Simple hardware based firewalls are $29 new at Office Max and around $10 used on Ebay, what is your "friend" doing on the Internet without one? Your "friend" is a sloppy Windows user who gets no damn sympathy from me. If in the year 2004 you are a computer user who hasn't heard the message that you need a firewall you need to pull your head out of some orifice or another.
Uh, I've been a sysadmin since 1994, and I still don't believe that most systems need firewalls. Sure, I hear there are some poor excuses for operating systems that are so busted that they can't take care of themselves, but I don't use those.
Type "firewall" into the help & support dialog on a windows XP box and see what you get.
And why would you ever expect anyone to do that? Unusually technical users may know the term firewall as meaning "that thing between the engine compartment and the cab," but most normal anglophones will never have heard the word at all.
Patching an install CD while involved is not difficult, do a google search on "Slipstreaming" and you too can amaze your friends.
I did such a search (I'd never heard the term), and I can assure you that the odds of the average computer user finding and following these instructions is substantially lower than that of them developing the aforementioned eye lasers.
My point here is not that people are dumb. My points are:
Many intelligent and competent people have better things to do with their lives than master the details of Microsoft's myriad failings.
If you feel that it's so blindingly obvious that these things always need to be done, why aren't they done already by default, rather than forcing every single user to repeat these exercises? Why would a reasonable user not assume that all of the necessary-for-everyone things have already been done?
You're right, it's very often the case that worms and such are exploiting vulnerabilities for which Microsoft issues patches long before. However, there are a few reasons that's the case.
1) My very-non-expert understanding of Microsoft's update mechanism is that there are several semi-overlapping systems which are relevant, and that some or all of them do not default to running automatically. (I've never used Windows myself, so it's entirely possible that I'm mistaken about this. It's the impression I've acquired after listening to many Windows users.)
Contrast this to Apple's Software Update tool, which defaults to checking for updates once a week, and handles all hardware and firmware from Apple. It requires explicit permission from the user to perform upgrades, but it does take the liberty of downloading "important" updates before requesting a final go-ahead, making it as painless as possible.
2) Microsoft's patches have a pretty high incidence of causing problems for previously-working systems. My understanding is that this is often related to a very inflexible shared library system which encourages third-party developers to overwrite standard system DLLs with their own versions left and right, predictably causing problems upon future update.
While it is absolutely the case that updates from Apple occasionally cause problems, it seems to be relatively rare. I personally have no qualms about simply agreeing immediately to any update Apple offers me; I've been doing so for five years now, and I haven't had any cause to regret it yet.
So, yes, a very high percentage of systems out there are lacking patches which Microsoft has made available. But there are still some senses in which Microsoft is very responsible for that being the case.
Again, TLS is just a way to get to SSL. I find it pretty predictable that asking it to use SSL will cause it to get there by whatever method the remote host supports.
Either way, as a previous poster pointed out, a single web search for "Mail.app TLS" would get you the answer pretty quickly. You complain that if you paid money you shouldn't have to refer to the web, and you lament the lack of source available to you, but I can't imagine any case in which it would be faster or easier to answer such a simple question by reading the source than by asking google.
About those.DS_store files you dislike... use Path Finder. Or KDE. Or zsh. Or whatever other file management thingy it is that you do like.
And about the same thing is true of all your other complaints: if you prefer VLC to the builtin DVD player, use VLC. If you prefer Thunderbird to Mail.app, use Thunderbird. If you don't like iTunes, use xmms (though that case appears to be more that you're conflating quicktime and itunes).
You seem to have this idea that Apple is forcing you into using only the applications they provide, but I really can't see any sense in which this is the case. They're providing a set of tools which many people (obviously including me) find to be excellent. But if your needs or priorities are addressed better by different tools, don't whine about Apple, just use the tools you actually like.
TLS and SSL aren't quite synonymous, but they're pretty damn close; TLS is just a way to bootstrap up to SSL from a previously-plaintext connection. So it would make sense that a checkbox labelled "Use SSL" would turn on using SSL by either method.
Which it does.
