The rules require not only that XP boot, but it must also dual-boot with Mac OS X. The user must be presented with the option of which OS to run at boot-time, and narf2006 hasn't done that yet.
Indeed the dual-booting requirement sounds rather hard to achieve due to the GUID Partition Table (GPT) format required by EFI; Windows XP does not recognise this format, and I fear that even if narf2006 or someone else succeeds, the solution will be along the lines “hack X tells Windows that boot partition begins from disk address Y... AND DO NOT MESS WITH DISK ADMINISTRATOR!!!”
OTOH, Apple most certainly does not see it your way – had they thought that the ability to boot windows would improve their market share, they would have included a CSM in their EFI implementation, and thus made possible to boot Windows easily.
This can't be the case. Rosetta does not support translating kext's at all. How could it – it fact, how could any kernel run kernel-space code as emulated or translated? That would sound technically challenging at best, although I don't know well enough to say that it would be totally impossible, but still...
Yes, 128 kpbs is probably adequate for most people. But does that make it good, or hi-fi? In my opinion, no. Not even close of it. In fact, that is so low, that I think it is actually quite crappy. That was my point. Perhaps “everyone else” just have their eardrums made of steel!
224 kbps is much, much better. Yet I wouldn't claim that that goes as hi-fi either. I just pointed out that it is high enough that I can mostly stand it by myself: It is quite adequate for casual listening, for iPods, etc. It is just where I've personally stroke a compromise between audio compression and quality. When I want to listen to some real hi-fi, I'll pick up a CD from my shelf and use a separate CD player.
224 kbps may be not high enough for you, and I understand that there are people, who are going to accept nothing but lossless. Hell, there are people who think that CD audio is crappy! But if you really think that 128 kbps is even close to perfect, I can't see why you are using lossless – unless you're making lots of conversions to other formats, in which case lossless source naturally makes sense. But that would also mean that you definitely wouldn't want anything as low as 128 kbps as source.
How capable is this Intel integrated graphics? How does it compare to that in the old ($100 cheaper) PPC mini or the new Duo iMac?
Don't know, but I still remember how they used to make a big number about how the Mac Mini had a dedicated GPU, and cheap PCs didn't. Google remembers too (read the chapter “Lock the Target”).
Funny how it is no longer important at all. Even though Mac minis definitely do not have any slots for those add-on graphics cards. Welcome to the wonderful world of advertising...
Indeed. This “Hi-fi” thing does not have much new comparing to Bose's Sound Dock (IIRC, Bose does not run on batteries, but that's it). And it is about as “hi-fi” as the crappy 128 bps songs available on iTMS.
We all know that every time you boot your antiquated G4, you think about selling one of your kidneys to buy a new MacBook.
Huh!? I boot my Powerbook every 15-30 days or so, and that's a rare enough event that I couldn't care less whether it takes 1 or 5 minutes.
Last time when I booted it was due to 10.4.5 update. Before that I tested Ubuntu's live DVD, and before that – well, I went and double-clicked an extremely old floppy disk image, without realising that it was actually MFS instead of HFS, but the OS, not supporting such ancient stuff, took it as HFS. Result: kernel panic... but that was not a common event.
Can someone remind me what is the point of a browser allowing "driveby downloads" and automatically launching the content of the download?
It's the same point as hiding file extensions in both Windows Explorer and Finder, and making users to be administrators by default in Windows. It is security that is sacrificed on the altar of convenience, blatant carelessness of those basic little things that have a big meaning in security.
Squeezing out buffer overflows helps only so far. Excecution prevention helps only so far. Limited user accounts help only so far. Well-designed UIs help only so far.
When all these (and perhaps few others) have at least been attempted to be done properly, it is possible that the whole system stays relatively safe, even if some part of the design is not actually that perfect.
Yeah, I actually know. But somehow that crossed into my mind only after hitting "submit". Besides, carefully thought defaults are nice.
Also, the Keyboard & Mouse prefpane won't let you assign same custom shortcut in two different apps (unless Apple has fixed this since I last checked for it), which is IMO rather stupid and problematic.
This would be nice, targeted to Camino 1.1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28770 5
And this is too, target Camino 1.2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30886 3
Switching tabs using PowerBook keyboard is also a bit complicated, as one has to press option, and PowerBooks only have the left one, so two hands are needed. Safari has better shortcuts (cmd-shift instead of cmd-option) in this sense.
Btw, welcome to the wonderful world of universal binaries: multilingual download is now whopping 19.5 MBytes!
But still, quite a nice browser, although not yet enough to make me drop Safari.
I get quite a little legitimate email written in English, so the combination of English subject & English sender name alone makes my finger hover over delete key, ready to proceed immediately if the subject does not sound something actually relevant. If the subject is about "credit card", "account" or something like that, I almost automatically dismiss the message as phishing.
