Maybe because the bug can't be reproduced on the hardware every time?
Their HCL does have every currently supported Mac, and they do test on them -- but it seems possible that it might be an issue once you throw user-installed kexts, etc. into the mix (I have no idea whether or not this this case though.)
Ideology predetermines their arguments, and in this case, the ideology at work is a sort of economic anarchism that, quite frankly, has been completely discredited by the current state of affairs in the US economy.
It's only been discredited if you're one of the people who believes that the US has had a free market for the last several decades. The people at Forbes (as well as those who actually study economics) have been living under no such misbelief.
The only reason macs have been able to get away with claiming such great security records (statistically) is herd immunity.
Indeed. Just look at Linux. It had a great security record up until the start of this decade. Then, once it gained a lot of popularity on servers, we started to see millions of infected Linux servers, linked together in botn...
Oh. Well damn. It seems that despite being the near ideal target for virus-writers (always on, very fast links, powerful hardware), the most popular server platform on earth doesn't have a major virus problem. Huh. Maybe an OSs security record isn't directly linked to its popularity...
1. Your IP address, browser, operating system, installed plugins, and physical location were logged by Google Analytics as soon as you hit Slashdot.
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My browser doesn't send referrer headers.
I don't accept cookies unless I have to (read required for work or finances.) If I do, they're deleted when I close the browser.
Doubleclick.net is blocked in my hosts file.
Doubleclick.net is blocked via my LAN's DNS server.
My browser doesn't send a user agent.
Not everyone has given up and allowed people to track and collect statistics as they please. Some of us take steps to drastically limit the amount of information that we give to advertisers, Google, etc. Browsers that submit any history or similar data without our knowledge just make our job harder.
Wait a sec.... you're actually claiming that Apple users are tolerant of glitches?
AHAHAHA ahem. Uh. Wow.
Have you actually read any Mac forums? Apple "fanbois" (as some would call them) are some of the most vocal critics out there. They are anything but tolerant. Every little glitch, any minor imperfection has the Apple "blogosphere" up in arms, demanding the head of Steve Jobs, Johnathan Ives, and Phil Schiller on a silver iPlatter. Any issue is pointed to as the sign of the "end of Apple as a quality brand". Hell, these are the same people that filed a class-action lawsuit over the fact that the iPod nano was made of plastic that could be scratched!
I'm sorry you've had issues with your phone, but I think your extrapolation (and the ensuing assumption) is... well... a little ridiculous.
And you know, nearly three years later, myopinions on it remain... exactly the same.
It'd be cool to see it succeed, but it's basically trying too hard to be a jack-of-all-trades. It offers a bunch of cool toy features, many of which will likely make a small portion of the user base absolutely delighted (things like concert ticket listings, for example). Unfortunately, it does so at the cost of many features that a large potion of the potential user base cares about, such as syncing with music players, maintaining a reasonable memory footprint, keeping the UI light and responsive, and improving the speed and ease with which people can manage their music libraries.
This is becoming a (disheartening) pattern:
Open source competitor arrives to challenge closed-source market leading freeware./. and CNet publish headlines like "$SOFTWARE killer?" We brag about how it's awesome for allowing us to do $GEEKY_FEATURE.
Normal users point out that it doesn't yet provide $BASIC_FEATURE. Geeks point out that 1) users don't really want $BASIC_FEATURE, and they should instead use $GEEKY_SUBSTITUTE. 2) $BASIC_FEATURE will be included at some point in the future.
Normal users ignore the app, as it doesn't do the basic things they require.
Time passes. Development moves on with no unified focus. More geek features are added to the program. Eventually $BASIC_FEATURE appears.
User points out that the app's implementation of $BASIC_FEATURE is not an improvement on the existing solution, and that it is hard to find amidst a mass of misc. features.
Geeks cry "But it's an open source alternative to $MARKET_LEADER!"
Normal users ignore it because it still doesn't do $BASIC_FEATURE particularly well, and the UI is cumbersome.
Enter Songbird. Three years after its first release, it doesn't support two popular MP3 players from the leading company. Its UI has been redesigned at least twice, and is now even less familiar to users than its first release was. It doesn't look like a native app, and on top of all that, it consumes more memory than it's closed source competitor.
