Welcome to several years ago. How is this new? The fact that a trojan being discovered is headline news? I guess.
Just to clarify: no OS is invulnerable to malware, especially trojans that rely on social engineering (among other infection routes). Add this one to the small pile of malware found on OS X, like that trojan that claimed to be an Office installer but instead deleted your home folder, or the one claiming to be "mac anti virus" that uses the classic "your system is infected! click here to solve the problem!" graphics on webpages, except with the use of browser sniffing to serve up Mac-specific UI graphics instead of Windows ones.
Either way, I'll just handle the one or two trojans that show up now and again rather than wading through the sea of malware and viruses on Windows. Still, saying that, Windows has got *a lot* better about that recently - funnily enough by working towards the security model used by OS X and other unix OSes. Not a coincidence, I think.
The Java exploit was only one of a few ways to get infected by this trojan. That hole is now closed.
Either way, having MS Office or Skype installed renders you immune to it for the time being (seriously - the trojan self deletes if it detects those apps are installed, along with several other monitoring apps such as Little Snitch or various virus scanner tools).
If both of those come back as "The domain/default pair... does not exist" then you are ok.
Although even easier, if you have MS Office 2008, MS Office 2011 or Skype installed you are not infected - the Trojan checks for these (for some reason) and deletes itself if it finds them
Similarly, it will check for the following directories, and if it finds them it stops installing and self-deletes:/Library/Little Snitch/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode/Applications/VirusBarrier X6.app/Applications/iAntiVirus/iAntiVirus.app/Applications/avast!.app/Applications/ClamXav.app/Applications/HTTPScoop.app/Applications/Packet Peeper.app
A threat, certainly (and Apple closed the Java hole just this week), but it's trying to fly under the radar as much as possible at the moment for whatever reason.
I remember well - I lived there for a little while and was going to relocate permanently. VW are about the furthest on, but the current crop of diesels being sold in the EU does meet the stricter particulate/emission regulations of the US, so hopefully things will start to change if they haven't already.
In the Ford makes some of the best (and class leading!) diesel vehicles that are genuinely high quality cars that are attractive to own, much to the surprise of people in the US. I think it's purely a function of cost that explains their absence in the US - I think what they sell in the US is built down to a price that they simply can't match with their EU offerings, which have higher build quality and better spec. EU Ford has at least two top-selling-in-class cars in the UK (and a few other very strong cars) and is making hay while the sun shines. US Ford is trying to avoid circling the drain after betting on the wrong horse. It's a shame, but hopefully all is not lost.
They don't make it any more, but do have a number of vehicles both slightly bigger and slightly smaller that fill the niche (C3 and C4 Picassos). You won't find one in the US, but if you are looking for efficiency, VW is your go-to right now for diesel in the USA. I was looking to move to the US on a permanent basis in 2008 and my research was suggesting VW was the only large scale manufacturer there going for diesel as an economy option rather than just something to put in big pickup trucks. The market may be much better now - especially since the diesels currently on sale in the EU (and for a number of years) have met the more punitive US regulations that prevented the early high efficiency turbo diesels that we had here in the early 2000's from being sold there. There are no barriers any more, except cultural ones that cars "must have big engines".
In a combined cycle I get 47 mpg, if I am doing longer distance driving (more than just driving in town) I get 55 mpg. My father used to drive a VW Touran that got even better figures that that (in a 5 year younger car) that also had 150 bhp. (For US mpg figures divide by 1.2).
Whatever they are doing, it does repurpose a pin that is used for something else on a normal drive (if it's not an activity pin, then it;s something else - I stand corrected), but it is easy (and Apple designed!) to be bypassed by using a jumper to short two pins. In other words, it was designed from the outset to be able to take modified and stock whitebox drives - hardly "proprietary lock in".
In the same generation of redesign (when they switched to Core i CPUs) they moved to MXM graphics cards (upgradable) and socketed CPUs (also upgradable). Just about the only non-standard bits of the iMac now are the physical case itself, the LCD, PSU and the Logic board. Not bad for an all in one machine.
I drive a minivan that seats 5 adults comfortably plus luggage and it does 53 mpg (44 US mpg) with relative ease.
It does not mean she has to drive a Smart car or an econobox. She won't be driving a Navigator or a Land Cruiser or Explorer or anything, but it doesn't mean you have to "go tiny".
Are you including the ~25% of electricity lost in transmission from central plant? What about the industrial costs of the batteries, and the fact that they lose range/ need to be replaced after a few years?
