Ummm... you are free to use your own terminology... but since as long ago as I can remember, both worms and viruses were self-replication code that moved from machine to machine without (intentional*) human intervention
The key difference between viruses and worms is this: - viruses "infect" software and files (macro viruses), adding their code into the existing code so that it runs whenever the infected code is run. - worms "infect" systems as stand-alone process, by using vulnerabilities like auto-run to have themselves executed independently of a host program.
Trojans, on the other hand, pretend to be legitimate programs, but instead make actions undesired by the user.
You didn't specify how your theoretical "virus" behaves, so it is hard to classify. Please point to some evidence that Apple has redefined the terms. Also, explain why Apple still encourages users to use anti-virus software. The truth is Apple has had a good and lately great track-record in avoiding wide-spread viruses. There are certainly more steps they can take... but your "dialog" above is just silly nonsense.
* I say intentional to include "old-school" viruses and worms that propagated by floppy disk and other means... where a user had to actually share disks with others to propagate the virus.
Yeah, I am aware of the possibilities, but it involves messing with your hardware, and potentially breaking something that the warranty won't cover...
picture this scenario... you are at a friend's house, you pop in the movie you brought to watch, and the DVD player displays a fire-and-brimstone message about how this DVD is not allowed in this region. Next you tell your friend: "Hold on a second, I'm going to surf the web to find some obscure key-combination the manufacturer doesn't want you to know, then I am going to feed it into your nice shiny new home theater system, modifying the built-in software, so that we can watch this movie I brought." They are going to say: "... how about we go to Blockbuster?" (BTW, this happened to me two weeks ago with a Region 0 DVD.)
It's all messy and inconvenient, just like DVD rippers, iTunes DRM-strippers, and software anti-piracy measures. It's now technically pretty easy to remove these restrictions... but you still have to jump through hoops.
"iTunes and DVDs are two examples of (relatively) harmless DRM protected digital media."
For DVDs, one word: Region Coding. As someone who likes to watch foreign films not available in the US, region coding makes me mad... luckily, some foreign DVDs use the Universal Region 0, but even that doesn't work in many US DVD players... (my iBook plays them... but I have come across PowerBooks and other comps that want to change the region first.)
(For those not familiar with region coding, it divides the world into 9 regions, 0 thru 8, and assigns a region to each DVD player and DVD disc. The regions have to match for the disc to play in a given player. North America is Region 1, Europe Region 2, and so on... the only exceptions are Region 0, which is theoretically unrestricted, and the availability of "region-free" DVD players.)
The iMac has two RAM slots. The densest RAM sticks widely available today are 1 GB. 2 x 1 GB = 2 GB. It is likely that once denser RAM is available, iMacs will go higher than 2 GB.
As for the default... if the default were higher... people would complain that Macs cost more than the Dell with 256 MB RAM, and others would complain that they want to get less RAM... this way, th buyer has a choice... get the minimum, or pay more.
Then your folks' iMac must be having deeper problems... an original Tangerine iMac (I have one sitting on my desk) could rip and play at the same time...
hmmm... actually, I just realized... do you mean play the freshly ripped mp3s as they are ripped, or play directly from the CD, because then your problem is clear. You can't generally play a CD while it is ripped because the entire bandwidth of the CD-ROM is devoted to the ripping.
That's probably just bad multi-threaded design on he part of many applications. I haven't had a chance to program under a GNOME or KDE-type environment, but both Cocoa and Carbon (and for that matter, Swing) are not thread-safe... that is, you can only interact with them in one thread... which encourages programmers to keep it simple and only use one thread... hence, if a button press leads to time-consuming operation, that program's interface will "hang", until the thread returns to the event-loop...
If Apple made it's GUI API's thread-safe, and farmed off event-dispatch to worker threads, you wouldn't have this problem... but until then, it is each programmers responsibility to do so. Many don't.
First, they did revise the estimated price well before the auction closed... so people had no reason to presume $85 was too low.
As for the lower price/volume, certainly it seems a lot of people were spooked off by the high price and pre-IPO jitters (Playboy, shady share giving, weird IPO method), but Google still made a lot more money then they would have in a traditional IPO.
Besides, since it seems everyone got approx. 75% of their bid, and Google offered 75% of the shares that were originally to be sold (19.6/25.9 ~= 75%)... they could have sold all the originally offered shared at $85. That means that by lowering the number of shares offered, they did not increase the price.