Where did you get your information (which I notice you've been repeating in all of your posts for weeks) that Mail.app doesn't support TLS? I've been using it happily for years now, but just to make absolutely sure that I wasn't the one spewing nonsense, I snooped one of my own sessions just now, and saw it saying STARTTLS like a good little MUA.
Uh, he's suggesting you use Google because you apparently were confused by the checkbox in Mail.app's preferences which reads, "Use SSL".
I think it would take design genius even beyond Apple's to come up with an even more obvious interface than a checkbox labelled "Use SSL" which you check when you want to use SSL.
If the ipod had greater battery life, support for some additional codecs, a "better" (whatever that means) remote, and a builtin mic, one or both of the following would've happened:
- production or development of them would cost more. Thus either reducing Apple's margins, or reducing sales _far_ more than the trivial number of people who chose other players for these features.
- they'd be larger/heavier/more complex, again ruining the features which actually do draw customers.
Really, the number of people who care about ogg decoding or a builtin mic is completely insignificant compared to the number of people who--as demonstrated by the success of the minipod--care about it's physical size and design.
So the answer to all your questions is that Apple doesn't bother doing these things because no one cares about them. However hard that is for you to believe, or however offensive you find it to be rounded down to "no one", I'm afraid that it's true.
The purists among us bristle at references to "apple-q to quit".
While I'm one of those bristly purists myself, I do find it pretty silly for Apple to have chosen to give this key two symbols, neither one of which is its name.
A word of warning about ps2->usb adaptors: every one I've tried has a bad habit of forgetting about modifier keys that are held down a few seconds with no other keypresses.
Which sounds like an obscure case, until you're scrolling back in your xterm with shift-pgup... go back a while, pause to read an interesting bit while still holding down shift... hit pgup again and find that you've just sent an unshifted pgup, dumping you back to the bottom of scrollback. Pretty bloody annoying, I found it.
(Fortunately, Kinesis now makes a usb version of their keyboard. Unfortunately, it has its whole own host of bugs. But it's a nice shiny silver!)
Uh, pserver is unencrypted, and using it is actually _more_ work than doing it the Right Way (over ssh). There's just no good reason for anyone anywhere to use it.
So, yeah, I'd consider breaking pserver to be a valid security enhancement.
But supporting open standards isn't compatible with their business objective.
Uh, kinda odd for them to be using AAC then, isn't it?
And why exactly would Apple be charging royalties for AAC use? It's one of those open standards you seem to champion (despite your lack of familiarity with them), and Apple not a creation of Apple's.
Some years ago, I asserted that DHCP basically had no good reason to exist. Any time a machine was going to be on my network, I wanted to know about it and explicitly handle its placement myself, rather than just having things reconfigure themselves willy-nilly.
Predictably, I've now changed my mind about that for many environments. If I were running a network of a thousand workstations, I'd much rather deal with the small chance of one of them doing something inappropriate than configure them all manually.
I have a guess that you may undergo a similar change in thinking about the appropriateness of Rendezvous and/or Xgrid. When it's an unusual task that only gets handled in small and exceptional circumstances, it seems best to handle it explicitly. When it just becomes part of what normal computers do all the time, it seems unthinkable to handle it manually.
Unless I'm misremembering the law, the DMCA criminalizes "circumventing" any "security" systems.
Now, claiming that Word's editing features are a security mechanism and that bypassing them is illegal would be ridiculous.
Unfortunately, no more ridiculous than, say, claiming that pdf e-books are a security system are that even foreign nationals bypassing them are US criminals.
I'm ashamed that, even having seen Elizabeth, I first read this as "the paypal assassin".
Re:"free registration" parethetical???
on
In Google We Trust
·
· Score: 1
Because the New York Times wants you to start thinking of this act as normal, and a perfectly acceptible thing to ask of users. They hope that while it was once preposterous, if they just keep doing it enough years, people will think of it as reasonable.
The slashdot editors feel that this is an offensive and absurd thing to ask of people, and that it will stay that way no matter how long they keep doing it.
I find that I mostly agree with the latter, and I'm happy with the compromise of being willing to link to their content, but only with a, "hey, turns out they're still being fuckwits over there" notice.
