Shouldn't front-line support people actually know if it's actual bad malware or not? If it is, this is remarkably stupid to neither confirm nor deny that it even exists. That seems like it came from marketing, not tech support. sigh.
Perhaps you don't realize that Apple is run by their marketing department.
It seems these days any new technology which Slashdot takes a dislike to goes on to enjoy huge success. Take for example the iPad, Facebook, Twitter... I am almost tempted to predict that Thunderbolt will be a huge success:)
There are many excellent reasons to dislike every one of your examples independent of their successes. You might as well predict that Window Phone 7 will be a huge success.
I like the simplicity of Xterm. It works well with SSH, can talk to endless serial devices (like console terminal login on headless stuff) and can run over a modem.
I think you're confusing xterm (one of many X11 terminal emulators) with the shell (typically Bash) running inside it. The shell is what accepts commands you type and interprets them. Terminal emulators only display the output from programs such as shells and ssh and forward keys you type to those programs. Any X11 program, including xterm can run on a remote machine and display on the X11 server controlling your display, but it would be a foolish waste of network bandwidth to run an xterm remotely rather than running just a shell remotely via ssh running in the terminal emulator.
The "cat" command is certainly the wrong choice for displaying an image since it's purpose is to concatenate streams of bytes, something everyone seems to have forgotten. What would it mean to concatenate two or more images? Superimpose them? Make a collage of them? Make an animation with each image a frame? However, a command like "open" or "display" might make sense.
There have always been protocols between programs run on the command line, but they've been ad-hoc. This approach works fine for simple stuff, but when you get a little complex, it starts being a pain. This is certainly not the first attempt to improve on that ad-hoc IPC model. For example, check out Infopipes, XML Pipeline and Hartmann_pipeline. I don't know if any of those is any good or if they're intended to be used interactively in a shell.
I would pay good money for a PowerShell implementation on Linux, and even more if Linux internals were exposed in the same way that WMI objects are on Windows.
And this is from a thirteen-year Linux veteran.
It's surprising that a thirteen-year Linux veteran wouldn't have discovered Python, which also is based on the idea that everything is an object, and has run on Windows and any kind of *nix for many years before PowerShell showed up. Its standard library has a huge amount of functionality built in and PSI - Python System Information looks like an easy way to get at system information. The enhanced interactive shell IPython has a lot of time saving features compared to the default one. Even on Windows, I'd rather use Python than PowerShell, since it has easy access to all the same COM and WMI objects that PowerShell does.
Command line interfaces are intended to be looked at. Shells such as the Bourne shell wouldn't have such terrible syntax for writing scripts if they hadn't been designed primarily for interactive use. If you only want a non-interactive interface, design a nice API and/or IPC protocol.
Everyone has an opinion, which is why all these Free desktops exist in the first place. I think Unity's fine on my desktop. I need to try GNOME 3, but I don't care that strongly about details of look and feel as long as they don't get in my way.
You're forgetting mobile and other embedded OSes, which are mostly *nix, but mostly very different from desktop GNU/Linux. Even Android is vastly different from a typical GNU/Linux distribution, though there may not be much call to run GNOME apps on Android.
Since there isn't a mature Gtk+ port for Cocoa and X11 apps are second class on OSX, GNOME apps are definitely marginalized on OSX similar to how they are on Windows. I use Gtk+ Emacs, but Emacs is not really "native" anywhere so it hardly matters. I've heard it may be possible to avoid running OSX's GUI stuff entirely and just run an X11 DE, but that's hardly worth it compared to simply replacing it with GNU/Linux or some other Free OS.
KDE is far from the only recourse, as there are a number of other Desktop Environments already in common use, including XFCE and Unity/GNOME 2. However, GNOME requiring systemd would be a giant mistake as it would be a kick in the face not only for non-Linux based OSes, but for any Linux-based distro that use a different init. I haven't followed the Canonical/GNOME controversies much, but this inclines me to think Canonical isn't being as unreasonable as some think to diverge from GNOME. Optional systemd integration is probably a good idea.
