What would be kind of funny is if a generic consumer electronics manufacturer went to Apple Corps and asked to license the name for an MP3 player. Ironically, this would be one case where Apple Computer infringing on Apple Corp's trademarks might actually work to the benefit of Apple Corps.
Your logic doesn't really hold up either. Let's take this:
They have spent gobs of money on developing it, XCode, and the entire development platform for it. Not to mention the money spent pushing the development platform, hold conferences, etc. Why in God's name would they just up and drop it because Microsoft (their archenemy AND antithises) is comming out with (WAY behind schedule mind you)a new operating system.
So, in other words: it's costing Apple a lot of money to continue developing OS X. They're spending a lot just trying to keep developers happy, at a time when many developers will be eyeing "Windows on Mac" as the solution to their cross platform worries (the games will go first.) Why not go with Microsoft's new operating system if, with minor delays, it can be made to be functionally as good as anything Apple would have developed?
Again, I'm not saying they are switching, I'm just saying that this is another of the arguments against that do not stand up to scrutiny.
It's not going to lose hardware manufacturers "billions" for the OS to be delayed a few months. A handful of people will wait before upgrading so they can save $99 when Vista finally comes out, but that handful is a minority.
Mac OS X represents Microsoft's last genuine competitor. I can see Microsoft delaying Vista for a few months if they could make minor changes that would make Apple happy about switching to it.
This is not to imply Apple is switching to it. I'm just saying, the logic you're using doesn't really work.
Yeah, it's not like Lenovo/IBM or Sony are big players in the Wintel world.;-)
People will spend more on what they perceive as a high quality brand, especially if the machines have what's considered superior design, be that functional, aesthetic, or a combination of both. Truth be told, Apple could probably be more successful than most at selling premium Wintel boxes. I'd guess they'd throw Sony out of the market.
As others have pointed out, what the supreme court did today means, in practice, that you have to abide by the community standards of all communities, or face prosecution.
The other point I'm going to address though is that I'm still baffled there are "libertarians" out there who consider a right of personal interference given to the Feds to be immoral, but the same right given to the States to be just. Whatever the constitution says, the laws themselves are either just or they're not. If they're just, then the federal government vs the States becomes an issue in abstractionism. If they're unjust, then the law will have victims. The only thing that changes is the government you blame.
More local government may, in theory, result in some better accountability, but let's not go down the route of taking the "the states" part of the 10th too seriously. I prefer the rights to go to the people by default, and the States only if there's a damned good reason for it.
I find it hard to take a libertarian seriously who really cares which official is wearing the jackboots.
Quicktime, like AVI, is a container. It forms part of a format, with the encoding of the actual moving images or audio waves being seperate from the encoding of the container. We generally seperate the two in terminology, the encoding of the images or waves being termed a codec.
In some cases, both formats use well documented codecs, in others they don't. A substantial amount of Quicktime content is encoded using Sorensen codecs. These are not documented, and due to a licensing agreement, are only available for Apple's implementation of Quicktime. Apple has veto power on what devices can use Sorensen codecs.
The reason, therefore, why there's no universal reader is because there cannot be. Microsoft, to use an example, cannot license "Quicktime" except for the publically documented, publically available, format and codecs. A substantial amount of content would not play under such a player. (Likewise, VLC cannot license most of WMV, though they're doing what they can.)
I have to agree with you. I wonder what it would take to make a Gamecube form factor PC anyway? Other than the power/reset/etc buttons taken off the top so that a full size CD/DVD carrier can be there, I mean.
Both this thing and the Nemesis look friggin' ugly to me. And big.
Well, if it's that cheap, why hasn't anyone created a label yet that sells $2 CDs of good and desired music?
The GP's point still stands BTW. Most movies make their money back the first few days at the box office. Aside from per-unit production/sales costs (roughly equal in CDs and DVDs), the money the DVD has to recoup is the cost of digitizing the movie. There's so much money left over, and the costs are so low, that generally there's a lot of other crap that's added simply because they have the space. Deleted scenes. A flashy menu. A "making of" documentary originally intended as promotional material that was playing on AMC for months.
By comparison, the CD has to recoup the production costs of the music. That means the advance the band was given, plus any production and promotional costs the label itself paid for in addition to the advance (usually the band does some of this, and the label does other aspects of it.)
And just to add insult to injury, despite the common complaint that they charge the same, they don't. DVDs, upon release, are usually around $20-30. CDs, on the other hand, are usually around $12-20. Upon release. DVDs drop in price substantially a few months, but rarely seriously undercut CDs "over all" (note the phrase "over all": I don't care you found a Goldie Hawn movie for $5.88 at Wal*Mart when that Rolling Stones album from the 1960s was $30, they're not in the same ballpark, and you can find plenty of second-tier bands, and even some first-tier ones, in bargain buckets across the country too.)
