daily Apple users are not going to commit themselves to a platform that is just one software update away from suddenly not functioning, or ones for which the apple drivers just don't work. On otherhand for people too cheap to buy apples, and who just want occasional use in an unmaintined state, apple should be happy. It's like throwing a market share bone to the their third pary software developers, and courting future hardware customers.
I can imagine that there is sliver of market share for people forced to use apples at work who have a PC at home that just dont have the money to buy an apple YET. I can imagine the hordes of thrird worl countries for whom income levels never will achieve mac status. Neither of these is going to hurt mac sales.
I've read that the underlying problem was more subtle, which might explain some of Apple's expressed frustration with MS. I can't confirm this but it may have been that the infected PC got the infection from a blank, formatted, drive from the drive manufacturer. Even if that is not true in this case, there is nothing stopping it from being true. It's a pretty subtle bug that, until now of course, I know would have bitten me since I would not have looked for it. I, and the technicians who do jobs for me, often replace burned hard drives in my clusters and computers with units straight out of the box. In some cases we have pre-formatted hot-swap spares still in the shrink wrap sitting on the shelf waiting to go in.
On my macs and linux machines, I sometimes use external USB drives to share with Windows PCs. I don't usually reformat these specifically because I don't entirely trust that the macintosh disk formatting program will create a prisitine PC FAT format. In all likelihood it can, I just don't have the ability to know. And I have reason to doubt: past experience has shown that when one OS provider emulates another's native formats (e.g. Samba or UFS or HFS++ or ZFS or NFS) that the emulation is usually less than complete or has artifacts.
It would be a major hassle and expense, to have to reformat every drive in a rack of clusters one is upgrading. But apparently that is now the requirement to be sure the manufacturer did not ship you a virus on the "blank" harddrive.
The problem is perhaps more diabolical than it seems. Imagine some Apple engineer putting out some specs for the process standards the Chinese manufacturer must follow. He's paranoid they won't have good practices with keeping their windows boxes clean. He also wants to assure the peripheral performance is comaptible with the ipod loading software and to assure the integrity of the data transfers to the ipod. So he decides that the sure way to do this is to make absolutely certain the box has never been on the internet, and to spec every part, so the machine has to be built at the chinese factory from scratch. They then load in the special Apple approved Windows software CD with apples programs and data. Seems foolproof. But it's not.
One might argue that to actually eliminate you have to boot from a trusted CD and then format the drives. But wait, this does not solve the problem. Isn't the problem of creating a trusted CD or and ipod install the problem we started out trying to solve? So one has to some how have a system that one can trust to do this. And that system has to be available to the manufacturer. It's kinds slippery.
If you were about to suggest "well just use Linux" to format the drive, well then apparently you just emitted the same faux paux apple did. Blaming Windows for the problem.
Check this out In 1999 scientists at Los alamos national lab did essentially the same thing. Except they went one better---they also added in Phase detection by heterodyning the receiver.
Instead of using micro mirrors, the Los alamos team used an LCD which were more mature at the time. And Instead of using random modulation they used a progression of zenike polynomials and thus achieved much more control over the data compression.
Someday in the future a worm will set off a wildfire, disabling every windows box in the world in a single day. Everyone else will only notice that there suddenly was no more spam and wonder why. Then the spammers will notice all their bots are dead and they will create a new worm that goes out and fixes the vulerability in the few remaining zombies they have left.. So mircosoft's problem will be solved by the spammers faster than you can say Patch-tuesday.
Whihc brings me to another question. What happens when the WGA cop is triggered. Your machine still functions right? you just can't get updates or fixes for vulnerabilities....
As you noted if you try to compete with tht eipod then apple can just change the encoding of the music so it breaks on your harmony player. But the reverse is not true. If I am selling songs I can encode them so they play on apple ipods yet are drm protected. Once I manage to emulate that for any given edition of the DRM format, the apple can't change the protocol because it would mean old songs won't play.
that is you encode the songs such that if old itunes music stroe songs play then your songs must play too.
Because itunes store exists, people like ipods more. It's not that they plan to get all their music there. It's just that it's part of the whole ecosystem that they like. If I'm going to be buying or downloading my songs outside the zune ecosystem as you suggest, why do I need a zune and not a zen? That's why making the zune ecosystem family freindly is what will bind everyone to it. It need not be the sole source of music input, just as it is not with itunes.
Zune is not Family freindly. For the single person it's okay, as long as they are the normal sort who is not religious about DRM issues or "ownership" of their music. The DRM seems to have only modest and tolerable consequences for single people.
For famliles it may be unattractive.
As I understand the Zune sales model, if you buy a song it's locked to play only on your computer and your Zune is also locked to your computer.
