So you agree that linux driver support is poor enough that you have to carefully pick what hardware you buy?
OS X's driver support would be no better than linux's. This means you won't just be able to install it on generic intel boxes and have things "just work". And this in turn means that it would still be relegated mostly to Apple hardware, and would not compete with windows.
When first Mactel ships, everyone can build a better box than Apple with the same amount of money. If AMD 64 is chosen, it would be even more modern.
Apple lost the thing making it unique. PowerPC architecture.
You've been able to build PPC boxes from parts ever since the PPC first came out. Just because it's not as in your face as x86 doesn't mean you can't do it. What you couldn't do, was run OS X on them, because apple makes their own motherboards, and those you couldn't get anywhere but from apple. So, I expect that the Apple intel machines will have custom motherboards as well, and therefore regular PC's won't run OS X easily (though unlike with the PPC I expect there to be a niche crowd who will try).
Hope they make it at least like Asus to update BIOS, you know, effortless, in OS GUI. They selected the backwards architecture having roots in 1980's.
Since they will have custom motherboards I expect them to not bother with typical PC architecture. They'll do something like OpenFirmware, but based on the intel architecture.
People make such a big deal of the transition to intel, but really, not much will change. It'll still be a mac through and through, even in the hardware. It's just that virtual pc will emulate a PC a bit faster, and you'll have a version of wine for OS X. That will pretty much be the extent of the differences, I expect.
I think that if Apple allowed third parties to make Apple clones, or Apple-Approved machines to run the new OSX on, this could potentially be good for Apple. I'd rather spend $200 on OSX for my workstation, than $200 for Windows anything -- especially if it worked properly.
I sincerely doubt there is a big untapped market of people who would run OS X on their intel boxes if only it was available. What exactly would be the thing that would change with OS X on intel that keeps people from just getting a mac and running it right now? Price goes out the window, since apple would still need to make as much money, so they would charge as much, only in software licenses instead of hardware. OS X would not go for a paltry $200. Lack of games goes out of the window too, since there aren't going to be magically more games, because OS X still will have no directx support.
Tell me seriously, what is the reason you're not just buying macs now? And do you genuinely believe that reason would not exist if there was a retail version of OS X on intel?
This imposes a burden on that person due to your condition, arising from a misguided belief that they are somehow obliged to help you.
Most people think that if you can help someone without causing unreasonable harm to yourself and those around you, you are indeed obliged to provide that help. That is a basic principle in christianity, for example (though surprisingly few supposed christians live their life by the principle).
In a democratic society, the will of the people flows from the majority. Since the majority thinks it is an obligation to help others, that act is codified into law.
Here's a list of reasons why you're being overly rosy:
- licensing cost of windows and office is actually much lower - retraining staff is necessary and means that staff not only gets paid to not work, but is not producing any income while they are retraining. The cost of this can be 300 USD / day / employee easily (at my place of work they calculate the cost of programmer downtime as 500+ USD / day / programmer). Make people retrain for even one whole day and your licensing savings are gone. - retraining sysadmins is necessary, even if they already know linux (every network has its own quirks to figure out) - there's no microsoft support for free linuces. Your sysadmins will have to really know their stuff and be able to respond to all scenario's, even when they involve rewriting OS code. Those guys cost money. - networks involve file shares, authentication, hostname assignment and lookup, and on, and on. Linux clients on windows server networks are... well... delicate. And linux clients on linux networks are a dramatic retooling (requiring a LOT of work hours). - linux has no outlook (you would be surprised how much people depend on outlook's abilities, and how difficult it can be to replace them with open source products). Pretty much all outlook equivalents require licensing, and since outlook is bundled with ms office (though exchange server isn't, to be fair), this negates part of your licensing advantage.
and finally:
- workhours involved in installing linux on all those pc's. That's a lot more work than you would assume.
Ofcourse, that's only a subset of all the problems involved with this. Suffice it to say that I don't believe you save all that much money by switching to linux. Not in the short term anyway.
Now, maybe you were thinking of the scenario where there are only four pc's in a direct network, like people have at home. That's different. That's doable. That's also not likely, since you probably wouldn't need to convince a boss, you'd be the boss and do sysadmin'ing on the side.
