And I doubt that the security advantage will keep after all. Give it a bit more time and iOS will be just as virus plagued as Android is.
Why would more time matter? For OS X, sure it is slowly gaining market share and becoming a more and more attractive target. For iOS though, it has dominated as the biggest single target for a long time.
I highy doubt iOS is fundamentally more secure than Android...
The article makes no such claim. Rather, it claims the difference is the ecosystem in which each is released. The claim is not that iOS is more secure, but that the distribution model locked to the Apple store and the accountability of people submitting to the iTunes App store is the determining factor. It's sort of like saying people in Vegas aren't more honest, rather the lack of petty crime in casinos is because there are cameras everywhere and sometimes they call the cops and others they take you out back and some guys beats the snot out of you. iOS is not more secure, but iOS devices end up being more so given the environment.
Not code documentation, but end user documentation was my gig for a while. At one point there were more Bugzilla entries from me (entered as I tried to use and document the software) than from the whole 15 person QA team put together. It was one of the experiences that drove me into software testing and then pen testing.
More on topic for the article, my current employer implements extensive unit testing before any code is written (no really, I know lots of places say they do this, but it actually happens and is useful). Specifications are written by non-technical people and then tested and approved by those people before code is accepted. It also goes through a technical review and blackbox testing before acceptance. I'm not sure writing technical documentation would add a lot to the process, but I'd like to give it a shot and see how the experiment plays out. I'll bring it up next week and see if the team has any interest.
Why? Why would Apple want to do this, aside from some insane take over the world theory? They are certainly pushing for signed applications running in nice sandboxes and they're using the Mac store as one way to do it, but why would they want to disable other applications entirely?
To charge their customary 30% for every Mac OS X application?
If money is the motive, you should know they make so little on both stores put together (including music and movie sales) that it is barely a blip on their radar. Apple is a razor not a blade business model. The stores are purely there as ways to make hardware more attractive and increase hardware sales.
The definition of worm is not "malware that copies itself from system to system automatically without user interaction". Worm is self-replicating code that uses a network, by some defintions, and, by others, a worm is any malware that spreads by itself but does not parasite legitimate software (thus why "USB worms").
I worked in the security industry for many years and never heard anyone call something a "usb worm". If it is copying itself as the result of user interaction, we always called it a virus. If it spread on its own, it was a worm. The definition of "worm" you provide does not seem to differentiate itself from a virus in any way. Something that copies itself via shared disks is almost the classic poster child for a virus. The term originated talking about malware spread on floppies.
You now, a paranoid man would say this is an Apple conspiracy to push the Mac community toward the walled garden approach that their iOS devices are stuck in. Imagine if in OS X 10.9 you cannot install any third-party applications unless they come digitally signed from the Mac App Store.
Why? Why would Apple want to do this, aside from some insane take over the world theory? They are certainly pushing for signed applications running in nice sandboxes and they're using the Mac store as one way to do it, but why would they want to disable other applications entirely? The whole corporate development market, the software developer market for both iOS and MacOS would be horribly inconvenienced potentially to the point of walking away from the platform. Legacy software would prevent huge numbers of users from ever upgrading. I could go on listing reasons why Apple wouldn't want to do this, but I still haven't heard one good reason why they would want to do this. Apple doesn't make money on the iOS app store, nor really on the Mac app store. Where's the motive?
I know, it's a stretch, but I never thought it would happen on their mobile devices either.
On mobile devices they got to start fresh and they had a huge problem to solve... battery life. Phones live or die in the market based on battery life and user perception thereof. Locking down software on iOS was primarily about preventing apps that did not use battery efficient threading, push notifications, and system services so that users would be happy about their battery usage. Google is still trying to crack that nut and if you ever get a chance to talk to their devs, they know it.
Is that Java security hole that we heard about over the last weeks Mac-specific or cross-platform? Any reason to worry or to have our belief in Java security shattered?
It was cross platform. Oracle seems to have fixed it in the Windows version of Java quite a while ago, then more recently in the Mac version, although that last point seems to be a matter of contention between Apple and Oracle.
Isn't a Trojan that requires no user interaction by definition a Virus?
Not really.
Trojan - malware posing as legitimate software.
Virus - malware that copies itself either replacing or attaching to legitimate software.
Worm - malware that copies itself from system to system automatically without user interaction.