I really would like Songbird to succeed, but at this point I can't honestly say that it's any better than (or even as good as) iTunes.
Like how iTunes appears to use some kind of hybrid Safari browser for the iTunes store?
There's a big difference though: iTunes may use WebKit for some of its iTMS rendering, but Songbird uses XUL for its entire interface. Songbird has (when last I checked) zero native controls (barring the menu bar.)
Actually, I'm not even sure that iTunes uses WebKit at all. The stuff it gets from phobos.apple.com sure ain't HTML, and it seems to be some form of XML-based format designed specifically for iTunes. I don't know if WebKit is what's actually doing the rendering.
Joe the Pedo cares a lot about getting free untraceable internet access.
Oh no you don't. If the politicians don't get to use the "think of children" excuse to justify increased surveillance, shredding the Constitution, and guilty-until-proven-innocent, then we don't get to use it as an explanation for our security decisions.
Let's not have a double standard here; one standard will do just fine.
The only saving grace would be that MS would be capable of signing an NDA with them.
That kinda implies that the barrier for Linux drivers is the lack of devs willing to sign an NDA. AFAIK, that's not often the case. In fact, from what I remember hearing, there have been quite a few developers willing to sign an NDA in order to get documentation -- but manufacturers just don't want the help of the OSS community. MS has the upper hand because 1) they're a corporation, not a random collection of developers and 2) they have money.
Actually, it looks like a pretty good search technique.
No, it's a pretty shitty one. Here's why:
It's easy to fool. Change one bit of your files, and they've got a totally different hash. More practically, anyone who recompresses a known image will end up with one that the hash scanners don't find.
It's not accurate. The article says they used MD5. MD5 is ridiculously vulnerable to collisions. It's trivial to make a second, unrelated file that has the same hash as another, provided you can add arbitrary data to the end of it. And guess what sort of files tend to be well-suited to that sort of padding? Yup. Image files.
It depends on the algorithm (a corollary to the above). So you know MD5 sucks, and pick another algorithm, let's say RIPEMD-160. Great. Works fine, and now you've got a foolproof method for finding child porn, right? For now, you might. But what happens in 10 years when a couple of Chinese researchers release a paper showing how you can construct collisions for RIPEMD-160? Do you go back and re-try all the cases based upon the findings of the hash search? Or (as I suspect will happen), do you simply let them rot in prison because they already "struck out" according to your hash search?
I made a skype-out call from the G1 over my wifi network today. Try that with an iPhone. Granted, it's a phone, so sure, what's the point. But it's good to know that even if I terminate my cell plan, the phone isn't a useless brick.
Yeah, I thought using VoIP on my iPhone was pretty cool back when I tried it last year.
Of course now there are several official apps that can do this, like fring (which supports SkypeOut, Gizmo, and other SIP providers, and (soon) iCall, which can switch to VoIP. If you're still on 1.1.x (like I am), you can use siphon with pretty much any SIP provider.
It's good to know that if I had a plan and then terminated it, the phone wouldn't be a useless brick.
However, he did succeed in finding two similarly overpriced models to the Mac from Sony and Lenovo, demonstrating that bad choices are also available in the PC world, if you look hard enough.
So price is the only thing that matters? If it costs a single dollar more than a similarly-specced alternative, that's it, it's a bad choice?
This may sound strange, but the value of a computer is more than just the actual hardware. Things like OS support, build quality, warranty, and support are important. In the case of the MacBook, you can run OS X, they are by all accounts very soundly-built machines, and come with a year of some of the best-rated customer care in the industry.
Now that may not matter to you, so maybe for you the MacBook isn't a good buy -- but to claim that the only important thing is the price/hardware ratio is to overlook three things that are very important to a hell of a lot of buyers.
Easy solution to locked phones: don't buy them (yes, I just heard thousands of Apple fanboys gasp at the though of not having Steve's latest piece of crap). Go get an unlocked phone and use a GSM carrier, that wasn't so hard was it?
