Heh, remember two worms in quick succession got the entire world riled enough to mumble bad words and consider switching away from Microsoft for a few days.
It's right to be suspicious of all Apple software -it's right to be suspicious of everything you didn't write yourself, and downright paranoid about stuff you did write yourself.:)
If Apple's security and QA stumbles of late have got people thinking about these issues then that's a Good Thing(TM).
Clearly, I *AM* an Apple apologist, but I know nobody and nothing is perfect.
The fire in the firewire wire burns up all the evil before it can reach your computer.
Whereas, all the evil in the universe gets to eat a hearty breakfast that will help keep them regular, on the bus ride to your CPU when you use the other one.
It was turned on by default in my (upgraded from Jaguar) install of Panther. The real problem here is that Apple had all this crap turned on by default, as the article mentions.
Basically, we can all avoid exploits of this ilk by turning off all of the remote authentication protocols in Directory Access.
This is pretty much the same kind of blunder that MS made with XP and the windows file and messaging services, and RedHat (5) used to make with Telnet and Finger and other worthless services.
They thought they were doing their users a favour by shipping with all this junk on by default even though most people don't need it.
What an amazing idiot you are, I realize most people don't even bother to read the article for most of these articles, but even the original post states that it's intended for release in December. Perhaps you should have a look on dictionary.com at the meaning of the word release.
Given that Apple just released a paid upgrade in October, it's not even remotely likely that they'd release one in December. For all the amazing bullshit spouted by one-eyed pro-apple people, there's an equal and opposite amount spouted by anti-apple morons like you.
It's been my experience that Apple's batteries and power supplies are crappier than any other big-name laptop manufacturers.
I own a Compaq Armada 1592DT from 1998 that's still getting over 2 hours of battery life.
I own a Toshiba Toughbook CF 27 from 2000 that's still good for more than 2 hours of battery life.
I've owned a few other Li-Ion laptops here and there that just didn't cut it feature wise and I've sold on, and of the two I know of, their batteries are still going strong 2+ years on, and all of them are still on their first power supply.
On the other hand, everyone I know (6 people) who own an Apple laptop manufactured in the last 5-6 years has had to replace either their battery or power supply within 18 months of buying their machine.
My own PowerBook G4 has been through 3 power supplies and one battery in 18 months. Not only that, but the AppleCare 3 year extended warranty I paid NZ $600 for doesn't cover batteries or power supplies.
Since the last power supply and the battery failure happened out of the 1 year warranty, Apple refused to replace them under warranty, even though I purchased one of their extended warranties. Hardly the way I'd expect someone who dropped NZD $7300 on a PowerBook G4 and extended warranty less than 18 months ago.
Pretty piss-poor performance on Apple's part (given the vague wording in the version of AppleCare T&C delivered in the box), and fortunately in New Zealand, totally and utterly illegal.
My advice to anyone in New Zealand who gets screwed over by Apple's battery policy, and their dodgy extended warranty (the word "battery" is not mentioned in the printed T&C sold with my AppleCare plan) is to take the store who sold it to you to the Disputes Tribunal and force the store to give you a replacement under the Consumer Guarantees Act (1993), which guarantees that items will last a "fair and reasonable" amount of time.
18 months is clearly NOT a fair and reasonable amount of time for a $6700 computer to fail to be usable for it's stated purpose as a portable computer
It costs $25 to file a claim, and if you can prove that the batteries/power supplies in similar products have (or should have) lasted longer, then you have a guaranteed winner.
Small price to pay for a new battery and the satisfaction of screwing over a dealer selling a premium priced product with shoddy componentry that is essential to their product functioning as advertised.
Hopefully, once enough Apple dealers either complain to Apple HQ or go out of business from having to pay for replacement parts out of their own pocket. Apple will either amend their T&C to make their warranty legal, or just stop selling their products here.
Either way, it will stop other people from getting sucked into buying an expensive lemon from a company so arrogant and unresponsive to customers that their dealers have to be singled out and hauled up before an adjudicator before they'll fulfill their legal rights.
You can't seriously believe market share has anything to do with whether a company can deliver a consistent platform.
