They've been doing it on the iTunes App Store since it launched. Look at, for example, that tethering app by NullRiver.
OK, so you're not referring to the Mac App Store, as that was an iOS app. And whether they kicked it out of the iOS App Store because they wanted to do it themselves or because AT&T (the only iPhone carrier at the time) didn't want tethering allowed on the iPhone is another matter. Once AT&T said OK to tethering, it would be kinda silly for Apple not to build it in.
...in a world with lots more application developers, more naive users, and access to the Intertubes being common, it's not so good any more.
I'm not sure I agree with that. There were always a high percentage of naïve users.
That's only one part of it. If you don't have a lot of malware out there, and you don't have Intertubes access to provide a bigger attack surface, the naive users matter less.
I remember the UNIX users of a couple of decades back,
UNIX isn't 20 years old. UNIX is over 40 years old, and the security model is even older, dating back at least to Multics, and possibly earlier (I forget how TOPS-10 handled permissions, for example).
And the larger number of developers actually makes things better, not worse.
O RLY?
The more apps that serve a particular purpose, the fewer users that use any one of them, and thus the fewer users that will be affected by an attack on it.
And, if the percentage of developers who are malicious is constant (or increases over time), the more developers, the more malicious developers.
And UNIX boxes were almost always networked.
O RLY? Not when I started using UNIX. UUCP, for example, didn't show up until V7 in 1979, and most UNIX sites didn't have ARPANET access back then.
What's different now is not so much that the security model is no longer adequate, but rather that the target has become juicier, so it is now worth attacking UNIX users where it was not worth bothering with them before.
So are you saying the Multics folks should have anticipated drive-by downloads?
Twenty years ago
The UNIX security model wasn't invented 20 years ago, it was invented more than 40 years ago (given that UNIX didn't invent it).
There are Algebras for Logic, you know. I don't know how you could get through a class in Logic, Philosophy, or even Rhetoric without Boolean Algebra. Not as well known here are Heyting Algebras.
I guess my point is that Algebra is a pretty broad term
Yes, there's "elementary algebra", which is what Prof. Hacker was talking about, and there's abstract algebra", which is a much broader topic, and there's an algebra, which is a particular type of mathematical structure in abstract algebra, and....
and, yes, it appears that a Political Science student would benefit from a study of Algebra.
Of course, I'd take it a bit further and suggest that they would very likely benefit from a strong mathematics background, including statistics. I don't see how this is even a question.
Perhaps if he were to read that, he'd change his mind.:-)
Doubtful. I think he's trying to justify his own incompetence in maths, so arguments are going to be wasted.
Actually, it's "doubtful" because "that" refers to the very essay he wrote. One technical term for what I was doing there is "snark", i.e. GodGell said "Mathematics is nothing less than the upmost tool of rationality. Lose it, and all progress decays." in a fashion that seemed to indicate he was arguing against Prof. Hacker, so I just quoted back at him a passage from the very essay linked to by the/. article in which Prof. Hacker agreed that "Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.”. However, "our civilization would collapse without mathematics" is inequivalent to "our civilization would collapse if we don't try to teach algebra to every high school graduate". Perhaps both statements are true, but the former doesn't ipso facto imply the latter.
And I didn't see anything in the article to lead me to believe that Prof. Hacker is completely incompetent in mathematics; he might not understand, for example, differential geometry, or category theory, or algebraic topology, but that's probably true of most people arguing with him in the comments here. (I, at least, will admit to knowing a tiny bit about the first of those, a much tinier bit about the second, and nothing about the third, although I suspect that I'd be able to understand a tiny bit more by reading a description of them, and could perhaps understand them somewhat better if I spent many years studying them full-time.)
Also, I would like to point out that Hack's (sic) article
You're not quoting somebody who gave his name as "Hack", so "(sic)" is inappropriate there. ("Is learning proper word/abbreviation usage necessary?") It's appropriate in my response, as it indicates that I didn't call him "Hack", you did.
other than the statistic showing students tend to not do well in math, was full of loose correlations, statistics not related to his points, or anecdotal evidence.
And doesn't discuss anything outside the US in any depth, which is my biggest problem with it. Yeah, he says
It’s true that students in Finland, South Korea and Canada score better on mathematics tests. But it’s their perseverance, not their classroom algebra, that fits them for demanding jobs.
and
That sort of collaboration has long undergirded German apprenticeship programs. I fully concur that high-tech knowledge is needed to sustain an advanced industrial economy. But we’re deluding ourselves if we believe the solution is largely academic.
but just says that in passing, which is why, although I think it's a good starting point for discussion (and not just something to be dismissed, especially by people who couldn't be bothered to RTFA), it's far from a definitive statement. I think the question "should we require algebra for high-school graduation or college admission?" is worth asking, even if the answer ends up being "hell, yes!" Even if that is the answer, you might learn something about how to teach algebra (and other parts of math) in the process.
