Having just replaced an iPhone that went swimming myself, I was pleasently surprised to know that if you let the MobileMe service run your life it will also restore the most important parts of your phone. To my pleasent surprise, as I was walking out of the apple store in a mall, entered my mobileme info and before I exited the mall my contacts and cals were all back, mail accounts configured and ready to sync.
Didn't have any of my apps, music or media, but the important stuff was already to go.
At that point, you won't get the option to restore from backup however, which means you have to jump through hoops if you had apps with important data to restore. iTunes still seems to be the best way to restore a phone.
To be blunt, after reading your post, I just think your MIS department is clueless.
Working being done on pirated copies of Windows is still your responsibility, knowing it happens in your building still makes you responsible. Just because you don't own the PC doesn't make it legal nor does it remove you from any responsibility for not stopping it. Its still happening under your roof, its still your responsibility, man up and stop it instead of making excuses.
Have you done any testing with Win7? My guess, but the sound o your whine that you won't be testing it and now that its been released you'll change your battle cry to 'its brand new and we don't support it yet for some new reason!' Yes, he was running a beta OS, you still need to support him until you know it really is a problem with the OS and you need to figure out how you are going to handle it now that Win7 is released since you just lost your excuse to be a whiney bitch.
Not having local admin doesn't prevent you from getting infected, your implication shows that you don't actually know how it works, just that you read slashdot and the news occasionally. Not being a local admin just helps to limit its spread, it can more than likely do all the damage it needs without spreading, but thats for being ignorant.
Your post sounds like a 15 year old kid complaining that work is hard and everything should be free. You are bitching about how everyone seems to think they know more than you, well to be honest I can see why they might think that, you haven't said on think in your rant that has made me think you are competent at your job. I've only been involved in IT support for 15 years or so, so you have a few more years on me and maybe it'll change in the next 5, but I'd fire your whiney ass for incompetence in a heartbeat if you came to me acting like this.
You only backup one specific folder? This is 100% your fault for giving a user a way around it. You backup the entire system, all its drives. You ignore specific files and folders that you know you don't want to backup. When the user moves his files or puts them in a new unexpected place, your backup still covers him. If you use a backup system that doesn't suck and has some intelligence and a single instance store you'll be able to maintain large amounts of snapshots on a relatively small amount of disk space.
You keep spare hardware around? Most of the time its easier to standardize on hardware. If you can't do that, you keep a few types and images to use to get other types working on the different hardware quickly.
Despite that, however, some of you still think that MIS is clueless.
Because of all you have just said, I think you are clueless. You've shown that you think you have a clue while at the same time proving you don't.
You say
Backups working and trustworthy
, but they didn't work for a user, you were just complaining about.
You say
Is the network/server performance adequate to everyone's needs?
Yet people bring in their own laptops so they can get shit done because whatever you've provided them doesn't cut it.
You say
UPS' functioning, generator too?
but probably ignore all the other things that turn off when the power goes out causing people to get up from the battery powered laptops at their desk and take a break anyway.
In short, your rant just proves you are a shitty IT person, thats why you are having problems. People think they are smarter than you because you don't know what you are doing and they can tell. Just because you've been doing it for 20 years doesn't mean you've been doing it RIGHT for 20 years.
Get off your high horse and start doing your job instead of whining like a 15 year old and things may change, otherwise you should probably find a new line of work if you want something different.
Except that we all have to have a general idea of what each word means to each other or the entire communication channel is as useless as cosmic microwave background radiation or static is for, well anything really.
There IS a dictionary, and it does have acceptable meanings for words. You don't get to redefine free to mean the color blue just because there isn't a god given dictionary that says otherwise unless you want to be considered an idiot by everyone else.
And seriously, $DEITY-given dictionary? Are you 15 trying to be trendy and anti-religious? You spent more time trying to be cute than thinking about how retarded your statement actually was.
There isn't really any bickering about what free means, there is just a GPL vs everyone else argument about what free means. GPL means free except when GPL disagrees. The idea behind GPL is great. GPLv2 is great. They have their place in the world and are very useful. They are not however free as in libre for anyone, the license is restrictive. Accept it and the argument will stop, keep denying it and people are going to continue calling you out on it.