This software seems to be automatically installed when the user follows a link in their Web browser, but there is no indication that it in any way sends more links to people. So this malware does not fit neatly into any of the common categories. "Virus" seems to be a catch all term these days so you might as well call it that.
This Trojan further underlines the importance of protecting Macs against malware with an updated anti-virus program as well as the latest security updates.
Doesn't that seem to come off as a slightly counter-intuitive statement? Is it unreasonable to come away from this article asking yourself "Why buy anti-virus when the malware just avoids it anyway?"
It is trying to hide its similarity to other malware so that a new signature is needed to detect this specific variant. So while anti-virus programs may not detect this now, within a few days they probably will, at least until there is yet another variant. Apple is, of course, including their own signatures right in the OS so that makes antivirus less attractive as well, although Apple's response time has been hit and miss.
I hope the recent rash of Malware for the Mac will serve to change the culture of security at Apple. They have a lot of really good technology in that regard and many very good coders who work with security as a priority (they have a lot of oldschool UNIX guys these days). The problem is, it is not a priority for Apple or part of their culture. Some Apple software ships with what looks like no security review at all and no real consideration, while other software clearly was architected with that as a design goal.
They have some very nice sandboxing, but they don't apply it very widely within OS X, even when there is no pain to the user or developer. It is like they just don't want to spend money and resources on that sort of hardening. You send a security hole to Apple and sometimes you hear back the next day and it is fixed in short order. Other times you hear nothing or malware is known and spreading for weeks before Apple bothers to issue a filtering signature.
Hey Apple! Wake up and smell the coffee. Dump some of your cash reserves into expanding work in security and having some experts paying attention and getting things done. "Think Different" about security and listen to the people you already have that have created groundbreaking security systems elsewhere.
Also, note that KDE, the original developers of the KHTML project that Apple forked and renamed as Webkit also would appear to be unwilling to jump into the arms of Apple.
They collaborated with Apple to integrate changes from Webkit into KHTML, but did not merge the projects because they wanted to go a different direction architecturally. Google and Samsung and numerous others don't seem to have any problem working with Apple to create OSS. Apple can be annoying and slow but i've never heard of them to be a poor OSS collaborator.
Citation? I've heard this before but every time I look into I just find articles debunking that theory. Apple got a head start because they helped develop it and wanted to ship right away. Other vendors could have done the same.
what apple shop you live in?
"until apple dumped their legacy ports".. wtf man. during that time period apple didn't mean jack shit, they didn't sell too much.
According to PC report, Apple iMacs accounted for 7% of all consumer PC sales in the US and were the top selling consumer PC in 98 (the year it was introduced and Apple dropped legacy ports for USB). That was more than enough to have a significant influence on the peripheral market, albeit a a niche one.
No, it doesn't. It says that talking to passengers is less distracting than talking on the phone. In other words, the nominal case for the cell phone is worse than the nominal case for an adult passenger. However, when you examine the worst case, their relative levels of distraction reverse fairly dramatically.
I don't see anything about the levels of distraction reversing, nor is the extreme case the normal case. Please provide a citation for your claims (or let us know when you are making up assertions without backing).
Yes, Microsoft's and Apple's bottom lines will be decimated by the loss of revenues from lower sales of [Microsoft Office, Microsoft Security, Silverlight, Printshop, Flux, iWork, etc].
Fixed that for you.
Printshop?!? You mean publishing software never owned by either Apple or MS? Flux? The only Apple product you listed was iWork and it isn't even a significant revenue stream for Apple. This entire argument seems idiotic, as companies like Apple do create and contribute to OSS all the time (Webkit anyone?). Apple mainly uses software and services as ways to motivate people to buy hardware. If you want to hurt their bottom line, use all their software and none of their hardware.
I thought Intellectual Property laws protected creators from other creators, not from retailers... Apple's terms and conditions clearly state that anything submitted to their store must be legal to sell in the first place. This is a grab for attention, nothing else, and the accusers are only wasting their time.
So it's perfectly legal to sell counterfeit goods so long as you didn't actually create said goods and your 'terms and conditions' state that you have been told by the supplier that the goods are legal to sell in the first place? Sounds like a nice way to absolve yourself of responsibility.
It's not "perfectly legal". It is, however, only slightly illegal and puts the majority of the financial burden on the company that has claimed the goods they are selling (or license they are granting) is legitimate.
