> There are interesting nuances to this, though, for one that Apple is using PC BIOS...
For GOD'S SAKE, get a GRIP! Their preliminary, not-for-sale, we'll-rent-you-a-system-for-a-year-and-then-you-gi ve-it-back, please-don't-show-this-to-anyone systems have a BIOS.
Their final shipping products are as likely to have a bios as the final PPC X-Box is to have APPLE ROMS. (Yes, the x-box dudes at MS are currently using PowerMacs to develop on. Get the parallel?)
God, I'm so tired of people leaping to conclusions like this. The first prerelease of what eventually became Mac OS X was Intel-only, and yet somehow when the actual first release of Mac OS X for consumers came out, it was for PPC.
Preliminary hardware is preliminary hardware. Stupid assumptions are stupid assumptions. Neither one is, frankly, worth terribly much.
Here's a car analogy for you: I used to drive an 18 year old, rusty, and not very fast Nissan. Yet I would still give all the ricers crap about their slow and ugly cars. Almost always, when they found out what I drove, I would always get the "Yeah, well my car will still smoke yours!" (usually true), but I would always come back with "Atleast my car isn't claiming to be something its not."
So, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from this.
That you're like an Apple zealot who owns a 5-year-old computer, yet goes around picking on people who use something that they consider inferior, even though yours is old and slow and inefficient and should have been scrapped years ago?
That you're like a Windows person, someone who has an inferior product, but still goes around making fun of people who have a superior product because they're experiencing buyer's remorse/secretly jealous/just an asshole?
That you're like an Amiga person, still stuck back when Amiga really did make a superior product and unwilling to admit that in every way that matters both Apple and Microsoft have passed him by?
Or maybe that you're just a dickhead, for going around ragging on people who value different things than you do?
Admittedly, the last one does sound accurate, but I do still have the nagging feeling that it wasn't what you INTENDED to get across.
In my admittedly limited experience, a three-week-old kipper tends to have gone right through 'dead' and back into 'alive' again, albeit in a different kingdom.
Actually, just for the sake of completeness, it is a dependent clause and not actually a sentence at all.
You can start a sentence with "although," but it has to be something like the following:
'Although he was slightly dismissive of the phenomenon, he later recanted and said that podcasting was the greatest thing since the PowerMac G4 Cube.'
Alternatively, you can weld it onto the previous sentence, thus:
O'Reilly Radar are ['is', in the US] reporting that in a demo at [the] D: All Things Digital Conference, Steve Jobs showed off iTunes 4.9, which has support for iPodder[-]like functionality, [a]lthough he was slightly dismissive of the phenomen[on], describing it as "Wayne's World for radio".
Actually, I've heard (from a fellow interviewed on NPR) that this little bit of silliness originally came from a scientist (and I use the term loosely) who paraded around a bunch of microcephalic people who were 'perfectly normal' (and HE used the term very loosely), and then said that if these people were normal and only had brains 1/5 the size of a normal person's, then normal people must only use 1/5 of their brains.
And everyone just bought into it for no reason whatsoever.
Can't run it with the power supply plugged in as normal. Plug a supply in with a current limiter and you can charge the batteries while the machine is running.
Apple or PC, everyone of those options seems more logical then walking around with a portable drive visting and reimaging machines one by one.
I don't know where YOU work, but for me, if someone's machine dies and their OS needs to be reinstalled, I go to their computer, I sit down in front of it, and I take out my pocket-sized firewire hard drive and plug it in. I can boot off of it (the magic of standardization... it has a bootable Windows partition for our standard machines, one for Linux on those same machines, and one for any Mac OS X machine). I can install off of it. I can triage disks and recover data off of them onto it.
And you propose, instead, for me to go and sit down in front of the machine (which I have to do anyway). To boot off of a netboot server... or, rather, at least three different netboot servers (one for Macs, one for Windows machines, one for Linux). And then connect to a network share and recover the files from the hard disk over the network. (Did I mention that this is actually a fairly heavily used 100-base-t network, without any schmancy gigabit backbone?)
And this is somehow simpler and more reasonable than plugging in the pocket drive? Not to mention the fact that I have to maintain the netboot servers, and update them, and keep anyone from booting off of them 'accidentally'? And that the netboot is probably managing 20 mbps or so, 40 if I'm amazingly lucky, as are the file transfers, whereas firewire is pegging the hard drive?