Last month, I got a message from PayPal that said that my credit card is about to expire. I thought "some phishing again, but may be I'll open and see this one just for some amusement". So I did open it, and red through. Then I realised that first, it was all text, didn't include any URLs, but told me to go to the PayPal site by manually typing the URL instead. Only then I recalled that my credit card actually was just updated and the old is about to expire. I then went to paypal.com, logged in and updated the expiration date.
Afterwards, this made me think what kind of idiots they are at PayPal; instead of asking about the expiry date during my next payment, they sent me an (unencrypted and unsigned) e-mail, which should be more verboten than anything in the online banking business. Of course, had I actually deleted the message, the damage would have been tiny and I would have realised my error later, but this is just something that teaches people to bad habits; that it might be a good idea to trust at least some of those emails, while it actually isn't.
I don't remember how long I was wondering how to run Explorer.exe (and thus, Control Panel) with runAs, before I realised what parent said. It really makes runAs much more useful.
European iPods ship with a volume limiter for this reason.
Perhaps this limiter is suitable for those crappy buds shipped with iPods.
With in-ear buds (in my case Sony MDR EX-71 [1]) I hardly ever turn the volume louder than up to 60% of the maximum of my Euro-iPod mini. And that 60% means that I am in an environment with somewhat noisy backround, like in a tube or in a bus. If I'm sitting at my desk at work 40% is more than enough. Hell, in a silent environment 20% is often enough. (These figures are with sound check turned on.)
But then again, it is not uncommon to see people on gigs without earplugs; actually, most of the people do not seem to use them. People are practically voluntarily opting in for deafness nowadays. Personally, I'm 26 years old and can still hear 20 kHz sounds, so I guess it does matter how do you treat your ears.
[1] Warning: with these buds, in-ear DRM might become installed without your consent. Detection is avoided by installing rootkit to your brain.
Oh, never mind. You see, your parent is an American, so he naturally supposes that you are really drinking it by yourselves, because, you see, they actually are drinking Bud.
OTOH, I'm wondering that you're actually calling it “beer”. Here in Finland we have some stuff called “beer”, whose brand name is “Lapin Kulta”, but I much prefer the name “Lapin kusta” instead. “Kusta” is a partitive case of the word “kusi”; click the “English” link to see, what it actually is...
Also, while the already suggested SafariBlock is for sure better than nothing, personally I find PithHelmet better (it costs money, though – whopping $10).
So, randomly chosen new laptops may fail under Windows just as well.
Well, it is by no means impossible. But it is rather unlikely that a new machine would refuse to work with newest available version of Windows, no? (In your case it would have been that XP.) Much more unlikely than that it would refuse to work with newest available version of a frequently updated Linux distro (like Fedora, SuSE or Ubuntu).
Still, single machine can always fail, no matter what OS. You should always test at least a few before drawing any statistical conclusions.
With the “NT kernel” I mean anything that carries NT version number, i.e. Windows 2000 (NT 5.0), Windows XP (NT 5.1) and Windows 2003 (NT 5.2; I'd guess that Vista will be 6.0), and they certainly support USB and other newer HW. I for sure didn't mean NT 4; it had crappy support for HW if any – no power management, no PnP (and thus no USB or FireWire either), not almost anything.
And yes, USB support was added in NT5. I guess it supports SATA too, if drivers for the controller exist.
Personally, I would love to ditch the Windows GUI but keep the NT kernel.
I've also been interested in this idea. I wonder, whether it would be possible to strip out kernel components from NT and install a real Unix-style subsystem on top of it, using GNU[1]- or BSD-derived userland apps. This way there would be an Unix variant with widest possible HW support[2] (though installing those drivers would most likely be somewhat complicated without CSRSS).
[1] Hmm... would this actually mean that we should call such a system system GNU/NT... and whom would the existence of such a beast make ill first: RMS or BillG?;)
[2]For those who feel obliged to comment to this argument: Yes, I know that Linux actually has pretty wide HW support, and in some cases even much better than Windows has. But to get the point: try to install it into a few randomly chosen new laptops so that everything works out of the box.
An ad blocker for Safari exists: it is called PithHelmet. IMO it is much better than Firefox's adblock extension, though it is not free; it costs $10, but it's worth every cent.
Re:Next headline - F-Secure in violation of DRM
on
Sober Code Cracked
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· Score: 1
I do realise that grandparent was a joke – after all, it currently scores at "+5, Funny". My parent that currently scores at 0, however, was not, but rather had the attitude that DMCA applies worldwide. So I decided to write a correction.
Re:Next headline - F-Secure in violation of DRM
on
Sober Code Cracked
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
The rules require not only that XP boot, but it must also dual-boot with Mac OS X. The user must be presented with the option of which OS to run at boot-time, and narf2006 hasn't done that yet.
