If you can replace a component, and choose which pieces to run piece by piece, people might make choices that aren't in Microsoft's interest.
And that's only the short-term danger. Even more dangerous is, if people can replace pieces one at a time, they might replace one piece after another until there are no Microsoft pieces left.
For reference, if anyone's interested, I recently tested the speed of some of the programs I mentioned. What I did was right-click on a Word document, and opened it in Word 2008, the latest OpenOffice Aqua alpha, NeoOffice, and Pages (in that order). And then I waited to see in what order the document would load, and which programs would make that document available for editing most quickly.
Now, this isn't the most scientific test, but the results that I got from loading these programs straight after boot was that Pages was the winner (by a lot) inspite of being started last. Next came Word 2008, then NeoOffice, and then OOo came in last by quite a bit. So I closed all the applications and tried again, after having loaded the applications in memory. Pages and NeoOffice tied this time, then Word, then OpenOffice (last again).
So again, OpenOffice is an alpha. There will probably be some performance improvements before release. Still, there isn't anything in this alpha that indicates that NeoOffice isn't as good as what OOo will produce.
What happens when someone cracks the encryption key and gets access anyways?
I also feel like it's worth noting here that many security experts I've read and talked to don't consider current WiFi encryption methods to be terribly secure. Even using WEP or WPA, it's certainly not unthinkable that someone could hack in, especially considering that they don't have to really obtain physical access. They can sit outside your home/apartment/office all day long and make attempts.
So I do sometimes advise people to encrypt their WiFi, but you should set up your network and computers such that if your WiFi is open, your computers are still secure.
this guarantees you'll never *end* up in pittsuburgh.
I have a question regarding this. It seems to me that you *could* end up in Pittsburgh, assuming following the pattern brings you there and that's were you decide to stop. I guess what I'm trying to get at is this: if following the pattern "red, red, blue" will eventually, at some point, bring be to Cleveland, that does seem useful. But does this problem address the question of, "how do I know when I've reached Cleveland?"
Within this method where a pattern will always bring you to your destination, is there also a pattern for knowing when you've reached your destination? Or is it assumed that you'll know your destination when you get there?
Yeah, I haven't actually timed them or anything, but given that they're both pretty slow, I'd rather stick with a release version of NeoOffice than an alpha of OOo.
Anyway, I really don't want to bash either project. I'm grateful to the people working on NeoOffice for having provided me with a very useful application for the past few years. I'm excited and glad the OOo team is working on an official Aqua port. Whether they remain two separate projects or find a way to work together, I wish everyone the best of luck.
Another example: Forbidding non-default apps, I think this was discussed before. So you can't for example install software that will make your Windows safer, like Ad-aware or Firefox.
Forbidding people from installing their own apps is entirely sensible behavior. First of all, if you give users admin rights, they'll break their own systems. It's as simple as that. You can get away with giving users admin rights if you're supporting a couple of users, and those users listen to you and have some idea of how to run/admin a computer. But if you're supporting more than 10 people, forget it. Lock those systems down tight.
It's very common for people to install adware/malware/crapware if you let them, and they'll play with settings they don't understand. I've seen users try to rearrange the Windows file system because they wanted to store all of their own files in c:\, so they made a folder called "c:\system" and try to move "Windows" and "Program Files" into that new folder. Even if you give people the ability to write new files in directories other than their home folder (or profile, whatever), they'll save files all over the file system and you'll have to help them track down files that they've lost.
So those are some of the problems that come from giving "bad" users admin access. But let's also talk about giving "good" users admin rights to "good" applications. For example, why wouldn't I want someone to install their own browser, assuming that browser is Firefox? One potential problem comes to mind for me, which is that if your company uses web applications, you might only want to pay your developers to support one browser. I'll grant you that the smart thing to do would probably be to have that one browser be Firefox, but if I had one business-critical web application that was specifically supported by a single browser, I'd probably be inclined to restrict my users to working with that browser. If possible.