DVDs are not used as much as CDs, come out costing 50% more, are of productions that have already paid for themselves, usually three or four times over, and are from companies that can only expect profits. CDs usually have to cover the production costs, in 90% of cases will not even do that (the vast majority of artists will never see royalties beyond their initial advance, and recording companies are not that profitable); and while a CD could be made the way you describe, the quality would be so poor it would be hard to market with the best will in the world.
But, hey, I don't think those costs are particularly high, so if you want to get started, go right ahead. FWIW, I'll take on Hollywood with my DV camera and Toast/iMovie-equipped Beige G3 Mac at the same time. With the production costs being that low, we should both make a killing, right?
...and Macs and Windows PCs using any application that uses QuickTime, including iTunes and (I believe) recent versions of RealPlayer.
It's likely, from context and where people are complaining, that the journalist was refering to portable players, not "every device on Earth". The journalist is arguably technically wrong, in that some Motorola phones can also play FairPlay crippled content, but this is specifically because Apple has blessed it. This is not the same thing as Apple licensing FairPlay: the implementation in the ROKR is of Apple's design with Apple's user interface, and with restrictions, such as an arbitrary 100 file limit, imposed by Apple.
If Apple had to shut down iTMS in France, its competition would have to shut down for the same reason.
Fascinating, but the journalist doesn't talk about iTMS "having" to be shut down. The suggestion is Apple may not like the new environment and may refuse to continue to operate in the same market. Apple uses FairPlay as a system to promote, and lock-in, users into the iPod platform. What France is proposing would undo that. Companies like Real, Napster, et al, do not have the same issues, they're purely selling music.
Can anyone translate this from journalist-speak to tech-speak for me? What exactly would Fnac have to make available?
Unencrypted, convertable, files. Just as the iTMS will be obliged to be open enough that you can download a song and without resorting to tricks like CD burning, put the song on a non-Apple MP3 player, other companies will be under the same obligation. This is not a law aimed at Apple and the iTMS, rather it's aimed at the entire industry.
Presumably they meant they can ask the ISP for the billing information of the customer who was using a particular IP address (not e-mail address), which the police agents obtained through monitoring P2P services (not Web sites).
For one, how are you planning on popping a program up at will on my desktop?
Either make use of a remote vulnerability, should one exist, or, in the mean time, trick the user into running something.
At this point, the virus or trojan will have ordinary user privileges (even if the user's admin), so it's still going to need to get itself escalated some how to cause serious damage. It can, if the user's an admin, change a few programs in/Applications, but it has to be careful if it wants to avoid detection. For example, if the program is likely to be launched because the user is opening a file with it, then OS X (at least, any versions released or patched in the last year) will actually warn the user.
If you have a trojan, why aren't you logging my keyboard input?
Because, at this stage, I can't. If I need your admin username and password, then it's safe to say I have no way of getting root access at this stage. I need root access to log keyboard input.
If you are a webpage or applet, I see an application border... maybe there are other ways.
This particular flaw would probably not be that useful to a webpage or applet type attack. The malware needs to have a certain amount of local access to be convincing. I don't just mean because of borders, but also timing. If a username/password box is thrown up in the middle of nowhere, it'll alert the user something's up. If it runs when Software Update is apparently running (either because the trojan has launched something with a similar icon, or because the trojan just sits in the background waiting for it to run, immediately pausing the process and then putting up its own dialog), then it'll be difficult for an end user to tell they've been screwed.
It's actually one of the best things IMHO because I see how 'intrusive' a program is in a day-to-day way.
Nah, it's a flaw. The problem isn't that OS X asks your permission, it's that it prompts for a username and password. If OS X just asked your permission, an application that put up a fake dialog wouldn't have any extra information it can use to raise its own privileges. Therein lies the flaw.
It's more like (gag, these analogies are beginning to suck) like the owner of a hotel testing the security to see if a resident would be able to get into the Janitor's room, where the master key for all the rooms is kept.
The test was specifically aimed at the notion that many machines are multiuser, be they because they belong to a hosting company that provides shell access, or because they're just used by a wide variety of people (say, shared computers in a classroom); and whether Mac OS X is up to the task. Clearly, if it can be hacked in 30 minutes, it isn't.
Also, as I said yesterday, it proves that as long as you can persuade the user to run a program (which 90% of Windows exploits seem to be about), you'll be able to escalate its privileges to root and do a whole bunch of things that shouldn't be possible, even without using simple trickery to get an admin's username and password (which, thanks to a major UI flaw of Mac OS X, is actually something a user expects to see on a regular basis. The funny thing is that most people think it's a security feature, rather than a screw-up.)
Neither the Intel compilers nor the DIMMs will make any difference (Apple is using GCC and the DIMMs are already paired.)
That's not to say they will not get faster. They will. Applications that use Rosetta, right now, will crawl on the Core Solo and look "Ok, but nothing spectacular" on the Duo. In time, more and more such apps will become Universal Binaries.
As far as the UT2004 comparison you make, it's worth noting that comparison is:
Core Solo: 10.4fps, vs
G4 1.25GHz: 13.9fps
That puts the G4 as over 33% faster.
