Unless I'm mistaken, they didn't make that claim for the iPhone 3G. Wireless is a fickle technology, and it's wise not to make such a bold claim for something that they have limited control over.
Anyone have suggestions on where to buy quality hardware i can load osx86 on?
I'd recommend Apple because (despite your cherry-picked examples) they make high quality, reliable hardware which meets the performance and durability needs of most of their customers.
Between their replacement of true color displays with crappy TN models which push their own calibration tools off the charts, their terrible all around macbook quality (mine's 1.5 years old and literally falling to pieces, including the graphics unit), and now these exploding batteries (again!, even dUll didn't pull the same mistake twice!), I say the days of apple as a quality brand are over.
All consumer laptops currently on the market use TN displays. All of 'em. There were a couple Thinkpads that shipped with IPS displays a while back, but they were pulled due to supply problems (low yield.) Some of the first-run MacBooks had faulty displays (which really did suck quite badly.) That problem was fixed c. the switch to Core 2 chips, and Apple even replaced some of the affected screens on their own dime.
First-rev MacBooks sucked in a lot of ways, no doubt about it. But that was _two years_ ago. Build quality now is quite good (if it weren't you can bet people would stop buying them.) There is a manufacturing defect that's caused some of them to develop stress cracks. Apple's responded to this by replacing the affected parts for free.
It is incredibly unlikely that your graphics chip is falling apart. It's soldered to the logic board.
I don't recall reading anything about exploding iPod nano batteries before. By 2007, there were over 100 million iPods sold. Assuming that only 5% of those were nanos, that that we're looking at a 15 / 5 million rate for this sort of failure. Maybe I'm a fanboy, but 15 exploding Li-ion batters out of 5 million doesn't really sound like the "end of a brand."
Apple gets a hell of a lot of flack courtesy of their fanatical following of fanboys and fanatical following of trolls. The former crows everytime Apple does anything. The latter throw their hands in the air and cry that the sky is falling whenever any issue is reported, no matter how small.
Frankly, the rest of the internet wishes you'd both shut the hell up.
I've had Dell laptops separate at their hinges. I've had Sony displays with horrible color balance and atrocious response times. I had an IBM workstation that went through three power supplies in a year. Over the nearly two decades that I've been using computers, I have seen hardware from pretty much every manufacturer fail. Somehow, despite that, I don't feel the need to seek out a BBS, newsgroup, or website and bemoan that a few isolated incidents spell the end of "_____ as a quality brand."
Probably not how it'd actually turn out, but this would be the best case scenario for this plan, don't you think?
Christ, haven't we [Western society] figured this one out yet?
Don't pass laws based on the "best case scenario". Doing so is a sure way to let the government fuck over the people using law passed with noble intent.
Take a look at child protection laws, the war on drugs, and anti-terrorism laws if you want examples...
That's because PeerGuardian sucks as a blacklist. It's wildly agressive -- their "level 3" list blocks something like 25% of all IPv4 addresses, no joke.
Psystar is going to win this as long as Apple sells their OS as a boxed product.
And as soon as this happens, Apple will stop selling OS X as a boxed product. Possible replacement: offer a subscription to Mac owners and Mac owners only. You give them your Mac's serial number, pay them a fee, and for a period of ___ years, you get free upgrades. Hell, they could even do this through their iTunes infrastructure -- lord knows they've got the bandwidth to spare.
IIRC a month or so back a windows, an OSX and a Linux machine were set up and the OSX machine went down first. Even before the Windows machine. OSX is secure cause nobody attacks it. As soon as more people run it you will see its shortcommings.
Not to burst your bubble, but that was when the attackers had physical access... As far as I'm concerned, if someone has physical access to your box, you're already screwed.
Why are you guys focusing on bashing the headline instead on the actual problem, which is that highly skilled people are working over time for nothing?
Two reasons:
If you believe that this is a serious issue that needs people's understanding, attention, and focus, then I'm sure you don't want to risk turning people off to your message because you published a headline rife with hyperbole. Using a reasonable headline will make sure you're taken seriously, and not discarded as some "loon".
