People pay what they value something at. Soda for example costs maybe $0.05 to fill up a glass in a restaurant. Yet people pay $2.00 for sodas in sit down restaurants. Just because something has a high profit margin doesn't mean something's dishonest. It just means you found a successful product. It would be dishonest if they were telling me I was paying for Soda and instead getting some inferior concoction, but when a product is clearly labeled and the consumer agrees to pay a price for that product, it isn't dishonest.
...Which is the other reason I tend to stick to ordering just tap water when eating out (the first being that I just don't drink soft drinks for health reasons). That's a very apt analogy I hadn't considered -- point well made. Kudos!
Also, a lot of times businesses will lose money a in certain areas like when they sell you your phone under a 2 year contract, expecting to make that money back from services like this. Is it dishonest for them to sell me a phone at a loss and make money back by charging more for texting? Dishonesty would be if I went to best buy and they tell me that monster cables are amazingly superior to the $5 cables I can get from monoprice, but best buy simply selling monster cables for $50 is not dishonest, even though it's not worth that money, because they sell their TVs a lot lower than competition and expect to make it back on such accessories and service plans. That's not dishonesty, that's me being an uniformed consumer.
Funny you should mention Worst^H^H^H^H^HBest Buy and Monster Cables.. I've actually been told that exact thing by a Best Buy salesperson. I, too, happen to know better, but I would say this still constitutes dishonesty on their part, regardless of my level of awareness. Unless there's a difference between 'telling the consumer an outright lie' and 'not telling them anything about a product (or at least hoping they don't ask) and assuming they know all about it already', this seems to turn the "simply selling Monster Cables for $50" or 'selling text plans for $5/month' or 'selling unhealthy $2.00 soft drinks in restaurants' into a bit grayer of an issue than suggested. (Quite a bit grayer in the area of soft drinks.. Whose responsibility is it to look out for a consumer's health: the vendor or the consumer himself? Restaurants sell alcoholic beverages as well, also at a tidy profit. Yet it's clear that alcohol impairs judgment and physical coordination even at low levels, which makes driving away from said restaurant an inherently dangerous undertaking. AFAIK, vendors of on- and off-sale alcoholic beverages have been successfully sued by the deceased's family for wrongful death caused by a driver impaired by the alcohol the vendor supplied. But this is now WAY off topic (not that it wasn't before...).)
That being said, I do agree that caveat emptor is a useful axiom to live by. I just wish it wasn't necessary to do so.:)
The problem I have is with the artificiality of the price they charge -- it is motivated purely by greed. People think the price they pay for texting services is based on what it costs the carriers to provide the service. But the cost is more closely associated with the operating overhead involved in actually charging their customers for the service, not the service itself, and it's certainly not even 1% of the amount of money they charge. It amounts to price gouging, pure and simple, and it's in the carriers' best interest to hide this fact from consumers.
I'm fine with them making a reasonable profit -- emphasis on 'reasonable'.
Then again, P. T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute," and Theodore Geisel wrote in The Lorax, "You never can tell what some people will buy."
In all honesty, I do have a texting plan on my phone -- $5/mo. for 200, which roughly equates to 2.5/message, but only if I send/recieve 200 messages. The reality is closer to 10/message (50 messages for my $5), and while that's still cheaper than the 20/message à la carte rate, they don't have to charge even that much to make a tidy profit. Again, it's just greed. It may be basic supply/demand economics and the status quo but that doesn't mean it isn't dishonest.
The problem is that it because of the way SMS messages are sent (i.e. along with other data that was "already going that'a'way" (in the packet headers for the nerds) it functionally costs the wireless carriers nothing to provide the service for which they charge money. In other words, it's 100% profit, no matter how much they charge.
..and not one "Menáge á Trois" joke? Odd, especially considering the project name: TresAmigas (loosely translated: three girlfriends).
Yay, karma-burn...
I would think they'd be less visible only at night. In the daytime they're actually the most visible.
Try this.. Place two cars of identical make and model, but one in black and the other in silver, next to each other and stand 50-100 feet away. I'm willing to bet you'll think the black one appears bigger than the other one in the daytime and smaller than the other one at night.
In fact, preventing them from learning by experience is likely to have the opposite effect of the one intended.
You're absolutely right. I just don't want your learning experience to end in a head-on crash with my car.
