On the otherhand, given a proper locked down Windows box, you would have similar problems. You can't write anywhere but the user's folders, you can't change system files, you can't install or start services, you can't install drivers, etc. The public Windows computers at the library seem to do fine despite patrons doing who knows what on them. Of course, Windows XP and all previous versions had the default being wide open, hence the malware problem on Windows. Vista attempts to fix a lot of that by having security out of the box, so by default programs can no longer do whatever they want behind the user's back.
Of course, that doesn't mean your safe. Root kits are out there for Linux, and they can be very insidious. You could play many of the same games on a Mac or a locked down Windows system. You don't need sudo rights, you can just use some local privilege escalation exploit to gain yourself root, then you do whatever you want. Heck, on a Mac you wouldn't even need to do that if you can get the user to run the program once - just attach your rootkit to something like Firefox (which can be user installed, and seems to update itself just fine in a user account without the Administrator password, so no special tricks needed). Cloak your files, hide yourself best you can, and get to work. Getting a good rootkit out is not as easy as dragging it to the trash, and the only way to really be sure is to reformat and reinstall from backup.
Not true. Even if 50% of all computer were Macs, the number of Mac hacks would not rise dramatically. Hackers are lazy, otherwise they'd get real jobs. If you were a hacker, which half of all computers would you rather attack? The easy half you know and have hacking tools for, or the other half for which you have nothing and are inherently harder to crack? There is no reason to assume that a hacked Mac would be more valuable to a criminal wanting to steal your private data than a hacked Windows system.
I dunno, I might go after the Macs. Lets look at the facts:
1. Most Mac users seem to care very little about security beyond not running Windows. They don't run anti-spyware tools, very few of them run anti-virus, and they also generally don't run a firewall. If your malware doesn't make it's presence obvious (say, by crashing a lot or spawning pop ups) you could go unnoticed on the typical Mac for quite some time. Compare to the Windows users who can be downright paranoid about security.
2. The typical Mac user has more money than the typical PC user, given the cost of the computer. Their personal data is likely more valuable.
Go to http://www.apple.com/iphone/ then watch the launch keynote. Then try to honestly say you'd rather have that current ugly lump you call a phone. I am not a fanboy, but I realise that there is the iphone and there is the rest.
The launch keynote is little more than a big glitzy advertisement for the iPhone. Go watch some ads for other high end phones, and compare to the current hunk of plastic you have now. Of course the keynote makes you want an iPhone, that's the whole idea. I'm going to guess that a fair number of people are going to be disappointed with the actual iPhone, once it comes crashing off of that high pedestal they've placed it on.
Well, I can think of situations where the company can provide you with the source code, but not with the freedoms that the BSD license or the GPL provide (such as the ability to redistribute the source code, or to use that code in another application). The question is, can a company distribute their program that way, and have the option of calling it "open source"?
Not to mention here in the US, the remaining passenger train service seems to be required to turn a profit, meanwhile the government seems to bail out the airlines every few years and no one seems to care.
Well, the non-conspiracy way to look at it is to program the robo-dialer that if it gets a busy signal, to keep redialing that number until it connects (logic being of course that a phone with a busy signal is being used, thus the mark on the other end is present and near the phone). Also, you will sometimes get this behavior with call waiting - if someone is trying to call you when you hang up the phone, it will immediately start ringing.
Buying a home within your means... As long as you make more than minimum wage, there is a tiny stamp of land nearby with a "structure" on it with four walls and a roof that you can afford to pay off almost immediately. At that point, you can start saving up for something larger if you want.
That may be true if you live out in the sticks, but there are many markets out there where even the most modest homes are $200,000 or more. Even in my area, the cheapest townhomes (800-900 sq feet, side-by-side row homes) are around $130,000, which is probably atleast $1000/mo for morgage, taxes, insurance, and association fee. You have to be working a bit more than minimum wage to afford even that.
My mortgage is about half what I'd pay in rent for an apartment in my area.
How long have you had your morgage? Making comparisons to morgages where the ink dried back in the 1990's and 1980's isn'n really fair if you looking to buy today.
Last I looked, the best batteries cost about $10,000 and could convert a Prius into a true EV with gas assist as required. I think this is an excellent way to go. But even with these batteries we are looking at 3,000 cycles.