Oh and dont forget, the ELECTRICAL infrastructure in most of the country is in poor shape, if we were to get a large surge in people recharging vehicles would have brown/blackouts and have to invest in upgrading there (probably a number of additional power plants as well)
Yes, I am including that. I should have specified.
So sell her car that's "in great shape" and use the money to buy another one with better mileage (diesel if she can get it). Why get a car payment?
You can easily get a car in *great* condition (only a couple of years old) for very reasonable money here in the UK that will do 50-60mpg (40-50 US mpg) - we do have better and more mature diesels though. Still, I'd be surprised if she couldn't find a really good second hand car that she could buy outright that does better than 20 mpg.
Still much more efficient than all of those cars burning gasoline. The central plant is more efficient, and has the benefit of being able to transition away to alternative generation means (nuclear/wind/tidal/solar/solar thermal/....(gap).... fusion) as they become more viable. This also cuts down on refuelling infrastructure - fewer gasoline tankers on the roads etc.
Baby steps, for a culture that is firmly entrenched in gasoline and other fossil fuels.
Alternatively, those Volts may be charged off the grid entirely (or with minimal grid load) - I have seen house installations where the car is charged up from solar PV installed on the house (running to battery banks to provide overnight charging capability).
Because where else do they get R&D for these things? Development of technologies isn't free, and it can't all come from government funded research etc.
Companies sink time and money into developing things that they can submit for use in a standard precisely because they can recoup the cost if it gets included. The FRAND system ensures that it is all fair for all.
I know we all want rainbows and sunshine and free shit handed to us on a plate, but it simply doesn't work that way for everything.
FRAND works because you get a return on your investment - if your patent goes into the standard then *everyone needs to use it* so you are guaranteed a steady flow of income from your patent. The restriction on this is that as a condition for inclusion of the patent, you must licence it fairly to everyone who wants to use it. That is, you can't use that patent to keep a competitor out of the market, or charge them an outrageous fee etc.
Apple's patents *are not in a standard* and as such are not "pretty essential to a modern smartphone". They differ from FRAND patents because Apple is free to do what it likes with them (licence them, not licence them, charge more for them to company A, less to company B etc) but equally it has no guarantee that anyone will use them at all, since they are not an essential part of any standard that goes into making a smartphone.
You not need to contribute *anything* to be able to use FRAND patents. If I want to make and sell a phone then I do not need to have any patents of my own - I can simply assemble it from other patented technology that I am free to choose from (and pay for the use of those patents). However, what I am *not* free to choose are things that relate to a standard that is necessary for it to work as a phone (eg, GSM/3G/WiFi) - I *must* choose the patent package that covers those technologies whether I want to or not, and as such they are covered by a FRAND agreement to enable me to do so without Motorola saying "hmm, your phone is selling better than ours and we don;t like competition... that will be 2.5% of your revenue please".
Now, where it gets complicated is that companies often offer their own (non-FRAND) patents in cross licensing agreements in payment, but it is *not required*. You can pay in cash if you really want. You don't have to have something to trade if you want to use a FRAND patent.
It is not a competitive disadvantage to have a FRAND patent in a standard - it is quite the opposite, since it is a guaranteed and ongoing source of revenue. What you *cannot* do is then use that patent in violation of the terms of the agreement that you signed up for in exchange for its use by the standards body.
Ultimately the best thing Samsung, Nokia, HTC, etc. could do at this point is jointly develop their own standards without the FRAND badge, use their combined market weight to force them into the industry and refuse to license them to Apple, so that Apple can't even have a smartphone that works on future networks at all. It's apparently the way business has to be done now.
Wow. I mean... really.... wow. I'm not even... Fuck me.
So, they should make phones that don't work with the current cell tower infrastructure? Who's going to pay to tear down all those cell towers and replace them with new ones? Of course, this assumes that the international standards body that sets the standard will accept this cartel's new, incompatible standard. Or they could just make their own network, and be unable to interoperate with every other cellphone on earth. Sounds like a great business model!
Well that really is the crux of the issue, but early indications are that *good* educational tablet software (and there's some serious cruft on the iPad and other devices among the actual gems) really does help. It's not really a new thing - my mum was experimenting with this way back in the day on the Archimedes with simple tablet input, except back then she had to "program" the tablet's surface area to represent different inputs based on the graphics and symbols she put on top of it (scissors and craft paper!). The modern versions simply allow you greater flexibility, portability and can do more in less time that the early hardware and software.