No matter how long you hold your breath, stomp your feet and ask daddy Stallman to beat up those who disagree with you, GPL will never be 'free'. You don't want free if you want GPL. The problem is you want GPL and you want to tell everyone else that its in the name of freedom.
People who scream that GPL is free are nothing but politicians who suck as the only ones that believe the chorus line they sing are ones that already are GPL fans, not anyone you are trying to convert. Just stop trying, you don't need to convert anyone, your cult is big enough.
Regardless of what zealots would like you to think, there are limits as to how far GPL's effect can go and no one is going to challenge them.
If the wrapper is network based for instance, i.e. you create a wrapper (also GPL'd) which wraps readline into a network service so that another app that isn't GPL can communicate with readline via sockets ito another process, GPL can not and will never be applied to your library connecting to it.
No one will ever seriously contest this, as doing so means every chunk of software involved in the Internet would all have to abide by every license involved which is impossible anywhere except some fantasyland that Stallman and his cult live in.
So yes, there are ways to wrap GPL apps/libraries and get around the requirement to GPL the other code. The advantage you have with GPL is that they can't revoke your license because they don't like you, or rather, the disadvantage to authors of GPL code.
Microsoft can revoke your license pretty quickly or at least no grant you any new ones if they don't like how you've worked around their rules.
I hadn't really thought about working around GPL this way until you mentioned it, never really had it become a problem for myself. As a general rule if theres any serious library that you would want to link against that is GPL, there is another actually free BSD/MIT/Apache style library that matchs it well enough so you don't have to use the GPL version. I've yet to run into any instance of a library of any importance or side that was GPL only and didn't have a free/open source counterpart. And yes, I'm saying GPL isn't actually free or OS, if that bothers you then flame away cause it won't bother me.
The difference is that the first group you speak of screams that its about 'freedom' when its not, its about what they want you to do. Thats why they are zealots. Say one thing, mean something else. You want to use our stuff, you have complete freedom to do so, except where we say you don't have freedom, and that you must make your stuff exactly like ours.
The second group generally doesn't claim its about freedom while telling you what you can't do. Say what you mean, no hidden agenda, you want to use our stuff, you play by our rules.
GPL and BSD/Apache/MIT differences are very simple. BSD/MIT/Apache allows you to take the code and make changes, distribute the binaries and not the source. GPL requires that if you distribute the binaries you have to distribute the source. GPL effectively takes away one of the freedoms of the BSD license for the developers and grants a freedom to the ones who receive the modified binaries/source.
More specificially, if you look at your last line, what you are effectively saying is that 'if a GPL nut comes a knockin, your code must be GPL licensed', if you have to provide the code as if it were GPL'd, it IS GPL'd. Its GPL from the start, not just because someone came an asked for it. If that were the case than my copy of Linux isn't covered by GPL because you haven't asked for a copy of it.
GPL code can not be released under a BSD/MIT/Apache license unless you own all copyrights because GPL specifically prevents taking away rights granted by it, and BSD/MIT/Apache remove some of those rights and grant ones that are effectively the inverse. GPL provides more rights/freedoms for the recipients of the distributed code and but removes rights/freedoms for the recipients who want to redistribute it themselves in a different way. BSD grants more rights/freedoms to the person distributing a copy of BSD/MIT/Apache code, but one of those freedoms/rights is that they do not have to extend those same rights to the changes that are being redistributed. GPL requires all changes to be GPLed as well, BSD lets you do whatever the hell you want with your changes, it doesn't try to exert its political agenda on you. GPL requires you to follow the exact same rules as the original.
They are different licenses with different, although not entirely conflicting goals.
In america we have cable card, and guess what, we're still stuck with provider boxes that all suck. The industry made sure cablecard was fucked up enough to be practically useless.