It was the dumbest system ever. I hated it, and hope it gets returned or at least improved in ME3. I basically saw it as a way to prevent me from being the sniper I was in ME1. With only 10 or so shots available on the sniper rifle, I inevitably had to run out of my cover with a practically useless pistol to find more ammo. The timed cooldown of the weapons in the original game made more sense with the physics and made for much more strategic battles as accuracy wasn't as important as your position. I also missed the varied upgrades you could do to weapons in ME1, though I do agree it was probably overly complicated, but I liked it as I could tailor my weapons based on each mission.
Also, I liked shooting randomly in ME1 to fill the long walks on alien worlds... No more in ME2, I had to conserve every shot.
Yeah, I'd much prefer to snipe everything. I've only played ME2, but now I'll have to get ME1.
The basic idea of mass effect fields, as well as how they're used in weapons, is interesting. However, ME2's "heat clips," which supposedly cool the weapon by being discarded are nonsensical. If overheating is truly to problem to solve, you could just wait, but the heat clips are actually just a stand-in for universal ammunition.
When I started caring about my diet and wanting to improve my health, I found myself eating a lot of "Asian" and "Middle Eastern" types of food. I was a vegetarian for a while, but have since started eating meat again. The idea of trying to make vegetarian equivalents of traditional American foods often leads to some not so great results. On the other hand, there are other cultures that eat primarily vegetarian diets and have been doing so for generations. Not surprisingly, their food tastes great despite not having any meat in it.
I whole-heartedly agree that trying to replace a burger with something vegetarian is asking for failure, while you can make great stir-fries without meat, as well as falafel. However, there is no hard definition of what is "American" cuisine. If you look into Italian-American, or Mexican-American cuisines, for example, you can make lots of tasty food without meat.
Most, if not all, cultures on this planet use food as a method of identity. If you went to China or Japan or France and still only sought out American-style food, you would likely be outcast. It's the same in America... especially for children! What recent immigrant children have to endure in the realm of food-mockery is genuine./remembers bringing tamales to school in elementary school//remembers watching my Chinese friend bring dried fish and rice.///kids are horrible and get away with it.
I'm sure you're right, which is sad. I was born in the US, but grew up in South and Central America and went to schools with students from very diverse origins. Some of my best food memories from childhood are of the great diversity of food, such as the shrimp my Korean classmates brought to class parties. I grew up experiencing food of Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, Honduran, and American styles and I wish more people had such diverse experiences.
A high school football player just last week died during practice. MANY kids are hurt doing team sports in schools. There's a KNOWN, DEFINITE health threat, proven beyond a shadow of a doubt!
If they can ban stuff based on the vague possibility of a problem, why not ban what is PROVEN to be one!
It's as simple as fear of the unknown, a basic feature of human nature. Why do people fear plane crashes and terrorist attacks and mostly ignore far greater risks to health and life like car crashes and hear disease?
Since it's streaming good quality video, a certain level of hardware capability and performance is necessary to play smoothly. Netflix can't determine the Android hardware any more than Google can. It's dumb to limit it to such a short list rather than provide general guidelines about hardware requirements and let users try it, but the reason is so that large numbers of people don't have a bad experience and get a bad impression of Netflix.
It's an odd analogy since Android is mostly Free/Open Source while Windows isn't, but you can compare them in this way. Windows runs on a huge variety of PC hardware. Is Windows fragmented? If so, that hasn't prevented huge numbers of developers from developing more applications for it than any Apple product.
Only Honeycomb was a bait and switch. Anyone smart enough to only use Free/Open Source releases of Android is fine. Honeycomb was a fork, which Google is now admitting was a mistake.
I'm not well-versed in Android, nor a lawyer, but I do know that if you release anything that uses modified GPL code, you have to release the code under the GPL as well. And I find it hard to believe that Android didn't modify any of the GNU/Linux/whatever code they used. Anyone more knowledgeable in the subject care to comment?
Google has been upfront about the fact that they chose the Apache license for the majority of Android specifically because it's not copyleft. They chose very little copyleft code to include. I don't think Android includes anything from GNU. All of the non-copyleft parts can be made proprietary by Google or anyone else. Obviously, Linux is copyleft and AFAIK, Google releases any changes to it.