Computers are very good for some tasks - the most crucial of which in a teaching setting is that they never get tired or irritable and will go over the same thing over and over again perfectly. They also do not make mistakes with things like arithmetic etc (Pentium floating point bug aside). They are certainly not a blanket replacement for free expression, nor are they merely an equally good method that just happens to be on a computer - they're better at some things and worse at others. They are very useful however. The tablet itself is especially good because it removes the major barrier to young children's learning; the input system. Removing the physical keyboard, mouse and cursor and just allowing them to touch what they want to almost eliminates the interface as a hindrance to learning.
The iMac hard drive thing has been blown out of proportion. They used a custom firmware to repurpose the LED activity light pin (they they don't use) to carry temperature information to cut down on parts and part variability. However, their own documentation has instructions for what to do if installing a non-special firmware drive in that bay (eg, one of Apple's own SSDs if you specify that as a BTO option, or a third party replacement drive); you install a jumper to short two pins together and it carries on as normal, and knows not to attempt to monitor the internal temperature of a non-special drive.
If you get an iMac from the factory with an SSD in that bay, the pins come pre-shorted with a little jumper installed at the factory. They just didn't tell anyone about it, since they don't consider the internals on an iMac to be user serviceable.
It seems your sig is particularly appropriate right about now.
(Also, who says that using educational software and using free-form expressive learning are mutually exclusive things? You have spoken - crayons are the peak of educational tools! Let us stop now and never try anything else!
If the grammar checker were not patented we might be spared your extremely basic error, too.
This is what happens when you take someone's patented technology and use it without paying for it. So, if WiFi access points become more expensive, it's not the original patent holder's fault.
Slashdot Mirror
Put it this way, OS X is at least as vulnerable to viruses and trojans as Linux is.
What, that another trojan has been found on OS X?
Welcome to several years ago. How is this new? The fact that a trojan being discovered is headline news? I guess.
Just to clarify: no OS is invulnerable to malware, especially trojans that rely on social engineering (among other infection routes). Add this one to the small pile of malware found on OS X, like that trojan that claimed to be an Office installer but instead deleted your home folder, or the one claiming to be "mac anti virus" that uses the classic "your system is infected! click here to solve the problem!" graphics on webpages, except with the use of browser sniffing to serve up Mac-specific UI graphics instead of Windows ones.
Either way, I'll just handle the one or two trojans that show up now and again rather than wading through the sea of malware and viruses on Windows. Still, saying that, Windows has got *a lot* better about that recently - funnily enough by working towards the security model used by OS X and other unix OSes. Not a coincidence, I think.
The Java exploit was only one of a few ways to get infected by this trojan. That hole is now closed.
Either way, having MS Office or Skype installed renders you immune to it for the time being (seriously - the trojan self deletes if it detects those apps are installed, along with several other monitoring apps such as Little Snitch or various virus scanner tools).
The latter, or at least because when you roll your own you can control what changes or updates happen on your own terms.
Yes.
From instructions here: http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/trojan-downloader_osx_flashback_i.shtml
It basically boils down to running two commands in Terminal:
defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
If both of those come back as "The domain/default pair ... does not exist" then you are ok.
Although even easier, if you have MS Office 2008, MS Office 2011 or Skype installed you are not infected - the Trojan checks for these (for some reason) and deletes itself if it finds them
Similarly, it will check for the following directories, and if it finds them it stops installing and self-deletes: /Library/Little Snitch /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode /Applications/VirusBarrier X6.app /Applications/iAntiVirus/iAntiVirus.app /Applications/avast!.app /Applications/ClamXav.app /Applications/HTTPScoop.app /Applications/Packet Peeper.app
A threat, certainly (and Apple closed the Java hole just this week), but it's trying to fly under the radar as much as possible at the moment for whatever reason.
I remember well - I lived there for a little while and was going to relocate permanently. VW are about the furthest on, but the current crop of diesels being sold in the EU does meet the stricter particulate/emission regulations of the US, so hopefully things will start to change if they haven't already.
In the Ford makes some of the best (and class leading!) diesel vehicles that are genuinely high quality cars that are attractive to own, much to the surprise of people in the US. I think it's purely a function of cost that explains their absence in the US - I think what they sell in the US is built down to a price that they simply can't match with their EU offerings, which have higher build quality and better spec. EU Ford has at least two top-selling-in-class cars in the UK (and a few other very strong cars) and is making hay while the sun shines. US Ford is trying to avoid circling the drain after betting on the wrong horse. It's a shame, but hopefully all is not lost.