Actually, I would argue that when done on a commercial scale it is theft. Since the people who obtain the infringing copy are paying for it, often believing they are paying the legitimate rights holder, one could say these very much are literally lost sales, and the infringer actually is stealing from the rights holder.
Apple is the one making copies in this case so they are the copyright infringer. The company that licensed the copyright to Apple could be committing fraud by licensing things they don't have legal rights to. Neither action is theft.
Theft is when you take something from someone, violating what most cultures believe to be the natural right to own goods. IP violations, on the other hand, are when you infringe upon a government granted monopoly on a particular kind of expression, expression which is itself a natural right. Confusing the two is promoting a very dangerous misunderstanding, that IP rights are somehow intrinsic and that you somehow naturally have the right to stop other people from repeating something you said or drawing a picture that looks like one you drew. This is not an unintentional problem. There has been a huge PR campaign for decades now to blur that distinction in the minds of the people to distract from the fact that in the US those IP rights are only supposed to be granted for the promotion of useful arts and sciences and that our current laws do no such thing, only funneling money into the hands of cartels that control distribution channels.
So I say again, this is about copyright violation and please, please, please stop referring to it as theft. The distinction is vital.
They do get a nice 30% commision and unless there is an indemnification clause on the publisher/developer agreement, Apple did profit from the IP theft.
First, it is copyright violation not "IP theft". Please don't conflate the terms as they have entirely different legal basis in most jurisdictions. Second, in the US commercial copyright infringement is punishable by the company having to pay a fine and reimburse the copyright holder unless it was knowledgeable about the copyright infringement first and refused to remove the offending content, in which case the court can award damages. So assuming this suit was filed in the US, Apple can pull the books from the store, reimburse whoever owns the copyright the profit on the 30% of each sale (which is almost nothing after operating expenses, Apple's store is about selling things cheaply in order to make money off of hardware), pay a fine, and sue whoever submitted the books to recoup the loss if they care enough. All of this, of course, presuming there is not some weird situation we don't know about or the suit was filed in China and the laws there are significantly different.
R.I.P. ClarisWorks, you were ever a thorn in Office's side.
It still is. Now it is called "iWork" and iWork on the iPad is one of MS's more credible threats as it puts a competitor on a popular device and market subset MS hasn't been able to effectively target.
I have a friend who makes beer, but making good home brew is quite a bit of work and while the ingredients are fairly cheap not all the equipment is. So he does it as a hobby, but if he were to allocate the full cost it'd be pretty expensive.
After the cost of the gear, which is a one time expense of $200-$500 for a normal home brewing setup, cost of home brewed beer is lower than mass market beer. A 1/6 barrel of Budweiser is about $40 at the store, which is about the cost for the ingredients in a premium beer made by a home brewer. If you buy cheap rice and grains in bulk you can easily make a 1/6 barrel of Budweiser clone for about $5 worth of ingredients.
The whole system is extremely rigged with a huge canyon between "beer for myself and a few friends" and "small-time brewery".
Economy of scale and regulations make that mostly true, but regulations have greatly improved of late with the microbrewing movement. You have a good year of waiting on approvals from the feds and lots of paperwork, but the costs are not prohibitive. That is why so many small scale breweries have appeared of late.
The disadvantage is that the iPad isn't a great remote control device. It's made to be interacted with, not to be grabbed and clicked. When you're watching a show and the phone rings, you don't want to study the device to find the mute icon - you want to slide your thumb to the mute button and click. And it's fragile, you can't casually toss it to your friend.
When the phone rings I want the TV to automatically pause or mute either when the call comes in or when I answer, based upon my user settings. That is one of the nice things about tying these devices together. It would also be nice, if I decide to keep watching, for the phone to be aware of the audio going out of the stereo and scrub it from the background noise picked up by the phone's mic.
The whole point of TV is to veg out and channel surf. It's called an "idiot box" for reason.
I disagree. One way of using a TV is to channel surf through lots of crap. Another way is to pull up a queue of shows you're interested in and watch one of the ones on top. Another way is to pull up a specific show or movie via search o by inserting a disc. Yet another way is to watch a genre specific channel of shows.
You're making the mistake of thinking one use case (maybe one you prefer) is and will remain the dominant use case. Current TV remotes are optimized for that use case and they really, really, really suck for most of the others. Navigating a list of shows for on demand TV, for example, is painfully bad.