The workers choose to work there. I'm not arguing that what Apple did is legal (I know far to little about labor laws to comment one way or another on TFA), but I can't help but think that it's not "slavery" or "abuse" if the workers have the option of quitting and moving on to greener pastures.
Unfortunately, microwaving it is likely to cause combustion, either of the chip itself and/or of the material around it.
I'm sure/. can come up with some other ideas for disabling these little bastards. As a privacy geek stuck in an increasingly totalitarian country, I'd love to hear 'em....
It's easier, just put IR LEDs around your plate and blind the camera.
Normally, I'd say something along the lines of "yeah, that'll work until they put an IR filter in front of the lens", but in this case, they can't do that, as doing so would make the technology useless in low-light conditions.
This actually seems like a really good solution. IR LEDs are cheap, and it'd be a fun hobby project for an afternoon.
Concept: IR-transparent license plate frame. Appears normal to visual inspection, but conceals a tightly-packed ring of high power IR LEDs around the perimeter of the license plate. Hide the on/off switch in, say, the cigarette lighter (strip out the guts first), and you're all set. The system would be completely concealed, and would be fairly cheap to build.
Of course, the one who remains clean will also retain important things like testicles, non-lactating breasts, and a future.
This comment makes me think your knowledge of modern anabolic steroids is limited to what you've seen in anti-drug PSAs and the like.
A course of modern anabolics, combined with the proper ancillary drugs, will not (when used for a reasonable cycle length) have any of the three impacts you referred to. Yes, if you inject massive amounts of nandrolone and then suddenly stop cold-turkey, bad things will happen -- but if you use a multi-drug stack with titrated dosing, take Clomid and other PCT drugs when appropriate, and use modern compounds (such as stanozolol) which carry fewer risks, you'll most likely be fine.
Even better, I'd recommend Motzarella for totally free Usenet access. Well over 40K groups, and although they don't carry binaries, retention and fill on the text groups is outstanding. Oh, and they support SSL, even SSL on port 443 (for those at work behind "fascist firewalls.")
You see despite 4+ decades of being groomed to think this is wildly wrong, there's absolutely nothing wrong with citizens owning guns, regardless of whether or not they've got photo ID.
Apple's PR machine is telling everyone that only Steve Jobs matters.
I'm gonna call you on this. I have yet to see any evidence that Apple does this. It _does_ seem like the media (particularly various tech publications) has a vested interest in promoting this myth, but that's certainly not the message Apple is sending. In fact, with Steve spending less and less time on stage at keynotes, it seems as though Apple is actually trying to fight this myth.
As with many Apple-related matters, what the company says/does often differs wildly from what the pundits, bashers, and fanboys claim.
You don't need to switch to a new ISP if they haven't patched yet - just switch to a new DNS server such as OpenDNS.
Please don't do that.
I don't think OpenDNS is a terribly good idea, and here's why:
They actively screw with the records and return incorrect information. Now you can argue that they do it for "OK" reasons, and indeed, OpenDNS does exactly this in their marketing materials, but the fact remains: they answer some queries with information that is in conflict with the authoritative nameservers.
Personally, I don't trust any DNS provider that does this, and I don't think it's a good idea for anyone to do so.
Use 4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.6. They're fast, free, don't mess with records (such as altering NXDOMAIN), and are anycast to local servers, so response times are minimal.
Most of Apple's beta stuff has the same confidentiality agreement, so I presumed this was just a bug.
Psh. Where's the potential for vitriolic outrage in that? I mean honestly... how can you expect critics to make comparisons to fascism if it's just extension of the same practices they've been using for almost a decade?
I may well get modded down to the depths of hell for this, but I've got karma to burn:
I would never buy an iPhone or an iPod, not with the kind of policies Apple lays down for them.
What policies?
I own an iPod. I have never, nor will I ever pay money for a track from the iTunes Music Store. Instead, my iPod is loaded with MP3s (ripped with cdparanoia and encoded with LAME) and AACs (again, ripped and encoded using OSS.)
Apple has done nothing to prevent me from using portable, cross platform formats on my iPod.
