Also, didn't they copy user-switching? But it's alright because they gave it a 3D animation, so it was innovative;-)
Apple didn't so much "copy" as "implement correctly." XP's fast user-switching does not work if the computer is part of an ActiveDirectory domain or if some weird Novell software is installed. (Found that out the hard way fixing an ex's aunt's computer.) Also, if fast user-switching is enabled, the "Welcome" screen is displayed with a list of users regardless of whether you want it there or not.
A blogger on the MSDN blog gave the following two reasons as to why fast user-switching was not enabled on domains.
How do you show all the users on the domain in the Welcome screen? You certainly don't want a list with 10,000 names in it. (Scroll scroll scroll.)
How do you check whether a user has a password? In Windows XP, the Welcome screen merely tries to log you on with a blank password. If it works, then poof! you're in. If it doesn't work, then it displays the password prompt. This works, but it also generates a failed password event into your security event log. Many IT administrators have a passwork lockout policy, where if you get your password wrong more than N times, your account is locked. Blank password probing would result in locked-out accounts all over the company.
In other words, when developing XP, no one at Microsoft thought of "Gee, let's enable the username / password box for fast user-switching." As to the second point, I've got a better question. Why are blank passwords even an option? Every user account should have a password, period.
Also, XP doesn't actually leave the processes running when switched out. I think it dumps the contents of the user-space memory to disk, in effect "freezing" the user's session in suspended animation. Once the user switches back in, it's like nothing changed. At least that's how I understand it. If someone has specifics, please feel free to correct / elaborate on my comments.
Mac OS X, on the other hand, just starts a new instance of the login window. All processes from a switched-out user are still running. You can switch among domain and local users without any problems at all. You can also have a normal username / password login window if fast user-switching is enabled. Mac OS X will also store domain accounts under the "Other" option in the login window if a list of users is being displayed. So yeah, Microsoft crossed the finish line first, but like sex, it's not about who gets there first. It's about how good it is when you do get there.
Re:Hardware Translucency in Linux
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Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 1
Mac OS X will LOOK the same, no matter what hardware you run it on. That's because every drawing routine has a CPU fallback. Quartz Extreme does not work on a Rage 128, period. There is no "minor support." And yes, the cursor drop-shadow has traditionally been an indicator of whether or not Quartz Extreme is running, but it's not absolute. You lack the required hardware features, and nothing is going to change that.
If you really think Quartz Extreme is running on your Rage 128, try stacking a few dozen translucent terminal windows over a playing QuickTime movie. Quartz Extreme machines will have no problem with it. Non-Quartz Extreme machines will choke and die.
Re:Hardware Translucency in Linux
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Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 1
It requires a Radeon / GeForce 2MX or better. The Rage 128 does not support non-power-of-2 texture sizes, so it can't display windows as textures.
Unfortunately for Apple, that trait is not Jobs' least-productive tendency. The worst trait of Jobs is that he does not understand technology trends.
The 10 million+ iPod owners would disagree. As would all the people buying music from the iTunes Music Store. As would all the reviewers giving OS X excellent reviews. Jobs views technology as it applies to the customer, not how it compares to something else. Where he has stepped into a fragmented market and offered a better way of doing things, he has succeeded. The biggest technology trend he missed was CD-R drives. Other than that, he's shown himself to have excellent judgment as to what the people want in their electronic devices.
His forte is that he understands fashion trends. The multi-colored iMacs were a smashing success. So, too are the stylish iPods. Peak inside of a Mac store, and you will see excellent styling.
Ah, so the iPod doesn't actually do anything? It just sits there and looks pretty? Give me a break. Jobs recognizes that people would prefer to use something they find aesthetically attractive and don't give a shit about what's under the hood so long as it works. Jobs gives people products that do what they want and nothing else. I'm sure there are tons of techies out there who wish the iPod came with FM tuning, recording, movie support and a personal death ray, but normal people really don't care.
Like it or not, part of technology is making it accessible to common person. Geeks may look down on Apple's products for not being ugly black things straight out of a 1985 stereo room, but that's because geeks don't know the first thing about marketing technology.
I'd need better screenshots to really say, but the new IE looks a hell of a lot like Safari, right down to the RSS interface. The window style looks like a combination of iTunes for Windows and Safari. And why the hell is the menubar below the tab bar?