In other words: the Dutch auction process determined that they could sell all planned shares at $85 dollars. Those shareholders selling shares reduced their offering, so that only 75% of the original shares were available. Rather than raising the price, and reducing the number of new shareholders, Google alloted every winning bidder 75% of their bid.
So no, if they had reduced all planned shares (that extra 25%), the price could have still been $85 for 100% of bids at or above.
As for $85 being too high, don't you also say that thousands of people thought that a bid of $80-$110 was so low that they wouldn't get any shares... seems like $85 is undervalued... that's what the market is saying so far... the future will tell.
Actually, since practically anyone could become a bidder and buy shares, I see the 17% bump as the cost for those who decided not to participate in the Dutch auction because of uncertainty in the process, or missing the deadlines, or not having a brokerage which offered the IPO.
Compare going to Amazon and ordering a book at 17% off (and waiting a few days to get it), or stopping by your local bookstore and buying it at full price. Of course, the next week everyone may start dumping unsold inventory, and you may find the same book on the value rack... but that life.
A lot of people want the simple act of telling their broker: buy GOOG, rather then going through the multi-day process of registering as a Google bidder, getting your brokerage to allow you to bid on Google, and then following and adjusting your bid in a flurry of pre-IPO filings and revisions.
If y was greater than $85, you got some shares. Since $85 was the lower limit of the suggested range, that suggests that pretty much everyone who bid got shares (assuming people didn't under the revised price range).
Actually, you could bid for as few as 5 shares (and no commision), so anybody who bothers having a brokerage account would certainly be able to find $500 bucks to invest.
As I said in another post, the reporters who were deniend bid status were probably screened out due to their answers for investment strategy or experience.
Anyway, the people who became millionaires off Dell, M$, Intel, Apple (the original hot IPO) did so not because they bought the IPO, but because they received very early stock in the company... the pre-IPO investors, the founders, and early employees/executives.
But I do think that Google in the medium-term has the potential to double to triple current investment (yes, I think it's now worth more than Yahoo). As for Microsoft, well, it is besieged on all sides by better products, malware and viruses, and vengeful users.
Linux is enroaching from the technical side, Mac OS X from the non-technical side, and free and open source software threatens its enterprise and server business. It has little prospects for growth... so I don't necessarily think that their value is that unassailable.
Hey, I guess it's better than sticking your money in a bank at 1% annually.
Not to turn this into a fruitless point-counterpoint, but:
Under the 100% for highest bidders, less for lower (but winning bidders), you are essentailly punishing the more "accurate" bidders. A Dutch auction establishes a fair price for a pool of identical items based on what people are willing to pay.
If Google, after considering the bids, decided to offer their items for sale at the "fair" price of $85... why should a person who bid at the fair price, $85, be punished for not bidding higher.
Google did say publicly (and more importanly, in their timely and exhaustive notices to registered bidders) that bidders may not receive all their allocation even if they bid above the offer price, in the interests of wider access to the IPO. I see that as Google being not evil.
In this case, they couldn't announce how they would allocate the shares before the bidding started, because the allocation of shares was based on how the bidding went. They actually were monitoring the bids to decide how to allocate and when to end the auction.
BTW, I'm not sure about this, but it seems that Google is restricted in what it can publicly say by SEC rules... and besides, in the case of the IPO, they were making their decisions known to all those who could bid.
While Google's market share may not have much room to grow... the overall market, I believe, is going to grow, as even more people will find even more of their info through the web, and most likely through Google's search engine.
So Google has potential for increased revenue/profit.
My brokerage asked a series of questions in roughly two categories:
1) About my relationships with financial institutions involved with the IPO, whether I was a financial professional, that sort of thing. I assume these are required by the SEC to screen for conflict of interest.
2) About my financial resources and my investment goals and experience. They asked me to rate investing knowledge and experience ( None, Basic, Intermediate, Advanced). Those aren't the terms they used, but you get the idea. I found that if I lowballed both at Basic, I was told I was not eligible, but at Intermediate, I was accepted. (Honestly, I am somewhere in between, so both answers were honest.)
I was also asked whether I was investing for Speculation, Growth, Maintenance, etc. Basically, the brokerages were screening to keep customers from making a serious mistake in the risks associated with an IPO... so that later, I can't sue them. If I had invested all my money in Google, and lost it all... they would point at my answers and say that I claimed to have enough money and was willing and aware of the risks.
My brokerage did not require that I have a certain level of assets held with them (some did), beyond enough to pay for my bid.
If they had spelled out their precise allocation process before the auction was closed, people would have gamed the system.