Cars are dangerous. Driving your car is probably the most dangerous thing you do every day (unless your a Marine or firefighter) for yourself and others. You really think society should just toss kids the keys and let them learn on their own?
You're absolutely right: cars are dangerous and driving is in fact the most dangerous thing anybody (even a Marine or a firefighter) does every day. And I didn't say "society should just toss kids the keys and let them learn on their own". That would be abdicating my parental responsibilities. I said learning by experience is the best way to learn. This was intended in a broad sense rather than being specifically limited to this logical argument. So I stand corrected on that point.
How about facing the reality that bad things happen to stupid people doing stupid things, and teach kids to not be stupid? Proactively blocking their every move because they might do something dumb does not turn them into responsible adults.
Amen! In fact, preventing them from learning by experience is likely to have the opposite effect of the one intended.
Amazing.. It took just a bit over 12 hours for someone to mention Password Safe, which neatly obviates both hardware and software keyloggers via copy/paste. It's also available for Windows, Mac and Linux (albeit as a command line tool for the latter two).
About the only way to capture any meaningful data from someone using Password Safe would be to capture the clipboard as well, which AFAIK no keyloggers (hardware or software) currently do (which isn't to say that they don't, can't or at least won't at some point).
Problem is, Verizon's FiOS offerings aren't available in the Twin Cities Metro Area. So the question of whether or not they'll offer significant competition to Comcast's new "speed" offering is almost entirely moot.
With respect, you are missing something.. This is the main point of the article, in fact: that the bits don't actually decay appreciably inside of about the first minute after power is removed from the memory module(s).
Admittedly, the hard drive swap would have to be performed relatively quickly (under a minute, based on the average decay time listed in TFA/TFPDF), but since much disassembly can take place before putting the computer into a powered-off state (i.e. opening cases, removing covers, etc.) and since most computer manufacturers have been making it blood simple to replace hard drives in their computers (including laptops) -- often without need of a screwdriver (except laptops) -- this doesn't realistically present much of a challenge. Actually, it's even easier than that since all we're really talking about is opening the case/cover, getting to a point where the data and/or power cable(s) can be removed, powering off, removing the data and/or power connectors and reattaching them to the attacking drive and then powering back on.
Even if that process takes more than a minute, the window of opportunity before the data bits in RAM start to decay can be greatly extended (by almost an order of magnitude) by "pre-freezing" the RAM prior to the power-down via application of a refrigerant (e.g. from an air-duster can held upside down so as to expel its contents as a liquid instead of a gas).
The other important piece of this is of course the custom memory-dump/key-sifting software, which in this case is run from a micro linux distribution pared down to the bare essential task of dumping the apparent memory contents to a file and then sifting through those contents for very well known patterns of code which constitute encryption keys of a specific type. The article is noticeably lacking in low-level specifics in this regard, but the implication is that when running it overwrites so little of the system's memory space and in memory addresses not likely to contain or which cannot possibly contain the desired data that recovery becomes a virtual certainty.
And this is all only if the system's rightful owner has locked the BIOS to disallow booting to anything other than the internal hard drive. It's much easier in all other scenarios.
The implication from TFA was that, if the target machine was preventing booting to anything but the internal hard drive, the attacker could open it and remove the hard drive and replace it with their own, which would presumably have the memory-dump/sift-for-keys software on it so they can get the keys from the rebooted RAM. Then they could either replace the target hard drive back into the target machine or, now having the keys, use them on it once installed in a different machine.
"Apple computers have a significantly longer lifespan on my desks than the PCs"
...and Porsches have significantly longer lifespans than Fords. One of the main factors people take into account when replacing something is how much the replacement will cost.
So, yes, if you consider the total environmental impact of a company, those with more expensive products will have a smaller effect. But this says nothing about the relative impact per unit sold, which is what really matters when you evaluate how "eco-friendly" a corporation is.
Except that "relative impact per unit sold" is actually largely meaningless when comparing one company which sells ~3.5 million PCs/year to one which sells an order of magnitude more than that per year. The one that sells 10 times more product must also be 10 times "greener" -- i.e. contain 1/10th the amount of pollutants -- in order to pollute less than the one that sells less.
That said, it's still in Apple's best interest overall to be or become the most aggressive at producing "green" hardware, especially in light of their rapid rise in popularity and hence public scrutiny.