I think you and I have a very different idea of the word 'solution', let alone the word 'simple'.
BTW, as for being able to boot PCs off of USB, you can... as long as you only have one model of computer, as we do. If you have the usual hodgepodge, you are SOL, unless you want to have a dozen of these little hard drives. I would assume the same is true of netboot images, but there may be some magic thingie that makes it all work. If not, I can think of few chores I'd like less than to maintain half a dozen netboot images, including weekly software updates because I'm scared to fall too far behind Microsoft's moving target.
From what I understand, if you open it up and break it in the process, you're on your own. If not, and you successfully get it back together again, working, then its warrantee is just as intact. Until the next time you open it up.
Well-implemented firewire devices are, in general, noticeably faster than well-implemented USB2 devices.
Poorly-implemented firewire devices are, in general, slower than well-implemented USB2 devices.
Poorly-implemented firewire devices and poorly-implemented USB2 devices vary so much that no real comparison is possible.
You had better evaluate your specific devices before you say that one spec is faster than another, because there are an AWFUL LOT of lousy firewire cases out there.
...compiled Java exists in any number of places. Heck, Metrowerks had it eight years ago.
Replacing Objective C (a language) with Java (a language) and using them in the same way (compiling them into native machine code) wouldn't have caused problems.
If the entire OS were interpreted, okay. But remember, just because the current usual use case for Java is interpreted doesn't mean it must be.
I hear this, and my first impulse is really to agree.
But I do have to sit back and think about what you're really saying. Which is, "Okay, Apple, here is our source code. And here is the way everything should be done."
I've cooperated with other companies enough to know that, when there is a clash of corporate culture, it is very rarely just one side that is to blame. It is generally either both or neither.
Sometimes the two companies are just two different in philosophy to cooperate smoothly. That's no one's fault, but when it happens, there are two choices: either deal with the unpleasantness at the interface, or stop. Yelling about it is a waste of everyone's time, and yelling 'We're right! We're right and they're wrong!' is a good way to get premature age lines and dyspepsia. And not a whole lot else.
Safari webcore code is looking like a mountain of kludges already, and they've only been working on it for a year or so.
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you've never seen it and are talking out your... hat. If you have actually looked at it, by all means, give us a pointer to this garbage code you're talking about, and if it is as bad as you say I'll be happy to agree with you.
My experience with Apple's code was largely positive, and that was with a codebase that was about a quarter ported from pascal over the course of five years, and the rest accreted slowly without the group in question ever having time to pause to take a breath and do some cleaning up. Within those limitations, and within the limitations of the complexity of the problem that the code was trying to solve, I'd have to say that most of it was fairly comprehensible. And the couple of really weird parts were the ones that were at the top of the list for rewrites. One of which got done while I was working with it.
If these guys had started with a snow=white codebase, it probably wouldn't have stayed that way, but I'd have to guess it would have faded to a lightish grey and then pretty much stayed there. Hardly a 'mountain of kludges', in any case.
No, instead, this vulnerability would exist if people got a MP4 (AAC) song off a P2P fileshare where someone exploited the pre-4.8 iTunes.
Oooor got it off of some garage band's web site, or decided they liked the background music at a web site and downloaded it and stuck it in iTunes, or (possibly) downloaded a video mpeg4 file from somewhere on the net and imported THAT into iTunes. (Yes, you can; in fact, I've done it accidentally a number of times, with video files that were mis-typed by web servers, or had the wrong filename extension But I'm not sure whether you could make an video mp4 file that exploited this vulnerability or not.)
I'm sorry, this may not be the vulnerability of the century, and I don't agree with the parent's post either, but it's not trivial, and to suggest it is does no one any good.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I guess it's a good thing you've got plenty of ass, huh?
Every community makes assumptions about what its members know. Either you learn those things, or you are not part of the community. The community of Slashdot assumes that one of the following two things is true:
1 - You have a basic idea what Darwin is.
and/or
2 - You couldn't care less about Macs.
If neither of those is true, you are not currently part of Slashdot's target audience. Learn, deal, or leave.
You don't require much in the way of 'proof', do you?
I've made bigger mistakes than that, misstatements and such, on Slashdot, and I've been programming and babysitting (IT) Macs since, quite possibly, before you were born. In any case, since before THEY were (officially) born. I could certainly see myself making this little semantic error, although I know all too well how the spinning beachball works, and all the stupid little tricks I had to play to get it to never* happen in my last piece of software.
