It is also using an OS not specifically written for low power devices.
That's bullshit, I don't have a figure handy but at around half of the machines running Mac OS X are notebooks. It's absolutely built for low power devices, plus it's a far far more mature operating system, which means Apple's engineers will have spent a ton of development-hours improving battery life/power management.
There is a reason mac notebooks get 4 to 6 hours of battery life. And yes, my iBook does get the "up to 6 hours" apple was claiming when I bought it.
It's exactly the same where I work, we have 15 people running xp and 2 macs. We're a web development firm, and received vista as part of an ms action pack. When someone was bored they installed vista on a spare machine that was laying around, but it doesn't run some of the software we use daily, and is in fact even less compatible with our software than the two macs.
I asked around the office, and there isn't a single person who plans to move to vista any time in the foreseeable future, even though they could do it for free.
We are all running Office 2007 though.
iChat uses AIM, Jabber and "Bonjour" (a "zero config" lan chat client, I think it's also based on jabber. Anyone who's logged in on your lan will automatically appear in your bonjour buddy list. it's pretty cool, but mac only).
Time Machine is already fully functional (apart from a few gui glitches) in the current leopard developer builds, but ZFS isn't even available in Disk Utility (yet?). This doesn't mean ZFS won't be added at the last minute, but it certainly isn't required for Time Machine.
Anybody who doesn't know html/css well enough to type it blindfolded shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a business website's html. Dreamweaver only produces good code if you hold it's hand, as people who don't know how to do that end up creating pages that are extremely difficult to maintain, slow to load, difficult for google to index and almost always riddled with minor bugs/inconsistencies.
If you can't find a designer who knows html, hire two people and have the one who knows html slice the mockup.
FWIW, i work at a large-ish web development company, and spent 3 hours today cleaning up a *single page* that was built by someone in dreamweaver... just so I could do what would have otherwise taken 5 minutes at the most. I guess what annoys me the most about the whole thing is that the original author earns about three times as much as me...
OK, so I tried it on my 800Mhz laptop running Mac OS X 10.4. The UI was laggy (menus took ~0.5 seconds to appear, window switches took a couple of seconds), and anything involving real cpu (such as loading the slashdot reply page) outright didn't work until I hit control-c in terminal (at which point *blink* slashdot reply page appeared and I'm now typing the reply as if nothing had happened).
My machine ran slow. But the OS didn't crash... or even cause any error messages to appear. Unless I'm supposed to leave it running for more than the couple of minutes I waited?
I've read the article, and some of the comments here, but can't find any concrete details about what the actual exploit is.
All I can find is some vague references to "using javascript instead of xml" for transfering data, and "It's perfectly possible for any one web site to run JavaScript hosted on another domain. Applications such as Google Adsense or Google Maps, for examples, rely upon it."
Do "11 out of 12" frameworks really use javascript? I thought JSON was the best method for transfering data (xml is too slow), and you're supposed to run a regex on it to kill any injections before evaling the JSON. I know I certainly do this, and I'd expect more than 1 in 12 of the major frameworks to do it too.
As for being easy to execute javascript hosted on another domain, yeah that can be done. But how do you get *your* code to run on a domain that you have zero control over? Browsers are supposed to make this impossible, and if there's a hole this article doesn't tell you what it is.
My FUD bells are ringing.
h.264 is a new format, but not a rare one. All blue-ray/hd-dvd's are h.264 encoded, and all the rips of them that I've seen have been re-encoded in h.264 at lower bit-rates (but still much higher res/less artifacts than dvd's). This is not an apple format, it's just the one they've decided to go with for iTunes.
The tests I've seen comparing MPEG 4 (which is what most divx files use) and h.264 are *very* impressive. Basically if you encode the same movie at a certain bitrate, the h.264 one will be 4 times the resolution with a slightly higher framerate. So, a 400MB h.264 file would be better quality than a 1.5GB divx.
