Since this seems to be turning into a HP bashfest, let me add some positive experiences. I've personally bought two HP products (both a few years ago), an old i8100 CD-RW that I never had problems with (just a bit slow), and an ancient LaserJet III (pre-owned I don't know how many times, still working like a champ). Maybe these older products were from better times?
My recent experiences aren't bad either. Our company desktops are HP Compaq D330 desktops (P4 2ghz), that are cheap but pretty well designed. They are very quiet and require no tools to open the box and swap components.
I just bought an iMac 2 Saturdays ago here in Austin. I had done all the research myself and I knew exactly what I wanted, but I waited until the Apple store opened up before buying
I'm sorry if I come of a bit negative, but did you check the Macrumors buyers guide? The consensus seems to be that a new iMac will be introduced on the WWDC next week.
> If I get a recent iBook do the problems still exist or have the manufacturing issues been resolved?
The G4 iBooks are still pretty new (less than 1 year) so nobody knows for sure. Still, I'd be surprised if they haven't solved the problems, even for the G3s. The reason is simple economics. They've commited themselves to replacing every logic board with the problems. If they haven't really solved the problems, this would cost them more money in the long run than spending any amount of resources to find a final working solution (even ignoring the loss of goodwill and potential future sales).
Try Metapad. It has everything you list, and it's incredibly enough even smaller than notepad (41K). Unlike some "notepad replacements" written in VB...
It takes considerable more time to learn (La)TeX than a wordprocessor, but the results are well worth it if you want publication quality print. PC wordprocessors are the logical evolution of typewriters, TeX (and Framemaker, InDesign, Quark, etc.) is an evolution of typesetting.
Typesetting was/is a separate skill from writing. In the old days, an author would type or write a manuscript and send it to the publisher, who had professionals to design and typeset the results. Nobody would think of publishing the output of their typewriters, since it looked awful. That's also how the original PC wordprocessors were used: to type manuscripts, letters and memos. A lot of authors seem to think that they are also typesetters, writing whole books in Word, thinking it is ready for publication.
One of the most obvious indications of the heritage of wordprocessors is the Underline toolbutton alongside Bold and Italic. Traditionally, underline almost never appeared in print. Typewriters, however, used them extensively since they had no Italic.
> I thought that the EU was dead against people being able to price people differently based on country.
I don't know if there are actual laws against this. The EU is a free trade zone. That does not mean that manufacturers must offer the same product at the same price, but for normal goods, the market does this automatically. If a manufacturer of some widget sells it for much more in France than in Germany, there is nothing stopping anyone from buying it cheaply in Germany and selling it for a little more in France. The market will ensure that prices cannot diverge too much. In case of iTMS this doesn't work because of the DRM; you cannot sell the tunes you purchased cheaply in the US for a little more in the UK.
> What's so special about a 12" Apple PB compared to a 12" subnotebook from a different vendor?
If you buy a notebook today, you have roughly three mainstream OS choices: Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Personally, I feel Windows is actually a pretty decent choice. On good hardware, stability of XP/2K is comparable to Linux. The main weakness is the default insecurity. It can be hardened pretty well if you have the time and know what you're doing. Unfortunately, most people do not. I do blame Microsoft for this: it is unreasonable to expect people to muddle with dcomcnfg and registry hacks to close ports that should be closed by default. According to most accounts, XP SP2 should help a lot when it is finally released. We'll see.
I like Linux as much as the next guy, but setting up Linux on a laptop will take some time and patience if you want all your hardware to work. And often you can't get everything to work even with a lot time and patience. Are the Centrino drivers useable yet? Or most 802.11g PCCards? The usb-adsl modem that I got for free from the telco? Drivers for the SD card slot? 4Mbps irda? I'm not sure if I can completely blame the hardware manufacturers: if the Linux market penetration remains as it is, it makes sense economically to just ignore Linux.