The problem is then families that have multiple computers or multiple zunes. If both sis and bro and mom like the latest snoop-dog tune, they can't buy it once and share it o all their computer's and Zunes. They have to buy one copy per machine/zune. That's freakin' nuts.
Or did I get it wrong. Sorry if I did, since Im itunes for the long haul and don't really care about Zune.
That's just what the NY times is doing. Sure you can intersperse news and commentary, but they are being scrupulous to label it clearly as containing commentary. It's not the same as straight Journalism. People reading the economis, or listening to Rush Limbaugh know and expect this. People reading less well defined venues don't know this. That's the challenge for blog journalism, because the distinction matters a great deal.
Without the editor&publisher supervising the Jouralist, there is more opportunity for ethical breaches.
The point was not that journalist don't have ethocs problems, as you rightly observe. The point is that this neew medium has a low barrier to entry and a bigh degree of anonimity. Couple that with no editor&publisher taking the long view of establishing the reputation of the journal in a High-barrier-to-entry medium, then you have a looming problem.
A possible retort would be to say that well, time will sort the good from the idiots. But empirically this does not appear to be true. Like the famous economic principle of bad apples driving the good out of the marketplace because of insufficient resources by the consumer to differentiate them, the web is a plethora bad apple paradise. So either you wind up with a system that is rife with bad apples. or you revert back to the non-anonymous, higher-barrier-to-entry system of a credential and reputation based system, like tradiational media.
The question was how to avoid those inevitable, and well proven, economic outcomes.
Copying a press release is NOT plagairism. It's like fruit of the vine: the plant wants you to eat it's fruit. The Fruit's sugar is not there to help the seed, it's there to get you to ingest it, and deposit the seed in a big hunk of poo.
printing quotes from a press release and planting them in a nice steaming front page story is what the PR firm wants you to do. That's why they provide the partially preapred ingredients for you. Indeed if you do it without attribution the happier they are.
What's the difference? Taking when attribution is expected is plagiarism.
Lately there's been a few incidents of Plagiarism in the news, not to mention some wholesale ethical breaches of faked stories (e.g. Blair at the NY times and "a million Little pieces"). But the thing is the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do. Indeed breaking this taboo is probably even more of a sin to the the fellow journalists than to the general public because of this entrenched ethic.
Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomena, Plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.
It seems to me this is a serious issue for any new journlism form with a low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonimity for the author. How does this ethos get enforced in such a realm?
A related question is the ethic division of commentary and news. We know that's become a problem in the media for some outlets where management has a thumb on the content. But the traditional news organs, especially newspapers, still refrain to the most part. Indeed the NY times just went so far as to remove the typset justification from any article that comtained any sort of analysis or opinion, and reserving the typsetting for only traditional factual journalism stories so the difference is apparent to the reader from the start. How do we reinforce that ethos in the untrain journalist?
It seems to me that the formal mechanism of the separation of the Editor&publisher from the writer is how such standards arose in the firstplace. The writer cannot just publish what they want. And the Editor&Publisher is concerned with establishing the Paper's reputation and can take a long view.
Lately there's been a few incidents of Plagiarism in the news, not to mention some wholesale ethical breaches of faked stories (e.g. Blair at the NY times and "a million Little pieces"). But the thing is the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do. In deed breaking this taboo is probably even more of a sin to the the fellow journalists than to the general public because of this entrenched ethic.
Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomena, Plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.
It seems to me this is a serious issue for any new journlism form with a low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonimity for the author. How does this ethos get enforced in such a realm?
A related question is the ethic division of commentary and news. We know that's become a problem in the media for some outlets where management has a thumb on the content. But the traditional news organs, especially newspapers, still refrain to the most part. Indeed the NY times just went so far as to remove the typset justification from any article that comtained any sort of analysis or opinion, and reserving the typsetting for only traditional factual journalism stories so the difference is apparent to the reader from the start. How do we reinforce that ethos in the untrain journalist?
Yes but you can't lose it
on
USB Batteries
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· Score: 1
Imagine you are on travel. Your battery is discharged. Well it's pretty certain you know where your expensive computer is. And it's pretty certain you know where the battery is--it's the damn thing you need to charge. But where the heck did I misplace that charger. Oh damn, it's at home. Or it's at work or it's in the other computer's computer bag. Out of luck.
If they can't afford new harware then they can't afford the differential power bill and waste of their time the old hardware is causing. If we figure their "free" time is worth minium wage. Then if they wast just 10 hours per year, then over a ten year period (remember this is windows 98), they have wasted over 500 dollars. If they bought a new computer every 5 years they'd still come out ahead. And that ignores the differential power bill which is even larger.
Are you one of the idiots running windows 98 on a space heater computer?
Besides which I never said they had to stop using windows 98. I just said why encourage them to lose money and have a crappy computer and waste energy? I certainly don't want to support that.