You just couldn't help but stick an anti-Apple jab in there, could you...:D
Realistically, you don't have to buy only factory-unlocked phones -- a lot of phones are trivial to unlock. I used to always buy Nokias for that reason (DCT-3/4 have been busted for ages). Recently I picked up a second-hand iPhone because I knew that it could reliably be unlocked. It's happily working outside the OS, tethered to my laptop. Kinda makes me the carrier's worst case user...
But I digress. Just because a phone is locked down by a carrier doesn't mean that its hard to remove the restrictions -- it's usually as simple as a bit of Googling and following a step-by-step guide. Given that it's almost always a one time thing and that phones purchased from your carrier tend to be subsidized, it's not a bad idea to do a bit of research first.
I get that Google's the new geek darling, I really do -- but this is ridiculous.
A kill switch is a kill switch. Period. If you can remotely disable an app on the user's phone, it's a kill switch. Now you may trust one company more than another, but trying to spin it like it's something else is just silly.
(For the record, I don't trust either company's killswitch. I don't own an Android phone, and I've disabled the killswitch on the one device I use that runs iPhone OS 2.1.)
By the same logic, you could say something along these lines:
Go to any cell phone outlet in Asia - look at even the Chinese-only or Korean-only cell phones. ALL have non-Unix firmware. Samsung, Motorola, LG, Palm, RIM, pretty much everyone uses a custom embedded OS. Except Apple.
And you'd be right. The real question, of course, is whether or not customers should be allowed to choose a product that you may think is inferior to its competition in some regard. I contend that they should. You (and the EU) seem to think that companies should be mandated to provide the same features as one another, so as to 'protect' the consumer from having to decide whether or not a certain feature is a dealbreaker.
Happened when Apple stopped releasing source code to Darwin.
Not to interrupt your screed, but they didn't stop releasing the source code. They delayed the release of a single version of the x86 branch by a couple months. People like yourself then extrapolated this out to "Apple has closed off Darwin."
some individuals so brainwashed that they blame the victim.
Gee, I never thought of myself as brainwashed before.
See I always figured that if you signed a contract to pay X when you do Y, that meant that if you did Y, you had to pay X. I guess I never realized that the people who did Y were just poor victims at the hands of an immoral corporation forcing them to abide by the contract that they agreed to...
What?!? Do you mean to tell me that the president of the company that made the phone refused to help with a bill from the carrier? Why how selfish of him not to intervene in a dispute that didn't involve Apple!
Apple is making it impossible for anyone else to sell a computer that is compatible with OS X.
That's 100% false.
Apple isn't doing anything to stop you from selling a machine built with OS X-compatible hardware.
If Psystar was just doing that, Apple wouldn't have a leg to stand on. As it is, they're pre-installing OS X on the machines (i.e. distributing an adaptation of a copyrighted work). There's a big difference. If they sold the machines with no OS, but said "Oh, BTW, you can install your own store-bought copy of OS X on them -- here are some instructions" they might well be in the clear.
That's great and all if you are an internet mechanic. But what if you just want to drive the damn car? For those people, who are the majority, those messages don't mean squat.
And you know, teenage kids who "just want to drive the damn car" are also responsible for a substantial portion of collisions. Coincidence?
The fundamental mistake of computer security is assuming that it can be made easy for the lowest common denominator. It can't. Sorry, I've got no clever analogy for this one -- but it's true. There is simply no way that you can design a system that can retain its security in the face of a user that is both ignorant and has no desire to learn how to properly use the tools at his disposal. You just can't do it. Warnings will be ignored, errors will be bypassed, and someone who wants to remain ignorant will, no matter how many hoops he has to jump through to do it. Most users aren't just ignorant -- they revel in it: how many times have you heard someone say "Oh, I'm just hopeless with computer stuff", followed by a smirk and a giggle? There ain't enough crypto in the world can protect that user.
Designing a security measure around the lowest common denominator will make everyone less secure, all in the name of making someone who wants to remain ignorant slightly more comfortable. And for the benefit of all of us who want real security, this is a very, very bad idea.
OTOH The Bible is about the only book that wouldn't have earned them a DMCA slapdown affidavit.