Now as to the iPhone -- you have more of a case here, but (at least in the US), not much of one. In order to release a cellphone in the US, you need the support of the carriers. If you don't have the support of the carriers... well... how's Openmoko doing again? In order to appease AT&T, Apple needed to make concessions (just as it had to make concessions with iTMS to appease the labels.) One of these concessions was control over the software that could be run on the device. AT&T doesn't want people using things like VoIP apps and SMS->email gateways. Apple needs AT&T's support, so it restricts the applications that can run on the device. It's as simple as that. It would make excellent business sense for Apple to support as much software as possible, but it wouldn't make very good business sense to piss off AT&T (thereby nixing the iPhone's chances of a US release.)
Look, I'm not happy about it either. I'd like to be able to install Java, Python, etc. on the iPhone through the app store. But given that the choice seems to be a somewhat restricted cellphone (that still performs admirably at its primary task as... well... a cellphone) or no Apple phone at all, I'd pick the former.
Apple does seem quite opposed to Freedom these days
Thing is, the rest of Apple's business doesn't seem to be nearly as controlling as you make it out to be. A large chunk of Mac OS X is open source, and Apple has donated code to the community even when it wasn't required for legal reasons (mDNSResponder, for example.) Apple's also donated a tremendous amount of manpower to the open source community: WebKit, LLVM, and gcc have all benefited from Apple's engineering staff. Take WebKit for example. Apple could have simply rolled KHTML into their browser, taken the patches from KHTML when they became available, and not done any work on their own. That would have been "good enough." But they didn't do that. Instead, albeit after a rocky start, they put a programmer (Dave Hyatt) on WebKit development full-time, opened the full source tree for public access, and turned WebKit into the best open source rendering engine out there.
Open standards run deep in Apple's desktop software. plist files are XML based, Mac OS X has system-wide support for PDF -- even iTunes (that "monopolistic" music player) rips files into a interchangeable format by default (AAC.) Apple has embraced H.264 for their video efforts (compare and contrast to if they had developed their own, proprietary codec.)
We'd all like a company that produces a completely open source OS that actively pushes its users towards using completely open formats like ODF with no option to use anything proprietary. We'd love it if this company made easy-to-use, stylish products built completely out of open components. I think I speak for all of/. when I say that if such a company existed and gained even half of Apple's popularity, we'd become fanatical supporters.
But in reality, such a company hasn't come along. The open source community (at least if past efforts are anything to go by) sucks when it comes to competing with Apple and Microsoft. The Openmoko FreeRunner, the open source community's answer to the iPhone, is an embarrassingly outdated usability nightmare. The OSS community _still_ has yet to make a music player as easy-to-use for the common consumer as the iPod.
Alternative, if you're just using text groups, you can use motzarella.org and never pay a dime. They even support SSL and run nntpds on port 443 for folks behind restrictive firewalls.
So instead of voting to take a way a tool in our war on terror,
Don't be deceptive. FISA has worked fine for 22 years -- there's no reason it suddenly needs to be updated now. The only thing this bill removes is judicial oversight and accountability. It's not as though it's challenging to get approval for a legitimate tap from the FISA court -- they've only ever rejected a handful of requests. It's also not about the need to tap in an emergency: FISA makes provisions for that too. Taps can be placed for 72 hours without a warrant in the event of an emergency, all that has to be done is that the tap be reported and a warrant sought after the 72 hours.
No, this bill is about removing judicial oversight, removing accountability, and removing the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
There's no way (as of yet) to change the iPhone's ESN, so if you report the phone stolen, you can expect the ESN to be barred from US networks (and EU ones, come to think of it) -- and if you try to use it, an alert will be triggered (assuming that AT&T's policies are anything like the policies of the carriers in the EU when it comes to stolen phones.)
They have set up a telehealth phoneline staffed by nurses and other qualified people so that people don't go down to the emergency room, or run to the doctor every time you have a rash or a cough.