For the past few weeks I've been running an 800Mhz G4 iBook with 640MB of ram as my workstation (long story). I always have at least 8 applications running from 9am to 5pm, and often as many as 15 (including safari by the way). I never notice any slow downs, everything runs perfectly all day long. Even when I open a large app like Adobe Illustrator, I don't need to close anything else to avoid running out of memory.
You only need more than 1GB of ram when you're working with movies or large collections of images (how many photos are in your iPhoto library? Do you realize the thumbnails for a large library could easily be 2 or 3 GB of data? And that for iPhoto's smooth-as-butter scrolling, they *have* to be sitting in ram?).
If I set Safari's User Agent to MSIE 6, everything seems to work fine except for a "plugin not found" error in the header logo. I can even preview the few movies that actually have previews (looks like they're useing flash). The site does seem fairly nice (functionality only), with lots of dom manipulation instead of going to a whole new page and so on, but there's nothing I saw that can't be done with prototype.js (which is cross browser).
I wasn't able to test how far into the order system I can get, since I get a "not available outside the US" popup.
So...based purely on what I'm reading alone, OSX and the built in services and QS et all appear to do a better job and achieve all the integration and consistent UI objectives and extensibility that I think we can expect of Enso
Actually you don't really need QS. Just spotlight is very good for opening apps/files. QS is a little smarter about abbreviations, but it has more overhead than spotlight, rescans every few minutes, and doesn't search by metadata or file content. Spotlight has none of these drawbacks, it updates immediately as the last step of any file read/write (in the background, doesn't slow anything down even on my 800Mhz iBook), and you can search for something like "foobar date:today" to open the email containing "foobar" that you read earlier.
Still, I mostly use QS because my older notebook doesn't run spotlight as fast as more recent machines. If I type "f" into spotlight, it takes between 0.5 and 3 seconds to show firefox as the 'top hit' (depending on system load), while in QS firefox is highlighted before I even release the f key. But I don't intend to install QS after upgrading to a faster machine.
Going through your paragraphs:
1st one: I don't have a mac pro but have heard of people using it on mac pros successfully, and never once heard of any problems. But either way it's irrelevant since parallels is third party software, and the only "official" way to run windows is boot camp (which was developed in house by apple, and is a free alternative to parallels), so it has nothing to do with apple at all.
2nd one: Keyboards are something were personal taste applies, in my own opinion apple's keyboards are among the best "stock standard" keyboards that come with desktop pc's from any manufacturer, but each to his own opinion. I'd personally never dream of doing real work on anything but the low-profile scissor switch keyboards I use. However what's this crap about "one company that makes a decent replacement"? Any USB keyboard will work perfectly, buy whatever you want if you're picky about keyboards.
3rd one: Again, illustrator is third party software. If you'd done your research you would see that illustrator does not run natively on intel macs, and this can cause stability issues. Bitch to Adobe about it, they could've fixed all the issues months ago but have instead decided to force everyone to pay for the fully compatible version of illustrator (which requires adding a few new features, which requires lots of development time). But really, the blame is yours for not doing your research.
4th one: are all your reasons as stupid as the ones above? Because none of them hold any real water. You say they "lied" about it. Who lied about it? Who told your illustrator would run perfectly under emulation? Who told you that parallels is a "major selling point" when it's a paid alternative to the free-official version of the same feature?
It looks to me like you're a victim of your own poor research.
The "admin" group (even though it's not really admin, just a sudoer) has write access to/Library (/System/Library is owned by root, but/Library is available to admins unless manually changed).
The security hole is that APE installs software that's being run as root in a directory that non-root users have write access too. All you have to do is modify the executable so it installs insert-evil-kernel-extension-here before executing the normal code, and bob's your uncle.
One of my apps is a competitor to a major ape-using-app (no names needed since it's irrelevant), and mine also requires root access to do it's magic. However we've done it the proper way: only root has write access to the executable file, and it can't possibly execute unless you have proper auth services access (or are logged in as root/using sudo). Auth services (part of Keychain.app) will remember the user's password, but ask for it again with an easy to understand warning message if anything suspicious has happened (eg: md5 of the executable is different).