Core Duo: 12.22fps, vs
G4 1.42GHz: 14.5fps
That puts the G4 as over 18% faster.
In both cases, not only are all G4 models faster than all Intel models, but they also beat out (the Core Solo to the point of it being embarassing) their market equivalent. And these are comparing against the penultimate generation of Mac minis, Apple replaced (without updating the website) the last high-end Mac mini with a 1.5GHz model.
This pretty much settles it. I'm not getting a Mac mini, not this time around. I mean, this is ridiculous. The Core Duo, with its decent FSB et al, should be a good 4x as fast as the machine it replaces, yet real world benchmarks are saying anything but, with one application type being badly degraded. Gah.
I'd have liked to see that to, plus some "Fly-By" FPS benchmarks for a few popular games.
Right now, the integrated graphics thing looks like a deal-breaker, and I was actually waiting for Ars, of all people, to do a decent, unbiased, comprehensive review that would at least answer the question. As it was, I don't feel any better informed having read it.
They made a product they expect to sell in one format for around ten weeks in one country (the first two or three weeks under heavy promotion), then in another for a good ten to twenty years (and then some after that.) Exactly how can six weeks be a problem? Is there any industry outside of Hollywood that expects to be selling the product for that kind of time span that considers six weeks an issue?
It's one thing to expect a single rock concert to make a profit on the same day (because once it's over, it's over), but a movie?
The unions in Hollywood are notorious for continuing their blacklist and favoritism controls -- keeping costs high and quality low. In order to distribute a movie in the States, you have to be part of the union's preferred cartels. If you attempt to make a movie outside of their control, you'll generally not see wide distribution. Copyright at its finest
Copyright at its what? What the fuck does copyright have to do with anything?
I'm also pretty sure that big names demanding multi-million dollar salaries has more of an affect on overall costs than the Union of Camera Operators demanding their employees have enough money to live and work in LA.
Still, you may be right. After all, after George Lucas made the Empire Strikes Back, he couldn't get it shown anywhere, those evil unions! (Note: Not only is that untrue, but that's of a movie the Director's union actually wanted to kill because of a dispute over the opening titles.)
On the other hand, it tells you what's possible if a user downloads a trojan and runs it. Despite the common argument that such hacks are, supposedly, impossible because "Only root is able to change critical files" and/or "Only admin users are able to do critical things and Apple does everything they can to encourage users not to set up their default accounts as "admin", explaining what an admin account is and the consequences of using it in their comprehensive, well written and easily readable user manual, shipped with every copy of OS X" (*snort*), it appears that, in actual fact, a trojan can escalate itself to root pretty easily.
I've always thought OS X was more hackable than its supporters tend to say. The very fact that, until recently (like, early 2005), you could set something like this up:
1. Set up page to "redirect" to a.sit or.zip if Safari is the browser.
2. Have trojan in.zip or.sit associate itself with many common types of file, especially uncommon variants of popular files (MPEGs, for instance, seem to randomly pick whether they're Quicktime, VLC, MPlayer, or just not associated with anything, files in OS X)
3. Wait (giggling with insane glee)
Apple fixed the bug exploited in (2) above sometime in early 2005 by having the OS warn you if it was running an application for the first time. For those who are scratching their heads though: Safari, by default, opens "safe" files. This means that step one would have caused the.zip or.sit to be downloaded and extracted on the user's desktop without any user intervention. Once an application is present on a hard drive, it's already installed. In OS X (as with previous versions of Mac OS), applications include associated metadata that tells the OS "I'm an application, and I open files of types JPEG, WDOC, and CARP." If the user hasn't already associated a specific application with a specific file (because, for instance, you just downloaded it from the Internet), then opening a new file will generally cause the OS to search for applications that can open that type, pick one, and open it.
Why am I talking about an old bug? Well, this was present in Mac OS for years, and nobody did anything about it, nobody even considered it a bug until relatively recently. Despite all the crap that's leveled against Microsoft on the same subject, some justified, much not, Apple's attitude towards security is not much better.
If you can get a user to open an application, then you have some access to their machine. If root privileges are gainable from a regular account, then you have root access to their machine.
And all this time I thought you'd have to do the social engineering step of, perhaps, waiting for an application that causes the "Type in an administrator username and password" dialog to come up (perhaps Installer.app, or.. perhaps... Software Update...) and throw a dialog over it that looks identical. It's easier than I thought.
Re:True for GSM, but False for CDMA (here and "che
on
No 3G for HP Until 2007
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I can't speak for the whole GSM world (which includes the third world where they're more bothered right now with coverage than video messaging), but 3G seems to be pretty much rolled out across Britain, and probably most of Europe.