For most users I think MacOS is a very good choice. The default installation is sensible and secure most of the time, and at least all hardware in your particular Mac is supported. Software selection is decent, with some exceptions (games?), and their laptops prices are quite competitive. The weakness is that Apple is only one company, so it cannot meet specialized needs like x86 laptop manufacturers. For example, if you want something REALLY small like those things on dynamism.com, you'd better look somewhere else. If you don't want a built-in optical drive, want a trackpoint, a 12"er with a PCCard slot, or a super high resolution (W)SXGA+/(W)UXGA screen, or a docking station, or even something as simple as a US (ANSI) keyboard layout in Europe (they only sell ISO-layout here), Apple has nothing to offer.
The U50 and U70 are $2199 and $2699 respectively. The OQO will be "just under $2000". The Flipstart price hasn't been announced yet, but I'd be surprised if it will be much cheaper. These things will remain rich men's toys for the forseeable future.
The thing that sells me for FreeBSD in corporate environments is that FreeBSD is an operating system. The same group of people do the kernel *and* the OS. [...] I've always had the impression that the Linuxes are all terribly fragmented, incoherent, and you never know what you're getting.
This may be true, but it is not necessarily a good thing. Having the kernel developed seperately from everything else may be better in the sense that it promotes modularity and cleaner interfaces. If different distributions use different components, bugs like apps depending on particular kernel or libc bugs might get caught easier than in the BSD model. I'm not saying that this is the case in practice, just that theoretically the argument can go both ways.
For many people vi starts to make much more sense when they think of it as not having an input and a command mode, but just a command mode. Every key you press is a command. I think a good way to learn vi is to use it first to edit existing files, learning the motion, replacement and delete commands. Then introduce insert and append as just some other commands that happen to be terminated with ESC.
Still, I have to agree that it will confuse most people who have used other editors/wordprocessors.
I think the main point behind the post was not the popularity or "bleeding edge" factor of Slackware. It was that Slackware is, in fact, intentionally *not* bleeding edge.
It may not be bleeding edge per se, but the development branch Slackware-current is very up to date. It usually contains the most recent versions of everything that was declared stable upstream. At the moment they have KDE 3.2.2, Gnome 2.6.1, X.org (was XFree86 4.4), Gimp 2.0.1, Mozilla 1.6, Perl 5.8.4, Python 2.3.4, etc. The only major packages that are still lagging are the kernel (2.4.26) and gcc (3.3.3), but the newer versions (2.6.6 and 3.4) are in a testing subdirectory. Slackware-current is usually more up to date than, say, Debian-testing (and often even than Debian-unstable).
Half an exabyte of hard disk equivalent storage
on
Thirty Years in Computing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
can hold every movie and sound track ever published.
And I see no evidence they were informed; further, how were they informed, if it did happen? Was it a "dude, your browser sucks! I can totally 0wnZ j00!" email sent to steve@apple.com? Or was it a well-written report sent through the proper channels? Or was it somewhere in between? I won't assume Apple was notified, or that it was done properly, just because someone says so.
The person who claimed to have reported this to Apple in Februari, lixlpixel, was credited by Apple for reporting the issue.
This issue was discovered on the MacNN forum, when they were discussing the previous exploit. The accepted workaround was downloading one of the utilities to change the protocol helpers, but the user kampl refused to have any non-Apple "security fix" on his system (He never acknowledged that the utilities were not sucurity fixes at all, just tools to change user preferences). His solution was to delete the HelpViewer app from his system. One bright member of the forum pointed out that that isn't enough, you could probably just stick the HelpViewer on the.dmg image and LaunchServices would find it there. Another poster realized this might work for any application if you bind it to a bogus protocol in the Info.plist file, so there is no need for HelpViewer at all. A third poster had a sample exploit coded in no time. Apple was promptly notified, so we can expect another fix soon (hopefully).
For more information, see the Carbon docs, in particular, the section "Registering Applications":
The Finder automatically registers all applications as it becomes aware of them, such as when they are dragged onto the user's disk or when the user navigates to a folder containing them.
and as we see with this exploit, whenever a volume is mounted. Doh! This is one of those handy MacOS features where the OS seems to find the right application as if by Magic even when the app is moved around. In this case though, it appears that too much Convenience has compromised Security. We can't really blame them though, I think this behaviour was inherited from Classic MacOS, before everyone was networked, and before security was such a big issue as it is today. The real test of Apple is how long it will take them to fix this hole.