Indeed the dual-booting requirement sounds rather hard to achieve due to the GUID Partition Table (GPT) format required by EFI; Windows XP does not recognise this format, and I fear that even if narf2006 or someone else succeeds, the solution will be along the lines “hack X tells Windows that boot partition begins from disk address Y... AND DO NOT MESS WITH DISK ADMINISTRATOR!!!”
OTOH, Apple most certainly does not see it your way – had they thought that the ability to boot windows would improve their market share, they would have included a CSM in their EFI implementation, and thus made possible to boot Windows easily.
This can't be the case. Rosetta does not support translating kext's at all. How could it – it fact, how could any kernel run kernel-space code as emulated or translated? That would sound technically challenging at best, although I don't know well enough to say that it would be totally impossible, but still...
Yes, 128 kpbs is probably adequate for most people. But does that make it good, or hi-fi? In my opinion, no. Not even close of it. In fact, that is so low, that I think it is actually quite crappy. That was my point. Perhaps “everyone else” just have their eardrums made of steel!
224 kbps is much, much better. Yet I wouldn't claim that that goes as hi-fi either. I just pointed out that it is high enough that I can mostly stand it by myself: It is quite adequate for casual listening, for iPods, etc. It is just where I've personally stroke a compromise between audio compression and quality. When I want to listen to some real hi-fi, I'll pick up a CD from my shelf and use a separate CD player.
224 kbps may be not high enough for you, and I understand that there are people, who are going to accept nothing but lossless. Hell, there are people who think that CD audio is crappy! But if you really think that 128 kbps is even close to perfect, I can't see why you are using lossless – unless you're making lots of conversions to other formats, in which case lossless source naturally makes sense. But that would also mean that you definitely wouldn't want anything as low as 128 kbps as source.
Actually, it was his mention of a Bose product.
Oh. Care to explain why this iPod “hi-fi” is so much better, then? Because it has an Apple logo on it?
That line right there rendered your entire post as useless and uniformed.
So a one-letter typo makes that now.
Also, not all formats are created the same.
Like I wouldn't know. Most of my iTunes library is ripped as 224 kbps AAC. 128 is crappy. Got it?
How capable is this Intel integrated graphics? How does it compare to that in the old ($100 cheaper) PPC mini or the new Duo iMac?
Don't know, but I still remember how they used to make a big number about how the Mac Mini had a dedicated GPU, and cheap PCs didn't. Google remembers too (read the chapter “Lock the Target”).
Funny how it is no longer important at all. Even though Mac minis definitely do not have any slots for those add-on graphics cards. Welcome to the wonderful world of advertising...
Indeed. This “Hi-fi” thing does not have much new comparing to Bose's Sound Dock (IIRC, Bose does not run on batteries, but that's it). And it is about as “hi-fi” as the crappy 128 bps songs available on iTMS.
We all know that every time you boot your antiquated G4, you think about selling one of your kidneys to buy a new MacBook.
Huh!? I boot my Powerbook every 15-30 days or so, and that's a rare enough event that I couldn't care less whether it takes 1 or 5 minutes.
Last time when I booted it was due to 10.4.5 update. Before that I tested Ubuntu's live DVD, and before that – well, I went and double-clicked an extremely old floppy disk image, without realising that it was actually MFS instead of HFS, but the OS, not supporting such ancient stuff, took it as HFS. Result: kernel panic... but that was not a common event.
Can someone remind me what is the point of a browser allowing "driveby downloads" and automatically launching the content of the download?
It's the same point as hiding file extensions in both Windows Explorer and Finder, and making users to be administrators by default in Windows.
It is security that is sacrificed on the altar of convenience, blatant carelessness of those basic little things that have a big meaning in security.
Squeezing out buffer overflows helps only so far.
Excecution prevention helps only so far.
Limited user accounts help only so far.
Well-designed UIs help only so far.
When all these (and perhaps few others) have at least been attempted to be done properly, it is possible that the whole system stays relatively safe, even if some part of the design is not actually that perfect.
Yeah, I actually know. But somehow that crossed into my mind only after hitting "submit". Besides, carefully thought defaults are nice.
Also, the Keyboard & Mouse prefpane won't let you assign same custom shortcut in two different apps (unless Apple has fixed this since I last checked for it), which is IMO rather stupid and problematic.
Btw, welcome to the wonderful world of universal binaries: multilingual download is now whopping 19.5 MBytes!
But still, quite a nice browser, although not yet enough to make me drop Safari.
I get quite a little legitimate email written in English, so the combination of English subject & English sender name alone makes my finger hover over delete key, ready to proceed immediately if the subject does not sound something actually relevant. If the subject is about "credit card", "account" or something like that, I almost automatically dismiss the message as phishing.
