The key point is that what you describe is a Microsoft phenomenon. Apple is the one doing this research, ergo it's on Macs. And on Macs -- really on pretty much EVERY OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM EVER CREATED -- you don't maximize your windows like that.
Your point is basically that Windows is not at all designed to be large-monitor-friendly. I agree. So... for shops that use Windows, large monitors are not very useful. Artists and programmers might still benefit from it, though.
Speaking as someone who did five years at Apple, the company certainly does audit stuff before it's released -- particularly network and filesystem code. Patches and bugfixes also tend to get code-reviewed right inside the bug report by several people outside of the core group with good security experience, and reviewed again before they make it into a release. The main problem is that there are so many lines of code and only a finite amount of time, and the more subtle problems take longer to detect. There is a cost-to-profit tradeoff after a certain point.
It's like microwave popcorn. You nuke it and in the first few minutes you can get almost all of the kernels (exploits) popped. Then the rate of popping slows down. After a while, you simply have to stop or else you'll burn right through your profit (of warm, yummy popped corn).
And that's just not worth it. No matter what there will always be a few hiding way down in the bottom of the bag. You can burn through the whole thing and still never pop them all.
"I saw them try the old "frozen ice bullet" thing without ever mentioning the word "sabot"; yes, it's a myth but they could have made it work, after a fashion, if they knew anything about guns."
As it happens, the ice bullet was the very first episode after the pilots. So they were still basically operating "blind" without fan feedback at that point. Once the shows started airing they very quickly found out that they needed to be more exhaustive in their tests to quiet people like you.;-)
FWIW, they've used sabots several times in other episodes, for the [frozen] chicken gun and other cannon-related episodes. Adam doesn't really know much about guns. (Although I suspect he's gotten better since the show started.) Jamie does.
Shock value. Drop an aircraft or two in the ocean, and you screw up air traffic worldwide. Plus, some people are just naturally scared of flying anyway. This plays on those fears.
May I suggest a far simpler strategy for the terrorists, given how nicely the government plays along and terrorizes its own citizens:
Drop an iPod or two in the toilet, and the government screws up air traffic worldwide.
The attacker gets extra bonus points if s/he includes an error-correcting checksum in the data stream (again, coded into packet delays) to make it more robust.
- let N be the number of characters in the alphabet you care about (say, 75: letters, numbers, and common punctuation)
- let M be the smallest resolution at which you can reliably time the packet differences (eg, 1ms)
- let P be the period represented by the time M*N
- when you want to transmit a key, map it into your alphabet as X where 1<X<=N
- no matter how much time has elapsed since the last packet, delay the next packet to (next multiple of P) + X.
To decode: take the time difference between packets, modulo P, and you get X.
You can enhance this system by using escape codes. Ordinary network traffic could proceed unmolested when you're not typing, but once you start typing a recognizable escape sequence is issued (coded into packet delays, of course) which kicks you over into keyboard mode, and another kicks you back out once typing has stopped.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the feature, Apple has its own GPO-like feature set built in to Mac OS X Server. It's part of the Workgroup Manager application in the server admin tools, which is essentially Apple's AD administration app. It allows you to:
1. manage preferences for groups of computers (energy saver, etc)
2. manage preferences for groups of user accounts (screen saver passwords, etc)
3. disable/enable all sorts of actions (eg: is the user allowed to mount servers? burn discs?).
Follow the link above for the technical brief, etc. The Centrify thing appears at first glance to just be a bridge that lets the Windows admin tool administer Mac OS X clients. Pretty neat, but I don't think it's necessary if you're willing to use Mac OS X to admin your Mac OS X boxes.
Yes to #1. Mascots are incidental to gameplay. They can be central to branding and marketing, but gameplay is what really makes or breaks a game. And too many companies (and their marketing droids) haven't actually figured out gameplay. I think some companies in the 90's wasted millions of dollars on branding and building up a character, only to find out that oops, the game sucks and nobody bought it. Or they created a great mascot, but then the second game in the series sucked and wiped out the company. So the companies that don't bother creating mascots are probably more profitable over the long run.
