Something that any one who is concerned that we didn't meet the goals of "golden era" science fiction should consider. Not a single one of those authors envisioned cheap, ubiquitous, and unspecialized computer hardware and software. Not one. The closest was Heinlein and he didn't get very close. See Heinlein's The Rolling Stones or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I grew up on science fiction in the 70s and recognized around 1977 that things were not going to be like in the books. Just because we didn't meet one goal doesn't mean that we should be pessimistic about the future. What the future holds is unpredictable.
Wow! I had forgotten the name of that upgrade. A total hack that worked flawlessly. The Monster board hooked up by clamping on some of the RAM decode logic chips. This was in the days before surface mount.
I had 2 MB of RAM and a 8 MHz 68k in 1987 or so. Better than most $10,000 workstations at the time.
"Nobody is selling me a CISC CPU carrying 8086 instructions in 2007."
Yeah, me either so I'm switching to Windows...Oh wait. Yeah, me either so I'm switching to Linux...Oh wait. Yeah, I'm going to stop using computers after 2007, yeah that's the ticket.
He is also the founder of a company mentioned in his article, Power Steering Software, though last I heard he isn't involved with its daily operation any longer.
The point is that PowerSteering Software sells its application like Salesforce.com over the web and not installed (usually) at the customer's site. PowerSteering hosts its software as a web-application on its own servers. Generally, those servers are Linux and the application server is Resin (again usually.)
The Cells are essentially identical so once the code has been parallelized the tasks that the code runs can be dispatched to any available Cell as it becomes available. The OS can do this automatically. This has nothing to do with how the code becomes parallelized but just how it is run.
Mac OS X 10.4.1 completely fixes the the widget auto-installation issue
I can confirm this. I would disagree on the "completely" but it is certainly good enough for now. It would be better if you couldn't override existing widgets and even better if Apple supplied an advanced button that allowed me to control the sandbox that is built in to Dashboard. As it stands now, Apple has a working sandbox with various levels of security which is completely useless because it isn't exposed to the end user. What is the point of having a AllowFullAccess boolean if the developer can add it without any controls by the user?
Also, do you know if this fixes the 1GB sparse image problem? I see a HFS resource fork issue vaguely mentioned in the developer release notes but I have no idea if that is the sparse image problem or not.
Go to the article and read about the streaming in the SPE. You can overlap incoming with outgoing. So thread 1 is DMAing its data in while thread 0 is DMAing its data out.
Can you point to any credible source for this (mis)information? I've heard many people repeat that spyware exists for OS X but they have never been able to point out any source or study, they just repeat the same rumors.
I did it for months on a project for a company I co-founded. But I don't think it is possible in a traditional environment.
For me, in between bouts of programming, I would sleep for 3 or 4 hours at a time. When I felt tired, I slept. There was no schedule. This was made easier by being at home and working in my home office. I also drank large quantities of Jolt Cola and somewhat less coffee.
I don't know why anyone would do such a thing for a company that they don't have an ownership interest in though.
If you read the threads, this isn't something that is going to affect most users. This guy is trying to put 22,000 contacts on his phone. It is taking up over 11 MB. Not good but we are talking an edge case here. I can't believe that this is a normal usage pattern for a phone!
I have about 100 contacts on my phone and I don't know who many of them are. They were added during business meetings or various introductions. How can anyone keep track of 22,000 contacts?
The supposed problem with the Treo 650 seems to be completely overblown from what I can see.
Have you ever tried to get it fixed? You do realize that if all iPods needed a hard reset every time before they were used, no one would buy them? It must have occurred to you that this is not normal behavior.
Apple would, hilariously enough, be in violation of the DMCA if they did that.
I'm not sure that this is true. Apple is the owner of the DRM in question. If the owner of the DRM doesn't have the right to decode the DRM, then how can the device play back the audio in the first place. I think we might have hit a spot that the DCMA doesn't address. Something completely unanticipated.
Something that no one seems to notice in these articles is that Fairplay as it currently implemented won't work on a CD. Fairplay includes your user id and encrypted atoms in the AAC container based on your user id. A CD will necessarily have to have a static encryption model. As far as I know, Fairplay doesn't do that.