Last month, I got a message from PayPal that said that my credit card is about to expire. I thought "some phishing again, but may be I'll open and see this one just for some amusement". So I did open it, and red through. Then I realised that first, it was all text, didn't include any URLs, but told me to go to the PayPal site by manually typing the URL instead. Only then I recalled that my credit card actually was just updated and the old is about to expire. I then went to paypal.com, logged in and updated the expiration date.
Afterwards, this made me think what kind of idiots they are at PayPal; instead of asking about the expiry date during my next payment, they sent me an (unencrypted and unsigned) e-mail, which should be more verboten than anything in the online banking business. Of course, had I actually deleted the message, the damage would have been tiny and I would have realised my error later, but this is just something that teaches people to bad habits; that it might be a good idea to trust at least some of those emails, while it actually isn't.
free toy model of jesus!
I thougt they've now all been replaced by images of prophet Mohammed?
*ducks*
just block all .jpg, .gif and .png images too! After all, they're the most commonly used formats, so one must be in safe after blocking them all!
Oh, wait...
I don't remember how long I was wondering how to run Explorer.exe (and thus, Control Panel) with runAs, before I realised what parent said. It really makes runAs much more useful.
European iPods ship with a volume limiter for this reason.
Perhaps this limiter is suitable for those crappy buds shipped with iPods.
With in-ear buds (in my case Sony MDR EX-71 [1]) I hardly ever turn the volume louder than up to 60% of the maximum of my Euro-iPod mini. And that 60% means that I am in an environment with somewhat noisy backround, like in a tube or in a bus. If I'm sitting at my desk at work 40% is more than enough. Hell, in a silent environment 20% is often enough. (These figures are with sound check turned on.)
But then again, it is not uncommon to see people on gigs without earplugs; actually, most of the people do not seem to use them. People are practically voluntarily opting in for deafness nowadays. Personally, I'm 26 years old and can still hear 20 kHz sounds, so I guess it does matter how do you treat your ears.
[1] Warning: with these buds, in-ear DRM might become installed without your consent. Detection is avoided by installing rootkit to your brain.
Oh, never mind. You see, your parent is an American, so he naturally supposes that you are really drinking it by yourselves, because, you see, they actually are drinking Bud.
OTOH, I'm wondering that you're actually calling it “beer”. Here in Finland we have some stuff called “beer”, whose brand name is “Lapin Kulta”, but I much prefer the name “Lapin kusta” instead. “Kusta” is a partitive case of the word “kusi”; click the “English” link to see, what it actually is...
You don't need that. Just open terminal, and give the following command:When done, you can choose UA string from Debug menu.
(Mentioned here.)
Also, while the already suggested SafariBlock is for sure better than nothing, personally I find PithHelmet better (it costs money, though – whopping $10).
So, randomly chosen new laptops may fail under Windows just as well.
Well, it is by no means impossible. But it is rather unlikely that a new machine would refuse to work with newest available version of Windows, no? (In your case it would have been that XP.) Much more unlikely than that it would refuse to work with newest available version of a frequently updated Linux distro (like Fedora, SuSE or Ubuntu).
Still, single machine can always fail, no matter what OS. You should always test at least a few before drawing any statistical conclusions.
With the “NT kernel” I mean anything that carries NT version number, i.e. Windows 2000 (NT 5.0), Windows XP (NT 5.1) and Windows 2003 (NT 5.2; I'd guess that Vista will be 6.0), and they certainly support USB and other newer HW. I for sure didn't mean NT 4; it had crappy support for HW if any – no power management, no PnP (and thus no USB or FireWire either), not almost anything.
And yes, USB support was added in NT5. I guess it supports SATA too, if drivers for the controller exist.
Personally, I would love to ditch the Windows GUI but keep the NT kernel.
;)
I've also been interested in this idea. I wonder, whether it would be possible to strip out kernel components from NT and install a real Unix-style subsystem on top of it, using GNU[1]- or BSD-derived userland apps. This way there would be an Unix variant with widest possible HW support[2] (though installing those drivers would most likely be somewhat complicated without CSRSS).
[1] Hmm... would this actually mean that we should call such a system system GNU/NT... and whom would the existence of such a beast make ill first: RMS or BillG?
[2]For those who feel obliged to comment to this argument: Yes, I know that Linux actually has pretty wide HW support, and in some cases even much better than Windows has. But to get the point: try to install it into a few randomly chosen new laptops so that everything works out of the box.
An ad blocker for Safari exists: it is called PithHelmet. IMO it is much better than Firefox's adblock extension, though it is not free; it costs $10, but it's worth every cent.
I do realise that grandparent was a joke – after all, it currently scores at "+5, Funny". My parent that currently scores at 0, however, was not, but rather had the attitude that DMCA applies worldwide. So I decided to write a correction.
Did you mean DMCA?
F-Secure is Finnish company; it does not apply (unless they would be sued in United States). Finnish implementation of European Copyright Directive would, but it is not effective until 1.1.2006.