There's a difference between negotiating in a closed room and trying to keep the results of that negotiation private. I've no problem with congress critters sequestering themselves in a smoke filled room to get a bill drafted. The results of the negotiation need to see the light of day before it's passed. Trying to hide the contents and just ram it through without public comment (as was tried with ACTA) is an entirely different thing.
* Damage our reputation through the rest of the world as a result of our overreaction and constant trampling on other nations. Too much of this, and our position as a world leader begins to suffer, and we just turn into a bully with lots of bombs. Once I think we were a world power because the rest of the nations of the world respected us. Increasingly, we take a page from Machiavelli, and we are "respected" (perhaps tolerated is a better word) as a world power simply because we can kill more of their citizens than they can kill of ours.
* Cause us to abandon our ideals of freedom and democracy (a piece at a time), thus destroying the basis that the nation was founded on and the things that make it (IMHO) great. This is an ideology win in that they can point and show how all of our freedoms don't actually amount to anything and that their restricted life controlled by government controlled by religion is the right and natural state of the world. They prove we had it wrong from the start.
* Ultimately, goad America into spending itself into inescapable debt through permanent war, eventually resulting in the destruction of the Republic. The question here is how long we can continue to "borrow" money on the unspoken threat that we continue to use our military to "protect" the rest of the world as long as the world continues to buy our debt. ("That's an awfully nice country you've got there. Shame if anything was to happen to it..")
All told, I think we're on a pretty good track to fulfill these paths to loss in this asymmetric.. no, sorry.. I can't bring myself to apply the world 'war' to this.
You use the word "rapid" to describe Windows' deteriorating use. Tell me, on a scale of "Watching grass grow," to "Why did the snail cross the road?" just how rapid are we talking here?
I'm not about to argue that Win8 is anything but a train wreck, but claiming that Windows' position in business is rapidly changing is a bit.. well.. dead wrong... Sure Win8 isn't being adopted in droves as MS might like, but of all of the WinXP-Win7 users who *aren't* upgrading [sic] to Win8, I don't imagine terribly many of them are jumping ship and moving to Linux or Mac. Some yes, but I doubt it's more than background noise on the stats.
Even if Microsoft didn't see a single new Windows license this year, their market share isn't in any immediate danger. (And by "new license," I mean an actual new person who wasn't using Windows before. Replacing an existing Winbox with a new one and paying the Microsoft tax or changing the installed Windows version on an existing machine doesn't effect the overall number of people using Windows and buying software to run on it.)
And perhaps worth nothing, this relatively MS-positive post was brought to you by a Mac user...
I was well aware as a child that if I touched my father's guns (without his immediate supervision & permission), any injury the guns might cause would pale in comparison with what awaited me when my father found out.
That said, most webservers have no firewall to speak of in front of them and are run by "administrators" who don't even know how to configure the hosts's software firewall properly to block unwanted traffic (or on shared hosting where the host has no interest in the complexities of managing the software firewall for multiple users).
I think my car analogy holds fine here. My car is FOSS in this case, but I still choose not to do most of the work myself even if there's nothing legal or technological preventing me from doing it. The software in the post I replied to originally is also FOSS, but the author seems to think that users should be required to do all of the dirty work themselves before they be allowed to use it. The only way I can drive that car is if I know how to install the engine & transmission myself before I start driving it.
Nothing in my original post had anything to do with the lock in of closed source software or restrictive EULA's that prevent me from fixing it. Yes that is a problem, but the problem of closed source software is not related to the problem of actively user-hostile open source software that prevents "real" people from using it.
Actually... On second thought, there is a relation between those things. The problem of user-hostile open source actually drives users to locked in closed source as they simply don't have the ability to use potentially equivalent open source options.
Not sure what domain your project is in, but unless your target market is "Linux, Emacs users who know C" odds are you're cutting a goodly number of potential users out with that attitude. Certainly there are tools that is appropriate for, but the VAST majority of users don't have a compiler on their systems, much less know how to use one.
Is that a tragedy of the Microsoft-ocracy keeping the world closed for users? I don't think so. [Car analogy coming up] Just because I could technically acquire all of the tools and knowhow to replace any particular part on my car, doesn't mean it's the best use of my money and time to do so. Even if the tools were all free (as in the case of GCC et al.), it's unlikely that it would be in the best interests of a non-techy to take the time to learn to use them, much less learn to troubleshoot them when `./configure && make && make install` doesn't go according to plan. To many people, computers are just tools to get other non-computer related work done, and there's nothing wrong with that. Some people like to tinker with their cars, others just want to drive to work and park them.
