Surprisingly, after a dozen of replies, nobody has managed to answer the simple question, what will EFI do for me that the BIOS didn't? What is the practical, real world advantage of an EFI system? Will it boot faster? Will it support booting from devices that the BIOS can't? Will we really get to see OS independent drivers (as opposed to being possible in theory, like with OF)?
Of course, I'd have no problem with this if the original article had actually talked about it meaningfully in the context of a local privilege escalation and explored the implications; instead, they just made it sound like you could throw a patched OS X box onto the internet and it'd get owned. The average reader would leave with that *distinct* impression, and most of the subsequent coverage of it talked about it exactly in that fashion.
So your main problem is the press coverage? How is your "challenge" going to change that? If your box doesn't get cracked by Friday, would ZDNet run an article titled "Mac OS X not hacked in five days" ?
Actually, I think the original test was more interesting than this one. For years we've read countless +5 Insightful posts that OS X is more secure than Windows because normal users run in restricted accounts by default. That trojans can't do anything to the system unless you're "stupid enough to type in your password". If the original hack was indeed an exploit of an undisclosed buffer overflow, it means that this argument is pretty much moot. There have already been lots of posts in this and the previous article that amounted to saying "a local exploit is no big deal, everybody has them, if you have local (restricted) access you should be expected to be compromised anyway". Are these posters saying that the supposed advantages of restricted user accounts on OS X are very overrated? Are they saying it's no big deal if the next social engineering attack is combined with a buffer overflow exploit, meaning no popups asking for your password?
If the original hacker Gwerdna (Andrew G?) was right that there are many undisclosed priviledge escalation bugs, that is a case for concern, not something to be dismissed as a mere "local" vulnerability. BSD, Linux and even Windows already have patches for NX to contain buffer offerflows, where is Apple on this?
I think that, especially if you're an Apple user, it is very important to test the claim that the OS is rifle with local priviledge escalation issues. And that's why I think the first test was much better than this one. I don't expect this U of W box to be hacked anytime soon. But this proves very little. You can even setup a Windows SP2 ISS+Remote Desktop box like this, and I don't think it will be hacked anytime soon either. But if you redo something like the original box (give normal user ssh accounts to anyone) and get hacked very quickly again, it proofs a lot. Namely that the local security measures of OS X that many have come to thrust amount to very little.
FullStream Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams
Video Immersion II delivers industry-leading DVD playback
Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage
Unique Adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques
YUV to RGB color space conversion
Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback
4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering
Upscaling and downscaling
Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide
Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems
Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics
If you read the manufacturers specs every graphics card is the best out there. Heck, even the crappy VIA Unichrome has hardware MPEG2 acceleration and motion compensation. The problem is not the hardware support in the 9200, the problem is that Apple's DVD Player didn't use the hardware features (nor does any other Mac DVD app AFAIK). I don't see why that would change with the Intel GMA. They even have less incentive, now that the CPU is much more powerful.
Jobs anounced last month that they've sold 42 million iPods, so they've sold on average less than 24 songs per iPod. Even the lowest capacity Shuffle holds 120 songs. If we assume an average capacity of 2GB (500 songs) per iPod (the majority of sales are probably the cheaper low capacity units), less than 5% of the aggregate iPod capacity is filled with iTMS songs.
This seems to contradict the oft repeated claims that the iPod ties you to iTMS, or that iTMS is a major contributor to the iPod's success.
I guess we just need a decentralized system which makes it practically impossible to track down what was downloaded from who and when. Bittorrent will have to change to protect it's users from RIAA & Co. If Bittorrent won't change, it will be replaced by a program that will.
From the February 12 2004 NYT interview with Bram Cohen:
Using BitTorrent for illegal trading, he added, is "patently stupid because it's not anonymous, and it can't be made anonymous because it's fundamentally antithetical to the architecture."
Chinese is not Chinese. I worked at a company that employed several Chinese engineers. While they could all read the same newspaper, they couldn't all talk to each other. Those from the south (Hong Kong and surrounding area) couldn't understand those from the north.