The short of it is that most batteries wear out faster than tires.
Is 3000 cycles really a problem? If you get 100 miles per charge, you're talking 300,000 miles to go through 3000 cycles. That's a longer lifespan than most cars last (and about 10 times longer than your typical set of tires). If you can get the set of batteries to last 300 miles per charge to emulate the range of a gasoline car, you're battery pack will be pushing a million miles. With that kind of life, there would likely be a second hand market for batteries pulled from EOL'd cars. I've heard reports that Priuses with the original battery packs running 200-300k miles on them already, though I know they also tend to "baby" the batteries a bit (it won't deeply discharge them).
Don't they have snow plows in Colorado? Here in Minnesota, they do a pretty decent job plowing the streets (during long blizzards, they just plow continously, constantly going over the same roads as snow accumulates). Furthermore, you have your fellow motorists driving around during the blizzard (we aren't scared by a little snow) helping to pack the snow down. So most of the time, you're driving on roads without a lot of snow accumulation, but can be pretty slick. In this situation, a 4x4 is usually at a disadvantage, as the poorer handling means your more likely to get into trouble, the higher center of mass means you're more likely to roll it when you do. Nevermind that half of the SUV drivers drive around like they are invincible. The best vehicle to have for winter driving is an AWD drive car like a Subaru with a good set of tires and ABS, if you ask me. Most of the time your typical FWD car will do just fine too.
Of course, if you are lazy and don't shovel you're driveway, it is a heck of a lot easier to get that 4x4 through a foot of snow than a VW.
In addition, normal operation for a car's climate control is to pull air in from the outside, cool (or heat) that air, then blow that air inside the passenger cabin. This is different from home A/C systems that mostly recycle the same air. This means that the car often has to cool 100+ degree air to something like 50 degrees. The reason cars do this differently that it is done primarly to keep moisture from building up inside the car, possibly exhaust fumes too if there is a small exhaust leak somewhere, and to keep the inside of the car from stinking from the 4-5 sweaty adults trapped inside a small space. Usually, the air leaves the cabin through the vent along the back window (in a sedan), flows through the trunk, then leaves through vents located somewhere in the trunk. This also allows the A/C to somewhat cool the items in the trunk.
I'm not sure if turning on the recycle air option on most cars would make a noticable difference in economy. I'm going to guess no.
Says who? My point (again) is that as long as browsers are interoperable it shouldn't matter what share of the market they have. Would being "#1" matter if it the market leaders each had about 33%? Being #1 becomes a statistical curiosity.
Don't be silly. Apple wants you to use Safari. Microsoft wants you to use Internet Explorer. Opera wants you to use Opera. As a developer, you may see them interchangable (except IE), however, the players in the browser wars do not.
Presumably according to Apple's market research, those are the users most likely to switch. That doesn't mean that Apple will do, or even can do anything to target the smaller players specifically. Can anyone point to something that Apple has actually done to shoot across the bow of Mozilla? One briefly displayed slide in a two-hour presentation does not seem like enough evidence to make a fuss over.
Steve Jobs is known as perfectionist and a control freak. Hence the notion that that slide is deliberate and no accident. Though you are right, the people who have switched already are the most likely to switch (though presumably, the non-Safari users on recent versions of OSX are also switchers - away from Safari).
Can we please kill this meme? As I wrote the other day: "There are only two competitors in the web browser market: Internet Explorer and standards-compliant browsers. From a web development standpoint, it doesn't matter which of the many standards-compliant browsers is being used: that's why there are standards. So this talk about Safari "stealing" from Firefox is bullshit. It doesn't make any difference."
That's it. There's no story. Safari on Windows doesn't hurt anyone except maybe Microsoft. Just because Jobs didn't take time out of his keynote to stroke the collective Firefox ego does not mean Apple is "hunting" Mozilla.
You don't understand how the browser game is played around here. The goal is to be the #1 browser. The way this is judged is by marketshare. Currently, the winner is IE, as it has been for a good part of a decade - but Firefox is coming up fast. Steve's presentation is curious, as he seems to be throwing Safari into the fray (Safari has existed for some time of course - but it really didn't have a chance at the #1 spot so long as it was tied to exclusively the Mac). Of course, marketshare is a zero-sum game, you only gain marketshare by taking it from someone else. Which makes Steve's presentation even more curious, as he implies that Safari is going to gain marketshare at Firefox's (and the other small player's) expense.
