You almost certainly don't want this phone. It's not a consumer phone - it's for developers to get started. If we (developers) wind up creating something amazing, then FIC is expecting to make more hardware. Right now GSM is the choice because it's ubiquitous - the only place you can't get it is Japan and Korea, where they already have such wicked cool phones that the Linux bit wouldn't be worth anything anyway.
GPRS is the choice because it's generally not restricted. Supposedly it's relatively easy to connect to GPRS without the provider's help, but a lot harder to connect to EDGE. Dunno how true that is, but that was the rationale for using GPRS. It would be nice if the consumer model had support for EDGE.
But the main point is that what this phone is doing is something different. Normal phones you get from your cell provider are disposable, and they have to be, because they generally suck. The hardware is great, don't get me wrong, but the software usually bites, and you can't fix it. My Samsung t809 won't sync with my Prius because of some stupid handshaking glitch. There's never going to be a firmware update for that. If the OpenMoko doesn't sync with my Prius, what to do? Fix it. I don't have to try to get Samsung to fix it. I don't have to listen to Samsung and Toyota blame each other for the problem. I just fix it. You, if you don't want to hack the phone yourself, wait for me to fix it. It's a really good deal from that perspective.
Likewise, my t809, which is a really sweet piece of software, has an alarm tone that genuinely pisses me off. It's an earworm. If I use the alarm on the t809, I'm hearing it in my head the rest of the day. I'd like to use a different alarm tone. But I can't. Because it's a closed-source phone, and they didn't think to let me install a different alarm tone. They weren't trying to screw me - they just didn't think of it. On the Neo, I can just hack the software if it's not configurable.
My t809 doesn't support stereo bluetooth. The fix? Buy a new phone. Two years later, when my old contract expires. Lame. On the Neo? A simple matter of programming. It probably already works - I haven't tried it because I don't have the phone yet. But if it doesn't work, I have the source code, I can fix it.
My Macbook won't work with the modem in my t809. So I have EDGE support, but I can't use it. On the Neo, as long as I can get the Neo to talk to the network, I can just have it do IP over the bluetooth, with NAT, so that my Mac has access to the Net at the same time that my Neo has access to the net. Doesn't work? Use the source, Luke.
So yeah, the Neo is really under-featured, if you're into cell phone cameras. But if you're into flexibility, and not being locked in to a broken phone for two years at a time, I think it's got possibilities.
No. It's harder to read in the second case. That's why you need an intelligent editor, not a dumb editor. You want the editor to lay it out so that it's easy to read, not so that it's eighty columns (or not eighty columns). The columns question is a red herring.
Nonsense. Getting it to line up correctly is a simple matter of programming. You're right that a stupid text editor will do the wrong thing, but that's precisely the point I was making - why are we still using such stupid text editors?
We've had 132-column terminals for a long time, but what I generally tend to jones for is taller, not wider. With a taller screen, you see more code. Then there's the whole issue of saccades, which is why for example newspapers do not run sentences horizontally across the entire page, but rather split the page up into columns. Your eye gets confused when the line gets too long - it's easier to read when there are fewer words on the screen. I suspect that when you use a lot of studlyCapsVariableNames that the eye tends to treat the whole variable as a single word, but there's still going to be a limit.
The question I would ask is a different one: why are we using such primitive typography in our text editors? We used to see all these *beautiful* demos of text editors that used proportional fonts, boldfacing, and the like, but you *never* see that in a production system. Some other folks here have mentioned automatic line breaking. One of the problems with that is that you want the bare text to look clean even when you're not in the fancy editor, but you can just have the editor automatically indent to the existing style in the text, but show you the style you prefer.
The programming editor technology we're using today is still very primitive. That's why coding styles are 80 columns.
The article says, in the third paragraph, "these results are very preliminary." It goes on to say that there is no certainty that this is the problem; rather, it's just repeating something that we've suspected for quite some time, with more data: they've actually identified genetic material from a number of viruses and a particular fungus. And if the problem turns out to be that fungus, there may be an antibiotic that will take care of the problem. This is/not/ the same thing as saying that they/know/ what the problem is.
The idea that it was cell phones is fairly ridiculous, since cell phone tower buildouts have been going on for years - you can't really point at cell phone towers as something that changed/this/ season. So we didn't need this article to know that it probably wasn't cell phone towers. Unfortunately, at this juncture we really don't know what's going on - we just have more data. Data + theory != fact. Hopefully the guy's right and the antibiotic works, though. It'd be scary if it didn't turn out that way.
If you just treat it like any other copyrighted work, you are abiding by the terms of the license. So saying you don't have to abide by the terms of the license if you just treat it like any other copyrighted work is nonsensical.
