That said, this is a particularly braindead bug from Apple, and it is worrisome because it shows they aren't thinking about security, or don't have proper processes in place to ensure the system stays secure. Their programmers should have known better than to create that kind of environment variable so lightly.
They are thinking about security. This entire class of exploit is impossible on iOS and will be impossible in the next release of OS X (where it's much harder if you want to be compatible with typical UNIX software).
Pandora = internet radio Apple music = spotify = you rent and play whatever songs you want.
No. Apple music is a hybrid of four things:
1. rent/play whatever you want (like spotify
2. purchase whatever you want (like old school iTunes)
3. internet radio with an algorithmic dj (like pandora)
4. internet radio with a human dj (like old school radio)
It costs $10/month for the first item, $1 per song for the second one, and items 3 and 4 are free.
To be fair, I don't know if Steve Ballmer would even know how to use Powerpoint, or Microsoft Word, if he didn't have an assistant that did it for him.
A quick check of wikipedia shows Balmer had very high scores in mathematics and engineering. He also studied business but dropped out.
I'm pretty sure he knows how to type into a word processor.
The main complaint about the patent reform bill is that it institutes a "loser pays" system that will make it impossible for small inventors to bring suit against large corporations. The AIA (the last reform bill) already substantially increased the cost that individual inventors had to pay to be able to sue large corporations.
What "small inventors"?
The cost to file a patent is already so high that small inventors do not ever patent anything. It's a total waste of time to try and protect them because they are a class of people who simply do not exist at all.
A far bigger problem is when small companies, say ones with five or six employees, are sued for patent infringement. They can't afford to defend themselves even if they don't infringe on the patent. If you could rack up millions of dollars defending yourself and have the patent holder be forced to pay your legal fees if the court rules that you did not infringe on their patent, then that would be quite an improvement. Then lawyers would be willing to work pro bono in patent defence lawsuits.
Granted, the biggest problem with the patent system has been that the criteria for patentability has been so loose, and the recent Supreme Court rulings will certainly do more to fix that root cause than the recent patent reform bills. Hopefully going forward these new rulings will improve the quality of patents approved and upheld in court, which is by far the single most important reform needed in the long run.
I think you're misguided. The criteria for patentability has never been bad, and has actually gotten worse since the recent change to "first to file".
The problem is it's impossible for anyone to know what can or cannot be patented without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring an entire team of lawyers to search through the back catalogue of patents and inventions and court precedents.
The patent office does not have enough staff to do proper research while a patent is being filed. If they did proper research, they would only be able to approve a handful of patents per year with the number of employees currently working at the PTO.
This means the patent office has no choice but to approve patents that may or may not be valid, and the only way to truly test if a patent is valid is by accusing somebody of violating a patent, and having the defendant refuse to settle out of court —choosing instead to spend two years investigating the patent trying to prove that it's invalid.
Even huge corporations like Apple and Samsung don't have deep enough pockets to defend themselves properly when a bogus patent is filed against them. They have to pick and choose two or three patents per year that they're willing to defend in court, while settling out of court for every other patent holder who demands royalties.
It simply isn't possible for a small company to defend themselves at all, their only viable option is to settle out of court which inevitably means nobody actually knows whether or not the patent is valid. After years of watching this issue closely I have never seen a small company defend themselves in court. Some have tried, but every single one gives up and settles out of court half way through the process. Some times they get lucky and the patent holder drops the charges and stops asking for royalties, but that's not the same as actually defending yourself properly and having a jury rule in your favour. Only big companies like Apple and Newegg are able to do that and they've only done it five or six times in their entire company history.
Personally I don't see how any reform could possibly fix the problem. There are certainly ways to improve the situation but I don't think anything can truly fix it. I've never seen anybody suggest a viable solution.
Depends what you're running on it. If you run a minimal OS with limited options on a processor or a more complex OS will make a difference. That and Android has to run on any phone, so efficiëncy is probably lost there too.
No it doesn't have anything to do with that. Apple's CPUs are just better. A lot better.
Even basic stuff like copying memory from one location in the CPU to another location is drastically faster on an iOS processor. The latest iPad Air is as fast as a low end Intel x86 chip... and the iPad chip does it with *far* less battery drain than the intel one.
This tablet has a low end x86 chip, which means it will be faster than any ARM processor money can buy... except for Apple's ARM processors.
What else is distinctive about an iPad apart from those two things? Really, all tablets look the same. They're basically just a rectangular touch-screen. About the only variations possible in their hardware are colour, size, and buttons - and some utilitarian designs as to which ports are located where, which are hardly distinctive.