Anything that takes your eyes off the screen ruins the experience.
For channel surfing one could have a modal interface with two huge buttons to prevent one having to take their eyes off the screen, but it is not clear this will remain a common use case when televisions are networked and more capable. For things like selecting a Netflix show (for example), I'd rather have a handy tablet to select from a list where I can type in search terms and touch the titles directly. trying to use a keyboard or remote where I need to type letters, while looking up at a big screen is no fun at all.
It is possible to configure Avahi to advertise CUPS printer queues by manually editing configuration files, but this is a huge step backwards from CUPS 0.9 when configuring a printer and ticking the "Share via DNS-SD" box just worked, whatever DNS-SD implementation you were using.
So it works with Avahi, but is a pain to configure? Isn't that a problem with Avahi then? Why can't they include CUPs configs in Avahi as one of the main zeroconf uses if it is a usability concern?
Because the "CUPS configs" are printer specific. CUPS used to configure both avahi and bonjour automatically for each printer, but since Apple took over the project, it was changed to only support bonjour.
I'm still not following. Apple took over the project five years ago when it started paying M. Sweet a salary and bought him out. CUPs is a printing service. Whether it does discovery over zeroconf with the avahi, bonjour, or generic zeroconf flags is based upon the config file, right? So are you saying the default CUPS doesn't ship with the config file suitable for a non-OS X OS? My Linux box seems to work fine with CUPs and I did not do anything fancy on the print server. So can you please elucidate the the issue in clear English.
In practice, that hasn't happened with Avahi support in CUPS since Apple insisted on Bonjour only APIs a few years ago.
Interesting. I did a project with zeroconf once. In what way are the APIs Bonjour only? Is there really an API per se?
It is possible to configure Avahi to advertise CUPS printer queues by manually editing configuration files, but this is a huge step backwards from CUPS 0.9 when configuring a printer and ticking the "Share via DNS-SD" box just worked, whatever DNS-SD implementation you were using.
So it works with Avahi, but is a pain to configure? Isn't that a problem with Avahi then? Why can't they include CUPs configs in Avahi as one of the main zeroconf uses if it is a usability concern?
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And I doubt that the security advantage will keep after all. Give it a bit more time and iOS will be just as virus plagued as Android is.
Why would more time matter? For OS X, sure it is slowly gaining market share and becoming a more and more attractive target. For iOS though, it has dominated as the biggest single target for a long time.
I highy doubt iOS is fundamentally more secure than Android...
The article makes no such claim. Rather, it claims the difference is the ecosystem in which each is released. The claim is not that iOS is more secure, but that the distribution model locked to the Apple store and the accountability of people submitting to the iTunes App store is the determining factor. It's sort of like saying people in Vegas aren't more honest, rather the lack of petty crime in casinos is because there are cameras everywhere and sometimes they call the cops and others they take you out back and some guys beats the snot out of you. iOS is not more secure, but iOS devices end up being more so given the environment.
Not code documentation, but end user documentation was my gig for a while. At one point there were more Bugzilla entries from me (entered as I tried to use and document the software) than from the whole 15 person QA team put together. It was one of the experiences that drove me into software testing and then pen testing.
More on topic for the article, my current employer implements extensive unit testing before any code is written (no really, I know lots of places say they do this, but it actually happens and is useful). Specifications are written by non-technical people and then tested and approved by those people before code is accepted. It also goes through a technical review and blackbox testing before acceptance. I'm not sure writing technical documentation would add a lot to the process, but I'd like to give it a shot and see how the experiment plays out. I'll bring it up next week and see if the team has any interest.
Why? Why would Apple want to do this, aside from some insane take over the world theory? They are certainly pushing for signed applications running in nice sandboxes and they're using the Mac store as one way to do it, but why would they want to disable other applications entirely?
To charge their customary 30% for every Mac OS X application?
If money is the motive, you should know they make so little on both stores put together (including music and movie sales) that it is barely a blip on their radar. Apple is a razor not a blade business model. The stores are purely there as ways to make hardware more attractive and increase hardware sales.
The definition of worm is not "malware that copies itself from system to system automatically without user interaction". Worm is self-replicating code that uses a network, by some defintions, and, by others, a worm is any malware that spreads by itself but does not parasite legitimate software (thus why "USB worms").