The GPL is a license. You have to abide by the terms of the license, or when you make a copy of the code you are violating the law. The terms of the license are pretty reasonable, and it's relatively unlikely that an average person would unknowingly violate them, but that doesn't mean you don't have to follow them. You're right that it's not a contract, but it is a license.
So in that sense, a click-through is a good idea. Whether it needs to be twenty paragraphs of legalese is another story. It might help to spread the word if instead of seeing the GPL, you just see some plain english, like this:
This is Free Software. What that means is that you are Free to use it, and others are Free to use it as well. This software is licensed under the GNU Public License. Briefly, this means that if you modify or redistribute this software, the only freedom that you do not have is the freedom to restrict others' freedom to use and share this software.
[Done]
I don't think there's anything wrong with encouraging people to know what they are getting into, and with trying to help them to understand what the point of free software is. I think that showing them a copy of the GPL in its full detail is probably not the best way to do that, but I think a better way to undermine the idea of long legalese that you click through to get to use some piece of software is a short click-through, rather than no click-through. No click-through doesn't really say anything at all.
In general, when you buy a copy of a Microsoft product, with all due respect to Microsoft, what you are getting is exactly the same level of support that you get when you download a copy of Ubuntu Linux. Actually, you're getting better support, because a lot of times you can actually get a question answered by someone knowledgeable if it's about an FOSS product, whereas you will _never_ get to talk to a Microsoft engineer. So if the Microsoft product works, great, but if it doesn't, you're SOL, because you can't get support for it, and you can't support it yourself. The same thing from an FOSS vendor gets you the source code, which you can fix yourself if you have to.
I don't really get the business model of a company like Redhat, but I don't use their software anyway. I run Ubuntu, and there just aren't any issues.
Now, you used the example of Qt. Qt isn't actually strictly speaking FOSS. You can get it as FOSS if you are an FOSS developer. But if you are not, as you've discovered, you have to pay a license fee. The license fee is for proprietary software, not for FOSS software. The very same software, under an FOSS license, is free.
Embedded Linux? Why are you using it, if your business model isn't FOSS? If it's so that you can have the source and hack on it, then get the source and hack on it. If it's because you want service, make your purchasing decision based on who provides the best service. If there is no FOSS vendor that's competitive, run VxWorks. Don't come crying to me, though, if you decide later on that you don't like the feature set. You could always run WinCE, you know...
Here's the second paragraph from the WifiNetNews article you referenced:
I have not, in fact, spoken to Maynor and Ellch, which may be an oversight, but when colleagues have offered to get me in touch, it has come with a proviso that I will learn non-disclosable information. Id rather not be in that position (yet).
That seems to confirm my theory, not your rebuttal.:'/
The way these things work is that when someone hacks your hardware, you get an injunction to stop them from talking about it. If they talk about it, they go to jail for contempt of court. If you were to RTFA, you might get the very strong impression that he's under an injunction of this type.
It's always fun to look for bad guys in situations like this, but both Apple and Mr. "Cache" here are wearing white hats. You want both of them to be doing what they're doing, and it's lame to make it into a flame war. You want Mr. Cache breaking drivers, because then they get fixed, and your Mac doesn't get 0wned when you're down at Starbucks watching YouTube videos.
And you want Apple to try to dissuade him from publishing his hack, because you want them to fix it before every random hacker figures it out, and the sooner he publishes, the sooner the black hats will have an exploit. So if Apple doesn't get him to stop talking, maybe your Mac will get 0wned down at *$$.
But you still want Apple to be paranoid about the information getting out, so that they release the bug fix quickly, not slowly. And so what he's done with this article is useful, because he's basically said how the hack works, and now presumably the black hats are working on trying to duplicate the hack. And Apple knows this, and so the patch release will probably come sooner. And so your laptop won't get 0wned at *$$. W00t!
What I don't see here is bluster. This isn't high school. People don't get up on stage at defcon and claim to have hacked something they didn't really hack. The reason they do these hacks is to improve security, not to count coup. You owe the guy your thanks, not your hopes that his reputation is ruined.
So the point of this language is that if you go to work for company X, and become an expert in company X's product, and then decide that you can do a revolutionary improvement on that product, while you are working at company X, and then you leave company X and go into competition, company X can own your ass. There's a reason why this language is in the contract - it's because that used to happen a lot.
As a consultant, you can't afford to sign a contract like this if you are already an expert, because it would prevent you from getting more work doing the same thing. But as an employee, when you _aren't_ already an expert, this isn't a completely unreasonable thing for an employer to ask of you.
To put this in perspective, consider that I am an expert in DHCP. I wrote one of the most widely used DHCP servers out there. I work for a company that makes another DHCP server, which has some substantial innovations over the one I originally wrote. If I were to leave my company and set up shop immediately selling a competitive product, that would be pretty lame, wouldn't it?