I know you said that partly in jest, but I actually got a little depressed when I gave it some thought. Think of what we could have included: the music that influenced generations, films that invoke anger, sadness, joy, books that literally changed the way that the world thought -- and not one bit of it can be reproduced, all because some assholes wanted to collect a check from an animated mouse.
I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net's e-mail forwarding. For 2 pennies per day, they forward any mail received at my domain. I've got both specific mappings (box1@example.com forwards to something) and blanket mappings (anything sent to a box without a specific mapping is sent to my address.) When I need to give out an address, I simply make one up. If that address starts getting spam, I simply blackhole it (i.e. I map it to discard@nearlyfreespeech.net). Simple, effective, and cheap.
Yes, I know I _could_ run my own MTA -- but I'm willing to pay a couple bucks a year to get something that "just works." That, and their privacy policy is pretty kick-ass.
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Maybe because the bug can't be reproduced on the hardware every time?
Their HCL does have every currently supported Mac, and they do test on them -- but it seems possible that it might be an issue once you throw user-installed kexts, etc. into the mix (I have no idea whether or not this this case though.)
Ideology predetermines their arguments, and in this case, the ideology at work is a sort of economic anarchism that, quite frankly, has been completely discredited by the current state of affairs in the US economy.
It's only been discredited if you're one of the people who believes that the US has had a free market for the last several decades. The people at Forbes (as well as those who actually study economics) have been living under no such misbelief.
Indeed. Just look at Linux. It had a great security record up until the start of this decade. Then, once it gained a lot of popularity on servers, we started to see millions of infected Linux servers, linked together in botn...
Oh. Well damn. It seems that despite being the near ideal target for virus-writers (always on, very fast links, powerful hardware), the most popular server platform on earth doesn't have a major virus problem. Huh. Maybe an OSs security record isn't directly linked to its popularity...
1. Your IP address, browser, operating system, installed plugins, and physical location were logged by Google Analytics as soon as you hit Slashdot.
2. If you don't have adblock installed, your browser contacted doubleclick.net when you visited Slashdot and uploaded the unique id assigned to your browser. If you did not have a unique id, one was assigned to you. Additional information such as the site you are visiting, your browser, your plugins, your geographic location, and other information may have been collected during this transaction.
Not everyone has given up and allowed people to track and collect statistics as they please. Some of us take steps to drastically limit the amount of information that we give to advertisers, Google, etc. Browsers that submit any history or similar data without our knowledge just make our job harder.
Wait a sec.... you're actually claiming that Apple users are tolerant of glitches?
AHAHAHA ahem. Uh. Wow.
Have you actually read any Mac forums? Apple "fanbois" (as some would call them) are some of the most vocal critics out there. They are anything but tolerant. Every little glitch, any minor imperfection has the Apple "blogosphere" up in arms, demanding the head of Steve Jobs, Johnathan Ives, and Phil Schiller on a silver iPlatter. Any issue is pointed to as the sign of the "end of Apple as a quality brand". Hell, these are the same people that filed a class-action lawsuit over the fact that the iPod nano was made of plastic that could be scratched!
I'm sorry you've had issues with your phone, but I think your extrapolation (and the ensuing assumption) is... well... a little ridiculous.
And you know, nearly three years later, my opinions on it remain... exactly the same.
It'd be cool to see it succeed, but it's basically trying too hard to be a jack-of-all-trades. It offers a bunch of cool toy features, many of which will likely make a small portion of the user base absolutely delighted (things like concert ticket listings, for example). Unfortunately, it does so at the cost of many features that a large potion of the potential user base cares about, such as syncing with music players, maintaining a reasonable memory footprint, keeping the UI light and responsive, and improving the speed and ease with which people can manage their music libraries.
This is becoming a (disheartening) pattern:
Enter Songbird. Three years after its first release, it doesn't support two popular MP3 players from the leading company. Its UI has been redesigned at least twice, and is now even less familiar to users than its first release was. It doesn't look like a native app, and on top of all that, it consumes more memory than it's closed source competitor.
I really would like Songbird to succeed, but at this point I can't honestly say that it's any better than (or even as good as) iTunes.