Now let's talk about Ad-Aware. Two problems jump out at me. The first thing that comes to mind is that I've had users that want to install security software without having a good grasp of what they're doing. I worked helpdesk for a company that used a Symantec AV solution that could be managed from a central point, but a couple of users wanted to install McAfee too because that's the antivirus software they used at home. Of course, then we'd have to pay for a McAfee license, running two AV scanners would slow the system down, and we couldn't manage the McAfee install from a central point. And speaking of licenses, the last time I checked, Ad-Aware was only free for non-commercial use, which means you wouldn't install it on my network without a license.
And finally, one of the biggest reasons to lock down even the "good" users is it actually keeps them more productive. It may be counter-intuitive, but I've supported a bunch of IT hobbyists who, left to their own devices, spend all day screwing around with their own computers, running virus scanners, AV scanners, spyware scanners, defragmenting their drives, bla bla bla. They insist that running their own systems and customizing it the way they want will make them more productive, but it just ends up with them wasting loads of time. By leaving them with no utilities to run and no settings to tweak, their systems run well and they work more efficiently.
I just downloaded it, and yup... still slow. Like NeoOffice, it's not so bad once you get it going, but it takes a long time to load, a long time to open a new document, and a relatively long time once you've started a document before you can actually start working.
I'll reserve judgement until the final version, though.
There wasn't a body - she just disappeared. So whether she was killed or not is left to your imagination. Maybe she fell into a trans-warp dimensional flux rift in spacetime or somesuch Star Trekish thing.
I don't remember too well, but didn't Apollo see her ship explode?
(Season 3 spoilers follow): The return of Bulldog and revelations about corruption and warmongering in the admiralty. That went nowhere. The killing of Sagittarons? Swept under the rug and forgotten. The unhappiness and emerging classism in the fleet? 10 second resolution at the end, and not a peep since.
Yes, but then again, is this far from real life? Warmongering goes on, and the warmongers don't get punished. Ethnic cleansing gets swept under the rug. The inequity of classes goes ignored, unnoticed, and unresolved.
On the other hand, I think the series was at its best when it wasn't dealing with the Cylons and science-fiction sorts of things, but rather when it was dealing specifically with social problems within the fleet. I remember early on there was a conflict regarding a girl who wanted an abortion. Beyond our normal social conflicts about this, there was the additional complication that there are only 50,000 humans left in existence. They've done this sort of thing repeatedly, dealing with crime and the black market, terrorism, and other problems that really have nothing to do with robots pretending to be human.
This is what has made the show great, and it's exactly what good science fiction should do, i.e. depicting real-life (and often controversial) issues in a fantastic setting that allows for the audience to gain a new perspective. I think the more they stray from those sorts of episodes, the worse the show gets.
What Apple's success tells me is that Apple's management methods of screaming at employees and "hero-shithead rollercoasters" (to quote the article) yield results not because the management methods themselves are working, but because there is a bona-fide genius at the helm whose micromanagement is genuinely better than whatever else a group of people could come up with.
I think the key thing is this: when you're running a project, the results will be better if you can follow the guy who has the best ideas. If the best ideas are coming from the lowliest employee, the best manager in that situation will be the one who can recognize that and get the whole team following that employee's lead. If the best ideas are coming from the manager himself, only then does it make any sense to let that manager be a dictator and push all his own ideas.
Of course, there are also times where the best idea ends up not really being the best idea. That's a whole other problem, though.
I don't want to get in any sort of an argument, but I just wanted to say that I think the NeoOffice guys deserve a little respect here. OOo went for years just not giving a damn about Mac users and meanwhile the NeoOffice project produced a very usable piece of software.
Yes, NeoOffice is still a bit slow. Last time I tried the alpha OOo Aqua port, it was pretty slow too. Hell, OpenOffice is a slow on Windows and Linux. MS Office on Mac is slow too, for that matter. It seems like only Apple has put in the work to make an office suite on OSX that performs well. But NeoOffice is quite an achievement for a small collection of developers, and it works well. I use it on a regular basis, and don't have any significant problems aside from a slow initial load.
You can be reactive about things and wait until a problem happens, then cry about it, then fix that specific problem, then rinse and repeat. Or you can be proactive and try to head off security problem initially.
My point is that there is no real "security problem" to head off except for user stupidity. User stupidity is common to all platforms and cannot be solved with AV software. User stupidity can be helped by user education or locking down that user's account, and that's about it.