I don't think that Apple will have much interest in changing their DRM to accommodate the CD DRM companies since doing nothing will have the same effect. If users can't use their iPods then I don't think that Suncomm or Macrovision DRM is going to become an industry standard.
You had to use iTunes to win, but you didn't have to purchase a song through iTunes to win. The "tell a friend" feature is only available when using iTunes. If you sent mail to itunes100@apple.com through regular email, you were not registered.
The length of time from discovery to the release of the patch is not the only important statistic, it is also important to study the percentage of the patches successfully deployed.
Apple has Software Update on by default and set to check weekly. The vast majority of OS X users update within a week of a patch being deployed. This is NOT the case on any version of Windows. Apple has a reputation of successful patches that, in general, don't screw up your system. Microsoft is far less successful in that department.
There is also more to security than how many reports of security holes are submitted. I won't claim Secunia have any agenda other than self aggrandizement but these "statistics" really don't show the security of any OS. It compares the number of security bugs found in each system. That is clearly not the same thing as measuring the actual security of an OS.
Secunia reports statistics but haven't studied the information, not even superficially. The statistics don't take into account how many of the remote exploits have the ports turned on or off by default in the OS. This is far more important than the bug count. If 30 exploits are from ftp and no one ever turns ftp on, then those 30 exploits are far less interesting than a single exploit that works through port 80 from a web browser without user interaction. There can be no comparison between those in terms of severity but Secunia doesn't even superficially try to rank the seriousness of the security problems.
All in all, Secunia's information isn't very useful for anyone really trying to understand the security differences between different OS platforms.
Finally, I can find nothing resembling a study of OS security on Secunia's website. All I can find are statistics without any information on how they categorized them in the Critical to Not rankings. I don't really see anything that is a study, just a statistical report with dubious information about exploit rankings.
How is click cancel when you see this dialog any more complicated then "don't open unknown email attachments"? Seems about the same level of complexity to me.
And you are probably correct that some people will never learn and will eventually get hit by this potential problem. But I'm at a loss to what you can do to prevent it? Any suggestions for the very weak minded who can't follow even the simplest of advice?
There are untold numbers of things you can do to people who don't learn to distrust software delivered to them without their express cooperation. I don't see how you can ever solve that problem except by doing the Microsoft thing and preventing software from being installed unless it is approved by some central approval agency. I wouldn't want that for OS X.
In addition, the dialog only appears the first time you open an app and only if you open it with an associated URI or document. If the user opens the application by double-clicking the application icon, then it opens without a warning, as expected. The issue Apple had to solve is how to inform the user of a new association of documents or URI handlers. Apple has solved it in the only way I can think of.
Hmm, easy then. Tell any unsophisticated OS X user to always click cancel. Always. Now the user only has to go find the actual application on their disk and click on it deliberately in the finder.
Go back to the same web page, if the dialog is gone, it was legitimate, if it still present when they go back then it is malware. Easy. Even the most unsophisticated user can follow those easy instructions. They are not going to get bombarded with this dialog. It is going to be a rare event for the average user.
Unlike windows, running a new, untrusted application installed from the browser is a very unusual circumstance on the Mac. It just doesn't happen. For most users, a new application is installed in/Applications. Since you can't do that without an Admin password, any legitimate Application already has to be installed with a users consent.
Users definitely need a quick tutorial on this potential security issue, but if and when they get this dialog they will know something is up. If they are running a new plug-in that they explicitly want, they simply click OK, if not then click Cancel and report the incident as suspicious.
Nothing should ever be installed on your computer via a browser without your express consent. Knowing when to accept or not isn't as big a problem as it is made out to be.
And the iPod is "lame". All of the negative feedback saying the iPod was missing too many features, it was too expensive, blah blah blah. Steve Jobs probably knows this market better than you do.
Slashdot Mirror
Something that any one who is concerned that we didn't meet the goals of "golden era" science fiction should consider. Not a single one of those authors envisioned cheap, ubiquitous, and unspecialized computer hardware and software. Not one. The closest was Heinlein and he didn't get very close. See Heinlein's The Rolling Stones or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I grew up on science fiction in the 70s and recognized around 1977 that things were not going to be like in the books. Just because we didn't meet one goal doesn't mean that we should be pessimistic about the future. What the future holds is unpredictable.