I can honestly say that if i were in charge of pentagon security, it would have been possible to fly an airplane in it. I know of no system that could shoot down an airliner intent on a kamikaze flight that isn't already on an irrevocably fatal trajectory unless that system is also capable of shooting down airliners that aren't so intent.
Well, I think you're not being creative enough. How difficult is it to put a permanent guard with heatseeking missiles on the roof? I'm not talking about a fully automated system. I'm talking about a radar operator keeping a look out, and two guys on every side of the building being directed to watch any nearby airplanes and shooting down any that insist on a collision course. Even if only 10 miles of airspace is forbidden around the building, that leaves you enough room to shoot that kamikaze plane down. Mach.8 gives you.17 miles per second, so 10 miles equals one minute to respond. If someone is ready on the roof to fire when told, you do not need a whole minute. 10 miles not enough? Make it 20. If your military headquarters can not be defended against such easy to defend against threats as commercial airliners on collision courses, you're screwing up.
Can you say that you'd be willing to fire upon 200 civilians on the possibility that they might be headed for the pentagon? This is a difficult decision even if you are 100% certain of the intent of the hijackers.
The potential harm to the nation of having your military headquarters destroyed or damaged far outweighs the harm to the nation of the death of the civilians in that one plane. Besides, what should they do? Just let it hit? How does that save those people? The essence is that once such a plane is on a collision course, the lives of all those on board are forfeit. It is no longer a difficult decision at that point, even though it is one that is hard to live with.
Do you honestly believe the airspace around the pentagon is not tracked? If so, how do you consider it reasonable that it is not tracked? Isn't it a sign of incompetence that this is not the case? How can it be that the pentagon does not have 24/7 surface-to-air defenses? It's all to dubious. Somebody screwed up big-time, there is no other explanation.
Besides, it is not THAT difficult a matter to automatically track transponders and their location and overlay those with prearranged flight plans. If a transponder goes down, make a human operator check it. If a plane diverts course, make a human operator check it. Sure, it's not a walk in the park, but it's not rocket science either.
Besides, it has been thoroughly pointed out that the information about hijacked planes was available in the system early enough that something could have been done about it. That nobody even managed to respond until it was all over points to more incompetence for me.
So.. you're saying, there must be some kind of intelligent design because the plot is too complicated to have occured on its own?
Not at all. I'm saying that under normal circumstances 9/11 should have been impossible, both from an organizational standpoint, and from an execution standpoint. The fact that the terrorists succeeded points out that things were not normal, that the system broke down on multiple levels. The 9/11 commission has pointed out to us how it broke down in halting the plan while it was being hatched, but there has yet to be someone to point out how it broke down on the day itself.
I mean seriously, if you were in charge of pentagon security, would it have been possible to fly an airplane into it? I'm absolutely certain that had I been in charge that plane would have been shot down long before it got anywhere near the pentagon. The fact that the plane hit points to gross negligence on the part of whoever was responsible for protecting the pentagon.
Still, I find it a leap to go from there to concluding a conspiracy. Conspiracies are awfully hard to keep secret. As a great man once said: why attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence?
Can't comment on the ROKR persay, but 128Kbs AAC, while certainly far from transparent, is a real step above 128Kbs MP3. (But then again, so is almost any audio format...)
ITMS songs are encoded at 128 kbps AAC. It's not perfect (classical music can sound pretty bad), but it is good enough for most people and most musical genres.
19 people acting alone should not be able to hijack airplanes and fly them anywhere without immediately having those planes shot down, let alone being able to fly them into the headquarters of the most well-funded military in the world.
The only way 9/11 was able to happen was the combination of planning/funding by more than those 19 hijackers, and gross negligence by various parties in the government.
It seems very arbitrary to be God's will, that's all that I'm saying. Especially the catholic/protestant divide. In the end there are real differences between the religions, and if someone is right, I can't really say who it is.
Internal consistency is to be expected for any long-lived religion. If it is trivially easy to demonstrate that the religious scriptures of a certain religion could not actually be truth, then that religion will not likely survive.
The problem with the internal consistency litmus test is that it does not do anything to explain why that particular canon is valid, since many consistent canons could be (and have been) made.
Actually, it was the Mac mini which caused me to use the Mac as my primary home computer, not the iPod.