True, but you cannot extrapolate too much from your anecdote. Even by conservative estimates, the Mandarin dialect accounts for 800 million+ almost-native speakers. Your experience is colored by the fact that Cantonese is especially overrepresented in California. If you take a random Chinese person in China (or even Asia), there's a high probability that he or she understands Mandarin. It's true that the probability is much lower if you take a sample from the Chinese in the US, but there are over a billion Chinese in China and only a few million in the US. While there are indeed a lot of different and mutually incomprehensible (spoken) local variants of Chinese, in the larger scheme only two count: Mandarin and Cantonese.
Mandarin was the local dialect of the area around Beijing, and later adapted by the government as the official national language of China (both the People's Republic (PRC) and Taiwan). In absolute numbers, it is by far the most important. In the PRC, although most regions and provinces have their own dialect used in daily life, the language used on TV and school is Mandarin. This may sound like Mandarin is a second language to the local dialect for most Chinese, but it's more like a "second native" language, as 1) all courses starting from elementary school are completely in Mandarin regardless of the local dialect, and 2) the script is the same as the local dialect. Thus, the majority of Chinese from Taiwan or the PRC will speak Mandarin (in addition to their own local dialect).
Cantonese is the native dialect around Guangdong (Canton) and Hong Kong, in the south. It's less important then Mandarin, but overrepresented the West (especially California and in the UK). Its importance is due to two factors: 1) a large proportion of early Chinese emmigrants came from the Guangdong (so many later emmigrants even from other provinces learned it as it was the language of the established community) and 2) it's the native language of the economic powerhouse Hong Kong. Most younger people from HK speak Mandarin pretty decently nowadays, but not as well as those from the PRC, since (AFAIK) courses in HK schools are still taught in Cantonese, and Mandarin is indeed a second language. However, many older Chinese emmigrants in the US and their descendents only understand Cantonese.
...how they implement the instant-on stuff. None of this "hibernation" crap, when I open my powerbook, I start working. Done and done.
And it it can be easily implemented on Intel arch, why hasn't it been done?
My old ThinkPad 600X takes many seconds to start up from suspend. OTOH my new ThinkPad X40 wakes in about a second. I open it, count to one, and start working. Done and done. Hibernation is optional (and very nice on this machine, about 20 seconds cold start, I basically use it instead of power off). That you personally haven't seen it doesn't mean that it hasn't been done on "Intel arch", whatever that means. It basically all comes down to the BIOS implementation, of which there are many varieties.
According to the iPod specs, it plays MPEG4 video up to 480x480 resolution, 30fps. But I don't think they will play the XVid/DivX clips in AVI containers (which I believe is against MPEG specs) that most people have lying around/rip to.
This is a worthless comment. Why? Because EVERY laptop manufacturer makes their OWN CUSTOM connector from mobo to drive. You will need that connector for that computer! So it doesn't fucking matter which one you get, you still need a special connector. Additionally, if you ask (which you obviously haven't) you can get either connector from any manufacturer. Try it. You want the Hitachi connector for a machine that had a Toshiba, call them the fuck up and ask, stop complaining. Nearly ALL manufacturers who use 1.8" drives supply from BOTH sources. It would be incredibly stupid to source only one maker. Duh.
Talk about worthless comments, this is totally rubish. All IDE (non-SATA) 2.5" drives have the same connector. You can stick any drive from any manufacturer in the laptop. The "custom connector from mobo to drive" is of course already included in your laptop. Not so for the 1.8" drives, since not only are the connectors different size, they're also in different locations. Just take a look at the linked pictures, the Hitachi connector is on the side while the Toshiba is on the back. In all devices that use 1.8" drives, space is a premium, and there is simply no room to convert from one interface to another. The fact is, all products that use 1.8" drives supply only from ONE source, since they need a different mobo design to fit the other drive. If you don't believe me I'll give you $100 if you can fit a 1.8" Hitachi in my iPod or a 1.8" Toshiba in my X40.
> The ThinkPad X-series uses 1.8" drives to cut down on weight and size.
Specifically the X40 series, the X30 series still use 2.5" drives, which are bigger but have many advantages. They're much faster, bigger, cheaper, and most importantly, there is competition from different manufacturers (Hitachi, Toshiba, Seagate, WD, Samsung, Fujitsu, all interchangable).
With 1.8" drives you're basically stuck with one manufacturer for a given laptop.