Like how iTunes appears to use some kind of hybrid Safari browser for the iTunes store?
There's a big difference though: iTunes may use WebKit for some of its iTMS rendering, but Songbird uses XUL for its entire interface. Songbird has (when last I checked) zero native controls (barring the menu bar.)
Actually, I'm not even sure that iTunes uses WebKit at all. The stuff it gets from phobos.apple.com sure ain't HTML, and it seems to be some form of XML-based format designed specifically for iTunes. I don't know if WebKit is what's actually doing the rendering.
Joe the Pedo cares a lot about getting free untraceable internet access.
Oh no you don't. If the politicians don't get to use the "think of children" excuse to justify increased surveillance, shredding the Constitution, and guilty-until-proven-innocent, then we don't get to use it as an explanation for our security decisions. Let's not have a double standard here; one standard will do just fine.
The only saving grace would be that MS would be capable of signing an NDA with them.
That kinda implies that the barrier for Linux drivers is the lack of devs willing to sign an NDA. AFAIK, that's not often the case. In fact, from what I remember hearing, there have been quite a few developers willing to sign an NDA in order to get documentation -- but manufacturers just don't want the help of the OSS community. MS has the upper hand because 1) they're a corporation, not a random collection of developers and 2) they have money.
You come back when WGA includes source code and a patch.
If you're comfortable with x86 ASM, I can give you buildable source and a patch... ;-)
Actually, it looks like a pretty good search technique.
No, it's a pretty shitty one. Here's why:
Yeah, I thought using VoIP on my iPhone was pretty cool back when I tried it last year.
Of course now there are several official apps that can do this, like fring (which supports SkypeOut, Gizmo, and other SIP providers, and (soon) iCall, which can switch to VoIP. If you're still on 1.1.x (like I am), you can use siphon with pretty much any SIP provider.
It's good to know that if I had a plan and then terminated it, the phone wouldn't be a useless brick.
However, he did succeed in finding two similarly overpriced models to the Mac from Sony and Lenovo, demonstrating that bad choices are also available in the PC world, if you look hard enough.
So price is the only thing that matters? If it costs a single dollar more than a similarly-specced alternative, that's it, it's a bad choice?
This may sound strange, but the value of a computer is more than just the actual hardware. Things like OS support, build quality, warranty, and support are important. In the case of the MacBook, you can run OS X, they are by all accounts very soundly-built machines, and come with a year of some of the best-rated customer care in the industry.
Now that may not matter to you, so maybe for you the MacBook isn't a good buy -- but to claim that the only important thing is the price/hardware ratio is to overlook three things that are very important to a hell of a lot of buyers.
Uh.... outside the US. Last I checked, the OS is still functional.
Easy solution to locked phones: don't buy them (yes, I just heard thousands of Apple fanboys gasp at the though of not having Steve's latest piece of crap). Go get an unlocked phone and use a GSM carrier, that wasn't so hard was it?
You just couldn't help but stick an anti-Apple jab in there, could you... :D
Realistically, you don't have to buy only factory-unlocked phones -- a lot of phones are trivial to unlock. I used to always buy Nokias for that reason (DCT-3/4 have been busted for ages). Recently I picked up a second-hand iPhone because I knew that it could reliably be unlocked. It's happily working outside the OS, tethered to my laptop. Kinda makes me the carrier's worst case user...
But I digress. Just because a phone is locked down by a carrier doesn't mean that its hard to remove the restrictions -- it's usually as simple as a bit of Googling and following a step-by-step guide. Given that it's almost always a one time thing and that phones purchased from your carrier tend to be subsidized, it's not a bad idea to do a bit of research first.
Really?
I get that Google's the new geek darling, I really do -- but this is ridiculous.
A kill switch is a kill switch. Period. If you can remotely disable an app on the user's phone, it's a kill switch. Now you may trust one company more than another, but trying to spin it like it's something else is just silly.
(For the record, I don't trust either company's killswitch. I don't own an Android phone, and I've disabled the killswitch on the one device I use that runs iPhone OS 2.1.)
So?