On something of a tangent, what I do find horrendously annoying and distracting is Yahoo's habit of appending (news - web sites) to damn near every noun. This reliably screws up the flow of sentences, and their willingness to insert this before even apostraphes makes it all the uglier.
Wasn't the whole bloody point of hypertext that one didn't need external pointers like that? That you can just make whatever words you want hot, and have them go to whatever content you feel matches that text?
The market for portable music players isn't anywhere saturated, and won't be for a long time.
And upgrades will still hold some draw for the forseeable future. Larger capacities, faster load times, smaller packages, wireless, color displays, video playing, more PDA functions, and dozens of other features will continue to make new models attractive even to those who already have a pod.
So basing a division of your business on revenue from this is as sound and long-term a plan as anything in the tech industry ever is.
You're right, that one was kinda stupid. I don't know the laws in Nevada, but here in PA they would have gotten her on SOMETHING. Perhaps "Assault on a police officer" when she slammed the door into him. THEN you get her for resisting arrest.
Trying to find a charge, any charge, on which to "get" someone is one of the more horrifying types of abuse of power around. Deciding that someone is a generally bad person and searching for crimes they might have committed is exactly backward.
People are defined as societally problematic only by the effects of crimes they've committed, not the other way around. If you have to work at trumping up some charges, then they simply don't need to be punished, however much you may dislike them.
This becomes even more problematic because it's virtually impossible to not be enacting at least some tiny infraction at any moment, especially while driving. So people aren't really punished according to their detrimental effects on society, but on the capricious decisions of whatever law enforcement official happens to be nearby at the moment. Driving one mph over the speed limit? Tire treads too worn? Driving recklessly, disturbing the peace, or doing anything else that's defined by officer's discretion? Then your world is in the hands of the temporary feudal lord who happens by.
I think the only solution to this would be removing officer discretion from the enforcement process. Enforcement officials should be legally required to punish every single infraction of every law, however minor.
What's that you say, they could never realistically do that? Then the laws are flawed. If an act is so ubiquitous that you can't keep up with punishing people for it, then it shouldn't be illegal.
I think that the set of people who can handle using virtual desktops and not losing track of windows has a lot of overlap with the set of people who can find, download, and install third-party software.
Sure, it'd be nice if there were a builtin tool which shipped with thhe system. But having to install your own is a very minor inconvenience, certainly not an OS-deciding issue.
(And if it were an OS-deciding issue, wouldn't the inconvenience and complexity of needing to find, download, and install all of a linux distribution more than outweigh it?)
You'd end up with a windowing system and gui which are completely unrelated to osx's, and unable to run any osx software. By any reasonable measure, the resultant beast would be much closer to any other linux/unix system than to macosx.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, I've been a sysadmin since 1994, and I still don't believe that most systems need firewalls. Sure, I hear there are some poor excuses for operating systems that are so busted that they can't take care of themselves, but I don't use those.
And why would you ever expect anyone to do that? Unusually technical users may know the term firewall as meaning "that thing between the engine compartment and the cab," but most normal anglophones will never have heard the word at all.
I did such a search (I'd never heard the term), and I can assure you that the odds of the average computer user finding and following these instructions is substantially lower than that of them developing the aforementioned eye lasers.
My point here is not that people are dumb. My points are:
Many intelligent and competent people have better things to do with their lives than master the details of Microsoft's myriad failings.
If you feel that it's so blindingly obvious that these things always need to be done, why aren't they done already by default, rather than forcing every single user to repeat these exercises? Why would a reasonable user not assume that all of the necessary-for-everyone things have already been done?
You're right, it's very often the case that worms and such are exploiting vulnerabilities for which Microsoft issues patches long before. However, there are a few reasons that's the case.
1) My very-non-expert understanding of Microsoft's update mechanism is that there are several semi-overlapping systems which are relevant, and that some or all of them do not default to running automatically. (I've never used Windows myself, so it's entirely possible that I'm mistaken about this. It's the impression I've acquired after listening to many Windows users.)
Contrast this to Apple's Software Update tool, which defaults to checking for updates once a week, and handles all hardware and firmware from Apple. It requires explicit permission from the user to perform upgrades, but it does take the liberty of downloading "important" updates before requesting a final go-ahead, making it as painless as possible.