This is very basic stuff and is clearly documented. But far too many small developers don't give a shit about security.
Yesterday I added a method to the string class that returns an "object enumerator" that does a search for the next tag, creates an object to represent it, and returns that object whenever the "nextObject" method is received. It returns nil when there are no more tags.
while (tag = [tagEn nextObject]) { .. do stuff with tag object..
}
This is done all over the place, even within the built in API's as a way to a class's methods into separate files. If you look at the header file for NSString, you'll see that it only has two methods (length and characterAtIndex:), but then underneath that is ~150 more that are added as "additions" to the class. It's a nice way to keep methods organized without using comments, and I imagine the actual implementation files for each "section" of methods are in a separate source code file.
Another use is for delegate methods. NSTextView adds a bunch of methods to the root class (NSObject), for example:
The method does nothing, but subclasses that are delegates of NSTextView can override the method to do Stuff. If a delegate only cares about actual content changes, and not selection changes, just don't define the selection change delegate method and NSObject's one will be executed instead (which does nothing in most cases).
* I hate the fact that I can never find *anything* I'm looking for. I spend entirely too long searching around for applications, their support files, and system configuration options. I realize that Apple designs these things for people who aren't familiar with computers, but fuck, it makes it hard for someone that is quite comfy with Linux and Windows configurations. Apart from the UNIX stuff, of which I only know the basics, everything is very well organized into the "Library" folders:/System/Library - owned by root, you can't modify this without changing permissions or using sudo, and you never ever need to modify it! The *only* tool that should ever touch this directory is Software Update, nothing else./Library - owned by admin, any admin user can modify this. Anything installed here will generally apply to all users on the machine.
~/Library - owned by the user, anything installed here will only be apply to that user (eg: emails, bookmarks, etc)./Network/Library - I've never used it... from memory anything installed here is supposed to be available to all machines on the LAN or something. I'm not sure how it works.
The contents of these folders should be fairly obvious, and all of the them can contain the same subdirectories, and if the same files exist in more than one library the "higher up ones" will normally override everything else (~/Library overrides/Library,/Library overrides/System/Library). If you rely on this behavior, test it extensively, because I don't think it applies to everything.
There are a few exceptions: some applications will also look inside the Application bundle itself (mostly done with frameworks or plug-ins), right click on an application and choose "show package contents" to poke around here. Also, some really badly written software will store your settings in ~/Documents, which was deprecated almost 10 years ago (!!), but a few big corporations (such as microsoft) still do it.
* I hate the fact that I have no idea what the fuck is going on behind the scenes with the Mac. Yeah, XP has gotten to this point but I guess because I have a basic idea built up over the years from other versions of Windows, I don't mind as much. Being built on Unix, I would expect to understand more about what OS X is doing -- but I don't. There's no such thing as understanding any OS unless you've been using it for a long time. Live with it.
* I really don't like the fact that I *could* do stuff on the CLI but I can never find out how. The files aren't in the locations I would expect. Have you ever heard of google?
As I said, I use it as my desktop (which is basically web browsing) but that's because I don't have a choice. I have a friend that is amazed as how often mine "pinwheels". I have a 1.42 with a GB of RAM and it still pinwheels constantly. "That's just not right," he says. I agree. Your friend is right, I'm tying this on an 800Mhz G4 with 640MB of ram running MacOS X 10.4, and it never pinwheels. Do a re-install.
A friend of mine is a Vastu consultant and from what he's told me about it, this is total bullshit.
Vastu is primarily about aligning a the energy of a building with the magnetics of the planet and so on, which is impossible to apply to a website.
the "Sorry, an error has occurred" box popping up in 5 or 6 languages on an almost daily basis) - maybe we both just had lemon hardware, though.
You definitely had "lemon" hardware, or a severely corrupted installation. Kernel panics under OS X are just as common as they are on debian, which is to say they never happen unless something in your hardware or kernel is totally fucked up.