For example, if you knew the allocation was 75%, you could artificially inflate your bid: you want 75 shares, you ask for 100 shares. This would ruin the whole point of the Dutch auction style IPO. (Yes, it wasn't a pure Dutch auction, in that Google seems to have favored a wider distribution of shares over a strict highest price sufficient to allocate all shares.)
The point is that everyone who was willing to buy Google shares at or above $85 got a piece of the action. Everyone from big institutions to small investors like me.
Actually, I WOULD pay a cent per search. Google saves me a lot of time and money... instead of buying books and hiring professionals, or spending my time stumbling around libraries, I type a simple search and get (generally good) results fast.
Not that I think Google will go this way, or that it would be a good business move, but I would honestly be willing to pay up about 10 cents per search... expecially if the search got even better (say, categorization of results). Above 10 cents, I'd probably wander away and try to find a cheaper engine... but I'd be back if nothing better were available.
But Mac notebooks rarely get restarted... maybe for major system upgrades... not something people will be doing in a coffee-shop, if at all.
This exploit ONLY works at boot, and according to Apple, is even more unlikely over wireless due to the timing of when the Airport network is available vs. when the system tries to net config.
Perhaps you've heard of such a thing as an Apple Store... or an Apple retailer.
ITunes has brick-and-mortars placement... not in places like convenience stores (where $15 looks like alot), but at stores selling thousand dollar computer equipment... think about it... Apple could encourage you to slip in a iTunes Card with your new iMac.
Placement in all those grocery stores may be huge for Napster... but there are already a lot of cards for sale at those places already.
Uhhh... that doesn't make any sense... when you share files, you are not making any copies... only the person who downloads a file is actually creating a copy.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... you are free to use your own terminology... but since as long ago as I can remember, both worms and viruses were self-replication code that moved from machine to machine without (intentional*) human intervention
The key difference between viruses and worms is this:
- viruses "infect" software and files (macro viruses), adding their code into the existing code so that it runs whenever the infected code is run.
- worms "infect" systems as stand-alone process, by using vulnerabilities like auto-run to have themselves executed independently of a host program.
Trojans, on the other hand, pretend to be legitimate programs, but instead make actions undesired by the user.
You didn't specify how your theoretical "virus" behaves, so it is hard to classify. Please point to some evidence that Apple has redefined the terms. Also, explain why Apple still encourages users to use anti-virus software. The truth is Apple has had a good and lately great track-record in avoiding wide-spread viruses. There are certainly more steps they can take... but your "dialog" above is just silly nonsense.
* I say intentional to include "old-school" viruses and worms that propagated by floppy disk and other means... where a user had to actually share disks with others to propagate the virus.
Yeah, I am aware of the possibilities, but it involves messing with your hardware, and potentially breaking something that the warranty won't cover...
picture this scenario... you are at a friend's house, you pop in the movie you brought to watch, and the DVD player displays a fire-and-brimstone message about how this DVD is not allowed in this region. Next you tell your friend: "Hold on a second, I'm going to surf the web to find some obscure key-combination the manufacturer doesn't want you to know, then I am going to feed it into your nice shiny new home theater system, modifying the built-in software, so that we can watch this movie I brought." They are going to say: "... how about we go to Blockbuster?"
(BTW, this happened to me two weeks ago with a Region 0 DVD.)
It's all messy and inconvenient, just like DVD rippers, iTunes DRM-strippers, and software anti-piracy measures. It's now technically pretty easy to remove these restrictions... but you still have to jump through hoops.
"iTunes and DVDs are two examples of (relatively) harmless DRM protected digital media."
For DVDs, one word: Region Coding. As someone who likes to watch foreign films not available in the US, region coding makes me mad... luckily, some foreign DVDs use the Universal Region 0, but even that doesn't work in many US DVD players... (my iBook plays them... but I have come across PowerBooks and other comps that want to change the region first.)
(For those not familiar with region coding, it divides the world into 9 regions, 0 thru 8, and assigns a region to each DVD player and DVD disc. The regions have to match for the disc to play in a given player. North America is Region 1, Europe Region 2, and so on... the only exceptions are Region 0, which is theoretically unrestricted, and the availability of "region-free" DVD players.)
The iMac has two RAM slots. The densest RAM sticks widely available today are 1 GB. 2 x 1 GB = 2 GB. It is likely that once denser RAM is available, iMacs will go higher than 2 GB.
As for the default... if the default were higher... people would complain that Macs cost more than the Dell with 256 MB RAM, and others would complain that they want to get less RAM... this way, th buyer has a choice... get the minimum, or pay more.
