How does switching to Mac help? You can't even buy their hardware without their OS on it. If I buy new hardware with WinXP installed on it, I assume this won't affect me either. But at least in a Wintel environment I can get a piece of hardware without paying an OS tax every time. Is Apple paying all you Slashdotters who post your little "time to switch" spam every time someone says something even remotely unfriendly about Microsoft?
Only someone who is not creative and wants to leech off the works of others would make this argument.
I doubt that. I have a bachelor's degree in "fine art" and I belive that our copyright laws are the biggest danger to creative activity going.
It's one thing to prevent plagiarism, it's quite another to bar most any form of derivation outright and to have huge grey areas where certain types of derivation may or may not be valid. There is a significant "chill factor" to the current copyright rules.
Seemed to me like the point of your post was to promote the use and purchase of Apple's products. My point is that Mac is not much different than Windows, except in terms of some minor improvements in execution. Limiting consumer choice by doing things like removing buttons from the mouse and including only USB ports will, of course, make it easier to execute more smoothly.
My other point, that you completely ignored, was that people who own Windows computers have already bought and paid for a computer. Why on earth would they go buy proprietary, non-commodity hardware like the stuff Apple shovels out, when they can transform their existing system by installing an operating system like GNU/Linux at little or no cost (assuming they download an install ISO from the internet)? Then, if they really need their proprietary apps (most of which are not available for Mac OS X in comparable form to what one has on Windows), they can dual boot, too.
I've played a couple, and they were boring. Final Fantasy Tactics was okay, though. When someone writes a video game that is half as compelling as "Cryptonomicon", let me know.
Side question: when we get done replacing textbooks with video games, will we then want to replace mental health professionals (i.e. shrinks) with Eliza and M-x doctor?
They don't hold a gun to your head, but with such a small number of companies having control over the entire industry, it can certainly feel like it. It's like, you either sign one of the bad deals that you're lucky to get (according to them), or you can go back to obscurity in your garage. I'm not saying that's actually the case, but I don't totally blame a young band for getting caught up in the excitement and signing a bad deal in the hope that somehow they'll be different.
It's the same in every business, though. Most of us had to start in "entry level" jobs where the pay sucked and our good ideas only helped us move up the ladder but didn't bring us a lot of immediate reward. If the stranglehold of the major labels is to be broken the artists will have to say "no" more and more often. The problem is that big labels can do things that small labels can't. Like force corporate radio to play the songs and move hundreds of thousands of units a week for a given title when it takes off. It's the same problem the corner store has competing against Wal-Mart. One would hope to see technology make some inroads here, but my guess is that the public being made up of fairly average people is that it won't happen any time soon. We just don't have time to filter all the necessary information and shop around.
I believe the main problem is that these old guys don't really understand the technology.
While "old guys" may apply in a very loose sense here (it is not a good generalization I mean), the implication that older men don't understand technology seems improbable to me. Most of them have watched this technology grow over the years. In any case, to assert that this is simply a misunderstanding about technology is to vastly oversimplify the issue. The real problem here is that these people think they have a right to control your property and your ability to communicate with others (and that the majority of us are not willing to raise a stink about it).
Further compounding this fundamental flaw in their approach, they also are heavily invested in an either-or "democratic" process which makes it nearly impossible for people who care about issues like this to deselect these representatives at election time without either implicitly or explicitly selecting other representatives who probably hold similarly troublesome stands on other issues. For example, I very much like MN Senator Norm Coleman for his sane and rational approach to these copyright issues. But considering his by-the-book Republican approach to other issues (most notably the drug war) I find him a completely unacceptable alternative at the ballot box.
Ugh. I wish I could see who moderated my post troll--my foes list is nowhere near maxed out. I don't mind being called on the various flame-like qualities of my posts, but getting a troll mod when I'm being sincere ticks me off. (And yes, I'm prepared to see this post modded OT, which it is.)
Honestly, there really is no excuse to stick with Windows unless there's some mission-critical program that is vital to your business needs or something.