" What of the claim that mathematics sharpens our minds and makes us more intellectually adept as individuals and a citizen body? It's true that mathematics requires mental exertion. But there's no evidence that being able to prove (x + y²)² = (x² - y²)² + (2xy)² leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis."
It seems to me that you can't tell the difference in the opinions of people who read his stance and those that read the title... since it summarizes the article nicely.
I.e., several posters fired up their blowtorches and set fire to a strawman bearing no resemblance to Prof. Hacker. I think his essay is worthy of further discussion and research (on both sides, including the opposing side), but that's not possible if you think he's saying nothing more than "math class is hard, let's go shopping!"
(I also wonder whether it was phrased as "Political Science Prof Asks: Is Algebra Necessary?" rather than "Should We Require Algebra For College Admission?" solely to provoke squealing outbursts of nerd rage, but that's another matter. Yes, it's true that Prof. Hacker is a political scientist, and, yes, it's true that he's asking whether algebra should be necessary for college education, but arguing that it's sort-of technically accurate, modulo his point not being that nobody needs algebra, doesn't mean that's the best choice of headline - I'm not sure how relevant his profession is to the discussion, especially given that he says "I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers.")
I wish the hell I could understand that just looking at it. And I'm not even joking.
I'm in my 30s now. I'm starting to see big gaps in my skill set.
Well, one gap might just be "unfamiliarity with the notation used in some programming languages for exponentiation"; x^2 is "x squared" in, for example, BASIC (and that might sort-of come from ALGOL, if I'm remembering correctly that up-arrow in early versions of ASCII became caret). In FORTRAN and some other languages, it would be x**2. As somebody whose first high-level programming language was FORTRAN, I'm not sure why I tend to use the ALGOLish/BASIC convention, perhaps because it's one fewer character, or perhaps because I suspect (perhaps incorrectly) that more people would be familiar with it. (See the "in programming languages" section of the Wikipedia article on exponentiation for the syntax for exponentiation in various programming languages.)
I tried just copying and pasting that from Hacker's article (and checked it, to make sure nobody ended up saying "ha, ha, see, that dumb political science professor can't do algebra!" - yes, they really are equal), and it didn't work. I was too lazy to try digging up HTML entities for the superscript-2 character, and didn't know whether that would work everywhere, so I just fell back on ^2.
I.e., don't ascribe to Prof. Hacker, based purely on the title or summary of the/. post (or on your prejudices about education, political science, political scientists, politics, politicians, or people who can't prove that (x^2 + y^2)^2 = (x^2 - y^2)^2 + (2xy)^2), views that he does not, in fact, hold. Thank you.
The point is not learning how to do complex calculation, the point is by learning these mathematical subjects you develop certain skills in logic, problem solving , and in critical thinking.
It goes beyond mathematics and to how to be a rational thinker ( and yes I am exaggerating a bit ).
Yeah. Maybe Prof. Hacker should read this essay, which proposes that
...mathematics teachers at every level could create exciting courses in what I call “citizen statistics.” This would not be a backdoor version of algebra, as in the Advanced Placement syllabus. Nor would it focus on equations used by scholars when they write for one another. Instead, it would familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.
It could, for example, teach students how the Consumer Price Index is computed, what is included and how each item in the index is weighted — and include discussion about which items should be included and what weights they should be given.
This need not involve dumbing down. Researching the reliability of numbers can be as demanding as geometry. More and more colleges are requiring courses in “quantitative reasoning.” In fact, we should be starting that in kindergarten.
It's the unintuitive ways in which it's taught (which in turn causes the societal alienation of the subject) that is the problem, not the fact that it's a requirement.
Mathematics is nothing less than the upmost tool of rationality. Lose it, and all progress decays.
Yeah. Somebody should point Prof. Hacker to this essay, in which the writer states that
Peter Braunfeld of the University of Illinois tells his students, “Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.” He’s absolutely right.
Algebraic algorithms underpin animated movies, investment strategies and airline ticket prices. And we need people to understand how those things work and to advance our frontiers.
Quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies, from the Affordable Care Act, to the costs and benefits of environmental regulation, to the impact of climate change. Being able to detect and identify ideology at work behind the numbers is of obvious use. Ours is fast becoming a statistical age, which raises the bar for informed citizenship.
Perhaps if he were to read that, he'd change his mind.:-)
(Shorter me: "You did RTFA, right? If not, please do so before ascribing to Prof. Hacker opinions he does not hold.")
Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white.
and substitute to:
History is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white.
...and you have something that's arguably a category error. "Algebra" is a particular part of the discipline of mathematics; "history" is the entire discipline of, well, history.
Now, to be fair, his essay switches back and forth between speaking of particular parts of mathematics and of mathematics as a whole, but it sounds as if he's not arguing "math class is hard, let's go shopping!", he's arguing that, whilst "quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies", requiring people to "master polynomial functions and parametric equations" in order to attend college might not improve quantitative literacy sufficiently to justify preventing students who have difficulty mastering them from taking other college courses that might not require those skills and that might increase their knowledge base and critical thinking skills.
The UNIX security model sucks. It assumes that attacks come from the outside, and is designed to protect the user from other users on the same system. In the UNIX model, everything run by a particular user has the same rights as the user. In practice, that just isn't a viable security model anymore.
The key is "anymore", so it's perhaps better stated as "the UNIX security model is no longer sufficient" - and I'd rephrase that as "the time-sharing security model is no longer sufficient", as that model predates UNIX and continues to exist in some present-day operating systems other than UN*Xes. It was pretty good for machines at that time, but, in a world with lots more application developers, more naive users, and access to the Intertubes being common, it's not so good any more.
And I'm reasonably confident that there will be. Apple appear to think that there are OS X machines and iOS machines, and that, whilst there are many things that both of them can do, they have different purposes - iOS machines being for users who prefer a simpler, but more limited, User Experience(TM), and OS X machines for users for whom that's not good enough.
What you really mean is that Apple has a history of outlawing functionality of a popular app,
"Outlawing" in what sense? If you're referring to OS X apps (which is what Arment was discussing), a history of "outlawing" in the sense of "banning from the Mac App Store software that provides that functionality", that history dates back at most a couple of years, given that the Mac App Store was announced in October 2010. If you mean "outlawing" in the sense of "removing APIs that allow that functionality to be provided", that's a different matter (note that's "APIs", not "internal interfaces that people have figured out how to use and that Apple later decided weren't the right way of doing things and just nuked", which is perfectly legitimate behavior).
What Marco will find is that for every serious application developer leaving the Mac App Store, there are 50 App developers moving in -- some of them migrants from the iOS App Store, who are just adding a secondary target to their development builds.
Well, it's a bit more than that, if by "just adding a secondary target to their development builds" you mean "just tweaking the build targets in the project file without writing any new code" - AppKit and UIKit are different APIs.
And the fun bit(!) -> When so many people have bought Apps developed outside the sandbox and they won't run on the next i(thingy)
The apps being discussed here don't run on any "i(thingy)", as they don't run on the OS that "i(thingies)" run. They run on OS X, not iOS, and the App Store being discussed is the Mac App Store.
It won't be too long before all MacOS has become is the build platform to build iOS apps on.
...and the platform for users for whom iOS's simplification of the User Experience(TM) crosses their threshold of "simpler" in "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler." (I'm one of those users - "sorry, only one window on the screen at a time" doesn't work for me, and neither does "documents should be organized by the application for which they're intended" rather than by "what they're about".)
If by "crippled folder system" you mean "silo for each app, with no subfolders in a silo", that's "early 1980s" at best; I think MS-DOS 2 (introduced in 1983) had subdirectories in FAT, as did HFS (introduced in 1985). (And workstation OSes had them since Day One, but most people didn't have UN*X workstations as their personal computers....)
I'm curious how many documents for a given app you need to have before "no subfolders in a silo" breaks down, and whether Apple just figured "anybody with that many documents should just use a Mac".
Something else... over the years I've noticed they're not very good about fixing OS bugs. They're perfectly happy to ship a version of the OS with a problem, sometimes quite serious (UDP socket bug, color profile stall bug, bogus console error bug) and then... perhaps... fix it in a later version of the OS, but leave everyone even with the previous version hanging.
Yes, they're annoyingly strict at times about what bug fixes they allow into a software update. (I'm assuming by "later version" you mean "later major version", so that a bug in 10.x gets fixed in 10.x+1 but not in any 10.x.y software update.)
Fixed in Lion, so that accidental resizing of a window when you're trying to select some text near the edge of the window is a completely cross-platform experience. (I forget whether I've done that on Windows, GNOME, or both, but when the ability to resize windows from the sides first showed up during Lion development, I started doing that on OS X as well.)
(That's not a reason not to have resize-from-the-side - resize-from-the-side lets you, for example, more easily resize along one axis without affecting the size along the other axis - it's just a small case where the advantages are accompanied by disadvantages.)