TV stations didn't stop showing SG-1, they were just several years behind the actual channel it showed on, which was sci-fi. Its called syndication and its basically like buying the generics. SciFi (or its new faggot name of syfy) shows the first run episodes, 5 seasons into it they start selling season 1 to other stations, then on the 6th season, they sell season 2 to the tv stations.
Its nice that you can lie to yourself and fall for it.
You missed them because they weren't worthless to you. Entertainment is far from worthless. Its very cool that you feel special because now you don't need to watch those shows, but in reality you're just in denial. You wouldn't even be posting if you truely didn't miss them anymore. They wouldn't even come to your mind, but the reality of it is, you still miss TV and you're just trying to convince yourself that you still don't need it and you can continue to resist it.
I typically find that people who are so impressed with themselves for not watching TV have replaced it with something equally 'worthless' such as playing WoW or reading random crap on the Internet and calling it 'educational' or some other BS about why its better.
Its fine that you don't watch TV, but give up with your bullshit excuses and stop trying to convince everyone else that your ability to no longer watch TV is impressive, we really don't give a fuck if you deny yourself something you like in order to prove some point to yourself that only exists in your head.
Opera, Firefox, Safari/Chrome... these are the underdog browsers. Everything else is irrelevant, sorry if your random fork of something else browser isn't a major browser, but if you're a fork or use the rendering engine of one of the 4 main browsers then you are irrelevant at this point.
Funny how some businesses 'must have unions to protect employees' but others don't. Tell me exactly, why is it the only place I see unions are where the employees are treated far better than they are worth and have all sorts of bullshit incentives.
It only works until every state taxes them the same, once everyone taxes them normally they'll stay where they are or move to where it makes sense for real reasons.
Or we can just nationalize all taxes and this sort of bullshit will end. We'll have a bunch of new problems, but this sort of moving and wastefulness because they don't want to support their local services will end.
Someone else does it and geeks and fanboys are happy as a pig in shit about it.
What do you think Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) has done? They largely ignored HTML5 until it started going their way. Then the standard moved towards their work. So its okay because Mozilla does it, but not when MS does it? Grow up fanboy.
I love how apparently no one can communicate without the Internet.
You realize people dealt with this soft of problem before the Internet existed right? People actually... talked to each other... rather than twiting it up or facebooking.
Contrary to popular belief, the Internet is not a requirement to life, you can live without it and do pretty much everything you need to do.
I don't want filtering either, but you're just pushing your own political agenda rather than actually caring about the problem.
Right, cause the effort put into protecting sat tv technology that is well over 20 years old now is the same as a brand new system ID system.
'smart cards' used for sat tv are designed to make it just hard enough that I won't bother to figure out how to do it myself. Any more than that and its too expensive for them to use it on a commercial basis. They aren't trying to make an uncrackable system, they just want most people to pay.
This is how all security works. Almost all of it will still let people through, its just a question of how much effort it takes and therefore who will actually do it.
For IDs there are far easier ways to get a fake ID that cracking any sort of even remotely secure card. Anyone who truely understands security will tell you that its far far easier to social engineer your hack than to actually break most security systems so there isn't a real point in making the security systems more complex.
Even if this is a real hack, its still far easier to give Betty in the office that makes them a $100 bill to take a long restroom break with the door open than to bother cloning a card.
No card needs a private key, if it contains one you've failed. The only thing the card needs is a digital signature signed by a trusted private key that no one who isn't trusted has access to.
The only people that need any private keys are the people who create the cards, and those should be extremely limited and more tightly controlled than nuclear weapons access.
Putting your personal private key to allow you to sign other things on the card may be convenient, but its stupid since you just need to be relatively close to an RFID card to read it, password protection or not. its still a horrible idea.
And what about the red flag that pops up saying 'digital signature verification failed - card tampered with?'
I can change an SSL certificate all day long, and fuck with your SSL connections to modify the data any way I see fit, and your browser can still read it.
It will also be happy to warn you that the SSL connection is using an invalid or unverifiable certificate, and that the data can not be trusted.
You go ahead and do that, and let us all know how well it worked out for you. Visa's chargeback won't help you here, regardless of how 'wrong' you feel it is. Its for when you get ripped off, not for when you don't like what you got.
