Here's another one... fucking fanboi making shit up as he goes along.
In most walled gardens with cryptographically secured clients(either hardware devices or software DRM piles on general purpose PCs) downgrading is a valuable tool for attackers
Erm, Einstein... if an attacker has already got into a system, why in hell would he need to downgrade it? I've worked in OS security for years and I've witnessed attackers installing new stuff on a system, but downgrading is a new one on me.
unless a fundamental attack is found, most attacks are comparatively minor bugs in version N or game Y's savegame loading routine or whatever, which are then fixed in version N+1 or game Y Gold Edition.
Sorry, you've the lost the fucking plot here on two counts - a. Why do attackers only attack gamesaves? and b. I don't fucking understand what you are bibbling on about here anyway - and care even fucking less!
If downgrading is possible, it becomes pretty trivial for people to keep a copy of the easiest-to-exploit firmware or software version that ever received a cryptographic signature, and then downgrade to it.
Thanks. Now I KNOW you know fuck all about what you think you are talking about. NOBODY downgrades for reasons of getting less security on a system, instead what they do is install INSECURE APPLICATIONS - e.g replacing SSH with Telnet because the latter is easier to use or supports more clients. But that's DIFFERENT SOFTWARE not DOWNGRADING.
This is the same reason why software that connects to DRMed media sources tends to get updated a zillion times a year, and why such updates are generally made mandatory pretty quickly.
You FUCKING idiot! Lots of software gets upgraded many times a year because of NEW SECURITY EXPLOITS that need to be patched, why you'd pick out DRM apps particularly makes no sense.
At least some of the updates, for Apple's flagship devices(upon which the iPod touch and wifi-only iPad are sort of hangers-on), aren't just OS update lumps, they also meddle with the embedded cellular hardware's firmware. Allowing downgrading would require dealing with v.N+1 basebands talking to v.N OSes, or involve allowing the baseband firmware to be downgraded(which is of interest to unlockers and other parties who Apple's carrier buddies don't approve of) and may involve some amount of bricking risk.
Two words - "backwards compatibility". And you've now moved up a gear with the inane babbling, BTW. I have no idea what you are on about, you sound like managers I've worked for who are trying to impress me with their technical knowledge and TOTALLY FUCKING IT UP in the process!
Apple has, at least until shitstorms forced their hand, never been much troubled at the idea that they are seen as forcing people to upgrade(remember their original response to the iPod battery life problem, until whining forced them to change it? Or the various OS 10.x releases that have dropped support for hardware configs upon which, once the version check is hacked away, it can in fact run?). This seems to be a matter both of business and of philosophy: Obviously, as a hardware maker, anything that makes people buy new hardware is profitable. Philosophically, they have never shied away from a pattern of releases of the form "Here is version N+1, it is insanely great. Everything prior to today is an obsolete archaism. On the plus side, this allows them to do interesting things with some regularity. On the minus side, this makes them quite happy to declare various features dead well before some of their customers are ready. The idea that they would dedicate engineering effort to allowing people with version N-1 or N-2 devices to run an obsolete OS runs against their priorities.
I do NOT understand you! Have you just entered some manic religious-fervour-induced naked dance around a pentagram shape made from your Apple products?
I give up, you are a technology moron. Stick to being an art student or a quantity surveyor or whatever other job you do that requires zero technical knowledge because you are clearly very good at it.
This argument is akin to the one made for Windows some decades back. "But look at the abundance of great shareware for the platform", while actually it was more like a steaming pile of VB6 homework projects.
What planet are you living on, apart from the obvious one filled with mind-warping breathable gases that make anything with a picture of a piece of fruit on it irresistible?
The whole concept of shareware is so that you "try before you buy" so that you avoid spending money on a poorly-written application or game before paying good money for it.
Additional, how in HELL do you think games companies like ID & Apogee made names for themselves across the world? Both were big proponents of shareware for games like Doom, Duke Nukem and many others - had they not had the shareware model, who knows where they would have been now.
I wouldn't even call myself a Windows user as these days I use mostly Linux, but I am sick to the back teeth of knowledgeless fanbois *MAKING SHIT UP* just because it appears to support their valid reasons to use Apple products when it's nothing more than wanting to be part of an elitist club of *BIGOTS* whose only purpose is to sneer down their noses at the rest of the world.
*BSD UNIX* comes from an ethic whereby some people write software because they have a good idea and some programming skills FIRST, and THEN discover that in some cases they can make money from it.
What the FUCK does it matter that some of the software they wrote wasn't very good! At LEAST they probably did a whole lot more than some clueless idiot like you buying into a fucking religion because you have more fucking money than sense.
Now kindly FUCK OFF and contribute to topics where you might have a FUCKING CLUE about the subject being discussed.
