I tried the exploit with my screensaver and got right in. Fortunately, I usually keep confidential data on encrypted disk images. If you leave them mounted, they will re-lock when the machine sleeps.
I also tried the exploit on the password dialog for an encrypted disk image and it did indeed crash but I did not get access to the volume. The dialog box remained up and could not be dismissed but the image mounter said that the filesystem could not be mounted because of an error of type -60008.
One specific thing you may want to try with a firewall is blocking packets to 224.0.0.251. I've been using MacSniffer to monitor the traffic on my own home lan to see what I might need to do security-wise and noticed packets going to this address periodically. After some searching, I found that this is probably Rendezvous activity. See this article.
Part of the problem with the activities carried out under the act is that they are very stealthy. You may not know that your rights have been violated.
Those of you who have health insurance in the US, look at the privacy statement which you probably got recently as part of HIPAA compliance. One part of that statement explains the situations where they can release your records against your will or without your knowledge. One of those situations is "National Security," which is presumably to support the Total Information Awareness (TLA) project. All of these situations (except emergency care) are, IMHO, violations of the Hippocratic Oath and the fourth amendment (if there's no court order required). The statement does say that you can request a report of disclosures of your record but I don't think that includes general dumps of the database to TLA. You would not know that your rights have been violated.
The name I use here, Aram Fingal, is actually from a made-for-TV movie called Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. Picture The Matrix done in the style (and budget) of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
I thought Photoshop 7 was written in Cocoa, not Carbon. They said that's why it took them a while to come out with an OS X native version but it's one which can take better advantage of the OS.
Cocoa is, theoretically, portable via GnuStep to other UNIX platforms although I haven't heard much about this recently. Carbon is a quick way of porting legacy Mac code to OS X and not very portable to UNIX in general.
Well, it looks like SoftWindows, the previous leader in the field before VirtualPC, has not been updated in a while and is classic mac only.
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=177 6&db=mac
There's also Blue Label but that apparently hasn't been updated to OS X yet either.
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=698 &db=mac
I have tried Bochs and it looks to me like it needs a lot of work in the area of making the configuration easier but it is supposed to be able to run any x86 OS.
I am still using CA-CricketGraph III which is probably the best all-around graphing program ever made. The problem is that its been several years since it's been supported. It runs just fine in the classic environment of OS X so there is no real pressure to switch. I'm not the only one, a lot of people at my university are still using CricketGraph.
Eventually, I do plan to get someting else. GraphPad Prism, as mentioned elsewhere in this topic, is probably the most likely replacement. I have also tried Kaleidagraph and ProFit and they're not bad.
I would like to use someting like Gnuplot which I know is open and will be around forever but It just isn't easy to use yet. I think the secret there would be to develop some spreadsheet macros to output data in Gnuplot's ASCII based file format but I have not had time to research this possibility and try it out.
Indeed, if a particular system were more vulnerable than Windows then crackers would scan for that system and attack it. Opportunists go for the easy prey, not necessarily the most common thing. You can find non-MS nodes on the internet if you look - that's not a problem.
I wonder if Keynote is just the first of a new suite to replace AppleWorks and if XML will make possible what OpenDoc failed to do. That is, make a fully modular office suite where you can mix and match, say a word processor from one developer and a spreadsheed from another and still have them work together as if they were integrated.
OmniOutliner already exports to Keynote via XML. That's a good sign.
I think this is not such a problem for the individual as it is for the country. If your kids have talent and there isn't work here anymore, they can telecommute to where there are jobs.
It is a bit of a loss for people using PowerMacs in the PPC 601 to 604 range that can't go beyond Mac OS 9. I would love to upgrade many of these systems we still have to ones which can run OS X but we just don't have the money now. Opera is a fast and compatible option for these systems where there are not as many other choices.
Doesn't Linux run on both PowerPC and Intel hardware? Then why doesn't some enterprising individual go put together some various benchmarks comparing the two on this type of level playing field? I want to believe that the PowerPC is faster clock-for-clock, but I can't until I see some good benchmarks
Unfortunately, it is not as level a playing field as it should be. GCC is not as well optimized for PPC as it is for Intel. Under Mac OS, you get better optimization from CodeWarrior.