Back in my senior year of high school (wow, 4 years already), we were doing a stock market competition in my government class. We used some sort of website portal, and my partner and I were actually doing fairly well. This was at a time when nVidia stock was shooting way up, so we were buying it. But we both forgot the password to our account over Christmas break and wanted to get in.
So I got wise and spoofed an e-mail to the administrator of the system (can't remember how I got the guy's e-mail address), forging the header to look like it was from my teacher. I (posing as the teacher) told him that a couple students had lost their password, and I needed it e-mailed to a hotmail account I'd set up. I put in some excuse about how I was going to be on the road and unable to check my regular e-mail address. This was actually true. My teacher told us he wouldn't be able to check his e-mails during the break because he was going to Colorado or something.
The guy bought it. He sent my password to the Hotmail account I'd set up. Not only had he sent my password, though. He'd sent everyone else's too. And to make matters worse, he'd CC'ed it to the teacher's real account... with the quoted text from my forged e-mail. Wonderful. I was in deep shit.
So there was no way out. My name was on the original e-mail, and it wouldn't take a genius to figure out what happened. So I copped to it. I e-mailed my teacher, explaining the whole thing, and waited the entire break. I got to class, and my teacher just told me, "Got your e-mail. It's cool." And that was it.
I risked a whole hell of a lot to save some time for a stupid game. And I got lucky that my teacher was merciful. The worst part is that I was so set on going the 1337 route that I never considered that, with the administrator's e-mail, I could've just requested my password as myself!
So I got a free lesson there. In short, I agree with you. Teenagers don't listen to this kind of stuff though, because of course, it'll never happen to them. And if it does, they'll get lucky like me. Good thing the law doesn't hold minors accountable for their decisions.
I was joking dude. The logic being that, without a reliable indication of which browsers are in wide use, webmasters would have to adhere to open standards to be confident that their pages are viewable on as wide a range of browsers as possible.
Naturally, this would never work. Webmasters are, by and large, shackled by their manager overlords who insist that they make it look good in IE because that's all managerial types use.
But that is kinda funny that I got modded insightful.:D
The thought just occurred to me that we could use one problem to fix another here. We want to get webmasters coding for standards-compliant web browsers, right? Problem Number 1 is that they generally don't. Problem Number 2 is that Windows is highly susceptible to malware and viruses. So how about someone just write a virus that changes IE's user agent string to a random pick from Firefox, Opera, Safari, Mozilla or any other browser out there? Webmasters would no longer be able to trust the user agent strings they receive, so they'll have to just code to standards instead.
Then we'll see just how fast Microsoft can get a security update out when their web monopoly is being threatened.
Life must be interesting on your planet, Dave.
First of all, video file formats are hardly a concern of "IT" -- this is really all being hashed out in Hollywood boardrooms, and is completely offtopic in a discussion about MS Office.
He obviously lives on Planet Earth, where IT corporations like to stream video content over the Internet and are thus concerned about video file formats.
Hey, you guys gave us the first season before it aired over here, and we'll return the favor. BitTorrent makes all this "who gets what first" bullshit meaningless.
ARGH! For fucks sake, they are NOT ALIENS. They are the mecha! How the hell do people come to think they are aliens?!
ARGH! For fuck's sake, they are NOT MECHA. They are robots! How the hell do people come to think that some stupid anime term for grossly impractical walking robots comes to apply generally to every artificial contraption with two legs in sci-fi?
I would be willing to wager a very large bet that if Mac OS X was the industry leader there would be the same difficulties with viruses, and other criminal activities that are currently associated with Microsoft's products.
I'd take that bet, and I'd win. Here's why. Windows happens to be in the precarious condition of being both the most popular operating system and being poorly-designed. Samba services are on by default, meaning that the user is automatically vulnerable to worms that propagate through the Samba service. This is why a machine with a fresh Windows install can be infected with a worm within minutes of connecting to the Internet. This was a huge problem on my campus a couple years back at the beginning of the semester. Blaster was hammering away at everything, and even the machines that were wiped got infected with it as soon as they were connected back to the Internet.
Why would this not happen (or at least happen far less frequently) on OS X? Because none of the services are enabled by default. Samba, AFP, SSH, Apache, everything is off. In order to infect a Mac OS X machine, it would take more social engineering than to infect a Windows machine. A Mac OS X user, to really, really do harm to the entire system, has to be tricked into entering his administrator password, even if he is logged in as an administrator.