Not until you have to let them grope your junk before you can become a developer. (And I don't mean that metaphorically. If it doesn't involve somebody from Apple wearing rubber gloves, it doesn't count.)
The only way to prevent such a scenario in a traditional UNIX permission system is to run each application as a separate user.
Let me introduce you to an interesting filesystem flag called SetGID.
I think he's quite aware of it. However, if the goal is to keep stuff that you run from getting access to files to which you have read access, set-GID doesn't help unless the permission system can say "a process with UID XXX only has access to this file if its group set includes group YYY", and the standard user/group/world permission set doesn't support that:
Perhaps it can be done with ACLs; if I remember correctly, the way OS X ACLs work is that the first ACL rule that matches wins, so if you put a "group YYY has read permission" rule in front of "user XXX has no read permission" rule, that might do it. Whether that would count as "[a] really scary [ACL]" is another matter.
That is not correct. Apple is sandboxing Mac OS X and Mac OS apps will have to be sandboxed to be accepted into the Mac OS app store very soon.
When you load up Mountain Lion, you will discover that by default the system will not run unsigned apps, including the ones you bought from them and other notable vendors.
Note that "signed" does not imply "sandboxed". The default Gatekeeper setting means that, unless you do Special Stuff, applications downloaded from the Intertubes (by programs that set the "quarantined" extended attribute, at least; dunno if any applications that set it do so only if they were downloaded from an "external" site, for some definition of "external") can't be launched with a double-click (or, presumably, automatically through some code paths) unless they're from the Mac App Store or signed by a "registered developer", even if they're not sandboxed. There are ways (involving a context menu, i.e. Control+click, I think) to override that without changing the default setting.
I have been resisting learning objective C, hoping to continue writing portable C++ applications against the Unix API's and other well known interfaces like X and python. I don't know yet if the sandboxing system only works for objective C Cocoa programs.
As far as I know, at least some of the sandboxing is ultimately implemented with Mandatory Access Control hooks in the kernel (see the security top-level directory in the XNU source, and stuff it calls and that calls it), which means it applies to anything that makes system calls, either directly or through libraries or frameworks, regardless of whether it's written in C or C++ or Objective-C or Objective-C++ or FORTRAN or..., as long as it's a statically-compiled language (if it's interpreted, the calls are made by the interpreter, which isn't sandboxed, and if it's compiled on the fly, the code that's running the generated code would need to be sandboxed; I don't know whether software of either type is allowed in the Mac App Store). Some of it might be implemented at the Mach messaging level, which means that part applies to anything that sends Mach messages to the services to which access is controlled, either directly or through libraries or frameworks, regardless of whether it's written in C or C++ or Objective-C or Objective-C++ or FORTRAN or... (same comments apply as in the previous sentence).
However, if you want to sell or give away your app via some mechanism other than the Mac App Store, you don't need to sandbox it. To have it launchable with the default settings on Mountain Lion, you'd have to join the Mac Developer Program and get a Developer ID and corresponding certificate with which to sign your code.
(And if you just want to build your own code and run it on your own machine, you don't, as far as I know, even need that, as the code hasn't been downloaded from the Intertubes and thus hasn't had a quarantine label slapped on it. And if you've downloaded the code with, say, curl, that might not slap a quarantine label on it, either.)
Steve Jobs wanted nothing less than revolution in each product release, and he didn't get that for the last 3 years he was there.
And he did get it prior to 2009? (Note that Snow Leopard development started before 2009 and the decision to make it a mostly clean-up-the-innards release was made before 2009. As for the "he didn't get that for the last 3 years he was there", presumably you're not counting the no-spinning-media-available versions of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, as the hard drive option for the MacBook Air was, at least if the Wikipedia page is to be believed, dropped in the Late 2010 MacBook Air.)
I suspect he's referring to Apple's App Store apps - things like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Configurator, Final Cut, Logic, iPhoto, iMovie.
To which "he" are you referring? The person claiming that "None -- absolutely zero -- of their desktop apps are or can be sandboxed..." or the person saying that "Apple apps were the only one sandboxed in Leopard and they've been adding more and more in every release"? If none of the Mac App Store apps are sandboxed - which may or may not be the case, depending on whether those apps still support Snow Leopard and on whether Snow Leopard supports sandboxing at the level that those Mac App Store apps need (e.g., whether all of the entitlements used by those apps exist in Snow Leopard) - I suspect Apple views that as a temporary situation for most of the apps, to be resolved in future versions of the apps (and, if new entitlements are required, future versions of the OS). I doubt the "...or can be sandboxed" part of the first of those claims. There might be some that can't, but I really doubt any of the components of iWork can't ever be sandboxed, for example.