Sure... except that this one has exactly the same colour (although Apple has three colours and they have only copied two of them), exactly the same size, exactly the same buttons in exactly the same locations, ports in exactly the same location except that Apple has two rows in their speaker grill and this has three rows of holes and it has USB-Type C instead of Lightning (which are also visually indistinguishable from each other).
The design is so close one has to wonder if they are actually using the same machinery for some of the components between this tablet and the iPad. They really are that similar.
Nope, only the phone division of Nokia was sold to Microsoft... this product is by one of the other divisions of Nokia not part of Microsoft.
There are no "other" divisions of Nokia. All of the employees who worked in every other division is now a Microsoft employee.
All that remains at Nokia is a skeleton of upper management (and not even that really, most of those work for Microsoft now too. Including Nokia's CEO).
At least until they re-invent themselves Nokia is basically a patent and intellectual property troll and a brand name. They have sold their name to Foxconn for use on it's own product.
That's exactly what people who make distributions do. If you want to see how complicated the build is for any piece of software, just look at how complicated the build scripts are for various distributions.
I think it's a bad idea to rely on distributors to do this work. With my projects, I always try to make the build process as simple as possible.
If somebody is thinking about maybe contributing to the project, I want it to be completely painless.
It doesn't always work out, especially with third party dependencies, but I try to keep the build process as simple as checkout source code, and build it. No configuration at all. Obviously you can configure stuff, but there should be a default that will work for almost everyone.
My non-noise-cancelling closed ear SRH-440's have better sound than any pair of headphones Bose has ever made and they cut out more background noise as well. I recently wore them trackside at a car race to prevent hearing damage, worked perfectly.
"Flat" relating to headphones usually means a flat frequency response, unless you are talking to people who don't have a clue (which is a very real possibility). A flat frequency response is the goal of a high fidelity system, the very word "fidelity" means trueness to the original source, which is what you get with a flat frequency response. The idea that a speaker needs to distort the sound because it "sounds good" is absurd, and in fact it's the exact same rationale audiofools have for preferring vinyl. Vinyl inherently has an uneven frequency response (among other things) and it is those characteristics that give it is distinctive sound, leading some to prefer it. It is distinctive but it is low fidelity, just like a poor set of speakers. Besides, if you want the treble or bass jacked up or some other frequency band notched, that's what equalizers are for. Although it should be noted they are called equalizers because the intent is to bring an equal loudness to all frequency bands - aka, a flat frequency response. To compensate for speakers that are not already flat.
Anybody with enough money for a pair of good audiophile headphones will be buying the "pro" beats, which have neutral sound by all reports (I've never tested them).
Except that "modern mobile devices" get messed up and bogged down exactly the same way - even if the apps are supposed to be sandboxed. There is one million os wide settings , or system apps and services that can get screwed up and their internally stored data will start causing issues. Is the battery drain on your android the same as it was after factory reset ? Didn't think so.
Android doesn't sandbox apps.
iOS does, and it doesn't suffer from this problem. All software is given a directory that they can read from/write to. There are a few places outside that which can be read, but virtually nothing has write access (except for a few cases where a system app will expose access to it's data via inter-app communication. Calendar for example has this).
When you uninstall the app, that directory is deleted. There is no trace at all that the app ever existed.
When a program is UNinstalled, all traces of it should be gone. Apple took a different approach, which arguably works far better. Even if stuff is left behind, it just takes up a bit of disk space, and doesn't affect the system at all.
Apple took a different approach on iOS.
OS X suffers the same problems as Windows, although perhaps not as severe.
Bose and Beats are both highly brand-focused. Bose targets the more mature quality-seeking crowd, while Beats targets the bass-hungry and fashion-conscious youth. There's some overlap, but generally I'd say their targets kept competition to a minimum, and they've pretty much cornered those targets
Apple has the best of both worlds being viewed both as high quality and a status symbol. If they start using their monster marketing teams to align peoples' view of Beats with that of Apple, Bose stands a chance of being pushed out of the market by a frightening direct competition. They've got good reason to try to stall the acquisition as much as possible
Bose also targets youth, although they do a terrible job of it and are getting their ass kicked by Beats.
And Beats also targets musicians with their "Pro" headphone which is not bass hungry at all and has higher quality than anything Bose has ever shipped. As far as I can tell, Beats Pro are some of the best studio headphones money can buy at the moment. If they weren't so expensive I would probably own a pair.