"IMHO, while the actual exploit might be new, haven't things like animated cursors always been among things you wanted to avoid due to the malware they come with? This just makes them worse."
If I understand the vulnerability correctly, this applies not to cursor animation packs downloaded/installed by the user but to a websites' ability to replace the cursor with a custom one within specific browsers (i.e. the cursor is only different while hovering over the browser window that's displaying the page containing the custom cursor code).
"Amazingly, the LAN cables needed to connect every seat in the aircraft weigh 150 lbs less than all the wireless antennae, access points, and thickened ceiling panels required to accommodate a wireless network (the design called for an access point above each row)."
So, obviously, they didn't spec this out with commodity hardware -- I'm guessing that and the extra shielding were to mitigate any radio interference that might mess with the avionics. But come on.. there has to be a wireless solution that uses less physical hardware than this.
Wow. I don't know a) why this was modded as Funny, or b) where to begin, so I guess I'll just go pedantic.
[Dons asbestos suit]
Quote: Hey Bud! Its just a part of Evolution of schools. Its closed minds like that, that hault the ability to learn more perspectives.
Clerical?
oops, can't teach that any more.
There's a missing comma in first sentence (which is really just a sentence fragment anyway), and "Bud" shouldn't be capitalized as it's not a proper noun. The second sentence is missing the article "the" before "Evolution" and since "Evolution" is capitalized, "schools" should be too. There's an unnecessary comma in the third sentence between the "thats". (Was it stolen from the first sentence?) Also in the third sentence, "Its" (third-person impresonal possessive) should instead be "It's" (contraction of "It is") (this is also present in the second sentence), "like" should be replaced with a more precise and descriptive phrase such as "such as", "halt" is misspelled with a "u" and should probably be a different word such as "stifle" or "retard", "learn" should be "acquire", "perspectives" should be singular rather than plural, and more context is necessary at the end of the sentence. So, it would read better thusly:
"Hey, bud! It's just a part of the Evolution of Schools. It's closed minds such as that that stifle the ability to acquire more perspective on the world at large."
The query "Clerical?" appears to be apropos of nothing -- especially being a lone adjective with nothing around to modify -- although I gather, based on the last sentence, that you are referring to the instruction of young adults in the skills associated with clerical work or the clergy, which I find to be somewhat ironic (not in the literal sense) considering the poor grammar exhibited. (Hmm.. Perhaps I have found the reason for the moderation of "Funny".)
Speaking of the last sentence, the interjection "oops" should be capitalized and followed with an elipsis ("..."), a period, a double dash, or an exclaimation point, but not a comma. Also, therefore, the "can't" should be capitalized unless a double dash is used.
My apologies. You are quite right. That is in fact what I meant -- that software can't be installed to the/Applications folder or subfolder(s) without Admin credentials. A side note is that while, as you stated, users can in fact install software to their home folder (or indeed any folder to which they have write perms), it needn't be named Applications, although that would be a useful convention to follow.
The main point, however -- which I totally failed to elucidate in my original reply (sorry..) -- is that regardless of location, software will run in the context of the user and if the software happens to be malware, only the user will be affected by it, if at all -- a lot of malware exists to zombify the machine, which is bloody hard to do with just User creds. The bigger danger to the user is malware which attempts to gather personal information. However, a lot of this is locked up in the user's Keychain which requires the user to authenticate access (barring a vulnerability in an app that already has access, of course).
You lost me on the bit about Windows apps insisting on "dumping pieces in the/Program Files or/Windows directories," though. Prithee, where should Windows apps install their files if not/Program Files? I mean... isn't that what it's for?
Don't get me wrong.. I'm all for Windows apps not littering the/Windows and/Windows/system32 folders with stray.dll's, and this serves to outline another sizeable difference between Windows and MacOS X -- generally, only apps that genuinely need access to system level libraries (or have their own fonts, for example) litter the hard drive with their bits of minutae; most OS X apps are well behaved and keep themselves contained in their/Applications/[program_name].app folder. Which kinda gets to your last point, that it's "important to establish good practices from the beginning of the OS lifetime, rather than trying to ship first and fix later," which Apple seems to have done a much better job of than Microsoft, IMNSHO.
I hope to be able to remove my foot from my mouth sometime before the weekend, but we'll see how the rest of the day goes.