I think Google does understand what it really takes to participate in Free and Open Source software projects. However, they sometimes choose not to do so or not do it properly. That was clearly what happened with Honeycomb. I think this announcement confirms that they understood it was a mistake and trying to correct it.
I remember a while ago when Google announced Honeycomb would not be open sourced for the time being. A lot of people on Slashdot were unsurprisingly up in arms and, equally unsurprisingly, for all the wrong reasons. From a FOSS standpoint it's a terrible move on their part, but what many didn't understand was the reasoning:
Android has an extremely vast community of amateurs that create custom builds of AOSP. These are people with little to no coding experience, distributing specialized "ROMs" to an even greater amount of curious users who are barely a shade above the average user. So what would happen if Honeycomb were opened? There'd be a very quick uptake by those users and, given the Tablet oriented state of Honeycomb, a really really bad user experience. As pretty as Honeycomb is, that would have reflected badly on Google -- worse than what many jumping the gun on/. thought when Google initially delayed the source release.
With that in mind, I'm glad that they are deferring the code until Ice Cream Sandwich where it seems they will "do it right."
Yeah, I'm sure glad big brother Google's taking their role seriously to keep us from shooting ourselves in the foot. Seriously, that's a terrible argument. If you release anything as Free or Open Source software, it can be misused. There is no avoiding that. There have already been many examples of vendors shipping Android products with user experience problems that Google couldn't do anything about.
What this announcement really means is that Google is admitting that Honeycomb was a giant mistake. It was a mistake to fork Android. It was a mistake to provide versions of Android under any license that had broken phone functionality. Google is saying that everyone should ignore Honeycomb and wait for Ice Cream Sandwich.
Slashdot Mirror
All you have to do is go into Safe Mode. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455
Then go into the Applications Folder > Choose MacDefender.app > Move to Trash. (in Safe Mode)
Reboot normally and reset Safari.
Bizarrely, AppleCare won't give you those simple instructions even if you ask. I see that as an excellent example of marketing trumping customer support.
Shouldn't front-line support people actually know if it's actual bad malware or not? If it is, this is remarkably stupid to neither confirm nor deny that it even exists. That seems like it came from marketing, not tech support. sigh.
Perhaps you don't realize that Apple is run by their marketing department.
It seems these days any new technology which Slashdot takes a dislike to goes on to enjoy huge success. Take for example the iPad, Facebook, Twitter... I am almost tempted to predict that Thunderbolt will be a huge success :)
There are many excellent reasons to dislike every one of your examples independent of their successes. You might as well predict that Window Phone 7 will be a huge success.
I like the simplicity of Xterm. It works well with SSH, can talk to endless serial devices (like console terminal login on headless stuff) and can run over a modem.
I think you're confusing xterm (one of many X11 terminal emulators) with the shell (typically Bash) running inside it. The shell is what accepts commands you type and interprets them. Terminal emulators only display the output from programs such as shells and ssh and forward keys you type to those programs. Any X11 program, including xterm can run on a remote machine and display on the X11 server controlling your display, but it would be a foolish waste of network bandwidth to run an xterm remotely rather than running just a shell remotely via ssh running in the terminal emulator.
The "cat" command is certainly the wrong choice for displaying an image since it's purpose is to concatenate streams of bytes, something everyone seems to have forgotten. What would it mean to concatenate two or more images? Superimpose them? Make a collage of them? Make an animation with each image a frame? However, a command like "open" or "display" might make sense.
There have always been protocols between programs run on the command line, but they've been ad-hoc. This approach works fine for simple stuff, but when you get a little complex, it starts being a pain. This is certainly not the first attempt to improve on that ad-hoc IPC model. For example, check out Infopipes, XML Pipeline and Hartmann_pipeline. I don't know if any of those is any good or if they're intended to be used interactively in a shell.
I would pay good money for a PowerShell implementation on Linux, and even more if Linux internals were exposed in the same way that WMI objects are on Windows.
And this is from a thirteen-year Linux veteran.