The two major GSM operators in the US, T-Mobile and Cingular, are at different stages and have different policies. T-Mobile is rolling out EDGE (technically 3G, but relatively slow. It's IDSL to UMTS/EVDO's ADSL), because it's incremental to GSM. It seems to be in most major areas, from my experience. T-Mobile's pricing for EDGE is the same as for GPRS - free for a theoretically port blocked service (SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS work fine), $20 a month for a non-blocked service (behind NAT, or restricted to a certain number of connections, none of which are incoming, your choice, though), plus the price of a regular monthy talk plan.
Cingular is rolling out a variant of UMTS (and has EDGE pretty much everywhere too), albeit on wierd frequencies because the FCC hasn't yet finished the work on freeing the relevent frequencies. This is less of a problem with the CDMA2000 systems, largely because nobody buys an IS95 phone and expects it to work outside of the US anyway (it will in a few areas, but not many.) What Cingular hasn't done yet is start to really market their UMTS based services, whereas Sprint and Verizon both are doing so. Cingular's unlimited service is relatively expensive ($80, IIRC), but it is here, it's rolled out to a significant part of the country, and I suspect they're not marketing it yet because they really don't know what people would want to use it for.
In short, HP's talking out of its arse. 3G, in various forms, is available across most parts of America, with both the world wide open standard UMTS (3GSM), and Qualcomm's proprietary system IS-95 (CDMA2000), well supported. HP might be waiting for everyone in the US to agree on a particular standard, but they're going to lose if they do. 3G will probably never settle down on a particular technology, even Cingular didn't go right for "regular" UMTS, going for HSDPA from the start. Meanwhile WiMax will become increasingly competitive too. If that's HP's reason, they've just announced their long-term withdrawl from relevence.
Apple did no hyping whatsoever - they sent out invitations to the event to a few relavent people and nothing more.
Quite. Sending out invites to a few hundred journalists for a few products doesn't constitute "hyping". Quite the reverse. For this to be "hyping", I think Apple would have had to send it out to millions of journalists. And it would have had to have had a history of using Steve Jobs hosted special events to announce new, exciting, products and announcing the kinds of products announced at this event (speakers, leather cases, and some unimpressive changes to the Mac mini) exclusively on its website.
Were either of these true? Clearly not. Apple is always using special events to announce things like iPod cases. Who can forget the three hour special it did in June of 2004 where Jobs went through a range of new Firewire cables? Was it not typical of Apple, in August of 2005, to gather a few hundred journalists into a large conference room at Apple to reveal some beautiful new earphones for the iPod?
And besides, were these products not worthy of hype? Apple, for so long ridiculed as a company that sells over-priced, under-powered, hardware was certainly going to shed that reputation by selling $350 integrated speakers, $100 leather cases, and a Mac mini that can't play games.
You need to charter one ship across the Atlantic to compete with the East India Company. It's a one-off, and you'll make a profit.
You need to lay an entire network to compete with an established phone company. The phone company you're competing with already has laid, and paid for, that company. So while you take twenty years to build your network and 40 to recoup your investment, you'll be somehow raising that money from customers who have the choice between your network, and the cheaper incumbent.
How the FUCK do you compete with that? Are you on the same planet? There's absolutely nothing whatsoever you can do. If you promise "better service", the incumbent has plenty of time to improve their services. If you promise enhanced features, the incumbent can roll that out to all their customers before you've laid the lines in a single street.
This isn't a myth. It's real. It's why nobody's building fully competitive networks, even in countries where it's encouraged. In Britain, the only competition was from cable TV companies, who were only able to get their networks built because BT was banned from selling television services. And I've never heard of someone asking to build a competing network and being told "no" by any American government. Why? Because nobody wants to.
The only "competition" we'll see in the short term is from the cable companies. In the long term, we don't even know for sure that the cable companies and the telephone companies will not merge anyway. And we already know that a duopoly isn't enough to ensure buyer-focussed products.
We need regulation. And we cannot wait for libertarian utopias to be proven idiotic, especially since I've never come across a libertarian who hasn't find something government related to blame any failure of deregulation upon.
The wires should work for us.
I'm a BellSouth customer too. I've never had bad service from them. They charge fairly reasonable prices so far as I can see. Their staff are friendly and helpful. They got our phones up and running quickly after the last three hurricanes to hit here. Maybe my standards are low having lived in Britain with the attrocious, "We don't actually want you to use our service", British Telecom, but BellSouth has been excellent in my experience.
I've not heard a good thing about SBC however, and their CEO is a total loon. While BellSouth has talked about possibly adding services so that companies can speed up their connections to BellSouth's customers, SBC's CEO has talked about forcing companies to pay for access. In general, he seems as much as of a nut as the CEO of Verizon.
Ironically, last time I spoofed an email, as a joke, it was supposedly from Jeff Bezos, "responding" to a complaint about Amazon from a co-worker, which started off as a reasonable response but got steadily more ridiculous as it explained how virtually everyone involved in the thing he was complaining about had just been fired.