I worked in the security industry for many years and never heard anyone call something a "usb worm". If it is copying itself as the result of user interaction, we always called it a virus. If it spread on its own, it was a worm. The definition of "worm" you provide does not seem to differentiate itself from a virus in any way. Something that copies itself via shared disks is almost the classic poster child for a virus. The term originated talking about malware spread on floppies.
Darn you kids and your newfangled definitions!
You now, a paranoid man would say this is an Apple conspiracy to push the Mac community toward the walled garden approach that their iOS devices are stuck in. Imagine if in OS X 10.9 you cannot install any third-party applications unless they come digitally signed from the Mac App Store.
Why? Why would Apple want to do this, aside from some insane take over the world theory? They are certainly pushing for signed applications running in nice sandboxes and they're using the Mac store as one way to do it, but why would they want to disable other applications entirely? The whole corporate development market, the software developer market for both iOS and MacOS would be horribly inconvenienced potentially to the point of walking away from the platform. Legacy software would prevent huge numbers of users from ever upgrading. I could go on listing reasons why Apple wouldn't want to do this, but I still haven't heard one good reason why they would want to do this. Apple doesn't make money on the iOS app store, nor really on the Mac app store. Where's the motive?
I know, it's a stretch, but I never thought it would happen on their mobile devices either.
On mobile devices they got to start fresh and they had a huge problem to solve... battery life. Phones live or die in the market based on battery life and user perception thereof. Locking down software on iOS was primarily about preventing apps that did not use battery efficient threading, push notifications, and system services so that users would be happy about their battery usage. Google is still trying to crack that nut and if you ever get a chance to talk to their devs, they know it.
Is that Java security hole that we heard about over the last weeks Mac-specific or cross-platform? Any reason to worry or to have our belief in Java security shattered?
It was cross platform. Oracle seems to have fixed it in the Windows version of Java quite a while ago, then more recently in the Mac version, although that last point seems to be a matter of contention between Apple and Oracle.
Isn't a Trojan that requires no user interaction by definition a Virus?
Not really.
Trojan - malware posing as legitimate software.
Virus - malware that copies itself either replacing or attaching to legitimate software.
Worm - malware that copies itself from system to system automatically without user interaction.
This software seems to be automatically installed when the user follows a link in their Web browser, but there is no indication that it in any way sends more links to people. So this malware does not fit neatly into any of the common categories. "Virus" seems to be a catch all term these days so you might as well call it that.
This Trojan further underlines the importance of protecting Macs against malware with an updated anti-virus program as well as the latest security updates.
Doesn't that seem to come off as a slightly counter-intuitive statement? Is it unreasonable to come away from this article asking yourself "Why buy anti-virus when the malware just avoids it anyway?"
It is trying to hide its similarity to other malware so that a new signature is needed to detect this specific variant. So while anti-virus programs may not detect this now, within a few days they probably will, at least until there is yet another variant. Apple is, of course, including their own signatures right in the OS so that makes antivirus less attractive as well, although Apple's response time has been hit and miss.
I hope the recent rash of Malware for the Mac will serve to change the culture of security at Apple. They have a lot of really good technology in that regard and many very good coders who work with security as a priority (they have a lot of oldschool UNIX guys these days). The problem is, it is not a priority for Apple or part of their culture. Some Apple software ships with what looks like no security review at all and no real consideration, while other software clearly was architected with that as a design goal.
They have some very nice sandboxing, but they don't apply it very widely within OS X, even when there is no pain to the user or developer. It is like they just don't want to spend money and resources on that sort of hardening. You send a security hole to Apple and sometimes you hear back the next day and it is fixed in short order. Other times you hear nothing or malware is known and spreading for weeks before Apple bothers to issue a filtering signature.
Hey Apple! Wake up and smell the coffee. Dump some of your cash reserves into expanding work in security and having some experts paying attention and getting things done. "Think Different" about security and listen to the people you already have that have created groundbreaking security systems elsewhere.
Also, note that KDE, the original developers of the KHTML project that Apple forked and renamed as Webkit also would appear to be unwilling to jump into the arms of Apple.
They collaborated with Apple to integrate changes from Webkit into KHTML, but did not merge the projects because they wanted to go a different direction architecturally. Google and Samsung and numerous others don't seem to have any problem working with Apple to create OSS. Apple can be annoying and slow but i've never heard of them to be a poor OSS collaborator.