No to #2. It's not that the main character is "you"... in Mario, Sonic, etc you play the main character as well. I think what you're trying to get at is that the perspective tends to be more first-person (or over-the-shoulder) these days. But I would still disagree with that statement.:-) A lot of great modern games are not first-person, and yet still haven't produced the same kind of iconic character. And I think first-person games could have iconic characters, but choose not to because it's cheaper.
No to #3 too. I don't think realism vs cartoonishness has anything to do with it. A lot of games are released with cartoony graphics these days and aren't creating long-lived mascots.
In fact, here's one counterexample to #2 and #3. Take God of War. God of War is not first-person; it's a 3D platformer at heart, similar to (yes) Mario. The main character Kratos is extremely distinctive and has a LOT of personality -- I'd say he's probably one of the best developed main characters in years. He's even charismatic, in a rip-your-face-off kind of way. He's also very realistic. Sure, he has some superpowers, but so does Master Chief.
And yet something has stopped Kratos from becoming an icon worthy of inclusion in the Mario / Sonic / Crash echelon. There just wasn't the same marketing push behind him. Perhaps he's just too angry and ultra-violent for a corporation to get behind.:-) I don't know.
I think that it's ultimately a decision of marketing. Creating a mascot is no longer fashionable. And the people in marketing (and upper management) don't think it's worth the huge amount of time and effort it takes to build a great brand around a great mascot. They'd rather grab for the quick cash and run.
Automation? Hahaha. No, in a modern Senator's office the emails would be sent (via tubes!) to a dot-matrix printer, printed on reams of butterfly paper, and read by an intern. Then they are MANUALLY delivered to the circular file.
What's interesting, btw, is actually that the major brand is Mac. And really MacBook is already an extension of that. MacBook Pro is a double-extension. That's starting to reach shaky ground. Any further extensions -- "MacBook Pro Ultra-Lite", for example -- and it gets too complicated for most people to remember.
The GP is correct about the way Apple has changed their branding strategy.
Old: * Brand: PowerBook * Brand: iBook
New: * Brand: MacBook * Brand Extension: MacBook Pro
I'm sure Jobs would hate the comparison to fizzy water, but it's sort of like the transition from Coke/Tab to Coke/Diet Coke. Diet Coke is a brand extension of Coke. It's a definite consolidation under the new name. But really, I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing and Apple is screwing themselves. It puts more weight behind the Mac name, and that might be a smart move if they want the Mac to seriously make inroads in marketshare.
Computationally, it's pretty close to what you'd expect. It only emulates a single processor machine right now, so if you benchmark it on a Core Duo 2GHz, it comes in somewhere between a 1.6 and 2.0 GHz single-core Pentium. Just about right. Integer is noticeably faster than FP, perhaps because FP context switches require a bigger virtualization hit. Compiling a big project with MSVC is about 10% slower on Parallels than on my previous 1.6GHz notebook, which is very reasonable to me given the overhead of virtualization.
However, I've noticed that typing can be laggy. There's a small delay (on the order of a few extra milliseconds) before you hit a key and it gets displayed. It's not as bad as it sounds -- I personally get used to it pretty quickly. But YMMV. It's noticeable, but not quite in the realm of annoying. Perhaps they'll figure out a way to improve that. If you pushed me for a diagnosis of what's wrong, maybe they haven't figured out how to turn off Quartz's double-buffering when they're in fullscreen mode. That'd be a relatively easy fix for 1.1.
So... the short answer is that it's not -quite- as snappy as your previous laptop in Parallels 1.0. It's definitely close enough to do something like compile code in MSVC, which is 90% of what I do. But speaking as a longtime Mac programmer I think there are still a lot of ways to optimize their app that aren't obvious to them (as mostly non-Mac-programmers), so there's still a lot of room for improvement.
btw, I have 2GB of RAM and gave Parallels 900MB of that. If you can easily afford to go up to 2GB, I'd strongly recommend it so that you can give Windows the amount of RAM you're used to. Virtualization isn't cheap.