Then your folks' iMac must be having deeper problems... an original Tangerine iMac (I have one sitting on my desk) could rip and play at the same time...
hmmm... actually, I just realized... do you mean play the freshly ripped mp3s as they are ripped, or play directly from the CD, because then your problem is clear. You can't generally play a CD while it is ripped because the entire bandwidth of the CD-ROM is devoted to the ripping.
That's probably just bad multi-threaded design on he part of many applications. I haven't had a chance to program under a GNOME or KDE-type environment, but both Cocoa and Carbon (and for that matter, Swing) are not thread-safe... that is, you can only interact with them in one thread... which encourages programmers to keep it simple and only use one thread... hence, if a button press leads to time-consuming operation, that program's interface will "hang", until the thread returns to the event-loop...
If Apple made it's GUI API's thread-safe, and farmed off event-dispatch to worker threads, you wouldn't have this problem... but until then, it is each programmers responsibility to do so. Many don't.
No.
"He is running." does not include a gerund.
The kind of mistake the warning refers to is:
"He running was superb."
This should be: "His running was superb."
Mine already does this (Mac OS X's Mail.app), as will ANY Cocoa-based Mac OS X program (web browsers, im, text editors, email, graphics, etc.)
My spelling is being checked as I type this message (by Safari).
Marcin Jeske
The bluetooth adapter is internal.
First, they did revise the estimated price well before the auction closed... so people had no reason to presume $85 was too low.
... they could have sold all the originally offered shared at $85. That means that by lowering the number of shares offered, they did not increase the price.
As for the lower price/volume, certainly it seems a lot of people were spooked off by the high price and pre-IPO jitters (Playboy, shady share giving, weird IPO method), but Google still made a lot more money then they would have in a traditional IPO.
Besides, since it seems everyone got approx. 75% of their bid, and Google offered 75% of the shares that were originally to be sold (19.6/25.9 ~= 75%)
In other words: the Dutch auction process determined that they could sell all planned shares at $85 dollars. Those shareholders selling shares reduced their offering, so that only 75% of the original shares were available. Rather than raising the price, and reducing the number of new shareholders, Google alloted every winning bidder 75% of their bid.
So no, if they had reduced all planned shares (that extra 25%), the price could have still been $85 for 100% of bids at or above.
As for $85 being too high, don't you also say that thousands of people thought that a bid of $80-$110 was so low that they wouldn't get any shares... seems like $85 is undervalued... that's what the market is saying so far... the future will tell.
Marcin
Unfortunately, most of that oil is mixed up with sand in a nasty sludge which covered vast expanses of Canadian wilderness...
But we are slowly figuring out how to harvest it.
Source; National Geographic issue which came out June-ish.
Actually, since practically anyone could become a bidder and buy shares, I see the 17% bump as the cost for those who decided not to participate in the Dutch auction because of uncertainty in the process, or missing the deadlines, or not having a brokerage which offered the IPO.
Compare going to Amazon and ordering a book at 17% off (and waiting a few days to get it), or stopping by your local bookstore and buying it at full price. Of course, the next week everyone may start dumping unsold inventory, and you may find the same book on the value rack... but that life.
A lot of people want the simple act of telling their broker: buy GOOG, rather then going through the multi-day process of registering as a Google bidder, getting your brokerage to allow you to bid on Google, and then following and adjusting your bid in a flurry of pre-IPO filings and revisions.
Simple often costs more...
Bids were made for x number of shares at y price.
If y was greater than $85, you got some shares. Since $85 was the lower limit of the suggested range, that suggests that pretty much everyone who bid got shares (assuming people didn't under the revised price range).
Actually, you could bid for as few as 5 shares (and no commision), so anybody who bothers having a brokerage account would certainly be able to find $500 bucks to invest.
As I said in another post, the reporters who were deniend bid status were probably screened out due to their answers for investment strategy or experience.
Ah... 10x growth...
Anyway, the people who became millionaires off Dell, M$, Intel, Apple (the original hot IPO) did so not because they bought the IPO, but because they received very early stock in the company... the pre-IPO investors, the founders, and early employees/executives.
But I do think that Google in the medium-term has the potential to double to triple current investment (yes, I think it's now worth more than Yahoo). As for Microsoft, well, it is besieged on all sides by better products, malware and viruses, and vengeful users.
Linux is enroaching from the technical side, Mac OS X from the non-technical side, and free and open source software threatens its enterprise and server business. It has little prospects for growth... so I don't necessarily think that their value is that unassailable.