That said, while spoofing emails on a one-off basis is clearly possible, it becomes more difficult to claim that the system is unreliable when you start talking about email threads. Then you're looking at a bunch of people responding to one-another. If the co-worker had responded to the email, and I'd put Jeff's real email address on the Reply-To: line (which, needless to say, on the off-chance he took it seriously before I had a chance to set him straight, I set to my own address), the fact it was fake would have been revealed immediately. The email thread would have been something like:
From: C. Oworker
Amazon sucks! You did X and Y and Z and...
From: "Jeff Bezos"
Dear C. Oworker, I'm sorry to hear about the problems you had with your recent order. I've ordered an investigation and in the mean time, I've fired everyone involved, and informed all of our competitors and other potential employers of these people how incompetent they are...(etc)
From: C. Oworker
Wow! You're the best. Thanks for dealing with my issue in such a thorough manner.
From: Jeff Bezos
I think you've been had. I never sent the email you quoted. You need to contact the FBI.
Such a chain would not be the case if the thread was genuine. Certainly, Bezos wouldn't respond to a reply to a bogus email with, say, "You're welcome. We always do our best to have top notch customer service" or something like that.
There are some circumstances in which CLI ("Calling Line Identification" - a more appropriate term than Caller ID because CLI doesn't identify the caller, only the line they're calling from) is just about the only screening feature available. Cellphones are an example. Generally though the service is provided "for free" with cellphones.
For landlines, there is absolutely no reason to subscribe to CLI. I don't recommend it. As you say, it doesn't even identify all numbers, only those on cooperating networks whose subscriber hasn't specifically blocked it. Whether it's a telemarketer, or a person calling from an abused women's shelter, you're not going to find out where the call is coming from with CLI. And, regardless, CLI isn't going to tell you who is calling, only where they're calling from. A call from a number identified as "772-555-0132 Fred Jones, 321 Fake St, Stuart, FL" is probably the person you know who lives at that address (presumably Fred, unless he lives with a bunch of people), but calls from unheard-of numbers might be from friends who are borrowing a phone, etc.
How do you, then, identify a caller? Answer: you use a telephone answering machine. Virtually all answerphones include call screening. That means you record a greeting asking the person to identify themselves, they'll start talking after the beep, and you'll know who's calling. FWIW, telemarketers almost never leave messages. It's actually more effective than the DNC list.
My recommendation: if you're pissed that you're paying for the service when it doesn't work properly, then you've misplaced your anger. It'll almost never work properly to begin with. Cancel the subscription unless it really is the only call screening feature available to you (in which case, you're probably using a cellphone, and if you're using one with a service provider that charges more for CLI, then you're using the wrong SP to begin with...), and get equipment and services designed to do the job that you actually want.
It's an unfortunate fact that most people are more interested in services that look good and technical, rather than ones that work as advertised. CLI doesn't. It never will. Even if we ban number-blocking (and we shouldn't), and upgrade every network in the world to pass on the information, at the simplest level it will never identify who is using the phone, only the phone they're using. Short of banning people from sharing or lending phones, I don't see how it can work. Meanwhile, a telephone answering machine always will do the job being asked of it.
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What would be kind of funny is if a generic consumer electronics manufacturer went to Apple Corps and asked to license the name for an MP3 player. Ironically, this would be one case where Apple Computer infringing on Apple Corp's trademarks might actually work to the benefit of Apple Corps.
The great thing is, after this lawsuit is over, whatever the outcome, you and I will be able to say "I told you so." ;-)
Again, I'm not saying they are switching, I'm just saying that this is another of the arguments against that do not stand up to scrutiny.
Mac OS X represents Microsoft's last genuine competitor. I can see Microsoft delaying Vista for a few months if they could make minor changes that would make Apple happy about switching to it.
This is not to imply Apple is switching to it. I'm just saying, the logic you're using doesn't really work.
People will spend more on what they perceive as a high quality brand, especially if the machines have what's considered superior design, be that functional, aesthetic, or a combination of both. Truth be told, Apple could probably be more successful than most at selling premium Wintel boxes. I'd guess they'd throw Sony out of the market.
The other point I'm going to address though is that I'm still baffled there are "libertarians" out there who consider a right of personal interference given to the Feds to be immoral, but the same right given to the States to be just. Whatever the constitution says, the laws themselves are either just or they're not. If they're just, then the federal government vs the States becomes an issue in abstractionism. If they're unjust, then the law will have victims. The only thing that changes is the government you blame.
More local government may, in theory, result in some better accountability, but let's not go down the route of taking the "the states" part of the 10th too seriously. I prefer the rights to go to the people by default, and the States only if there's a damned good reason for it.
I find it hard to take a libertarian seriously who really cares which official is wearing the jackboots.
A method for flying faster than a speeding bullet, in order to provision help to persons or property in danger
A mechanism for helping persons in peril through gaining almost infinite strength
Or perhaps:
A genetic modification to provide the subject with the ability to grow his or her fingernails very quickly.
I'd like to examine those patents, there may be prior art...