Maybe they would migrate to Linux but why would you want then, They are computer-backward folks who have not updated their equipment. They will be a support nightmare.
Additionally why do you want to encourage them to use legacy hardware? It uses up more electricity to get the job done than modern hardware. Makes the user less productive. Why encourage that.
I'm developing a car that will get negative 100MPG to cancel this out.
Actually I'm trying to cancel out this goofy definition of MPG when there's electricity involved. Does a pure electric car get Infinity Miles per gallon?
This sort of reminds me of a prank a friend pulled in college. One guy was always entering the room to announce he had managed to drive is economy car so skillfully that got outrageous gas milage. Tiring of this, my friend started adding a gallon of gas to the braggarts tank every night so that his milage and brags got bigger and bigger. Then the next week he started siphoning out a gallon out of the tank. The brags "mysteriously" ceased without explanation.
So my car is going to use photovoltaics, and have an onboard device that inhales smog, and uses the electricity to produce gasoline. Then I'm going to drive up to gas stations, connect the hose and pump gas back into the filling station tanks. That will mess with their arithmetic! and I'll have my negative 100MPG vehicle.
You are missing the forest for your nitpicks over trees.
Are you trolling or something? Any Linux application that wants to touch the contents of/bin or/lib is abysmally poorly designed.
If I had said more specifically that it gets installed in $USR/bin or $USR/lib would you be less outraged? You still need root for all the common values of $USR. As a result installs on linux are ubiquitously done as root. On mac's its not common to install as root. Sure sometimes you have to. But you expect the installer to ask for the password in those cases. It's not. That's unexpected. Whereas if you always grant root to the installer as a matter of course, as you do in Linux, it would not be surprising it used root privs to do the install. Hence it's not a situation you usually have on linux. At least with Linux you know your pants are around your ankles. With the macs, they were down too, you just did not know it. Surprise!
Yes you are being blunt. Do you run as a Privileged user or unprivileged user when you do your installs? If you are like most people you run as privileged. So once again it's like Linux. Most folks installer is running privileged by default.
But even if I were wrong, that is that there is some hypothetical way to set up a Windows machine so it's similar to macs in regard to allowing everyday unprivileged installs. The essential point I was making remains unchanged an undeserving of your antipathy. That it would be surprising to find you that your installer was assuming root privileges on you.
I'm going to reply to my own post because reading other comments I see that people don't grasp why this is an unexpected behaviour on a mac. It's a fairly normal behaviour on linux and Windows.
According to the Apple documentation linked from TFA, if this behaviour is actually happening, then it is neither expected, nr proper, and is definitely a bug. How the article writer managed to arrive at the conclusion that Apple's documentation say it is correct and expected, I don't know.
**perhaps if you are not informed on this, it's because I and probably that author reported this behaviour to apple and got the response, Whereas you did not.
On a mac, it's normally possible to install an application without requiring any super user privledges. On linux and Windows it's frequently impossible or at least quite hard (on linux you often have to fiddle with the make configuration, and it results normally in a crippled application.
On Windows this is an issue completely up to the application developer, who decides a) whether their installation procedures requires access to system areas, and/or b) whether they allow the user to specify where to install the applications (and/or c) if they bother to check the privilege level that the user has).
**Reality intrudes here: on Linux and Windows ubiquitously the applications need root, or whatever you want to call it, so often that everyone does run and install as root level user. Your reply is really pretty strange and weasly lawyer speak
On Linux, if you're compiling from source, it's a matter of passing --prefix=/some/path to 'configure'. WIth packages, it's a function of the package manager and subject to the same restrictions regarding whether or not the developer has done the right thing.
**Oh come on...this is stupid. Have you ever tried to do large numbers of package installs this way and not basically break the usability of installed libraries for other users, or maintain any consistency between package mangers or had to hand edit other make files unaware of your non-standard installs??? This is completely disingenuous or you are not considering multi-user systems
OS X is *exactly* the same.
**errr no it's not. That's the WHOLE point.
Here's one example. On a windows computer when you install something it has to have some way to get it's hooks into the OS.
No, it doesn't.
**Yes it does, he retorted tersely.
This might be as simple as notifying the OS of what extension/suffixes it can open or what services or filters it provides to other applications. This is done through the registry. And you need to be root to modify the registry. So you can't really install anything properly without giving your application the ability to write to the registry.
This is wrong.
Firstly, you don't need to be "root" to write to the Registry (Windows has no "root" equivalent and access to the Registry is governed by the same types of ACLs that restrict filesystem access, applied on a per-Registry-key basis).
**Oh were back to semantics about "no root" on windows. Whatever.
Secondly, file associations and similar config data are stored in the per-user Registry hives which, of course, users are (typically) able to modify. The equivalents in OS X are all those XML config files hiding in your home directory (which, of course, you have permissions to modify - although access is not restricted at the same fine-grained level as it is to the Registry).