I'd like to ammend this because of other posts that I've read here. I said:
Meh... I guess that's a courteous thing to do, but I'm not going screw my machine up on the off-chance that I might possibly be hosting infected files that might infect someone else. Which, you know, I don't even know why this would be an issue except on a file server. Next time I run an OSX file server, I'd consider installing something like ClamAV to scan everything once a day or something, but I'm not worrying more than that.
So yes, I'm admitting that it makes sense to scan for viruses on a file server because you're more likely to then be hosting infected files, and more likely to pass those files around to multiple clients. However, the issue was raised elsewhere of public computes, e.g. computer labs and internet cafes. In places where you're not really securing access to your computers or your network, security should of course be extremely tight.
On the other hand, I don't think AV software is necessary on a Mac for most people's personal computers that they own. Even in businesses, it's probably sufficient to deny people admin rights, set the firewall properly, control what services are run on the machine, and make sure people use strong passwords. That will generally protect a Mac on the internet well enough, and it should be more than enough on an otherwise secure LAN.
I suspect that if a bona fide threat to OS X ever does appear ClamAV will be made available for the client release via Software Update the next day.
Well I think that's really the issue-- there hasn't been any threat to OSX yet where the best way to solve it is an AntiVirus. If that threat emerges, it will be a new threat, and so you'd need to update your computer anyway with new virus definitions. If you're going to require users to update in order to be safe from these threats, you may as well have the updates remove the exploit that the virus uses to gain access. Failing that, the update can be an antivirus program.
If there are no threats today, and any Anti-Virus software installed on your Mac today will not protect you from tomorrow's threats, then what's the point of having AV software installed on your Mac today? All it's doing is slowing your system, possibly giving false positives, possibly conflicting with other software, or possibly conflicting with OS updates.
I'm not sure AV software has shown itself to be an effective way of addressing security issues anyhow. What has generally worked better is to secure your system properly, and to avoid running unknown/mysterious applications from untrusted sources. Even when running Windows, those two precautions will serve you better than most AV programs.
If your Mac runs MS-Office software or other cross-platform software that has infectable data files, you are vulnerable to some Macro viruses.
Macro viruses aren't really that common. Plus many users don't run Microsoft Office for Mac, they use NeoOffice or iWork. And even if you use Microsoft Office, I don't even know that Windows Office macro viruses will successfully propagate to the OSX version. You know why I don't know that? Because in the 7 years I've been supporting OSX and Windows in mixed environments, I've never seen anyone infected with a macro virus.
If your Mac can run MS-Windows binaries you may be vulnerable to some Windows viruses.
You might have a point here. If you're running Windows on your Mac, you might want to get a Windows-based anti-virus.
If your Mac hosts files on a mixed network your Mac should protect itself from hosting infected files.
Meh... I guess that's a courteous thing to do, but I'm not going screw my machine up on the off-chance that I might possibly be hosting infected files that might infect someone else. Which, you know, I don't even know why this would be an issue except on a file server. Next time I run an OSX file server, I'd consider installing something like ClamAV to scan everything once a day or something, but I'm not worrying more than that.
The thing is, AV software is really stupid. It slows down your system and causes lots of problems, and it's often expensive. You can generally avoid viruses by closing off all your ports (running a firewall) and not running software unless you know what that software is. Most of the reason for AV software is because MS can't get it together in terms of security, but none of the Unix-based operating systems have shown the same level of susceptibility.
And no, it's not just because Windows is a bigger target. It's because Windows is an easier target.
Ya well turns out they can if you are dumb enough to have a world writable FTP server with the root directory of/, which is what this idiot had done. I don't even know that it was being used for anything other than a public warez FTP, but still, the point is MacOS couldn't defend against extreme stupidity.
So I think it is a good idea for Mac users to run AV scanners, and other security tools, just in case. Even if you've never found anything, better to have a good security policy than to end up being sad later on.
If you're dealing with users setting up poorly configured FTP servers, no AV scanner I've ever seen is going to keep them from doing that.
Any geek willing to break the seal is willing to forego support when they inevitably break the machine.
