GCD is a mechanism to let one central authority dispatch threads across multiple cores, for all running applications (including the OS).
er... isn't that what modern preemptive multi-tasking OSes already do?
Sort of, but GCD is about what application developers can do. Using current development methods the average developer decides how many threads to spawn and the OS tries to give them all equal priority. Further if you break your app into too many threads performance drops because of management issues. If you break it into fewer threads than there are cores, cores sit idle.
GCD lets app developers break up their app into chunks that can be threads or can be the same thread and let the OS decide how far to break it up and what to send to what core and what to send to the GPU. It basically lets developers who use good practices fire and forget apps and not have to really worry about profiling and optimization for cores.
Agreed. If bandwidth capacity becomes concentrated upon the same entities that are content providers, then the next logical step is the erection of barriers to competing content.
I think you're misunderstanding what this article is talking about. It is about users of Google and other big content providers bypassing the tier 1 operators of the network core. There's no way Google can erect barriers to anyone but themselves in this scenario.
It will be in their interest to create an artificial scarcity of bandwidth, either through network architecture or legislation, so that they can monopolize the delivery medium, much in the same way that TV networks and Radio stations were able to because of the real scarcity in the open-air EM spectrum.
There are already one cable provider and one phone line provider making a duopoly restricting access and introducing uncompetitive scarcity. And you're worried that Google and 29 other companies that provide about 30% of content are going to together exercise influence to create a new bottleneck? That's not particularly plausible or worrying.
All the more reason for the development and mainstreaming of reliable, high bandwidth peer-to-peer ad hoc networking over wifi or wimax, or something else not controlled by telcos and googles.
I wish wifi made for a viable solution, but I don't think it does reliably enough. The engineer in me says hard wired cabling for big bandwidth transfers makes a lot more sense than the latency of many hops through a peer-to-peer system. It makes a lot more sense in my mind to follow the lead of other countries and implement net neutrality rules or even a socialized backbone to provide competition and prevent abuse of power.
This is because the FCC has demonstrated its vulnerability to capture by the entities it's supposed to be regulating.
This is because we allow corporations to lobby congresspersons and donate to campaign funds when there is no legitimate reason for them to do so.
Umm, Google already does this, so does Yahoo and a bunch of others. Just take a trip to mainland China and see if Google works the same for you.
Gee, I think I'll book a trip to China to test an anonymous coward's theory. Or maybe you could provide a citation or at least details about what you're claiming. You say Google is degrading performance for users in China in order to extort more money? Also, how does a potential US law have any influence on this in any case?
With a few large, unregulated companies sourcing and directly distributing much of the Internet's traffic, the potential for self interested mischief grows.
Actually, most of the motivation to erect additional barriers and artificial costs is the result of gatekeepers on users. What motivation does Google have to try to charge users more for traffic to Google? What motivation do they have to restrict access by some subset of users?
This actually removes a potential problem, that being tier 1 providers using their position to extort money for not degrading performance to specific content providers. Still, I think the proposed network neutrality rules are important for network edge, last mile providers and it doesn't hurt to apply it across the board.
If it crashes your phone, there's something wrong with your phone, not the site.
Because clearly, when so many other pages work, and this one particular site causes my phone to crash, the fault is with my phone.
If a Website, even a maliciously crafted one, can crash your phone, then you have multiple problems with your phone. First your browser or browser plug-in is flawed. Second, your phone's OS is failing to properly handle a crashing program. There might be something wrong with the site as well, but your phone definitely has several things wrong with it.
It's quite possible that Apples market-share is over-inflated in some peoples minds, either that or it's under-inflated in my mind.
Since market studies show it as 73% of the music player market, it may well be the latter. Of course that does not count cell phone sales. Apple sells about 10 million ipods a quarter and there are about 30 million cell phone sales, a subset of which are music players and about 4 million of which are iPhones. So if we combine the markets, Apple sells about 14 million of the 43 million combined phone and music player market. So (roughly) better than 1 in 4 music playing devices in use is an Apple device. If you have more than 4 friends, you're bucking the curve.
Because Apple is a big corporation primarly interested in making money. Getting $10000 in design fees is a handy way of making $10000 more then if they just let you put it up for free.
Except that breaks Apple's business model. Apple makes money selling iPods and iPhones and Macs. They run the iTunes music store at near break even prices in order to sell more hardware. Charging high fees as a way to make money, limits content and gives people less incentive to buy the hardware that makes Apple money.
Of course since it turns out Apple was never charging $10,000 and they're opening the format up to everyone for free, it's kind of a non-issue.
MS managed to ship Win7 and be more compatible with older software than Vista. Apple freed up 7GB on a HDD and break backwards compatibility. Which would you rather have?
Apple broke backwards compatibility with older hardware, not software to any appreciable extent, excepting a short list of a few apps and applications that were built only for the PPC architecture and which did not work with the emulation mode. I'd note, they broke compatibility with a hardware platform MS is not supporting at all since Win2K and which was unusable even then.
Since the Guest account obviously has access to the Admin account's home directory somehow, this does expose a deeper security flaw.