Microsoft has acknowledged this flaw. They want to transition users to a model of the lowest possible privilege assignment. If a user doesn't need to be an administrator, he shouldn't be. Unfortunately, as Microsoft has also acknowledged, there is too much poorly-designed Windows software that won't run unless the user is an administrator (even though the software does nothing that requires administrative privileges... it may just be storing its preferences in a weird way) to make such a transition in the short-term possible. This is a direct consequence of the design choices Microsoft made with Windows and their encouragement of developers to write easy software first, secure software second.
In Mac OS X, software installers must acquire administrative rights by getting the user to authenticate as an admin if they want to write to anything that isn't in the current user's space. Apple encourages developers to avoid having the user authenticate authenticate at all costs and to only attempt to gain admin privileges if absolutely necessary. That is smart design, and since it's been that way since 10.0, there aren't very many applications that absolutely require an administrator for no reason.
You're absolutely right. But I was talking about Mac OS X vs. Linux, not Windows vs. Linux. In OS X, it's been my experience that just plugging in a device is enough to make it work. It beats both Windows and Linux in terms of "plug 'n play" hands down.
I completely agree. But I was comparing Linux to Mac OS X, not Linux to Windows. The post I was replying to (waaaaaay up there) was asking why one should recommend Mac OS X over Linux.
Because if Linux doesn't work right off the bat, your average newbie is completely fucked. Linux distros attempt to make up for the complex process of installing device drivers by prepackaging the drivers for every device they can imagine in the main install. But if you don't have one of these predefined devices, you have to wade through about 3000 Linux forums where all the users tell you to go to RTFM.
Linux is a great server operating system. Its flexibility and open nature make it very resilient, and being able to compile the kernel with just the features you want is a major plus when it comes to security. But until the Linux community can rally around a single, unified vision for a Linux desktop OS, it will never be anything more than a hobbyist's desktop OS. Having 40 billion distros simply is not helping Linux's push to the desktop.
Since when? "They" is the plural form, and the usage of the plural form of the verb "be" following it is consistent. Do you say "I like that person because they is cool"? No, you say, "I like that person because they are cool." People who use "they" in place of a gender-neutral pronoun are all admitting that "they" is, in fact, a plural pronoun. If these people can't even maintain consistency in their usage, why the hell should we consider their usage acceptable?
The gender-neutral pronoun in the English language is and has always been "he". Period. You can use "she" if you want, and that's fine. If you want to make up a new word or bastardized version of two words (like "s/he"), also fine. If you want to change the sentence to refer to a generic group of individuals rather than one person (which works most of the time), then also fine. But substituting "they" for "he" or "she" is not acceptable because you break consistency among the verbs in the sentence.
Increasing the power of a unit is generally accomplished by integration; acceleration is the result of differentiating the position function twice. And any acceleration (whether it refers to position, growth or whatever) will use the inverse of a square-second: 1/s^2 = s^-2.
A "square second" is a meaningless unit without a context. For example, Earth's acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, or a change of 9.8 meters per second per second. It's the "per" that gives the unit meaning. A simple "s^-2" would be interpreted as "per second per second," while "s^2" is interpreted as "second second," which has no real meaning.
In Ebert's case, however, he describes "action per second-squared" or "action per second per second". In other words, he is saying that the action accelerates at a greater rate than other movies.
If memory serves, at least one county in Ohio which implemented Diebold's voting machines contributed about 6,000 votes for Bush when there were only about 300 total people in the county. That's what I call an irregularity. However, the irregularities reported in Ohio did not amount to enough questionable votes to make a difference in the margin Bush won by.
Slashdot Mirror
A blogger on the MSDN blog gave the following two reasons as to why fast user-switching was not enabled on domains. In other words, when developing XP, no one at Microsoft thought of "Gee, let's enable the username / password box for fast user-switching." As to the second point, I've got a better question. Why are blank passwords even an option? Every user account should have a password, period.
Also, XP doesn't actually leave the processes running when switched out. I think it dumps the contents of the user-space memory to disk, in effect "freezing" the user's session in suspended animation. Once the user switches back in, it's like nothing changed. At least that's how I understand it. If someone has specifics, please feel free to correct / elaborate on my comments.