"Those who can't create, litigate" --- who does this remind you of over last 2-3 years? Funny to see Apple whine about plays outta their OWN playbook
Apple filed a patent lawsuit against HTC in 2010, and Samsung in 2011. According to Wikipedia, are the only two patent lawsuits Apple has ever filed in the entire history of the company.
Both those lawsuits only happened after Apple spent years trying to negotiate their disagreements without involving the legal system.
A company that has only filed two lawsuits hardly has a "playbook" for suing people for patent infringement.
Stronger than steel is cool and all, but that doesn't necessarily mean "all the same properties of steel". Durability, heat tolerance, reaction to moisture and a host of other things are likely to mean it's not a drop-in replacement for fibreglass/plastic/metal.
Fibreglass is terrible at all of the things you just listed and we use it for all kinds of things. It just has to be coated with a thin protective layer.
Maybe Apple or the carriers will cut a deal... or maybe their marketing material will just start referring to "apple phones."
Apple is also a trademark, so they are not allowed to use that in advertising either.
I'm not familiar with Mexican law either but these laws are pretty well unified by international treaties. You cannot use another company's trademark in your advertising material unless you have permission. Any carrier who sells the iPhone to customers would have permission to use the trademark, so this tells me the carrier does not sell iPhones and therefore has no business using iPhone in their ads.
Chromium is open source so if you don't like it, fork you own copy and get whatever useless toolbars that install without permission that you want.
Darwin is open source too, so you can fork it and install whatever apps you want.
The fact is most people stick with the official release. Your platform is not "open" if your official release if third party extensions aren't allowed.
It's worth mentioning the (non-mobile) version of Safari does allow arbitrary third party extensions. There are some warnings to the user that it might be malware, but they don't block installation.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, this is a particularly braindead bug from Apple, and it is worrisome because it shows they aren't thinking about security, or don't have proper processes in place to ensure the system stays secure. Their programmers should have known better than to create that kind of environment variable so lightly.
They are thinking about security. This entire class of exploit is impossible on iOS and will be impossible in the next release of OS X (where it's much harder if you want to be compatible with typical UNIX software).
Which explains why I don't have to re-enter passwords after restoring from backup. You moron.
You do have to re-enter your passwords after restoring from a backup with Apple devices.
I just had to go through it earlier this week.
Also consider they're not just a taxi company, they're also a courier company and have potential to become the biggest in the world.
FexEx has a market cap even larger than Uber's and they offer vastly inferior service to the network Uber is building.
Pandora = internet radio
Apple music = spotify = you rent and play whatever songs you want.
No. Apple music is a hybrid of four things:
1. rent/play whatever you want (like spotify
2. purchase whatever you want (like old school iTunes)
3. internet radio with an algorithmic dj (like pandora)
4. internet radio with a human dj (like old school radio)
It costs $10/month for the first item, $1 per song for the second one, and items 3 and 4 are free.
To be fair, I don't know if Steve Ballmer would even know how to use Powerpoint, or Microsoft Word, if he didn't have an assistant that did it for him.
A quick check of wikipedia shows Balmer had very high scores in mathematics and engineering. He also studied business but dropped out.
I'm pretty sure he knows how to type into a word processor.
The main complaint about the patent reform bill is that it institutes a "loser pays" system that will make it impossible for small inventors to bring suit against large corporations. The AIA (the last reform bill) already substantially increased the cost that individual inventors had to pay to be able to sue large corporations.
What "small inventors"?
The cost to file a patent is already so high that small inventors do not ever patent anything. It's a total waste of time to try and protect them because they are a class of people who simply do not exist at all.
A far bigger problem is when small companies, say ones with five or six employees, are sued for patent infringement. They can't afford to defend themselves even if they don't infringe on the patent. If you could rack up millions of dollars defending yourself and have the patent holder be forced to pay your legal fees if the court rules that you did not infringe on their patent, then that would be quite an improvement. Then lawyers would be willing to work pro bono in patent defence lawsuits.
Granted, the biggest problem with the patent system has been that the criteria for patentability has been so loose, and the recent Supreme Court rulings will certainly do more to fix that root cause than the recent patent reform bills. Hopefully going forward these new rulings will improve the quality of patents approved and upheld in court, which is by far the single most important reform needed in the long run.
I think you're misguided. The criteria for patentability has never been bad, and has actually gotten worse since the recent change to "first to file".
The problem is it's impossible for anyone to know what can or cannot be patented without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring an entire team of lawyers to search through the back catalogue of patents and inventions and court precedents.
