Really, a NES game running in Nintendo's Virtual Console emulator IS sandboxed, in that it's running inside a virtual machine environment, not as a native application.
I think one of the smartest moves MS could make WOULD be to use it's existing code - VirtualPC - to build a 'classic' style environment (similar to Apple's when they migrated to OS X) so that they could write a completely new OS from the ground up and dump the legacy rubbish. At least that way the legacy apps would have time to degrade gracefully and they'd not upset the applecart (er... should that be MSCart?) with their longstanding customers. It's the smartest move, but they don't seem bold enough to just bite the bullet and go for it, even though it's a proven strategy.
No I think it's a fair point. They even took on one of their biggest third party app supporters (Adobe) by writing Final Cut Pro and undermining the install base for Premiere and After Effects. There are other instances - not forgetting the Konfabulator/Dashboard debacle of course. They do have a record of doing this so I think the OP makes a good case for an issue of concern.
There is of course no guarantee that you'll USE iTunes/Mail/Safari and may choose another app if one exists, and the difference between OS X and Windows is that you CAN remove Apple's default apps quite easily and not be affected by any exploits for those particular apps, but most users are generally lazy and too scared to go installing their own apps if there are pre-installed apps which do what they want - fact! And that's the biggest security hole of all - the luser.
I AM a MacEvangelist btw, just not a fanboy - I'm oldskool, not one of these newbie types. So I can admit where there are problems, and look for solutions rather than blindly going 'lalala, can't infect me'. heh;)
No, the fanboys biggest argument is 'it just works', which still stands. There have been viruses on the Mac since before Windows existed, but just nothing so heinously compromising that it's wiped out half the world (or even a significant number of Mac users).
As things stand there are still no serious exploits being widely flouted in the wild under OS X, so even the original premise isn't far from being true. Not bad really for the best part of a decade in existence. Before that, the last (and only) infection I had was perhaps the Autostart9805 Worm under OS8 - and the fix, once it was deleted from System Folder>Extensions, was to dsiable CD autoplay in the control strip. Took about 2 minutes to clean a machine and not get reinfected.
Quite a good history compared to my current Win box which has a scan running every day removing the previous 24 hours' crap.
No, the closed hardware platform makes sense - they can write an OS that runs much more smoothly on the hardware they KNOW is in there. Fewer issues with cheaply made third party crap needing support so smaller install footprint (check how much bloat installing all the printer drivers that come with OS X by default adds - personally I always uncheck them at install and just install the printer drivers I need from the manufacturer's sites).
Additionally you CAN run OS X on your intel box. You just have to purchase your intel box from Apple. Too expensive? Then have a look at ebay for second hand Minis going for a couple of hundred quid. If you're really not seriously into running OS X enough to fork out for more high end hardware to run it then surely this is a viable option for something to 'play' with. If you DO really want to run OS X seriously, and want decent hardware to run it on to get the best performance out of it, then what's so hard about buying a new Mac? I really don't understand all the fuss. If I want cheaper fuel (price per litre) in my car I'd run a petrol car, but I want better mileage so I have a diesel - I don't moan every time they drop the price of petrol but not diesel just because it won't run my car. There is a choice (and even some cheaper options for just dipping your toe in), it's really that simple.
Yes, but the slowdowns I personally experienced through traffic shaping were over a fibre-optic connection with 2mb package. You're not seriously telling me that a 2mb connection using perhaps three quarters of it's maximum throughput at most to stream video from a website is breaking the ISPs networks? Before traffic shaping, even WITH a huge number of subscribers, there was never any slowdown.
I should imagine it may have been hitting some of the guys on the higher bandwidth packages even harder, but there was a blanket rule across all users - not even capping at a particular reasonable speed as max available at certain times (but what is a 'reasonable' speed anyway when you're paying for 20mb+?), just a cut-off point after 20 minutes of using a percentage of bandwidth on your package. The connection could drop as low as 56kb for as much as 6 hours as a 'punishment', regardless of how congested the network was at the time you were using your bandwidth.
I switched to another ISP on ADSL2 (8mb) and even with network congestion evident from oversubscription, it rarely dropped below 2mb, but when it did I could understand the reasons why (too many people online at once) and the ISP had acknowledged the problem and expanded their capacity to take account of all their recent oversubscription. No traffic shaping, just natural network flow and suitable response by the ISP.