Correct. But these days malicious software doesn't actually need root access any more. Unsandboxed access is probably "good enough".
Which means Apple had better have made sure pboxd pretty secure against attack. It's probably easier to make pboxd reasonably secure than to make all their frameworks and all their own apps reasonably secure and ensure that third-party apps are that secure, at least as long as the languages being used for development allow code unfettered read-write access to the writable portion of the address space.
Slashdot Mirror
They've been doing it on the iTunes App Store since it launched. Look at, for example, that tethering app by NullRiver.
OK, so you're not referring to the Mac App Store, as that was an iOS app. And whether they kicked it out of the iOS App Store because they wanted to do it themselves or because AT&T (the only iPhone carrier at the time) didn't want tethering allowed on the iPhone is another matter. Once AT&T said OK to tethering, it would be kinda silly for Apple not to build it in.
I'm not sure I agree with that. There were always a high percentage of naïve users.
That's only one part of it. If you don't have a lot of malware out there, and you don't have Intertubes access to provide a bigger attack surface, the naive users matter less.
I remember the UNIX users of a couple of decades back,
UNIX isn't 20 years old. UNIX is over 40 years old, and the security model is even older, dating back at least to Multics, and possibly earlier (I forget how TOPS-10 handled permissions, for example).
And the larger number of developers actually makes things better, not worse.
O RLY?
The more apps that serve a particular purpose, the fewer users that use any one of them, and thus the fewer users that will be affected by an attack on it.
And, if the percentage of developers who are malicious is constant (or increases over time), the more developers, the more malicious developers.
And UNIX boxes were almost always networked.
O RLY? Not when I started using UNIX. UUCP, for example, didn't show up until V7 in 1979, and most UNIX sites didn't have ARPANET access back then.
What's different now is not so much that the security model is no longer adequate, but rather that the target has become juicier, so it is now worth attacking UNIX users where it was not worth bothering with them before.
So are you saying the Multics folks should have anticipated drive-by downloads?
Twenty years ago
The UNIX security model wasn't invented 20 years ago, it was invented more than 40 years ago (given that UNIX didn't invent it).
There are Algebras for Logic, you know. I don't know how you could get through a class in Logic, Philosophy, or even Rhetoric without Boolean Algebra. Not as well known here are Heyting Algebras.
I guess my point is that Algebra is a pretty broad term
Yes, there's "elementary algebra", which is what Prof. Hacker was talking about, and there's abstract algebra", which is a much broader topic, and there's an algebra, which is a particular type of mathematical structure in abstract algebra, and....
and, yes, it appears that a Political Science student would benefit from a study of Algebra.
Of course, I'd take it a bit further and suggest that they would very likely benefit from a strong mathematics background, including statistics. I don't see how this is even a question.
And there's even a political science professor "whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers" and who would probably agree with you 100%.
Perhaps if he were to read that, he'd change his mind. :-)
Doubtful. I think he's trying to justify his own incompetence in maths, so arguments are going to be wasted.
Actually, it's "doubtful" because "that" refers to the very essay he wrote. One technical term for what I was doing there is "snark", i.e. GodGell said "Mathematics is nothing less than the upmost tool of rationality. Lose it, and all progress decays." in a fashion that seemed to indicate he was arguing against Prof. Hacker, so I just quoted back at him a passage from the very essay linked to by the /. article in which Prof. Hacker agreed that "Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.”. However, "our civilization would collapse without mathematics" is inequivalent to "our civilization would collapse if we don't try to teach algebra to every high school graduate". Perhaps both statements are true, but the former doesn't ipso facto imply the latter.
And I didn't see anything in the article to lead me to believe that Prof. Hacker is completely incompetent in mathematics; he might not understand, for example, differential geometry, or category theory, or algebraic topology, but that's probably true of most people arguing with him in the comments here. (I, at least, will admit to knowing a tiny bit about the first of those, a much tinier bit about the second, and nothing about the third, although I suspect that I'd be able to understand a tiny bit more by reading a description of them, and could perhaps understand them somewhat better if I spent many years studying them full-time.)
Also, I would like to point out that Hack's (sic) article
You're not quoting somebody who gave his name as "Hack", so "(sic)" is inappropriate there. ("Is learning proper word/abbreviation usage necessary?") It's appropriate in my response, as it indicates that I didn't call him "Hack", you did.
other than the statistic showing students tend to not do well in math, was full of loose correlations, statistics not related to his points, or anecdotal evidence.