Well, that's fine to say, but there is also a certain positive aspect to, say, providing news and services and important information to those people who are inclined to agree with you.
Or perhaps you think the Drudge Report is a failure, because it doesn't convince Democrats that it's right? (Well, except that I would hold Ms. Huffington's page to a higher standard, because Matt Drudge is a total whacko who prints (his own) speculation as rumor, prints rumor as fact, and very rarely prints fact at all.)
Slashdot Mirror
> There are interesting nuances to this, though, for one that Apple is using PC BIOS...
i ve-it-back, please-don't-show-this-to-anyone systems have a BIOS.
For GOD'S SAKE, get a GRIP! Their preliminary, not-for-sale, we'll-rent-you-a-system-for-a-year-and-then-you-g
Their final shipping products are as likely to have a bios as the final PPC X-Box is to have APPLE ROMS. (Yes, the x-box dudes at MS are currently using PowerMacs to develop on. Get the parallel?)
God, I'm so tired of people leaping to conclusions like this. The first prerelease of what eventually became Mac OS X was Intel-only, and yet somehow when the actual first release of Mac OS X for consumers came out, it was for PPC.
Preliminary hardware is preliminary hardware. Stupid assumptions are stupid assumptions. Neither one is, frankly, worth terribly much.
-fred
-fred
That you're like an Apple zealot who owns a 5-year-old computer, yet goes around picking on people who use something that they consider inferior, even though yours is old and slow and inefficient and should have been scrapped years ago?
That you're like a Windows person, someone who has an inferior product, but still goes around making fun of people who have a superior product because they're experiencing buyer's remorse/secretly jealous/just an asshole?
That you're like an Amiga person, still stuck back when Amiga really did make a superior product and unwilling to admit that in every way that matters both Apple and Microsoft have passed him by?
Or maybe that you're just a dickhead, for going around ragging on people who value different things than you do?
Admittedly, the last one does sound accurate, but I do still have the nagging feeling that it wasn't what you INTENDED to get across.
-fred
-fred
Actually, just for the sake of completeness, it is a dependent clause and not actually a sentence at all.
You can start a sentence with "although," but it has to be something like the following:
'Although he was slightly dismissive of the phenomenon, he later recanted and said that podcasting was the greatest thing since the PowerMac G4 Cube.'
Alternatively, you can weld it onto the previous sentence, thus:
O'Reilly Radar are ['is', in the US] reporting that in a demo at [the] D: All Things Digital Conference, Steve Jobs showed off iTunes 4.9, which has support for iPodder[-]like functionality, [a]lthough he was slightly dismissive of the phenomen[on], describing it as "Wayne's World for radio".
Then it just becomes a run-on sentence.
Sometimes you just can't win.
-fred
It's already clear which is more important to The American People.
-fred
Can you at least tell us what country, so I can arrange to be elsewhere?
-fred
Hurrah.
But my point still stands. You're now dealing with the unpleasantness at the interface.
-fred
Actually, I've heard (from a fellow interviewed on NPR) that this little bit of silliness originally came from a scientist (and I use the term loosely) who paraded around a bunch of microcephalic people who were 'perfectly normal' (and HE used the term very loosely), and then said that if these people were normal and only had brains 1/5 the size of a normal person's, then normal people must only use 1/5 of their brains.
And everyone just bought into it for no reason whatsoever.
-fred
Can't run it with the power supply plugged in as normal. Plug a supply in with a current limiter and you can charge the batteries while the machine is running.
-fred
'...but probably not.'
Curse you, Slashdot!
-fred
-fred
And you propose, instead, for me to go and sit down in front of the machine (which I have to do anyway). To boot off of a netboot server... or, rather, at least three different netboot servers (one for Macs, one for Windows machines, one for Linux). And then connect to a network share and recover the files from the hard disk over the network. (Did I mention that this is actually a fairly heavily used 100-base-t network, without any schmancy gigabit backbone?)
And this is somehow simpler and more reasonable than plugging in the pocket drive? Not to mention the fact that I have to maintain the netboot servers, and update them, and keep anyone from booting off of them 'accidentally'? And that the netboot is probably managing 20 mbps or so, 40 if I'm amazingly lucky, as are the file transfers, whereas firewire is pegging the hard drive?