Blocking people's usage is not a good idea - you just lose customers to competitors who don't do it. Using the money from the extra subscriptions you've taken to expand your service to keep everyone happy leads to more customers through recommendation, thus more income to expand the network and on and on - it's simple economics really. But rather than face this simple truism, most ISPs are trying to fight against spending the money or perhaps purposely trying to shed subscribers (by pissing them off) to get back to a level they can suitably maintain without having to spend money on extra infrastructure.
Maybe I'm just lucky to have found an ISP who is orienting their business model to be customer-centric, but their willingness to invest in their infrastructure to cater for recent boosts in subscription after a wide advertising campaign looks promising. They had a month or so of moaning customers as there was a network-wide slow down due to the sudden influx of new users, but they publicised their work to expand throughput and resolve this issue including giving people a date when work would be complete, which they stuck to rigidly in practice.
Other ISPs could learn from this approach. Don't alienate your users, treat them like people and they'll bear with you if you're reasonable. For the month or so of disruption, most users just modified their net use to get around the problem and then once the dust settled they went back to normal. Now it's back to great speed again, proof that investment works as I'd recommend them to other people.
No, the '20 minute' model fails most users miserably and made me leave Virgin media as an ISP. They have a policy of throttling anyone downloading at any significant level for 20 minutes solid. This meant that my wife watching on-demand TV shows she'd missed earlier in the evening would be able to see the first 20 minutes of a show, then have to wait 6 hours until the full bandwidth resumed before she could watch the last 10 minutes of the show. Unless of course she was happy to watch 1 second of the show, wait 3 seconds for the file to buffer, watch 1 second, buffer 3 seconds, watch 1 second, buffer 3 seconds.
Slapping on an arbitrary 'time' cut-off for bandwidth will fail many legitimate users for many different uses. The use I've mentioned is NOT an illegal act, nor is it demanding more of our bandwidth than we should be allowed (given that at the time we were on a 2mb connection) or hogging overall bandwidth. Some users on Virgin Media are paying for 16mb connections or greater - so if we're using 1.5mb of our allocated bandwidth, does that equate to them using 12mb of a 16mb connection, or
15.5mb? How do you set a 'limit' when there is ALREADY a limit placed on the connection speed by the ISP (in our case that was the upper 2mb limit we were paying for).
People who want greater bandwidth already pay more, so they should receive that bandwidth. If the ISPs can't offer that bandwidth reliably then they shouldn't be allowed to sell it - it'd be like a car manufacturer selling you a car labelled as 'top speed up to 150mph' and then setting the engine management unit to only allow you top speed for a few minutes each day and the rest of the time limiting you to 30mph - they'd get their arses sued off the face of the planet!
No way - that's a return to the bad old days of having to keep an eye on how long you're online for!
The ISPs aren't just moaning about P2P, they're having a good old whinge at TV companies hosting on-demand services too. The BBC's iPlayer is one such target for UK ISPs. That's not filesharing, but traffic over a normal http connection and people watching TV shows on bandwidth that should easily handle the traffic aren't being a 'hogs'. They're just 'surfing' in it's traditional sense - visiting websites and viewing the content on those sites. Legitimate use (even under acceptable usage policies) for the bandwidth they're paying for - it's the ISPs who have oversold their capacity.
If you dig down into the fine print it probably also has some boilerplate about it being sold as an entertainment service, not an information service. Cable and phone companies have never been real ISP's.
But for many people, information IS entertainment.;)
If you paid on a credit card, then technically the laptop belongs to THEM until you've paid them back. If you purchase anything on credit card you have protection against this kind of thing. Speak to your CC company and ask them to intervene - they have huge financial and legal muscle and WILL resolve the issue very quickly on your behalf, either issuing a chargeback against the payment or ensuring Dell bend over backwards to get you your laptop.
Yes you can.
Next time you see an advert for loans check out the masses of smallprint on screen all the way through stating that all the spoken narrative is lala-land.
If you display the caveat, you're covered.
It's called the Harry Potter Lexicon for f*cks sake... how much more attribution do you need than the publication's title?