My understanding of the ESRB ratings is that they're done with volunteered video clips from the maker which are supposed to be representative samples of gameplay. They don't actually play the game.
I think in general the number of games released vs the board size makes it impractical for them to test actual gameplay. With 50+ hrs of content in a game, they need someone to pick out some clips to summarize the gameplay. In a voluntary system, it actually makes sense for this to be the game authors.
What the ESRB has been missing is penalties for (deliberately or accidentally) picking bad, non-representative video clips. This is a step in the right direction.
Most brick-and-mortar retailers would probably refuse to distribute an unrated console game.
The console-makers would also have the option of refusing to release a game that isn't ESRB-rated. I've heard that Sony won't make AO game discs, so maybe that's a requirement already.
After reading some of the other comments in this thread, I'd add something that OSX does not have but other implementations do:
Open Format. The format that any persistent encrypted data is stored in needs to be open and documented, so that an authorized user can recover it readily from a different operating system. This becomes particularly important once it becomes obsolete tech. AFAIK the file format for FileVault is entirely undocumented, and that's bad news in the long run. (It's probably not super hard to reverse-engineer, but it should actually be documented for real and specifically unencumbered so that other people can use the same format.)
Don't just make it easy. Make it the default. The vast majority of users start with everything at default settings. Why would you deliberately use a default which is incorrect?
Defaults are missing. Why would you -not- make it a standard system feature and turn it on by default? If you do that, then you need much less in the way of education... basically just educate the user to use a strong password, and you're done.
IMO the combination of two Mac OS X features, FileVault + Secure VM, comes closest to doing things absolutely right. It's trivial to enable. There can be a global rescue password set up by an IT department. You can use long passwords that are harder to crack. Only the user's data is encrypted, not the OS files (which generally don't need to be). VM swap is automatically encrypted with no password needed. Heck, there's even a password checker dialog that shows the strength of your password every time you create a new one.
And yet... the damn thing is still off by default.
It's almost like someone paid a lot of attention to building the most secure house in the world with shatterproof glass, burglar alarms everywhere, bulletproof walls that can stop an armor-piercing shell, and so on. But when you buy it the front door doesn't come with a lock.
The first answer to the "why not?" question is, of course, benchmarking. Many evils have been committed in the name of better benchmarks. Nobody wants to be the OS vendor or hardware vendor whose machines run 10% slower by default (or whatever) because they are more secure by default.
The second answer to the "why not?" question is probably "risk". I bet Apple has seriously considered turning on FV by default. And I bet the execs were afraid that it might be too immature. Given that I've seen some bugs in Secure VM on my x86 Mac, they might be correct in that assessment for now.
"Apple is going switch to x86. Oh yeah, and Microsoft will switch to PowerPC at the same time!"
You'd have been entirely justified in laughing your ass off. And yet that's pretty much what has happened. (The PPC I'm talking about is the Xbox 360, of course.) Funny old world we live in.
Dvorak's totally full of crap on this one, however. I can sum it up in one sentence: Steve Jobs is a control freak. He'll let Apple's apps get ported to Windows, sure. That's like printing money. But he will not ever want to have his own personal computer, the one that sits on his desk, be beholden to Microsoft's bugs and crappy user experience. Jobs has been refining one version or another of his own personal OS for as long as he's been in the industry. As long as he lives, OSX will never die.
What I could see happening is this:
Apple starts offering the option of Windows pre-installed on its Macs.
Dell/HP/etc start offering the option of OSX pre-installed on their PCs.
Rather than Apple switching entirely, it'd just sell Windows as an option. There is no strong business reason for Apple not to do this, so I suspect they might do it eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
So -- it'll work for the majority of political candidates, then.
The key point is that what you describe is a Microsoft phenomenon. Apple is the one doing this research, ergo it's on Macs. And on Macs -- really on pretty much EVERY OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM EVER CREATED -- you don't maximize your windows like that.
... for shops that use Windows, large monitors are not very useful. Artists and programmers might still benefit from it, though.