For me it was the ipod that made me seriously consider the switch, and the mac mini that drove my decision. The mini was priced at a point where I could try it out and abandon it if it didn't work for me. The plan was that if I didn't like a mac as my main desktop machine, I would use it as a server, running linux, and buy a cheapo windows system. I never did end up buying that cheapo windows system.
I'm just mad at myself for not having made the switch sooner.
The protestant bible has fewer books than the roman catholic bible. Are you saying those books just don't matter? Or are protestants just not christians in your opinion? If so, why not? Why don't they have it right, with what books belong in the bible?
Or how about the torah? It is what the old testament is based on, yet not identical in content. Several books were dropped to make the old testament. If god meant for the torah to be "part one", why were those books dropped? And if god didn't mean the torah as part one, why did it end up in the bible?
And that's not even getting into the varied recordings of how the orthodox faction in the early christian church supposedly drastically re-engineered the bible canon several times, adding and dropping whole books.
Of course, you do need to have the right privileges to install a driver in order to install this rootkit. Usually, that means being an adminstrator.
Which raises a basic question: when will microsoft finally make it possible to run your desktop apps in windows as a regular user, not as administrator, without having to resort to extreme geekery? Every modern desktop operating system out there, except windows, runs stuff as a regular user already.
I really don't see Apple doing anything like the 'desktop replacement' laptops you get in the Windows world (there's one sat next to me now, and it's the loudest thing in the room and I can feel the heat from here).
Nothing quite like a laptop that warms your lap so thoroughly that you're afraid of becoming infertile.
is there anybody left at Apple capable of even comprehending the old baroque Apple hardware?
I've wondered about this myself. I do get the distinct impression that the classic lore is disappearing from within the corporate belly. Quite a shame. They're wonderful machines. I own an SE/30 myself.
Then again, maybe the lore isn't that important anymore. I'd rather they released the rights to more of their classic software, and specifically their operating systems. For example, having system 7.1 as an easy download from the apple site would be quite handy. Or what about something more esotheric, like having the Apple X11 server for classic mac os available?
Despite what you and almost every other/.er would love to think, MS isn't inherenty bad.
MS is a publicly held enterprise. Because of this, it is neither good or bad, it is amoral. A corporation has only one aim: to maximize profit for its investors. That is all microsoft does, and all it ever will do. "Doing the right thing" is only useful in as far as it serves profitability. Microsoft could conceivably be losing customers due to doing the wrong thing too often, so for a while they may try to do the right thing, to gain goodwill. But make no mistake, publicly held corporations have no morality. You can never trust a corporation to do the right thing, only to maximize profit.
I agree that it's easy enough to find out whether a CD is copy-protected or not most of the time. By paying attention to it I've already been able to avoid buying several copy-protected CD's.
In my experience most artists don't even know their CD is copy-protected. Like Charlotte Martin's CD On Your Shore. BMG put copy-protection on there without informing her. When she found out, she made them remove it from the second print. Had she known beforehand, it would have never gotten on there. She was pissed about it. Just informing the artist of your displeasure about the DRM can go a long way.
However, using prepaired statements (which is what I believe the GP was speaking of) runs the statement through a parser to set escape characters into the query strings so something like that can't happen.
Actually, prepared statements parse the query first, and fill in the variables after that. This makes it impossible to escape out of the query, since it is already parsed.
This is the ONLY way to write decent SQL applications?
In the vast majority of cases, yes. It's stupefying how little mention is made of variable binding / prepared statements in SQL tutorials. Most of the time it not only is more secure, but easier to read (in code), AND faster.
On the other hand, if you're doing data mining, with the complex queries that go along with that, you start to get a performance hit from the database not knowing the exact values of the variables you've bound (unless you're using one of the higher end databases, which have support for variable peeking). But at that point you probably are not running your queries from a PHP front-end, since that would make DoS all too easy.
I suppose a large part of the reason for variable binding getting so little mention is that mysql didn't support it for quite a while, at least not in PHP (maybe it did with another API?).
Slashdot Mirror
So you agree that linux driver support is poor enough that you have to carefully pick what hardware you buy?
OS X's driver support would be no better than linux's. This means you won't just be able to install it on generic intel boxes and have things "just work". And this in turn means that it would still be relegated mostly to Apple hardware, and would not compete with windows.