Right. As an iPhone owner, I hacked mine a while back. It was really easy. Part of the problem, though, is that the OS has been changing often enough that most apps won't work unless they're written for the specific firmware you're using, so the payoff of hacking your phone is diminished. I think lots of developers stopped keeping up figuring they'd wait for the official SDK.
Anyway, I don't doubt that the iPhone will keep getting hacked for as long as it's useful to hack it. I'm betting either Apple will be very reasonable about letting people distribute on iTunes, or else people will immediately hack a different distribution method for unauthorized apps. Either way you'll be able to get the apps you want with a minimum of hassle.
It's going to happen, and the iPhone will be a cool platform. If Apple's smart (which they often show themselves to be) then they won't fight it.
Well part of what I'm saying is if you have a number system where all of you your integers be 1/pi, 2/pi, 3/pi, 4/pi, etc., then really 1/pi is just your unit and you have a normal number system of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. So we say that the diameter of a circle is 1, and that makes the circumference approximately 3.14159265. But we could make the circumference 1 and then the diameter would be an irrational number that is approximately 0.318309886. That irrational number (0.318309886...) is just as magical as pi, and there's no absolute reason to say that 3.14159265... is more important than 0.318309886... It's largely an issue of tradition that we talk about circumference:diameter instead of diameter:circumference.
It may be interesting, but it sure rubs me the wrong way.. Does anyone actually do anything useful with non-integer bases? I've heard people raise the idea before, but it sounds pretty dumb to me. Sure, algebra could work that way, but that doesn't tell me anything. I could say I'm redefining "2" as "1.5" and "3" as "6", and then I could say that "2+2=6" and continue to do algebra like that, but I'm not sure I'm doing anything particularly valid there. And in base pi, is "12" an whole number...?
Re:Unknown value?
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Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'm sorry because I know I'm being pedantic, but I've dealt a fair amount with number theory and I felt like I should comment. You can't, strictly speaking, have "base pi" in the way that our number system is "base 10". If you don't quite know why that is the case, ask yourself if you wanted to count to "10" in "base pi" (which would be pi), what would that counting look like?
If you think it would be "1, 2, 3, 10" then you're talking about base 4. Otherwise, the distance on a number line between 0->1, 1->2, and 2->3 would all be equal to one unit, but 3->10 (the next number) would be 0.14159265... units.
The issue of pi being an irrational number, rather, is related to the definition of numbers as geometric ratios (which is how most of our mathematics consider numbers). The problem is that the diameter of a circle and the circumference are incommensurable, meaning that you can never come up with a whole-number ratio between those two lengths. Therefore, you cannot, no matter what length you choose as your unit, measure both the diameter and circumference with the same unit.
As a result, we generally take the diameter to be 1 unit of length, and the length of the circumference to be represented by the irrational number pi units of length. So the "number" of pi is an approximation of the ratio of diameter:circumference. We could just as easily assign the circumference to be the unit, however, and then the measurement usually represented by pi would be represented by "1" (which is what I think the GP post was alluding to). However, this would result in us having to deal with a different irrational number, which would be for representing the diameter, which would be 1/pi.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic here, but I don't think your needs are exactly "the norm". Lots of people use their PCs for e-mail, word processing, web browsing, and MP3s. For lots of people, you won't see them ripping and storing HD movies until they have a set-top box that lets them watch it on their TV, and though that idea is starting to play out, it's still not clear what form that will take. It may be that we all have a specialty piece of hardware for HD DVR, IPTV, VoD, etc. in a few years, and then we still won't need high-capacity storage on our PCs, because it'll all be in this specialized set-top box.
I think you're assuming two things that aren't necessarily true:
Everyone will be ripping movies soon the way people have been ripping music: The problem here is primarily that people watch movies differently than how they listen to music. I can wear tiny headphones and get a decent music-listening experience from a portable player. I can't really get a decent movie-watching experience form a portable player or small computer screen. Also, by the masses have caught on to the phenomenon of hooking a computer to their TV for the sake of watching movies, it may be that physical media is out and streaming is the default.
People care about quality and will require perfect-quality HD movies: People don't care as much about quality as you might think. Most people don't rip their music collection higher than 128kbps, let alone FLAC. Loads of people have spent money for a huge HDTV, plug it into a SDTV signal, and still marvel at how great it looks.