Citroen Xsara Picasso, 2.0 litre HDi from 2003. Looks like this: http://www.carzoneoflouth.co.uk/used-car-photos/louth-used-CITROEN-Xsara-Picasso-1.jpg
They don't make it any more, but do have a number of vehicles both slightly bigger and slightly smaller that fill the niche (C3 and C4 Picassos). You won't find one in the US, but if you are looking for efficiency, VW is your go-to right now for diesel in the USA. I was looking to move to the US on a permanent basis in 2008 and my research was suggesting VW was the only large scale manufacturer there going for diesel as an economy option rather than just something to put in big pickup trucks. The market may be much better now - especially since the diesels currently on sale in the EU (and for a number of years) have met the more punitive US regulations that prevented the early high efficiency turbo diesels that we had here in the early 2000's from being sold there. There are no barriers any more, except cultural ones that cars "must have big engines".
In a combined cycle I get 47 mpg, if I am doing longer distance driving (more than just driving in town) I get 55 mpg. My father used to drive a VW Touran that got even better figures that that (in a 5 year younger car) that also had 150 bhp. (For US mpg figures divide by 1.2).
I know, but I was being massively over conservative with estimates since I knew I'd be attacked by AC trolls with an ingrained hate for electric cars.
"Proprietary Lock In Schemes". My goodness.
Whatever they are doing, it does repurpose a pin that is used for something else on a normal drive (if it's not an activity pin, then it;s something else - I stand corrected), but it is easy (and Apple designed!) to be bypassed by using a jumper to short two pins. In other words, it was designed from the outset to be able to take modified and stock whitebox drives - hardly "proprietary lock in".
In the same generation of redesign (when they switched to Core i CPUs) they moved to MXM graphics cards (upgradable) and socketed CPUs (also upgradable). Just about the only non-standard bits of the iMac now are the physical case itself, the LCD, PSU and the Logic board. Not bad for an all in one machine.
I drive a minivan that seats 5 adults comfortably plus luggage and it does 53 mpg (44 US mpg) with relative ease.
It does not mean she has to drive a Smart car or an econobox. She won't be driving a Navigator or a Land Cruiser or Explorer or anything, but it doesn't mean you have to "go tiny".
No, why?
Oh right, you want to take a cheap shot at Obama! Ok, go for it. Let me know when we can get back to adult discussion.
???
Are you including the ~25% of electricity lost in transmission from central plant?
What about the industrial costs of the batteries, and the fact that they lose range/ need to be replaced after a few years?
Oh and dont forget, the ELECTRICAL infrastructure in most of the country is in poor shape, if we were to get a large surge in people recharging vehicles
would have brown/blackouts and have to invest in upgrading there (probably a number of additional power plants as well)
Yes, I am including that. I should have specified.
So sell her car that's "in great shape" and use the money to buy another one with better mileage (diesel if she can get it). Why get a car payment?
You can easily get a car in *great* condition (only a couple of years old) for very reasonable money here in the UK that will do 50-60mpg (40-50 US mpg) - we do have better and more mature diesels though. Still, I'd be surprised if she couldn't find a really good second hand car that she could buy outright that does better than 20 mpg.
Still much more efficient than all of those cars burning gasoline. The central plant is more efficient, and has the benefit of being able to transition away to alternative generation means (nuclear/wind/tidal/solar/solar thermal/....(gap).... fusion) as they become more viable. This also cuts down on refuelling infrastructure - fewer gasoline tankers on the roads etc.
Baby steps, for a culture that is firmly entrenched in gasoline and other fossil fuels.
Alternatively, those Volts may be charged off the grid entirely (or with minimal grid load) - I have seen house installations where the car is charged up from solar PV installed on the house (running to battery banks to provide overnight charging capability).
Because where else do they get R&D for these things? Development of technologies isn't free, and it can't all come from government funded research etc.
Companies sink time and money into developing things that they can submit for use in a standard precisely because they can recoup the cost if it gets included. The FRAND system ensures that it is all fair for all.
I know we all want rainbows and sunshine and free shit handed to us on a plate, but it simply doesn't work that way for everything.
Sure, here you go, I wrote this in reply to someone else:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2764575&cid=39570495
What nonsense.
FRAND works because you get a return on your investment - if your patent goes into the standard then *everyone needs to use it* so you are guaranteed a steady flow of income from your patent. The restriction on this is that as a condition for inclusion of the patent, you must licence it fairly to everyone who wants to use it. That is, you can't use that patent to keep a competitor out of the market, or charge them an outrageous fee etc.