The UK does something like this too. Any time of day or night, if you've got a pressing (but not obviously life-threatening) issue, call NHS24. I've used their service once or twice, and I was pleased. The call was answered right away by a real human, and once it was determined that it was not an urgent trauma situation, I was told to wait for a few minutes for a nurse. When I got called back, the nurse took down my symptoms, ran over my medical history, and made the appropriate diagnosis. Saved me a trip to the ER, and probably sped up the ensuing visit to my GP (since the call and symptoms were already on file.)
Slashdot Mirror
Opera 9 works just fine on 10.3.
Unless I'm mistaken, they didn't make that claim for the iPhone 3G. Wireless is a fickle technology, and it's wise not to make such a bold claim for something that they have limited control over.
Anyone have suggestions on where to buy quality hardware i can load osx86 on?
I'd recommend Apple because (despite your cherry-picked examples) they make high quality, reliable hardware which meets the performance and durability needs of most of their customers.
Between their replacement of true color displays with crappy TN models which push their own calibration tools off the charts, their terrible all around macbook quality (mine's 1.5 years old and literally falling to pieces, including the graphics unit), and now these exploding batteries (again!, even dUll didn't pull the same mistake twice!), I say the days of apple as a quality brand are over.
Apple gets a hell of a lot of flack courtesy of their fanatical following of fanboys and fanatical following of trolls. The former crows everytime Apple does anything. The latter throw their hands in the air and cry that the sky is falling whenever any issue is reported, no matter how small.
Frankly, the rest of the internet wishes you'd both shut the hell up.
I've had Dell laptops separate at their hinges. I've had Sony displays with horrible color balance and atrocious response times. I had an IBM workstation that went through three power supplies in a year. Over the nearly two decades that I've been using computers, I have seen hardware from pretty much every manufacturer fail. Somehow, despite that, I don't feel the need to seek out a BBS, newsgroup, or website and bemoan that a few isolated incidents spell the end of "_____ as a quality brand."
Probably not how it'd actually turn out, but this would be the best case scenario for this plan, don't you think?
Christ, haven't we [Western society] figured this one out yet?
Don't pass laws based on the "best case scenario". Doing so is a sure way to let the government fuck over the people using law passed with noble intent.
Take a look at child protection laws, the war on drugs, and anti-terrorism laws if you want examples...
That's because PeerGuardian sucks as a blacklist. It's wildly agressive -- their "level 3" list blocks something like 25% of all IPv4 addresses, no joke.
Psystar is going to win this as long as Apple sells their OS as a boxed product.
And as soon as this happens, Apple will stop selling OS X as a boxed product. Possible replacement: offer a subscription to Mac owners and Mac owners only. You give them your Mac's serial number, pay them a fee, and for a period of ___ years, you get free upgrades. Hell, they could even do this through their iTunes infrastructure -- lord knows they've got the bandwidth to spare.
IIRC a month or so back a windows, an OSX and a Linux machine were set up and the OSX machine went down first. Even before the Windows machine. OSX is secure cause nobody attacks it. As soon as more people run it you will see its shortcommings.
Not to burst your bubble, but that was when the attackers had physical access... As far as I'm concerned, if someone has physical access to your box, you're already screwed.
Then again, will Apple manage to maintain and refine their secret sauce when Steve Jobs is gone?
Yes, I think so.
Why are you guys focusing on bashing the headline instead on the actual problem, which is that highly skilled people are working over time for nothing?
Two reasons:
Unfortunately, microwaving it is likely to cause combustion, either of the chip itself and/or of the material around it. /. can come up with some other ideas for disabling these little bastards. As a privacy geek stuck in an increasingly totalitarian country, I'd love to hear 'em....
I'm sure
You know for all the flak we give the traditional media, at least they don't have headlines like this.
Not properly dispensing overtime pay is not the same thing as slavery, and the disconnect between the inflammatory headline and TFA is appalling.
On a lighter note, the CAPTCHA for me is unionize.
It's easier, just put IR LEDs around your plate and blind the camera.
Normally, I'd say something along the lines of "yeah, that'll work until they put an IR filter in front of the lens", but in this case, they can't do that, as doing so would make the technology useless in low-light conditions.
This actually seems like a really good solution. IR LEDs are cheap, and it'd be a fun hobby project for an afternoon.