And doesn't discuss anything outside the US in any depth, which is my biggest problem with it. Yeah, he says
and
but just says that in passing, which is why, although I think it's a good starting point for discussion (and not just something to be dismissed, especially by people who couldn't be bothered to RTFA), it's far from a definitive statement. I think the question "should we require algebra for high-school graduation or college admission?" is worth asking, even if the answer ends up being "hell, yes!" Even if that is the answer, you might learn something about how to teach algebra (and other parts of math) in the process.
" What of the claim that mathematics sharpens our minds and makes us more intellectually adept as individuals and a citizen body? It's true that mathematics requires mental exertion. But there's no evidence that being able to prove (x + y²)² = (x² - y²)² + (2xy)² leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis." It seems to me that you can't tell the difference in the opinions of people who read his stance and those that read the title... since it summarizes the article nicely.
It "summarizes" it but omits Hacker's repeated insistence that mathematics is important (so the opinions of people who actually read the entire article would not use "Mathematics is nothing less than the upmost tool of rationality. Lose it, and all progress decays." as if they were stating something opposite to what he's saying, given that Prof. Hacker said "Peter Braunfeld of the University of Illinois tells his students, “Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.” He’s absolutely right." in his article.
I.e., several posters fired up their blowtorches and set fire to a strawman bearing no resemblance to Prof. Hacker. I think his essay is worthy of further discussion and research (on both sides, including the opposing side), but that's not possible if you think he's saying nothing more than "math class is hard, let's go shopping!"
(I also wonder whether it was phrased as "Political Science Prof Asks: Is Algebra Necessary?" rather than "Should We Require Algebra For College Admission?" solely to provoke squealing outbursts of nerd rage, but that's another matter. Yes, it's true that Prof. Hacker is a political scientist, and, yes, it's true that he's asking whether algebra should be necessary for college education, but arguing that it's sort-of technically accurate, modulo his point not being that nobody needs algebra, doesn't mean that's the best choice of headline - I'm not sure how relevant his profession is to the discussion, especially given that he says "I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers.")
... (x^2 + y^2)^2 = (x^2 - y^2)^2 + (2xy)^2) ...
I wish the hell I could understand that just looking at it. And I'm not even joking.
I'm in my 30s now. I'm starting to see big gaps in my skill set.
Well, one gap might just be "unfamiliarity with the notation used in some programming languages for exponentiation"; x^2 is "x squared" in, for example, BASIC (and that might sort-of come from ALGOL, if I'm remembering correctly that up-arrow in early versions of ASCII became caret). In FORTRAN and some other languages, it would be x**2. As somebody whose first high-level programming language was FORTRAN, I'm not sure why I tend to use the ALGOLish/BASIC convention, perhaps because it's one fewer character, or perhaps because I suspect (perhaps incorrectly) that more people would be familiar with it. (See the "in programming languages" section of the Wikipedia article on exponentiation for the syntax for exponentiation in various programming languages.)
I tried just copying and pasting that from Hacker's article (and checked it, to make sure nobody ended up saying "ha, ha, see, that dumb political science professor can't do algebra!" - yes, they really are equal), and it didn't work. I was too lazy to try digging up HTML entities for the superscript-2 character, and didn't know whether that would work everywhere, so I just fell back on ^2.
I.e., don't ascribe to Prof. Hacker, based purely on the title or summary of the /. post (or on your prejudices about education, political science, political scientists, politics, politicians, or people who can't prove that (x^2 + y^2)^2 = (x^2 - y^2)^2 + (2xy)^2), views that he does not, in fact, hold. Thank you.
The point is not learning how to do complex calculation, the point is by learning these mathematical subjects you develop certain skills in logic, problem solving , and in critical thinking. It goes beyond mathematics and to how to be a rational thinker ( and yes I am exaggerating a bit ).
Yeah. Maybe Prof. Hacker should read this essay, which proposes that
NO.
It's the unintuitive ways in which it's taught (which in turn causes the societal alienation of the subject) that is the problem, not the fact that it's a requirement.
Mathematics is nothing less than the upmost tool of rationality. Lose it, and all progress decays.
Yeah. Somebody should point Prof. Hacker to this essay, in which the writer states that
Perhaps if he were to read that, he'd change his mind. :-)
(Shorter me: "You did RTFA, right? If not, please do so before ascribing to Prof. Hacker opinions he does not hold.")
Yes!
substitute in his thesis,
Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white.
and substitute to:
History is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white.
...and you have something that's arguably a category error. "Algebra" is a particular part of the discipline of mathematics; "history" is the entire discipline of, well, history.
Now, to be fair, his essay switches back and forth between speaking of particular parts of mathematics and of mathematics as a whole, but it sounds as if he's not arguing "math class is hard, let's go shopping!", he's arguing that, whilst "quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies", requiring people to "master polynomial functions and parametric equations" in order to attend college might not improve quantitative literacy sufficiently to justify preventing students who have difficulty mastering them from taking other college courses that might not require those skills and that might increase their knowledge base and critical thinking skills.