Citation? I've heard this before but every time I look into I just find articles debunking that theory. Apple got a head start because they helped develop it and wanted to ship right away. Other vendors could have done the same.
what apple shop you live in? "until apple dumped their legacy ports".. wtf man. during that time period apple didn't mean jack shit, they didn't sell too much.
According to PC report, Apple iMacs accounted for 7% of all consumer PC sales in the US and were the top selling consumer PC in 98 (the year it was introduced and Apple dropped legacy ports for USB). That was more than enough to have a significant influence on the peripheral market, albeit a a niche one.
No, it doesn't. It says that talking to passengers is less distracting than talking on the phone. In other words, the nominal case for the cell phone is worse than the nominal case for an adult passenger. However, when you examine the worst case, their relative levels of distraction reverse fairly dramatically.
I don't see anything about the levels of distraction reversing, nor is the extreme case the normal case. Please provide a citation for your claims (or let us know when you are making up assertions without backing).
The study referenced in this article claims just the opposite.
Yes, Microsoft's and Apple's bottom lines will be decimated by the loss of revenues from lower sales of [Microsoft Office, Microsoft Security, Silverlight, Printshop, Flux, iWork, etc].
Fixed that for you.
Printshop?!? You mean publishing software never owned by either Apple or MS? Flux? The only Apple product you listed was iWork and it isn't even a significant revenue stream for Apple. This entire argument seems idiotic, as companies like Apple do create and contribute to OSS all the time (Webkit anyone?). Apple mainly uses software and services as ways to motivate people to buy hardware. If you want to hurt their bottom line, use all their software and none of their hardware.
Apple does contribute to about 30 different GPL projects they use in OS X, according to their press info.
I thought Intellectual Property laws protected creators from other creators, not from retailers... Apple's terms and conditions clearly state that anything submitted to their store must be legal to sell in the first place. This is a grab for attention, nothing else, and the accusers are only wasting their time.
So it's perfectly legal to sell counterfeit goods so long as you didn't actually create said goods and your 'terms and conditions' state that you have been told by the supplier that the goods are legal to sell in the first place? Sounds like a nice way to absolve yourself of responsibility.
It's not "perfectly legal". It is, however, only slightly illegal and puts the majority of the financial burden on the company that has claimed the goods they are selling (or license they are granting) is legitimate.
Actually, I would argue that when done on a commercial scale it is theft. Since the people who obtain the infringing copy are paying for it, often believing they are paying the legitimate rights holder, one could say these very much are literally lost sales, and the infringer actually is stealing from the rights holder.
Apple is the one making copies in this case so they are the copyright infringer. The company that licensed the copyright to Apple could be committing fraud by licensing things they don't have legal rights to. Neither action is theft.
Theft is when you take something from someone, violating what most cultures believe to be the natural right to own goods. IP violations, on the other hand, are when you infringe upon a government granted monopoly on a particular kind of expression, expression which is itself a natural right. Confusing the two is promoting a very dangerous misunderstanding, that IP rights are somehow intrinsic and that you somehow naturally have the right to stop other people from repeating something you said or drawing a picture that looks like one you drew. This is not an unintentional problem. There has been a huge PR campaign for decades now to blur that distinction in the minds of the people to distract from the fact that in the US those IP rights are only supposed to be granted for the promotion of useful arts and sciences and that our current laws do no such thing, only funneling money into the hands of cartels that control distribution channels.
So I say again, this is about copyright violation and please, please, please stop referring to it as theft. The distinction is vital.
They do get a nice 30% commision and unless there is an indemnification clause on the publisher/developer agreement, Apple did profit from the IP theft.
First, it is copyright violation not "IP theft". Please don't conflate the terms as they have entirely different legal basis in most jurisdictions. Second, in the US commercial copyright infringement is punishable by the company having to pay a fine and reimburse the copyright holder unless it was knowledgeable about the copyright infringement first and refused to remove the offending content, in which case the court can award damages. So assuming this suit was filed in the US, Apple can pull the books from the store, reimburse whoever owns the copyright the profit on the 30% of each sale (which is almost nothing after operating expenses, Apple's store is about selling things cheaply in order to make money off of hardware), pay a fine, and sue whoever submitted the books to recoup the loss if they care enough. All of this, of course, presuming there is not some weird situation we don't know about or the suit was filed in China and the laws there are significantly different.
R.I.P. ClarisWorks, you were ever a thorn in Office's side.