I think it makes sense for an OS which depends on marketing to graphic artists to have a UI which shows off some of the machine's abilities in this area. Graphic artists are exactly the people who want to work within a graphically rich environment. You may or may not like the Aqua scheme in Mac OS X but it's still clear that some effort and creativity went into the design.
If I understand the situation correctly, Chimera is a port of Mozilla from UNIX code base with a GUI written in Cocoa while the Mozilla that is called "Mozilla" on OS X is a Carbon port of the legacy Mac OS code for Mozilla. A Carbon Mozilla makes sense if you need to support both classic Mac OS and Mac OS X with uniform behavior as the priority.
Eventually, however, won't it be more important to use technologies like the UNIX base and Cocoa which make better use of OS X's abilities than Carbon does? Chimera may be marginal now but it's the method that makes more sense for the future.
I don't want to blame the Chinese for everything but there are two things which bother me. Their degrees are treated the same as those of other major countries when they typically have no lab experience whatsoever. They only have classroom study.
The other problem is cultural and linguistic. Many of the Chinese here don't speak English well enough to communicate at all. This is a safety problem when working with radioactive, biological and chemical hazards as well as a problem for the exchange of ideas, yet the major university where I work doesn't seem to mind. Part of the reason they don't learn English is that they stick together and don't mix with other nationalities. There is a whole floor here where everyone is Chinese. That's not diversity.
It would be better if they allowed you to choose an identification string like iCab and OmniWeb do. Some sites will refuse to serve a particular browser even when it really is compatible.
So much potential (and it still is an absolutely great platform) but it got such a kick in the ribs from MS and this decision is typically late in prescribing a remedy.
I use a Psion with my Mac system. I much prefer the form factor of the Psion, with it's keyboard and 640x240 screen. I can actually touch type on it and see a full page width at a time.
It can run a version of Linux in addition to it's native Epoch OS. It will dock with a Mac by way of the serial port (or serial to USB adaptor) but I mostly transfer files by way of a Compact Flash card.
I bought mine on ebay for $70 a while back and I have another one for backup. I just can't see carrying around a device worth several hundred dollars when I could so easily break it, loose it, or have it stolen.
For most of us, the speed is not as important as final product. I would like to see a comparison of the trueness of colorsync technologies on PC and Mac. I think that would be more important to me than processor speed.
All along, I've been trying to promote my site by encouraging people to link to it. Now I see. If I just forbid people to link to my site I will get some links to it. Yes!
... and it was also not common sense to do it the more traditional Mac way and use the top menu which changes as you move around select things to include the stuff which you might otherwise get by right-clicking, etc.
Nothing that I can think of on the Mac actually requires control-clicking except for situations where you are emulating some other machine. A basic part of the HIG, which others have referred to, is that you can find every function of a program in the top pulldown menu. That way, everything is in one place and you don't have to search.
I take your point that it may be easier for occasional users coming from another OS who regularly use a mouse with more than one button. You want to be able to do things without having to think.
My understanding of Apple's position on multi-button mice is that they unnecessarily complicate the user interface. They give the user one more place to have to look to figure out how to do something. OS X supports multi button mice if you want an alternate way of doing things but Apple ships one button mice to keep programmers from writing stuff that depends on the additional buttons.
Shake is something which Apple acquired from another company. I suspect it will only require a three button mouse until Apple has a chance to rewrite it.
Having said that, one other Apple product which used a three button mouse was, the now long gone, A/UX (Apple UNIX).
They're not forbidding outside mechanics to work on their cars. Ford is just refusing to give them the codes necessary to communicate with the onboard computers, effectively shutting them down a bit at a time as the computers become more and more important.
I have been using encrypted disk images in Mac OS X for well over a year now and it works very well.
I was worried, at first, that disk images could become corrupted if something went wrong and make the entire contents unreadable. They are actually quite robust. You can even open a terminal and kill the process called hdid which will force unmount the image in the middle of a copy operation, and your data is still safe.
You can open an image from an AppleTalk server and use that to encrypt your network traffic. It works, I've checked it with a packet sniffer.
Part of the reason images are so good for backups is that they preserve the relative pointing of aliases. If you just do a finder drag-and-drop copy with a folder, any copied aliases from that folder will point to the item in the original and not the copy.