Well, Fuck You. I want to make a living off of my creativity and intellect. I work long, often 14+ hour days to create what you want to have. If imaginary property has no value and requires no input of resources go fucking do it yourself. But no, you won't (and you probably can't even if you wanted to).
You know something? I fully defend your right to make a living from what you do.
But if you're working 14 hour days to make it then it's clearly not only making you exceedingly angry but please don't bullshit the rest of us that you do long hours for our benefit.
It could well be you're not actually very good at doing it in the first place and if you were good at doing it then you could do it in an 8 hour day - just saying, that's all.
Yep, as a techie engineer & consultant for the past 30-odd years, a skilled Project Manager is a great asset to have on a project.
I've got good communications skills and have no problems standing in front of customers, but I've tried to manage smaller projects myself purely from my own skills on many occasions - most of the time it's been fine, but on others it's got into a stalemate position until I've pulled in a PM to help sort out the tangle and get it moving.
So don't try to straddle both skill areas - they're mutually exclusive.
...if it's free to set up multiple email accounts on Google and if you are that concerned about the priority of "authorised spam" emails (i.e. advertising emails that you have agreed to receive), why not just create two accounts, one for private use and one for subscriptions?
If you weren't using Google then you'd be inundated with a lot more spam than on Gmail because Google's mail filters are so good - and if I have to put up with a bit of prioritised emails of stuff I've subscribed to avoid virtually all spam, then so be it. The fact is, I don't subscribe to all that crap in the first place...
I use it because it has excellent spam filtering and specifically because it has IMAP (and POP3) access - I do use the webmail interface to quickly scan emails on rare occasions, I've not used much in the way of other webmail systems to state whether or not it's more or less clunky than others.
Just be aware that it's not *JUST* webmail access and I suspect a lot of people jumped across to it when Hotmail disabled POP3 access.
If anything, as someone who used to write mail-filtering rules up to about 5 years ago in procmail with my old ISP's mail servers, I kind of miss not having to write them any more.
...every time some Apple device somewhere gets stolen by someone, Slashdot has to create a story about it.
And some people on here have the audacity to wonder why we non-fanbois hate Apple so much - it's like a badly spoilt child constantly craving your attention and something from you....
Ignoring the fact that I'm in the UK and therefore what is grammatically correct in English may vary across the various dialects over the world, doesn't the US constitution contain the phrase "We the people" rather than "Us the people".
And not trying to be pedantic either but it should be "unless you want TO continue sounding like an idiot".
Rumour has it that Slashdot is shortly releasing a special section for Apple users where you only get access if you prove you are a stockbroker or art student with an income in excess of £80,000 p.a. and a man-bag.
Thus you will be able to stay well away from we smelly hippies with our open-toed sandals.
I will add that I've used many operating systems over the years, and the 'OS' has always referred to the complete package - kernel, core libraries, userland applications, IO and other hardware drivers, etc.
In which case, please explain at what point the kernel, as you add tools and applications on top of it, becomes an Operating System?
Just for reference, I'm no Microsoft fan (Linux guy) and Android is my current choice of mobile OS.
But the above statement strikes me as rather pathetic trolling - in the history of new computing devices, has there ever been a wealth of software sat there waiting for its release day ready to install on it?
If you are talking about, say, a new games console platform, then at £50 a game a developer with millions in the bank can maybe afford to take a risk and have a game or two ready to buy and run on a console on release day.
But for mobile apps that average £2-£3 in price where you are more than likely a small or independent developer, are you really going to want to take the risk of having stuff ready on release day if you end up only selling a few hundred copies of your app?
I too believe Microsoft have an uphill struggle with WP7 but, like Apple, they are exceedingly good at marketing and pulling rabbits out of hats, so now is not the time to start shouting "FAIL".
I do wonder if the human race is beginning to lose its capabilities of imagination...
I have and have had times when what I've been watching on a screen in front of me has been so interesting or so well filmed that I've managed to become immersed in what's going on without the need for surround sound, high definition, 3D or odours.
It might be argued that people now need these extra "enhancements" because most stuff on screen these days is such crap that there's little chance of becoming immersed in it without them.
They provide the hardware on which a fairly open OS runs - so you buy the product then go off and do what you like. You are not forced to continue to do business with either company afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another one... fucking fanboi making shit up as he goes along.
In most walled gardens with cryptographically secured clients(either hardware devices or software DRM piles on general purpose PCs) downgrading is a valuable tool for attackers
Erm, Einstein... if an attacker has already got into a system, why in hell would he need to downgrade it? I've worked in OS security for years and I've witnessed attackers installing new stuff on a system, but downgrading is a new one on me.
unless a fundamental attack is found, most attacks are comparatively minor bugs in version N or game Y's savegame loading routine or whatever, which are then fixed in version N+1 or game Y Gold Edition.