Now on the other hand, if my company wanted me to do no further work in the field of software in general for two years, that would be a *big* problem - essentially, I'd be unable to quit my job if I wanted to.
And what I've seen in legal cases revolving around this here in the U.S., is that in general if they try to stop me from marketing my own DHCP server, they'll probably succeed, and if they try to stop me from working as a geek, they'll fail. The closer to the DHCP extreme I get, the more likely I am to lose. The closer to the geek extreme they get, the more likely they are to lose.
For what it's worth, the best thing to do here is not be an asshole, and check to make sure you're not taking a job working for assholes. Because the *last* thing you want to be doing is engaging in any kind of legal action with a former employer, particularly over copyrights or patents.
1. Employee does something that runs counter to the company's stated policy in an important way. Bad employee - no biscuit.
2. Employee tells the truth when lying might have saved their job. Good person - refused to lie even when lying seemed to be of benefit.
There's no reason to mix these two - they're separate actions. One's a mistake, one's a sign of character. So of the mistake, you say "oh shit, that was really stupid, I wish I hadn't done that." And of the truth-telling, you say "yay, I'm glad I did that."
When you try to mix the two, it wrecks the good taste of telling the truth. Don't regret doing the right thing. Just take this lesson forward and try to avoid doing the wrong thing in the future.
--Speaking as one who was burned by exactly this kind of thinking in high school, and wasted a lot of emotional energy on it.
I think the conclusion that he draws is probably correct, but he doesn't really seem to explain why. The reason that systems like OS X and Linux are safer than Windows is not that launchd runs a shell, but that both Linux and OS X tend to run processes that don't need privileges as root.
This is a substantial win. However, if you manage to compromise a process that is running as root, you do have full control of the machine, and you can install your own privileged software on the machine without an authentication prompt appearing on the console.
Also, most of the man pages on OS X are woefully out of date, so giving the existence of these as a reason for why security is better on OS X is unfortunately a cruel joke. Third party apps from the Open Source community do often have better documentation, but the basic man pages from OS X are often years out of date - this is one of my pet peeves about OS X, I will admit.
It sounds like the hack he's describing occurred because he'd installed third-party software that ran as a service with an open port, as SYSTEM (i.e., with full privileges) and that took over his machine. The reason this is less likely (not impossible, just less likely) is because if you are running a third party server process on OS X, it's probably a piece of open source software like Apache, which has been vetted to within an inch of its life, because it is open source, and the many people who care that it is secure have the freedom to check that it is secure. And it probably doesn't run with full privileges, as the author says.
Anyway, like I said, he's right, but his reasoning is a little foggy. And it's important to be aware of the ways in which it's foggy, because this is your best chance of avoiding having your machine hacked.
There was interesting stuff in the article, but much of what he said was just inaccurate. He credits Unix with being the first operating system that did paging. I don't think so. Furthermore, what he said about Stallman's motivation isn't even accurate - Stallman came out of the MIT LISP Machine crowd, and (rightly!) thought Unix was primitive by comparison. He originally wanted GNU to have a filesystem like TOPS-20, with versions. And the original goal of the GNU project wasn't to make tools - it was to make a complete operating system.
I don't know how accurate or inaccurate some of the other things the article says are, because they are in areas that I don't know as well. But certainly what he said about the history of GNU and Linux was almost completely wrong in its details.
I live in Tucson and use t-mobile. It also works just fine in Phoenix. In places where there is no t-mobile coverage, it roams to Cingular, although I haven't tried using EDGE there (I am afraid it might cost a *lot*, so I'm chicken). It works really nicely with the Nokia 770. But skype over GPRS is a bad idea, because skype is quite chatty. You'd be much better off using straight Voip - e.g., OpenWengo. But GSM is probably better anyway, unless you're really short on minutes.
While it's true that in some sense there's no difference between politicians, in that they all want power, there are in fact differences between politicians that do actually matter. Ask anybody from outside the U.S. whether they'd rather have George Bush in power, or Bill Clinton. If your theory were correct, everybody would say "doesn't matter, they're all bastards." But in fact that's not what people who live outside the U.S. say when I ask them this question, so I respectfully submit that despite the likely fact that they're all bastards, it does make a difference which bastard is in power.
Interesting how of the entire argument I made above, you picked such an insignificant nit.
If you insist on four wheels, the one that pops up most readily is the Smart fortwo coupe, which gets 60mpg average, 70 on the highway. That was in two minutes of surfing, english-language only. But then you're insisting on four wheels, when in fact there are a lot of two-wheel solutions that are different than you imagine - for example, scooter-like contraptions with full roll cages and weather protection. I don't know what the mpg rating on these are, because they're not available off the continent, and my foreign language googling skills suck, but if they get under 75mpg in city driving, I'll be shocked. This was in fact the vehicle I had in mind when I wrote the above comment.