> Other issues... I ran the Security Update, and then tried Unsanity's example. it didn't work. So, it looks like that particular vulnerability is fixed by the Security Update.
The issue is fixed by disabling Open Safe Files and the disk:// protocol, not by Apple's SU. There are rumors that other volume-mounting protocols are also succeptible to the attack (ftp://, afp://, smb://, webdav://, others?)
> I'll most likely be modded down for touching a "hero" of the Linux revolution:
Tanenbaum is hardly seen as a "hero" in the Linux community, of those who know him at all, most only remember the infamous "Linux is obsolete" flameware on Usenet.
> It's quite well known that Proff Tanenbaum is somewhat of a prick, very very pleased with himself for having written Minix and fostered the development of Linux.
How is this well known? I've never read anything about him boasting about having fostered the development of Linux. He does point out areas where the early Linux was inspired by Minix, but I don't think anyone would dispute that.
> Minix knew success because it was "this other, free Unix for i386"
It was the "free Unix for XT". One of the reasons for Linus to develop Linux was that Minix didn't take advantage of any of the advanced features of the 80386. AST refused almost all suggested improvements, his motivation being that he wanted to teach it in a one semester course.
> That's the extent of Tanenbaum's achievenemts.
Tanenbaum is a university professor. His achievements are his publications in peer reviewed journals, and citations to these publications. Since he has lots of both, he's been pretty successful.
It's not clear from your writing if you realize that there is another similar exploit that has not been fixed yet. Malware writers can invent their own URL protocols and LaunchServices will automatically register them on mounted volumes (e.g. through disk://, and maybe also ftp:// and afp://). In other words, the same kind of exploit is possible without HelpViewer, for details, see this link.
As already noted in the writeup and elsewhere in this thread, the Apple fix isn't enough. The other issues, discovered on the MacNN forum, are summarized here.
The MacNN thread is a great read, you can witness the discovery of this vulnerability almost live. The new exploit means the malware author can make up his own protols like malware:// and give his app the appropriate creator code. Is other words, fixing the Help app is not enough, the problem is the automounting of.dmg and the URL handlers. Apple has been notified, so expect another fix soon.
After reading this, the Tanenbaum interview and this, there is little doubt that of Brown and the AdTI were determined in their slander campain against Linux from the start. From the AST interview, it is clear that he is just fishing for incriminating quotes. It is well known that initial Linux development took place on (and was inspired by) Minix. With selective quoting, it's likely that he will have AST seemingly accusing Linus of stealing Minix. One of his more persuasive arguments to the laymen will be that it took the highly experienced professor Tanenbaum years to develop Linux, while kid Linus hacked his OS together in 6 months. Of course, he knows this is not a truthful representation, but that doesn't matter as long as it will get him headlines. We (and AST it seems) may regard people like Brown and McBride as dumb and ignorant. But we should beware, these people are of a kind that we do not encounter often day-to-day: people with malicious intend.
It's common knowledge that their older Crusoe processors had rather unimpressive performance. They had a small niche in energy-efficient computing, but even there they didn't appear much better than the ULV Tualatin mobile-P3s to me. Recently I read some claims that their new Efficeon would perform almost on P-M levels. But the first real benchmarks I found tells a complete different story. From the conclusion:
Unfortunately, the efficeon is a staggering failure by nearly every measure.
Performance is unambiguously lackluster. In fact, efficeon is only slightly faster than Crusoe. If it weren't for the other Transmeta products and the 366MHz AMD Geode, thrown in for comic relief, the Crusoe would be dead last even when compared to the miniscule VIA C3.
Given this, is there any hope left for the company?
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My recent experiences aren't bad either. Our company desktops are HP Compaq D330 desktops (P4 2ghz), that are cheap but pretty well designed. They are very quiet and require no tools to open the box and swap components.
Please state first whether you've actually seen the movie or not, OK?
I haven't, BTW.
> If I get a recent iBook do the problems still exist or have the manufacturing issues been resolved?