I think you and I have a very different idea of the word 'solution', let alone the word 'simple'.
BTW, as for being able to boot PCs off of USB, you can... as long as you only have one model of computer, as we do. If you have the usual hodgepodge, you are SOL, unless you want to have a dozen of these little hard drives. I would assume the same is true of netboot images, but there may be some magic thingie that makes it all work. If not, I can think of few chores I'd like less than to maintain half a dozen netboot images, including weekly software updates because I'm scared to fall too far behind Microsoft's moving target.
-fred
From what I understand, if you open it up and break it in the process, you're on your own. If not, and you successfully get it back together again, working, then its warrantee is just as intact. Until the next time you open it up.
-fred
Well-implemented firewire devices are, in general, noticeably faster than well-implemented USB2 devices.
Poorly-implemented firewire devices are, in general, slower than well-implemented USB2 devices.
Poorly-implemented firewire devices and poorly-implemented USB2 devices vary so much that no real comparison is possible.
You had better evaluate your specific devices before you say that one spec is faster than another, because there are an AWFUL LOT of lousy firewire cases out there.
-fred
...compiled Java exists in any number of places. Heck, Metrowerks had it eight years ago.
Replacing Objective C (a language) with Java (a language) and using them in the same way (compiling them into native machine code) wouldn't have caused problems.
If the entire OS were interpreted, okay. But remember, just because the current usual use case for Java is interpreted doesn't mean it must be.
-fred
I hear this, and my first impulse is really to agree.
But I do have to sit back and think about what you're really saying. Which is, "Okay, Apple, here is our source code. And here is the way everything should be done."
I've cooperated with other companies enough to know that, when there is a clash of corporate culture, it is very rarely just one side that is to blame. It is generally either both or neither.
Sometimes the two companies are just two different in philosophy to cooperate smoothly. That's no one's fault, but when it happens, there are two choices: either deal with the unpleasantness at the interface, or stop. Yelling about it is a waste of everyone's time, and yelling 'We're right! We're right and they're wrong!' is a good way to get premature age lines and dyspepsia. And not a whole lot else.
Including popularity.
-fred
My experience with Apple's code was largely positive, and that was with a codebase that was about a quarter ported from pascal over the course of five years, and the rest accreted slowly without the group in question ever having time to pause to take a breath and do some cleaning up. Within those limitations, and within the limitations of the complexity of the problem that the code was trying to solve, I'd have to say that most of it was fairly comprehensible. And the couple of really weird parts were the ones that were at the top of the list for rewrites. One of which got done while I was working with it.
If these guys had started with a snow=white codebase, it probably wouldn't have stayed that way, but I'd have to guess it would have faded to a lightish grey and then pretty much stayed there. Hardly a 'mountain of kludges', in any case.
-fred
I'm sorry, this may not be the vulnerability of the century, and I don't agree with the parent's post either, but it's not trivial, and to suggest it is does no one any good.I guess it's a good thing you've got plenty of ass, huh?
-fred
It was delicious.
-fred
Every community makes assumptions about what its members know. Either you learn those things, or you are not part of the community. The community of Slashdot assumes that one of the following two things is true:
1 - You have a basic idea what Darwin is.
and/or
2 - You couldn't care less about Macs.
If neither of those is true, you are not currently part of Slashdot's target audience. Learn, deal, or leave.
-fred
You don't require much in the way of 'proof', do you?
I've made bigger mistakes than that, misstatements and such, on Slashdot, and I've been programming and babysitting (IT) Macs since, quite possibly, before you were born. In any case, since before THEY were (officially) born. I could certainly see myself making this little semantic error, although I know all too well how the spinning beachball works, and all the stupid little tricks I had to play to get it to never* happen in my last piece of software.
-fred
*Okay, well, never that I've observed yet.
Ah, no. That's not Avie. Or, if it is, he's telling someone else what facts to allow to dribble out, but not writing the posts himself.
-fred
Get a TV that has DVI in?
A lot of the new ones do. Of course, they're bloody expensive, but with any luck that'll start to change...
-fred
Or perhaps you think the Drudge Report is a failure, because it doesn't convince Democrats that it's right? (Well, except that I would hold Ms. Huffington's page to a higher standard, because Matt Drudge is a total whacko who prints (his own) speculation as rumor, prints rumor as fact, and very rarely prints fact at all.)
-fred