**There are no application XML config files hiding in the your home directory on a mac. That's the point: APP information is in the APP itself. The only thing that ends up in the user prefs folder is the persistent user customization data. But that's not the same thing as what goes in the windows registry.
And since there's no selective privledges that would say "well I trust you to only modify this part
If you don't have access to the root password you really shouldn't be modifying the partitions on the system either:).
I saw the smiley, so I get your jist. But more seriously, that's sort of the point. If you are the super user but you run normally as root, it's a hassle on Linux to do some sys admin tasks without logging in as the super user's desktop. So naturally one tends to run as a sudo or super user as ones normal desktop.
If you are running a single user system or are administrating a home PC for a small number of users then its likely that you will know the root password.
I have about 600 linux machines (not to brag but just to say I'm not talking out my ass either). I dont know the password for "ROOT" on any of them. I do have a UID=0 account on many of these, but the username is not root. The way we configure things is that every UID=0 user gets their own username and password. That does not cut it for KDE and Gnome however where only username=root matters.
Even as a power user you will be able to use 99% / all the applications that you use day to day without recourse to using root credentials.
well yes and no. Sure I wish that were more true. And as good practices go, I pretty much follow that rule as far as the command line interface goes. But for GUI, well forget it. Linux is unmanagable in GUI form if your not a superuser account.
But that was not really the point. The point was that on macs you can install apps without giving the app installer root privledges. So you don't even face that exposure.
Falcon, just a heads up, but unless things have changed linspire makes all users root unless otherwise told. yikes! watch out. and by the way creating a second user is not so much hard to do, per se, but just not something the average mac home user would ever think of doing. They ought to have a setup wizard that says, "Would you like to create a special accouunt for system maintanbinece separate from your daily user account (this is reccomended)?"
On macs you would not generally install into/usr/lib. Sometimes you would sure. But not normally. Even for pure CLI apps, in most cases you would have gotten those from a package manager like fink. And fink follows, partly, the apple style of being self contained. So it goes into/sw/bin. So what's the difference? well this means your bin's form other package managers and the system don't get stirred together. To delete just remove/sw. it's gone. You can also grant the permissions to change these more selectively using ACLs for the separate bin directories. Not that people do very often since macs don't need that kind of paranoia. But it's built into the security model so if you need it you can do it.
Sure anyone can run from the command line as unprivledged because su is always there. It's no different on mac or linux.
But trying to run in a gui as unprivledged in linux is a freakin nightmare. For example when you try this and you run a GUI program that need root (like say Gparted) then if you are truly Gnome or KDE will pop up a dialog asking for the root password. But that's asking for the root password, not asking for any user who has sudo. So if you are not root or have the root password then it fails. And of course that's only under ideal cicrumstances where the app is good enought to do that. Most don't.
I'm going to reply to my own post because reading other comments I see that people don't grasp why this is an unexpected behaviour on a mac. It's a fairly normal behaviour on linux and Windows.
On a mac, it's normally possible to install an application without requiring any super user privledges. On linux and Windows it's frequently impossible or at least quite hard (on linux you often have to fiddle with the make configuration, and it results normally in a crippled application.
Here's one example. On a windows computer when you install something it has to have some way to get it's hooks into the OS. This might be as simple as notifying the OS of what extension/suffixes it can open or what services or filters it provides to other applications. This is done through the registry. And you need to be root to modify the registry. So you can't really install anything properly without giving your application the ability to write to the registry.
And since there's no selective privledges that would say "well I trust you to only modify this part of the registry and no where else nor any other file, you basically pull your pants down around your ankles, close your eyes and pray there is no unsolicited finger up the butt every time you install. Linux is simmilar, since it propably wants to shove stuff in/bin and maybe overwrite somethings in/lib.
On a mac, applications don't do that. Normally an entire application lives in a single folder with no stuff placed anywhere else. SO how does the application provide services? Well what happens is that the operating system will interorogate the Application when it is installed or when you boot or launch it the first time. Inside the application is a standard XML file info.plist that declares all sorts of things the OS might want to know about the application. And then the OS relays this to the other applications as serices that are available. This is how for example, the OS knows what applications can open what kind of documents.
As a result, there is no need to unbuckle your jeans and grab your ankles when you do an install in most cases. And it's also easy to undo an application since the number of places it touches (usually just the application's folder and the library/preferences)
Now I just said in most cases. Some applications do need privledges since they are going to make strong modifications. THis might be installing a start-up item, for example, or things that make intimate hardare interface modifications And for those when you run the installer script you naturally expect it to ask you for your password so it can escalate it's privs.