Concept: IR-transparent license plate frame. Appears normal to visual inspection, but conceals a tightly-packed ring of high power IR LEDs around the perimeter of the license plate. Hide the on/off switch in, say, the cigarette lighter (strip out the guts first), and you're all set. The system would be completely concealed, and would be fairly cheap to build.
Of course, the one who remains clean will also retain important things like testicles, non-lactating breasts, and a future.
This comment makes me think your knowledge of modern anabolic steroids is limited to what you've seen in anti-drug PSAs and the like.
A course of modern anabolics, combined with the proper ancillary drugs, will not (when used for a reasonable cycle length) have any of the three impacts you referred to. Yes, if you inject massive amounts of nandrolone and then suddenly stop cold-turkey, bad things will happen -- but if you use a multi-drug stack with titrated dosing, take Clomid and other PCT drugs when appropriate, and use modern compounds (such as stanozolol) which carry fewer risks, you'll most likely be fine.
Even better, I'd recommend Motzarella for totally free Usenet access. Well over 40K groups, and although they don't carry binaries, retention and fill on the text groups is outstanding. Oh, and they support SSL, even SSL on port 443 (for those at work behind "fascist firewalls.")
Bought the shotgun at a gunshow with no ID? Fine.
You're right. That is fine.
You see despite 4+ decades of being groomed to think this is wildly wrong, there's absolutely nothing wrong with citizens owning guns, regardless of whether or not they've got photo ID.
There is no perfect solution, but at least with government there is a chance of some accountability.
Think long and hard whether these are the folks you want governing the Internet.
Iraq.
Warrantless wiretapping.
Torture.
Habeus corpus.
Vote fraud.
DoD contracts.
What accountability?
Apple's PR machine is telling everyone that only Steve Jobs matters.
I'm gonna call you on this. I have yet to see any evidence that Apple does this. It _does_ seem like the media (particularly various tech publications) has a vested interest in promoting this myth, but that's certainly not the message Apple is sending. In fact, with Steve spending less and less time on stage at keynotes, it seems as though Apple is actually trying to fight this myth.
As with many Apple-related matters, what the company says/does often differs wildly from what the pundits, bashers, and fanboys claim.
You don't need to switch to a new ISP if they haven't patched yet - just switch to a new DNS server such as OpenDNS.
Please don't do that.
I don't think OpenDNS is a terribly good idea, and here's why:
They actively screw with the records and return incorrect information. Now you can argue that they do it for "OK" reasons, and indeed, OpenDNS does exactly this in their marketing materials, but the fact remains: they answer some queries with information that is in conflict with the authoritative nameservers.
Personally, I don't trust any DNS provider that does this, and I don't think it's a good idea for anyone to do so.
Use 4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.6. They're fast, free, don't mess with records (such as altering NXDOMAIN), and are anycast to local servers, so response times are minimal.
Most of Apple's beta stuff has the same confidentiality agreement, so I presumed this was just a bug.
Psh. Where's the potential for vitriolic outrage in that? I mean honestly... how can you expect critics to make comparisons to fascism if it's just extension of the same practices they've been using for almost a decade?
I may well get modded down to the depths of hell for this, but I've got karma to burn:
I would never buy an iPhone or an iPod, not with the kind of policies Apple lays down for them.
What policies?
I own an iPod. I have never, nor will I ever pay money for a track from the iTunes Music Store. Instead, my iPod is loaded with MP3s (ripped with cdparanoia and encoded with LAME) and AACs (again, ripped and encoded using OSS.)
Apple has done nothing to prevent me from using portable, cross platform formats on my iPod.
Now as to the iPhone -- you have more of a case here, but (at least in the US), not much of one. In order to release a cellphone in the US, you need the support of the carriers. If you don't have the support of the carriers... well... how's Openmoko doing again? In order to appease AT&T, Apple needed to make concessions (just as it had to make concessions with iTMS to appease the labels.) One of these concessions was control over the software that could be run on the device. AT&T doesn't want people using things like VoIP apps and SMS->email gateways. Apple needs AT&T's support, so it restricts the applications that can run on the device. It's as simple as that. It would make excellent business sense for Apple to support as much software as possible, but it wouldn't make very good business sense to piss off AT&T (thereby nixing the iPhone's chances of a US release.)