You really don't seem to get it. There are 75mpg vehicles right now that are perfectly servicable and quite nice. You can buy them. In Europe. Walk down any street in Paris and you will see an amazing assortment of transportation solutions. Why can't you buy them in the U.S.?
The main reason is that the price of gas is too low here. (Yes, I know, heresy! $3.00/gallon TOO LOW?!?) And parking is too cheap here. In most American cities, it's really not an issue, and in those where it is, it's a relatively minor issue.
In many cities, there exist government entitlements for drivers - e.g., in most California cities, you can't build an office building without building a certain minimum number of parking spaces, and you can't build a rental property, even near public transportation, if it doesn't include a parking space for each tenant family. This prevents renters and commuters from consuming free, subsidized street parking.
And did you know that in many states, because the gas tax is so low, the roads you drive on are paid for, not out of use taxes like a gasoline tax, but rather out of state and federal income and property tax? Frankly, it's a scandal! And don't forget that the more expensive the vehicle you buy, the more likely it is that you can get a big tax deduction for buying it, if you are a small business owner or use your car for work. And more expensive cars are nearly always lower-milage cars.
So the individual economic incentives that would drive up mileage in vehicles simply isn't present here. And one major part of the problem is stupidly-directed government subsidies and entitlements. So to say that global warming is a conspiracy by "big government" proponents is nonsense. In many cases, the way to deal with the problem of global warming is to take away government incentives for buying cars.
And to say that I need to go out and "invent" something that is already available is likewise nonsense. The problem is that the economics of the situation don't favor the thing that would mitigate our production of carbon dioxide - it is not that there is no innovation going on.
It sounds like you're asserting that there's no tragedy of the commons. In fact, the whole point of having a government is that it can do things that individuals can't do individually. It provides a context for negotiations that cannot occur amongst individuals.
There is absolutely nothing I personally can do about global warming, because my actions, individually, make so little difference as to be immeasurable. People can't even agree that it's possible for humans to affect the environment. Why do you think that is? Because it's so hard to imagine something that *I* do affecting the global environment. It's just so much huger than I am that it's hard to comprehend.
There's a lesson there. It's collective action that does the damage, and only collective restraint can prevent it. So your laissez-faire critique is completely wrong-headed. If there is a problem, and we need to solve it, it's really _only_ through government regulation that it's going to get solved. And the way that governmental regulation will happen is by getting a preponderance of citizens to agree that it's something we need to do.
That is, it's not the case that there's some external force called a "government" that makes us do things we don't want to do for our own good. Rather, the government is a force that, perfectly or imperfectly, makes decisions in the aggregate, about things that are beyond the scope of individual action. The government is in a real sense "us," although not always in a particularly pleasant way.
So maybe this is a stupid question, but isn't Bush against talking about Global Warming? Hasn't he, in fact, had reports that mention global warming suppressed or altered? Isn't the government in fact entirely run by people who are actively hostile to the idea that there is such a thing as global warming?
If so, then where the hell is all this funding you're talking about *coming* from? Doing research that backs up the theory of Global Warming is a great way to avoid getting your research funded next year, not a great way to ensure that you keep your job for a long time.
The thing that astounds me about this discussion is that back when Clinton was in office, people talked about a huge liberal conspiracy. But the Republicans own the country at this point, top to bottom. When you hear a liberal position expressed in a mainstream environment, it's *despite* the best efforts of the government, not *because* of those efforts. The big conspiracy that I see going on right now is the one that's giving U.S. oilmen record profits, at the cost of relatively few American lives and a lot of non-American lives.
I don't know whether the idea of global warming is true - I haven't watched the movie, and honestly don't have a lot of faith that a movie intended to sway the American public is going to tell me anything I haven't already heard. But what I do know is that this theory that global warming is some kind of conspiracy of control is just a stupid invention of Michael Crichton, not a real thing that's actually happening.
Ah, I see. Well, in fact, they seem to be able to sell toys even in countries where people make a lot less money per capita than we make here. Sometimes people pool resources. Sometimes they opt for cheaper versions of the toys. It all works out. But if you had a level playing field, I think that a lot of toys would get bought. Artificially keeping some workers at low wages and others at high wages isn't the cause of having lots of people who can buy toys. A prosperous middle class floats all boats.
I think a lot of geeks in Silicon Valley are learning this the hard way. Personally, when my holding costs for my house in San Francisco went to about 50% of my income, I freaked. Happily, I'm living in Tucson now -a much cheaper neighborhood.:') But it's hard to get geek jobs here, or so I hear - I'm still working the same job in California.