And there is the problem. It turns out that the installer application on a mac, is a an application that can retain root privs after the first time you grant them (like says SETUID). To me this would seem unneccessary, but it does. And it turns out that if you are a sudo users, and if you have ever granted the installer elevated privs, then when it goes to install an application the requires elevated priv, it does not have to ask you for them! Now it also turns out that in most cases the applicaitons that are being installed can't know if a sudo user or a normal user is installing them so they automatically ask for the password. But they don't have to if you are sudo.
So the fix is not to install as a sudo user. Then the installer can't get the elevated privs be default. And so the application is forced to ask for them if it needs them.
Thus when your "make-a-smiley" application you got from gatorware asks for root during the install you have a chance to rethink if this might be a trojan.
Thus the behaviour of the installer that blows past the authentication check is bothersome to mac users even though they are doing an install. On linux and windows doing an install normally is always done at root privs so the peril is always there.
Slashdot Mirror
daily Apple users are not going to commit themselves to a platform that is just one software update away from suddenly not functioning, or ones for which the apple drivers just don't work. On otherhand for people too cheap to buy apples, and who just want occasional use in an unmaintined state, apple should be happy. It's like throwing a market share bone to the their third pary software developers, and courting future hardware customers. I can imagine that there is sliver of market share for people forced to use apples at work who have a PC at home that just dont have the money to buy an apple YET. I can imagine the hordes of thrird worl countries for whom income levels never will achieve mac status. Neither of these is going to hurt mac sales.
I've read that the underlying problem was more subtle, which might explain some of Apple's expressed frustration with MS. I can't confirm this but it may have been that the infected PC got the infection from a blank, formatted, drive from the drive manufacturer. Even if that is not true in this case, there is nothing stopping it from being true.
It's a pretty subtle bug that, until now of course, I know would have bitten me since I would not have looked for it. I, and the technicians who do jobs for me, often replace burned hard drives in my clusters and computers with units straight out of the box. In some cases we have pre-formatted hot-swap spares still in the shrink wrap sitting on the shelf waiting to go in.
On my macs and linux machines, I sometimes use external USB drives to share with Windows PCs. I don't usually reformat these specifically because I don't entirely trust that the macintosh disk formatting program will create a prisitine PC FAT format. In all likelihood it can, I just don't have the ability to know. And I have reason to doubt: past experience has shown that when one OS provider emulates another's native formats (e.g. Samba or UFS or HFS++ or ZFS or NFS) that the emulation is usually less than complete or has artifacts.
It would be a major hassle and expense, to have to reformat every drive in a rack of clusters one is upgrading. But apparently that is now the requirement to be sure the manufacturer did not ship you a virus on the "blank" harddrive.
The problem is perhaps more diabolical than it seems. Imagine some Apple engineer putting out some specs for the process standards the Chinese manufacturer must follow. He's paranoid they won't have good practices with keeping their windows boxes clean. He also wants to assure the peripheral performance is comaptible with the ipod loading software and to assure the integrity of the data transfers to the ipod. So he decides that the sure way to do this is to make absolutely certain the box has never been on the internet, and to spec every part, so the machine has to be built at the chinese factory from scratch. They then load in the special Apple approved Windows software CD with apples programs and data. Seems foolproof. But it's not.
One might argue that to actually eliminate you have to boot from a trusted CD and then format the drives. But wait, this does not solve the problem. Isn't the problem of creating a trusted CD or and ipod install the problem we started out trying to solve? So one has to some how have a system that one can trust to do this. And that system has to be available to the manufacturer. It's kinds slippery.
If you were about to suggest "well just use Linux" to format the drive, well then apparently you just emitted the same faux paux apple did. Blaming Windows for the problem.
Instead of using micro mirrors, the Los alamos team used an LCD which were more mature at the time. And Instead of using random modulation they used a progression of zenike polynomials and thus achieved much more control over the data compression.
Someday in the future a worm will set off a wildfire, disabling every windows box in the world in a single day. Everyone else will only notice that there suddenly was no more spam and wonder why. Then the spammers will notice all their bots are dead and they will create a new worm that goes out and fixes the vulerability in the few remaining zombies they have left.. So mircosoft's problem will be solved by the spammers faster than you can say Patch-tuesday.
Whihc brings me to another question. What happens when the WGA cop is triggered. Your machine still functions right? you just can't get updates or fixes for vulnerabilities....
As you noted if you try to compete with tht eipod then apple can just change the encoding of the music so it breaks on your harmony player. But the reverse is not true. If I am selling songs I can encode them so they play on apple ipods yet are drm protected. Once I manage to emulate that for any given edition of the DRM format, the apple can't change the protocol because it would mean old songs won't play.
that is you encode the songs such that if old itunes music stroe songs play then your songs must play too.