The patent office does not have enough staff to do proper research while a patent is being filed. If they did proper research, they would only be able to approve a handful of patents per year with the number of employees currently working at the PTO.
This means the patent office has no choice but to approve patents that may or may not be valid, and the only way to truly test if a patent is valid is by accusing somebody of violating a patent, and having the defendant refuse to settle out of court —choosing instead to spend two years investigating the patent trying to prove that it's invalid.
Even huge corporations like Apple and Samsung don't have deep enough pockets to defend themselves properly when a bogus patent is filed against them. They have to pick and choose two or three patents per year that they're willing to defend in court, while settling out of court for every other patent holder who demands royalties.
It simply isn't possible for a small company to defend themselves at all, their only viable option is to settle out of court which inevitably means nobody actually knows whether or not the patent is valid. After years of watching this issue closely I have never seen a small company defend themselves in court. Some have tried, but every single one gives up and settles out of court half way through the process. Some times they get lucky and the patent holder drops the charges and stops asking for royalties, but that's not the same as actually defending yourself properly and having a jury rule in your favour. Only big companies like Apple and Newegg are able to do that and they've only done it five or six times in their entire company history.
Personally I don't see how any reform could possibly fix the problem. There are certainly ways to improve the situation but I don't think anything can truly fix it. I've never seen anybody suggest a viable solution.
Depends what you're running on it. If you run a minimal OS with limited options on a processor or a more complex OS will make a difference. That and Android has to run on any phone, so efficiëncy is probably lost there too.
No it doesn't have anything to do with that. Apple's CPUs are just better. A lot better.
Even basic stuff like copying memory from one location in the CPU to another location is drastically faster on an iOS processor. The latest iPad Air is as fast as a low end Intel x86 chip... and the iPad chip does it with *far* less battery drain than the intel one.
This tablet has a low end x86 chip, which means it will be faster than any ARM processor money can buy... except for Apple's ARM processors.
What else is distinctive about an iPad apart from those two things? Really, all tablets look the same. They're basically just a rectangular touch-screen. About the only variations possible in their hardware are colour, size, and buttons - and some utilitarian designs as to which ports are located where, which are hardly distinctive.
Sure... except that this one has exactly the same colour (although Apple has three colours and they have only copied two of them), exactly the same size, exactly the same buttons in exactly the same locations, ports in exactly the same location except that Apple has two rows in their speaker grill and this has three rows of holes and it has USB-Type C instead of Lightning (which are also visually indistinguishable from each other).
The design is so close one has to wonder if they are actually using the same machinery for some of the components between this tablet and the iPad. They really are that similar.
Nope, only the phone division of Nokia was sold to Microsoft... this product is by one of the other divisions of Nokia not part of Microsoft.
There are no "other" divisions of Nokia. All of the employees who worked in every other division is now a Microsoft employee.
All that remains at Nokia is a skeleton of upper management (and not even that really, most of those work for Microsoft now too. Including Nokia's CEO).
At least until they re-invent themselves Nokia is basically a patent and intellectual property troll and a brand name. They have sold their name to Foxconn for use on it's own product.
If only someone would come along and write a new, unified make system.
This has been done. A thousand times over.
And now we have a thousand unified make systems.
That's exactly what people who make distributions do. If you want to see how complicated the build is for any piece of software, just look at how complicated the build scripts are for various distributions.
I think it's a bad idea to rely on distributors to do this work. With my projects, I always try to make the build process as simple as possible.
If somebody is thinking about maybe contributing to the project, I want it to be completely painless.
It doesn't always work out, especially with third party dependencies, but I try to keep the build process as simple as checkout source code, and build it. No configuration at all. Obviously you can configure stuff, but there should be a default that will work for almost everyone.
My non-noise-cancelling closed ear SRH-440's have better sound than any pair of headphones Bose has ever made and they cut out more background noise as well. I recently wore them trackside at a car race to prevent hearing damage, worked perfectly.
"Flat" relating to headphones usually means a flat frequency response, unless you are talking to people who don't have a clue (which is a very real possibility). A flat frequency response is the goal of a high fidelity system, the very word "fidelity" means trueness to the original source, which is what you get with a flat frequency response. The idea that a speaker needs to distort the sound because it "sounds good" is absurd, and in fact it's the exact same rationale audiofools have for preferring vinyl. Vinyl inherently has an uneven frequency response (among other things) and it is those characteristics that give it is distinctive sound, leading some to prefer it. It is distinctive but it is low fidelity, just like a poor set of speakers. Besides, if you want the treble or bass jacked up or some other frequency band notched, that's what equalizers are for. Although it should be noted they are called equalizers because the intent is to bring an equal loudness to all frequency bands - aka, a flat frequency response. To compensate for speakers that are not already flat.