Look, I'm not happy about it either. I'd like to be able to install Java, Python, etc. on the iPhone through the app store. But given that the choice seems to be a somewhat restricted cellphone (that still performs admirably at its primary task as... well... a cellphone) or no Apple phone at all, I'd pick the former.
Apple does seem quite opposed to Freedom these days
Thing is, the rest of Apple's business doesn't seem to be nearly as controlling as you make it out to be. A large chunk of Mac OS X is open source, and Apple has donated code to the community even when it wasn't required for legal reasons (mDNSResponder, for example.) Apple's also donated a tremendous amount of manpower to the open source community: WebKit, LLVM, and gcc have all benefited from Apple's engineering staff. Take WebKit for example. Apple could have simply rolled KHTML into their browser, taken the patches from KHTML when they became available, and not done any work on their own. That would have been "good enough." But they didn't do that. Instead, albeit after a rocky start, they put a programmer (Dave Hyatt) on WebKit development full-time, opened the full source tree for public access, and turned WebKit into the best open source rendering engine out there.
Open standards run deep in Apple's desktop software. plist files are XML based, Mac OS X has system-wide support for PDF -- even iTunes (that "monopolistic" music player) rips files into a interchangeable format by default (AAC.) Apple has embraced H.264 for their video efforts (compare and contrast to if they had developed their own, proprietary codec.)
We'd all like a company that produces a completely open source OS that actively pushes its users towards using completely open formats like ODF with no option to use anything proprietary. We'd love it if this company made easy-to-use, stylish products built completely out of open components. I think I speak for all of /. when I say that if such a company existed and gained even half of Apple's popularity, we'd become fanatical supporters.
But in reality, such a company hasn't come along. The open source community (at least if past efforts are anything to go by) sucks when it comes to competing with Apple and Microsoft. The Openmoko FreeRunner, the open source community's answer to the iPhone, is an embarrassingly outdated usability nightmare. The OSS community _still_ has yet to make a music player as easy-to-use for the common consumer as the iPod.
We can all rant and rave abou
Alternative, if you're just using text groups, you can use motzarella.org and never pay a dime. They even support SSL and run nntpds on port 443 for folks behind restrictive firewalls.
So instead of voting to take a way a tool in our war on terror,
Don't be deceptive. FISA has worked fine for 22 years -- there's no reason it suddenly needs to be updated now. The only thing this bill removes is judicial oversight and accountability. It's not as though it's challenging to get approval for a legitimate tap from the FISA court -- they've only ever rejected a handful of requests. It's also not about the need to tap in an emergency: FISA makes provisions for that too. Taps can be placed for 72 hours without a warrant in the event of an emergency, all that has to be done is that the tap be reported and a warrant sought after the 72 hours.
No, this bill is about removing judicial oversight, removing accountability, and removing the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
So Saturdays at your house must be a real blast, huh?
What if the phone gets "stolen"?
Then you might get accused of "fraud".
There's no way (as of yet) to change the iPhone's ESN, so if you report the phone stolen, you can expect the ESN to be barred from US networks (and EU ones, come to think of it) -- and if you try to use it, an alert will be triggered (assuming that AT&T's policies are anything like the policies of the carriers in the EU when it comes to stolen phones.)
They have set up a telehealth phoneline staffed by nurses and other qualified people so that people don't go down to the emergency room, or run to the doctor every time you have a rash or a cough.
The UK does something like this too. Any time of day or night, if you've got a pressing (but not obviously life-threatening) issue, call NHS24. I've used their service once or twice, and I was pleased. The call was answered right away by a real human, and once it was determined that it was not an urgent trauma situation, I was told to wait for a few minutes for a nurse. When I got called back, the nurse took down my symptoms, ran over my medical history, and made the appropriate diagnosis. Saved me a trip to the ER, and probably sped up the ensuing visit to my GP (since the call and symptoms were already on file.)