I'd imagine anyone buying a copy would have some idea of who wrote Harry Potter - and many people know who originally wrote the ideas that Ms Rowling ripped off (without attributing those ideas and 'styles' to their relevant owners)!
Just run a spider style of program that send out millions of upstream connections per day - you don't even need to wait for downstream content, just send upstream requests - let them wade through THAT at their expense. It does say that it records website 'visits', not the content transferred right?;)
I think you're right. I think many of the proverbial 'undecided' voted for who they perceived as the 'lesser of two evils', after being brainwashed by the media into believing that a vote for a third candidate is wasted. In reality, the only real wasted vote is one cast for either of the two 'big' parties - it's just the same old shit with a different PR company.
Now you've got a supposed 'populist' leader who'll be less scrutinised by the parts of society who were always watching Bush's dodgy antics closely, but thanks to Bush and those dodgy antics he's left with all the same unconstitutional powers his predecessor awarded himself.
Time for the US people to reign that power back (if they still can) for the good of the country and the world, no matter what your political point of view. I can see this being an easy one for Republicans bearing a grudge, but the Dems need to take a realistic approach too - it's just that the coin of unquestioning support has flipped to the other half of the country now.
I dunno, the US political system is a f*cked up place - probably even worse than the UK's. At least we have a third party of a size large enough to cause some disruptions to the status quo from time to time and do the job of the official opposition when the actual official opposition just follow the establishment line. It's not good enough, mind, and there needs to be FAR more independent MP's in our Parliament, but it's better than slap in the face with a rotting fish I suppose.
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Really, a NES game running in Nintendo's Virtual Console emulator IS sandboxed, in that it's running inside a virtual machine environment, not as a native application.
I think one of the smartest moves MS could make WOULD be to use it's existing code - VirtualPC - to build a 'classic' style environment (similar to Apple's when they migrated to OS X) so that they could write a completely new OS from the ground up and dump the legacy rubbish. At least that way the legacy apps would have time to degrade gracefully and they'd not upset the applecart (er... should that be MSCart?) with their longstanding customers. It's the smartest move, but they don't seem bold enough to just bite the bullet and go for it, even though it's a proven strategy.
Rather than giving the root account a password and then disabling which should in theory block this kind of attack AFAIK?
Is that a traditional English folk-dancing invertebrate?
No I think it's a fair point. They even took on one of their biggest third party app supporters (Adobe) by writing Final Cut Pro and undermining the install base for Premiere and After Effects. There are other instances - not forgetting the Konfabulator/Dashboard debacle of course. They do have a record of doing this so I think the OP makes a good case for an issue of concern.
There is of course no guarantee that you'll USE iTunes/Mail/Safari and may choose another app if one exists, and the difference between OS X and Windows is that you CAN remove Apple's default apps quite easily and not be affected by any exploits for those particular apps, but most users are generally lazy and too scared to go installing their own apps if there are pre-installed apps which do what they want - fact! And that's the biggest security hole of all - the luser.
I AM a MacEvangelist btw, just not a fanboy - I'm oldskool, not one of these newbie types. So I can admit where there are problems, and look for solutions rather than blindly going 'lalala, can't infect me'. heh ;)
Well DUH! Or so I believe the saying goes.
No, the fanboys biggest argument is 'it just works', which still stands. There have been viruses on the Mac since before Windows existed, but just nothing so heinously compromising that it's wiped out half the world (or even a significant number of Mac users).
As things stand there are still no serious exploits being widely flouted in the wild under OS X, so even the original premise isn't far from being true. Not bad really for the best part of a decade in existence. Before that, the last (and only) infection I had was perhaps the Autostart9805 Worm under OS8 - and the fix, once it was deleted from System Folder>Extensions, was to dsiable CD autoplay in the control strip. Took about 2 minutes to clean a machine and not get reinfected.
Quite a good history compared to my current Win box which has a scan running every day removing the previous 24 hours' crap.
No, the closed hardware platform makes sense - they can write an OS that runs much more smoothly on the hardware they KNOW is in there. Fewer issues with cheaply made third party crap needing support so smaller install footprint (check how much bloat installing all the printer drivers that come with OS X by default adds - personally I always uncheck them at install and just install the printer drivers I need from the manufacturer's sites).