If Apple commanded 90% of the home computer market, like it used to, back in the dark ages, they still wouldn't have to deal with a mish-mash of commodity hardware like Windows and Linux does, because they basically make the whole computer and control the platform with an iron fist.
It has a lot more to do with Apple's clinging to an ancient computer-business model than it does with the amount of people using their stuff.
The "filesystem is a database" concept was actually proposed years ago by Microsoft (I made a stab at finding a link, but couldn't recall enough information to find it), I believe the feature was intended for Windows NT 4. It seems that implementing such a system is far harder than envisioning and marketing it, so I'll take Microsoft's promises about it appearing in 2005 with more than just a grain of salt.
Apple on the other hand, have one of the few people to have created a successful and proven database-backed filesystem in Dominic Giampolo (the creator of BeFS). His influence at Apple can already be seen in the form of the journaling HFS+ filesystem in Jaguar and Panther. It's unlikely that he's spent all his time making background defragmentation and journaling hacks to the old filesystem, so I think there's reasonable grounds to suspect that by the time [and if] WinFS becomes available to the wider public, Apple will have something to match it, and most likely Linux will too -by the looks of the plugin architecture for ReiserFS.
Here's hoping that this is the beginning of a long overdue softening of the whole files-and-folders metaphor that likens our harddrives and data to a filing cabinet, and imposes a bunch of real-world limitations on something that's really quite abstract. Go the database-backed filesystem!:)
You can use another browser instead, but the majority of IE continues to be loaded into memory at startup in the form of DLLs, Just in case you want to fire up IE for some reason.
Also, unless you don't like upgrading your software, you won't try to disable IE, because if you do, you can say goodbye to Windows Update if you use any browser but IE.
Back to the original point though, there is no way to uninstall IE from any version of windows without downgrading libraries to a previous version of windows that didn't integrate IE into the operating system.
Caveat: Although it is technically possible to remove IE using software from litePC.net, that option barely qualifies because it requires a level of knowledge that goes far beyond being intelligent enough to select a different browser, it also breaks compatibility with some software, only removes IE from Windows 98, and reintruduces some bugs from Windows 95.
Case in point: I tried to help a friend troubleshoot a network card in his Mac a couple of years back - there were no options to tweak, no settings exposed to the end user for fear that they might break something. If it conflicted with an existing piece of hardware - you were screwed. In the end, he had to simply return it and try another brand.
Firstly, all this proves is that you're a PC guy and don't have a clue about debugging hardware issues on Macs, If you're talking about OS X, you'd need to pass any settings to the kernel as you load the kext to change IO settings, and most other settings (duplex etc) can be changed via ifconfig. On the other hand, if you're talking about OS 9, then you're just being a troll, because you mentioned above that you know everything is different in OS X.
If I put a supported network card into a Linux box and it doesn't work, I don't automatically think "Jeez, there must be some options I have to tweak", I think "Fucked". The same goes for Windows once the driver is installed.
If that happens, I take it back and swap it for the next least expensive card that should work with Linux for my purposes. That's because in the modern world of PCI, the card and BIOS should work out between themselves what Memory and IRQ settings they are going to use, so as not to stomp on any other PCI or PnP devices. All this happens before the OS even starts.
The lesson to be learned from your experience is that you don't automatically know everything about every computer in existence simply because you know a lot about PCs and Windows, and that if a network card doesn't work when you plug it in, you might as well find another one straight away.
You're telling me to grow up, yet you seem the one unable to respond to criticism in an adult way. This isn't the schoolyard. If you can't put together a coherent post, don't expect me to respond in anything other than a completely patronizing way.
Personally, I wish someone had written an open source version of the DSL card I have that's gathering dust, and wistful looks, instead of a binary driver that only works with RedHat's version of the 2.4.2 kernel.
The 2.4.2 kernel has remote security holes that make NAT unsafe, rendering the card useless for me, (and not through any fault of it's creator either, other than that it's closed source) and the company is now defunct.
I have given/thrown away a few bits of old hardware that I would have used except that there are no drivers except for Windows 9x/3.11
I see that people are working on ways to make some Windows drivers work under Linux, while no-one seems to be talking about making a stable ABI for Linux binary drivers. So I'm endorsing an approach that doesn't require manufacturers to think about Linux (they don't seem to anyway), and doesn't require separate binary drivers with their accompanying kernel dependencies, because it uses the driver that the manufacturer made.