It still is. Now it is called "iWork" and iWork on the iPad is one of MS's more credible threats as it puts a competitor on a popular device and market subset MS hasn't been able to effectively target.
I have a friend who makes beer, but making good home brew is quite a bit of work and while the ingredients are fairly cheap not all the equipment is. So he does it as a hobby, but if he were to allocate the full cost it'd be pretty expensive.
After the cost of the gear, which is a one time expense of $200-$500 for a normal home brewing setup, cost of home brewed beer is lower than mass market beer. A 1/6 barrel of Budweiser is about $40 at the store, which is about the cost for the ingredients in a premium beer made by a home brewer. If you buy cheap rice and grains in bulk you can easily make a 1/6 barrel of Budweiser clone for about $5 worth of ingredients.
The whole system is extremely rigged with a huge canyon between "beer for myself and a few friends" and "small-time brewery".
Economy of scale and regulations make that mostly true, but regulations have greatly improved of late with the microbrewing movement. You have a good year of waiting on approvals from the feds and lots of paperwork, but the costs are not prohibitive. That is why so many small scale breweries have appeared of late.
The disadvantage is that the iPad isn't a great remote control device. It's made to be interacted with, not to be grabbed and clicked. When you're watching a show and the phone rings, you don't want to study the device to find the mute icon - you want to slide your thumb to the mute button and click. And it's fragile, you can't casually toss it to your friend.
When the phone rings I want the TV to automatically pause or mute either when the call comes in or when I answer, based upon my user settings. That is one of the nice things about tying these devices together. It would also be nice, if I decide to keep watching, for the phone to be aware of the audio going out of the stereo and scrub it from the background noise picked up by the phone's mic.
The whole point of TV is to veg out and channel surf. It's called an "idiot box" for reason.
I disagree. One way of using a TV is to channel surf through lots of crap. Another way is to pull up a queue of shows you're interested in and watch one of the ones on top. Another way is to pull up a specific show or movie via search o by inserting a disc. Yet another way is to watch a genre specific channel of shows.
You're making the mistake of thinking one use case (maybe one you prefer) is and will remain the dominant use case. Current TV remotes are optimized for that use case and they really, really, really suck for most of the others. Navigating a list of shows for on demand TV, for example, is painfully bad.
Anything that takes your eyes off the screen ruins the experience.
For channel surfing one could have a modal interface with two huge buttons to prevent one having to take their eyes off the screen, but it is not clear this will remain a common use case when televisions are networked and more capable. For things like selecting a Netflix show (for example), I'd rather have a handy tablet to select from a list where I can type in search terms and touch the titles directly. trying to use a keyboard or remote where I need to type letters, while looking up at a big screen is no fun at all.
It is possible to configure Avahi to advertise CUPS printer queues by manually editing configuration files, but this is a huge step backwards from CUPS 0.9 when configuring a printer and ticking the "Share via DNS-SD" box just worked, whatever DNS-SD implementation you were using.
So it works with Avahi, but is a pain to configure? Isn't that a problem with Avahi then? Why can't they include CUPs configs in Avahi as one of the main zeroconf uses if it is a usability concern?
Because the "CUPS configs" are printer specific. CUPS used to configure both avahi and bonjour automatically for each printer, but since Apple took over the project, it was changed to only support bonjour.
I'm still not following. Apple took over the project five years ago when it started paying M. Sweet a salary and bought him out. CUPs is a printing service. Whether it does discovery over zeroconf with the avahi, bonjour, or generic zeroconf flags is based upon the config file, right? So are you saying the default CUPS doesn't ship with the config file suitable for a non-OS X OS? My Linux box seems to work fine with CUPs and I did not do anything fancy on the print server. So can you please elucidate the the issue in clear English.
In practice, that hasn't happened with Avahi support in CUPS since Apple insisted on Bonjour only APIs a few years ago.
Interesting. I did a project with zeroconf once. In what way are the APIs Bonjour only? Is there really an API per se?
It is possible to configure Avahi to advertise CUPS printer queues by manually editing configuration files, but this is a huge step backwards from CUPS 0.9 when configuring a printer and ticking the "Share via DNS-SD" box just worked, whatever DNS-SD implementation you were using.
So it works with Avahi, but is a pain to configure? Isn't that a problem with Avahi then? Why can't they include CUPs configs in Avahi as one of the main zeroconf uses if it is a usability concern?