I'm pretty sure it is a parody and not a serious article. It is written in the style of a 12 yo fanboy with no sense of history or interest in facts.
It reads like something from the Onion. Don't take it seriously.
Wow! I had forgotten the name of that upgrade. A total hack that worked flawlessly. The Monster board hooked up by clamping on some of the RAM decode logic chips. This was in the days before surface mount.
I had 2 MB of RAM and a 8 MHz 68k in 1987 or so. Better than most $10,000 workstations at the time.
Yeah, me either so I'm switching to Windows...Oh wait. Yeah, me either so I'm switching to Linux...Oh wait. Yeah, I'm going to stop using computers after 2007, yeah that's the ticket.
What are you going to do? Buy a Sun workstation?
He is also the founder of a company mentioned in his article, Power Steering Software, though last I heard he isn't involved with its daily operation any longer.
The point is that PowerSteering Software sells its application like Salesforce.com over the web and not installed (usually) at the customer's site. PowerSteering hosts its software as a web-application on its own servers. Generally, those servers are Linux and the application server is Resin (again usually.)
The Cells are essentially identical so once the code has been parallelized the tasks that the code runs can be dispatched to any available Cell as it becomes available. The OS can do this automatically. This has nothing to do with how the code becomes parallelized but just how it is run.
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
I can confirm this. I would disagree on the "completely" but it is certainly good enough for now. It would be better if you couldn't override existing widgets and even better if Apple supplied an advanced button that allowed me to control the sandbox that is built in to Dashboard. As it stands now, Apple has a working sandbox with various levels of security which is completely useless because it isn't exposed to the end user. What is the point of having a AllowFullAccess boolean if the developer can add it without any controls by the user?
Also, do you know if this fixes the 1GB sparse image problem? I see a HFS resource fork issue vaguely mentioned in the developer release notes but I have no idea if that is the sparse image problem or not.
Figure 2 - Per stage circuit delay depth of 11 FO4 often left only 5~8 FO4 for logic flow
The author of the article seems to think an 11 F04 is pretty aggressive.
Go to the article and read about the streaming in the SPE. You can overlap incoming with outgoing. So thread 1 is DMAing its data in while thread 0 is DMAing its data out.
Why do you think they licensed the XDR interface from RAMBUS?
There are 2 dual XDR interfaces. Each interface is running at 6.4 GB/s. So 4*6.4 = 25.6 GBytes/sec.
So the CELL memory design is at least 4 times faster than current DDR2 memory systems.
Can you point to any credible source for this (mis)information? I've heard many people repeat that spyware exists for OS X but they have never been able to point out any source or study, they just repeat the same rumors.
I did it for months on a project for a company I co-founded. But I don't think it is possible in a traditional environment.
For me, in between bouts of programming, I would sleep for 3 or 4 hours at a time. When I felt tired, I slept. There was no schedule. This was made easier by being at home and working in my home office. I also drank large quantities of Jolt Cola and somewhat less coffee.
I don't know why anyone would do such a thing for a company that they don't have an ownership interest in though.
If you read the threads, this isn't something that is going to affect most users. This guy is trying to put 22,000 contacts on his phone. It is taking up over 11 MB. Not good but we are talking an edge case here. I can't believe that this is a normal usage pattern for a phone!
I have about 100 contacts on my phone and I don't know who many of them are. They were added during business meetings or various introductions. How can anyone keep track of 22,000 contacts?
The supposed problem with the Treo 650 seems to be completely overblown from what I can see.
Have you ever tried to get it fixed? You do realize that if all iPods needed a hard reset every time before they were used, no one would buy them? It must have occurred to you that this is not normal behavior.
I'm not sure that this is true. Apple is the owner of the DRM in question. If the owner of the DRM doesn't have the right to decode the DRM, then how can the device play back the audio in the first place. I think we might have hit a spot that the DCMA doesn't address. Something completely unanticipated.