Because itunes store exists, people like ipods more. It's not that they plan to get all their music there. It's just that it's part of the whole ecosystem that they like. If I'm going to be buying or downloading my songs outside the zune ecosystem as you suggest, why do I need a zune and not a zen? That's why making the zune ecosystem family freindly is what will bind everyone to it. It need not be the sole source of music input, just as it is not with itunes.
For famliles it may be unattractive.
As I understand the Zune sales model, if you buy a song it's locked to play only on your computer and your Zune is also locked to your computer.
The problem is then families that have multiple computers or multiple zunes. If both sis and bro and mom like the latest snoop-dog tune, they can't buy it once and share it o all their computer's and Zunes. They have to buy one copy per machine/zune. That's freakin' nuts.
Or did I get it wrong. Sorry if I did, since Im itunes for the long haul and don't really care about Zune.
That's just what the NY times is doing. Sure you can intersperse news and commentary, but they are being scrupulous to label it clearly as containing commentary. It's not the same as straight Journalism. People reading the economis, or listening to Rush Limbaugh know and expect this. People reading less well defined venues don't know this. That's the challenge for blog journalism, because the distinction matters a great deal.
Without the editor&publisher supervising the Jouralist, there is more opportunity for ethical breaches.
The point was not that journalist don't have ethocs problems, as you rightly observe. The point is that this neew medium has a low barrier to entry and a bigh degree of anonimity. Couple that with no editor&publisher taking the long view of establishing the reputation of the journal in a High-barrier-to-entry medium, then you have a looming problem.
A possible retort would be to say that well, time will sort the good from the idiots. But empirically this does not appear to be true. Like the famous economic principle of bad apples driving the good out of the marketplace because of insufficient resources by the consumer to differentiate them, the web is a plethora bad apple paradise. So either you wind up with a system that is rife with bad apples. or you revert back to the non-anonymous, higher-barrier-to-entry system of a credential and reputation based system, like tradiational media.
The question was how to avoid those inevitable, and well proven, economic outcomes.
Copying a press release is NOT plagairism. It's like fruit of the vine: the plant wants you to eat it's fruit. The Fruit's sugar is not there to help the seed, it's there to get you to ingest it, and deposit the seed in a big hunk of poo.
printing quotes from a press release and planting them in a nice steaming front page story is what the PR firm wants you to do. That's why they provide the partially preapred ingredients for you. Indeed if you do it without attribution the happier they are.
What's the difference? Taking when attribution is expected is plagiarism.
It seems to me that the formal mechanism of the separation of the Editor&publisher from the writer is how such standards arose in the firstplace. The writer cannot just publish what they want. And the Editor&Publisher is concerned with establishing the Paper's reputation and can take a long view.
Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomena, Plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.
It seems to me this is a serious issue for any new journlism form with a low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonimity for the author. How does this ethos get enforced in such a realm?
A related question is the ethic division of commentary and news. We know that's become a problem in the media for some outlets where management has a thumb on the content. But the traditional news organs, especially newspapers, still refrain to the most part. Indeed the NY times just went so far as to remove the typset justification from any article that comtained any sort of analysis or opinion, and reserving the typsetting for only traditional factual journalism stories so the difference is apparent to the reader from the start. How do we reinforce that ethos in the untrain journalist?
Imagine you are on travel. Your battery is discharged. Well it's pretty certain you know where your expensive computer is. And it's pretty certain you know where the battery is--it's the damn thing you need to charge. But where the heck did I misplace that charger. Oh damn, it's at home. Or it's at work or it's in the other computer's computer bag. Out of luck.
If they can't afford new harware then they can't afford the differential power bill and waste of their time the old hardware is causing. If we figure their "free" time is worth minium wage. Then if they wast just 10 hours per year, then over a ten year period (remember this is windows 98), they have wasted over 500 dollars.
If they bought a new computer every 5 years they'd still come out ahead. And that ignores the differential power bill which is even larger.
Are you one of the idiots running windows 98 on a space heater computer?
Besides which I never said they had to stop using windows 98. I just said why encourage them to lose money and have a crappy computer and waste energy? I certainly don't want to support that.
Maybe they would migrate to Linux but why would you want then, They are computer-backward folks who have not updated their equipment. They will be a support nightmare.
Additionally why do you want to encourage them to use legacy hardware? It uses up more electricity to get the job done than modern hardware. Makes the user less productive. Why encourage that.
Ebay, announces the cancelation of 537,000 auctions for "genuine" dvds by the seller for "item no longer available"
And if I drove in reverse and pumped back too, I'd get positive 100MPG :-)
I'm developing a car that will get negative 100MPG to cancel this out.
Actually I'm trying to cancel out this goofy definition of MPG when there's electricity involved. Does a pure electric car get Infinity Miles per gallon?