I think it's very possible that purchasing videos will lose a bit of ground in favor of VoD to a set-top box, and then purchasing movies will be an over-the-internet media-less process that goes straight to your set-top box without going to your PC. In that's the case, your PC still won't need much storage.
Re:but this goes for any stream of information
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The Geometry of Music
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· Score: 2, Informative
At the very least, it would be foolish to take this as some kind of indication about the universe, i.e. this isn't an indication that string theory is correct, that the universe has more than 4 dimensions, or that music exists in "higher dimensions".
Being able to "represent" something in higher dimensional space just means it has more than 3 quantifiable features.
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If you can replace a component, and choose which pieces to run piece by piece, people might make choices that aren't in Microsoft's interest.
And that's only the short-term danger. Even more dangerous is, if people can replace pieces one at a time, they might replace one piece after another until there are no Microsoft pieces left.
For reference, if anyone's interested, I recently tested the speed of some of the programs I mentioned. What I did was right-click on a Word document, and opened it in Word 2008, the latest OpenOffice Aqua alpha, NeoOffice, and Pages (in that order). And then I waited to see in what order the document would load, and which programs would make that document available for editing most quickly.
Now, this isn't the most scientific test, but the results that I got from loading these programs straight after boot was that Pages was the winner (by a lot) inspite of being started last. Next came Word 2008, then NeoOffice, and then OOo came in last by quite a bit. So I closed all the applications and tried again, after having loaded the applications in memory. Pages and NeoOffice tied this time, then Word, then OpenOffice (last again).
So again, OpenOffice is an alpha. There will probably be some performance improvements before release. Still, there isn't anything in this alpha that indicates that NeoOffice isn't as good as what OOo will produce.
What happens when someone cracks the encryption key and gets access anyways?
I also feel like it's worth noting here that many security experts I've read and talked to don't consider current WiFi encryption methods to be terribly secure. Even using WEP or WPA, it's certainly not unthinkable that someone could hack in, especially considering that they don't have to really obtain physical access. They can sit outside your home/apartment/office all day long and make attempts.
So I do sometimes advise people to encrypt their WiFi, but you should set up your network and computers such that if your WiFi is open, your computers are still secure.
Me? I'd have called in the buses, and shipped everyone off property to be safe right away.
And then what happens when the busses drop below 55mph?
this guarantees you'll never *end* up in pittsuburgh.
I have a question regarding this. It seems to me that you *could* end up in Pittsburgh, assuming following the pattern brings you there and that's were you decide to stop. I guess what I'm trying to get at is this: if following the pattern "red, red, blue" will eventually, at some point, bring be to Cleveland, that does seem useful. But does this problem address the question of, "how do I know when I've reached Cleveland?"
Within this method where a pattern will always bring you to your destination, is there also a pattern for knowing when you've reached your destination? Or is it assumed that you'll know your destination when you get there?
Yeah, I haven't actually timed them or anything, but given that they're both pretty slow, I'd rather stick with a release version of NeoOffice than an alpha of OOo.
Anyway, I really don't want to bash either project. I'm grateful to the people working on NeoOffice for having provided me with a very useful application for the past few years. I'm excited and glad the OOo team is working on an official Aqua port. Whether they remain two separate projects or find a way to work together, I wish everyone the best of luck.
Another example: Forbidding non-default apps, I think this was discussed before. So you can't for example install software that will make your Windows safer, like Ad-aware or Firefox.
Forbidding people from installing their own apps is entirely sensible behavior. First of all, if you give users admin rights, they'll break their own systems. It's as simple as that. You can get away with giving users admin rights if you're supporting a couple of users, and those users listen to you and have some idea of how to run/admin a computer. But if you're supporting more than 10 people, forget it. Lock those systems down tight.
It's very common for people to install adware/malware/crapware if you let them, and they'll play with settings they don't understand. I've seen users try to rearrange the Windows file system because they wanted to store all of their own files in c:\, so they made a folder called "c:\system" and try to move "Windows" and "Program Files" into that new folder. Even if you give people the ability to write new files in directories other than their home folder (or profile, whatever), they'll save files all over the file system and you'll have to help them track down files that they've lost.