Sorry, you've the lost the fucking plot here on two counts - a. Why do attackers only attack gamesaves? and b. I don't fucking understand what you are bibbling on about here anyway - and care even fucking less!
If downgrading is possible, it becomes pretty trivial for people to keep a copy of the easiest-to-exploit firmware or software version that ever received a cryptographic signature, and then downgrade to it.
Thanks. Now I KNOW you know fuck all about what you think you are talking about. NOBODY downgrades for reasons of getting less security on a system, instead what they do is install INSECURE APPLICATIONS - e.g replacing SSH with Telnet because the latter is easier to use or supports more clients. But that's DIFFERENT SOFTWARE not DOWNGRADING.
This is the same reason why software that connects to DRMed media sources tends to get updated a zillion times a year, and why such updates are generally made mandatory pretty quickly.
You FUCKING idiot! Lots of software gets upgraded many times a year because of NEW SECURITY EXPLOITS that need to be patched, why you'd pick out DRM apps particularly makes no sense.
At least some of the updates, for Apple's flagship devices(upon which the iPod touch and wifi-only iPad are sort of hangers-on), aren't just OS update lumps, they also meddle with the embedded cellular hardware's firmware. Allowing downgrading would require dealing with v.N+1 basebands talking to v.N OSes, or involve allowing the baseband firmware to be downgraded(which is of interest to unlockers and other parties who Apple's carrier buddies don't approve of) and may involve some amount of bricking risk.
Two words - "backwards compatibility". And you've now moved up a gear with the inane babbling, BTW. I have no idea what you are on about, you sound like managers I've worked for who are trying to impress me with their technical knowledge and TOTALLY FUCKING IT UP in the process!
Apple has, at least until shitstorms forced their hand, never been much troubled at the idea that they are seen as forcing people to upgrade(remember their original response to the iPod battery life problem, until whining forced them to change it? Or the various OS 10.x releases that have dropped support for hardware configs upon which, once the version check is hacked away, it can in fact run?). This seems to be a matter both of business and of philosophy: Obviously, as a hardware maker, anything that makes people buy new hardware is profitable. Philosophically, they have never shied away from a pattern of releases of the form "Here is version N+1, it is insanely great. Everything prior to today is an obsolete archaism. On the plus side, this allows them to do interesting things with some regularity. On the minus side, this makes them quite happy to declare various features dead well before some of their customers are ready. The idea that they would dedicate engineering effort to allowing people with version N-1 or N-2 devices to run an obsolete OS runs against their priorities.
I do NOT understand you! Have you just entered some manic religious-fervour-induced naked dance around a pentagram shape made from your Apple products?
I give up, you are a technology moron. Stick to being an art student or a quantity surveyor or whatever other job you do that requires zero technical knowledge because you are clearly very good at it.
This argument is akin to the one made for Windows some decades back. "But look at the abundance of great shareware for the platform", while actually it was more like a steaming pile of VB6 homework projects.
What planet are you living on, apart from the obvious one filled with mind-warping breathable gases that make anything with a picture of a piece of fruit on it irresistible?
The whole concept of shareware is so that you "try before you buy" so that you avoid spending money on a poorly-written application or game before paying good money for it.
Additional, how in HELL do you think games companies like ID & Apogee made names for themselves across the world? Both were big proponents of shareware for games like Doom, Duke Nukem and many others - had they not had the shareware model, who knows where they would have been now.
I wouldn't even call myself a Windows user as these days I use mostly Linux, but I am sick to the back teeth of knowledgeless fanbois *MAKING SHIT UP* just because it appears to support their valid reasons to use Apple products when it's nothing more than wanting to be part of an elitist club of *BIGOTS* whose only purpose is to sneer down their noses at the rest of the world.
*BSD UNIX* comes from an ethic whereby some people write software because they have a good idea and some programming skills FIRST, and THEN discover that in some cases they can make money from it.
What the FUCK does it matter that some of the software they wrote wasn't very good! At LEAST they probably did a whole lot more than some clueless idiot like you buying into a fucking religion because you have more fucking money than sense.
Now kindly FUCK OFF and contribute to topics where you might have a FUCKING CLUE about the subject being discussed.
Well, Fuck You. I want to make a living off of my creativity and intellect. I work long, often 14+ hour days to create what you want to have. If imaginary property has no value and requires no input of resources go fucking do it yourself. But no, you won't (and you probably can't even if you wanted to).
You know something? I fully defend your right to make a living from what you do.
But if you're working 14 hour days to make it then it's clearly not only making you exceedingly angry but please don't bullshit the rest of us that you do long hours for our benefit.