It is still a reason for celebrations. We should have fireworks on that day. IE6 has tormented web authors far too long.
I wouldn't celebrate just yet. It seems that only recently many web developers have stopped worrying about IE5/IE5.5, despite it being superceded by IE6 six years ago. Even so, it still seems to have a lingering ~1% share, making it a larger concern than some the other minor players like Opera or Konquerer.
All of those examples seem much more extreme that the comparatively quiet and friendly Apple advertising.
Obviously you have been missing out on all the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" advertisements that Apple has been running recently. For Apple, it seems that poking fun at the competition is fairly common amonst their ads.
The real value of Safari on Windows is not as a web browser, but as an IDE for the iPhone.
People keep saying that, but I don't think they know what they are saying. How exactly is Safari an IDE for the iPhone? At best, it's just a way for developers to see how their web applications look in Safari.
Because it's not as fun and a lil Elton John and Moulin Rouge is worth having access to a sex partner?
Why don't just pull out that spare computer from the closet, set it up for her, and point it to the file server with all the music so she can enjoy Elton John and Moulin Rouge without bothering your iTunes?
I guess it depends on the market. Around here, it's a renter's market, and if you don't renew the lease, there is a good chance the apartment would sit vacant for several months. Hence, the landlord is not likely to try to screw you on the lease like that.
Where's your data for that? From a skewed poll? Likely because that is flat-out wrong. The majority may be unhappy, but unhappy does not equal impeach.
Nor does wanting a change in government equal impeachment, you know.
I can see how someone could say that the Republicans are the best thing we've got right now (the Democrats have proven themselves to be pretty inept, after all). But when the surveyer says "Do you approve of George W. Bush?", how can you be one of the 28% that answers "Yes" with a straight face?
One of the greater victories that the Republicans have been able to pull off is the general notion that the media has a "liberal" bias. Fact is, most of the major media outlets out there are somewhat conservative, with Fox News out there so far to the right that it's just whack. If you think about it, it makes sense - the mass media is primarly interested in their own interests, and very large companies tend to be rather conservative. If the media was really liberal, they would have caused enough of a stink about the crap Bush/Cheney has pulled for the previous 6 years that there would be widespread support for impeaching him. Rather, they have been pretty low-key when it comes to things like the faulty intelligence leading up the war (which I may add, at the time had wide support by the so-called "liberal media"), the wire-tapping program, free-speech zones, the Valerie Plame leak, etc.
Apple is positioning themselves as the "premium" computer manufacturer nowadays, something that Dell used to be considered. Now Dells are the low end, cheap computers that everyone buys, something like what Acer or Packard Bell was back in the 1990's.
I would say that many modern cars are hideous and garish. It seems that the current trend is bold, aggressive styling - which leads to things like the oversized wheel wells, plastic cladding everywhere, oversized tires, and really ugly headlight/taillight designs that you have only seen at a ricer convention a few years back. Furthermore, it seems that form is winning over function on cars today, with sloping rooflines that cut visibility drastically, cramped interiors, and large trunks with small trunk lids which you can't get larger objects through. Also, it seems that the controls are getting harder to use and overcomplicated with the increasing computerization, and many newer cars have knobs and buttons that are impossible to manipulate with gloves on or by feel alone. Furthermore, the controls and gauges seems to be made of cheap, hard plastic, feel and look flimsy, giving the whole car a cheap feel to it. Finally, newer cars also seem to feel heavy, which soaks up the advances in power and efficency made over the years, leaving new cars lagging behind comparable cars from 20 years ago in fuel economy. Overall, it seems that cars from the 1980's and 1990's are more utilitarian, with more thought about what makes a good car rather than what makes a cool car. But that's just me.
Web 2.0 is just a jargon way of saying "moderatly standards compliant HTML and CSS, JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest." It doesn't have a whole lot to do with marketing, and a lot of people care. Grow up.
I highly doubt that's what the marketing types mean when they say "Web 2.0".
I don't like Apple's antialiasing. Windows does a pretty decent job of rendering the text to look nice, particularly on high DPI screens (such as on laptops) making it easier to read. Apple's is just too blurry, like a lower quality CRT.