So those are some of the problems that come from giving "bad" users admin access. But let's also talk about giving "good" users admin rights to "good" applications. For example, why wouldn't I want someone to install their own browser, assuming that browser is Firefox? One potential problem comes to mind for me, which is that if your company uses web applications, you might only want to pay your developers to support one browser. I'll grant you that the smart thing to do would probably be to have that one browser be Firefox, but if I had one business-critical web application that was specifically supported by a single browser, I'd probably be inclined to restrict my users to working with that browser. If possible.
Now let's talk about Ad-Aware. Two problems jump out at me. The first thing that comes to mind is that I've had users that want to install security software without having a good grasp of what they're doing. I worked helpdesk for a company that used a Symantec AV solution that could be managed from a central point, but a couple of users wanted to install McAfee too because that's the antivirus software they used at home. Of course, then we'd have to pay for a McAfee license, running two AV scanners would slow the system down, and we couldn't manage the McAfee install from a central point. And speaking of licenses, the last time I checked, Ad-Aware was only free for non-commercial use, which means you wouldn't install it on my network without a license.
And finally, one of the biggest reasons to lock down even the "good" users is it actually keeps them more productive. It may be counter-intuitive, but I've supported a bunch of IT hobbyists who, left to their own devices, spend all day screwing around with their own computers, running virus scanners, AV scanners, spyware scanners, defragmenting their drives, bla bla bla. They insist that running their own systems and customizing it the way they want will make them more productive, but it just ends up with them wasting loads of time. By leaving them with no utilities to run and no settings to tweak, their systems run well and they work more efficiently.
I just downloaded it, and yup... still slow. Like NeoOffice, it's not so bad once you get it going, but it takes a long time to load, a long time to open a new document, and a relatively long time once you've started a document before you can actually start working.
I'll reserve judgement until the final version, though.
There wasn't a body - she just disappeared. So whether she was killed or not is left to your imagination. Maybe she fell into a trans-warp dimensional flux rift in spacetime or somesuch Star Trekish thing.
I don't remember too well, but didn't Apollo see her ship explode?
Yes, but then again, is this far from real life? Warmongering goes on, and the warmongers don't get punished. Ethnic cleansing gets swept under the rug. The inequity of classes goes ignored, unnoticed, and unresolved.
On the other hand, I think the series was at its best when it wasn't dealing with the Cylons and science-fiction sorts of things, but rather when it was dealing specifically with social problems within the fleet. I remember early on there was a conflict regarding a girl who wanted an abortion. Beyond our normal social conflicts about this, there was the additional complication that there are only 50,000 humans left in existence. They've done this sort of thing repeatedly, dealing with crime and the black market, terrorism, and other problems that really have nothing to do with robots pretending to be human.
This is what has made the show great, and it's exactly what good science fiction should do, i.e. depicting real-life (and often controversial) issues in a fantastic setting that allows for the audience to gain a new perspective. I think the more they stray from those sorts of episodes, the worse the show gets.
The idea behind the US Constitution was to put in place a system that would have a good chance of working no matter what idiots were at the helm.
Yeah, but at what happens when you put actual idiots at the helm.
What Apple's success tells me is that Apple's management methods of screaming at employees and "hero-shithead rollercoasters" (to quote the article) yield results not because the management methods themselves are working, but because there is a bona-fide genius at the helm whose micromanagement is genuinely better than whatever else a group of people could come up with.
I think the key thing is this: when you're running a project, the results will be better if you can follow the guy who has the best ideas. If the best ideas are coming from the lowliest employee, the best manager in that situation will be the one who can recognize that and get the whole team following that employee's lead. If the best ideas are coming from the manager himself, only then does it make any sense to let that manager be a dictator and push all his own ideas.
Of course, there are also times where the best idea ends up not really being the best idea. That's a whole other problem, though.
Also notable is their calendar server, which is also open source.
I don't want to get in any sort of an argument, but I just wanted to say that I think the NeoOffice guys deserve a little respect here. OOo went for years just not giving a damn about Mac users and meanwhile the NeoOffice project produced a very usable piece of software.