Or maybe you're not made out of money like most Mac zealots? Yeah, I know they just released some rinky-dink POS under $500 system so this argument would seem to lose steam, but when you look at what you get for $500 from Apple and what I can slap together in off-the-shelf components that will be affordable to both upgrade and replace when they break it starts to feel like less of a deal.
At this point I would rather see people recommending Linux as a Windows replacement since it won't require a substantial cash outlay for yet another proprietary operating system designed to limit the user's freedom in the future. Linux, via several existing distributions, has got to be at least as user friendly as Mac these days. I know I've recommended Mac in the past to at least two people and one of them has constant issues (largely due being unwilling to RTFM or put in any effort on his own)--luckily he does not *appear* to have any problems with this kind of malware. If they asked me today, I would offer to build them a system from scratch and install Linux on it rather than recommending a Mac.
My point here is that Mac is not the easy way out you make it sound like it is. In fact, if it hadn't been for a long series of headaches I had with my own iMac about six years ago, I may not have become a Linux fan when I did (if ever). I was very close, at the time, to switching to Windows--thankfully there was a little distro called Yellow Dog Linux that saved me from that.
One step at a time. Telling people to buy a Mac when they already own a computer seems a bit drastic. But if we can show them some free software that makes them happier, then maybe they'll eventually be willing to consider installing GNU/Linux on the hardware they already own. That, to me, would be much better than them helping line Steve Jobs' pockets.
Why not just install Firefox and Thunderbird on your Windows machine? That should help quite a bit with respect to spyware via the browser and spam via the mailbox. Best of all, they're free (in both senses of the word).
I'm with you for the most part. To nitpick: there's a difference between notification of a flaw and providing working exploit code to the general public. I would opt for the former until there is a patch. I know some black hats might be able to use even a vague description to figure out the flaw... but security is always going to involve compromises. I'm also skeptical of invite-only communications. Social engineering being the weak link that it is, I would worry about a black hat being able to get on one of those lists. Bad enough that they can read BugTraq or vendor security notices before I have a chance to patch.;)
Not only that, even if the communications related to the security flaw are kept private, there is no guarantee that a black hat hasn't figured out a way to listen to those communications. If the flaw is known and communications about it are taking place and a black hat manages to get wind of it but there is a delay before public disclosure or a patch, that's an even larger head start for the "bad guys."
I think the onus is really on those discovering the flaw to be careful in how they communicate it. I agree that they need not release a fully working exploit to a public mailing list the minute they figure it out.
Disclosure or not, if there is an exploit possible your systems are vulnerable. Would you not prefer knowing right away that your system is vulnerable? The exploit may have been discovered some time ago by a black-hat--he won't wait 90 days for you to have a chance to patch it before exploiting it. What you're saying makes it sound like the bug doesn't exist until somebody talks about it.
Your religion can't answer "Why am I here?" any better than science. I'm not even sure that's a useful question to ask. The fact is, we are here.
The real question is: what are we going to do now? And we don't need mythological gods to tell us the answers to that, we can easily examine our lives and make those decisions using our own neurological processes (if, in fact, we are even capable of "making" decisions-- I strongly recommend a book by the name of "The Illusion of Conscious Will" for some scientific discussion of this age old question). Surely if there is a god who gave us the ability to think and free will it was because he/she wanted us to use our minds and decide for ourselves?
United States GDP: $10,990,000,000,000.
7% of US GDP: $769,300,000,000.
Saudi Arabia GDP: $287,800,000,000.
Number of Saudi Arabias it would take to produce 7% of what the U.S. does: 2.67.
The odds that whatever you're saying about Saudi Arabia having a "7 percent share in [the U.S.] economy" is a load of [cow manure]: 100%.
I agree that Google need not scream this from the mountaintop, however my response was more geared to the general sentiment that there was no downside to keeping security holes secret until they are fixed. It seems to me from your response that you are really stretching my statement into something that I did not write. I certainly wasn't trying to imply that Google was trying to put one over on the users. But that's the way you seem to have read it.
If the project is in beta and they track other bugs in public, then they really ought to be disclosing this one as well. Maybe that will drive home the foolishness of using a beta for critical or sensitive email.