Even a user who doesn't know how to fix bugs & recompile can be a useful asset to an Open Source project. I've found that some of my non-technical users are the most details oriented when it comes to finding edge case bugs and documenting what it takes to reproduce them. Often enough those are the kinds of bugs that take me two minutes to fix but would have taken hours to track down if not for a complete reproducer reported by a user.
As far as giving people the wrong idea about Free Software, which is worse: Users thinking Free Software is about the price or that it's unusable junk that only nerd/hacker/terr'ists actually use? I've already read articles where less-than-savy authority/law enforcement types have considered simply having Linux installed on a system as evidence of criminal activity. Making Free Software cryptic and difficult to use (neigh unto impossible for certain groups of users) certainly doesn't advance the cause any.
Not sure you can entirely judge the pay by the parking lot. I could afford to drive a nicer/newer car than I do. I choose not to because I like my cheap Yaris (thing sips gas, and it's a blast to drive!), and I'd rather drive it until the wheels fall off then get a new one rather than have a car payment forever and keep rolling it into a new car every couple of years.
Some people prioritize a nice, new, hot car as something they really want. Others couldn't care less and spend their pay check on other hobbies/luxuries or (heaven forbid..) save the money instead of spend it on a car that'll be in scrap heap in 6 years.
Personally I'd much rather drive a beater and spend the money on a nice house to live in & nice things to play with when I'm home than on a car I spend usually less than an hour a day in. Granted, if I had a long commute, I might reevaluate my priorities.
If you're talking about forensic recovery, then you can't kill it with just one overwrite. Wear-leveling at the hardware level would ensure that your single overwrite actually wrote to different physical blocks than the original. The original blocks wouldn't be touched again until a reasonably large percentage of free storage was overwritten. If you can root the device, you should be able to read out the raw disk blocks with `dd` or similar, Search for "JFIF" tags identifying a JPEG image, and go from there. Assuming the OS is booted at that point, any built-in flash encryption would transparently decrypt as you accessed it, so no help there.
iOS at least does provide a way to do this properly if you really want to. Never store the image in the clear. Create a random encryption key for each image and write the image to flash encrypted with that key. Store the key in the OS' Keychain services. When you want to delete the image, destroy the key, then you can delete the encrypted image from the flash device without concern. iOS provides a mechanism for actually destroying a key in Keychain. IE the flash wear-leveling problem is accounted for at the operating system level. Down side to that is now your app has to go through US export control BS since it does encryption
SO... Now that it's secure on disk, I move to the next weakness. Sniff it over the wire. I haven't looked at SnapChat's traffic, but let's assume they used SSL (otherwise, way too easy...). You'd need to setup a man-in-the-middle proxy. Even on locked down non-jailbroken iOS, you can add trusted CA roots to the OS. So self-sign a cert for whatever hostname they use for their servers, trust it on the device, and now you can sniff the images to save them and most likely figure out the protocol to emulate a client and remove the phone from the equation completely.
Of course, all of this is pretty silly when there's an OS-provided screen capture function that apps aren't able to delete. Power/home button combination, and you have a screenshot. The entire concept of Snapchat is fundamentally flawed given that it can't possibly enforce what it's stated purpose for existence is on its target platform.
"Well designed" isn't a phrase I'd use to describe any COBOL app I've ever had the misfortune to deal with. Most have "stood the test of time" only by having an army of support staff to continuously fix data that the poorly designed and neigh unto unmaintained applications constantly mess up.
Not to say that it's the least bit difficult to write crap in Java,.NET or any other language you'd care to hire an amateur to hack on for you. That said, of the lot, COBOL is by far the most likely to leave you paying tons of money to keep the thing running and least likely to be able to find competent coders to replace an aging workforce.
Assuming they do in some fashion regain control of their account (and setting trusted friends doesn't prevent them from using some other password reset channel), they can simply un-trust your faux friends. Account security is restored. Granted there's a race condition if you can re-reset the password faster than they can un-trust you, but that seems like an *awful* lot of work to keep a Facebook account.
ZoL is useable. Not kernel-integrated, but as an installable module, the licensing isn't an issue. Been using it on home systems for over a year after switching from BSD (moved the BSD pools into ZoL as-is). No dataloss or corruption issues, though I've hit some pathologically bad performance limitations at times on admittedly under-sized hardware.
