing on the cake is: XP Pro *upgrade* costs as much as OS X, and is still bundled with a remote destruct switch in Microsoft's hands.
I can also understand Apple charging for the jump from 9.x to 10.x. But from 10.4 to 10.5?
The jump from 9.x to 10.x was like the jump from Windows 9x/Me to Windows NT/2000. Whole new OS, from the ground up.
The jump from 10.x to 10.y is much more like the jumps from NT4 to 2000 to XP to Vista. New frosting on the same cake. If you need the new features, get them. If you don't, don't. You don't need to jump if you don't want to.
Seamonkey has exactly the same extensions vulnerability as Firefox.
I'm talking about a browser that uses the Gecko or KHTML rendering engine but uses a native user interface, so it's not open to privilege escalation attacks, or at least requires that you download and explicitly install extensions rather than having special magic in the browser to decide whether to trust a document or not - and so avoids the possibility of a cross-zone privilege escalation attack.
It's a music player, not a PDA. It should be designed so you can operate it blindfolded.
The Shuffle has it right. A D-Pad with the five important controls: forward, back, volume-up, volume-down, and play/pause. Additional controls can be added for devices that have a display. That bit can even be touch-sensitive, but the basic controls have to be usable by feel even when the display controls are locked.
It's a pity there's no good Gecko (or for that matter KHTML) based browser for Windows other than Firefox, because XUL has a huge potential for exploits, and on top of that the mechanism for installing XPI files is just begging for attacks (and in fact there's been at least one vulnerability fixed there).
On the Mac there's a plethora of browsers using both engines. Why on Windows is there only Firefox and KMelion?
You can, in theory, guarantee that your OS has not been compromised.
You can guarantee that it has not been modified through direct manipulation of the executable files. You can not guarantee that it hasn't been compromised by (for example) a buffer overflow attack in the current session. Unless you remove all interpreters from the system or require that all interpreted code (including configuration files!) be signed, it's not much harder to run arbitrary code even on a TPM-protected system than to devise an exploit in the first place.
You can't even guarantee that it's clean at boot, since a secondary exploit could be hidden in a data file, database, or configuration file to be re-run at boot.
And by making it impossible to replace the binaries without devising a similar exploit yourself you prevent people from fixing the problem... you have to wait for the manufacturer to do it. We can see how well that has worked for Microsoft.
I can use TPM to protect my own data.
TPM doesn't protect your own data any better than any other equally strong cryptographic technique... except from yourself.
Unless you're running code that's pushing hard against the limits of 4GB of RAM (well, 2GB on Windows), in which case you already know it and you're almost certainly not using OS X or Windows anyway (unless you're some kind of masochist, or you're Oracle), the only reason to run 64 bit is to take advantage of the larger register file on an AMD 64-bit processors. AMD pulled a very clever trick here, and used 64-bit processing as an excuse to introduce an ABI that exposed a larger register file to the compiler, which gave them a performance edge over Intel. Intel doesn't seem to have really taken advantage of this on their new rev of the old P6 core... they're just depending on their better process to make up for the overhead.
Yes, and then they closed it. Please keep up.
1. The source is still there. They've pulled one version, similar to what they did the last time someone used it to run OS X on non-Apple machines. They put it back, eventually. Until they announce they're not making any more releases I think it's way premature too say that they've "closed it".
GNUSTEP has the potential of providing that, but it seems to be stalled.
This isn't illegal, unethical, or surprising. It's interesting and encouraging, that OpenDarwin's frustration and shutdown hasn't stalled the continued support of Darwin on non-Apple hardware, but people have been turning Apple's open source releases into bootable operating systems for years.
What's the big deal? That if you take things a few steps further you can use this to run the GUI on top of Darwin on Intel instead of just Power PC? Well, yes, that's a big deal, but that's not possible with what this guy's released. It's not XPostFacto.
Um, they *did* make the operating system (Darwin) OSS. How did you think the source you're looking at was released in the first place? This hasn't been news for five years at least.
They haven't made the GUI shell (Quartz, Aqua, etc...) that runs on top of it OSS, but then neither have all the companies that make accelerated X servers and other system software for Linux made their software OSS.
which means there's going to be some sad people getting their ipods hacked.
That doesn't follow.
There's no reason they couldn't have more than two states:
* WiFi off
* WiFi passive - track SSIDs but don't register on any network or open listening connections
* WiFi online - regsiter on the network but don't open any listening connections
* WiFi notify - allow connections to start but don't complete the handshake, just give the user an audible notification that there's a stream or message available
* WiFi active
* WiFi sharing - share playlists and music
In addition, you can download music from the Internet. OK, that would mean it would go to Wifi online if it was in off or passive, and then drop back to the previous state when you're done.
Personally, I'd leave mine in WiFi Off just to save battery power.
The first iPods were formatted in HFS. HFS has an "alias" mechanism that bypasses the file hierarchy and name already, and for a special purpose device the alias could simply be an index into the catalog. For FAT formatted ipods, the first extent of the file could be used. The actual file name could be kept in a non-memory-resident file indexed by this pointer that was only referenced if the pointer failed to find the file. This would save even more space.
iTunes could reliably maintain this database, which means that most people would still want to use iTunes, but if you didn't mind having your iPod spend a minute or so "indexing..." after you load files into it you could do that too.
I doubt it would play just anything you were walking by, or at least this would be something you could disable. It would be more sensible for it to give you an audible cue that information was available, and let you choose to stream or download the music.