Anybody with enough money for a pair of good audiophile headphones will be buying the "pro" beats, which have neutral sound by all reports (I've never tested them).
Except that "modern mobile devices" get messed up and bogged down exactly the same way - even if the apps are supposed to be sandboxed.
There is one million os wide settings , or system apps and services that can get screwed up and their internally stored data will start causing issues.
Is the battery drain on your android the same as it was after factory reset ? Didn't think so.
Android doesn't sandbox apps.
iOS does, and it doesn't suffer from this problem. All software is given a directory that they can read from/write to. There are a few places outside that which can be read, but virtually nothing has write access (except for a few cases where a system app will expose access to it's data via inter-app communication. Calendar for example has this).
When you uninstall the app, that directory is deleted. There is no trace at all that the app ever existed.
When a program is UNinstalled, all traces of it should be gone. Apple took a different approach, which arguably works far better. Even if stuff is left behind, it just takes up a bit of disk space, and doesn't affect the system at all.
Apple took a different approach on iOS.
OS X suffers the same problems as Windows, although perhaps not as severe.
"Balic goes on to explain to Apple that he was able to try over 20,000 passwords combinations on any account."
20,000 is not a brute force attack. That will only succeed if your password was 3 characters long.
I find it hard to believe anyone was actually vulnerable to this.
I use my phone more often than any other possession I own.
This means any extra money I spend on top of what I "need" is well worth it.
FWIW, I purchased a 5s a few days ago. Not a 6.
My sister is just using Safari on her PowerMac G5.
Anything with flash is pig slow... but most stuff still works. The kids play lots of games without any issues.
Bose and Beats are both highly brand-focused. Bose targets the more mature quality-seeking crowd, while Beats targets the bass-hungry and fashion-conscious youth. There's some overlap, but generally I'd say their targets kept competition to a minimum, and they've pretty much cornered those targets
Apple has the best of both worlds being viewed both as high quality and a status symbol. If they start using their monster marketing teams to align peoples' view of Beats with that of Apple, Bose stands a chance of being pushed out of the market by a frightening direct competition. They've got good reason to try to stall the acquisition as much as possible
Bose also targets youth, although they do a terrible job of it and are getting their ass kicked by Beats.
And Beats also targets musicians with their "Pro" headphone which is not bass hungry at all and has higher quality than anything Bose has ever shipped. As far as I can tell, Beats Pro are some of the best studio headphones money can buy at the moment. If they weren't so expensive I would probably own a pair.
"Those who can't create, litigate" --- who does this remind you of over last 2-3 years? Funny to see Apple whine about plays outta their OWN playbook
Apple filed a patent lawsuit against HTC in 2010, and Samsung in 2011. According to Wikipedia, are the only two patent lawsuits Apple has ever filed in the entire history of the company.
Both those lawsuits only happened after Apple spent years trying to negotiate their disagreements without involving the legal system.
A company that has only filed two lawsuits hardly has a "playbook" for suing people for patent infringement.
Stronger than steel is cool and all, but that doesn't necessarily mean "all the same properties of steel". Durability, heat tolerance, reaction to moisture and a host of other things are likely to mean it's not a drop-in replacement for fibreglass/plastic/metal.
Fibreglass is terrible at all of the things you just listed and we use it for all kinds of things. It just has to be coated with a thin protective layer.
Maybe Apple or the carriers will cut a deal... or maybe their marketing material will just start referring to "apple phones."
Apple is also a trademark, so they are not allowed to use that in advertising either.
I'm not familiar with Mexican law either but these laws are pretty well unified by international treaties. You cannot use another company's trademark in your advertising material unless you have permission. Any carrier who sells the iPhone to customers would have permission to use the trademark, so this tells me the carrier does not sell iPhones and therefore has no business using iPhone in their ads.
This is one of many reasons why I like Safari -you have to jump into the command line settings to *enable* backspace-to-go-back.
It's definitely the best browser available, in terms of getting little things like this right.
Chromium is open source so if you don't like it, fork you own copy and get whatever useless toolbars that install without permission that you want.
Darwin is open source too, so you can fork it and install whatever apps you want.
The fact is most people stick with the official release. Your platform is not "open" if your official release if third party extensions aren't allowed.
It's worth mentioning the (non-mobile) version of Safari does allow arbitrary third party extensions. There are some warnings to the user that it might be malware, but they don't block installation.