Mac OS X, on the other hand, just starts a new instance of the login window. All processes from a switched-out user are still running. You can switch among domain and local users without any problems at all. You can also have a normal username / password login window if fast user-switching is enabled. Mac OS X will also store domain accounts under the "Other" option in the login window if a list of users is being displayed. So yeah, Microsoft crossed the finish line first, but like sex, it's not about who gets there first. It's about how good it is when you do get there.
Mac OS X will LOOK the same, no matter what hardware you run it on. That's because every drawing routine has a CPU fallback. Quartz Extreme does not work on a Rage 128, period. There is no "minor support." And yes, the cursor drop-shadow has traditionally been an indicator of whether or not Quartz Extreme is running, but it's not absolute. You lack the required hardware features, and nothing is going to change that.
If you really think Quartz Extreme is running on your Rage 128, try stacking a few dozen translucent terminal windows over a playing QuickTime movie. Quartz Extreme machines will have no problem with it. Non-Quartz Extreme machines will choke and die.
It requires a Radeon / GeForce 2MX or better. The Rage 128 does not support non-power-of-2 texture sizes, so it can't display windows as textures.
Like it or not, part of technology is making it accessible to common person. Geeks may look down on Apple's products for not being ugly black things straight out of a 1985 stereo room, but that's because geeks don't know the first thing about marketing technology.
They did. Notice the "E" in "PEBL". I guess that's all they budgeted for though.
I'd need better screenshots to really say, but the new IE looks a hell of a lot like Safari, right down to the RSS interface. The window style looks like a combination of iTunes for Windows and Safari. And why the hell is the menubar below the tab bar?
I never said it was a good system. But the guy sent me a list of all usernames and their corresponding passwords, something I did not expect.
I'm going on my fifth year at college. Perhaps I wasn't clear.
Back in my senior year of high school (wow, 4 years already), we were doing a stock market competition in my government class. We used some sort of website portal, and my partner and I were actually doing fairly well. This was at a time when nVidia stock was shooting way up, so we were buying it. But we both forgot the password to our account over Christmas break and wanted to get in.
... with the quoted text from my forged e-mail. Wonderful. I was in deep shit.
So I got wise and spoofed an e-mail to the administrator of the system (can't remember how I got the guy's e-mail address), forging the header to look like it was from my teacher. I (posing as the teacher) told him that a couple students had lost their password, and I needed it e-mailed to a hotmail account I'd set up. I put in some excuse about how I was going to be on the road and unable to check my regular e-mail address. This was actually true. My teacher told us he wouldn't be able to check his e-mails during the break because he was going to Colorado or something.
The guy bought it. He sent my password to the Hotmail account I'd set up. Not only had he sent my password, though. He'd sent everyone else's too. And to make matters worse, he'd CC'ed it to the teacher's real account
So there was no way out. My name was on the original e-mail, and it wouldn't take a genius to figure out what happened. So I copped to it. I e-mailed my teacher, explaining the whole thing, and waited the entire break. I got to class, and my teacher just told me, "Got your e-mail. It's cool." And that was it.
I risked a whole hell of a lot to save some time for a stupid game. And I got lucky that my teacher was merciful. The worst part is that I was so set on going the 1337 route that I never considered that, with the administrator's e-mail, I could've just requested my password as myself!
So I got a free lesson there. In short, I agree with you. Teenagers don't listen to this kind of stuff though, because of course, it'll never happen to them. And if it does, they'll get lucky like me. Good thing the law doesn't hold minors accountable for their decisions.
I was joking dude. The logic being that, without a reliable indication of which browsers are in wide use, webmasters would have to adhere to open standards to be confident that their pages are viewable on as wide a range of browsers as possible.
:D
Naturally, this would never work. Webmasters are, by and large, shackled by their manager overlords who insist that they make it look good in IE because that's all managerial types use.
But that is kinda funny that I got modded insightful.
The thought just occurred to me that we could use one problem to fix another here. We want to get webmasters coding for standards-compliant web browsers, right? Problem Number 1 is that they generally don't. Problem Number 2 is that Windows is highly susceptible to malware and viruses. So how about someone just write a virus that changes IE's user agent string to a random pick from Firefox, Opera, Safari, Mozilla or any other browser out there? Webmasters would no longer be able to trust the user agent strings they receive, so they'll have to just code to standards instead.