Something that no one seems to notice in these articles is that Fairplay as it currently implemented won't work on a CD. Fairplay includes your user id and encrypted atoms in the AAC container based on your user id. A CD will necessarily have to have a static encryption model. As far as I know, Fairplay doesn't do that.
I don't think that Apple will have much interest in changing their DRM to accommodate the CD DRM companies since doing nothing will have the same effect. If users can't use their iPods then I don't think that Suncomm or Macrovision DRM is going to become an industry standard.
You had to use iTunes to win, but you didn't have to purchase a song through iTunes to win. The "tell a friend" feature is only available when using iTunes. If you sent mail to itunes100@apple.com through regular email, you were not registered.
Hope that clears up the conspiracy theory.
The length of time from discovery to the release of the patch is not the only important statistic, it is also important to study the percentage of the patches successfully deployed.
Apple has Software Update on by default and set to check weekly. The vast majority of OS X users update within a week of a patch being deployed. This is NOT the case on any version of Windows. Apple has a reputation of successful patches that, in general, don't screw up your system. Microsoft is far less successful in that department.
There is also more to security than how many reports of security holes are submitted. I won't claim Secunia have any agenda other than self aggrandizement but these "statistics" really don't show the security of any OS. It compares the number of security bugs found in each system. That is clearly not the same thing as measuring the actual security of an OS.
Secunia reports statistics but haven't studied the information, not even superficially. The statistics don't take into account how many of the remote exploits have the ports turned on or off by default in the OS. This is far more important than the bug count. If 30 exploits are from ftp and no one ever turns ftp on, then those 30 exploits are far less interesting than a single exploit that works through port 80 from a web browser without user interaction. There can be no comparison between those in terms of severity but Secunia doesn't even superficially try to rank the seriousness of the security problems.
All in all, Secunia's information isn't very useful for anyone really trying to understand the security differences between different OS platforms.
Finally, I can find nothing resembling a study of OS security on Secunia's website. All I can find are statistics without any information on how they categorized them in the Critical to Not rankings. I don't really see anything that is a study, just a statistical report with dubious information about exploit rankings.
How is click cancel when you see this dialog any more complicated then "don't open unknown email attachments"? Seems about the same level of complexity to me.
And you are probably correct that some people will never learn and will eventually get hit by this potential problem. But I'm at a loss to what you can do to prevent it? Any suggestions for the very weak minded who can't follow even the simplest of advice?
There are untold numbers of things you can do to people who don't learn to distrust software delivered to them without their express cooperation. I don't see how you can ever solve that problem except by doing the Microsoft thing and preventing software from being installed unless it is approved by some central approval agency. I wouldn't want that for OS X.
In addition, the dialog only appears the first time you open an app and only if you open it with an associated URI or document. If the user opens the application by double-clicking the application icon, then it opens without a warning, as expected. The issue Apple had to solve is how to inform the user of a new association of documents or URI handlers. Apple has solved it in the only way I can think of.
Hmm, easy then. Tell any unsophisticated OS X user to always click cancel. Always. Now the user only has to go find the actual application on their disk and click on it deliberately in the finder.
Go back to the same web page, if the dialog is gone, it was legitimate, if it still present when they go back then it is malware. Easy. Even the most unsophisticated user can follow those easy instructions. They are not going to get bombarded with this dialog. It is going to be a rare event for the average user.
I think you are overstating the problem.
Unlike windows, running a new, untrusted application installed from the browser is a very unusual circumstance on the Mac. It just doesn't happen. For most users, a new application is installed in /Applications. Since you can't do that without an Admin password, any legitimate Application already has to be installed with a users consent.
Users definitely need a quick tutorial on this potential security issue, but if and when they get this dialog they will know something is up. If they are running a new plug-in that they explicitly want, they simply click OK, if not then click Cancel and report the incident as suspicious.
Nothing should ever be installed on your computer via a browser without your express consent. Knowing when to accept or not isn't as big a problem as it is made out to be.
And the iPod is "lame". All of the negative feedback saying the iPod was missing too many features, it was too expensive, blah blah blah. Steve Jobs probably knows this market better than you do.
Right, remember all the drawbacks to the "lame" iPod? Everyone said it was doomed from the start. Please.