I know a few companies who'll suffer tremendous losses if their entire IT is down for a day or two.
Not days: hours. If a server that takes, say, tourist bookings goes down for a couple of hours, that's often *tens of thousands of dollars* in lost sales, which is definitely more expensive than moving their entire system over to Linux, and that's the exact advice they'll get from web developers like me.
In my opinion, it doesn't matter if they're doing it from pluto: if one government is spying on the goings-on of another government, they're in the wrong.
Doesn't matter who does it, or why, it's close to an act of war if you ask me.
The whole idea of increasing feedback between users and developers is total bullshit: developers have more important things to do than explain why it's a bad idea to implement xy in the next release.
I've worked as a developer in both software that people download and more recently custom software developed for a single client, and there's one thing that hasn't changed in either model: the customer is *never* right. Or at least, so close to never that it rounds down to nothing.
I agree 100% that there needs to be a good system in place for developers to receive feedback from users, but in most cases it's best as a one way flow. Developers need to see what needs to be done first, but end users don't really need to see what will happen next.
Also, user's feature requests almost certainly never, ever, *ever* will happen for one simple reason: it takes five seconds to request a feature, and five days to implement it. When combined with the fact that feature requesters outnumber feature implementers by *several thousand to one*, it's pretty easy to see why that's an impossible situation (and that doesn't even take into account the fact that most customers, and especially clients, have no idea what they're talking about). If a feature you requested gets implemented, 99% of the time it was already on the to-do list long before you dreamed it up.
Re:Still not too bad
on
Crypto Snake Oil
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Peer reviewed does not equal security. It could be there are several known flaws in something that's had "peer reviews", or it could be the system is totally open but hasn't been around long enough to be tested thoroughly, or maybe it's been around forever but is now using a faster alogorithm that hasn't been proven to be secure...
If you want security, ask an authority on the matter rather than basing it on inderect things like price, openness, etc.
We're not talking about 250GB of data. We're talking about 30GB. Burning two or three DVD's does not take long and is *much* cheaper.
Also, most of your data doesn't need to be backed up very often. If all your music fits on your MP3 player, and your emails are left on the server, they don't even really need to be backed up at all (though it's probably a good idea to include them, just to be safe). I do regular backups of about 30MB to an ftp server (daily when I'm working on an important project), and occaisional (a few times a year) backups to DVD, which contains all my important data and all the software I use regularly. After erasing my hard drive many, many times for various reasons, and occaisionally having a major hardware failure, I'm very happy with this system. It's not perfect, but I don't loose any data, my schedule doesn't suffer much, and I don't spend much cash on backups.
I'd rather buy a faster GPU or more RAM than an external HD that's dedicated to backups.
PS: I use Toast to burn my backups, it automatically spans the data accross multiple disks and puts an executable on the first one that allows you to pick and choose what data to restore without me knowing what disk it's on. But Toast is not free, and (AFAIK) only runs on a mac.
Slashdot Mirror
That's bullshit, I don't have a figure handy but at around half of the machines running Mac OS X are notebooks. It's absolutely built for low power devices, plus it's a far far more mature operating system, which means Apple's engineers will have spent a ton of development-hours improving battery life/power management.
There is a reason mac notebooks get 4 to 6 hours of battery life. And yes, my iBook does get the "up to 6 hours" apple was claiming when I bought it.
It's exactly the same where I work, we have 15 people running xp and 2 macs. We're a web development firm, and received vista as part of an ms action pack. When someone was bored they installed vista on a spare machine that was laying around, but it doesn't run some of the software we use daily, and is in fact even less compatible with our software than the two macs. I asked around the office, and there isn't a single person who plans to move to vista any time in the foreseeable future, even though they could do it for free. We are all running Office 2007 though.
iChat uses AIM, Jabber and "Bonjour" (a "zero config" lan chat client, I think it's also based on jabber. Anyone who's logged in on your lan will automatically appear in your bonjour buddy list. it's pretty cool, but mac only).
