The problem in the US is gang violence. Eliminate that (ending drug prohibition would help), and you'll see a drastic drop in crime, not just "gun violence." Very true - what so many people fail to realize is that gangs are economic entities more than anything else. Take away their primary source of income (drugs, sold for a tremendous profit due to the artificially inflated price) and the gangs will crumble, because they will no longer be able to support their members.
My point was that there would be two fewer security holes on these computers if Apple didn't go to great lengths to install Safari on them in the first place. There, fixed that for ya.
If a file has a.doc extension - it won't execute, it will simply be passed to Word to be opened (at which point Word will let you know that it has no idea how to open the file). If the user has "Show all file extensions" turned off in the Finder, and you try to rename, say, iTunes to iTunes.doc - it becomes iTunes.doc.app. So, as far as I know, there's no way to reliably disguise a.app file as a.doc, and still leave it double-click executable.
The only executable files that can be launched from a GUI on Mac OS X are those that are packaged as applications, in Mac OS X's application format. Command-line executables cannot be launched from the gui, and even if you do download a binary executable, it loses the executable flag. Changing the extension of a.app file to say,.doc causes it to be passed by the OS to Microsoft Word - it never gets executed. Barring any code execution vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office 2008 - if you double click on a file labelled.doc, you can be reasonably sure that regardless of what it actually is, it will not be executed.
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
So I ask: Why the bashing? It's new and different from the J2EE frameworks the many web developers on Slashdot have been developing with for so many years. As such it's wide open to criticism by said developers (in most cases the people bashing it haven't actually taken the time to build anything with it and are simply spouting the criticisms others have leveled at it since it entered the scene). As a Rails developer myself, I can tell you that while Rails is not the holy grail (that some claim it to be),but it's a great framework, with a lot to offer (including the best community support of *any* open source web development framework out there). At any rate, take all the bashing with a grain of salt, if you want a real opinion on what rails has to offer - hack something together with it yourself. I'd offer the same advice to all the bashers out there.
Re:Please O PLEASE stop the Ruby hype
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You're right. Fortran should be good enough for anyone.
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As a full time (read: salaried) Rails developer, I call bullshit.
I'm sorry - your going to have to clarify 'legally banning'...in the US, jailbreaking or even unlocking a phone is *perfectly legal*. Subsequently doing whatever the hell you want with *your* purchased hardware is also *perfectly legal* assuming you do not change the power/frequency at which the wifi and gsm radios operate (actually, that's perfectly legal too, as long as you do not operate it in a way that will interfere with other devices - e.g. in a Faraday cage). Apple is legally allowed to release software updates that subsequently break this unsupported, unadvertised functionality, and I am legally allowed to totally ignore said updates until the cows come home. So how, exactly, is Apple legally banning anything?
The correct answer to that question is: they're not.
The mobile market in the UK and the rest of the world is quite different from the US. None of the major wireless carriers in the US allow VoIP via their "unlimited" data plans per their terms of service. Good for you if that's not the case in the UK, and if VoIP over the cellular data network is important for you, then don't buy an iPhone. I bought one because it has the best interface of any handheld phone/computer I've ever used (IMO), and it runs my favorite operating system (and I knew when I bought it that I would be able to jailbreak it).
I've never understood the rabid anti-iPhone sentiments running around the internet; people are just itching to find some wrong with it and expressing their distaste for it at every opportunity - what the fuck do you care if you did not, in fact, buy one? I did, and I'm quite happy with it, and I very much understand that it's not for everyone. I also happen to prefer emacs over vi - you wanna fight about it?
Interesting, I had never heard of this particular model before - some googling brought me to a Motorola page from late 2003 that said the phone had not yet passed FCC inspection and was due out in 2004 - am I missing something? Was this phone ever released in the US market? And while we're on the subject, did you have a terminal and root access?
Apple did not in any way brick jailbroken iPhones, only people who unlocked the phones (and then proceeded to apply an update Apple very publicly announced would break unlocked phones; a few months later, they released a firmware update - 1.1.3 - that brought 'bricked' phones back from the dead - in other words, they were never bricked to begin with). My phone will work indefinitely as a jailbroken 1.1.4 phone, Apple is not forcing software upgrades down users' throats. One further point on this topic - Apple did *not* patch the hole that allowed the 1.1.3 firmware to be jailbroken, the same method was used for jailbreaking 1.1.4 firmware - it may or may not indicate a tacit nod to jailbreakers, but there it is.
Oh, they restrict what you can do with corporate intranet access as well - specifically "corporate email, customer relationship management, sales force automation, and field service automation."