Quicktime, like AVI, is a container. It forms part of a format, with the encoding of the actual moving images or audio waves being seperate from the encoding of the container. We generally seperate the two in terminology, the encoding of the images or waves being termed a codec.
In some cases, both formats use well documented codecs, in others they don't. A substantial amount of Quicktime content is encoded using Sorensen codecs. These are not documented, and due to a licensing agreement, are only available for Apple's implementation of Quicktime. Apple has veto power on what devices can use Sorensen codecs.
The reason, therefore, why there's no universal reader is because there cannot be. Microsoft, to use an example, cannot license "Quicktime" except for the publically documented, publically available, format and codecs. A substantial amount of content would not play under such a player. (Likewise, VLC cannot license most of WMV, though they're doing what they can.)
Both this thing and the Nemesis look friggin' ugly to me. And big.
The GP's point still stands BTW. Most movies make their money back the first few days at the box office. Aside from per-unit production/sales costs (roughly equal in CDs and DVDs), the money the DVD has to recoup is the cost of digitizing the movie. There's so much money left over, and the costs are so low, that generally there's a lot of other crap that's added simply because they have the space. Deleted scenes. A flashy menu. A "making of" documentary originally intended as promotional material that was playing on AMC for months.
By comparison, the CD has to recoup the production costs of the music. That means the advance the band was given, plus any production and promotional costs the label itself paid for in addition to the advance (usually the band does some of this, and the label does other aspects of it.)
And just to add insult to injury, despite the common complaint that they charge the same, they don't. DVDs, upon release, are usually around $20-30. CDs, on the other hand, are usually around $12-20. Upon release. DVDs drop in price substantially a few months, but rarely seriously undercut CDs "over all" (note the phrase "over all": I don't care you found a Goldie Hawn movie for $5.88 at Wal*Mart when that Rolling Stones album from the 1960s was $30, they're not in the same ballpark, and you can find plenty of second-tier bands, and even some first-tier ones, in bargain buckets across the country too.)
DVDs are not used as much as CDs, come out costing 50% more, are of productions that have already paid for themselves, usually three or four times over, and are from companies that can only expect profits. CDs usually have to cover the production costs, in 90% of cases will not even do that (the vast majority of artists will never see royalties beyond their initial advance, and recording companies are not that profitable); and while a CD could be made the way you describe, the quality would be so poor it would be hard to market with the best will in the world.
But, hey, I don't think those costs are particularly high, so if you want to get started, go right ahead. FWIW, I'll take on Hollywood with my DV camera and Toast/iMovie-equipped Beige G3 Mac at the same time. With the production costs being that low, we should both make a killing, right?
The BIOS emulator can do this dynamically on boot up. It could even write an MBR before booting Windows.
At this point, the virus or trojan will have ordinary user privileges (even if the user's admin), so it's still going to need to get itself escalated some how to cause serious damage. It can, if the user's an admin, change a few programs in /Applications, but it has to be careful if it wants to avoid detection. For example, if the program is likely to be launched because the user is opening a file with it, then OS X (at least, any versions released or patched in the last year) will actually warn the user.
Because, at this stage, I can't. If I need your admin username and password, then it's safe to say I have no way of getting root access at this stage. I need root access to log keyboard input. This particular flaw would probably not be that useful to a webpage or applet type attack. The malware needs to have a certain amount of local access to be convincing. I don't just mean because of borders, but also timing. If a username/password box is thrown up in the middle of nowhere, it'll alert the user something's up. If it runs when Software Update is apparently running (either because the trojan has launched something with a similar icon, or because the trojan just sits in the background waiting for it to run, immediately pausing the process and then putting up its own dialog), then it'll be difficult for an end user to tell they've been screwed. Nah, it's a flaw. The problem isn't that OS X asks your permission, it's that it prompts for a username and password. If OS X just asked your permission, an application that put up a fake dialog wouldn't have any extra information it can use to raise its own privileges. Therein lies the flaw.It's more like (gag, these analogies are beginning to suck) like the owner of a hotel testing the security to see if a resident would be able to get into the Janitor's room, where the master key for all the rooms is kept.
The test was specifically aimed at the notion that many machines are multiuser, be they because they belong to a hosting company that provides shell access, or because they're just used by a wide variety of people (say, shared computers in a classroom); and whether Mac OS X is up to the task. Clearly, if it can be hacked in 30 minutes, it isn't.
Also, as I said yesterday, it proves that as long as you can persuade the user to run a program (which 90% of Windows exploits seem to be about), you'll be able to escalate its privileges to root and do a whole bunch of things that shouldn't be possible, even without using simple trickery to get an admin's username and password (which, thanks to a major UI flaw of Mac OS X, is actually something a user expects to see on a regular basis. The funny thing is that most people think it's a security feature, rather than a screw-up.)
That's not to say they will not get faster. They will. Applications that use Rosetta, right now, will crawl on the Core Solo and look "Ok, but nothing spectacular" on the Duo. In time, more and more such apps will become Universal Binaries.