Additionally you CAN run OS X on your intel box. You just have to purchase your intel box from Apple. Too expensive? Then have a look at ebay for second hand Minis going for a couple of hundred quid. If you're really not seriously into running OS X enough to fork out for more high end hardware to run it then surely this is a viable option for something to 'play' with. If you DO really want to run OS X seriously, and want decent hardware to run it on to get the best performance out of it, then what's so hard about buying a new Mac? I really don't understand all the fuss. If I want cheaper fuel (price per litre) in my car I'd run a petrol car, but I want better mileage so I have a diesel - I don't moan every time they drop the price of petrol but not diesel just because it won't run my car. There is a choice (and even some cheaper options for just dipping your toe in), it's really that simple.
Tsssk... some people ;P
For some reason, when I was quickly skimming through the comments I read yours as "The likelihood of car-sucking tomatoes is on the rise"... DOH! :D
Yes, but the slowdowns I personally experienced through traffic shaping were over a fibre-optic connection with 2mb package. You're not seriously telling me that a 2mb connection using perhaps three quarters of it's maximum throughput at most to stream video from a website is breaking the ISPs networks? Before traffic shaping, even WITH a huge number of subscribers, there was never any slowdown.
I should imagine it may have been hitting some of the guys on the higher bandwidth packages even harder, but there was a blanket rule across all users - not even capping at a particular reasonable speed as max available at certain times (but what is a 'reasonable' speed anyway when you're paying for 20mb+?), just a cut-off point after 20 minutes of using a percentage of bandwidth on your package. The connection could drop as low as 56kb for as much as 6 hours as a 'punishment', regardless of how congested the network was at the time you were using your bandwidth.
I switched to another ISP on ADSL2 (8mb) and even with network congestion evident from oversubscription, it rarely dropped below 2mb, but when it did I could understand the reasons why (too many people online at once) and the ISP had acknowledged the problem and expanded their capacity to take account of all their recent oversubscription. No traffic shaping, just natural network flow and suitable response by the ISP.
Blocking people's usage is not a good idea - you just lose customers to competitors who don't do it. Using the money from the extra subscriptions you've taken to expand your service to keep everyone happy leads to more customers through recommendation, thus more income to expand the network and on and on - it's simple economics really. But rather than face this simple truism, most ISPs are trying to fight against spending the money or perhaps purposely trying to shed subscribers (by pissing them off) to get back to a level they can suitably maintain without having to spend money on extra infrastructure.
Maybe I'm just lucky to have found an ISP who is orienting their business model to be customer-centric, but their willingness to invest in their infrastructure to cater for recent boosts in subscription after a wide advertising campaign looks promising. They had a month or so of moaning customers as there was a network-wide slow down due to the sudden influx of new users, but they publicised their work to expand throughput and resolve this issue including giving people a date when work would be complete, which they stuck to rigidly in practice.
Other ISPs could learn from this approach. Don't alienate your users, treat them like people and they'll bear with you if you're reasonable. For the month or so of disruption, most users just modified their net use to get around the problem and then once the dust settled they went back to normal. Now it's back to great speed again, proof that investment works as I'd recommend them to other people.
No, the '20 minute' model fails most users miserably and made me leave Virgin media as an ISP. They have a policy of throttling anyone downloading at any significant level for 20 minutes solid. This meant that my wife watching on-demand TV shows she'd missed earlier in the evening would be able to see the first 20 minutes of a show, then have to wait 6 hours until the full bandwidth resumed before she could watch the last 10 minutes of the show. Unless of course she was happy to watch 1 second of the show, wait 3 seconds for the file to buffer, watch 1 second, buffer 3 seconds, watch 1 second, buffer 3 seconds.
Slapping on an arbitrary 'time' cut-off for bandwidth will fail many legitimate users for many different uses. The use I've mentioned is NOT an illegal act, nor is it demanding more of our bandwidth than we should be allowed (given that at the time we were on a 2mb connection) or hogging overall bandwidth. Some users on Virgin Media are paying for 16mb connections or greater - so if we're using 1.5mb of our allocated bandwidth, does that equate to them using 12mb of a 16mb connection, or 15.5mb? How do you set a 'limit' when there is ALREADY a limit placed on the connection speed by the ISP (in our case that was the upper 2mb limit we were paying for).