Time Machine is already fully functional (apart from a few gui glitches) in the current leopard developer builds, but ZFS isn't even available in Disk Utility (yet?). This doesn't mean ZFS won't be added at the last minute, but it certainly isn't required for Time Machine.
Anybody who doesn't know html/css well enough to type it blindfolded shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a business website's html. Dreamweaver only produces good code if you hold it's hand, as people who don't know how to do that end up creating pages that are extremely difficult to maintain, slow to load, difficult for google to index and almost always riddled with minor bugs/inconsistencies.
If you can't find a designer who knows html, hire two people and have the one who knows html slice the mockup.
FWIW, i work at a large-ish web development company, and spent 3 hours today cleaning up a *single page* that was built by someone in dreamweaver... just so I could do what would have otherwise taken 5 minutes at the most. I guess what annoys me the most about the whole thing is that the original author earns about three times as much as me...
OK, so I tried it on my 800Mhz laptop running Mac OS X 10.4. The UI was laggy (menus took ~0.5 seconds to appear, window switches took a couple of seconds), and anything involving real cpu (such as loading the slashdot reply page) outright didn't work until I hit control-c in terminal (at which point *blink* slashdot reply page appeared and I'm now typing the reply as if nothing had happened).
My machine ran slow. But the OS didn't crash... or even cause any error messages to appear. Unless I'm supposed to leave it running for more than the couple of minutes I waited?
I've read the article, and some of the comments here, but can't find any concrete details about what the actual exploit is. All I can find is some vague references to "using javascript instead of xml" for transfering data, and "It's perfectly possible for any one web site to run JavaScript hosted on another domain. Applications such as Google Adsense or Google Maps, for examples, rely upon it." Do "11 out of 12" frameworks really use javascript? I thought JSON was the best method for transfering data (xml is too slow), and you're supposed to run a regex on it to kill any injections before evaling the JSON. I know I certainly do this, and I'd expect more than 1 in 12 of the major frameworks to do it too. As for being easy to execute javascript hosted on another domain, yeah that can be done. But how do you get *your* code to run on a domain that you have zero control over? Browsers are supposed to make this impossible, and if there's a hole this article doesn't tell you what it is. My FUD bells are ringing.
h.264 is a new format, but not a rare one. All blue-ray/hd-dvd's are h.264 encoded, and all the rips of them that I've seen have been re-encoded in h.264 at lower bit-rates (but still much higher res/less artifacts than dvd's). This is not an apple format, it's just the one they've decided to go with for iTunes.
The tests I've seen comparing MPEG 4 (which is what most divx files use) and h.264 are *very* impressive. Basically if you encode the same movie at a certain bitrate, the h.264 one will be 4 times the resolution with a slightly higher framerate. So, a 400MB h.264 file would be better quality than a 1.5GB divx.
For the past few weeks I've been running an 800Mhz G4 iBook with 640MB of ram as my workstation (long story). I always have at least 8 applications running from 9am to 5pm, and often as many as 15 (including safari by the way). I never notice any slow downs, everything runs perfectly all day long. Even when I open a large app like Adobe Illustrator, I don't need to close anything else to avoid running out of memory.
You only need more than 1GB of ram when you're working with movies or large collections of images (how many photos are in your iPhoto library? Do you realize the thumbnails for a large library could easily be 2 or 3 GB of data? And that for iPhoto's smooth-as-butter scrolling, they *have* to be sitting in ram?).
If I set Safari's User Agent to MSIE 6, everything seems to work fine except for a "plugin not found" error in the header logo. I can even preview the few movies that actually have previews (looks like they're useing flash). The site does seem fairly nice (functionality only), with lots of dom manipulation instead of going to a whole new page and so on, but there's nothing I saw that can't be done with prototype.js (which is cross browser).
I wasn't able to test how far into the order system I can get, since I get a "not available outside the US" popup.