When first Mactel ships, everyone can build a better box than Apple with the same amount of money. If AMD 64 is chosen, it would be even more modern.
Apple lost the thing making it unique. PowerPC architecture.
You've been able to build PPC boxes from parts ever since the PPC first came out. Just because it's not as in your face as x86 doesn't mean you can't do it. What you couldn't do, was run OS X on them, because apple makes their own motherboards, and those you couldn't get anywhere but from apple. So, I expect that the Apple intel machines will have custom motherboards as well, and therefore regular PC's won't run OS X easily (though unlike with the PPC I expect there to be a niche crowd who will try).
Hope they make it at least like Asus to update BIOS, you know, effortless, in OS GUI. They selected the backwards architecture having roots in 1980's.
Since they will have custom motherboards I expect them to not bother with typical PC architecture. They'll do something like OpenFirmware, but based on the intel architecture.
People make such a big deal of the transition to intel, but really, not much will change. It'll still be a mac through and through, even in the hardware. It's just that virtual pc will emulate a PC a bit faster, and you'll have a version of wine for OS X. That will pretty much be the extent of the differences, I expect.
I think that if Apple allowed third parties to make Apple clones, or Apple-Approved machines to run the new OSX on, this could potentially be good for Apple. I'd rather spend $200 on OSX for my workstation, than $200 for Windows anything -- especially if it worked properly.
I sincerely doubt there is a big untapped market of people who would run OS X on their intel boxes if only it was available. What exactly would be the thing that would change with OS X on intel that keeps people from just getting a mac and running it right now? Price goes out the window, since apple would still need to make as much money, so they would charge as much, only in software licenses instead of hardware. OS X would not go for a paltry $200. Lack of games goes out of the window too, since there aren't going to be magically more games, because OS X still will have no directx support.
Tell me seriously, what is the reason you're not just buying macs now? And do you genuinely believe that reason would not exist if there was a retail version of OS X on intel?
This imposes a burden on that person due to your condition, arising from a misguided belief that they are somehow obliged to help you.
Most people think that if you can help someone without causing unreasonable harm to yourself and those around you, you are indeed obliged to provide that help. That is a basic principle in christianity, for example (though surprisingly few supposed christians live their life by the principle).
In a democratic society, the will of the people flows from the majority. Since the majority thinks it is an obligation to help others, that act is codified into law.
Works 2006 includes Word 2002 and is $99, retail (meaning you don't even have to be a student to get it).
I'm certain there are even cheaper ways of legally obtaining a copy of word.
Here's a list of reasons why you're being overly rosy:
... well ... delicate. And linux clients on linux networks are a dramatic retooling (requiring a LOT of work hours).
- licensing cost of windows and office is actually much lower
- retraining staff is necessary and means that staff not only gets paid to not work, but is not producing any income while they are retraining. The cost of this can be 300 USD / day / employee easily (at my place of work they calculate the cost of programmer downtime as 500+ USD / day / programmer). Make people retrain for even one whole day and your licensing savings are gone.
- retraining sysadmins is necessary, even if they already know linux (every network has its own quirks to figure out)
- there's no microsoft support for free linuces. Your sysadmins will have to really know their stuff and be able to respond to all scenario's, even when they involve rewriting OS code. Those guys cost money.
- networks involve file shares, authentication, hostname assignment and lookup, and on, and on. Linux clients on windows server networks are
- linux has no outlook (you would be surprised how much people depend on outlook's abilities, and how difficult it can be to replace them with open source products). Pretty much all outlook equivalents require licensing, and since outlook is bundled with ms office (though exchange server isn't, to be fair), this negates part of your licensing advantage.
and finally:
- workhours involved in installing linux on all those pc's. That's a lot more work than you would assume.
Ofcourse, that's only a subset of all the problems involved with this. Suffice it to say that I don't believe you save all that much money by switching to linux. Not in the short term anyway.
Now, maybe you were thinking of the scenario where there are only four pc's in a direct network, like people have at home. That's different. That's doable. That's also not likely, since you probably wouldn't need to convince a boss, you'd be the boss and do sysadmin'ing on the side.
I can honestly say that if i were in charge of pentagon security, it would have been possible to fly an airplane in it. I know of no system that could shoot down an airliner intent on a kamikaze flight that isn't already on an irrevocably fatal trajectory unless that system is also capable of shooting down airliners that aren't so intent.