It's surprising that a thirteen-year Linux veteran wouldn't have discovered Python, which also is based on the idea that everything is an object, and has run on Windows and any kind of *nix for many years before PowerShell showed up. Its standard library has a huge amount of functionality built in and PSI - Python System Information looks like an easy way to get at system information. The enhanced interactive shell IPython has a lot of time saving features compared to the default one. Even on Windows, I'd rather use Python than PowerShell, since it has easy access to all the same COM and WMI objects that PowerShell does.
Things have come a long way from the original Mac, which had no command line at all.
Command line interfaces are intended to be looked at. Shells such as the Bourne shell wouldn't have such terrible syntax for writing scripts if they hadn't been designed primarily for interactive use. If you only want a non-interactive interface, design a nice API and/or IPC protocol.
Everyone has an opinion, which is why all these Free desktops exist in the first place. I think Unity's fine on my desktop. I need to try GNOME 3, but I don't care that strongly about details of look and feel as long as they don't get in my way.
You're forgetting mobile and other embedded OSes, which are mostly *nix, but mostly very different from desktop GNU/Linux. Even Android is vastly different from a typical GNU/Linux distribution, though there may not be much call to run GNOME apps on Android.
Since there isn't a mature Gtk+ port for Cocoa and X11 apps are second class on OSX, GNOME apps are definitely marginalized on OSX similar to how they are on Windows. I use Gtk+ Emacs, but Emacs is not really "native" anywhere so it hardly matters. I've heard it may be possible to avoid running OSX's GUI stuff entirely and just run an X11 DE, but that's hardly worth it compared to simply replacing it with GNU/Linux or some other Free OS.
KDE is far from the only recourse, as there are a number of other Desktop Environments already in common use, including XFCE and Unity/GNOME 2. However, GNOME requiring systemd would be a giant mistake as it would be a kick in the face not only for non-Linux based OSes, but for any Linux-based distro that use a different init. I haven't followed the Canonical /GNOME controversies much, but this inclines me to think Canonical isn't being as unreasonable as some think to diverge from GNOME. Optional systemd integration is probably a good idea.
It was the dumbest system ever. I hated it, and hope it gets returned or at least improved in ME3. I basically saw it as a way to prevent me from being the sniper I was in ME1. With only 10 or so shots available on the sniper rifle, I inevitably had to run out of my cover with a practically useless pistol to find more ammo. The timed cooldown of the weapons in the original game made more sense with the physics and made for much more strategic battles as accuracy wasn't as important as your position. I also missed the varied upgrades you could do to weapons in ME1, though I do agree it was probably overly complicated, but I liked it as I could tailor my weapons based on each mission.
Also, I liked shooting randomly in ME1 to fill the long walks on alien worlds... No more in ME2, I had to conserve every shot.
Yeah, I'd much prefer to snipe everything. I've only played ME2, but now I'll have to get ME1.
The basic idea of mass effect fields, as well as how they're used in weapons, is interesting. However, ME2's "heat clips," which supposedly cool the weapon by being discarded are nonsensical. If overheating is truly to problem to solve, you could just wait, but the heat clips are actually just a stand-in for universal ammunition.
When I started caring about my diet and wanting to improve my health, I found myself eating a lot of "Asian" and "Middle Eastern" types of food. I was a vegetarian for a while, but have since started eating meat again. The idea of trying to make vegetarian equivalents of traditional American foods often leads to some not so great results. On the other hand, there are other cultures that eat primarily vegetarian diets and have been doing so for generations. Not surprisingly, their food tastes great despite not having any meat in it.
I whole-heartedly agree that trying to replace a burger with something vegetarian is asking for failure, while you can make great stir-fries without meat, as well as falafel. However, there is no hard definition of what is "American" cuisine. If you look into Italian-American, or Mexican-American cuisines, for example, you can make lots of tasty food without meat.
Most, if not all, cultures on this planet use food as a method of identity. If you went to China or Japan or France and still only sought out American-style food, you would likely be outcast. It's the same in America... especially for children! What recent immigrant children have to endure in the realm of food-mockery is genuine. /remembers bringing tamales to school in elementary school //remembers watching my Chinese friend bring dried fish and rice. ///kids are horrible and get away with it.