Also, have hit the "wait for days and hope" issue with ZFS on BSD about two years ago. No dataloss, but three very tense days waiting for dedupe-enabled pool to import on a system that had way too little RAM to property support dedupe.
Hardly the same situation. There are relatively few people who could afford to buy any new car for cash. That said, there are options in a car as there are options in a phone. You can spend $51k on a Corvette (tires extra..), or $15k on a Yaris. One of those may be more realistic at a given income level.
For phones, it's entirely possible to get an affordable phone without going into debt. It may not have all the bells & whistles, but it'll make & receive calls. You can get basic unlocked phones on Amazon in the $50 range. Or you can spend $700 for an iPhone.
If you can't afford $50 out of pocket for the phone, I have a hard time seeing how you're going to pay the monthly fee for a smartphone data plan. Make a realistic choice about what you can afford, and you can have a phone no-contract, and no "gun to your chest" for the loan.
I'm willing to admit that having a phone that rings is an important thing for obtaining and maintaining employment. Outside of specialized (higher paying) industries, there's no *way* having a smartphone is a requirement. If you make enough to be able to afford the smartphone, that's great. I love mine, and I'm glad to have a job that lets me afford to have it. If your job doesn't pay enough, that's unfortunate. There are probably more important things to consider going into debt for than a smartphone, particularly given the much larger monthly cost of a data plan to support the thing.
That's not to say that the loan option is automatically bad. I've not read the fine print, but an interest free loan is generally a GoodThing to take, assuming the small print doesn't taketh away what the large print giveth. Odds are the money could be more effectively used if it really is an interest free loan -- even leaving it in an interest baring bank account gives something. Now.. If you could find the phone for cash online cheaper than the "retail" price at the store, then you're probably ahead to buy it out right.
With respect, perhaps poorer customers who can't afford a balloon payment on a $600 smartphone should.. oh.. I don't know.. Not take a $600 smartphone?
I get that having a cell phone has more or less reached the point of necessity to operate as a productive member of society at this point, but a $50 basic "phone" rings just as well as an iPhone. I can't find a whole lot of sympathy for someone who chooses to get financially locked into a service by accepting a loan that's borderline beyond their means.
Generally paying more as a result of being bigger isn't all that uncommon, regardless of whether you're in-shape and just taller or obese. It doesn't really effect the situation whether the reason for your larger size is beyond your control (your genes make you tall) or by choice (your genes to some degree influence how you carry weight, but your eating choices have a much larger impact).
All-you-can-stuff-your-gullet-with buffets notwithstanding, generally you would expect a larger person to pay more for more food than a smaller person, given the assumption that you likely need more calories to maintain your weight. If you eat a 10oz steak while your smaller companion is satisfied with a 6oz one, asking you to pay more is standard practice and something many restaurants offer. Or perhaps you get the extra appetizer.
You would likely spend (slightly) more on gasoline to drive to & from work on a regular basis than a smaller person.
I don't know enough about weight / fuel cost calculations to know if the additional fee charged in this case is at all fair, but it seems reasonable that the airline would spend more on fuel to fly a plane with 50 300lb people than it would with 50 100lb people. Assuming they're not gouging in the weight difference (again, I don't know enough about the technology to have an opinion on that), it seems reasonable that a patron who costs them more to serve would be expected to pay a commensurate higher rate.
In fairness, at least on Mac, VMWare slaughters VirtualBox and Parallels on performance. Worth the money, IMHO. On Linux/Windows it could well be a different story.
No, but a lawyer should consult with a software engineer before setting out to design software, rather like a software engineer should consult with a lawyer before setting out to apply legal constraints to his creation.
The reinstall disks that come with new machines are intended only to install on the new machine they came with. They're locked to the model number they were produced for. It's no surprise you had trouble installing your laptop's reinstall disk on your wife's machine. You're not supposed to be able to install it on other systems because you're violating the license in doing so. Think of it like an "OEM" CD for Windows. It's only going to install (without a fight) on the system type it came with.
If you had a retail install DVD (or created a DVD/USB stick from the DMG in the AppStore download), you shouldn't have any trouble installing an older OSX on newer hardware, just so long as you're not trying to cross the PPC/Intel boundary. Drivers are of course the wild card there, but the OS should work in some kind of fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh.. Looks like you actually came late this time. Must be a first for you.
There's a difference between negotiating in a closed room and trying to keep the results of that negotiation private. I've no problem with congress critters sequestering themselves in a smoke filled room to get a bill drafted. The results of the negotiation need to see the light of day before it's passed. Trying to hide the contents and just ram it through without public comment (as was tried with ACTA) is an entirely different thing.