It could well be you're not actually very good at doing it in the first place and if you were good at doing it then you could do it in an 8 hour day - just saying, that's all.
Yep, as a techie engineer & consultant for the past 30-odd years, a skilled Project Manager is a great asset to have on a project.
I've got good communications skills and have no problems standing in front of customers, but I've tried to manage smaller projects myself purely from my own skills on many occasions - most of the time it's been fine, but on others it's got into a stalemate position until I've pulled in a PM to help sort out the tangle and get it moving.
So don't try to straddle both skill areas - they're mutually exclusive.
...if it's free to set up multiple email accounts on Google and if you are that concerned about the priority of "authorised spam" emails (i.e. advertising emails that you have agreed to receive), why not just create two accounts, one for private use and one for subscriptions?
If you weren't using Google then you'd be inundated with a lot more spam than on Gmail because Google's mail filters are so good - and if I have to put up with a bit of prioritised emails of stuff I've subscribed to avoid virtually all spam, then so be it. The fact is, I don't subscribe to all that crap in the first place...
I use it because it has excellent spam filtering and specifically because it has IMAP (and POP3) access - I do use the webmail interface to quickly scan emails on rare occasions, I've not used much in the way of other webmail systems to state whether or not it's more or less clunky than others.
Just be aware that it's not *JUST* webmail access and I suspect a lot of people jumped across to it when Hotmail disabled POP3 access.
If anything, as someone who used to write mail-filtering rules up to about 5 years ago in procmail with my old ISP's mail servers, I kind of miss not having to write them any more.
...every time some Apple device somewhere gets stolen by someone, Slashdot has to create a story about it.
And some people on here have the audacity to wonder why we non-fanbois hate Apple so much - it's like a badly spoilt child constantly craving your attention and something from you....
I think I just felt a great disturbance in The Force.
...and I think you might have a Mac.
And given the choice, I would still stick with Linux and a small willy.
Ignoring the fact that I'm in the UK and therefore what is grammatically correct in English may vary across the various dialects over the world, doesn't the US constitution contain the phrase "We the people" rather than "Us the people".
And not trying to be pedantic either but it should be "unless you want TO continue sounding like an idiot".
...if only because of the endless puerile mirth to be obtained from a social networking site called "Winklebook".
You might want to get a doctor to look at that exposed nerve ending...
Yeah, sorry about that.
Rumour has it that Slashdot is shortly releasing a special section for Apple users where you only get access if you prove you are a stockbroker or art student with an income in excess of £80,000 p.a. and a man-bag.
Thus you will be able to stay well away from we smelly hippies with our open-toed sandals.
...as we've had wireless sync-ing and notification icons for, oh, at least 2 years now.
I will add that I've used many operating systems over the years, and the 'OS' has always referred to the complete package - kernel, core libraries, userland applications, IO and other hardware drivers, etc.
In which case, please explain at what point the kernel, as you add tools and applications on top of it, becomes an Operating System?
...as I read this as "iPad Account Holder Pleads Guilty".
I had visions of a fanboi in jail with his new friend "Bubba" who is not as interested in his Apple as he is in his cherry.
Just for reference, I'm no Microsoft fan (Linux guy) and Android is my current choice of mobile OS.
But the above statement strikes me as rather pathetic trolling - in the history of new computing devices, has there ever been a wealth of software sat there waiting for its release day ready to install on it?
If you are talking about, say, a new games console platform, then at £50 a game a developer with millions in the bank can maybe afford to take a risk and have a game or two ready to buy and run on a console on release day.
But for mobile apps that average £2-£3 in price where you are more than likely a small or independent developer, are you really going to want to take the risk of having stuff ready on release day if you end up only selling a few hundred copies of your app?
I too believe Microsoft have an uphill struggle with WP7 but, like Apple, they are exceedingly good at marketing and pulling rabbits out of hats, so now is not the time to start shouting "FAIL".
Here's $1,000,000, I'll take two fingers-worth for the V-sign I'm about to use.
I do wonder if the human race is beginning to lose its capabilities of imagination...
I have and have had times when what I've been watching on a screen in front of me has been so interesting or so well filmed that I've managed to become immersed in what's going on without the need for surround sound, high definition, 3D or odours.
It might be argued that people now need these extra "enhancements" because most stuff on screen these days is such crap that there's little chance of becoming immersed in it without them.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
It's a shame then that they don't practice what they preach and "Think Differently".
Don't talk rubbish, please!
Downloads and CDs are mastered from the SAME master tapes.
They provide the hardware on which a fairly open OS runs - so you buy the product then go off and do what you like. You are not forced to continue to do business with either company afterwards.
From what I remember, it restricts one Apple device (iPod Touch, iPhone) to five PCs that it can connect to.
Proof?
...Greek economy permitting.