The G4 iBooks are still pretty new (less than 1 year) so nobody knows for sure. Still, I'd be surprised if they haven't solved the problems, even for the G3s. The reason is simple economics. They've commited themselves to replacing every logic board with the problems. If they haven't really solved the problems, this would cost them more money in the long run than spending any amount of resources to find a final working solution (even ignoring the loss of goodwill and potential future sales).
Try Metapad. It has everything you list, and it's incredibly enough even smaller than notepad (41K). Unlike some "notepad replacements" written in VB...
It takes considerable more time to learn (La)TeX than a wordprocessor, but the results are well worth it if you want publication quality print. PC wordprocessors are the logical evolution of typewriters, TeX (and Framemaker, InDesign, Quark, etc.) is an evolution of typesetting.
Typesetting was/is a separate skill from writing. In the old days, an author would type or write a manuscript and send it to the publisher, who had professionals to design and typeset the results. Nobody would think of publishing the output of their typewriters, since it looked awful. That's also how the original PC wordprocessors were used: to type manuscripts, letters and memos. A lot of authors seem to think that they are also typesetters, writing whole books in Word, thinking it is ready for publication.
One of the most obvious indications of the heritage of wordprocessors is the Underline toolbutton alongside Bold and Italic. Traditionally, underline almost never appeared in print. Typewriters, however, used them extensively since they had no Italic.
> I thought that the EU was dead against people being able to price people differently based on country.
I don't know if there are actual laws against this. The EU is a free trade zone. That does not mean that manufacturers must offer the same product at the same price, but for normal goods, the market does this automatically. If a manufacturer of some widget sells it for much more in France than in Germany, there is nothing stopping anyone from buying it cheaply in Germany and selling it for a little more in France. The market will ensure that prices cannot diverge too much. In case of iTMS this doesn't work because of the DRM; you cannot sell the tunes you purchased cheaply in the US for a little more in the UK.
> What's so special about a 12" Apple PB compared to a 12" subnotebook from a different vendor?
If you buy a notebook today, you have roughly three mainstream OS choices: Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Personally, I feel Windows is actually a pretty decent choice. On good hardware, stability of XP/2K is comparable to Linux. The main weakness is the default insecurity. It can be hardened pretty well if you have the time and know what you're doing. Unfortunately, most people do not. I do blame Microsoft for this: it is unreasonable to expect people to muddle with dcomcnfg and registry hacks to close ports that should be closed by default. According to most accounts, XP SP2 should help a lot when it is finally released. We'll see.
I like Linux as much as the next guy, but setting up Linux on a laptop will take some time and patience if you want all your hardware to work. And often you can't get everything to work even with a lot time and patience. Are the Centrino drivers useable yet? Or most 802.11g PCCards? The usb-adsl modem that I got for free from the telco? Drivers for the SD card slot? 4Mbps irda? I'm not sure if I can completely blame the hardware manufacturers: if the Linux market penetration remains as it is, it makes sense economically to just ignore Linux.
For most users I think MacOS is a very good choice. The default installation is sensible and secure most of the time, and at least all hardware in your particular Mac is supported. Software selection is decent, with some exceptions (games?), and their laptops prices are quite competitive. The weakness is that Apple is only one company, so it cannot meet specialized needs like x86 laptop manufacturers. For example, if you want something REALLY small like those things on dynamism.com, you'd better look somewhere else. If you don't want a built-in optical drive, want a trackpoint, a 12"er with a PCCard slot, or a super high resolution (W)SXGA+/(W)UXGA screen, or a docking station, or even something as simple as a US (ANSI) keyboard layout in Europe (they only sell ISO-layout here), Apple has nothing to offer.
The U50 and U70 are $2199 and $2699 respectively. The OQO will be "just under $2000". The Flipstart price hasn't been announced yet, but I'd be surprised if it will be much cheaper. These things will remain rich men's toys for the forseeable future.
For many people vi starts to make much more sense when they think of it as not having an input and a command mode, but just a command mode. Every key you press is a command. I think a good way to learn vi is to use it first to edit existing files, learning the motion, replacement and delete commands. Then introduce insert and append as just some other commands that happen to be terminated with ESC.