There's nothing wrong with deciding to not publicize known security holes while you try to fix them.
Actually, there could be. In this case, it lulls the user into a false sense of security with respect to GMail. In other cases it conceals the problem from users who may need to take some sort of corrective action until the problem is fixed. Now, if you had said it was fine to issue a notice about the bug, but conceal the mechanical details, that's a different story.
Why do you do all that work to secure your system and then blindy trust a server on the internet to upgrade your software without any human intervention at all? By "nightly apt-get" I assume it's a cron job and not merely the last thing you do before leaving at night...
Animators have been using rotoscoping to get motion correct since Disney championed the technique decades ago. The problem is that it's not cheap or fast, so it's only used for "serious" works and only in those areas where natural motion is critical.
The digital version of this is to build wireframe models and then use live humans with sensors to manipulate the models naturally. My understanding is that this is becoming very common, especially for video games.
Personally I'm not as excited about an animated version of this story as I would be about a photo-realistic version. As an animated film it now has to compete against all of the decent anime out there that has similar themes or subject matter ("Serial Experiments Lain" comes to mind). If they can do "I, Robot" as well as they did and have it be photo-realistic (not talking story, just presentation), then they ought to be able to do the same here.
and what I'm saying is that people like you are exceptions when it comes to Windows issues. How many other people do you know who haven't been bitten by something in Windows and spent many hours fixing their situation? How often do your friends and relatives come to you for help with that stuff?
I'm not saying GNU/Linux is a magic bullet that never has security or install problems, just that my experience leads me to believe that any talk about Windows being a timesaver in terms of install time or maintenance is mythological. The amount of time spent futzing with systems seems constant, therefore not a reliable indicator of which one to choose.
Which brings us back to applications and freedoms questions.
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How does switching to Mac help? You can't even buy their hardware without their OS on it. If I buy new hardware with WinXP installed on it, I assume this won't affect me either. But at least in a Wintel environment I can get a piece of hardware without paying an OS tax every time. Is Apple paying all you Slashdotters who post your little "time to switch" spam every time someone says something even remotely unfriendly about Microsoft?
How does money assist in breaking a cipher text that was encrypted using a one time pad?
Only someone who is not creative and wants to leech off the works of others would make this argument.
I doubt that. I have a bachelor's degree in "fine art" and I belive that our copyright laws are the biggest danger to creative activity going.
It's one thing to prevent plagiarism, it's quite another to bar most any form of derivation outright and to have huge grey areas where certain types of derivation may or may not be valid. There is a significant "chill factor" to the current copyright rules.
Gnome got started because some GPL bigots got their panties in a bunch
Hint to moderators: when you see someone use the phrase "GPL bigots" the appropriate moderation is "troll".
And are there not web-based USENET services out there also?
You mean like little thing?
Seemed to me like the point of your post was to promote the use and purchase of Apple's products. My point is that Mac is not much different than Windows, except in terms of some minor improvements in execution. Limiting consumer choice by doing things like removing buttons from the mouse and including only USB ports will, of course, make it easier to execute more smoothly.
My other point, that you completely ignored, was that people who own Windows computers have already bought and paid for a computer. Why on earth would they go buy proprietary, non-commodity hardware like the stuff Apple shovels out, when they can transform their existing system by installing an operating system like GNU/Linux at little or no cost (assuming they download an install ISO from the internet)? Then, if they really need their proprietary apps (most of which are not available for Mac OS X in comparable form to what one has on Windows), they can dual boot, too.
I've played a couple, and they were boring. Final Fantasy Tactics was okay, though. When someone writes a video game that is half as compelling as "Cryptonomicon", let me know.
Side question: when we get done replacing textbooks with video games, will we then want to replace mental health professionals (i.e. shrinks) with Eliza and M-x doctor?
They don't hold a gun to your head, but with such a small number of companies having control over the entire industry, it can certainly feel like it. It's like, you either sign one of the bad deals that you're lucky to get (according to them), or you can go back to obscurity in your garage. I'm not saying that's actually the case, but I don't totally blame a young band for getting caught up in the excitement and signing a bad deal in the hope that somehow they'll be different.
