No one is forcing you to apply firmware updates. However, if new features come with those updates you want, then you'll have to balance the "harm" of the updates against what it offers.
Meanwhile, sure, you never signed anything saying you would only use iTunes songs, but Apple never said they'd support that. Meanwhile, feel free to paint your iPod and hack it to death, but don't expect a warranty repair.
As to open systems, if you're really supporting them, why did you buy an iPod? Name one thing about the iPod that is open. And also, if you want open systems and freedom, why are you buying restricted music files?
It's your choice. Apple will do what Apple needs to - you do what you need to.
Personally, I'll keep using my iPod and purchasing songs from Apple. I see no reason to purchase from Real in the first place, especially if my goal is to use them on an iPod.
Pause for a moment and consider the lengths of the bills and how many are proposed. Now consider your reading speed, even with a staff to help synthesize all of the information. Is it any wonder so many unrelated items make their way in? There is no way anyone can process all of that information for every bill - eventually they have to go with their gut and however much they have been able to process. The immediate aftermath of 9/11 was the perfect time for people like John Ashcroft to pounce, and they did. Patriot Act II is going nowhere (IIRC - please correct me if not) because we feel we have enough time to devote to analyzing it. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is already busy striking down some of the egregiousness of the Bush Administration (enemy combatants, violation of Geneva Conventions).
Meanwhile, I echo what others have said - get out there and educate people (NOT on Slashdot). Distill the worst aspects of the act and contrast them DIRECTLY to the Bill of Rights. Just saying "it's evil" will not get Joe Schmoe to care, but once you can show them that what our forefathers fought and died for is being lost, then you might get somewhere and someday large chunks will be overturned.
Until then, Joe Schmoe (frighteningly enough) loves the Patriot Act, because it only affects those with "something to hide".
Perhaps you didn't notice that the "tax rebate" check (if this is the original one from August, 2001) you got was actually a loan against your upcoming tax return (the following year), and you'd actually still owe that money? Everyone got that check and paid it back.
Okay, someone explain this to me then. What's wrong with a national identity card that does *not* link back to a huge central database? Why not just have a card that standardizes the information on the card, where it's located, etc. And a magnetic strip with the same information on it - no more, no less. What exactly is wrong with that? We all (just about) have drivers' licenses, why not standardize them (and the state driving laws, for that matter)?
Sounds to me like whatever setup they had before didn't have an index. I've seen batch jobs that took *days* shrink to a matter of minutes by simply indexing the database and keeping it current.
Oops, you're not, because you're still running under whatever privileges Safari is - you did not just get root access, and the user would be warned at any attempt to gain such privileges.
Nevermind that there are innumerable *worms* on Windows that will be attacking your machine from the moment you plug in an ethernet cable, nevermind surfing to some fictional web site. Go ahead, try building a Windows 2000 or XP system while connected to the internet (to download your patches).
How about a zero-config simple protocol? Take a look at the article and others on Rendezvous - it is a very lightweight, simple protocol that uses existing TCP/IP and DNS to get its job done. Very simple and efficient, which should make it easy to implement in silicon.
Also, as the article mentions Rendezvous (and its less sexy name, ZeroConf) only works on your local subnet, so you don't have to worry about overhead and chattiness with finding your neighbor's equipment as well as that web server in Uzbekistan.
This will also never happen because it would make driving in heavy traffic or hilly areas (or both!) next to impossible.
Don't get me wrong - I absolutely love a manual transmission - much more enjoyable to drive, more efficient, easier to repair, but I'd never drive one to work.
...that the Playstation 2's backwards compatibility was vastly simplified since it used the Playstation 1's main CPU as its audio chip. So when you stick in a PS1 game, it cleverly routes main CPU functions over there, which results in extremely good compatibility without the need for messy and expensive (processor and development-wise) emulation.
Backward compatibility for the XBox2 (if rumors are to be believed) is much more of a herculean task, particularly since with video games people expect it to Just Work (even moreso than a Mac). No if's and's or but's. While I agree that backwards compatibility is a very important feature (especially at launch), it's by no means a trivial one, particularly given the public falling out between Microsoft and NVidia.
This is bull. Look at the progression of Moore's Law on flash memory versus magnetic discs. NOTHING has beat the old Winchester technology all these years, because it works, it's fast, it's cheap, and it improves faster than anything else.