The encryption process can make use of both AltiVec (Velocity Engine) and multiple processors. With a G4, you hardly notice the processor time needed to perform the encryption/decryption.
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I tried the exploit with my screensaver and got right in. Fortunately, I usually keep confidential data on encrypted disk images. If you leave them mounted, they will re-lock when the machine sleeps.
I also tried the exploit on the password dialog for an encrypted disk image and it did indeed crash but I did not get access to the volume. The dialog box remained up and could not be dismissed but the image mounter said that the filesystem could not be mounted because of an error of type -60008.
One specific thing you may want to try with a firewall is blocking packets to 224.0.0.251. I've been using MacSniffer to monitor the traffic on my own home lan to see what I might need to do security-wise and noticed packets going to this address periodically. After some searching, I found that this is probably Rendezvous activity. See this article.
Part of the problem with the activities carried out under the act is that they are very stealthy. You may not know that your rights have been violated.
Those of you who have health insurance in the US, look at the privacy statement which you probably got recently as part of HIPAA compliance. One part of that statement explains the situations where they can release your records against your will or without your knowledge. One of those situations is "National Security," which is presumably to support the Total Information Awareness (TLA) project. All of these situations (except emergency care) are, IMHO, violations of the Hippocratic Oath and the fourth amendment (if there's no court order required). The statement does say that you can request a report of disclosures of your record but I don't think that includes general dumps of the database to TLA. You would not know that your rights have been violated.
The name I use here, Aram Fingal, is actually from a made-for-TV movie called Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. Picture The Matrix done in the style (and budget) of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
I thought Photoshop 7 was written in Cocoa, not Carbon. They said that's why it took them a while to come out with an OS X native version but it's one which can take better advantage of the OS.
Cocoa is, theoretically, portable via GnuStep to other UNIX platforms although I haven't heard much about this recently. Carbon is a quick way of porting legacy Mac code to OS X and not very portable to UNIX in general.
Well, it looks like SoftWindows, the previous leader in the field before VirtualPC, has not been updated in a while and is classic mac only. http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=177 6&db=mac
8 &db=mac
There's also Blue Label but that apparently hasn't been updated to OS X yet either. http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=69
I have tried Bochs and it looks to me like it needs a lot of work in the area of making the configuration easier but it is supposed to be able to run any x86 OS.
I am still using CA-CricketGraph III which is probably the best all-around graphing program ever made. The problem is that its been several years since it's been supported. It runs just fine in the classic environment of OS X so there is no real pressure to switch. I'm not the only one, a lot of people at my university are still using CricketGraph.
Eventually, I do plan to get someting else. GraphPad Prism, as mentioned elsewhere in this topic, is probably the most likely replacement. I have also tried Kaleidagraph and ProFit and they're not bad.
I would like to use someting like Gnuplot which I know is open and will be around forever but It just isn't easy to use yet. I think the secret there would be to develop some spreadsheet macros to output data in Gnuplot's ASCII based file format but I have not had time to research this possibility and try it out.
Indeed, if a particular system were more vulnerable than Windows then crackers would scan for that system and attack it. Opportunists go for the easy prey, not necessarily the most common thing. You can find non-MS nodes on the internet if you look - that's not a problem.
I wonder if Keynote is just the first of a new suite to replace AppleWorks and if XML will make possible what OpenDoc failed to do. That is, make a fully modular office suite where you can mix and match, say a word processor from one developer and a spreadsheed from another and still have them work together as if they were integrated.
OmniOutliner already exports to Keynote via XML. That's a good sign.
I think this is not such a problem for the individual as it is for the country. If your kids have talent and there isn't work here anymore, they can telecommute to where there are jobs.
It is a bit of a loss for people using PowerMacs in the PPC 601 to 604 range that can't go beyond Mac OS 9. I would love to upgrade many of these systems we still have to ones which can run OS X but we just don't have the money now. Opera is a fast and compatible option for these systems where there are not as many other choices.
Unfortunately, it is not as level a playing field as it should be. GCC is not as well optimized for PPC as it is for Intel. Under Mac OS, you get better optimization from CodeWarrior.