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On the otherhand, given a proper locked down Windows box, you would have similar problems. You can't write anywhere but the user's folders, you can't change system files, you can't install or start services, you can't install drivers, etc. The public Windows computers at the library seem to do fine despite patrons doing who knows what on them. Of course, Windows XP and all previous versions had the default being wide open, hence the malware problem on Windows. Vista attempts to fix a lot of that by having security out of the box, so by default programs can no longer do whatever they want behind the user's back.
Of course, that doesn't mean your safe. Root kits are out there for Linux, and they can be very insidious. You could play many of the same games on a Mac or a locked down Windows system. You don't need sudo rights, you can just use some local privilege escalation exploit to gain yourself root, then you do whatever you want. Heck, on a Mac you wouldn't even need to do that if you can get the user to run the program once - just attach your rootkit to something like Firefox (which can be user installed, and seems to update itself just fine in a user account without the Administrator password, so no special tricks needed). Cloak your files, hide yourself best you can, and get to work. Getting a good rootkit out is not as easy as dragging it to the trash, and the only way to really be sure is to reformat and reinstall from backup.
Not true. Even if 50% of all computer were Macs, the number of Mac hacks would not rise dramatically. Hackers are lazy, otherwise they'd get real jobs. If you were a hacker, which half of all computers would you rather attack? The easy half you know and have hacking tools for, or the other half for which you have nothing and are inherently harder to crack? There is no reason to assume that a hacked Mac would be more valuable to a criminal wanting to steal your private data than a hacked Windows system.
I dunno, I might go after the Macs. Lets look at the facts:
1. Most Mac users seem to care very little about security beyond not running Windows. They don't run anti-spyware tools, very few of them run anti-virus, and they also generally don't run a firewall. If your malware doesn't make it's presence obvious (say, by crashing a lot or spawning pop ups) you could go unnoticed on the typical Mac for quite some time. Compare to the Windows users who can be downright paranoid about security.
2. The typical Mac user has more money than the typical PC user, given the cost of the computer. Their personal data is likely more valuable.
Go to http://www.apple.com/iphone/ then watch the launch keynote. Then try to honestly say you'd rather have that current ugly lump you call a phone. I am not a fanboy, but I realise that there is the iphone and there is the rest.
The launch keynote is little more than a big glitzy advertisement for the iPhone. Go watch some ads for other high end phones, and compare to the current hunk of plastic you have now. Of course the keynote makes you want an iPhone, that's the whole idea. I'm going to guess that a fair number of people are going to be disappointed with the actual iPhone, once it comes crashing off of that high pedestal they've placed it on.
Well, I can think of situations where the company can provide you with the source code, but not with the freedoms that the BSD license or the GPL provide (such as the ability to redistribute the source code, or to use that code in another application). The question is, can a company distribute their program that way, and have the option of calling it "open source"?
Not to mention here in the US, the remaining passenger train service seems to be required to turn a profit, meanwhile the government seems to bail out the airlines every few years and no one seems to care.
Well, the non-conspiracy way to look at it is to program the robo-dialer that if it gets a busy signal, to keep redialing that number until it connects (logic being of course that a phone with a busy signal is being used, thus the mark on the other end is present and near the phone). Also, you will sometimes get this behavior with call waiting - if someone is trying to call you when you hang up the phone, it will immediately start ringing.
Buying a home within your means... As long as you make more than minimum wage, there is a tiny stamp of land nearby with a "structure" on it with four walls and a roof that you can afford to pay off almost immediately. At that point, you can start saving up for something larger if you want.
That may be true if you live out in the sticks, but there are many markets out there where even the most modest homes are $200,000 or more. Even in my area, the cheapest townhomes (800-900 sq feet, side-by-side row homes) are around $130,000, which is probably atleast $1000/mo for morgage, taxes, insurance, and association fee. You have to be working a bit more than minimum wage to afford even that.
My mortgage is about half what I'd pay in rent for an apartment in my area.
How long have you had your morgage? Making comparisons to morgages where the ink dried back in the 1990's and 1980's isn'n really fair if you looking to buy today.
Last I looked, the best batteries cost about $10,000 and could convert a Prius into a true EV with gas assist as required. I think this is an excellent way to go. But even with these batteries we are looking at 3,000 cycles.