The funny part is that all those flash-only marketing pages could already have OGL access if anyone wanted it. Theres nothing stopping Flash version 152123112.51 or whatever they are up to this week from supporting OpenGL if anyone actually wanted it.
What's more, it's hardly pointless. Or would you rather go back to the days when if you wanted something cool, like the ability to check the weather, receive email, or watch TV, you'd have to download an untrusted (possibly virus/spyware infested) binary.exe, run it on Windows, and hope it doesn't have some weird incompatibility with everything else on your system?
God I hate this argument. THATS WHAT THE OS IS FOR, which no one seems to understand or willing to fix. We just keep adding more buggy layers that don't actually fix the problem.
We put OSes in VMs as if its a security fence. If the OS can't be made secure, the VM can't either and adding more code is always less secure and has more bugs. ALWAYS.
We put browsers on top of OSes as if its a security fence. If the OS can't be made secure, the VM can't either and adding more code is always less secure and has more bugs. ALWAYS.
Everytime someone comes up with some new middle man it gets worse, not better, and does nothing but add another false sense of security to people who don't understand.
Your browser can't do any the OS doesn't allow it to do. Web apps are portable because we've started to demand that our browsers function with a common set of code and APIs, you can do the same for the OS you know? In fact its been done before, but done just well enough to please pointheaded bosses and still be too much of a pain in the ass to be useful. You may have heard of it, Posix.
I would rather not take the web direction and skip that entire bullshit layer and do it at the OS.
Its not positive feedback, evolution has no concept of positive feedback. Positive feedback is a human concept invented to give us warm fuzzy feelings about doing the right thing.
Evolution and in fact most of nature works purely on negative feedback or lack there of. Evolution doesn't prefer anything what so ever, it just punishes things that are bad for a species by killing it off.
The whole idea of postive feedback is just one of those retarded things people have invented that screws up evolution and results in teenagers and children like we have today that don't listen to anyone, parents included.
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Having just replaced an iPhone that went swimming myself, I was pleasently surprised to know that if you let the MobileMe service run your life it will also restore the most important parts of your phone. To my pleasent surprise, as I was walking out of the apple store in a mall, entered my mobileme info and before I exited the mall my contacts and cals were all back, mail accounts configured and ready to sync.
Didn't have any of my apps, music or media, but the important stuff was already to go.
At that point, you won't get the option to restore from backup however, which means you have to jump through hoops if you had apps with important data to restore. iTunes still seems to be the best way to restore a phone.
To be blunt, after reading your post, I just think your MIS department is clueless.
Working being done on pirated copies of Windows is still your responsibility, knowing it happens in your building still makes you responsible. Just because you don't own the PC doesn't make it legal nor does it remove you from any responsibility for not stopping it. Its still happening under your roof, its still your responsibility, man up and stop it instead of making excuses.
Have you done any testing with Win7? My guess, but the sound o your whine that you won't be testing it and now that its been released you'll change your battle cry to 'its brand new and we don't support it yet for some new reason!' Yes, he was running a beta OS, you still need to support him until you know it really is a problem with the OS and you need to figure out how you are going to handle it now that Win7 is released since you just lost your excuse to be a whiney bitch.
Not having local admin doesn't prevent you from getting infected, your implication shows that you don't actually know how it works, just that you read slashdot and the news occasionally. Not being a local admin just helps to limit its spread, it can more than likely do all the damage it needs without spreading, but thats for being ignorant.
Your post sounds like a 15 year old kid complaining that work is hard and everything should be free. You are bitching about how everyone seems to think they know more than you, well to be honest I can see why they might think that, you haven't said on think in your rant that has made me think you are competent at your job. I've only been involved in IT support for 15 years or so, so you have a few more years on me and maybe it'll change in the next 5, but I'd fire your whiney ass for incompetence in a heartbeat if you came to me acting like this.