Granted, FISA is a somewhat different situation.
Paths to victory:
* Damage our reputation through the rest of the world as a result of our overreaction and constant trampling on other nations. Too much of this, and our position as a world leader begins to suffer, and we just turn into a bully with lots of bombs. Once I think we were a world power because the rest of the nations of the world respected us. Increasingly, we take a page from Machiavelli, and we are "respected" (perhaps tolerated is a better word) as a world power simply because we can kill more of their citizens than they can kill of ours.
* Cause us to abandon our ideals of freedom and democracy (a piece at a time), thus destroying the basis that the nation was founded on and the things that make it (IMHO) great. This is an ideology win in that they can point and show how all of our freedoms don't actually amount to anything and that their restricted life controlled by government controlled by religion is the right and natural state of the world. They prove we had it wrong from the start.
* Ultimately, goad America into spending itself into inescapable debt through permanent war, eventually resulting in the destruction of the Republic. The question here is how long we can continue to "borrow" money on the unspoken threat that we continue to use our military to "protect" the rest of the world as long as the world continues to buy our debt. ("That's an awfully nice country you've got there. Shame if anything was to happen to it..")
All told, I think we're on a pretty good track to fulfill these paths to loss in this asymmetric .. no, sorry.. I can't bring myself to apply the world 'war' to this.
Is that you, Mr. Card?
You use the word "rapid" to describe Windows' deteriorating use. Tell me, on a scale of "Watching grass grow," to "Why did the snail cross the road?" just how rapid are we talking here?
I'm not about to argue that Win8 is anything but a train wreck, but claiming that Windows' position in business is rapidly changing is a bit.. well.. dead wrong... Sure Win8 isn't being adopted in droves as MS might like, but of all of the WinXP-Win7 users who *aren't* upgrading [sic] to Win8, I don't imagine terribly many of them are jumping ship and moving to Linux or Mac. Some yes, but I doubt it's more than background noise on the stats.
Even if Microsoft didn't see a single new Windows license this year, their market share isn't in any immediate danger. (And by "new license," I mean an actual new person who wasn't using Windows before. Replacing an existing Winbox with a new one and paying the Microsoft tax or changing the installed Windows version on an existing machine doesn't effect the overall number of people using Windows and buying software to run on it.)
And perhaps worth nothing, this relatively MS-positive post was brought to you by a Mac user...
Imma break this iPhone in half and shank you with the broken gorilla glass!!!
I was well aware as a child that if I touched my father's guns (without his immediate supervision & permission), any injury the guns might cause would pale in comparison with what awaited me when my father found out.
No. And quite a few good reasons to block them.
That said, most webservers have no firewall to speak of in front of them and are run by "administrators" who don't even know how to configure the hosts's software firewall properly to block unwanted traffic (or on shared hosting where the host has no interest in the complexities of managing the software firewall for multiple users).
"Swaying a judgement." I think we've found a new euphemism here.
I think my car analogy holds fine here. My car is FOSS in this case, but I still choose not to do most of the work myself even if there's nothing legal or technological preventing me from doing it. The software in the post I replied to originally is also FOSS, but the author seems to think that users should be required to do all of the dirty work themselves before they be allowed to use it. The only way I can drive that car is if I know how to install the engine & transmission myself before I start driving it.
Nothing in my original post had anything to do with the lock in of closed source software or restrictive EULA's that prevent me from fixing it. Yes that is a problem, but the problem of closed source software is not related to the problem of actively user-hostile open source software that prevents "real" people from using it.
Actually... On second thought, there is a relation between those things. The problem of user-hostile open source actually drives users to locked in closed source as they simply don't have the ability to use potentially equivalent open source options.
RMS, is that you?
Not sure what domain your project is in, but unless your target market is "Linux, Emacs users who know C" odds are you're cutting a goodly number of potential users out with that attitude. Certainly there are tools that is appropriate for, but the VAST majority of users don't have a compiler on their systems, much less know how to use one.
Is that a tragedy of the Microsoft-ocracy keeping the world closed for users? I don't think so. [Car analogy coming up] Just because I could technically acquire all of the tools and knowhow to replace any particular part on my car, doesn't mean it's the best use of my money and time to do so. Even if the tools were all free (as in the case of GCC et al.), it's unlikely that it would be in the best interests of a non-techy to take the time to learn to use them, much less learn to troubleshoot them when `./configure && make && make install` doesn't go according to plan. To many people, computers are just tools to get other non-computer related work done, and there's nothing wrong with that. Some people like to tinker with their cars, others just want to drive to work and park them.