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You almost certainly don't want this phone. It's not a consumer phone - it's for developers to get started. If we (developers) wind up creating something amazing, then FIC is expecting to make more hardware. Right now GSM is the choice because it's ubiquitous - the only place you can't get it is Japan and Korea, where they already have such wicked cool phones that the Linux bit wouldn't be worth anything anyway.
GPRS is the choice because it's generally not restricted. Supposedly it's relatively easy to connect to GPRS without the provider's help, but a lot harder to connect to EDGE. Dunno how true that is, but that was the rationale for using GPRS. It would be nice if the consumer model had support for EDGE.
But the main point is that what this phone is doing is something different. Normal phones you get from your cell provider are disposable, and they have to be, because they generally suck. The hardware is great, don't get me wrong, but the software usually bites, and you can't fix it. My Samsung t809 won't sync with my Prius because of some stupid handshaking glitch. There's never going to be a firmware update for that. If the OpenMoko doesn't sync with my Prius, what to do? Fix it. I don't have to try to get Samsung to fix it. I don't have to listen to Samsung and Toyota blame each other for the problem. I just fix it. You, if you don't want to hack the phone yourself, wait for me to fix it. It's a really good deal from that perspective.
Likewise, my t809, which is a really sweet piece of software, has an alarm tone that genuinely pisses me off. It's an earworm. If I use the alarm on the t809, I'm hearing it in my head the rest of the day. I'd like to use a different alarm tone. But I can't. Because it's a closed-source phone, and they didn't think to let me install a different alarm tone. They weren't trying to screw me - they just didn't think of it. On the Neo, I can just hack the software if it's not configurable.
My t809 doesn't support stereo bluetooth. The fix? Buy a new phone. Two years later, when my old contract expires. Lame. On the Neo? A simple matter of programming. It probably already works - I haven't tried it because I don't have the phone yet. But if it doesn't work, I have the source code, I can fix it.
My Macbook won't work with the modem in my t809. So I have EDGE support, but I can't use it. On the Neo, as long as I can get the Neo to talk to the network, I can just have it do IP over the bluetooth, with NAT, so that my Mac has access to the Net at the same time that my Neo has access to the net. Doesn't work? Use the source, Luke.
So yeah, the Neo is really under-featured, if you're into cell phone cameras. But if you're into flexibility, and not being locked in to a broken phone for two years at a time, I think it's got possibilities.
No. It's harder to read in the second case. That's why you need an intelligent editor, not a dumb editor. You want the editor to lay it out so that it's easy to read, not so that it's eighty columns (or not eighty columns). The columns question is a red herring.
Nonsense. Getting it to line up correctly is a simple matter of programming. You're right that a stupid text editor will do the wrong thing, but that's precisely the point I was making - why are we still using such stupid text editors?
We've had 132-column terminals for a long time, but what I generally tend to jones for is taller, not wider. With a taller screen, you see more code. Then there's the whole issue of saccades, which is why for example newspapers do not run sentences horizontally across the entire page, but rather split the page up into columns. Your eye gets confused when the line gets too long - it's easier to read when there are fewer words on the screen. I suspect that when you use a lot of studlyCapsVariableNames that the eye tends to treat the whole variable as a single word, but there's still going to be a limit.
The question I would ask is a different one: why are we using such primitive typography in our text editors? We used to see all these *beautiful* demos of text editors that used proportional fonts, boldfacing, and the like, but you *never* see that in a production system. Some other folks here have mentioned automatic line breaking. One of the problems with that is that you want the bare text to look clean even when you're not in the fancy editor, but you can just have the editor automatically indent to the existing style in the text, but show you the style you prefer.
The programming editor technology we're using today is still very primitive. That's why coding styles are 80 columns.
The article says, in the third paragraph, "these results are very preliminary." It goes on to say that there is no certainty that this is the problem; rather, it's just repeating something that we've suspected for quite some time, with more data: they've actually identified genetic material from a number of viruses and a particular fungus. And if the problem turns out to be that fungus, there may be an antibiotic that will take care of the problem. This is /not/ the same thing as saying that they /know/ what the problem is.
/this/ season. So we didn't need this article to know that it probably wasn't cell phone towers. Unfortunately, at this juncture we really don't know what's going on - we just have more data. Data + theory != fact. Hopefully the guy's right and the antibiotic works, though. It'd be scary if it didn't turn out that way.
The idea that it was cell phones is fairly ridiculous, since cell phone tower buildouts have been going on for years - you can't really point at cell phone towers as something that changed
If you just treat it like any other copyrighted work, you are abiding by the terms of the license. So saying you don't have to abide by the terms of the license if you just treat it like any other copyrighted work is nonsensical.