Your point is basically that Windows is not at all designed to be large-monitor-friendly. I agree. So
I'm not sure his neighbor will let him plug an ethernet cable into his router. Although it wouldn't hurt to ask. ;-)
Speaking as someone who did five years at Apple, the company certainly does audit stuff before it's released -- particularly network and filesystem code. Patches and bugfixes also tend to get code-reviewed right inside the bug report by several people outside of the core group with good security experience, and reviewed again before they make it into a release. The main problem is that there are so many lines of code and only a finite amount of time, and the more subtle problems take longer to detect. There is a cost-to-profit tradeoff after a certain point.
It's like microwave popcorn. You nuke it and in the first few minutes you can get almost all of the kernels (exploits) popped. Then the rate of popping slows down. After a while, you simply have to stop or else you'll burn right through your profit (of warm, yummy popped corn).
And that's just not worth it. No matter what there will always be a few hiding way down in the bottom of the bag. You can burn through the whole thing and still never pop them all.
presumably their profit margin expectations will not be as high as they might otherwise be?
Their profit margin expectations may well be nil. It's merely that they are *allowed* to make a profit, not that they necessarily *will*.
"I saw them try the old "frozen ice bullet" thing without ever mentioning the word "sabot"; yes, it's a myth but they could have made it work, after a fashion, if they knew anything about guns."
;-)
As it happens, the ice bullet was the very first episode after the pilots. So they were still basically operating "blind" without fan feedback at that point. Once the shows started airing they very quickly found out that they needed to be more exhaustive in their tests to quiet people like you.
FWIW, they've used sabots several times in other episodes, for the [frozen] chicken gun and other cannon-related episodes. Adam doesn't really know much about guns. (Although I suspect he's gotten better since the show started.) Jamie does.
May I suggest a far simpler strategy for the terrorists, given how nicely the government plays along and terrorizes its own citizens:
Drop an iPod or two in the toilet, and the government screws up air traffic worldwide.
Think about that for a moment.
Not always ... after all, there was a stretch of comics where Gabe switched. In perhaps more ways than one.
But I agree with their general point, it's just always good clean fun to pick on Artie MacStrawman.
Happy, uh, zeroth birthday to the Hurd.
Good thing Linus didn't decide to just wait for GNU to finish their OS instead...
The attacker gets extra bonus points if s/he includes an error-correcting checksum in the data stream (again, coded into packet delays) to make it more robust.
Here's a simple way to do it:
- let N be the number of characters in the alphabet you care about (say, 75: letters, numbers, and common punctuation)
- let M be the smallest resolution at which you can reliably time the packet differences (eg, 1ms)
- let P be the period represented by the time M*N
- when you want to transmit a key, map it into your alphabet as X where 1<X<=N
- no matter how much time has elapsed since the last packet, delay the next packet to (next multiple of P) + X.
To decode: take the time difference between packets, modulo P, and you get X.
You can enhance this system by using escape codes. Ordinary network traffic could proceed unmolested when you're not typing, but once you start typing a recognizable escape sequence is issued (coded into packet delays, of course) which kicks you over into keyboard mode, and another kicks you back out once typing has stopped.
Um, filesystems *are* transactional.
:-)
Begin a transaction: open().
End a transaction: close().
If one or more writes occured to the fd between those two calls, then you've just created a new version. It's hardly rocket science.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the feature, Apple has its own GPO-like feature set built in to Mac OS X Server. It's part of the Workgroup Manager application in the server admin tools, which is essentially Apple's AD administration app. It allows you to:
1. manage preferences for groups of computers (energy saver, etc)
2. manage preferences for groups of user accounts (screen saver passwords, etc)
3. disable/enable all sorts of actions (eg: is the user allowed to mount servers? burn discs?).
Follow the link above for the technical brief, etc. The Centrify thing appears at first glance to just be a bridge that lets the Windows admin tool administer Mac OS X clients. Pretty neat, but I don't think it's necessary if you're willing to use Mac OS X to admin your Mac OS X boxes.