Even a user who doesn't know how to fix bugs & recompile can be a useful asset to an Open Source project. I've found that some of my non-technical users are the most details oriented when it comes to finding edge case bugs and documenting what it takes to reproduce them. Often enough those are the kinds of bugs that take me two minutes to fix but would have taken hours to track down if not for a complete reproducer reported by a user.
As far as giving people the wrong idea about Free Software, which is worse: Users thinking Free Software is about the price or that it's unusable junk that only nerd/hacker/terr'ists actually use? I've already read articles where less-than-savy authority/law enforcement types have considered simply having Linux installed on a system as evidence of criminal activity. Making Free Software cryptic and difficult to use (neigh unto impossible for certain groups of users) certainly doesn't advance the cause any.
Not sure you can entirely judge the pay by the parking lot. I could afford to drive a nicer/newer car than I do. I choose not to because I like my cheap Yaris (thing sips gas, and it's a blast to drive!), and I'd rather drive it until the wheels fall off then get a new one rather than have a car payment forever and keep rolling it into a new car every couple of years.
Some people prioritize a nice, new, hot car as something they really want. Others couldn't care less and spend their pay check on other hobbies/luxuries or (heaven forbid..) save the money instead of spend it on a car that'll be in scrap heap in 6 years.
Personally I'd much rather drive a beater and spend the money on a nice house to live in & nice things to play with when I'm home than on a car I spend usually less than an hour a day in. Granted, if I had a long commute, I might reevaluate my priorities.
If you're talking about forensic recovery, then you can't kill it with just one overwrite. Wear-leveling at the hardware level would ensure that your single overwrite actually wrote to different physical blocks than the original. The original blocks wouldn't be touched again until a reasonably large percentage of free storage was overwritten. If you can root the device, you should be able to read out the raw disk blocks with `dd` or similar, Search for "JFIF" tags identifying a JPEG image, and go from there. Assuming the OS is booted at that point, any built-in flash encryption would transparently decrypt as you accessed it, so no help there.
iOS at least does provide a way to do this properly if you really want to. Never store the image in the clear. Create a random encryption key for each image and write the image to flash encrypted with that key. Store the key in the OS' Keychain services. When you want to delete the image, destroy the key, then you can delete the encrypted image from the flash device without concern. iOS provides a mechanism for actually destroying a key in Keychain. IE the flash wear-leveling problem is accounted for at the operating system level. Down side to that is now your app has to go through US export control BS since it does encryption
SO... Now that it's secure on disk, I move to the next weakness. Sniff it over the wire. I haven't looked at SnapChat's traffic, but let's assume they used SSL (otherwise, way too easy...). You'd need to setup a man-in-the-middle proxy. Even on locked down non-jailbroken iOS, you can add trusted CA roots to the OS. So self-sign a cert for whatever hostname they use for their servers, trust it on the device, and now you can sniff the images to save them and most likely figure out the protocol to emulate a client and remove the phone from the equation completely.
Of course, all of this is pretty silly when there's an OS-provided screen capture function that apps aren't able to delete. Power/home button combination, and you have a screenshot. The entire concept of Snapchat is fundamentally flawed given that it can't possibly enforce what it's stated purpose for existence is on its target platform.
"Well designed" isn't a phrase I'd use to describe any COBOL app I've ever had the misfortune to deal with. Most have "stood the test of time" only by having an army of support staff to continuously fix data that the poorly designed and neigh unto unmaintained applications constantly mess up.
Not to say that it's the least bit difficult to write crap in Java, .NET or any other language you'd care to hire an amateur to hack on for you. That said, of the lot, COBOL is by far the most likely to leave you paying tons of money to keep the thing running and least likely to be able to find competent coders to replace an aging workforce.
Assuming they do in some fashion regain control of their account (and setting trusted friends doesn't prevent them from using some other password reset channel), they can simply un-trust your faux friends. Account security is restored. Granted there's a race condition if you can re-reset the password faster than they can un-trust you, but that seems like an *awful* lot of work to keep a Facebook account.
ZoL is useable. Not kernel-integrated, but as an installable module, the licensing isn't an issue. Been using it on home systems for over a year after switching from BSD (moved the BSD pools into ZoL as-is). No dataloss or corruption issues, though I've hit some pathologically bad performance limitations at times on admittedly under-sized hardware.