The GPL is a license. You have to abide by the terms of the license, or when you make a copy of the code you are violating the law. The terms of the license are pretty reasonable, and it's relatively unlikely that an average person would unknowingly violate them, but that doesn't mean you don't have to follow them. You're right that it's not a contract, but it is a license.
So in that sense, a click-through is a good idea. Whether it needs to be twenty paragraphs of legalese is another story. It might help to spread the word if instead of seeing the GPL, you just see some plain english, like this:
This is Free Software. What that means is that you are Free to use it, and others are Free to use it as well. This software is licensed under the GNU Public License. Briefly, this means that if you modify or redistribute this software, the only freedom that you do not have is the freedom to restrict others' freedom to use and share this software.
[Done]
I don't think there's anything wrong with encouraging people to know what they are getting into, and with trying to help them to understand what the point of free software is. I think that showing them a copy of the GPL in its full detail is probably not the best way to do that, but I think a better way to undermine the idea of long legalese that you click through to get to use some piece of software is a short click-through, rather than no click-through. No click-through doesn't really say anything at all.
In general, when you buy a copy of a Microsoft product, with all due respect to Microsoft, what you are getting is exactly the same level of support that you get when you download a copy of Ubuntu Linux. Actually, you're getting better support, because a lot of times you can actually get a question answered by someone knowledgeable if it's about an FOSS product, whereas you will _never_ get to talk to a Microsoft engineer. So if the Microsoft product works, great, but if it doesn't, you're SOL, because you can't get support for it, and you can't support it yourself. The same thing from an FOSS vendor gets you the source code, which you can fix yourself if you have to.
I don't really get the business model of a company like Redhat, but I don't use their software anyway. I run Ubuntu, and there just aren't any issues.
Now, you used the example of Qt. Qt isn't actually strictly speaking FOSS. You can get it as FOSS if you are an FOSS developer. But if you are not, as you've discovered, you have to pay a license fee. The license fee is for proprietary software, not for FOSS software. The very same software, under an FOSS license, is free.
Embedded Linux? Why are you using it, if your business model isn't FOSS? If it's so that you can have the source and hack on it, then get the source and hack on it. If it's because you want service, make your purchasing decision based on who provides the best service. If there is no FOSS vendor that's competitive, run VxWorks. Don't come crying to me, though, if you decide later on that you don't like the feature set. You could always run WinCE, you know...
That seems to confirm my theory, not your rebuttal.
If you're under a gag order, there's a decent possibility that the gag order forbids you to talk about the gag order.
The way these things work is that when someone hacks your hardware, you get an injunction to stop them from talking about it. If they talk about it, they go to jail for contempt of court. If you were to RTFA, you might get the very strong impression that he's under an injunction of this type.
It's always fun to look for bad guys in situations like this, but both Apple and Mr. "Cache" here are wearing white hats. You want both of them to be doing what they're doing, and it's lame to make it into a flame war. You want Mr. Cache breaking drivers, because then they get fixed, and your Mac doesn't get 0wned when you're down at Starbucks watching YouTube videos.
And you want Apple to try to dissuade him from publishing his hack, because you want them to fix it before every random hacker figures it out, and the sooner he publishes, the sooner the black hats will have an exploit. So if Apple doesn't get him to stop talking, maybe your Mac will get 0wned down at *$$.
But you still want Apple to be paranoid about the information getting out, so that they release the bug fix quickly, not slowly. And so what he's done with this article is useful, because he's basically said how the hack works, and now presumably the black hats are working on trying to duplicate the hack. And Apple knows this, and so the patch release will probably come sooner. And so your laptop won't get 0wned at *$$. W00t!
What I don't see here is bluster. This isn't high school. People don't get up on stage at defcon and claim to have hacked something they didn't really hack. The reason they do these hacks is to improve security, not to count coup. You owe the guy your thanks, not your hopes that his reputation is ruined.
So the point of this language is that if you go to work for company X, and become an expert in company X's product, and then decide that you can do a revolutionary improvement on that product, while you are working at company X, and then you leave company X and go into competition, company X can own your ass. There's a reason why this language is in the contract - it's because that used to happen a lot.
As a consultant, you can't afford to sign a contract like this if you are already an expert, because it would prevent you from getting more work doing the same thing. But as an employee, when you _aren't_ already an expert, this isn't a completely unreasonable thing for an employer to ask of you.
To put this in perspective, consider that I am an expert in DHCP. I wrote one of the most widely used DHCP servers out there. I work for a company that makes another DHCP server, which has some substantial innovations over the one I originally wrote. If I were to leave my company and set up shop immediately selling a competitive product, that would be pretty lame, wouldn't it?