Still, I have to agree that it will confuse most people who have used other editors/wordprocessors.
can hold every movie and sound track ever published.
This issue was discovered on the MacNN forum, when they were discussing the previous exploit. The accepted workaround was downloading one of the utilities to change the protocol helpers, but the user kampl refused to have any non-Apple "security fix" on his system (He never acknowledged that the utilities were not sucurity fixes at all, just tools to change user preferences). His solution was to delete the HelpViewer app from his system. One bright member of the forum pointed out that that isn't enough, you could probably just stick the HelpViewer on the .dmg image and LaunchServices would find it there. Another poster realized this might work for any application if you bind it to a bogus protocol in the Info.plist file, so there is no need for HelpViewer at all. A third poster had a sample exploit coded in no time. Apple was promptly notified, so we can expect another fix soon (hopefully).
> Other issues... I ran the Security Update, and then tried Unsanity's example. it didn't work. So, it looks like that particular vulnerability is fixed by the Security Update.
The issue is fixed by disabling Open Safe Files and the disk:// protocol, not by Apple's SU. There are rumors that other volume-mounting protocols are also succeptible to the attack (ftp://, afp://, smb://, webdav://, others?)
> I'll most likely be modded down for touching a "hero" of the Linux revolution:
Tanenbaum is hardly seen as a "hero" in the Linux community, of those who know him at all, most only remember the infamous "Linux is obsolete" flameware on Usenet.
> It's quite well known that Proff Tanenbaum is somewhat of a prick, very very pleased with himself for having written Minix and fostered the development of Linux.
How is this well known? I've never read anything about him boasting about having fostered the development of Linux. He does point out areas where the early Linux was inspired by Minix, but I don't think anyone would dispute that.
> Minix knew success because it was "this other, free Unix for i386"
It was the "free Unix for XT". One of the reasons for Linus to develop Linux was that Minix didn't take advantage of any of the advanced features of the 80386. AST refused almost all suggested improvements, his motivation being that he wanted to teach it in a one semester course.
> That's the extent of Tanenbaum's achievenemts.
Tanenbaum is a university professor. His achievements are his publications in peer reviewed journals, and citations to these publications. Since he has lots of both, he's been pretty successful.
> Some notes about the now-fixed exploit:
It's not clear from your writing if you realize that there is another similar exploit that has not been fixed yet. Malware writers can invent their own URL protocols and LaunchServices will automatically register them on mounted volumes (e.g. through disk://, and maybe also ftp:// and afp://). In other words, the same kind of exploit is possible without HelpViewer, for details, see this link.
As already noted in the writeup and elsewhere in this thread, the Apple fix isn't enough. The other issues, discovered on the MacNN forum, are summarized here.
The MacNN thread is a great read, you can witness the discovery of this vulnerability almost live. The new exploit means the malware author can make up his own protols like malware:// and give his app the appropriate creator code. Is other words, fixing the Help app is not enough, the problem is the automounting of .dmg and the URL handlers. Apple has been notified, so expect another fix soon.
> MINIX is licensed under the BSD licence, as mentioned in the article.
Not until 2000, when Prentice Hall finally came to realize that nobody would pay for Minix with Linux and the BSDs out there.
After reading this, the Tanenbaum interview and this, there is little doubt that of Brown and the AdTI were determined in their slander campain against Linux from the start. From the AST interview, it is clear that he is just fishing for incriminating quotes. It is well known that initial Linux development took place on (and was inspired by) Minix. With selective quoting, it's likely that he will have AST seemingly accusing Linus of stealing Minix. One of his more persuasive arguments to the laymen will be that it took the highly experienced professor Tanenbaum years to develop Linux, while kid Linus hacked his OS together in 6 months. Of course, he knows this is not a truthful representation, but that doesn't matter as long as it will get him headlines. We (and AST it seems) may regard people like Brown and McBride as dumb and ignorant. But we should beware, these people are of a kind that we do not encounter often day-to-day: people with malicious intend.