Since it would be non-native, purists and performance-hungry coders might well still write open source versions of the drivers, thus ensuring that the devices stay usable long after Linux replaces Windows and the Windows driver compatibility is confined to the annals of history.
All I am doing is espousing my opinion, and hoping someone takes notice, other than to quote me out of context after misreading my original comment.:)
You expect people who are in the wrong to be happy?
Sorry, I wasn't aware that there was anything else in that post that was a question, or deserved a response.
I saw someone quote me out of context, who rather than re-reading the original post, degenerate to name-calling, before asking me a seemingly unrelated question.
I care, because at least if Jack Smith of Nowhere, Iowa reverse engineered it, then BigCorp who made my device can't stop me from using it with the next version of whatever OS the driver is for. Discontinued, or non-existent support has determined my hardware and OS choices over other factors like for instance merit many times.
"Their experience leads me to think that some kind of stable ABI is needed to allow device drivers to be distributed in a binary form."
"and after all who wants more binary-only cruft floating around?"
"Besides, having Linux native drivers might only serve to discourage people from creating open-source versions of the drivers."
Huh? Well which is it?
In the english language, we have a thing called context, since you can't even be bothered quoting in context, or reading things in context, I won't bother replying. Try again.
Slashdot Mirror
Hope you don't rip Bill's anus when your cock spasms from Darl's orgasm,
Heh, remember two worms in quick succession got the entire world riled enough to mumble bad words and consider switching away from Microsoft for a few days.
:)
It's right to be suspicious of all Apple software -it's right to be suspicious of everything you didn't write yourself, and downright paranoid about stuff you did write yourself.
If Apple's security and QA stumbles of late have got people thinking about these issues then that's a Good Thing(TM).
Clearly, I *AM* an Apple apologist, but I know nobody and nothing is perfect.
No, that's N/F for not funny.
Much like this post.
The fire in the firewire wire burns up all the evil before it can reach your computer.
Whereas, all the evil in the universe gets to eat a hearty breakfast that will help keep them regular, on the bus ride to your CPU when you use the other one.
Hope that clears things up.
It was turned on by default in my (upgraded from Jaguar) install of Panther. The real problem here is that Apple had all this crap turned on by default, as the article mentions.
Basically, we can all avoid exploits of this ilk by turning off all of the remote authentication protocols in Directory Access.
This is pretty much the same kind of blunder that MS made with XP and the windows file and messaging services, and RedHat (5) used to make with Telnet and Finger and other worthless services.
They thought they were doing their users a favour by shipping with all this junk on by default even though most people don't need it.
What an amazing idiot you are, I realize most people don't even bother to read the article for most of these articles, but even the original post states that it's intended for release in December. Perhaps you should have a look on dictionary.com at the meaning of the word release.
Given that Apple just released a paid upgrade in October, it's not even remotely likely that they'd release one in December. For all the amazing bullshit spouted by one-eyed pro-apple people, there's an equal and opposite amount spouted by anti-apple morons like you.
It's been my experience that Apple's batteries and power supplies are crappier than any other big-name laptop manufacturers.
I own a Compaq Armada 1592DT from 1998 that's still getting over 2 hours of battery life.
I own a Toshiba Toughbook CF 27 from 2000 that's still good for more than 2 hours of battery life.
I've owned a few other Li-Ion laptops here and there that just didn't cut it feature wise and I've sold on, and of the two I know of, their batteries are still going strong 2+ years on, and all of them are still on their first power supply.
On the other hand, everyone I know (6 people) who own an Apple laptop manufactured in the last 5-6 years has had to replace either their battery or power supply within 18 months of buying their machine.
My own PowerBook G4 has been through 3 power supplies and one battery in 18 months. Not only that, but the AppleCare 3 year extended warranty I paid NZ $600 for doesn't cover batteries or power supplies.
Since the last power supply and the battery failure happened out of the 1 year warranty, Apple refused to replace them under warranty, even though I purchased one of their extended warranties. Hardly the way I'd expect someone who dropped NZD $7300 on a PowerBook G4 and extended warranty less than 18 months ago.