It's the same in every business, though. Most of us had to start in "entry level" jobs where the pay sucked and our good ideas only helped us move up the ladder but didn't bring us a lot of immediate reward. If the stranglehold of the major labels is to be broken the artists will have to say "no" more and more often. The problem is that big labels can do things that small labels can't. Like force corporate radio to play the songs and move hundreds of thousands of units a week for a given title when it takes off. It's the same problem the corner store has competing against Wal-Mart. One would hope to see technology make some inroads here, but my guess is that the public being made up of fairly average people is that it won't happen any time soon. We just don't have time to filter all the necessary information and shop around.
I believe the main problem is that these old guys don't really understand the technology.
While "old guys" may apply in a very loose sense here (it is not a good generalization I mean), the implication that older men don't understand technology seems improbable to me. Most of them have watched this technology grow over the years. In any case, to assert that this is simply a misunderstanding about technology is to vastly oversimplify the issue. The real problem here is that these people think they have a right to control your property and your ability to communicate with others (and that the majority of us are not willing to raise a stink about it).
Further compounding this fundamental flaw in their approach, they also are heavily invested in an either-or "democratic" process which makes it nearly impossible for people who care about issues like this to deselect these representatives at election time without either implicitly or explicitly selecting other representatives who probably hold similarly troublesome stands on other issues. For example, I very much like MN Senator Norm Coleman for his sane and rational approach to these copyright issues. But considering his by-the-book Republican approach to other issues (most notably the drug war) I find him a completely unacceptable alternative at the ballot box.
Ugh. I wish I could see who moderated my post troll--my foes list is nowhere near maxed out. I don't mind being called on the various flame-like qualities of my posts, but getting a troll mod when I'm being sincere ticks me off. (And yes, I'm prepared to see this post modded OT, which it is.)
Honestly, there really is no excuse to stick with Windows unless there's some mission-critical program that is vital to your business needs or something.
Or maybe you're not made out of money like most Mac zealots? Yeah, I know they just released some rinky-dink POS under $500 system so this argument would seem to lose steam, but when you look at what you get for $500 from Apple and what I can slap together in off-the-shelf components that will be affordable to both upgrade and replace when they break it starts to feel like less of a deal.
At this point I would rather see people recommending Linux as a Windows replacement since it won't require a substantial cash outlay for yet another proprietary operating system designed to limit the user's freedom in the future. Linux, via several existing distributions, has got to be at least as user friendly as Mac these days. I know I've recommended Mac in the past to at least two people and one of them has constant issues (largely due being unwilling to RTFM or put in any effort on his own)--luckily he does not *appear* to have any problems with this kind of malware. If they asked me today, I would offer to build them a system from scratch and install Linux on it rather than recommending a Mac.
My point here is that Mac is not the easy way out you make it sound like it is. In fact, if it hadn't been for a long series of headaches I had with my own iMac about six years ago, I may not have become a Linux fan when I did (if ever). I was very close, at the time, to switching to Windows--thankfully there was a little distro called Yellow Dog Linux that saved me from that.
What about Dr. Dobb's Journal? Seems like a top-notch American computer magazine to me.
One step at a time. Telling people to buy a Mac when they already own a computer seems a bit drastic. But if we can show them some free software that makes them happier, then maybe they'll eventually be willing to consider installing GNU/Linux on the hardware they already own. That, to me, would be much better than them helping line Steve Jobs' pockets.
Why not just install Firefox and Thunderbird on your Windows machine? That should help quite a bit with respect to spyware via the browser and spam via the mailbox. Best of all, they're free (in both senses of the word).