There are only two 1.8" HD manufacturers, Toshiba and Hitachi, and they use incompatible connectors. The Toshiba looks like a shrunken 2.5" drive, while Hitachi uses the same connector from the 2.5" drive mounted on the side of the drive. The IBM X40 uses the Hitachi connector, while Dell uses the Toshiba in the Lattitude X1. I think most ultraportable laptops with 1.8" drives use the Toshiba connector, but as they rarely mention the HD manufacturer, for each model you'd have to find someone who has opened it to find out. Same thing for media players, I'm pretty certain iPods use Toshibas while the Rio Karma has the Hitachi drive. To make matters even more confusing, Hitachi has introduced another incompatible connector for 1.8" drives ("ZIF connector"), which seems to be mainly marketed to media player manufacturers.
Re:Music Store Opens in another Country...
on
iTMS Launches in Japan
·
· Score: 3, Informative
While your explanation is good, what you're explaining is not "price fixing" (different suppliers agreeing to charge the same price) but price discrimination (charging different prices for the same good).
> But with Yahoo!, that's a whole fuckload of fees - I'll leave the maths to you.
Yahoo offers the option of purchasing tracks for $0.79 in addition to the $4.99 supscription plan.
So you can choose to spend $4.99 on one month of unlimited listening and purchase 69 songs with the remaining $55. Sounds like better value than the 60 songs from iTMS.
If it were up to me, there would be a hybrid model, with $0.99 songs, a $5.00 subscription option, and with the $5.00 subscription option, you get 25%-50% off of songs you purchase after hearing them.
Then you must really love the Yahoo model: you pay $4.99 to rent the entire catalogue and you can opt to purchase the songs you want to keep for $0.79.
The overall costs of doing business in Europe are higher (overhead, localization, transportation, stricter consumer protection regulations,...). Therefore you will find that the majority of consumer products (especially electronics) are priced higher in the EU than in the US.
If multibutton mice are so confusiong, the hordes of Mac using grandmas must be dying en masse of heart attack from looking at the keyboard with over a hundred keys, many with utterly confusing labels like "ctrl", "f1" or a picture of a pretzel. For the well being of Mac using grandmas everywhere I propose Apple should not ship keyboards with any of their computers. After all, all the keys are in the on-screen keyboards anyway and pro-users can always choose to buy their own keyboards. This has the additional advantage of forcing developers to write apps without assuming the presence of a keyboard, leading obviously to a much better interface than Windows PCs which often won't even boot without a keyboard.
Ah, yes, the Bulwer-Lytton contest. The challenge is to write the worst novel opening line you can think of. As most entries tend to be rather long, there is also a Lyttle Lytton contest limited to 25 word, with classics as
In 3010, the potatoes triumphed.
and the latest winner
John, surfing, said to his mother, surfing beside him, "How do you like surfing?"
Why are the iPod recommendations modded up like crazy, while comments that actually answer the question left untouched? The poster didn't ask for a portable hard drive but for an enclosure. Unlike many Ask Slashdot requests, the question was very specific. The probably already has the 2.5" drive(s), or he's using it to house 2.5" drives for his job, and just looking for a small $20 enclosure, not a $200+ hard disk music player.
They're reasonably powerful systems with very low power consumption: the entire system (minus display) usually stays under 20W. Even the Pentium-M consumes much more on the desktop (granted, they're also much faster). The most comparable competition in terms of power consumption are Via Mini-ITX systems, which tend to be much slower.
Slashdot Mirror
Surprisingly, after a dozen of replies, nobody has managed to answer the simple question, what will EFI do for me that the BIOS didn't? What is the practical, real world advantage of an EFI system? Will it boot faster? Will it support booting from devices that the BIOS can't? Will we really get to see OS independent drivers (as opposed to being possible in theory, like with OF)?
Actually, I think the original test was more interesting than this one. For years we've read countless +5 Insightful posts that OS X is more secure than Windows because normal users run in restricted accounts by default. That trojans can't do anything to the system unless you're "stupid enough to type in your password". If the original hack was indeed an exploit of an undisclosed buffer overflow, it means that this argument is pretty much moot. There have already been lots of posts in this and the previous article that amounted to saying "a local exploit is no big deal, everybody has them, if you have local (restricted) access you should be expected to be compromised anyway". Are these posters saying that the supposed advantages of restricted user accounts on OS X are very overrated? Are they saying it's no big deal if the next social engineering attack is combined with a buffer overflow exploit, meaning no popups asking for your password?