As far as the UT2004 comparison you make, it's worth noting that comparison is:
Core Solo: 10.4fps, vs
G4 1.25GHz: 13.9fps
That puts the G4 as over 33% faster.
Core Duo: 12.22fps, vs
G4 1.42GHz: 14.5fps
That puts the G4 as over 18% faster.
In both cases, not only are all G4 models faster than all Intel models, but they also beat out (the Core Solo to the point of it being embarassing) their market equivalent. And these are comparing against the penultimate generation of Mac minis, Apple replaced (without updating the website) the last high-end Mac mini with a 1.5GHz model.
This pretty much settles it. I'm not getting a Mac mini, not this time around. I mean, this is ridiculous. The Core Duo, with its decent FSB et al, should be a good 4x as fast as the machine it replaces, yet real world benchmarks are saying anything but, with one application type being badly degraded. Gah.
Right now, the integrated graphics thing looks like a deal-breaker, and I was actually waiting for Ars, of all people, to do a decent, unbiased, comprehensive review that would at least answer the question. As it was, I don't feel any better informed having read it.
They made a product they expect to sell in one format for around ten weeks in one country (the first two or three weeks under heavy promotion), then in another for a good ten to twenty years (and then some after that.) Exactly how can six weeks be a problem? Is there any industry outside of Hollywood that expects to be selling the product for that kind of time span that considers six weeks an issue?
It's one thing to expect a single rock concert to make a profit on the same day (because once it's over, it's over), but a movie?
Copyright at its what? What the fuck does copyright have to do with anything?
I'm also pretty sure that big names demanding multi-million dollar salaries has more of an affect on overall costs than the Union of Camera Operators demanding their employees have enough money to live and work in LA.
Still, you may be right. After all, after George Lucas made the Empire Strikes Back, he couldn't get it shown anywhere, those evil unions! (Note: Not only is that untrue, but that's of a movie the Director's union actually wanted to kill because of a dispute over the opening titles.)
I've always thought OS X was more hackable than its supporters tend to say. The very fact that, until recently (like, early 2005), you could set something like this up:
1. Set up page to "redirect" to a .sit or .zip if Safari is the browser.
2. Have trojan in .zip or .sit associate itself with many common types of file, especially uncommon variants of popular files (MPEGs, for instance, seem to randomly pick whether they're Quicktime, VLC, MPlayer, or just not associated with anything, files in OS X)
3. Wait (giggling with insane glee)
Apple fixed the bug exploited in (2) above sometime in early 2005 by having the OS warn you if it was running an application for the first time. For those who are scratching their heads though: Safari, by default, opens "safe" files. This means that step one would have caused the .zip or .sit to be downloaded and extracted on the user's desktop without any user intervention. Once an application is present on a hard drive, it's already installed. In OS X (as with previous versions of Mac OS), applications include associated metadata that tells the OS "I'm an application, and I open files of types JPEG, WDOC, and CARP." If the user hasn't already associated a specific application with a specific file (because, for instance, you just downloaded it from the Internet), then opening a new file will generally cause the OS to search for applications that can open that type, pick one, and open it.
Why am I talking about an old bug? Well, this was present in Mac OS for years, and nobody did anything about it, nobody even considered it a bug until relatively recently. Despite all the crap that's leveled against Microsoft on the same subject, some justified, much not, Apple's attitude towards security is not much better.
If you can get a user to open an application, then you have some access to their machine. If root privileges are gainable from a regular account, then you have root access to their machine.
And all this time I thought you'd have to do the social engineering step of, perhaps, waiting for an application that causes the "Type in an administrator username and password" dialog to come up (perhaps Installer.app, or.. perhaps... Software Update...) and throw a dialog over it that looks identical. It's easier than I thought.
The two major GSM operators in the US, T-Mobile and Cingular, are at different stages and have different policies. T-Mobile is rolling out EDGE (technically 3G, but relatively slow. It's IDSL to UMTS/EVDO's ADSL), because it's incremental to GSM. It seems to be in most major areas, from my experience. T-Mobile's pricing for EDGE is the same as for GPRS - free for a theoretically port blocked service (SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS work fine), $20 a month for a non-blocked service (behind NAT, or restricted to a certain number of connections, none of which are incoming, your choice, though), plus the price of a regular monthy talk plan.
Cingular is rolling out a variant of UMTS (and has EDGE pretty much everywhere too), albeit on wierd frequencies because the FCC hasn't yet finished the work on freeing the relevent frequencies. This is less of a problem with the CDMA2000 systems, largely because nobody buys an IS95 phone and expects it to work outside of the US anyway (it will in a few areas, but not many.) What Cingular hasn't done yet is start to really market their UMTS based services, whereas Sprint and Verizon both are doing so. Cingular's unlimited service is relatively expensive ($80, IIRC), but it is here, it's rolled out to a significant part of the country, and I suspect they're not marketing it yet because they really don't know what people would want to use it for.