Then we'll see just how fast Microsoft can get a security update out when their web monopoly is being threatened.
I, for one, welcome our new Intel overlords.
Your website visits do not indicate an unbiased sampling of all computers on the Internet.
Hey, you guys gave us the first season before it aired over here, and we'll return the favor. BitTorrent makes all this "who gets what first" bullshit meaningless.
I just want to know what he was thinking when he signed on for Hollywood Homicide.
Same thing, I suppose. Samba/CIFS, whatever you want to call it. Port 139 is open by default.
Why would this not happen (or at least happen far less frequently) on OS X? Because none of the services are enabled by default. Samba, AFP, SSH, Apache, everything is off. In order to infect a Mac OS X machine, it would take more social engineering than to infect a Windows machine. A Mac OS X user, to really, really do harm to the entire system, has to be tricked into entering his administrator password, even if he is logged in as an administrator.
Microsoft has acknowledged this flaw. They want to transition users to a model of the lowest possible privilege assignment. If a user doesn't need to be an administrator, he shouldn't be. Unfortunately, as Microsoft has also acknowledged, there is too much poorly-designed Windows software that won't run unless the user is an administrator (even though the software does nothing that requires administrative privileges
In Mac OS X, software installers must acquire administrative rights by getting the user to authenticate as an admin if they want to write to anything that isn't in the current user's space. Apple encourages developers to avoid having the user authenticate authenticate at all costs and to only attempt to gain admin privileges if absolutely necessary. That is smart design, and since it's been that way since 10.0, there aren't very many applications that absolutely require an administrator for no reason.
You're absolutely right. But I was talking about Mac OS X vs. Linux, not Windows vs. Linux. In OS X, it's been my experience that just plugging in a device is enough to make it work. It beats both Windows and Linux in terms of "plug 'n play" hands down.
I completely agree. But I was comparing Linux to Mac OS X, not Linux to Windows. The post I was replying to (waaaaaay up there) was asking why one should recommend Mac OS X over Linux.
Because if Linux doesn't work right off the bat, your average newbie is completely fucked. Linux distros attempt to make up for the complex process of installing device drivers by prepackaging the drivers for every device they can imagine in the main install. But if you don't have one of these predefined devices, you have to wade through about 3000 Linux forums where all the users tell you to go to RTFM.
Linux is a great server operating system. Its flexibility and open nature make it very resilient, and being able to compile the kernel with just the features you want is a major plus when it comes to security. But until the Linux community can rally around a single, unified vision for a Linux desktop OS, it will never be anything more than a hobbyist's desktop OS. Having 40 billion distros simply is not helping Linux's push to the desktop.
Since when? "They" is the plural form, and the usage of the plural form of the verb "be" following it is consistent. Do you say "I like that person because they is cool"? No, you say, "I like that person because they are cool." People who use "they" in place of a gender-neutral pronoun are all admitting that "they" is, in fact, a plural pronoun. If these people can't even maintain consistency in their usage, why the hell should we consider their usage acceptable?
The gender-neutral pronoun in the English language is and has always been "he". Period. You can use "she" if you want, and that's fine. If you want to make up a new word or bastardized version of two words (like "s/he"), also fine. If you want to change the sentence to refer to a generic group of individuals rather than one person (which works most of the time), then also fine. But substituting "they" for "he" or "she" is not acceptable because you break consistency among the verbs in the sentence.
Increasing the power of a unit is generally accomplished by integration; acceleration is the result of differentiating the position function twice. And any acceleration (whether it refers to position, growth or whatever) will use the inverse of a square-second: 1/s^2 = s^-2.
A "square second" is a meaningless unit without a context. For example, Earth's acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, or a change of 9.8 meters per second per second. It's the "per" that gives the unit meaning. A simple "s^-2" would be interpreted as "per second per second," while "s^2" is interpreted as "second second," which has no real meaning.
In Ebert's case, however, he describes "action per second-squared" or "action per second per second". In other words, he is saying that the action accelerates at a greater rate than other movies.
If memory serves, at least one county in Ohio which implemented Diebold's voting machines contributed about 6,000 votes for Bush when there were only about 300 total people in the county. That's what I call an irregularity. However, the irregularities reported in Ohio did not amount to enough questionable votes to make a difference in the margin Bush won by.