Screenshot: http://aadesign.ausdatahost.com/misc-files/walmart -safari.jpg
So...based purely on what I'm reading alone, OSX and the built in services and QS et all appear to do a better job and achieve all the integration and consistent UI objectives and extensibility that I think we can expect of Enso
Actually you don't really need QS. Just spotlight is very good for opening apps/files. QS is a little smarter about abbreviations, but it has more overhead than spotlight, rescans every few minutes, and doesn't search by metadata or file content. Spotlight has none of these drawbacks, it updates immediately as the last step of any file read/write (in the background, doesn't slow anything down even on my 800Mhz iBook), and you can search for something like "foobar date:today" to open the email containing "foobar" that you read earlier.
Still, I mostly use QS because my older notebook doesn't run spotlight as fast as more recent machines. If I type "f" into spotlight, it takes between 0.5 and 3 seconds to show firefox as the 'top hit' (depending on system load), while in QS firefox is highlighted before I even release the f key. But I don't intend to install QS after upgrading to a faster machine.
Going through your paragraphs: 1st one: I don't have a mac pro but have heard of people using it on mac pros successfully, and never once heard of any problems. But either way it's irrelevant since parallels is third party software, and the only "official" way to run windows is boot camp (which was developed in house by apple, and is a free alternative to parallels), so it has nothing to do with apple at all. 2nd one: Keyboards are something were personal taste applies, in my own opinion apple's keyboards are among the best "stock standard" keyboards that come with desktop pc's from any manufacturer, but each to his own opinion. I'd personally never dream of doing real work on anything but the low-profile scissor switch keyboards I use. However what's this crap about "one company that makes a decent replacement"? Any USB keyboard will work perfectly, buy whatever you want if you're picky about keyboards. 3rd one: Again, illustrator is third party software. If you'd done your research you would see that illustrator does not run natively on intel macs, and this can cause stability issues. Bitch to Adobe about it, they could've fixed all the issues months ago but have instead decided to force everyone to pay for the fully compatible version of illustrator (which requires adding a few new features, which requires lots of development time). But really, the blame is yours for not doing your research. 4th one: are all your reasons as stupid as the ones above? Because none of them hold any real water. You say they "lied" about it. Who lied about it? Who told your illustrator would run perfectly under emulation? Who told you that parallels is a "major selling point" when it's a paid alternative to the free-official version of the same feature? It looks to me like you're a victim of your own poor research.
The "admin" group (even though it's not really admin, just a sudoer) has write access to /Library (/System/Library is owned by root, but /Library is available to admins unless manually changed).
The security hole is that APE installs software that's being run as root in a directory that non-root users have write access too. All you have to do is modify the executable so it installs insert-evil-kernel-extension-here before executing the normal code, and bob's your uncle.
One of my apps is a competitor to a major ape-using-app (no names needed since it's irrelevant), and mine also requires root access to do it's magic. However we've done it the proper way: only root has write access to the executable file, and it can't possibly execute unless you have proper auth services access (or are logged in as root/using sudo). Auth services (part of Keychain.app) will remember the user's password, but ask for it again with an easy to understand warning message if anything suspicious has happened (eg: md5 of the executable is different).
This is very basic stuff and is clearly documented. But far too many small developers don't give a shit about security.
Yesterday I added a method to the string class that returns an "object enumerator" that does a search for the next tag, creates an object to represent it, and returns that object whenever the "nextObject" method is received. It returns nil when there are no more tags.
NSEnumerator *tagEn = [htmlSource htmlTagEnumerator];MyHTMLTag *tag;
while (tag = [tagEn nextObject]) {
}
This is done all over the place, even within the built in API's as a way to a class's methods into separate files. If you look at the header file for NSString, you'll see that it only has two methods (length and characterAtIndex:), but then underneath that is ~150 more that are added as "additions" to the class. It's a nice way to keep methods organized without using comments, and I imagine the actual implementation files for each "section" of methods are in a separate source code file.