2) Microsoft's patches have a pretty high incidence of causing problems for previously-working systems. My understanding is that this is often related to a very inflexible shared library system which encourages third-party developers to overwrite standard system DLLs with their own versions left and right, predictably causing problems upon future update.
While it is absolutely the case that updates from Apple occasionally cause problems, it seems to be relatively rare. I personally have no qualms about simply agreeing immediately to any update Apple offers me; I've been doing so for five years now, and I haven't had any cause to regret it yet.
So, yes, a very high percentage of systems out there are lacking patches which Microsoft has made available. But there are still some senses in which Microsoft is very responsible for that being the case.
Again, TLS is just a way to get to SSL. I find it pretty predictable that asking it to use SSL will cause it to get there by whatever method the remote host supports.
.DS_store files you dislike... use Path Finder. Or KDE. Or zsh. Or whatever other file management thingy it is that you do like.
Either way, as a previous poster pointed out, a single web search for "Mail.app TLS" would get you the answer pretty quickly. You complain that if you paid money you shouldn't have to refer to the web, and you lament the lack of source available to you, but I can't imagine any case in which it would be faster or easier to answer such a simple question by reading the source than by asking google.
About those
And about the same thing is true of all your other complaints: if you prefer VLC to the builtin DVD player, use VLC. If you prefer Thunderbird to Mail.app, use Thunderbird. If you don't like iTunes, use xmms (though that case appears to be more that you're conflating quicktime and itunes).
You seem to have this idea that Apple is forcing you into using only the applications they provide, but I really can't see any sense in which this is the case. They're providing a set of tools which many people (obviously including me) find to be excellent. But if your needs or priorities are addressed better by different tools, don't whine about Apple, just use the tools you actually like.
Which it does.
Where did you get your information (which I notice you've been repeating in all of your posts for weeks) that Mail.app doesn't support TLS? I've been using it happily for years now, but just to make absolutely sure that I wasn't the one spewing nonsense, I snooped one of my own sessions just now, and saw it saying STARTTLS like a good little MUA.
I think it would take design genius even beyond Apple's to come up with an even more obvious interface than a checkbox labelled "Use SSL" which you check when you want to use SSL.
If the ipod had greater battery life, support for some additional codecs, a "better" (whatever that means) remote, and a builtin mic, one or both of the following would've happened:
- production or development of them would cost more. Thus either reducing Apple's margins, or reducing sales _far_ more than the trivial number of people who chose other players for these features.
- they'd be larger/heavier/more complex, again ruining the features which actually do draw customers.
Really, the number of people who care about ogg decoding or a builtin mic is completely insignificant compared to the number of people who--as demonstrated by the success of the minipod--care about it's physical size and design.
So the answer to all your questions is that Apple doesn't bother doing these things because no one cares about them. However hard that is for you to believe, or however offensive you find it to be rounded down to "no one", I'm afraid that it's true.
Then why not get one anyway? No mac magic to it, it's just a usb keyboard with a free bonus meta key.
While I'm one of those bristly purists myself, I do find it pretty silly for Apple to have chosen to give this key two symbols, neither one of which is its name.
A word of warning about ps2->usb adaptors: every one I've tried has a bad habit of forgetting about modifier keys that are held down a few seconds with no other keypresses.
Which sounds like an obscure case, until you're scrolling back in your xterm with shift-pgup... go back a while, pause to read an interesting bit while still holding down shift... hit pgup again and find that you've just sent an unshifted pgup, dumping you back to the bottom of scrollback. Pretty bloody annoying, I found it.
(Fortunately, Kinesis now makes a usb version of their keyboard. Unfortunately, it has its whole own host of bugs. But it's a nice shiny silver!)
Uh, pserver is unencrypted, and using it is actually _more_ work than doing it the Right Way (over ssh). There's just no good reason for anyone anywhere to use it.
So, yeah, I'd consider breaking pserver to be a valid security enhancement.
Uh, kinda odd for them to be using AAC then, isn't it?
And why exactly would Apple be charging royalties for AAC use? It's one of those open standards you seem to champion (despite your lack of familiarity with them), and Apple not a creation of Apple's.