Yes to #1. Mascots are incidental to gameplay. They can be central to branding and marketing, but gameplay is what really makes or breaks a game. And too many companies (and their marketing droids) haven't actually figured out gameplay. I think some companies in the 90's wasted millions of dollars on branding and building up a character, only to find out that oops, the game sucks and nobody bought it. Or they created a great mascot, but then the second game in the series sucked and wiped out the company. So the companies that don't bother creating mascots are probably more profitable over the long run.
... in Mario, Sonic, etc you play the main character as well. I think what you're trying to get at is that the perspective tends to be more first-person (or over-the-shoulder) these days. But I would still disagree with that statement. :-) A lot of great modern games are not first-person, and yet still haven't produced the same kind of iconic character. And I think first-person games could have iconic characters, but choose not to because it's cheaper.
:-) I don't know.
No to #2. It's not that the main character is "you"
No to #3 too. I don't think realism vs cartoonishness has anything to do with it. A lot of games are released with cartoony graphics these days and aren't creating long-lived mascots.
In fact, here's one counterexample to #2 and #3. Take God of War. God of War is not first-person; it's a 3D platformer at heart, similar to (yes) Mario. The main character Kratos is extremely distinctive and has a LOT of personality -- I'd say he's probably one of the best developed main characters in years. He's even charismatic, in a rip-your-face-off kind of way. He's also very realistic. Sure, he has some superpowers, but so does Master Chief.
And yet something has stopped Kratos from becoming an icon worthy of inclusion in the Mario / Sonic / Crash echelon. There just wasn't the same marketing push behind him. Perhaps he's just too angry and ultra-violent for a corporation to get behind.
I think that it's ultimately a decision of marketing. Creating a mascot is no longer fashionable. And the people in marketing (and upper management) don't think it's worth the huge amount of time and effort it takes to build a great brand around a great mascot. They'd rather grab for the quick cash and run.
Automation? Hahaha. No, in a modern Senator's office the emails would be sent (via tubes!) to a dot-matrix printer, printed on reams of butterfly paper, and read by an intern. Then they are MANUALLY delivered to the circular file.
What's interesting, btw, is actually that the major brand is Mac. And really MacBook is already an extension of that. MacBook Pro is a double-extension. That's starting to reach shaky ground. Any further extensions -- "MacBook Pro Ultra-Lite", for example -- and it gets too complicated for most people to remember.
The GP is correct about the way Apple has changed their branding strategy.
Old:
* Brand: PowerBook
* Brand: iBook
New:
* Brand: MacBook
* Brand Extension: MacBook Pro
I'm sure Jobs would hate the comparison to fizzy water, but it's sort of like the transition from Coke/Tab to Coke/Diet Coke. Diet Coke is a brand extension of Coke. It's a definite consolidation under the new name. But really, I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing and Apple is screwing themselves. It puts more weight behind the Mac name, and that might be a smart move if they want the Mac to seriously make inroads in marketshare.
When all you have is a compiler, everything looks like a programming problem.
What's odd about Parallels's performance:
... the short answer is that it's not -quite- as snappy as your previous laptop in Parallels 1.0. It's definitely close enough to do something like compile code in MSVC, which is 90% of what I do. But speaking as a longtime Mac programmer I think there are still a lot of ways to optimize their app that aren't obvious to them (as mostly non-Mac-programmers), so there's still a lot of room for improvement.
Computationally, it's pretty close to what you'd expect. It only emulates a single processor machine right now, so if you benchmark it on a Core Duo 2GHz, it comes in somewhere between a 1.6 and 2.0 GHz single-core Pentium. Just about right. Integer is noticeably faster than FP, perhaps because FP context switches require a bigger virtualization hit. Compiling a big project with MSVC is about 10% slower on Parallels than on my previous 1.6GHz notebook, which is very reasonable to me given the overhead of virtualization.