You only backup one specific folder? This is 100% your fault for giving a user a way around it. You backup the entire system, all its drives. You ignore specific files and folders that you know you don't want to backup. When the user moves his files or puts them in a new unexpected place, your backup still covers him. If you use a backup system that doesn't suck and has some intelligence and a single instance store you'll be able to maintain large amounts of snapshots on a relatively small amount of disk space.
You keep spare hardware around? Most of the time its easier to standardize on hardware. If you can't do that, you keep a few types and images to use to get other types working on the different hardware quickly.
Because of all you have just said, I think you are clueless. You've shown that you think you have a clue while at the same time proving you don't.
You say
, but they didn't work for a user, you were just complaining about.
You say
Is the network/server performance adequate to everyone's needs?
Yet people bring in their own laptops so they can get shit done because whatever you've provided them doesn't cut it.
You say
UPS' functioning, generator too?
but probably ignore all the other things that turn off when the power goes out causing people to get up from the battery powered laptops at their desk and take a break anyway.
In short, your rant just proves you are a shitty IT person, thats why you are having problems. People think they are smarter than you because you don't know what you are doing and they can tell. Just because you've been doing it for 20 years doesn't mean you've been doing it RIGHT for 20 years.
Get off your high horse and start doing your job instead of whining like a 15 year old and things may change, otherwise you should probably find a new line of work if you want something different.
Asians actually have honor, something most of the rest of the world, including the US, is in very short supply of.
Except that we all have to have a general idea of what each word means to each other or the entire communication channel is as useless as cosmic microwave background radiation or static is for, well anything really.
There IS a dictionary, and it does have acceptable meanings for words. You don't get to redefine free to mean the color blue just because there isn't a god given dictionary that says otherwise unless you want to be considered an idiot by everyone else.
And seriously, $DEITY-given dictionary? Are you 15 trying to be trendy and anti-religious? You spent more time trying to be cute than thinking about how retarded your statement actually was.
There isn't really any bickering about what free means, there is just a GPL vs everyone else argument about what free means. GPL means free except when GPL disagrees. The idea behind GPL is great. GPLv2 is great. They have their place in the world and are very useful. They are not however free as in libre for anyone, the license is restrictive. Accept it and the argument will stop, keep denying it and people are going to continue calling you out on it.
No matter how long you hold your breath, stomp your feet and ask daddy Stallman to beat up those who disagree with you, GPL will never be 'free'. You don't want free if you want GPL. The problem is you want GPL and you want to tell everyone else that its in the name of freedom.
People who scream that GPL is free are nothing but politicians who suck as the only ones that believe the chorus line they sing are ones that already are GPL fans, not anyone you are trying to convert. Just stop trying, you don't need to convert anyone, your cult is big enough.
Regardless of what zealots would like you to think, there are limits as to how far GPL's effect can go and no one is going to challenge them.
If the wrapper is network based for instance, i.e. you create a wrapper (also GPL'd) which wraps readline into a network service so that another app that isn't GPL can communicate with readline via sockets ito another process, GPL can not and will never be applied to your library connecting to it.
No one will ever seriously contest this, as doing so means every chunk of software involved in the Internet would all have to abide by every license involved which is impossible anywhere except some fantasyland that Stallman and his cult live in.
So yes, there are ways to wrap GPL apps/libraries and get around the requirement to GPL the other code. The advantage you have with GPL is that they can't revoke your license because they don't like you, or rather, the disadvantage to authors of GPL code.
Microsoft can revoke your license pretty quickly or at least no grant you any new ones if they don't like how you've worked around their rules.
I hadn't really thought about working around GPL this way until you mentioned it, never really had it become a problem for myself. As a general rule if theres any serious library that you would want to link against that is GPL, there is another actually free BSD/MIT/Apache style library that matchs it well enough so you don't have to use the GPL version. I've yet to run into any instance of a library of any importance or side that was GPL only and didn't have a free/open source counterpart. And yes, I'm saying GPL isn't actually free or OS, if that bothers you then flame away cause it won't bother me.