I'm sure you're right, which is sad. I was born in the US, but grew up in South and Central America and went to schools with students from very diverse origins. Some of my best food memories from childhood are of the great diversity of food, such as the shrimp my Korean classmates brought to class parties. I grew up experiencing food of Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, Honduran, and American styles and I wish more people had such diverse experiences.
... cryptologist Bill Binney was found dead today in his New York apartment the victim of an apparent accident.
I think you need to give the NSA more credit than that. If they want him to be ignored, they'll work something so that he seems crazy or corrupt.
A high school football player just last week died during practice. MANY kids are hurt doing team sports in schools. There's a KNOWN, DEFINITE health threat, proven beyond a shadow of a doubt!
If they can ban stuff based on the vague possibility of a problem, why not ban what is PROVEN to be one!
It's as simple as fear of the unknown, a basic feature of human nature. Why do people fear plane crashes and terrorist attacks and mostly ignore far greater risks to health and life like car crashes and hear disease?
Since it's streaming good quality video, a certain level of hardware capability and performance is necessary to play smoothly. Netflix can't determine the Android hardware any more than Google can. It's dumb to limit it to such a short list rather than provide general guidelines about hardware requirements and let users try it, but the reason is so that large numbers of people don't have a bad experience and get a bad impression of Netflix.
It's an odd analogy since Android is mostly Free/Open Source while Windows isn't, but you can compare them in this way. Windows runs on a huge variety of PC hardware. Is Windows fragmented? If so, that hasn't prevented huge numbers of developers from developing more applications for it than any Apple product.
Yeah, Google claiming this isn't a Chrome bug is like saying that an IE exploit isn't a Windows bug.
Only Honeycomb was a bait and switch. Anyone smart enough to only use Free/Open Source releases of Android is fine. Honeycomb was a fork, which Google is now admitting was a mistake.
I'm not well-versed in Android, nor a lawyer, but I do know that if you release anything that uses modified GPL code, you have to release the code under the GPL as well. And I find it hard to believe that Android didn't modify any of the GNU/Linux/whatever code they used. Anyone more knowledgeable in the subject care to comment?
Google has been upfront about the fact that they chose the Apache license for the majority of Android specifically because it's not copyleft. They chose very little copyleft code to include. I don't think Android includes anything from GNU. All of the non-copyleft parts can be made proprietary by Google or anyone else. Obviously, Linux is copyleft and AFAIK, Google releases any changes to it.
I think Google does understand what it really takes to participate in Free and Open Source software projects. However, they sometimes choose not to do so or not do it properly. That was clearly what happened with Honeycomb. I think this announcement confirms that they understood it was a mistake and trying to correct it.
I remember a while ago when Google announced Honeycomb would not be open sourced for the time being. A lot of people on Slashdot were unsurprisingly up in arms and, equally unsurprisingly, for all the wrong reasons. From a FOSS standpoint it's a terrible move on their part, but what many didn't understand was the reasoning:
Android has an extremely vast community of amateurs that create custom builds of AOSP. These are people with little to no coding experience, distributing specialized "ROMs" to an even greater amount of curious users who are barely a shade above the average user. So what would happen if Honeycomb were opened? There'd be a very quick uptake by those users and, given the Tablet oriented state of Honeycomb, a really really bad user experience. As pretty as Honeycomb is, that would have reflected badly on Google -- worse than what many jumping the gun on /. thought when Google initially delayed the source release.
With that in mind, I'm glad that they are deferring the code until Ice Cream Sandwich where it seems they will "do it right."
Yeah, I'm sure glad big brother Google's taking their role seriously to keep us from shooting ourselves in the foot. Seriously, that's a terrible argument. If you release anything as Free or Open Source software, it can be misused. There is no avoiding that. There have already been many examples of vendors shipping Android products with user experience problems that Google couldn't do anything about.
What this announcement really means is that Google is admitting that Honeycomb was a giant mistake. It was a mistake to fork Android. It was a mistake to provide versions of Android under any license that had broken phone functionality. Google is saying that everyone should ignore Honeycomb and wait for Ice Cream Sandwich.