In short, HP's talking out of its arse. 3G, in various forms, is available across most parts of America, with both the world wide open standard UMTS (3GSM), and Qualcomm's proprietary system IS-95 (CDMA2000), well supported. HP might be waiting for everyone in the US to agree on a particular standard, but they're going to lose if they do. 3G will probably never settle down on a particular technology, even Cingular didn't go right for "regular" UMTS, going for HSDPA from the start. Meanwhile WiMax will become increasingly competitive too. If that's HP's reason, they've just announced their long-term withdrawl from relevence.
Were either of these true? Clearly not. Apple is always using special events to announce things like iPod cases. Who can forget the three hour special it did in June of 2004 where Jobs went through a range of new Firewire cables? Was it not typical of Apple, in August of 2005, to gather a few hundred journalists into a large conference room at Apple to reveal some beautiful new earphones for the iPod?
And besides, were these products not worthy of hype? Apple, for so long ridiculed as a company that sells over-priced, under-powered, hardware was certainly going to shed that reputation by selling $350 integrated speakers, $100 leather cases, and a Mac mini that can't play games.
You need to lay an entire network to compete with an established phone company. The phone company you're competing with already has laid, and paid for, that company. So while you take twenty years to build your network and 40 to recoup your investment, you'll be somehow raising that money from customers who have the choice between your network, and the cheaper incumbent.
How the FUCK do you compete with that? Are you on the same planet? There's absolutely nothing whatsoever you can do. If you promise "better service", the incumbent has plenty of time to improve their services. If you promise enhanced features, the incumbent can roll that out to all their customers before you've laid the lines in a single street.
This isn't a myth. It's real. It's why nobody's building fully competitive networks, even in countries where it's encouraged. In Britain, the only competition was from cable TV companies, who were only able to get their networks built because BT was banned from selling television services. And I've never heard of someone asking to build a competing network and being told "no" by any American government. Why? Because nobody wants to.
The only "competition" we'll see in the short term is from the cable companies. In the long term, we don't even know for sure that the cable companies and the telephone companies will not merge anyway. And we already know that a duopoly isn't enough to ensure buyer-focussed products.
We need regulation. And we cannot wait for libertarian utopias to be proven idiotic, especially since I've never come across a libertarian who hasn't find something government related to blame any failure of deregulation upon. The wires should work for us.
I've not heard a good thing about SBC however, and their CEO is a total loon. While BellSouth has talked about possibly adding services so that companies can speed up their connections to BellSouth's customers, SBC's CEO has talked about forcing companies to pay for access. In general, he seems as much as of a nut as the CEO of Verizon.
This is about as bad as we can get.
That said, while spoofing emails on a one-off basis is clearly possible, it becomes more difficult to claim that the system is unreliable when you start talking about email threads. Then you're looking at a bunch of people responding to one-another. If the co-worker had responded to the email, and I'd put Jeff's real email address on the Reply-To: line (which, needless to say, on the off-chance he took it seriously before I had a chance to set him straight, I set to my own address), the fact it was fake would have been revealed immediately. The email thread would have been something like:
Such a chain would not be the case if the thread was genuine. Certainly, Bezos wouldn't respond to a reply to a bogus email with, say, "You're welcome. We always do our best to have top notch customer service" or something like that.
For landlines, there is absolutely no reason to subscribe to CLI. I don't recommend it. As you say, it doesn't even identify all numbers, only those on cooperating networks whose subscriber hasn't specifically blocked it. Whether it's a telemarketer, or a person calling from an abused women's shelter, you're not going to find out where the call is coming from with CLI. And, regardless, CLI isn't going to tell you who is calling, only where they're calling from. A call from a number identified as "772-555-0132 Fred Jones, 321 Fake St, Stuart, FL" is probably the person you know who lives at that address (presumably Fred, unless he lives with a bunch of people), but calls from unheard-of numbers might be from friends who are borrowing a phone, etc.
How do you, then, identify a caller? Answer: you use a telephone answering machine. Virtually all answerphones include call screening. That means you record a greeting asking the person to identify themselves, they'll start talking after the beep, and you'll know who's calling. FWIW, telemarketers almost never leave messages. It's actually more effective than the DNC list.
My recommendation: if you're pissed that you're paying for the service when it doesn't work properly, then you've misplaced your anger. It'll almost never work properly to begin with. Cancel the subscription unless it really is the only call screening feature available to you (in which case, you're probably using a cellphone, and if you're using one with a service provider that charges more for CLI, then you're using the wrong SP to begin with...), and get equipment and services designed to do the job that you actually want.
It's an unfortunate fact that most people are more interested in services that look good and technical, rather than ones that work as advertised. CLI doesn't. It never will. Even if we ban number-blocking (and we shouldn't), and upgrade every network in the world to pass on the information, at the simplest level it will never identify who is using the phone, only the phone they're using. Short of banning people from sharing or lending phones, I don't see how it can work. Meanwhile, a telephone answering machine always will do the job being asked of it.