- Windows requires users to use Administrator to install software? No, buggy software requires that. Historically a few Mac programs have had the same requirements... iTunes springs to mind. Anyway, the Apple solution to buggy software requiring elevated privileges is "you can't run that software" - not very helpful if you need it.
From TFA:
"- Windows requires that users log in with administrative privileges to install software, which causes many to use privileged accounts for day-to-day usage." [emphasis mine]
First, administrative privilege != the Administrator account.
Secondly, yes, Windows does in fact require admin privs to install most software. Try this some time... Start with a fresh WinXP install. Immediately after setup, create an account with only User privilege and log in with it. Then, try to install all the software you'd normally install (anti-virus/spyware-checker/firewall, ANY productivity software (MS-Office, OpenOffice.org)) and see just how far you get. I'll save you the time: you can't. This is exactly the reason that most users run under an account with membership in the Administrators group for every-day tasks -- they're lazy and don't want to be bothered by being constantly denied access to this function or that resource because the account they're using isn't an Admin. By the way, this goes double for people whose job is Windows Administrator, but not just because they're lazy.. Because they're arrogant in addition to being lazy. [And before you label me a whiner, I'll say that it takes a Windows Admin to know a Windows Admin.]
I further defy you to find a single piece of software for MacOS X that doesn't require Admin privs to install.
I conclude that you're missing the point. A system requiring privilege to install ANY software will be inherently less prone to malware since it requires a brain to be sitting in front of the screen having to make a decision based essentially on whether or not they did anything to provoke such a request from the OS. It makes sense in a business environment where you don't want users installing just anything, and it makes sense in a home environment where you don't want your kids installing just anything -- especially when you don't want it installed by accident, which is (or should be) always. I would also point out that there's a difference between "want" and "need". In the above cases (business and home) "need" becomes "demonstrated need".
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People pay what they value something at. Soda for example costs maybe $0.05 to fill up a glass in a restaurant. Yet people pay $2.00 for sodas in sit down restaurants. Just because something has a high profit margin doesn't mean something's dishonest. It just means you found a successful product. It would be dishonest if they were telling me I was paying for Soda and instead getting some inferior concoction, but when a product is clearly labeled and the consumer agrees to pay a price for that product, it isn't dishonest.
Also, a lot of times businesses will lose money a in certain areas like when they sell you your phone under a 2 year contract, expecting to make that money back from services like this. Is it dishonest for them to sell me a phone at a loss and make money back by charging more for texting? Dishonesty would be if I went to best buy and they tell me that monster cables are amazingly superior to the $5 cables I can get from monoprice, but best buy simply selling monster cables for $50 is not dishonest, even though it's not worth that money, because they sell their TVs a lot lower than competition and expect to make it back on such accessories and service plans. That's not dishonesty, that's me being an uniformed consumer.
Funny you should mention Worst^H^H^H^H^HBest Buy and Monster Cables.. I've actually been told that exact thing by a Best Buy salesperson. I, too, happen to know better, but I would say this still constitutes dishonesty on their part, regardless of my level of awareness. Unless there's a difference between 'telling the consumer an outright lie' and 'not telling them anything about a product (or at least hoping they don't ask) and assuming they know all about it already', this seems to turn the "simply selling Monster Cables for $50" or 'selling text plans for $5/month' or 'selling unhealthy $2.00 soft drinks in restaurants' into a bit grayer of an issue than suggested. (Quite a bit grayer in the area of soft drinks.. Whose responsibility is it to look out for a consumer's health: the vendor or the consumer himself? Restaurants sell alcoholic beverages as well, also at a tidy profit. Yet it's clear that alcohol impairs judgment and physical coordination even at low levels, which makes driving away from said restaurant an inherently dangerous undertaking. AFAIK, vendors of on- and off-sale alcoholic beverages have been successfully sued by the deceased's family for wrongful death caused by a driver impaired by the alcohol the vendor supplied. But this is now WAY off topic (not that it wasn't before...).)
:)
That being said, I do agree that caveat emptor is a useful axiom to live by. I just wish it wasn't necessary to do so.