Hey, I guess it's better than sticking your money in a bank at 1% annually.
Marcin
Not to turn this into a fruitless point-counterpoint, but:
Under the 100% for highest bidders, less for lower (but winning bidders), you are essentailly punishing the more "accurate" bidders. A Dutch auction establishes a fair price for a pool of identical items based on what people are willing to pay.
If Google, after considering the bids, decided to offer their items for sale at the "fair" price of $85... why should a person who bid at the fair price, $85, be punished for not bidding higher.
Google did say publicly (and more importanly, in their timely and exhaustive notices to registered bidders) that bidders may not receive all their allocation even if they bid above the offer price, in the interests of wider access to the IPO. I see that as Google being not evil.
In this case, they couldn't announce how they would allocate the shares before the bidding started, because the allocation of shares was based on how the bidding went. They actually were monitoring the bids to decide how to allocate and when to end the auction.
BTW, I'm not sure about this, but it seems that Google is restricted in what it can publicly say by SEC rules... and besides, in the case of the IPO, they were making their decisions known to all those who could bid.
Marcin
While Google's market share may not have much room to grow... the overall market, I believe, is going to grow, as even more people will find even more of their info through the web, and most likely through Google's search engine.
So Google has potential for increased revenue/profit.
My brokerage asked a series of questions in roughly two categories:
1) About my relationships with financial institutions involved with the IPO, whether I was a financial professional, that sort of thing. I assume these are required by the SEC to screen for conflict of interest.
2) About my financial resources and my investment goals and experience. They asked me to rate investing knowledge and experience ( None, Basic, Intermediate, Advanced). Those aren't the terms they used, but you get the idea. I found that if I lowballed both at Basic, I was told I was not eligible, but at Intermediate, I was accepted. (Honestly, I am somewhere in between, so both answers were honest.)
I was also asked whether I was investing for Speculation, Growth, Maintenance, etc. Basically, the brokerages were screening to keep customers from making a serious mistake in the risks associated with an IPO... so that later, I can't sue them. If I had invested all my money in Google, and lost it all... they would point at my answers and say that I claimed to have enough money and was willing and aware of the risks.
My brokerage did not require that I have a certain level of assets held with them (some did), beyond enough to pay for my bid.
So no scandal here...
If they had spelled out their precise allocation process before the auction was closed, people would have gamed the system.
For example, if you knew the allocation was 75%, you could artificially inflate your bid: you want 75 shares, you ask for 100 shares. This would ruin the whole point of the Dutch auction style IPO. (Yes, it wasn't a pure Dutch auction, in that Google seems to have favored a wider distribution of shares over a strict highest price sufficient to allocate all shares.)
The point is that everyone who was willing to buy Google shares at or above $85 got a piece of the action. Everyone from big institutions to small investors like me.
Marcin
Actually, I WOULD pay a cent per search. Google saves me a lot of time and money... instead of buying books and hiring professionals, or spending my time stumbling around libraries, I type a simple search and get (generally good) results fast.
Not that I think Google will go this way, or that it would be a good business move, but I would honestly be willing to pay up about 10 cents per search... expecially if the search got even better (say, categorization of results). Above 10 cents, I'd probably wander away and try to find a cheaper engine... but I'd be back if nothing better were available.
Just my two cents... as it were,
Marcin
But Mac notebooks rarely get restarted... maybe for major system upgrades... not something people will be doing in a coffee-shop, if at all.
This exploit ONLY works at boot, and according to Apple, is even more unlikely over wireless due to the timing of when the Airport network is available vs. when the system tries to net config.
Uhhh... the simple solution is:
Don't type your password while "flurries" bounce around your screen (or whatever screensaver variant you use).
You should never type your password unless you are staring at an OS-provided password field or prompt.
"These are not the G5s you are looking for..."
(Hmmm... maybe that's Steve Jobs' line)
Perhaps you've heard of such a thing as an Apple Store... or an Apple retailer.
ITunes has brick-and-mortars placement... not in places like convenience stores (where $15 looks like alot), but at stores selling thousand dollar computer equipment... think about it... Apple could encourage you to slip in a iTunes Card with your new iMac.
Placement in all those grocery stores may be huge for Napster... but there are already a lot of cards for sale at those places already.
Uhhh... that doesn't make any sense... when you share files, you are not making any copies... only the person who downloads a file is actually creating a copy.
By your rationale, downloaders are criminals.