The short of it is that most batteries wear out faster than tires.
Is 3000 cycles really a problem? If you get 100 miles per charge, you're talking 300,000 miles to go through 3000 cycles. That's a longer lifespan than most cars last (and about 10 times longer than your typical set of tires). If you can get the set of batteries to last 300 miles per charge to emulate the range of a gasoline car, you're battery pack will be pushing a million miles. With that kind of life, there would likely be a second hand market for batteries pulled from EOL'd cars. I've heard reports that Priuses with the original battery packs running 200-300k miles on them already, though I know they also tend to "baby" the batteries a bit (it won't deeply discharge them).
Don't they have snow plows in Colorado? Here in Minnesota, they do a pretty decent job plowing the streets (during long blizzards, they just plow continously, constantly going over the same roads as snow accumulates). Furthermore, you have your fellow motorists driving around during the blizzard (we aren't scared by a little snow) helping to pack the snow down. So most of the time, you're driving on roads without a lot of snow accumulation, but can be pretty slick. In this situation, a 4x4 is usually at a disadvantage, as the poorer handling means your more likely to get into trouble, the higher center of mass means you're more likely to roll it when you do. Nevermind that half of the SUV drivers drive around like they are invincible. The best vehicle to have for winter driving is an AWD drive car like a Subaru with a good set of tires and ABS, if you ask me. Most of the time your typical FWD car will do just fine too.
Of course, if you are lazy and don't shovel you're driveway, it is a heck of a lot easier to get that 4x4 through a foot of snow than a VW.
In addition, normal operation for a car's climate control is to pull air in from the outside, cool (or heat) that air, then blow that air inside the passenger cabin. This is different from home A/C systems that mostly recycle the same air. This means that the car often has to cool 100+ degree air to something like 50 degrees. The reason cars do this differently that it is done primarly to keep moisture from building up inside the car, possibly exhaust fumes too if there is a small exhaust leak somewhere, and to keep the inside of the car from stinking from the 4-5 sweaty adults trapped inside a small space. Usually, the air leaves the cabin through the vent along the back window (in a sedan), flows through the trunk, then leaves through vents located somewhere in the trunk. This also allows the A/C to somewhat cool the items in the trunk.
I'm not sure if turning on the recycle air option on most cars would make a noticable difference in economy. I'm going to guess no.
Says who? My point (again) is that as long as browsers are interoperable it shouldn't matter what share of the market they have. Would being "#1" matter if it the market leaders each had about 33%? Being #1 becomes a statistical curiosity.
Don't be silly. Apple wants you to use Safari. Microsoft wants you to use Internet Explorer. Opera wants you to use Opera. As a developer, you may see them interchangable (except IE), however, the players in the browser wars do not.
Presumably according to Apple's market research, those are the users most likely to switch. That doesn't mean that Apple will do, or even can do anything to target the smaller players specifically. Can anyone point to something that Apple has actually done to shoot across the bow of Mozilla? One briefly displayed slide in a two-hour presentation does not seem like enough evidence to make a fuss over.
Steve Jobs is known as perfectionist and a control freak. Hence the notion that that slide is deliberate and no accident. Though you are right, the people who have switched already are the most likely to switch (though presumably, the non-Safari users on recent versions of OSX are also switchers - away from Safari).
Can we please kill this meme? As I wrote the other day: "There are only two competitors in the web browser market: Internet Explorer and standards-compliant browsers. From a web development standpoint, it doesn't matter which of the many standards-compliant browsers is being used: that's why there are standards. So this talk about Safari "stealing" from Firefox is bullshit. It doesn't make any difference."
That's it. There's no story. Safari on Windows doesn't hurt anyone except maybe Microsoft. Just because Jobs didn't take time out of his keynote to stroke the collective Firefox ego does not mean Apple is "hunting" Mozilla.
You don't understand how the browser game is played around here. The goal is to be the #1 browser. The way this is judged is by marketshare. Currently, the winner is IE, as it has been for a good part of a decade - but Firefox is coming up fast. Steve's presentation is curious, as he seems to be throwing Safari into the fray (Safari has existed for some time of course - but it really didn't have a chance at the #1 spot so long as it was tied to exclusively the Mac). Of course, marketshare is a zero-sum game, you only gain marketshare by taking it from someone else. Which makes Steve's presentation even more curious, as he implies that Safari is going to gain marketshare at Firefox's (and the other small player's) expense.