Another use is for delegate methods. NSTextView adds a bunch of methods to the root class (NSObject), for example:
- (NSRange)textView:(NSTextView *)textView willChangeSelectionFromCharacterRange:(NSRange)olThe method does nothing, but subclasses that are delegates of NSTextView can override the method to do Stuff. If a delegate only cares about actual content changes, and not selection changes, just don't define the selection change delegate method and NSObject's one will be executed instead (which does nothing in most cases).
Bullshit, the vast majority of our population can't trace their lines back to the convicts who first came here.
A friend of mine is a Vastu consultant and from what he's told me about it, this is total bullshit. Vastu is primarily about aligning a the energy of a building with the magnetics of the planet and so on, which is impossible to apply to a website.
the "Sorry, an error has occurred" box popping up in 5 or 6 languages on an almost daily basis) - maybe we both just had lemon hardware, though. You definitely had "lemon" hardware, or a severely corrupted installation. Kernel panics under OS X are just as common as they are on debian, which is to say they never happen unless something in your hardware or kernel is totally fucked up.
I know a few companies who'll suffer tremendous losses if their entire IT is down for a day or two.
Not days: hours. If a server that takes, say, tourist bookings goes down for a couple of hours, that's often *tens of thousands of dollars* in lost sales, which is definitely more expensive than moving their entire system over to Linux, and that's the exact advice they'll get from web developers like me.
In my opinion, it doesn't matter if they're doing it from pluto: if one government is spying on the goings-on of another government, they're in the wrong. Doesn't matter who does it, or why, it's close to an act of war if you ask me.
The whole idea of increasing feedback between users and developers is total bullshit: developers have more important things to do than explain why it's a bad idea to implement xy in the next release.
I've worked as a developer in both software that people download and more recently custom software developed for a single client, and there's one thing that hasn't changed in either model: the customer is *never* right. Or at least, so close to never that it rounds down to nothing.
I agree 100% that there needs to be a good system in place for developers to receive feedback from users, but in most cases it's best as a one way flow. Developers need to see what needs to be done first, but end users don't really need to see what will happen next. Also, user's feature requests almost certainly never, ever, *ever* will happen for one simple reason: it takes five seconds to request a feature, and five days to implement it. When combined with the fact that feature requesters outnumber feature implementers by *several thousand to one*, it's pretty easy to see why that's an impossible situation (and that doesn't even take into account the fact that most customers, and especially clients, have no idea what they're talking about). If a feature you requested gets implemented, 99% of the time it was already on the to-do list long before you dreamed it up.
Peer reviewed does not equal security. It could be there are several known flaws in something that's had "peer reviews", or it could be the system is totally open but hasn't been around long enough to be tested thoroughly, or maybe it's been around forever but is now using a faster alogorithm that hasn't been proven to be secure...
If you want security, ask an authority on the matter rather than basing it on inderect things like price, openness, etc.
"It doesn't look much better than a standard DVD" Who cares about that! I just want my shoot 'em ups to be six times more shoot 'em upier!
Apple didn't even create iTunes, they bought it several versions ago. How many of these "breaches" were developed by the original software team?
We're not talking about 250GB of data. We're talking about 30GB. Burning two or three DVD's does not take long and is *much* cheaper.
Also, most of your data doesn't need to be backed up very often. If all your music fits on your MP3 player, and your emails are left on the server, they don't even really need to be backed up at all (though it's probably a good idea to include them, just to be safe). I do regular backups of about 30MB to an ftp server (daily when I'm working on an important project), and occaisional (a few times a year) backups to DVD, which contains all my important data and all the software I use regularly. After erasing my hard drive many, many times for various reasons, and occaisionally having a major hardware failure, I'm very happy with this system. It's not perfect, but I don't loose any data, my schedule doesn't suffer much, and I don't spend much cash on backups.
I'd rather buy a faster GPU or more RAM than an external HD that's dedicated to backups.
PS: I use Toast to burn my backups, it automatically spans the data accross multiple disks and puts an executable on the first one that allows you to pick and choose what data to restore without me knowing what disk it's on. But Toast is not free, and (AFAIK) only runs on a mac.