The difference is that the first group you speak of screams that its about 'freedom' when its not, its about what they want you to do. Thats why they are zealots. Say one thing, mean something else. You want to use our stuff, you have complete freedom to do so, except where we say you don't have freedom, and that you must make your stuff exactly like ours.
The second group generally doesn't claim its about freedom while telling you what you can't do. Say what you mean, no hidden agenda, you want to use our stuff, you play by our rules.
GPL and BSD/Apache/MIT differences are very simple. BSD/MIT/Apache allows you to take the code and make changes, distribute the binaries and not the source. GPL requires that if you distribute the binaries you have to distribute the source. GPL effectively takes away one of the freedoms of the BSD license for the developers and grants a freedom to the ones who receive the modified binaries/source.
More specificially, if you look at your last line, what you are effectively saying is that 'if a GPL nut comes a knockin, your code must be GPL licensed', if you have to provide the code as if it were GPL'd, it IS GPL'd. Its GPL from the start, not just because someone came an asked for it. If that were the case than my copy of Linux isn't covered by GPL because you haven't asked for a copy of it.
GPL code can not be released under a BSD/MIT/Apache license unless you own all copyrights because GPL specifically prevents taking away rights granted by it, and BSD/MIT/Apache remove some of those rights and grant ones that are effectively the inverse. GPL provides more rights/freedoms for the recipients of the distributed code and but removes rights/freedoms for the recipients who want to redistribute it themselves in a different way. BSD grants more rights/freedoms to the person distributing a copy of BSD/MIT/Apache code, but one of those freedoms/rights is that they do not have to extend those same rights to the changes that are being redistributed. GPL requires all changes to be GPLed as well, BSD lets you do whatever the hell you want with your changes, it doesn't try to exert its political agenda on you. GPL requires you to follow the exact same rules as the original.
They are different licenses with different, although not entirely conflicting goals.
Excepting for the fact that twitter is neither stable nor highly available by any means the medical industry would use.
In america we have cable card, and guess what, we're still stuck with provider boxes that all suck. The industry made sure cablecard was fucked up enough to be practically useless.
TV stations didn't stop showing SG-1, they were just several years behind the actual channel it showed on, which was sci-fi. Its called syndication and its basically like buying the generics. SciFi (or its new faggot name of syfy) shows the first run episodes, 5 seasons into it they start selling season 1 to other stations, then on the 6th season, they sell season 2 to the tv stations.
Its nice that you can lie to yourself and fall for it.
You missed them because they weren't worthless to you. Entertainment is far from worthless. Its very cool that you feel special because now you don't need to watch those shows, but in reality you're just in denial. You wouldn't even be posting if you truely didn't miss them anymore. They wouldn't even come to your mind, but the reality of it is, you still miss TV and you're just trying to convince yourself that you still don't need it and you can continue to resist it.
I typically find that people who are so impressed with themselves for not watching TV have replaced it with something equally 'worthless' such as playing WoW or reading random crap on the Internet and calling it 'educational' or some other BS about why its better.
Its fine that you don't watch TV, but give up with your bullshit excuses and stop trying to convince everyone else that your ability to no longer watch TV is impressive, we really don't give a fuck if you deny yourself something you like in order to prove some point to yourself that only exists in your head.
Opera, Firefox, Safari/Chrome ... these are the underdog browsers. Everything else is irrelevant, sorry if your random fork of something else browser isn't a major browser, but if you're a fork or use the rendering engine of one of the 4 main browsers then you are irrelevant at this point.
Funny how some businesses 'must have unions to protect employees' but others don't. Tell me exactly, why is it the only place I see unions are where the employees are treated far better than they are worth and have all sorts of bullshit incentives.
It only works until every state taxes them the same, once everyone taxes them normally they'll stay where they are or move to where it makes sense for real reasons.
Or we can just nationalize all taxes and this sort of bullshit will end. We'll have a bunch of new problems, but this sort of moving and wastefulness because they don't want to support their local services will end.
Hypocrisy is great isn't it.
MS does it and its evil.
Someone else does it and geeks and fanboys are happy as a pig in shit about it.