The UNIX security model sucks. It assumes that attacks come from the outside, and is designed to protect the user from other users on the same system. In the UNIX model, everything run by a particular user has the same rights as the user. In practice, that just isn't a viable security model anymore.
The key is "anymore", so it's perhaps better stated as "the UNIX security model is no longer sufficient" - and I'd rephrase that as "the time-sharing security model is no longer sufficient", as that model predates UNIX and continues to exist in some present-day operating systems other than UN*Xes. It was pretty good for machines at that time, but, in a world with lots more application developers, more naive users, and access to the Intertubes being common, it's not so good any more.
And I'm reasonably confident that there will be. Apple appear to think that there are OS X machines and iOS machines, and that, whilst there are many things that both of them can do, they have different purposes - iOS machines being for users who prefer a simpler, but more limited, User Experience(TM), and OS X machines for users for whom that's not good enough.
What you really mean is that Apple has a history of outlawing functionality of a popular app,
"Outlawing" in what sense? If you're referring to OS X apps (which is what Arment was discussing), a history of "outlawing" in the sense of "banning from the Mac App Store software that provides that functionality", that history dates back at most a couple of years, given that the Mac App Store was announced in October 2010. If you mean "outlawing" in the sense of "removing APIs that allow that functionality to be provided", that's a different matter (note that's "APIs", not "internal interfaces that people have figured out how to use and that Apple later decided weren't the right way of doing things and just nuked", which is perfectly legitimate behavior).
What Marco will find is that for every serious application developer leaving the Mac App Store, there are 50 App developers moving in -- some of them migrants from the iOS App Store, who are just adding a secondary target to their development builds.
Well, it's a bit more than that, if by "just adding a secondary target to their development builds" you mean "just tweaking the build targets in the project file without writing any new code" - AppKit and UIKit are different APIs.
And the fun bit(!) -> When so many people have bought Apps developed outside the sandbox and they won't run on the next i(thingy)
The apps being discussed here don't run on any "i(thingy)", as they don't run on the OS that "i(thingies)" run. They run on OS X, not iOS, and the App Store being discussed is the Mac App Store.
It won't be too long before all MacOS has become is the build platform to build iOS apps on.
...and the platform for users for whom iOS's simplification of the User Experience(TM) crosses their threshold of "simpler" in "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler." (I'm one of those users - "sorry, only one window on the screen at a time" doesn't work for me, and neither does "documents should be organized by the application for which they're intended" rather than by "what they're about".)
IOS... bigger, slower, buggier. 1980s-era crippled folder system.
If by "crippled folder system" you mean "silo for each app, with no subfolders in a silo", that's "early 1980s" at best; I think MS-DOS 2 (introduced in 1983) had subdirectories in FAT, as did HFS (introduced in 1985). (And workstation OSes had them since Day One, but most people didn't have UN*X workstations as their personal computers....)
I'm curious how many documents for a given app you need to have before "no subfolders in a silo" breaks down, and whether Apple just figured "anybody with that many documents should just use a Mac".
Something else... over the years I've noticed they're not very good about fixing OS bugs. They're perfectly happy to ship a version of the OS with a problem, sometimes quite serious (UDP socket bug, color profile stall bug, bogus console error bug) and then... perhaps... fix it in a later version of the OS, but leave everyone even with the previous version hanging.
Yes, they're annoyingly strict at times about what bug fixes they allow into a software update. (I'm assuming by "later version" you mean "later major version", so that a bug in 10.x gets fixed in 10.x+1 but not in any 10.x.y software update.)
I tolerated the crippled resize handles
Fixed in Lion, so that accidental resizing of a window when you're trying to select some text near the edge of the window is a completely cross-platform experience. (I forget whether I've done that on Windows, GNOME, or both, but when the ability to resize windows from the sides first showed up during Lion development, I started doing that on OS X as well.)
(That's not a reason not to have resize-from-the-side - resize-from-the-side lets you, for example, more easily resize along one axis without affecting the size along the other axis - it's just a small case where the advantages are accompanied by disadvantages.)
Not until you have to let them grope your junk before you can become a developer. (And I don't mean that metaphorically. If it doesn't involve somebody from Apple wearing rubber gloves, it doesn't count.)
The only way to prevent such a scenario in a traditional UNIX permission system is to run each application as a separate user.
Let me introduce you to an interesting filesystem flag called SetGID.