If the original hacker Gwerdna (Andrew G?) was right that there are many undisclosed priviledge escalation bugs, that is a case for concern, not something to be dismissed as a mere "local" vulnerability. BSD, Linux and even Windows already have patches for NX to contain buffer offerflows, where is Apple on this?
I think that, especially if you're an Apple user, it is very important to test the claim that the OS is rifle with local priviledge escalation issues. And that's why I think the first test was much better than this one. I don't expect this U of W box to be hacked anytime soon. But this proves very little. You can even setup a Windows SP2 ISS+Remote Desktop box like this, and I don't think it will be hacked anytime soon either. But if you redo something like the original box (give normal user ssh accounts to anyone) and get hacked very quickly again, it proofs a lot. Namely that the local security measures of OS X that many have come to thrust amount to very little.
From ATIs 9200 specs: VIDEO FEATURES
-
FullStream Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams
-
Video Immersion II delivers industry-leading DVD playback
-
Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage
-
Unique Adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques
-
YUV to RGB color space conversion
-
Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback
-
4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering
-
Upscaling and downscaling
-
Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide
-
Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems
-
Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics
If you read the manufacturers specs every graphics card is the best out there. Heck, even the crappy VIA Unichrome has hardware MPEG2 acceleration and motion compensation. The problem is not the hardware support in the 9200, the problem is that Apple's DVD Player didn't use the hardware features (nor does any other Mac DVD app AFAIK). I don't see why that would change with the Intel GMA. They even have less incentive, now that the CPU is much more powerful.Jobs anounced last month that they've sold 42 million iPods, so they've sold on average less than 24 songs per iPod. Even the lowest capacity Shuffle holds 120 songs. If we assume an average capacity of 2GB (500 songs) per iPod (the majority of sales are probably the cheaper low capacity units), less than 5% of the aggregate iPod capacity is filled with iTMS songs.
This seems to contradict the oft repeated claims that the iPod ties you to iTMS, or that iTMS is a major contributor to the iPod's success.
From the February 12 2004 NYT interview with Bram Cohen:
Using BitTorrent for illegal trading, he added, is "patently stupid because it's not anonymous, and it can't be made anonymous because it's fundamentally antithetical to the architecture."
True, but you cannot extrapolate too much from your anecdote. Even by conservative estimates, the Mandarin dialect accounts for 800 million+ almost-native speakers. Your experience is colored by the fact that Cantonese is especially overrepresented in California. If you take a random Chinese person in China (or even Asia), there's a high probability that he or she understands Mandarin. It's true that the probability is much lower if you take a sample from the Chinese in the US, but there are over a billion Chinese in China and only a few million in the US. While there are indeed a lot of different and mutually incomprehensible (spoken) local variants of Chinese, in the larger scheme only two count: Mandarin and Cantonese.
Mandarin was the local dialect of the area around Beijing, and later adapted by the government as the official national language of China (both the People's Republic (PRC) and Taiwan). In absolute numbers, it is by far the most important. In the PRC, although most regions and provinces have their own dialect used in daily life, the language used on TV and school is Mandarin. This may sound like Mandarin is a second language to the local dialect for most Chinese, but it's more like a "second native" language, as 1) all courses starting from elementary school are completely in Mandarin regardless of the local dialect, and 2) the script is the same as the local dialect. Thus, the majority of Chinese from Taiwan or the PRC will speak Mandarin (in addition to their own local dialect).
Cantonese is the native dialect around Guangdong (Canton) and Hong Kong, in the south. It's less important then Mandarin, but overrepresented the West (especially California and in the UK). Its importance is due to two factors: 1) a large proportion of early Chinese emmigrants came from the Guangdong (so many later emmigrants even from other provinces learned it as it was the language of the established community) and 2) it's the native language of the economic powerhouse Hong Kong. Most younger people from HK speak Mandarin pretty decently nowadays, but not as well as those from the PRC, since (AFAIK) courses in HK schools are still taught in Cantonese, and Mandarin is indeed a second language. However, many older Chinese emmigrants in the US and their descendents only understand Cantonese.