I'm with you for the most part. To nitpick: there's a difference between notification of a flaw and providing working exploit code to the general public. I would opt for the former until there is a patch. I know some black hats might be able to use even a vague description to figure out the flaw... but security is always going to involve compromises. I'm also skeptical of invite-only communications. Social engineering being the weak link that it is, I would worry about a black hat being able to get on one of those lists. Bad enough that they can read BugTraq or vendor security notices before I have a chance to patch. ;)
Not only that, even if the communications related to the security flaw are kept private, there is no guarantee that a black hat hasn't figured out a way to listen to those communications. If the flaw is known and communications about it are taking place and a black hat manages to get wind of it but there is a delay before public disclosure or a patch, that's an even larger head start for the "bad guys."
I think the onus is really on those discovering the flaw to be careful in how they communicate it. I agree that they need not release a fully working exploit to a public mailing list the minute they figure it out.
Disclosure or not, if there is an exploit possible your systems are vulnerable. Would you not prefer knowing right away that your system is vulnerable? The exploit may have been discovered some time ago by a black-hat--he won't wait 90 days for you to have a chance to patch it before exploiting it. What you're saying makes it sound like the bug doesn't exist until somebody talks about it.
Your religion can't answer "Why am I here?" any better than science. I'm not even sure that's a useful question to ask. The fact is, we are here.
The real question is: what are we going to do now? And we don't need mythological gods to tell us the answers to that, we can easily examine our lives and make those decisions using our own neurological processes (if, in fact, we are even capable of "making" decisions-- I strongly recommend a book by the name of "The Illusion of Conscious Will" for some scientific discussion of this age old question). Surely if there is a god who gave us the ability to think and free will it was because he/she wanted us to use our minds and decide for ourselves?
Why would wikipedia need one? You can use google.com to search wikipedia already.
United States GDP: $10,990,000,000,000.
7% of US GDP: $769,300,000,000.
Saudi Arabia GDP: $287,800,000,000.
Number of Saudi Arabias it would take to produce 7% of what the U.S. does: 2.67.
The odds that whatever you're saying about Saudi Arabia having a "7 percent share in [the U.S.] economy" is a load of [cow manure]: 100%.
I agree that Google need not scream this from the mountaintop, however my response was more geared to the general sentiment that there was no downside to keeping security holes secret until they are fixed. It seems to me from your response that you are really stretching my statement into something that I did not write. I certainly wasn't trying to imply that Google was trying to put one over on the users. But that's the way you seem to have read it.
If the project is in beta and they track other bugs in public, then they really ought to be disclosing this one as well. Maybe that will drive home the foolishness of using a beta for critical or sensitive email.
There's nothing wrong with deciding to not publicize known security holes while you try to fix them.
Actually, there could be. In this case, it lulls the user into a false sense of security with respect to GMail. In other cases it conceals the problem from users who may need to take some sort of corrective action until the problem is fixed. Now, if you had said it was fine to issue a notice about the bug, but conceal the mechanical details, that's a different story.
Why do you do all that work to secure your system and then blindy trust a server on the internet to upgrade your software without any human intervention at all? By "nightly apt-get" I assume it's a cron job and not merely the last thing you do before leaving at night...
Animators have been using rotoscoping to get motion correct since Disney championed the technique decades ago. The problem is that it's not cheap or fast, so it's only used for "serious" works and only in those areas where natural motion is critical.
The digital version of this is to build wireframe models and then use live humans with sensors to manipulate the models naturally. My understanding is that this is becoming very common, especially for video games.
Personally I'm not as excited about an animated version of this story as I would be about a photo-realistic version. As an animated film it now has to compete against all of the decent anime out there that has similar themes or subject matter ("Serial Experiments Lain" comes to mind). If they can do "I, Robot" as well as they did and have it be photo-realistic (not talking story, just presentation), then they ought to be able to do the same here.
and what I'm saying is that people like you are exceptions when it comes to Windows issues. How many other people do you know who haven't been bitten by something in Windows and spent many hours fixing their situation? How often do your friends and relatives come to you for help with that stuff?
I'm not saying GNU/Linux is a magic bullet that never has security or install problems, just that my experience leads me to believe that any talk about Windows being a timesaver in terms of install time or maintenance is mythological. The amount of time spent futzing with systems seems constant, therefore not a reliable indicator of which one to choose.
Which brings us back to applications and freedoms questions.