I think he's quite aware of it. However, if the goal is to keep stuff that you run from getting access to files to which you have read access, set-GID doesn't help unless the permission system can say "a process with UID XXX only has access to this file if its group set includes group YYY", and the standard user/group/world permission set doesn't support that:
Perhaps it can be done with ACLs; if I remember correctly, the way OS X ACLs work is that the first ACL rule that matches wins, so if you put a "group YYY has read permission" rule in front of "user XXX has no read permission" rule, that might do it. Whether that would count as "[a] really scary [ACL]" is another matter.
That is not correct. Apple is sandboxing Mac OS X and Mac OS apps will have to be sandboxed to be accepted into the Mac OS app store very soon.
When you load up Mountain Lion, you will discover that by default the system will not run unsigned apps, including the ones you bought from them and other notable vendors.
Note that "signed" does not imply "sandboxed". The default Gatekeeper setting means that, unless you do Special Stuff, applications downloaded from the Intertubes (by programs that set the "quarantined" extended attribute, at least; dunno if any applications that set it do so only if they were downloaded from an "external" site, for some definition of "external") can't be launched with a double-click (or, presumably, automatically through some code paths) unless they're from the Mac App Store or signed by a "registered developer", even if they're not sandboxed. There are ways (involving a context menu, i.e. Control+click, I think) to override that without changing the default setting.
I have been resisting learning objective C, hoping to continue writing portable C++ applications against the Unix API's and other well known interfaces like X and python. I don't know yet if the sandboxing system only works for objective C Cocoa programs.
As far as I know, at least some of the sandboxing is ultimately implemented with Mandatory Access Control hooks in the kernel (see the security top-level directory in the XNU source, and stuff it calls and that calls it), which means it applies to anything that makes system calls, either directly or through libraries or frameworks, regardless of whether it's written in C or C++ or Objective-C or Objective-C++ or FORTRAN or..., as long as it's a statically-compiled language (if it's interpreted, the calls are made by the interpreter, which isn't sandboxed, and if it's compiled on the fly, the code that's running the generated code would need to be sandboxed; I don't know whether software of either type is allowed in the Mac App Store). Some of it might be implemented at the Mach messaging level, which means that part applies to anything that sends Mach messages to the services to which access is controlled, either directly or through libraries or frameworks, regardless of whether it's written in C or C++ or Objective-C or Objective-C++ or FORTRAN or... (same comments apply as in the previous sentence).
However, if you want to sell or give away your app via some mechanism other than the Mac App Store, you don't need to sandbox it. To have it launchable with the default settings on Mountain Lion, you'd have to join the Mac Developer Program and get a Developer ID and corresponding certificate with which to sign your code.
(And if you just want to build your own code and run it on your own machine, you don't, as far as I know, even need that, as the code hasn't been downloaded from the Intertubes and thus hasn't had a quarantine label slapped on it. And if you've downloaded the code with, say, curl, that might not slap a quarantine label on it, either.)
Steve Jobs wanted nothing less than revolution in each product release, and he didn't get that for the last 3 years he was there.
And he did get it prior to 2009? (Note that Snow Leopard development started before 2009 and the decision to make it a mostly clean-up-the-innards release was made before 2009. As for the "he didn't get that for the last 3 years he was there", presumably you're not counting the no-spinning-media-available versions of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, as the hard drive option for the MacBook Air was, at least if the Wikipedia page is to be believed, dropped in the Late 2010 MacBook Air.)
I suspect he's referring to Apple's App Store apps - things like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Configurator, Final Cut, Logic, iPhoto, iMovie.
To which "he" are you referring? The person claiming that "None -- absolutely zero -- of their desktop apps are or can be sandboxed..." or the person saying that "Apple apps were the only one sandboxed in Leopard and they've been adding more and more in every release"? If none of the Mac App Store apps are sandboxed - which may or may not be the case, depending on whether those apps still support Snow Leopard and on whether Snow Leopard supports sandboxing at the level that those Mac App Store apps need (e.g., whether all of the entitlements used by those apps exist in Snow Leopard) - I suspect Apple views that as a temporary situation for most of the apps, to be resolved in future versions of the apps (and, if new entitlements are required, future versions of the OS). I doubt the "...or can be sandboxed" part of the first of those claims. There might be some that can't, but I really doubt any of the components of iWork can't ever be sandboxed, for example.
Correct. But these days malicious software doesn't actually need root access any more. Unsandboxed access is probably "good enough".
Which means Apple had better have made sure pboxd pretty secure against attack. It's probably easier to make pboxd reasonably secure than to make all their frameworks and all their own apps reasonably secure and ensure that third-party apps are that secure, at least as long as the languages being used for development allow code unfettered read-write access to the writable portion of the address space.