Now, while it IS true that larger isn't always that important (look at Apple's conundrum with ever-larger iPod's - who will need a 1TB iPod in however-many years?), I can easily see a drive manufacturer designing super-cheap drives if they had a more or less guaranteed demand. The reason we don't see uber-cheap drives is because who is going to buy a 20GB drive for $20 when for $50 you can get an 80GB? Or for $90 get a 200GB?
Meanwhile, flash has always been obscenely expensive compared to hard drives. Sure, I can get 256MB of flash memory cheap (witness the PS2 memory cards), but once you get beyond that it gets *really* expensive *really* fast. Games of the future (like Final Fantasy XI) require the space only a hard drive can provide.
Finally, if the XBox and other video game consoles really are moving towards being "convergence" devices, then a hard drive is a prerequisite. I'm sure not going to try streaming my PVR content back to my computer (which means I need a computer, obviating the whole "convergence" thing).
Or place a NAT device (such as a cheap broadband router/firewall) out in front of your computer. Since all of the worms attack via open TCP/IP ports, the NAT device will block them all while allowing you to update your computer. Works every time for me.
WriteNow was written almost entirely in 68K assembler, which is why it was so fast on the original Macs but died after the PowerPC transition.
Word 5.1a was an outstanding product - it had almost all of the features we still need today - basic headers, footers, tables, lists, style sheets, indexing, spell checking, etc, but was only about a meg or less, and the thing *flew*. I also don't recall any stability problems.
Okay, the writer's an ass. Get over it. The guy writing the article is an ass for trying to impose his world view on you (particularly the preposterous claims of reducing folder depth - I find spatiality works *better* with increased depth). His points are poorly chosen and made. But that doesn't mean that spatiality is bad - far from it - it just means this guy is an ass.
The main point of a spatial interface that he fails to emphasize (but mentions briefly in passing) is that every time you open a window everything is exactly as you left it. The icons are in the same spots, the view options are set as they were, the window looks the *same*. Each folder is unique.
I can glance at my screen for a split second and tell you exactly what folders are open, just based on their position and view options - all of the "major" folders have distinctive views set. As I click through windows, I'm already moving the mouse to the next icon because I know exactly where it will be. Although he beat his metaphors to death, it *is* just like a desk. I always keep these files here, I can look at my filer and tell how much I have left to do, etc.
Many of you are using spatiality in your web browsers and not even realizing it. When you open a lot of tabs at once, I'll bet you know instinctively where each site is (Megatokyo, Real Life, then PVP, etc) and don't necessarily have to read the titles - you just know that "that's the one I want". That's spatiality.
The reason spatial interfaces on Windows and most Linuxes have failed is *not* because spatial = bad, but because their implementations have generally sucked. The whole point of a spatial interface is that everything maintains its state - it's where you left it and predictable. Linux and Windows (especially Windows) fail in this regard because thye only seem to keep state for a while, or not in all circumstances. Every so often on Windows all the folders lose their state information. That makes a spatial interface impossible to use effectively.
Recently the Mac (where all of this really got started 20 years ago) has screwed it up with its brushed metal windows that interfere with state maintenance in particularly brain-dead ways. Nautilus is the first really good implementation of a spatial file browser in a long time.
To all of the people touting the explorer view, consider this. How often do you need to copy files and end up scrolling the tree pane up and down, clicking through directory trees, or even try opening two explorer windows at once and resize all over to copy? It happens a lot because you're trying to show the entire directory structure in a window at once, and *that* doesn't scale well. However, having one window for one folder does scale. In a spatial model, I open each folder (maybe by clicking through other folders to it, maybe by using a menu or shortcut) and then drag.
Honestly *try* it for a while. Don't like it? Switch it off. Done.
In my experience (limited as it may be) this is due to the very bloated and inefficient stock kernel that's shipped with the distro. Go in and compile a finely tuned kernel, and you'll be amazed. Fedora Core 2 was dog slow on my dual-CPU PII-400 box, but after a kernel compile it flies (Gnome 2.6 and all).
I know you said you don't like the Keychain, but by using it, you surf to the webpage and... it's already filled in from an encrypted database. Why reinvent the wheel, especially for web logins and such?