However, I've noticed that typing can be laggy. There's a small delay (on the order of a few extra milliseconds) before you hit a key and it gets displayed. It's not as bad as it sounds -- I personally get used to it pretty quickly. But YMMV. It's noticeable, but not quite in the realm of annoying. Perhaps they'll figure out a way to improve that. If you pushed me for a diagnosis of what's wrong, maybe they haven't figured out how to turn off Quartz's double-buffering when they're in fullscreen mode. That'd be a relatively easy fix for 1.1.
So
btw, I have 2GB of RAM and gave Parallels 900MB of that. If you can easily afford to go up to 2GB, I'd strongly recommend it so that you can give Windows the amount of RAM you're used to. Virtualization isn't cheap.
My understanding of the ESRB ratings is that they're done with volunteered video clips from the maker which are supposed to be representative samples of gameplay. They don't actually play the game.
I think in general the number of games released vs the board size makes it impractical for them to test actual gameplay. With 50+ hrs of content in a game, they need someone to pick out some clips to summarize the gameplay. In a voluntary system, it actually makes sense for this to be the game authors.
What the ESRB has been missing is penalties for (deliberately or accidentally) picking bad, non-representative video clips. This is a step in the right direction.
Most brick-and-mortar retailers would probably refuse to distribute an unrated console game.
The console-makers would also have the option of refusing to release a game that isn't ESRB-rated. I've heard that Sony won't make AO game discs, so maybe that's a requirement already.
After reading some of the other comments in this thread, I'd add something that OSX does not have but other implementations do:
Open Format. The format that any persistent encrypted data is stored in needs to be open and documented, so that an authorized user can recover it readily from a different operating system. This becomes particularly important once it becomes obsolete tech. AFAIK the file format for FileVault is entirely undocumented, and that's bad news in the long run. (It's probably not super hard to reverse-engineer, but it should actually be documented for real and specifically unencumbered so that other people can use the same format.)
Don't just make it easy. Make it the default. The vast majority of users start with everything at default settings. Why would you deliberately use a default which is incorrect?
Defaults are missing. Why would you -not- make it a standard system feature and turn it on by default? If you do that, then you need much less in the way of education... basically just educate the user to use a strong password, and you're done.
... the damn thing is still off by default.
IMO the combination of two Mac OS X features, FileVault + Secure VM, comes closest to doing things absolutely right. It's trivial to enable. There can be a global rescue password set up by an IT department. You can use long passwords that are harder to crack. Only the user's data is encrypted, not the OS files (which generally don't need to be). VM swap is automatically encrypted with no password needed. Heck, there's even a password checker dialog that shows the strength of your password every time you create a new one.
And yet
It's almost like someone paid a lot of attention to building the most secure house in the world with shatterproof glass, burglar alarms everywhere, bulletproof walls that can stop an armor-piercing shell, and so on. But when you buy it the front door doesn't come with a lock.
The first answer to the "why not?" question is, of course, benchmarking. Many evils have been committed in the name of better benchmarks. Nobody wants to be the OS vendor or hardware vendor whose machines run 10% slower by default (or whatever) because they are more secure by default.
The second answer to the "why not?" question is probably "risk". I bet Apple has seriously considered turning on FV by default. And I bet the execs were afraid that it might be too immature. Given that I've seen some bugs in Secure VM on my x86 Mac, they might be correct in that assessment for now.
"Apple is going switch to x86. Oh yeah, and Microsoft will switch to PowerPC at the same time!"
You'd have been entirely justified in laughing your ass off. And yet that's pretty much what has happened. (The PPC I'm talking about is the Xbox 360, of course.) Funny old world we live in.
Dvorak's totally full of crap on this one, however. I can sum it up in one sentence: Steve Jobs is a control freak. He'll let Apple's apps get ported to Windows, sure. That's like printing money. But he will not ever want to have his own personal computer, the one that sits on his desk, be beholden to Microsoft's bugs and crappy user experience. Jobs has been refining one version or another of his own personal OS for as long as he's been in the industry. As long as he lives, OSX will never die.
What I could see happening is this:
Rather than Apple switching entirely, it'd just sell Windows as an option. There is no strong business reason for Apple not to do this, so I suspect they might do it eventually.