The problem I have is with the artificiality of the price they charge -- it is motivated purely by greed. People think the price they pay for texting services is based on what it costs the carriers to provide the service. But the cost is more closely associated with the operating overhead involved in actually charging their customers for the service, not the service itself, and it's certainly not even 1% of the amount of money they charge. It amounts to price gouging, pure and simple, and it's in the carriers' best interest to hide this fact from consumers. I'm fine with them making a reasonable profit -- emphasis on 'reasonable'. Then again, P. T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute," and Theodore Geisel wrote in The Lorax, "You never can tell what some people will buy." In all honesty, I do have a texting plan on my phone -- $5/mo. for 200, which roughly equates to 2.5/message, but only if I send/recieve 200 messages. The reality is closer to 10/message (50 messages for my $5), and while that's still cheaper than the 20/message à la carte rate, they don't have to charge even that much to make a tidy profit. Again, it's just greed. It may be basic supply/demand economics and the status quo but that doesn't mean it isn't dishonest.
The problem is that it because of the way SMS messages are sent (i.e. along with other data that was "already going that'a'way" (in the packet headers for the nerds) it functionally costs the wireless carriers nothing to provide the service for which they charge money. In other words, it's 100% profit, no matter how much they charge.
...or by anyone to create a scandal to be blamed on the voting machine manufacturer (ES&S) (where it squarely belongs)?
Seconded and mod up plz. This definitely appeared to be a pre-launch tethering failure.
Most of us just use the shorter form, "Dammit". ;)
..and not one "Menáge á Trois" joke? Odd, especially considering the project name: TresAmigas (loosely translated: three girlfriends). Yay, karma-burn...
Yes, you do. It's rolled into the price of the loaf of bread, though.
I would think they'd be less visible only at night. In the daytime they're actually the most visible.
Try this.. Place two cars of identical make and model, but one in black and the other in silver, next to each other and stand 50-100 feet away. I'm willing to bet you'll think the black one appears bigger than the other one in the daytime and smaller than the other one at night.
...and don't it suck when they work against us?
In fact, preventing them from learning by experience is likely to have the opposite effect of the one intended.
You're absolutely right. I just don't want your learning experience to end in a head-on crash with my car.
Cars are dangerous. Driving your car is probably the most dangerous thing you do every day (unless your a Marine or firefighter) for yourself and others. You really think society should just toss kids the keys and let them learn on their own?
You're absolutely right: cars are dangerous and driving is in fact the most dangerous thing anybody (even a Marine or a firefighter) does every day. And I didn't say "society should just toss kids the keys and let them learn on their own". That would be abdicating my parental responsibilities. I said learning by experience is the best way to learn. This was intended in a broad sense rather than being specifically limited to this logical argument. So I stand corrected on that point.
How about facing the reality that bad things happen to stupid people doing stupid things, and teach kids to not be stupid? Proactively blocking their every move because they might do something dumb does not turn them into responsible adults.
Amen! In fact, preventing them from learning by experience is likely to have the opposite effect of the one intended.
Amazing.. It took just a bit over 12 hours for someone to mention Password Safe, which neatly obviates both hardware and software keyloggers via copy/paste. It's also available for Windows, Mac and Linux (albeit as a command line tool for the latter two).
About the only way to capture any meaningful data from someone using Password Safe would be to capture the clipboard as well, which AFAIK no keyloggers (hardware or software) currently do (which isn't to say that they don't, can't or at least won't at some point).
Problem is, Verizon's FiOS offerings aren't available in the Twin Cities Metro Area. So the question of whether or not they'll offer significant competition to Comcast's new "speed" offering is almost entirely moot.
With respect, you are missing something.. This is the main point of the article, in fact: that the bits don't actually decay appreciably inside of about the first minute after power is removed from the memory module(s).
Admittedly, the hard drive swap would have to be performed relatively quickly (under a minute, based on the average decay time listed in TFA/TFPDF), but since much disassembly can take place before putting the computer into a powered-off state (i.e. opening cases, removing covers, etc.) and since most computer manufacturers have been making it blood simple to replace hard drives in their computers (including laptops) -- often without need of a screwdriver (except laptops) -- this doesn't realistically present much of a challenge. Actually, it's even easier than that since all we're really talking about is opening the case/cover, getting to a point where the data and/or power cable(s) can be removed, powering off, removing the data and/or power connectors and reattaching them to the attacking drive and then powering back on.