Some years ago, I asserted that DHCP basically had no good reason to exist. Any time a machine was going to be on my network, I wanted to know about it and explicitly handle its placement myself, rather than just having things reconfigure themselves willy-nilly.
Predictably, I've now changed my mind about that for many environments. If I were running a network of a thousand workstations, I'd much rather deal with the small chance of one of them doing something inappropriate than configure them all manually.
I have a guess that you may undergo a similar change in thinking about the appropriateness of Rendezvous and/or Xgrid. When it's an unusual task that only gets handled in small and exceptional circumstances, it seems best to handle it explicitly. When it just becomes part of what normal computers do all the time, it seems unthinkable to handle it manually.
Unless I'm misremembering the law, the DMCA criminalizes "circumventing" any "security" systems.
Now, claiming that Word's editing features are a security mechanism and that bypassing them is illegal would be ridiculous.
Unfortunately, no more ridiculous than, say, claiming that pdf e-books are a security system are that even foreign nationals bypassing them are US criminals.
I'm ashamed that, even having seen Elizabeth, I first read this as "the paypal assassin".
The slashdot editors feel that this is an offensive and absurd thing to ask of people, and that it will stay that way no matter how long they keep doing it.
I find that I mostly agree with the latter, and I'm happy with the compromise of being willing to link to their content, but only with a, "hey, turns out they're still being fuckwits over there" notice.
On something of a tangent, what I do find horrendously annoying and distracting is Yahoo's habit of appending (news - web sites) to damn near every noun. This reliably screws up the flow of sentences, and their willingness to insert this before even apostraphes makes it all the uglier.
Wasn't the whole bloody point of hypertext that one didn't need external pointers like that? That you can just make whatever words you want hot, and have them go to whatever content you feel matches that text?
Right, cause that powerpc version of NT 3.51 was such a roaring success, yeah?
The market for portable music players isn't anywhere saturated, and won't be for a long time.
And upgrades will still hold some draw for the forseeable future. Larger capacities, faster load times, smaller packages, wireless, color displays, video playing, more PDA functions, and dozens of other features will continue to make new models attractive even to those who already have a pod.
So basing a division of your business on revenue from this is as sound and long-term a plan as anything in the tech industry ever is.
Trying to find a charge, any charge, on which to "get" someone is one of the more horrifying types of abuse of power around. Deciding that someone is a generally bad person and searching for crimes they might have committed is exactly backward.
People are defined as societally problematic only by the effects of crimes they've committed, not the other way around. If you have to work at trumping up some charges, then they simply don't need to be punished, however much you may dislike them.
This becomes even more problematic because it's virtually impossible to not be enacting at least some tiny infraction at any moment, especially while driving. So people aren't really punished according to their detrimental effects on society, but on the capricious decisions of whatever law enforcement official happens to be nearby at the moment. Driving one mph over the speed limit? Tire treads too worn? Driving recklessly, disturbing the peace, or doing anything else that's defined by officer's discretion? Then your world is in the hands of the temporary feudal lord who happens by.
I think the only solution to this would be removing officer discretion from the enforcement process. Enforcement officials should be legally required to punish every single infraction of every law, however minor.
What's that you say, they could never realistically do that? Then the laws are flawed. If an act is so ubiquitous that you can't keep up with punishing people for it, then it shouldn't be illegal.
I think that the set of people who can handle using virtual desktops and not losing track of windows has a lot of overlap with the set of people who can find, download, and install third-party software.
Sure, it'd be nice if there were a builtin tool which shipped with thhe system. But having to install your own is a very minor inconvenience, certainly not an OS-deciding issue.
(And if it were an OS-deciding issue, wouldn't the inconvenience and complexity of needing to find, download, and install all of a linux distribution more than outweigh it?)
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Whoa, _many_ reasons? Okay, you totally convinced me.
Still every bit as relevant. Allow me to direct your attention to all of the large and thriving companies writing open-source games..
You'd end up with a windowing system and gui which are completely unrelated to osx's, and unable to run any osx software. By any reasonable measure, the resultant beast would be much closer to any other linux/unix system than to macosx.
How exactly do you propose that they "lower" the price to $99 from "free with the OS"?