Just put your swap on another partition and zero it every so often (any way to do this automatically during shutdown, after VM is suspended?) - that takes care of your passwords in memory. As for programs that store them on disk, they better be encrypted, ala Apple's Keychain.
The major difference has been past behavior. Microsoft has shown time and time again that they will happily screw over their customers every chance they get to maintain their power and profits. While Apple is also a for-profit corporation, their history has shown from the very, very beginning a different philosophy of "changing the world" and making it a better place (as lofty a goal as that may be).
For instance, while we agree DRM is a Bad Thing, if we accept that it is a prerequisite for successful online distribution of music, which would you rather have? Apple's terms or Microsoft's? Who has fought as much as possible for liberal licensing terms (and not opened their stores without them)? What about Apple fighting royalties on MPEG-4 licensing and not releasing Quicktime 6 until they were settled?
Apple has a much better track record of working with us and for us than Microsoft, and as such they get our support.
I started programming as a hobby, got a CS degree, loved it, and still love it. However, that's not my job. When my job included programming a few years back, I grew to hate it.
What I love about programming is the creativity, and setting my own direction. I love being able to create or not at my own pace. When you start doing this as a job, you have deadlines, lack of control, and criteria that must be met. That can quickly poison a favorite hobby.
You connect to port 80 on the remote server - your client box uses a random high port. Firewalls by default will allow return traffic on known outbound traffic flows.
Okay, let's get one thing straight. The only reason Windows is so easily attackable (and why Mac OS X and Linux are not) is that Windows ships with 10 million services running and listening on well-known ports. It's not the registry (although that contributes to instability over time), it's not Windows Update (although that could be much better designed - resumability, and fewer reboots!). The reason Windows is so vulnerable is it has far too many open avenues of attack.
Try to hack a default OS X install, or many default Linux installs - sorry, *no* ports are open by default, so what can you attack? At best you minght be able to DDOS the box, or some upstream piece of network equipment, but you can't crash or hack the box itself.
On my OS X box all I have open is SSH and everything else configured to only listen to localhost. If you manage to crack that, I have a lot more to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
No one is forcing you to apply firmware updates. However, if new features come with those updates you want, then you'll have to balance the "harm" of the updates against what it offers.
Meanwhile, sure, you never signed anything saying you would only use iTunes songs, but Apple never said they'd support that. Meanwhile, feel free to paint your iPod and hack it to death, but don't expect a warranty repair.
As to open systems, if you're really supporting them, why did you buy an iPod? Name one thing about the iPod that is open. And also, if you want open systems and freedom, why are you buying restricted music files?
It's your choice. Apple will do what Apple needs to - you do what you need to.
Personally, I'll keep using my iPod and purchasing songs from Apple. I see no reason to purchase from Real in the first place, especially if my goal is to use them on an iPod.
Pause for a moment and consider the lengths of the bills and how many are proposed. Now consider your reading speed, even with a staff to help synthesize all of the information. Is it any wonder so many unrelated items make their way in? There is no way anyone can process all of that information for every bill - eventually they have to go with their gut and however much they have been able to process. The immediate aftermath of 9/11 was the perfect time for people like John Ashcroft to pounce, and they did. Patriot Act II is going nowhere (IIRC - please correct me if not) because we feel we have enough time to devote to analyzing it. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is already busy striking down some of the egregiousness of the Bush Administration (enemy combatants, violation of Geneva Conventions).
Meanwhile, I echo what others have said - get out there and educate people (NOT on Slashdot). Distill the worst aspects of the act and contrast them DIRECTLY to the Bill of Rights. Just saying "it's evil" will not get Joe Schmoe to care, but once you can show them that what our forefathers fought and died for is being lost, then you might get somewhere and someday large chunks will be overturned.
Until then, Joe Schmoe (frighteningly enough) loves the Patriot Act, because it only affects those with "something to hide".
Perhaps you didn't notice that the "tax rebate" check (if this is the original one from August, 2001) you got was actually a loan against your upcoming tax return (the following year), and you'd actually still owe that money? Everyone got that check and paid it back.
Okay, someone explain this to me then. What's wrong with a national identity card that does *not* link back to a huge central database? Why not just have a card that standardizes the information on the card, where it's located, etc. And a magnetic strip with the same information on it - no more, no less. What exactly is wrong with that? We all (just about) have drivers' licenses, why not standardize them (and the state driving laws, for that matter)?