What do you think Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) has done? They largely ignored HTML5 until it started going their way. Then the standard moved towards their work. So its okay because Mozilla does it, but not when MS does it? Grow up fanboy.
I love how apparently no one can communicate without the Internet.
You realize people dealt with this soft of problem before the Internet existed right? People actually ... talked to each other ... rather than twiting it up or facebooking.
Contrary to popular belief, the Internet is not a requirement to life, you can live without it and do pretty much everything you need to do.
I don't want filtering either, but you're just pushing your own political agenda rather than actually caring about the problem.
Right, cause the effort put into protecting sat tv technology that is well over 20 years old now is the same as a brand new system ID system.
'smart cards' used for sat tv are designed to make it just hard enough that I won't bother to figure out how to do it myself. Any more than that and its too expensive for them to use it on a commercial basis. They aren't trying to make an uncrackable system, they just want most people to pay.
This is how all security works. Almost all of it will still let people through, its just a question of how much effort it takes and therefore who will actually do it.
For IDs there are far easier ways to get a fake ID that cracking any sort of even remotely secure card. Anyone who truely understands security will tell you that its far far easier to social engineer your hack than to actually break most security systems so there isn't a real point in making the security systems more complex.
Even if this is a real hack, its still far easier to give Betty in the office that makes them a $100 bill to take a long restroom break with the door open than to bother cloning a card.
No card needs a private key, if it contains one you've failed. The only thing the card needs is a digital signature signed by a trusted private key that no one who isn't trusted has access to.
The only people that need any private keys are the people who create the cards, and those should be extremely limited and more tightly controlled than nuclear weapons access.
Putting your personal private key to allow you to sign other things on the card may be convenient, but its stupid since you just need to be relatively close to an RFID card to read it, password protection or not. its still a horrible idea.
And what about the red flag that pops up saying 'digital signature verification failed - card tampered with?'
I can change an SSL certificate all day long, and fuck with your SSL connections to modify the data any way I see fit, and your browser can still read it.
It will also be happy to warn you that the SSL connection is using an invalid or unverifiable certificate, and that the data can not be trusted.
You go ahead and do that, and let us all know how well it worked out for you. Visa's chargeback won't help you here, regardless of how 'wrong' you feel it is. Its for when you get ripped off, not for when you don't like what you got.
The funny part is that all those flash-only marketing pages could already have OGL access if anyone wanted it. Theres nothing stopping Flash version 152123112.51 or whatever they are up to this week from supporting OpenGL if anyone actually wanted it.
You and I have different ideas of 'standard'.
God I hate this argument. THATS WHAT THE OS IS FOR, which no one seems to understand or willing to fix. We just keep adding more buggy layers that don't actually fix the problem.
We put OSes in VMs as if its a security fence. If the OS can't be made secure, the VM can't either and adding more code is always less secure and has more bugs. ALWAYS.
We put browsers on top of OSes as if its a security fence. If the OS can't be made secure, the VM can't either and adding more code is always less secure and has more bugs. ALWAYS.
Everytime someone comes up with some new middle man it gets worse, not better, and does nothing but add another false sense of security to people who don't understand.
Your browser can't do any the OS doesn't allow it to do. Web apps are portable because we've started to demand that our browsers function with a common set of code and APIs, you can do the same for the OS you know? In fact its been done before, but done just well enough to please pointheaded bosses and still be too much of a pain in the ass to be useful. You may have heard of it, Posix.
I would rather not take the web direction and skip that entire bullshit layer and do it at the OS.
Its not positive feedback, evolution has no concept of positive feedback. Positive feedback is a human concept invented to give us warm fuzzy feelings about doing the right thing.
Evolution and in fact most of nature works purely on negative feedback or lack there of. Evolution doesn't prefer anything what so ever, it just punishes things that are bad for a species by killing it off.
The whole idea of postive feedback is just one of those retarded things people have invented that screws up evolution and results in teenagers and children like we have today that don't listen to anyone, parents included.
Someone has made the musical keyboard comment, and LCARS won't become a reality because its an absolutely shitty interface.