.8 gives you .17 miles per second, so 10 miles equals one minute to respond. If someone is ready on the roof to fire when told, you do not need a whole minute. 10 miles not enough? Make it 20. If your military headquarters can not be defended against such easy to defend against threats as commercial airliners on collision courses, you're screwing up.
Well, I think you're not being creative enough. How difficult is it to put a permanent guard with heatseeking missiles on the roof? I'm not talking about a fully automated system. I'm talking about a radar operator keeping a look out, and two guys on every side of the building being directed to watch any nearby airplanes and shooting down any that insist on a collision course. Even if only 10 miles of airspace is forbidden around the building, that leaves you enough room to shoot that kamikaze plane down. Mach
Can you say that you'd be willing to fire upon 200 civilians on the possibility that they might be headed for the pentagon? This is a difficult decision even if you are 100% certain of the intent of the hijackers.
The potential harm to the nation of having your military headquarters destroyed or damaged far outweighs the harm to the nation of the death of the civilians in that one plane. Besides, what should they do? Just let it hit? How does that save those people? The essence is that once such a plane is on a collision course, the lives of all those on board are forfeit. It is no longer a difficult decision at that point, even though it is one that is hard to live with.
Do you honestly believe the airspace around the pentagon is not tracked? If so, how do you consider it reasonable that it is not tracked? Isn't it a sign of incompetence that this is not the case? How can it be that the pentagon does not have 24/7 surface-to-air defenses? It's all to dubious. Somebody screwed up big-time, there is no other explanation.
Besides, it is not THAT difficult a matter to automatically track transponders and their location and overlay those with prearranged flight plans. If a transponder goes down, make a human operator check it. If a plane diverts course, make a human operator check it. Sure, it's not a walk in the park, but it's not rocket science either.
Besides, it has been thoroughly pointed out that the information about hijacked planes was available in the system early enough that something could have been done about it. That nobody even managed to respond until it was all over points to more incompetence for me.
So.. you're saying, there must be some kind of intelligent design because the plot is too complicated to have occured on its own?
Not at all. I'm saying that under normal circumstances 9/11 should have been impossible, both from an organizational standpoint, and from an execution standpoint. The fact that the terrorists succeeded points out that things were not normal, that the system broke down on multiple levels. The 9/11 commission has pointed out to us how it broke down in halting the plan while it was being hatched, but there has yet to be someone to point out how it broke down on the day itself.
I mean seriously, if you were in charge of pentagon security, would it have been possible to fly an airplane into it? I'm absolutely certain that had I been in charge that plane would have been shot down long before it got anywhere near the pentagon. The fact that the plane hit points to gross negligence on the part of whoever was responsible for protecting the pentagon.
Still, I find it a leap to go from there to concluding a conspiracy. Conspiracies are awfully hard to keep secret. As a great man once said: why attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence?
Can't comment on the ROKR persay, but 128Kbs AAC, while certainly far from transparent, is a real step above 128Kbs MP3. (But then again, so is almost any audio format...)
ITMS songs are encoded at 128 kbps AAC. It's not perfect (classical music can sound pretty bad), but it is good enough for most people and most musical genres.
19 people acting alone should not be able to hijack airplanes and fly them anywhere without immediately having those planes shot down, let alone being able to fly them into the headquarters of the most well-funded military in the world.
The only way 9/11 was able to happen was the combination of planning/funding by more than those 19 hijackers, and gross negligence by various parties in the government.
It seems very arbitrary to be God's will, that's all that I'm saying. Especially the catholic/protestant divide. In the end there are real differences between the religions, and if someone is right, I can't really say who it is.
Internal consistency is to be expected for any long-lived religion. If it is trivially easy to demonstrate that the religious scriptures of a certain religion could not actually be truth, then that religion will not likely survive.
The problem with the internal consistency litmus test is that it does not do anything to explain why that particular canon is valid, since many consistent canons could be (and have been) made.
So, basically your argument is that the bible asserts the accuracy of the bible, so the bible can not be doubted.
That's not actually very convincing.
Actually, it was the Mac mini which caused me to use the Mac as my primary home computer, not the iPod.