This sort of reminds me of a prank a friend pulled in college. One guy was always entering the room to announce he had managed to drive is economy car so skillfully that got outrageous gas milage. Tiring of this, my friend started adding a gallon of gas to the braggarts tank every night so that his milage and brags got bigger and bigger. Then the next week he started siphoning out a gallon out of the tank. The brags "mysteriously" ceased without explanation.
So my car is going to use photovoltaics, and have an onboard device that inhales smog, and uses the electricity to produce gasoline. Then I'm going to drive up to gas stations, connect the hose and pump gas back into the filling station tanks. That will mess with their arithmetic! and I'll have my negative 100MPG vehicle.
Are you trolling or something? Any Linux application that wants to touch the contents of /bin or /lib is abysmally poorly designed.
If I had said more specifically that it gets installed in $USR/bin or $USR/lib would you be less outraged? You still need root for all the common values of $USR. As a result installs on linux are ubiquitously done as root. On mac's its not common to install as root. Sure sometimes you have to. But you expect the installer to ask for the password in those cases. It's not. That's unexpected. Whereas if you always grant root to the installer as a matter of course, as you do in Linux, it would not be surprising it used root privs to do the install. Hence it's not a situation you usually have on linux. At least with Linux you know your pants are around your ankles. With the macs, they were down too, you just did not know it. Surprise!
Yes you are being blunt. Do you run as a Privileged user or unprivileged user when you do your installs? If you are like most people you run as privileged. So once again it's like Linux. Most folks installer is running privileged by default.
But even if I were wrong, that is that there is some hypothetical way to set up a Windows machine so it's similar to macs in regard to allowing everyday unprivileged installs. The essential point I was making remains unchanged an undeserving of your antipathy. That it would be surprising to find you that your installer was assuming root privileges on you.
According to the Apple documentation linked from TFA, if this behaviour is actually happening, then it is neither expected, nr proper, and is definitely a bug. How the article writer managed to arrive at the conclusion that Apple's documentation say it is correct and expected, I don't know.
**perhaps if you are not informed on this, it's because I and probably that author reported this behaviour to apple and got the response, Whereas you did not.
On a mac, it's normally possible to install an application without requiring any super user privledges. On linux and Windows it's frequently impossible or at least quite hard (on linux you often have to fiddle with the make configuration, and it results normally in a crippled application.
On Windows this is an issue completely up to the application developer, who decides a) whether their installation procedures requires access to system areas, and/or b) whether they allow the user to specify where to install the applications (and/or c) if they bother to check the privilege level that the user has).
**Reality intrudes here: on Linux and Windows ubiquitously the applications need root, or whatever you want to call it, so often that everyone does run and install as root level user. Your reply is really pretty strange and weasly lawyer speak
On Linux, if you're compiling from source, it's a matter of passing --prefix=/some/path to 'configure'. WIth packages, it's a function of the package manager and subject to the same restrictions regarding whether or not the developer has done the right thing.
**Oh come on...this is stupid. Have you ever tried to do large numbers of package installs this way and not basically break the usability of installed libraries for other users, or maintain any consistency between package mangers or had to hand edit other make files unaware of your non-standard installs??? This is completely disingenuous or you are not considering multi-user systems
OS X is *exactly* the same.
**errr no it's not. That's the WHOLE point.
Here's one example. On a windows computer when you install something it has to have some way to get it's hooks into the OS.
No, it doesn't.
**Yes it does, he retorted tersely.
This might be as simple as notifying the OS of what extension/suffixes it can open or what services or filters it provides to other applications. This is done through the registry. And you need to be root to modify the registry. So you can't really install anything properly without giving your application the ability to write to the registry.
This is wrong. Firstly, you don't need to be "root" to write to the Registry (Windows has no "root" equivalent and access to the Registry is governed by the same types of ACLs that restrict filesystem access, applied on a per-Registry-key basis).
**Oh were back to semantics about "no root" on windows. Whatever.
Secondly, file associations and similar config data are stored in the per-user Registry hives which, of course, users are (typically) able to modify. The equivalents in OS X are all those XML config files hiding in your home directory (which, of course, you have permissions to modify - although access is not restricted at the same fine-grained level as it is to the Registry).
**There are no application XML config files hiding in the your home directory on a mac. That's the point: APP information is in the APP itself. The only thing that ends up in the user prefs folder is the persistent user customization data. But that's not the same thing as what goes in the windows registry.
And since there's no selective privledges that would say "well I trust you to only modify this part
I saw the smiley, so I get your jist. But more seriously, that's sort of the point. If you are the super user but you run normally as root, it's a hassle on Linux to do some sys admin tasks without logging in as the super user's desktop. So naturally one tends to run as a sudo or super user as ones normal desktop.
If you are running a single user system or are administrating a home PC for a small number of users then its likely that you will know the root password.