They legally have. I can not... use skype with edge. Just to make sure you know this - you cannot legally use Skype (or any VoIP service) with Edge on *any* AT&T phone. It is explicitly forbidden in the terms of use.
lots of other AT&T phones don't have these kinds of restrictions The phones themselves may not have built in restrictions, but AT&T's terms of use sure as hell do. Any heavy bandwidth usage over edge can subject you to cancellation of service - edge is even explicitly restricted to "(i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) corporate Intranet access."
Bah, you're so far off it's not even funny. I'm running a native terminal on my iPhone. It's got Ruby, Python, and (horrors) Java running on it - each with Objective C bridges (except Ruby). I have root on my phone, for the first time ever. So, yeah - the iPhone does not officially support the hacker/tinkerer ethic - so fucking what? Unofficially supporting it is good enough for me - it is by far the best *nix based phone on the market (oh wait, it's the *only* *nix based phone on the market - that actually works).
The 2.0 software may break the current jailbreak methods, but again, so what, I've already got 3rd party apps on my phone.
Well said. And here I was expecting (and received) a bunch of "turn in your geek card" responses, certainly not a real response that actually answered the question. Hats off to you, AC!
Last time I checked, people who climbed say, Everest, do it with Sherpas, oxygen tanks, ice picks, crampons, etc. This is more like climbing Everest on roller skates.
If the only effect God can have is to change the rolls of the dice, it limits God in a way that many highly religious folks don't believe He should be limited. Fair enough - but if one assumes God is omniscient - what difference would it make? If one were to posit that God could know beforehand what any given roll of the dice would produce a million/billion/trillion years after it's cast - everything that is, was, and will be is still part of His Grand Plan, and therefore God's role is no less than it was at any given point in the history of the universe.
I am, admittedly, an atheist, and personally find the presumption of omniscience preposterous, but given that presumption (which is, I believe, put forth in the Bible) he is capable of absolutely anything. The natural indeterminism of quantum mechanics still leaves plenty of wiggle room for an active, listens-and-responds-to-prayers God (should you choose to believe it) - why, therefore is there some presumption that his actions have to resemble something that we measly humans can perceive/understand?
C'mon guys, the e isn't anywhere near the k on the keyboard! Yes, but they both require a middle finger - I know my middle fingers get a little twitchy when I talk about Microsoft.
I'm atheist, and I'm anti-gay marriage... However, I do think that the gov't should encourage breeding amongst people who are productive as they tend to produce more productive people. (There is a bell curve here, the 2nd generation wealthy tend to be schleps.) Gay's have a particularly hard to cross threshold regarding the breeding thing. It's inconvenient and inefficient for them. This struck me as somewhat disconnected from the reality of marriage in this country. First of all, the *only* requirement for marriage in this country is that one person is a man, and the other is a woman (and they're not related). There is nothing requiring both parties to be productive members of society, nor is there a requirement of compatibility in a marriage, nor is there any restriction whatsoever on breeding. There are plenty of statistics to show that the most "productive" members of society (as measured by level of education or income bracket) have far fewer children than the least "productive" members of society. Furthermore, married couples with no children pay *more* in taxes than they would if they each remained single, regardless of whether or not they file jointly or separately. Even better, a divorced couple with joint custody of the children will pay *less* in total taxes than they would as a married couple (assuming their aggregate gross income is the same in both cases). So where is this encouragement you speak of, and how does gay marriage have any impact at all?
OS X, strictly speaking, is a hybrid kernel. Essentially, NeXT mashed together Carnegie Mellon's microkernel Mach with BSD (a monolithic kernel) - yielding the overwhelmingly originally named XNU kernel. (X is Not Unix). So in short - yes , OS X is a microkernel based OS, but is just as much a monolithic kernel based OS.
Indeed - he did misuse that term, but phrased like: "Vista's kernel is monolithic" it seems quite accurate...
...I think it's quite reasonable to describe the Vista kernel (when loaded in memory) as a "giant black box that drives primates into a murderous rage."
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Okay - first of all, some of us (Canadians) live here in the US, and second of all - the word you're looking for is "unlocked" not "jailbroken".
Umm - there's also a little thing called the "Apple Menu" demarcated by - you guessed it - an Apple logo.
If a file has a .doc extension - it won't execute, it will simply be passed to Word to be opened (at which point Word will let you know that it has no idea how to open the file). If the user has "Show all file extensions" turned off in the Finder, and you try to rename, say, iTunes to iTunes.doc - it becomes iTunes.doc.app. So, as far as I know, there's no way to reliably disguise a .app file as a .doc, and still leave it double-click executable.