Apple's patents *are not in a standard* and as such are not "pretty essential to a modern smartphone". They differ from FRAND patents because Apple is free to do what it likes with them (licence them, not licence them, charge more for them to company A, less to company B etc) but equally it has no guarantee that anyone will use them at all, since they are not an essential part of any standard that goes into making a smartphone.
You not need to contribute *anything* to be able to use FRAND patents. If I want to make and sell a phone then I do not need to have any patents of my own - I can simply assemble it from other patented technology that I am free to choose from (and pay for the use of those patents). However, what I am *not* free to choose are things that relate to a standard that is necessary for it to work as a phone (eg, GSM/3G/WiFi) - I *must* choose the patent package that covers those technologies whether I want to or not, and as such they are covered by a FRAND agreement to enable me to do so without Motorola saying "hmm, your phone is selling better than ours and we don;t like competition... that will be 2.5% of your revenue please".
Now, where it gets complicated is that companies often offer their own (non-FRAND) patents in cross licensing agreements in payment, but it is *not required*. You can pay in cash if you really want. You don't have to have something to trade if you want to use a FRAND patent.
It is not a competitive disadvantage to have a FRAND patent in a standard - it is quite the opposite, since it is a guaranteed and ongoing source of revenue. What you *cannot* do is then use that patent in violation of the terms of the agreement that you signed up for in exchange for its use by the standards body.
Ultimately the best thing Samsung, Nokia, HTC, etc. could do at this point is jointly develop their own standards without the FRAND badge, use their combined market weight to force them into the industry and refuse to license them to Apple, so that Apple can't even have a smartphone that works on future networks at all. It's apparently the way business has to be done now.
Wow. I mean... really.... wow. I'm not even... Fuck me.
So, they should make phones that don't work with the current cell tower infrastructure? Who's going to pay to tear down all those cell towers and replace them with new ones? Of course, this assumes that the international standards body that sets the standard will accept this cartel's new, incompatible standard. Or they could just make their own network, and be unable to interoperate with every other cellphone on earth. Sounds like a great business model!
Not at all. MS's patents in that case are not FRAND covered and are not part of a standard.
There is, however, another way to get the patents: don't join the FRAND license pool and buy them under non FRAND rules.
I can see why you didn't log in! Your post is almost totally devoid of facts.
You also seem to be totally ignorant of how FRAND patent licensing works as it relates to its use in international standards like GSM, WiFi, etc.
Well that really is the crux of the issue, but early indications are that *good* educational tablet software (and there's some serious cruft on the iPad and other devices among the actual gems) really does help. It's not really a new thing - my mum was experimenting with this way back in the day on the Archimedes with simple tablet input, except back then she had to "program" the tablet's surface area to represent different inputs based on the graphics and symbols she put on top of it (scissors and craft paper!). The modern versions simply allow you greater flexibility, portability and can do more in less time that the early hardware and software.
Computers are very good for some tasks - the most crucial of which in a teaching setting is that they never get tired or irritable and will go over the same thing over and over again perfectly. They also do not make mistakes with things like arithmetic etc (Pentium floating point bug aside). They are certainly not a blanket replacement for free expression, nor are they merely an equally good method that just happens to be on a computer - they're better at some things and worse at others. They are very useful however. The tablet itself is especially good because it removes the major barrier to young children's learning; the input system. Removing the physical keyboard, mouse and cursor and just allowing them to touch what they want to almost eliminates the interface as a hindrance to learning.
The iMac hard drive thing has been blown out of proportion. They used a custom firmware to repurpose the LED activity light pin (they they don't use) to carry temperature information to cut down on parts and part variability. However, their own documentation has instructions for what to do if installing a non-special firmware drive in that bay (eg, one of Apple's own SSDs if you specify that as a BTO option, or a third party replacement drive); you install a jumper to short two pins together and it carries on as normal, and knows not to attempt to monitor the internal temperature of a non-special drive.
If you get an iMac from the factory with an SSD in that bay, the pins come pre-shorted with a little jumper installed at the factory. They just didn't tell anyone about it, since they don't consider the internals on an iMac to be user serviceable.
It seems your sig is particularly appropriate right about now.
(Also, who says that using educational software and using free-form expressive learning are mutually exclusive things? You have spoken - crayons are the peak of educational tools! Let us stop now and never try anything else!
Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre
If the grammar checker were not patented we might be spared your extremely basic error, too.
This is what happens when you take someone's patented technology and use it without paying for it. So, if WiFi access points become more expensive, it's not the original patent holder's fault.
Wow, you really are clueless, aren't you?