Also, have hit the "wait for days and hope" issue with ZFS on BSD about two years ago. No dataloss, but three very tense days waiting for dedupe-enabled pool to import on a system that had way too little RAM to property support dedupe.
Hardly the same situation. There are relatively few people who could afford to buy any new car for cash. That said, there are options in a car as there are options in a phone. You can spend $51k on a Corvette (tires extra..), or $15k on a Yaris. One of those may be more realistic at a given income level.
For phones, it's entirely possible to get an affordable phone without going into debt. It may not have all the bells & whistles, but it'll make & receive calls. You can get basic unlocked phones on Amazon in the $50 range. Or you can spend $700 for an iPhone.
If you can't afford $50 out of pocket for the phone, I have a hard time seeing how you're going to pay the monthly fee for a smartphone data plan. Make a realistic choice about what you can afford, and you can have a phone no-contract, and no "gun to your chest" for the loan.
I'm willing to admit that having a phone that rings is an important thing for obtaining and maintaining employment. Outside of specialized (higher paying) industries, there's no *way* having a smartphone is a requirement. If you make enough to be able to afford the smartphone, that's great. I love mine, and I'm glad to have a job that lets me afford to have it. If your job doesn't pay enough, that's unfortunate. There are probably more important things to consider going into debt for than a smartphone, particularly given the much larger monthly cost of a data plan to support the thing.
That's not to say that the loan option is automatically bad. I've not read the fine print, but an interest free loan is generally a GoodThing to take, assuming the small print doesn't taketh away what the large print giveth. Odds are the money could be more effectively used if it really is an interest free loan -- even leaving it in an interest baring bank account gives something. Now.. If you could find the phone for cash online cheaper than the "retail" price at the store, then you're probably ahead to buy it out right.
With respect, perhaps poorer customers who can't afford a balloon payment on a $600 smartphone should.. oh.. I don't know.. Not take a $600 smartphone?
I get that having a cell phone has more or less reached the point of necessity to operate as a productive member of society at this point, but a $50 basic "phone" rings just as well as an iPhone. I can't find a whole lot of sympathy for someone who chooses to get financially locked into a service by accepting a loan that's borderline beyond their means.
Generally paying more as a result of being bigger isn't all that uncommon, regardless of whether you're in-shape and just taller or obese. It doesn't really effect the situation whether the reason for your larger size is beyond your control (your genes make you tall) or by choice (your genes to some degree influence how you carry weight, but your eating choices have a much larger impact).
All-you-can-stuff-your-gullet-with buffets notwithstanding, generally you would expect a larger person to pay more for more food than a smaller person, given the assumption that you likely need more calories to maintain your weight. If you eat a 10oz steak while your smaller companion is satisfied with a 6oz one, asking you to pay more is standard practice and something many restaurants offer. Or perhaps you get the extra appetizer.
You would likely spend (slightly) more on gasoline to drive to & from work on a regular basis than a smaller person.
I don't know enough about weight / fuel cost calculations to know if the additional fee charged in this case is at all fair, but it seems reasonable that the airline would spend more on fuel to fly a plane with 50 300lb people than it would with 50 100lb people. Assuming they're not gouging in the weight difference (again, I don't know enough about the technology to have an opinion on that), it seems reasonable that a patron who costs them more to serve would be expected to pay a commensurate higher rate.
Yup. Triggers since 5.0.2:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/triggers.html
In fairness, at least on Mac, VMWare slaughters VirtualBox and Parallels on performance. Worth the money, IMHO. On Linux/Windows it could well be a different story.
While Apple developed launchd and uses it pretty exclusively, they haven't removed cron from OS X.
That's rather moot as Apple's cron isn't covered by GPL. They use vixie cron which is BSD licensed.
No, but a lawyer should consult with a software engineer before setting out to design software, rather like a software engineer should consult with a lawyer before setting out to apply legal constraints to his creation.
Is that how you catch hearing AIDS?
The reinstall disks that come with new machines are intended only to install on the new machine they came with. They're locked to the model number they were produced for. It's no surprise you had trouble installing your laptop's reinstall disk on your wife's machine. You're not supposed to be able to install it on other systems because you're violating the license in doing so. Think of it like an "OEM" CD for Windows. It's only going to install (without a fight) on the system type it came with.
If you had a retail install DVD (or created a DVD/USB stick from the DMG in the AppStore download), you shouldn't have any trouble installing an older OSX on newer hardware, just so long as you're not trying to cross the PPC/Intel boundary. Drivers are of course the wild card there, but the OS should work in some kind of fashion.