The only executable files that can be launched from a GUI on Mac OS X are those that are packaged as applications, in Mac OS X's application format. Command-line executables cannot be launched from the gui, and even if you do download a binary executable, it loses the executable flag. Changing the extension of a .app file to say, .doc causes it to be passed by the OS to Microsoft Word - it never gets executed. Barring any code execution vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office 2008 - if you double click on a file labelled .doc, you can be reasonably sure that regardless of what it actually is, it will not be executed.
You're right. Fortran should be good enough for anyone.
As a full time (read: salaried) Rails developer, I call bullshit.
I'm sorry - your going to have to clarify 'legally banning'...in the US, jailbreaking or even unlocking a phone is *perfectly legal*. Subsequently doing whatever the hell you want with *your* purchased hardware is also *perfectly legal* assuming you do not change the power/frequency at which the wifi and gsm radios operate (actually, that's perfectly legal too, as long as you do not operate it in a way that will interfere with other devices - e.g. in a Faraday cage). Apple is legally allowed to release software updates that subsequently break this unsupported, unadvertised functionality, and I am legally allowed to totally ignore said updates until the cows come home. So how, exactly, is Apple legally banning anything?
The correct answer to that question is: they're not.
The mobile market in the UK and the rest of the world is quite different from the US. None of the major wireless carriers in the US allow VoIP via their "unlimited" data plans per their terms of service. Good for you if that's not the case in the UK, and if VoIP over the cellular data network is important for you, then don't buy an iPhone. I bought one because it has the best interface of any handheld phone/computer I've ever used (IMO), and it runs my favorite operating system (and I knew when I bought it that I would be able to jailbreak it).
I've never understood the rabid anti-iPhone sentiments running around the internet; people are just itching to find some wrong with it and expressing their distaste for it at every opportunity - what the fuck do you care if you did not, in fact, buy one? I did, and I'm quite happy with it, and I very much understand that it's not for everyone. I also happen to prefer emacs over vi - you wanna fight about it?
Interesting, I had never heard of this particular model before - some googling brought me to a Motorola page from late 2003 that said the phone had not yet passed FCC inspection and was due out in 2004 - am I missing something? Was this phone ever released in the US market? And while we're on the subject, did you have a terminal and root access?
Apple did not in any way brick jailbroken iPhones, only people who unlocked the phones (and then proceeded to apply an update Apple very publicly announced would break unlocked phones; a few months later, they released a firmware update - 1.1.3 - that brought 'bricked' phones back from the dead - in other words, they were never bricked to begin with). My phone will work indefinitely as a jailbroken 1.1.4 phone, Apple is not forcing software upgrades down users' throats. One further point on this topic - Apple did *not* patch the hole that allowed the 1.1.3 firmware to be jailbroken, the same method was used for jailbreaking 1.1.4 firmware - it may or may not indicate a tacit nod to jailbreakers, but there it is.
Oh, they restrict what you can do with corporate intranet access as well - specifically "corporate email, customer relationship management, sales force automation, and field service automation."
Bah, you're so far off it's not even funny. I'm running a native terminal on my iPhone. It's got Ruby, Python, and (horrors) Java running on it - each with Objective C bridges (except Ruby). I have root on my phone, for the first time ever. So, yeah - the iPhone does not officially support the hacker/tinkerer ethic - so fucking what? Unofficially supporting it is good enough for me - it is by far the best *nix based phone on the market (oh wait, it's the *only* *nix based phone on the market - that actually works).
The 2.0 software may break the current jailbreak methods, but again, so what, I've already got 3rd party apps on my phone.
Well said. And here I was expecting (and received) a bunch of "turn in your geek card" responses, certainly not a real response that actually answered the question. Hats off to you, AC!
Last time I checked, people who climbed say, Everest, do it with Sherpas, oxygen tanks, ice picks, crampons, etc. This is more like climbing Everest on roller skates.
...why?
I am, admittedly, an atheist, and personally find the presumption of omniscience preposterous, but given that presumption (which is, I believe, put forth in the Bible) he is capable of absolutely anything. The natural indeterminism of quantum mechanics still leaves plenty of wiggle room for an active, listens-and-responds-to-prayers God (should you choose to believe it) - why, therefore is there some presumption that his actions have to resemble something that we measly humans can perceive/understand?
OS X, strictly speaking, is a hybrid kernel. Essentially, NeXT mashed together Carnegie Mellon's microkernel Mach with BSD (a monolithic kernel) - yielding the overwhelmingly originally named XNU kernel. (X is Not Unix). So in short - yes , OS X is a microkernel based OS, but is just as much a monolithic kernel based OS.
Indeed - he did misuse that term, but phrased like: "Vista's kernel is monolithic" it seems quite accurate...
:P
...I think it's quite reasonable to describe the Vista kernel (when loaded in memory) as a "giant black box that drives primates into a murderous rage."
(With apologies to Kubrick and Clarke)