Even if that process takes more than a minute, the window of opportunity before the data bits in RAM start to decay can be greatly extended (by almost an order of magnitude) by "pre-freezing" the RAM prior to the power-down via application of a refrigerant (e.g. from an air-duster can held upside down so as to expel its contents as a liquid instead of a gas).
The other important piece of this is of course the custom memory-dump/key-sifting software, which in this case is run from a micro linux distribution pared down to the bare essential task of dumping the apparent memory contents to a file and then sifting through those contents for very well known patterns of code which constitute encryption keys of a specific type. The article is noticeably lacking in low-level specifics in this regard, but the implication is that when running it overwrites so little of the system's memory space and in memory addresses not likely to contain or which cannot possibly contain the desired data that recovery becomes a virtual certainty.
And this is all only if the system's rightful owner has locked the BIOS to disallow booting to anything other than the internal hard drive. It's much easier in all other scenarios.
The implication from TFA was that, if the target machine was preventing booting to anything but the internal hard drive, the attacker could open it and remove the hard drive and replace it with their own, which would presumably have the memory-dump/sift-for-keys software on it so they can get the keys from the rebooted RAM. Then they could either replace the target hard drive back into the target machine or, now having the keys, use them on it once installed in a different machine.
"Apple computers have a significantly longer lifespan on my desks than the PCs"
...and Porsches have significantly longer lifespans than Fords. One of the main factors people take into account when replacing something is how much the replacement will cost.
So, yes, if you consider the total environmental impact of a company, those with more expensive products will have a smaller effect. But this says nothing about the relative impact per unit sold, which is what really matters when you evaluate how "eco-friendly" a corporation is.
Except that "relative impact per unit sold" is actually largely meaningless when comparing one company which sells ~3.5 million PCs/year to one which sells an order of magnitude more than that per year. The one that sells 10 times more product must also be 10 times "greener" -- i.e. contain 1/10th the amount of pollutants -- in order to pollute less than the one that sells less.
That said, it's still in Apple's best interest overall to be or become the most aggressive at producing "green" hardware, especially in light of their rapid rise in popularity and hence public scrutiny.
- 'Drew
"IMHO, while the actual exploit might be new, haven't things like animated cursors always been among things you wanted to avoid due to the malware they come with? This just makes them worse."
If I understand the vulnerability correctly, this applies not to cursor animation packs downloaded/installed by the user but to a websites' ability to replace the cursor with a custom one within specific browsers (i.e. the cursor is only different while hovering over the browser window that's displaying the page containing the custom cursor code).
Is this correct, or am I mistaken?
- 'Drew
..unto the NSA.
"Amazingly, the LAN cables needed to connect every seat in the aircraft weigh 150 lbs less than all the wireless antennae, access points, and thickened ceiling panels required to accommodate a wireless network (the design called for an access point above each row)."
So, obviously, they didn't spec this out with commodity hardware -- I'm guessing that and the extra shielding were to mitigate any radio interference that might mess with the avionics. But come on.. there has to be a wireless solution that uses less physical hardware than this.
- 'Drew
It's a dead horse. Either fuck it or walk away, but for God's sake STOP BEATING IT !
Well noted, and amen to that. Thank you for enlightening me.
And sorry if my tone came off as harsh. I tend to over-elaborate sometimes.
Wow. I don't know a) why this was modded as Funny, or b) where to begin, so I guess I'll just go pedantic.
[Dons asbestos suit]
Quote:
Hey Bud! Its just a part of Evolution of schools. Its closed minds like that, that hault the ability to learn more perspectives.
Clerical?
oops, can't teach that any more.
There's a missing comma in first sentence (which is really just a sentence fragment anyway), and "Bud" shouldn't be capitalized as it's not a proper noun. The second sentence is missing the article "the" before "Evolution" and since "Evolution" is capitalized, "schools" should be too. There's an unnecessary comma in the third sentence between the "thats". (Was it stolen from the first sentence?) Also in the third sentence, "Its" (third-person impresonal possessive) should instead be "It's" (contraction of "It is") (this is also present in the second sentence), "like" should be replaced with a more precise and descriptive phrase such as "such as", "halt" is misspelled with a "u" and should probably be a different word such as "stifle" or "retard", "learn" should be "acquire", "perspectives" should be singular rather than plural, and more context is necessary at the end of the sentence. So, it would read better thusly:
"Hey, bud! It's just a part of the Evolution of Schools. It's closed minds such as that that stifle the ability to acquire more perspective on the world at large."