Yes, NeoOffice is still a bit slow. Last time I tried the alpha OOo Aqua port, it was pretty slow too. Hell, OpenOffice is a slow on Windows and Linux. MS Office on Mac is slow too, for that matter. It seems like only Apple has put in the work to make an office suite on OSX that performs well. But NeoOffice is quite an achievement for a small collection of developers, and it works well. I use it on a regular basis, and don't have any significant problems aside from a slow initial load.
You can be reactive about things and wait until a problem happens, then cry about it, then fix that specific problem, then rinse and repeat. Or you can be proactive and try to head off security problem initially.
My point is that there is no real "security problem" to head off except for user stupidity. User stupidity is common to all platforms and cannot be solved with AV software. User stupidity can be helped by user education or locking down that user's account, and that's about it.
I'd like to ammend this because of other posts that I've read here. I said:
So yes, I'm admitting that it makes sense to scan for viruses on a file server because you're more likely to then be hosting infected files, and more likely to pass those files around to multiple clients. However, the issue was raised elsewhere of public computes, e.g. computer labs and internet cafes. In places where you're not really securing access to your computers or your network, security should of course be extremely tight.
On the other hand, I don't think AV software is necessary on a Mac for most people's personal computers that they own. Even in businesses, it's probably sufficient to deny people admin rights, set the firewall properly, control what services are run on the machine, and make sure people use strong passwords. That will generally protect a Mac on the internet well enough, and it should be more than enough on an otherwise secure LAN.
I suspect that if a bona fide threat to OS X ever does appear ClamAV will be made available for the client release via Software Update the next day.
Well I think that's really the issue-- there hasn't been any threat to OSX yet where the best way to solve it is an AntiVirus. If that threat emerges, it will be a new threat, and so you'd need to update your computer anyway with new virus definitions. If you're going to require users to update in order to be safe from these threats, you may as well have the updates remove the exploit that the virus uses to gain access. Failing that, the update can be an antivirus program.
If there are no threats today, and any Anti-Virus software installed on your Mac today will not protect you from tomorrow's threats, then what's the point of having AV software installed on your Mac today? All it's doing is slowing your system, possibly giving false positives, possibly conflicting with other software, or possibly conflicting with OS updates.
I'm not sure AV software has shown itself to be an effective way of addressing security issues anyhow. What has generally worked better is to secure your system properly, and to avoid running unknown/mysterious applications from untrusted sources. Even when running Windows, those two precautions will serve you better than most AV programs.
I disagree. Point by point:
If your Mac runs MS-Office software or other cross-platform software that has infectable data files, you are vulnerable to some Macro viruses.
Macro viruses aren't really that common. Plus many users don't run Microsoft Office for Mac, they use NeoOffice or iWork. And even if you use Microsoft Office, I don't even know that Windows Office macro viruses will successfully propagate to the OSX version. You know why I don't know that? Because in the 7 years I've been supporting OSX and Windows in mixed environments, I've never seen anyone infected with a macro virus.
If your Mac can run MS-Windows binaries you may be vulnerable to some Windows viruses.
You might have a point here. If you're running Windows on your Mac, you might want to get a Windows-based anti-virus.
If your Mac hosts files on a mixed network your Mac should protect itself from hosting infected files.
Meh... I guess that's a courteous thing to do, but I'm not going screw my machine up on the off-chance that I might possibly be hosting infected files that might infect someone else. Which, you know, I don't even know why this would be an issue except on a file server. Next time I run an OSX file server, I'd consider installing something like ClamAV to scan everything once a day or something, but I'm not worrying more than that.
The thing is, AV software is really stupid. It slows down your system and causes lots of problems, and it's often expensive. You can generally avoid viruses by closing off all your ports (running a firewall) and not running software unless you know what that software is. Most of the reason for AV software is because MS can't get it together in terms of security, but none of the Unix-based operating systems have shown the same level of susceptibility.
And no, it's not just because Windows is a bigger target. It's because Windows is an easier target.
If you're dealing with users setting up poorly configured FTP servers, no AV scanner I've ever seen is going to keep them from doing that.
Any geek willing to break the seal is willing to forego support when they inevitably break the machine.