I have about 600 linux machines (not to brag but just to say I'm not talking out my ass either). I dont know the password for "ROOT" on any of them. I do have a UID=0 account on many of these, but the username is not root. The way we configure things is that every UID=0 user gets their own username and password. That does not cut it for KDE and Gnome however where only username=root matters.
Even as a power user you will be able to use 99% / all the applications that you use day to day without recourse to using root credentials.
well yes and no. Sure I wish that were more true. And as good practices go, I pretty much follow that rule as far as the command line interface goes. But for GUI, well forget it. Linux is unmanagable in GUI form if your not a superuser account.
But that was not really the point. The point was that on macs you can install apps without giving the app installer root privledges. So you don't even face that exposure.
Falcon, just a heads up, but unless things have changed linspire makes all users root unless otherwise told. yikes! watch out. and by the way creating a second user is not so much hard to do, per se, but just not something the average mac home user would ever think of doing. They ought to have a setup wizard that says, "Would you like to create a special accouunt for system maintanbinece separate from your daily user account (this is reccomended)?"
On macs you would not generally install into /usr/lib. Sometimes you would sure. But not normally. Even for pure CLI apps, in most cases you would have gotten those from a package manager like fink. And fink follows, partly, the apple style of being self contained. So it goes into /sw/bin. So what's the difference? well this means your bin's form other package managers and the system don't get stirred together. To delete just remove /sw. it's gone. You can also grant the permissions to change these more selectively using ACLs for the separate bin directories. Not that people do very often since macs don't need that kind of paranoia. But it's built into the security model so if you need it you can do it.
Sure anyone can run from the command line as unprivledged because su is always there. It's no different on mac or linux.
But trying to run in a gui as unprivledged in linux is a freakin nightmare. For example when you try this and you run a GUI program that need root (like say Gparted) then if you are truly Gnome or KDE will pop up a dialog asking for the root password. But that's asking for the root password, not asking for any user who has sudo. So if you are not root or have the root password then it fails. And of course that's only under ideal cicrumstances where the app is good enought to do that. Most don't.
I'm going to reply to my own post because reading other comments I see that people don't grasp why this is an unexpected behaviour on a mac. It's a fairly normal behaviour on linux and Windows.
/bin and maybe overwrite somethings in /lib.
On a mac, it's normally possible to install an application without requiring any super user privledges. On linux and Windows it's frequently impossible or at least quite hard (on linux you often have to fiddle with the make configuration, and it results normally in a crippled application.
Here's one example. On a windows computer when you install something it has to have some way to get it's hooks into the OS. This might be as simple as notifying the OS of what extension/suffixes it can open or what services or filters it provides to other applications. This is done through the registry. And you need to be root to modify the registry. So you can't really install anything properly without giving your application the ability to write to the registry.
And since there's no selective privledges that would say "well I trust you to only modify this part of the registry and no where else nor any other file, you basically pull your pants down around your ankles, close your eyes and pray there is no unsolicited finger up the butt every time you install. Linux is simmilar, since it propably wants to shove stuff in
On a mac, applications don't do that. Normally an entire application lives in a single folder with no stuff placed anywhere else. SO how does the application provide services? Well what happens is that the operating system will interorogate the Application when it is installed or when you boot or launch it the first time. Inside the application is a standard XML file info.plist that declares all sorts of things the OS might want to know about the application. And then the OS relays this to the other applications as serices that are available. This is how for example, the OS knows what applications can open what kind of documents.
As a result, there is no need to unbuckle your jeans and grab your ankles when you do an install in most cases. And it's also easy to undo an application since the number of places it touches (usually just the application's folder and the library/preferences)
Now I just said in most cases. Some applications do need privledges since they are going to make strong modifications. THis might be installing a start-up item, for example, or things that make intimate hardare interface modifications And for those when you run the installer script you naturally expect it to ask you for your password so it can escalate it's privs.
And there is the problem. It turns out that the installer application on a mac, is a an application that can retain root privs after the first time you grant them (like says SETUID). To me this would seem unneccessary, but it does. And it turns out that if you are a sudo users, and if you have ever granted the installer elevated privs, then when it goes to install an application the requires elevated priv, it does not have to ask you for them! Now it also turns out that in most cases the applicaitons that are being installed can't know if a sudo user or a normal user is installing them so they automatically ask for the password. But they don't have to if you are sudo.
So the fix is not to install as a sudo user. Then the installer can't get the elevated privs be default. And so the application is forced to ask for them if it needs them.
Thus when your "make-a-smiley" application you got from gatorware asks for root during the install you have a chance to rethink if this might be a trojan.
Thus the behaviour of the installer that blows past the authentication check is bothersome to mac users even though they are doing an install. On linux and windows doing an install normally is always done at root privs so the peril is always there.