Now on the other hand, if my company wanted me to do no further work in the field of software in general for two years, that would be a *big* problem - essentially, I'd be unable to quit my job if I wanted to.
And what I've seen in legal cases revolving around this here in the U.S., is that in general if they try to stop me from marketing my own DHCP server, they'll probably succeed, and if they try to stop me from working as a geek, they'll fail. The closer to the DHCP extreme I get, the more likely I am to lose. The closer to the geek extreme they get, the more likely they are to lose.
For what it's worth, the best thing to do here is not be an asshole, and check to make sure you're not taking a job working for assholes. Because the *last* thing you want to be doing is engaging in any kind of legal action with a former employer, particularly over copyrights or patents.
From an ethical perspective, you have two things:
1. Employee does something that runs counter to the company's stated policy in an important way. Bad employee - no biscuit.
2. Employee tells the truth when lying might have saved their job. Good person - refused to lie even when lying seemed to be of benefit.
There's no reason to mix these two - they're separate actions. One's a mistake, one's a sign of character. So of the mistake, you say "oh shit, that was really stupid, I wish I hadn't done that." And of the truth-telling, you say "yay, I'm glad I did that."
When you try to mix the two, it wrecks the good taste of telling the truth. Don't regret doing the right thing. Just take this lesson forward and try to avoid doing the wrong thing in the future.
--Speaking as one who was burned by exactly this kind of thinking in high school, and wasted a lot of emotional energy on it.
I think the conclusion that he draws is probably correct, but he doesn't really seem to explain why. The reason that systems like OS X and Linux are safer than Windows is not that launchd runs a shell, but that both Linux and OS X tend to run processes that don't need privileges as root.
This is a substantial win. However, if you manage to compromise a process that is running as root, you do have full control of the machine, and you can install your own privileged software on the machine without an authentication prompt appearing on the console.
Also, most of the man pages on OS X are woefully out of date, so giving the existence of these as a reason for why security is better on OS X is unfortunately a cruel joke. Third party apps from the Open Source community do often have better documentation, but the basic man pages from OS X are often years out of date - this is one of my pet peeves about OS X, I will admit.
It sounds like the hack he's describing occurred because he'd installed third-party software that ran as a service with an open port, as SYSTEM (i.e., with full privileges) and that took over his machine. The reason this is less likely (not impossible, just less likely) is because if you are running a third party server process on OS X, it's probably a piece of open source software like Apache, which has been vetted to within an inch of its life, because it is open source, and the many people who care that it is secure have the freedom to check that it is secure. And it probably doesn't run with full privileges, as the author says.
Anyway, like I said, he's right, but his reasoning is a little foggy. And it's important to be aware of the ways in which it's foggy, because this is your best chance of avoiding having your machine hacked.
There was interesting stuff in the article, but much of what he said was just inaccurate. He credits Unix with being the first operating system that did paging. I don't think so. Furthermore, what he said about Stallman's motivation isn't even accurate - Stallman came out of the MIT LISP Machine crowd, and (rightly!) thought Unix was primitive by comparison. He originally wanted GNU to have a filesystem like TOPS-20, with versions. And the original goal of the GNU project wasn't to make tools - it was to make a complete operating system.
I don't know how accurate or inaccurate some of the other things the article says are, because they are in areas that I don't know as well. But certainly what he said about the history of GNU and Linux was almost completely wrong in its details.
I live in Tucson and use t-mobile. It also works just fine in Phoenix. In places where there is no t-mobile coverage, it roams to Cingular, although I haven't tried using EDGE there (I am afraid it might cost a *lot*, so I'm chicken). It works really nicely with the Nokia 770. But skype over GPRS is a bad idea, because skype is quite chatty. You'd be much better off using straight Voip - e.g., OpenWengo. But GSM is probably better anyway, unless you're really short on minutes.
While it's true that in some sense there's no difference between politicians, in that they all want power, there are in fact differences between politicians that do actually matter. Ask anybody from outside the U.S. whether they'd rather have George Bush in power, or Bill Clinton. If your theory were correct, everybody would say "doesn't matter, they're all bastards." But in fact that's not what people who live outside the U.S. say when I ask them this question, so I respectfully submit that despite the likely fact that they're all bastards, it does make a difference which bastard is in power.
Interesting how of the entire argument I made above, you picked such an insignificant nit.
If you insist on four wheels, the one that pops up most readily is the Smart fortwo coupe, which gets 60mpg average, 70 on the highway. That was in two minutes of surfing, english-language only. But then you're insisting on four wheels, when in fact there are a lot of two-wheel solutions that are different than you imagine - for example, scooter-like contraptions with full roll cages and weather protection. I don't know what the mpg rating on these are, because they're not available off the continent, and my foreign language googling skills suck, but if they get under 75mpg in city driving, I'll be shocked. This was in fact the vehicle I had in mind when I wrote the above comment.