By the same logic, you could say something along these lines:
Go to any cell phone outlet in Asia - look at even the Chinese-only or Korean-only cell phones. ALL have non-Unix firmware. Samsung, Motorola, LG, Palm, RIM, pretty much everyone uses a custom embedded OS. Except Apple.
And you'd be right. The real question, of course, is whether or not customers should be allowed to choose a product that you may think is inferior to its competition in some regard. I contend that they should. You (and the EU) seem to think that companies should be mandated to provide the same features as one another, so as to 'protect' the consumer from having to decide whether or not a certain feature is a dealbreaker.
You know, that area on the windows tool bar that gives you quick access to applications? Been there since Windows95 I think..
You know, that area at the screen edge that gives you all your application tiles? Been there since Nextstep I think..
Happened when Apple stopped releasing source code to Darwin.
Not to interrupt your screed, but they didn't stop releasing the source code. They delayed the release of a single version of the x86 branch by a couple months. People like yourself then extrapolated this out to "Apple has closed off Darwin."
some individuals so brainwashed that they blame the victim.
Gee, I never thought of myself as brainwashed before. See I always figured that if you signed a contract to pay X when you do Y, that meant that if you did Y, you had to pay X. I guess I never realized that the people who did Y were just poor victims at the hands of an immoral corporation forcing them to abide by the contract that they agreed to...
Steve Jobs did nothing.
What?!? Do you mean to tell me that the president of the company that made the phone refused to help with a bill from the carrier? Why how selfish of him not to intervene in a dispute that didn't involve Apple!
Apple is making it impossible for anyone else to sell a computer that is compatible with OS X.
That's 100% false.
Apple isn't doing anything to stop you from selling a machine built with OS X-compatible hardware.
If Psystar was just doing that, Apple wouldn't have a leg to stand on. As it is, they're pre-installing OS X on the machines (i.e. distributing an adaptation of a copyrighted work). There's a big difference. If they sold the machines with no OS, but said "Oh, BTW, you can install your own store-bought copy of OS X on them -- here are some instructions" they might well be in the clear.
That's great and all if you are an internet mechanic. But what if you just want to drive the damn car? For those people, who are the majority, those messages don't mean squat.
And you know, teenage kids who "just want to drive the damn car" are also responsible for a substantial portion of collisions. Coincidence?
The fundamental mistake of computer security is assuming that it can be made easy for the lowest common denominator. It can't. Sorry, I've got no clever analogy for this one -- but it's true. There is simply no way that you can design a system that can retain its security in the face of a user that is both ignorant and has no desire to learn how to properly use the tools at his disposal. You just can't do it. Warnings will be ignored, errors will be bypassed, and someone who wants to remain ignorant will, no matter how many hoops he has to jump through to do it. Most users aren't just ignorant -- they revel in it: how many times have you heard someone say "Oh, I'm just hopeless with computer stuff", followed by a smirk and a giggle? There ain't enough crypto in the world can protect that user.
Designing a security measure around the lowest common denominator will make everyone less secure, all in the name of making someone who wants to remain ignorant slightly more comfortable. And for the benefit of all of us who want real security, this is a very, very bad idea.
OTOH The Bible is about the only book that wouldn't have earned them a DMCA slapdown affidavit.
I know you said that partly in jest, but I actually got a little depressed when I gave it some thought. Think of what we could have included: the music that influenced generations, films that invoke anger, sadness, joy, books that literally changed the way that the world thought -- and not one bit of it can be reproduced, all because some assholes wanted to collect a check from an animated mouse.
We fucked up somewhere.
I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net's e-mail forwarding. For 2 pennies per day, they forward any mail received at my domain. I've got both specific mappings (box1@example.com forwards to something) and blanket mappings (anything sent to a box without a specific mapping is sent to my address.) When I need to give out an address, I simply make one up. If that address starts getting spam, I simply blackhole it (i.e. I map it to discard@nearlyfreespeech.net). Simple, effective, and cheap.
Yes, I know I _could_ run my own MTA -- but I'm willing to pay a couple bucks a year to get something that "just works." That, and their privacy policy is pretty kick-ass.