Right. As an iPhone owner, I hacked mine a while back. It was really easy. Part of the problem, though, is that the OS has been changing often enough that most apps won't work unless they're written for the specific firmware you're using, so the payoff of hacking your phone is diminished. I think lots of developers stopped keeping up figuring they'd wait for the official SDK.
Anyway, I don't doubt that the iPhone will keep getting hacked for as long as it's useful to hack it. I'm betting either Apple will be very reasonable about letting people distribute on iTunes, or else people will immediately hack a different distribution method for unauthorized apps. Either way you'll be able to get the apps you want with a minimum of hassle.
It's going to happen, and the iPhone will be a cool platform. If Apple's smart (which they often show themselves to be) then they won't fight it.
Well part of what I'm saying is if you have a number system where all of you your integers be 1/pi, 2/pi, 3/pi, 4/pi, etc., then really 1/pi is just your unit and you have a normal number system of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. So we say that the diameter of a circle is 1, and that makes the circumference approximately 3.14159265. But we could make the circumference 1 and then the diameter would be an irrational number that is approximately 0.318309886. That irrational number (0.318309886...) is just as magical as pi, and there's no absolute reason to say that 3.14159265... is more important than 0.318309886... It's largely an issue of tradition that we talk about circumference:diameter instead of diameter:circumference.
It may be interesting, but it sure rubs me the wrong way.. Does anyone actually do anything useful with non-integer bases? I've heard people raise the idea before, but it sounds pretty dumb to me. Sure, algebra could work that way, but that doesn't tell me anything. I could say I'm redefining "2" as "1.5" and "3" as "6", and then I could say that "2+2=6" and continue to do algebra like that, but I'm not sure I'm doing anything particularly valid there. And in base pi, is "12" an whole number...?
I'm sorry because I know I'm being pedantic, but I've dealt a fair amount with number theory and I felt like I should comment. You can't, strictly speaking, have "base pi" in the way that our number system is "base 10". If you don't quite know why that is the case, ask yourself if you wanted to count to "10" in "base pi" (which would be pi), what would that counting look like?
If you think it would be "1, 2, 3, 10" then you're talking about base 4. Otherwise, the distance on a number line between 0->1, 1->2, and 2->3 would all be equal to one unit, but 3->10 (the next number) would be 0.14159265... units.
The issue of pi being an irrational number, rather, is related to the definition of numbers as geometric ratios (which is how most of our mathematics consider numbers). The problem is that the diameter of a circle and the circumference are incommensurable, meaning that you can never come up with a whole-number ratio between those two lengths. Therefore, you cannot, no matter what length you choose as your unit, measure both the diameter and circumference with the same unit.
As a result, we generally take the diameter to be 1 unit of length, and the length of the circumference to be represented by the irrational number pi units of length. So the "number" of pi is an approximation of the ratio of diameter:circumference. We could just as easily assign the circumference to be the unit, however, and then the measurement usually represented by pi would be represented by "1" (which is what I think the GP post was alluding to). However, this would result in us having to deal with a different irrational number, which would be for representing the diameter, which would be 1/pi.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic here, but I don't think your needs are exactly "the norm". Lots of people use their PCs for e-mail, word processing, web browsing, and MP3s. For lots of people, you won't see them ripping and storing HD movies until they have a set-top box that lets them watch it on their TV, and though that idea is starting to play out, it's still not clear what form that will take. It may be that we all have a specialty piece of hardware for HD DVR, IPTV, VoD, etc. in a few years, and then we still won't need high-capacity storage on our PCs, because it'll all be in this specialized set-top box.
I think you're assuming two things that aren't necessarily true:
I think it's very possible that purchasing videos will lose a bit of ground in favor of VoD to a set-top box, and then purchasing movies will be an over-the-internet media-less process that goes straight to your set-top box without going to your PC. In that's the case, your PC still won't need much storage.
At the very least, it would be foolish to take this as some kind of indication about the universe, i.e. this isn't an indication that string theory is correct, that the universe has more than 4 dimensions, or that music exists in "higher dimensions".
Being able to "represent" something in higher dimensional space just means it has more than 3 quantifiable features.