It is still a reason for celebrations. We should have fireworks on that day. IE6 has tormented web authors far too long.
I wouldn't celebrate just yet. It seems that only recently many web developers have stopped worrying about IE5/IE5.5, despite it being superceded by IE6 six years ago. Even so, it still seems to have a lingering ~1% share, making it a larger concern than some the other minor players like Opera or Konquerer.
All of those examples seem much more extreme that the comparatively quiet and friendly Apple advertising.
Obviously you have been missing out on all the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" advertisements that Apple has been running recently. For Apple, it seems that poking fun at the competition is fairly common amonst their ads.
The real value of Safari on Windows is not as a web browser, but as an IDE for the iPhone.
People keep saying that, but I don't think they know what they are saying. How exactly is Safari an IDE for the iPhone? At best, it's just a way for developers to see how their web applications look in Safari.
Because it's not as fun and a lil Elton John and Moulin Rouge is worth having access to a sex partner?
Why don't just pull out that spare computer from the closet, set it up for her, and point it to the file server with all the music so she can enjoy Elton John and Moulin Rouge without bothering your iTunes?
I guess it depends on the market. Around here, it's a renter's market, and if you don't renew the lease, there is a good chance the apartment would sit vacant for several months. Hence, the landlord is not likely to try to screw you on the lease like that.
Where's your data for that? From a skewed poll? Likely because that is flat-out wrong. The majority may be unhappy, but unhappy does not equal impeach.
Nor does wanting a change in government equal impeachment, you know.
I can see how someone could say that the Republicans are the best thing we've got right now (the Democrats have proven themselves to be pretty inept, after all). But when the surveyer says "Do you approve of George W. Bush?", how can you be one of the 28% that answers "Yes" with a straight face?
One of the greater victories that the Republicans have been able to pull off is the general notion that the media has a "liberal" bias. Fact is, most of the major media outlets out there are somewhat conservative, with Fox News out there so far to the right that it's just whack. If you think about it, it makes sense - the mass media is primarly interested in their own interests, and very large companies tend to be rather conservative. If the media was really liberal, they would have caused enough of a stink about the crap Bush/Cheney has pulled for the previous 6 years that there would be widespread support for impeaching him. Rather, they have been pretty low-key when it comes to things like the faulty intelligence leading up the war (which I may add, at the time had wide support by the so-called "liberal media"), the wire-tapping program, free-speech zones, the Valerie Plame leak, etc.
Apple is positioning themselves as the "premium" computer manufacturer nowadays, something that Dell used to be considered. Now Dells are the low end, cheap computers that everyone buys, something like what Acer or Packard Bell was back in the 1990's.
I would say that many modern cars are hideous and garish. It seems that the current trend is bold, aggressive styling - which leads to things like the oversized wheel wells, plastic cladding everywhere, oversized tires, and really ugly headlight/taillight designs that you have only seen at a ricer convention a few years back. Furthermore, it seems that form is winning over function on cars today, with sloping rooflines that cut visibility drastically, cramped interiors, and large trunks with small trunk lids which you can't get larger objects through. Also, it seems that the controls are getting harder to use and overcomplicated with the increasing computerization, and many newer cars have knobs and buttons that are impossible to manipulate with gloves on or by feel alone. Furthermore, the controls and gauges seems to be made of cheap, hard plastic, feel and look flimsy, giving the whole car a cheap feel to it. Finally, newer cars also seem to feel heavy, which soaks up the advances in power and efficency made over the years, leaving new cars lagging behind comparable cars from 20 years ago in fuel economy. Overall, it seems that cars from the 1980's and 1990's are more utilitarian, with more thought about what makes a good car rather than what makes a cool car. But that's just me.
Web 2.0 is just a jargon way of saying "moderatly standards compliant HTML and CSS, JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest." It doesn't have a whole lot to do with marketing, and a lot of people care. Grow up.
I highly doubt that's what the marketing types mean when they say "Web 2.0".
I don't like Apple's antialiasing. Windows does a pretty decent job of rendering the text to look nice, particularly on high DPI screens (such as on laptops) making it easier to read. Apple's is just too blurry, like a lower quality CRT.