Pretty piss-poor performance on Apple's part (given the vague wording in the version of AppleCare T&C delivered in the box), and fortunately in New Zealand, totally and utterly illegal.
My advice to anyone in New Zealand who gets screwed over by Apple's battery policy, and their dodgy extended warranty (the word "battery" is not mentioned in the printed T&C sold with my AppleCare plan) is to take the store who sold it to you to the Disputes Tribunal and force the store to give you a replacement under the Consumer Guarantees Act (1993), which guarantees that items will last a "fair and reasonable" amount of time.
18 months is clearly NOT a fair and reasonable amount of time for a $6700 computer to fail to be usable for it's stated purpose as a portable computer
It costs $25 to file a claim, and if you can prove that the batteries/power supplies in similar products have (or should have) lasted longer, then you have a guaranteed winner.
Small price to pay for a new battery and the satisfaction of screwing over a dealer selling a premium priced product with shoddy componentry that is essential to their product functioning as advertised.
Hopefully, once enough Apple dealers either complain to Apple HQ or go out of business from having to pay for replacement parts out of their own pocket. Apple will either amend their T&C to make their warranty legal, or just stop selling their products here.
Either way, it will stop other people from getting sucked into buying an expensive lemon from a company so arrogant and unresponsive to customers that their dealers have to be singled out and hauled up before an adjudicator before they'll fulfill their legal rights.
* END RANT *
It seems odd that you didn't take into consideration whether the device you're buying would actually work on your computer before buying it.
The problem is that you bought because of the price or on impulse, not that Linux doesn't support the device you bought.
Think of it this way;
"I bought this cheap set of tyres from the Daewoo dealer, and they don't fit my Ford Explorer, stupid Ford! stupid Daewoo!"
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd prefer to leave support for your Sony digicam out of the Debian install on my transparent proxy machine.
You can't seriously believe market share has anything to do with whether a company can deliver a consistent platform.
If Apple commanded 90% of the home computer market, like it used to, back in the dark ages, they still wouldn't have to deal with a mish-mash of commodity hardware like Windows and Linux does, because they basically make the whole computer and control the platform with an iron fist.
It has a lot more to do with Apple's clinging to an ancient computer-business model than it does with the amount of people using their stuff.
Works for them though.
Heh, slashdot ate my tag. :D
Two things to remember in future.
1) Plain Old Text is not so plain
2) Always preview, even when drunk
Yeah, like we're going to take advice from the illuminati. Go back to your freemasons meeting you evil NWO member
The "filesystem is a database" concept was actually proposed years ago by Microsoft (I made a stab at finding a link, but couldn't recall enough information to find it), I believe the feature was intended for Windows NT 4. It seems that implementing such a system is far harder than envisioning and marketing it, so I'll take Microsoft's promises about it appearing in 2005 with more than just a grain of salt.
:)
Apple on the other hand, have one of the few people to have created a successful and proven database-backed filesystem in Dominic Giampolo (the creator of BeFS). His influence at Apple can already be seen in the form of the journaling HFS+ filesystem in Jaguar and Panther. It's unlikely that he's spent all his time making background defragmentation and journaling hacks to the old filesystem, so I think there's reasonable grounds to suspect that by the time [and if] WinFS becomes available to the wider public, Apple will have something to match it, and most likely Linux will too -by the looks of the plugin architecture for ReiserFS.
Here's hoping that this is the beginning of a long overdue softening of the whole files-and-folders metaphor that likens our harddrives and data to a filing cabinet, and imposes a bunch of real-world limitations on something that's really quite abstract. Go the database-backed filesystem!
glibc is supposedly portable
:D
Oh you mean like my PowerBook with a dud battery?
Huh?
OS X users can already apt-get to their heart's content (albeit for lower values of content) here
You CAN'T uninstall IE.
You can use another browser instead, but the majority of IE continues to be loaded into memory at startup in the form of DLLs, Just in case you want to fire up IE for some reason.
Also, unless you don't like upgrading your software, you won't try to disable IE, because if you do, you can say goodbye to Windows Update if you use any browser but IE.