The query "Clerical?" appears to be apropos of nothing -- especially being a lone adjective with nothing around to modify -- although I gather, based on the last sentence, that you are referring to the instruction of young adults in the skills associated with clerical work or the clergy, which I find to be somewhat ironic (not in the literal sense) considering the poor grammar exhibited. (Hmm.. Perhaps I have found the reason for the moderation of "Funny".)
Speaking of the last sentence, the interjection "oops" should be capitalized and followed with an elipsis ("..."), a period, a double dash, or an exclaimation point, but not a comma. Also, therefore, the "can't" should be capitalized unless a double dash is used.
[Doffs asbestos suit]
Wow. I need to get out more...
My apologies. You are quite right. That is in fact what I meant -- that software can't be installed to the /Applications folder or subfolder(s) without Admin credentials. A side note is that while, as you stated, users can in fact install software to their home folder (or indeed any folder to which they have write perms), it needn't be named Applications, although that would be a useful convention to follow.
/Program Files or /Windows directories," though. Prithee, where should Windows apps install their files if not /Program Files? I mean... isn't that what it's for?
/Windows and /Windows/system32 folders with stray .dll's, and this serves to outline another sizeable difference between Windows and MacOS X -- generally, only apps that genuinely need access to system level libraries (or have their own fonts, for example) litter the hard drive with their bits of minutae; most OS X apps are well behaved and keep themselves contained in their /Applications/[program_name].app folder. Which kinda gets to your last point, that it's "important to establish good practices from the beginning of the OS lifetime, rather than trying to ship first and fix later," which Apple seems to have done a much better job of than Microsoft, IMNSHO.
The main point, however -- which I totally failed to elucidate in my original reply (sorry..) -- is that regardless of location, software will run in the context of the user and if the software happens to be malware, only the user will be affected by it, if at all -- a lot of malware exists to zombify the machine, which is bloody hard to do with just User creds. The bigger danger to the user is malware which attempts to gather personal information. However, a lot of this is locked up in the user's Keychain which requires the user to authenticate access (barring a vulnerability in an app that already has access, of course).
You lost me on the bit about Windows apps insisting on "dumping pieces in the
Don't get me wrong.. I'm all for Windows apps not littering the
I hope to be able to remove my foot from my mouth sometime before the weekend, but we'll see how the rest of the day goes.
- Windows requires users to use Administrator to install software? No, buggy software requires that. Historically a few Mac programs have had the same requirements ... iTunes springs to mind. Anyway, the Apple solution to buggy software requiring elevated privileges is "you can't run that software" - not very helpful if you need it.
/rant
From TFA:
"- Windows requires that users log in with administrative privileges to install software, which causes many to use privileged accounts for day-to-day usage." [emphasis mine]
First, administrative privilege != the Administrator account.
Secondly, yes, Windows does in fact require admin privs to install most software. Try this some time... Start with a fresh WinXP install. Immediately after setup, create an account with only User privilege and log in with it. Then, try to install all the software you'd normally install (anti-virus/spyware-checker/firewall, ANY productivity software (MS-Office, OpenOffice.org)) and see just how far you get. I'll save you the time: you can't. This is exactly the reason that most users run under an account with membership in the Administrators group for every-day tasks -- they're lazy and don't want to be bothered by being constantly denied access to this function or that resource because the account they're using isn't an Admin. By the way, this goes double for people whose job is Windows Administrator, but not just because they're lazy.. Because they're arrogant in addition to being lazy. [And before you label me a whiner, I'll say that it takes a Windows Admin to know a Windows Admin.]
I further defy you to find a single piece of software for MacOS X that doesn't require Admin privs to install.
I conclude that you're missing the point. A system requiring privilege to install ANY software will be inherently less prone to malware since it requires a brain to be sitting in front of the screen having to make a decision based essentially on whether or not they did anything to provoke such a request from the OS. It makes sense in a business environment where you don't want users installing just anything, and it makes sense in a home environment where you don't want your kids installing just anything -- especially when you don't want it installed by accident, which is (or should be) always. I would also point out that there's a difference between "want" and "need". In the above cases (business and home) "need" becomes "demonstrated need".