You really don't seem to get it. There are 75mpg vehicles right now that are perfectly servicable and quite nice. You can buy them. In Europe. Walk down any street in Paris and you will see an amazing assortment of transportation solutions. Why can't you buy them in the U.S.?
The main reason is that the price of gas is too low here. (Yes, I know, heresy! $3.00/gallon TOO LOW?!?) And parking is too cheap here. In most American cities, it's really not an issue, and in those where it is, it's a relatively minor issue.
In many cities, there exist government entitlements for drivers - e.g., in most California cities, you can't build an office building without building a certain minimum number of parking spaces, and you can't build a rental property, even near public transportation, if it doesn't include a parking space for each tenant family. This prevents renters and commuters from consuming free, subsidized street parking.
And did you know that in many states, because the gas tax is so low, the roads you drive on are paid for, not out of use taxes like a gasoline tax, but rather out of state and federal income and property tax? Frankly, it's a scandal! And don't forget that the more expensive the vehicle you buy, the more likely it is that you can get a big tax deduction for buying it, if you are a small business owner or use your car for work. And more expensive cars are nearly always lower-milage cars.
So the individual economic incentives that would drive up mileage in vehicles simply isn't present here. And one major part of the problem is stupidly-directed government subsidies and entitlements. So to say that global warming is a conspiracy by "big government" proponents is nonsense. In many cases, the way to deal with the problem of global warming is to take away government incentives for buying cars.
And to say that I need to go out and "invent" something that is already available is likewise nonsense. The problem is that the economics of the situation don't favor the thing that would mitigate our production of carbon dioxide - it is not that there is no innovation going on.
It sounds like you're asserting that there's no tragedy of the commons. In fact, the whole point of having a government is that it can do things that individuals can't do individually. It provides a context for negotiations that cannot occur amongst individuals.
There is absolutely nothing I personally can do about global warming, because my actions, individually, make so little difference as to be immeasurable. People can't even agree that it's possible for humans to affect the environment. Why do you think that is? Because it's so hard to imagine something that *I* do affecting the global environment. It's just so much huger than I am that it's hard to comprehend.
There's a lesson there. It's collective action that does the damage, and only collective restraint can prevent it. So your laissez-faire critique is completely wrong-headed. If there is a problem, and we need to solve it, it's really _only_ through government regulation that it's going to get solved. And the way that governmental regulation will happen is by getting a preponderance of citizens to agree that it's something we need to do.
That is, it's not the case that there's some external force called a "government" that makes us do things we don't want to do for our own good. Rather, the government is a force that, perfectly or imperfectly, makes decisions in the aggregate, about things that are beyond the scope of individual action. The government is in a real sense "us," although not always in a particularly pleasant way.
twenty-five minute songs? :')
Get the CD. No DRM. Win win.
So maybe this is a stupid question, but isn't Bush against talking about Global Warming? Hasn't he, in fact, had reports that mention global warming suppressed or altered? Isn't the government in fact entirely run by people who are actively hostile to the idea that there is such a thing as global warming?
If so, then where the hell is all this funding you're talking about *coming* from? Doing research that backs up the theory of Global Warming is a great way to avoid getting your research funded next year, not a great way to ensure that you keep your job for a long time.
The thing that astounds me about this discussion is that back when Clinton was in office, people talked about a huge liberal conspiracy. But the Republicans own the country at this point, top to bottom. When you hear a liberal position expressed in a mainstream environment, it's *despite* the best efforts of the government, not *because* of those efforts. The big conspiracy that I see going on right now is the one that's giving U.S. oilmen record profits, at the cost of relatively few American lives and a lot of non-American lives.
I don't know whether the idea of global warming is true - I haven't watched the movie, and honestly don't have a lot of faith that a movie intended to sway the American public is going to tell me anything I haven't already heard. But what I do know is that this theory that global warming is some kind of conspiracy of control is just a stupid invention of Michael Crichton, not a real thing that's actually happening.
Ah, I see. Well, in fact, they seem to be able to sell toys even in countries where people make a lot less money per capita than we make here. Sometimes people pool resources. Sometimes they opt for cheaper versions of the toys. It all works out. But if you had a level playing field, I think that a lot of toys would get bought. Artificially keeping some workers at low wages and others at high wages isn't the cause of having lots of people who can buy toys. A prosperous middle class floats all boats.
I think a lot of geeks in Silicon Valley are learning this the hard way. Personally, when my holding costs for my house in San Francisco went to about 50% of my income, I freaked. Happily, I'm living in Tucson now -a much cheaper neighborhood. :') But it's hard to get geek jobs here, or so I hear - I'm still working the same job in California.