Sounds to me like whatever setup they had before didn't have an index. I've seen batch jobs that took *days* shrink to a matter of minutes by simply indexing the database and keeping it current.
Almost always?
Oops, you're not, because you're still running under whatever privileges Safari is - you did not just get root access, and the user would be warned at any attempt to gain such privileges.
Nevermind that there are innumerable *worms* on Windows that will be attacking your machine from the moment you plug in an ethernet cable, nevermind surfing to some fictional web site. Go ahead, try building a Windows 2000 or XP system while connected to the internet (to download your patches).
You mean like AirPort Express?
How about a zero-config simple protocol? Take a look at the article and others on Rendezvous - it is a very lightweight, simple protocol that uses existing TCP/IP and DNS to get its job done. Very simple and efficient, which should make it easy to implement in silicon.
Also, as the article mentions Rendezvous (and its less sexy name, ZeroConf) only works on your local subnet, so you don't have to worry about overhead and chattiness with finding your neighbor's equipment as well as that web server in Uzbekistan.
This will also never happen because it would make driving in heavy traffic or hilly areas (or both!) next to impossible.
Don't get me wrong - I absolutely love a manual transmission - much more enjoyable to drive, more efficient, easier to repair, but I'd never drive one to work.
...that the Playstation 2's backwards compatibility was vastly simplified since it used the Playstation 1's main CPU as its audio chip. So when you stick in a PS1 game, it cleverly routes main CPU functions over there, which results in extremely good compatibility without the need for messy and expensive (processor and development-wise) emulation.
Backward compatibility for the XBox2 (if rumors are to be believed) is much more of a herculean task, particularly since with video games people expect it to Just Work (even moreso than a Mac). No if's and's or but's. While I agree that backwards compatibility is a very important feature (especially at launch), it's by no means a trivial one, particularly given the public falling out between Microsoft and NVidia.
This is bull. Look at the progression of Moore's Law on flash memory versus magnetic discs. NOTHING has beat the old Winchester technology all these years, because it works, it's fast, it's cheap, and it improves faster than anything else.
Now, while it IS true that larger isn't always that important (look at Apple's conundrum with ever-larger iPod's - who will need a 1TB iPod in however-many years?), I can easily see a drive manufacturer designing super-cheap drives if they had a more or less guaranteed demand. The reason we don't see uber-cheap drives is because who is going to buy a 20GB drive for $20 when for $50 you can get an 80GB? Or for $90 get a 200GB?
Meanwhile, flash has always been obscenely expensive compared to hard drives. Sure, I can get 256MB of flash memory cheap (witness the PS2 memory cards), but once you get beyond that it gets *really* expensive *really* fast. Games of the future (like Final Fantasy XI) require the space only a hard drive can provide.
Finally, if the XBox and other video game consoles really are moving towards being "convergence" devices, then a hard drive is a prerequisite. I'm sure not going to try streaming my PVR content back to my computer (which means I need a computer, obviating the whole "convergence" thing).
RTFA? Have you not been around that long?
Or place a NAT device (such as a cheap broadband router/firewall) out in front of your computer. Since all of the worms attack via open TCP/IP ports, the NAT device will block them all while allowing you to update your computer. Works every time for me.
WriteNow was written almost entirely in 68K assembler, which is why it was so fast on the original Macs but died after the PowerPC transition.
Word 5.1a was an outstanding product - it had almost all of the features we still need today - basic headers, footers, tables, lists, style sheets, indexing, spell checking, etc, but was only about a meg or less, and the thing *flew*. I also don't recall any stability problems.
Okay, the writer's an ass. Get over it. The guy writing the article is an ass for trying to impose his world view on you (particularly the preposterous claims of reducing folder depth - I find spatiality works *better* with increased depth). His points are poorly chosen and made. But that doesn't mean that spatiality is bad - far from it - it just means this guy is an ass.
The main point of a spatial interface that he fails to emphasize (but mentions briefly in passing) is that every time you open a window everything is exactly as you left it. The icons are in the same spots, the view options are set as they were, the window looks the *same*. Each folder is unique.