Back to the original point though, there is no way to uninstall IE from any version of windows without downgrading libraries to a previous version of windows that didn't integrate IE into the operating system.
Caveat:
Although it is technically possible to remove IE using software from litePC.net, that option barely qualifies because it requires a level of knowledge that goes far beyond being intelligent enough to select a different browser, it also breaks compatibility with some software, only removes IE from Windows 98, and reintruduces some bugs from Windows 95.
Case in point: I tried to help a friend troubleshoot a network card in his Mac a couple of years back - there were no options to tweak, no settings exposed to the end user for fear that they might break something. If it conflicted with an existing piece of hardware - you were screwed. In the end, he had to simply return it and try another brand.
Firstly, all this proves is that you're a PC guy and don't have a clue about debugging hardware issues on Macs, If you're talking about OS X, you'd need to pass any settings to the kernel as you load the kext to change IO settings, and most other settings (duplex etc) can be changed via ifconfig. On the other hand, if you're talking about OS 9, then you're just being a troll, because you mentioned above that you know everything is different in OS X.
If I put a supported network card into a Linux box and it doesn't work, I don't automatically think "Jeez, there must be some options I have to tweak", I think "Fucked". The same goes for Windows once the driver is installed.
If that happens, I take it back and swap it for the next least expensive card that should work with Linux for my purposes. That's because in the modern world of PCI, the card and BIOS should work out between themselves what Memory and IRQ settings they are going to use, so as not to stomp on any other PCI or PnP devices. All this happens before the OS even starts.
The lesson to be learned from your experience is that you don't automatically know everything about every computer in existence simply because you know a lot about PCs and Windows, and that if a network card doesn't work when you plug it in, you might as well find another one straight away.
I beg your pardon?
You're telling me to grow up, yet you seem the one unable to respond to criticism in an adult way. This isn't the schoolyard. If you can't put together a coherent post, don't expect me to respond in anything other than a completely patronizing way.
You're wasting my time, now go away.
Fair enough, I say.
:)
Personally, I wish someone had written an open source version of the DSL card I have that's gathering dust, and wistful looks, instead of a binary driver that only works with RedHat's version of the 2.4.2 kernel.
The 2.4.2 kernel has remote security holes that make NAT unsafe, rendering the card useless for me, (and not through any fault of it's creator either, other than that it's closed source) and the company is now defunct.
I have given/thrown away a few bits of old hardware that I would have used except that there are no drivers except for Windows 9x/3.11
I see that people are working on ways to make some Windows drivers work under Linux, while no-one seems to be talking about making a stable ABI for Linux binary drivers. So I'm endorsing an approach that doesn't require manufacturers to think about Linux (they don't seem to anyway), and doesn't require separate binary drivers with their accompanying kernel dependencies, because it uses the driver that the manufacturer made.
Since it would be non-native, purists and performance-hungry coders might well still write open source versions of the drivers, thus ensuring that the devices stay usable long after Linux replaces Windows and the Windows driver compatibility is confined to the annals of history.
All I am doing is espousing my opinion, and hoping someone takes notice, other than to quote me out of context after misreading my original comment.
You expect people who are in the wrong to be happy?
Sorry, I wasn't aware that there was anything else in that post that was a question, or deserved a response.
I saw someone quote me out of context, who rather than re-reading the original post, degenerate to name-calling, before asking me a seemingly unrelated question.
What was I wrong about again?
I care, because at least if Jack Smith of Nowhere, Iowa reverse engineered it, then BigCorp who made my device can't stop me from using it with the next version of whatever OS the driver is for. Discontinued, or non-existent support has determined my hardware and OS choices over other factors like for instance merit many times.
I'm very happy indeed, thanks for asking! :)
Fair enough matey, and I'll believe Apple over you.
"Their experience leads me to think that some kind of stable ABI is needed to allow device drivers to be distributed in a binary form."
"and after all who wants more binary-only cruft floating around?"
"Besides, having Linux native drivers might only serve to discourage people from creating open-source versions of the drivers."
Huh? Well which is it?
In the english language, we have a thing called context, since you can't even be bothered quoting in context, or reading things in context, I won't bother replying. Try again.