For me it was the ipod that made me seriously consider the switch, and the mac mini that drove my decision. The mini was priced at a point where I could try it out and abandon it if it didn't work for me. The plan was that if I didn't like a mac as my main desktop machine, I would use it as a server, running linux, and buy a cheapo windows system. I never did end up buying that cheapo windows system.
I'm just mad at myself for not having made the switch sooner.
The protestant bible has fewer books than the roman catholic bible. Are you saying those books just don't matter? Or are protestants just not christians in your opinion? If so, why not? Why don't they have it right, with what books belong in the bible?
Or how about the torah? It is what the old testament is based on, yet not identical in content. Several books were dropped to make the old testament. If god meant for the torah to be "part one", why were those books dropped? And if god didn't mean the torah as part one, why did it end up in the bible?
And that's not even getting into the varied recordings of how the orthodox faction in the early christian church supposedly drastically re-engineered the bible canon several times, adding and dropping whole books.
Of course, you do need to have the right privileges to install a driver in order to install this rootkit. Usually, that means being an adminstrator.
Which raises a basic question: when will microsoft finally make it possible to run your desktop apps in windows as a regular user, not as administrator, without having to resort to extreme geekery? Every modern desktop operating system out there, except windows, runs stuff as a regular user already.
For me, I have faith in the Bible because (by faith) I have chosen to believe it is God's literal word.
Tell me, what version of the bible is the literal and entire truth, and why is it only that version and no others?
I really don't see Apple doing anything like the 'desktop replacement' laptops you get in the Windows world (there's one sat next to me now, and it's the loudest thing in the room and I can feel the heat from here).
Nothing quite like a laptop that warms your lap so thoroughly that you're afraid of becoming infertile.
is there anybody left at Apple capable of even comprehending the old baroque Apple hardware?
I've wondered about this myself. I do get the distinct impression that the classic lore is disappearing from within the corporate belly. Quite a shame. They're wonderful machines. I own an SE/30 myself.
Then again, maybe the lore isn't that important anymore. I'd rather they released the rights to more of their classic software, and specifically their operating systems. For example, having system 7.1 as an easy download from the apple site would be quite handy. Or what about something more esotheric, like having the Apple X11 server for classic mac os available?
Despite what you and almost every other /.er would love to think, MS isn't inherenty bad.
MS is a publicly held enterprise. Because of this, it is neither good or bad, it is amoral. A corporation has only one aim: to maximize profit for its investors. That is all microsoft does, and all it ever will do. "Doing the right thing" is only useful in as far as it serves profitability. Microsoft could conceivably be losing customers due to doing the wrong thing too often, so for a while they may try to do the right thing, to gain goodwill. But make no mistake, publicly held corporations have no morality. You can never trust a corporation to do the right thing, only to maximize profit.
I agree that it's easy enough to find out whether a CD is copy-protected or not most of the time. By paying attention to it I've already been able to avoid buying several copy-protected CD's.
In my experience most artists don't even know their CD is copy-protected. Like Charlotte Martin's CD On Your Shore. BMG put copy-protection on there without informing her. When she found out, she made them remove it from the second print. Had she known beforehand, it would have never gotten on there. She was pissed about it. Just informing the artist of your displeasure about the DRM can go a long way.
What about the source? Ad hominem attacks are a logical fallacy. Who wrote the article should not have bearing on judging the validity of the article.
Now, what about the actual statements made in the article. Does anyone have anything to say about those?
However, using prepaired statements (which is what I believe the GP was speaking of) runs the statement through a parser to set escape characters into the query strings so something like that can't happen.
Actually, prepared statements parse the query first, and fill in the variables after that. This makes it impossible to escape out of the query, since it is already parsed.
This is the ONLY way to write decent SQL applications?
In the vast majority of cases, yes. It's stupefying how little mention is made of variable binding / prepared statements in SQL tutorials. Most of the time it not only is more secure, but easier to read (in code), AND faster.
On the other hand, if you're doing data mining, with the complex queries that go along with that, you start to get a performance hit from the database not knowing the exact values of the variables you've bound (unless you're using one of the higher end databases, which have support for variable peeking). But at that point you probably are not running your queries from a PHP front-end, since that would make DoS all too easy.
I suppose a large part of the reason for variable binding getting so little mention is that mysql didn't support it for quite a while, at least not in PHP (maybe it did with another API?).