I think it makes sense for an OS which depends on marketing to graphic artists to have a UI which shows off some of the machine's abilities in this area. Graphic artists are exactly the people who want to work within a graphically rich environment. You may or may not like the Aqua scheme in Mac OS X but it's still clear that some effort and creativity went into the design.
If I understand the situation correctly, Chimera is a port of Mozilla from UNIX code base with a GUI written in Cocoa while the Mozilla that is called "Mozilla" on OS X is a Carbon port of the legacy Mac OS code for Mozilla. A Carbon Mozilla makes sense if you need to support both classic Mac OS and Mac OS X with uniform behavior as the priority.
Eventually, however, won't it be more important to use technologies like the UNIX base and Cocoa which make better use of OS X's abilities than Carbon does? Chimera may be marginal now but it's the method that makes more sense for the future.
I don't want to blame the Chinese for everything but there are two things which bother me. Their degrees are treated the same as those of other major countries when they typically have no lab experience whatsoever. They only have classroom study.
The other problem is cultural and linguistic. Many of the Chinese here don't speak English well enough to communicate at all. This is a safety problem when working with radioactive, biological and chemical hazards as well as a problem for the exchange of ideas, yet the major university where I work doesn't seem to mind. Part of the reason they don't learn English is that they stick together and don't mix with other nationalities. There is a whole floor here where everyone is Chinese. That's not diversity.
It would be better if they allowed you to choose an identification string like iCab and OmniWeb do. Some sites will refuse to serve a particular browser even when it really is compatible.
I use a Psion with my Mac system. I much prefer the form factor of the Psion, with it's keyboard and 640x240 screen. I can actually touch type on it and see a full page width at a time.
It can run a version of Linux in addition to it's native Epoch OS. It will dock with a Mac by way of the serial port (or serial to USB adaptor) but I mostly transfer files by way of a Compact Flash card.
I bought mine on ebay for $70 a while back and I have another one for backup. I just can't see carrying around a device worth several hundred dollars when I could so easily break it, loose it, or have it stolen.
For most of us, the speed is not as important as final product. I would like to see a comparison of the trueness of colorsync technologies on PC and Mac. I think that would be more important to me than processor speed.
All along, I've been trying to promote my site by encouraging people to link to it. Now I see. If I just forbid people to link to my site I will get some links to it. Yes!
... and it was also not common sense to do it the more traditional Mac way and use the top menu which changes as you move around select things to include the stuff which you might otherwise get by right-clicking, etc.
Nothing that I can think of on the Mac actually requires control-clicking except for situations where you are emulating some other machine. A basic part of the HIG, which others have referred to, is that you can find every function of a program in the top pulldown menu. That way, everything is in one place and you don't have to search.
I take your point that it may be easier for occasional users coming from another OS who regularly use a mouse with more than one button. You want to be able to do things without having to think.
My understanding of Apple's position on multi-button mice is that they unnecessarily complicate the user interface. They give the user one more place to have to look to figure out how to do something. OS X supports multi button mice if you want an alternate way of doing things but Apple ships one button mice to keep programmers from writing stuff that depends on the additional buttons.
Shake is something which Apple acquired from another company. I suspect it will only require a three button mouse until Apple has a chance to rewrite it.
Having said that, one other Apple product which used a three button mouse was, the now long gone, A/UX (Apple UNIX).
They're not forbidding outside mechanics to work on their cars. Ford is just refusing to give them the codes necessary to communicate with the onboard computers, effectively shutting them down a bit at a time as the computers become more and more important.
I have been using encrypted disk images in Mac OS X for well over a year now and it works very well.
I was worried, at first, that disk images could become corrupted if something went wrong and make the entire contents unreadable. They are actually quite robust. You can even open a terminal and kill the process called hdid which will force unmount the image in the middle of a copy operation, and your data is still safe.
You can open an image from an AppleTalk server and use that to encrypt your network traffic. It works, I've checked it with a packet sniffer.
Part of the reason images are so good for backups is that they preserve the relative pointing of aliases. If you just do a finder drag-and-drop copy with a folder, any copied aliases from that folder will point to the item in the original and not the copy.
The encryption process can make use of both AltiVec (Velocity Engine) and multiple processors. With a G4, you hardly notice the processor time needed to perform the encryption/decryption.