People who want greater bandwidth already pay more, so they should receive that bandwidth. If the ISPs can't offer that bandwidth reliably then they shouldn't be allowed to sell it - it'd be like a car manufacturer selling you a car labelled as 'top speed up to 150mph' and then setting the engine management unit to only allow you top speed for a few minutes each day and the rest of the time limiting you to 30mph - they'd get their arses sued off the face of the planet!
No way - that's a return to the bad old days of having to keep an eye on how long you're online for! The ISPs aren't just moaning about P2P, they're having a good old whinge at TV companies hosting on-demand services too. The BBC's iPlayer is one such target for UK ISPs. That's not filesharing, but traffic over a normal http connection and people watching TV shows on bandwidth that should easily handle the traffic aren't being a 'hogs'. They're just 'surfing' in it's traditional sense - visiting websites and viewing the content on those sites. Legitimate use (even under acceptable usage policies) for the bandwidth they're paying for - it's the ISPs who have oversold their capacity.
If you dig down into the fine print it probably also has some boilerplate about it being sold as an entertainment service, not an information service. Cable and phone companies have never been real ISP's.
But for many people, information IS entertainment. ;)
If you paid on a credit card, then technically the laptop belongs to THEM until you've paid them back. If you purchase anything on credit card you have protection against this kind of thing. Speak to your CC company and ask them to intervene - they have huge financial and legal muscle and WILL resolve the issue very quickly on your behalf, either issuing a chargeback against the payment or ensuring Dell bend over backwards to get you your laptop.
There - fixed that for you.
Yes you can. Next time you see an advert for loans check out the masses of smallprint on screen all the way through stating that all the spoken narrative is lala-land. If you display the caveat, you're covered.
Is this a snide comment about the performance of cars from the erstwhile British car manufacturer? ;)
I shoot mine out a canon into the heart of the sun!
Harry Potter has a zigzag scar on his forehead right? I wonder where she got that idea from?
"But obviously he's just an avaricious turd with no original ideas." So THAT'S how he's copied Rowling's 'style'.
It's called the Harry Potter Lexicon for f*cks sake... how much more attribution do you need than the publication's title? I'd imagine anyone buying a copy would have some idea of who wrote Harry Potter - and many people know who originally wrote the ideas that Ms Rowling ripped off (without attributing those ideas and 'styles' to their relevant owners)!
Even MORE so on a raster display, because then they're a series of lots of small straight lines! ;)
Just run a spider style of program that send out millions of upstream connections per day - you don't even need to wait for downstream content, just send upstream requests - let them wade through THAT at their expense. It does say that it records website 'visits', not the content transferred right? ;)
I think you're right. I think many of the proverbial 'undecided' voted for who they perceived as the 'lesser of two evils', after being brainwashed by the media into believing that a vote for a third candidate is wasted. In reality, the only real wasted vote is one cast for either of the two 'big' parties - it's just the same old shit with a different PR company. Now you've got a supposed 'populist' leader who'll be less scrutinised by the parts of society who were always watching Bush's dodgy antics closely, but thanks to Bush and those dodgy antics he's left with all the same unconstitutional powers his predecessor awarded himself. Time for the US people to reign that power back (if they still can) for the good of the country and the world, no matter what your political point of view. I can see this being an easy one for Republicans bearing a grudge, but the Dems need to take a realistic approach too - it's just that the coin of unquestioning support has flipped to the other half of the country now. I dunno, the US political system is a f*cked up place - probably even worse than the UK's. At least we have a third party of a size large enough to cause some disruptions to the status quo from time to time and do the job of the official opposition when the actual official opposition just follow the establishment line. It's not good enough, mind, and there needs to be FAR more independent MP's in our Parliament, but it's better than slap in the face with a rotting fish I suppose.
Heh, you forgot to add a line about his old pastor (in his Arab Christian Muslim Terrorist Churchmosque)... "God Damn America!" hehehe
...which the current Iraqi government is doing with our consent now!
Hahaha... you use the term 'foreign fighters on Iraqi soil' with no sense of irony? I hope you include US and UK forces in that description.