> Apple displays are all (with the exception of the 14" iBook) 100dpi.
Nonsense, what did you think they updated in the latest PB updates?
My old ThinkPad 600X takes many seconds to start up from suspend. OTOH my new ThinkPad X40 wakes in about a second. I open it, count to one, and start working. Done and done. Hibernation is optional (and very nice on this machine, about 20 seconds cold start, I basically use it instead of power off). That you personally haven't seen it doesn't mean that it hasn't been done on "Intel arch", whatever that means. It basically all comes down to the BIOS implementation, of which there are many varieties.
According to the iPod specs, it plays MPEG4 video up to 480x480 resolution, 30fps. But I don't think they will play the XVid/DivX clips in AVI containers (which I believe is against MPEG specs) that most people have lying around/rip to.
You think $80 is expensive? Take a look at these.
> The ThinkPad X-series uses 1.8" drives to cut down on weight and size.
Specifically the X40 series, the X30 series still use 2.5" drives, which are bigger but have many advantages. They're much faster, bigger, cheaper, and most importantly, there is competition from different manufacturers (Hitachi, Toshiba, Seagate, WD, Samsung, Fujitsu, all interchangable). With 1.8" drives you're basically stuck with one manufacturer for a given laptop.
There are only two 1.8" HD manufacturers, Toshiba and Hitachi, and they use incompatible connectors. The Toshiba looks like a shrunken 2.5" drive, while Hitachi uses the same connector from the 2.5" drive mounted on the side of the drive. The IBM X40 uses the Hitachi connector, while Dell uses the Toshiba in the Lattitude X1. I think most ultraportable laptops with 1.8" drives use the Toshiba connector, but as they rarely mention the HD manufacturer, for each model you'd have to find someone who has opened it to find out. Same thing for media players, I'm pretty certain iPods use Toshibas while the Rio Karma has the Hitachi drive. To make matters even more confusing, Hitachi has introduced another incompatible connector for 1.8" drives ("ZIF connector"), which seems to be mainly marketed to media player manufacturers.
While your explanation is good, what you're explaining is not "price fixing" (different suppliers agreeing to charge the same price) but price discrimination (charging different prices for the same good).
> But with Yahoo!, that's a whole fuckload of fees - I'll leave the maths to you.
Yahoo offers the option of purchasing tracks for $0.79 in addition to the $4.99 supscription plan. So you can choose to spend $4.99 on one month of unlimited listening and purchase 69 songs with the remaining $55. Sounds like better value than the 60 songs from iTMS.
The overall costs of doing business in Europe are higher (overhead, localization, transportation, stricter consumer protection regulations, ...). Therefore you will find that the majority of consumer products (especially electronics) are priced higher in the EU than in the US.
If multibutton mice are so confusiong, the hordes of Mac using grandmas must be dying en masse of heart attack from looking at the keyboard with over a hundred keys, many with utterly confusing labels like "ctrl", "f1" or a picture of a pretzel. For the well being of Mac using grandmas everywhere I propose Apple should not ship keyboards with any of their computers. After all, all the keys are in the on-screen keyboards anyway and pro-users can always choose to buy their own keyboards. This has the additional advantage of forcing developers to write apps without assuming the presence of a keyboard, leading obviously to a much better interface than Windows PCs which often won't even boot without a keyboard.
Also consider Lout, which sits somewhere between TeX and groff in terms of features and complexity.
and the latest winner
Why are the iPod recommendations modded up like crazy, while comments that actually answer the question left untouched? The poster didn't ask for a portable hard drive but for an enclosure. Unlike many Ask Slashdot requests, the question was very specific. The probably already has the 2.5" drive(s), or he's using it to house 2.5" drives for his job, and just looking for a small $20 enclosure, not a $200+ hard disk music player.
Another fine SW parody: Grocery Store Wars.
Happy Hacking also has blank keyboards. Warning: don't at the price if you a weak stomach..
They're reasonably powerful systems with very low power consumption: the entire system (minus display) usually stays under 20W. Even the Pentium-M consumes much more on the desktop (granted, they're also much faster). The most comparable competition in terms of power consumption are Via Mini-ITX systems, which tend to be much slower.
Cpufreq works fine on iBooks and PBooks. Since the Mini uses the same processor (7447A) I suppose it should also work.