I can glance at my screen for a split second and tell you exactly what folders are open, just based on their position and view options - all of the "major" folders have distinctive views set. As I click through windows, I'm already moving the mouse to the next icon because I know exactly where it will be. Although he beat his metaphors to death, it *is* just like a desk. I always keep these files here, I can look at my filer and tell how much I have left to do, etc.
Many of you are using spatiality in your web browsers and not even realizing it. When you open a lot of tabs at once, I'll bet you know instinctively where each site is (Megatokyo, Real Life, then PVP, etc) and don't necessarily have to read the titles - you just know that "that's the one I want". That's spatiality.
The reason spatial interfaces on Windows and most Linuxes have failed is *not* because spatial = bad, but because their implementations have generally sucked. The whole point of a spatial interface is that everything maintains its state - it's where you left it and predictable. Linux and Windows (especially Windows) fail in this regard because thye only seem to keep state for a while, or not in all circumstances. Every so often on Windows all the folders lose their state information. That makes a spatial interface impossible to use effectively.
Recently the Mac (where all of this really got started 20 years ago) has screwed it up with its brushed metal windows that interfere with state maintenance in particularly brain-dead ways. Nautilus is the first really good implementation of a spatial file browser in a long time.
To all of the people touting the explorer view, consider this. How often do you need to copy files and end up scrolling the tree pane up and down, clicking through directory trees, or even try opening two explorer windows at once and resize all over to copy? It happens a lot because you're trying to show the entire directory structure in a window at once, and *that* doesn't scale well. However, having one window for one folder does scale. In a spatial model, I open each folder (maybe by clicking through other folders to it, maybe by using a menu or shortcut) and then drag.
Honestly *try* it for a while. Don't like it? Switch it off. Done.
In my experience (limited as it may be) this is due to the very bloated and inefficient stock kernel that's shipped with the distro. Go in and compile a finely tuned kernel, and you'll be amazed. Fedora Core 2 was dog slow on my dual-CPU PII-400 box, but after a kernel compile it flies (Gnome 2.6 and all).
I know you said you don't like the Keychain, but by using it, you surf to the webpage and... it's already filled in from an encrypted database. Why reinvent the wheel, especially for web logins and such?
Just put your swap on another partition and zero it every so often (any way to do this automatically during shutdown, after VM is suspended?) - that takes care of your passwords in memory. As for programs that store them on disk, they better be encrypted, ala Apple's Keychain.
Says the person who has to filch files from another distro to get his working?
The major difference has been past behavior. Microsoft has shown time and time again that they will happily screw over their customers every chance they get to maintain their power and profits. While Apple is also a for-profit corporation, their history has shown from the very, very beginning a different philosophy of "changing the world" and making it a better place (as lofty a goal as that may be).
For instance, while we agree DRM is a Bad Thing, if we accept that it is a prerequisite for successful online distribution of music, which would you rather have? Apple's terms or Microsoft's? Who has fought as much as possible for liberal licensing terms (and not opened their stores without them)? What about Apple fighting royalties on MPEG-4 licensing and not releasing Quicktime 6 until they were settled?
Apple has a much better track record of working with us and for us than Microsoft, and as such they get our support.
I started programming as a hobby, got a CS degree, loved it, and still love it. However, that's not my job. When my job included programming a few years back, I grew to hate it.
What I love about programming is the creativity, and setting my own direction. I love being able to create or not at my own pace. When you start doing this as a job, you have deadlines, lack of control, and criteria that must be met. That can quickly poison a favorite hobby.
You connect to port 80 on the remote server - your client box uses a random high port. Firewalls by default will allow return traffic on known outbound traffic flows.
RTF... Oh yeah, this is Slashdot. Nevermind...
Okay, let's get one thing straight. The only reason Windows is so easily attackable (and why Mac OS X and Linux are not) is that Windows ships with 10 million services running and listening on well-known ports. It's not the registry (although that contributes to instability over time), it's not Windows Update (although that could be much better designed - resumability, and fewer reboots!). The reason Windows is so vulnerable is it has far too many open avenues of attack.
Try to hack a default OS X install, or many default Linux installs - sorry, *no* ports are open by default, so what can you attack? At best you minght be able to DDOS the box, or some upstream piece of network equipment, but you can't crash or hack the box itself.
On my OS X box all I have open is SSH and everything else configured to only listen to localhost. If you manage to crack that, I have a lot more to worry about.