You're mistaken in believing a guest has the ability to wipe an admin account, but correct in that this is a security bug to some extent. The guest does not have a process that wipes their own account, a system service does that forcibly to the guest account, since you don't want guests being able to override that action. The point of guest accounts is to get rid or everything at the end of a session for use by guests at a home or for public terminals. Running the process to wipe the account as the guest would be a huge security hole.
What is happening here seems to be the system wants to wipe out the guest account, but if somehow the machine crashes after that task is scheduled but before it is executed and an admin logs in and has permission, the task will still be queued and will mistakenly delete the currently logged in account.
Theoretically this could be exploited by a guest user looking to do damage to the system. Apple should have implemented better error checking in this service and probably should have neatly sandboxed it to prevent it from being hijacked and intentionally misused. You'd think engineers building such a system would be more security conscious.
...if really wanted to allow someone limited local access to the machine, I would create a limited account for that purpose alone.
That sounds like a lot of work and hard to get right. Before Apple implemented a guest account, I had a limited rights account on the machine in my living room so people at parties and frineds who were over could check their mail or look something up without any security risk. Creating a properly restricted account is non-trivial. When Apple created it for me, they did a better job locking it down than I did and built a nice process to wipe the data every time, so one of my guests could not leave a trojan or keylogger for another. It's lot easier and safer than creating a new account every tie and them manually deleting it.
That doesn't sound like such a good idea, if for some reason the Guest user has managed to leave a nasty process running it would make sense to restore the account on logout.
That's probably what Apple did. This bug only appears after restarting after a hard crash, so what is probably happening is the process to wipe gets scheduled, then the machine crashes, is logged into the admin account and the wipe process executes. Since this only happens after some crashes, this explanation makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, Apple should have put better safeguards in place for the process and probably stuck it in one of their sandboxes so it is not a security issue either. That said, you can avoid the problem on your own system simply by making sure that if you're logging into an admin account, you know it was not crashed from a guest account first. If there is any possibility of that, log into a non-admin account first (even the guest account) then logout and log back into your admin account for whatever you were going to do.
Now, if this buzz didn't alert me, I would have upgraded and been none the wiser when my data got wiped out (luckily I use SuperDuper regularly).
The summary is misleading. Even if you had updated and had used the guest account it would not have wiped your regular account. If you had upgraded and used the guest account and the guest account crashed and the system rebooted and you logged in as admin as the next login, then the bug might have wiped your account, but not every time, just in some instances.
This is a really bad bug, but only for a very small subset of users who get unlucky.
Guest accounts are setup by default, IIRC.
They are not in Leopard.
data loss of any magnitude should be a Priority 0 fix right away bug, not something you leave off to sub-dot-release 10.6.2.
Agreed and I'm sure they're working on it as fast as they can, but so far it is not even clear they have ben able to replicate this edge case.
From what I read, I do fall into the "very small number of users" that this bug could catch. That is, I've had a guest account before upgrading to Snow Leopard. I guess that I've never been hit by this because I've never logged out of the guest account and then logged in to an admin account.
It is my understanding this bug only occurs if the guest account crashes the system, you reboot, and you then log into an admin account. Further, it only happens some of the time in that instance as everyone has had trouble replicating this bug. So you're probably pretty safe so long as you never log into the admin account unless you know a guest did not crash the machine and reboot before you got to it.
Wait... Right Click on a Mac?!?! You mean they hid functionality into a context menu?
Apple never hides functionality in a context menu. They offer it in a right click context menu in addition to offering it in a location you get to with a single click. In this case, that is the action menu in each finder window (looks like a little gear). You can also get to it from the CLI just by using the "cd" command to navigate into the folder. That doesn't mean OS X now has the same usability as Linux.
$300 is not a "significant financial incentive" for anyone buying Macs.
For the average user that does not see the need for backups because they've never had a bad failure, yeah that's still a lot.
The cheapest Mac costs roughly $1000, and spending a third more for 802.11n wireless, a gigabit switch, automated backups, and the usual Apple "easy integration", is bupkis.
To you spending more on networking gear and backup hardware may not seem like a lot, but we're talking prices approaching that of the machine itself. You can and users do pick up a mac mini used for $450 bucks these days. While the additional cost may not seem like much to a well employed geek, there are plenty of people in a lot worse financial situations these days who still buy a Mac and probably save money on the TCO doing so. For an average user, buying a backup they may never need or buying 8 games for their Wii is not a hard choice and not the way you assert.
I don't see how you're addressing the point we were discussing. That being, you said this was a permissions problem and that an implementation that used permissions beyond that of the guest user was a flaw. As far as I know, that's how all guest implementations work and is the only way that makes sense.
I'm not arguing that Apple's implementation was not flawed or even that they architected the idea well, (that is clearly the case) just that the problem is not with the permission level, per se.
After a bit more thought on it, however, this would have been a perfect use case for Apple's ACL implementation, which would have made this service less of a security risk and caught this sort of anomalous and overzealous behavior. Still, traditional permissions, as most people consider them were not the problem here.
Uh, why do you have to buy a Time Capsule? I run Time Machine using a $75 external HD, works fine. Set and forget.
You don't,but since a huge percentage of Mac users are using laptops, they have to either plug and unplug it regularly or buy a network capable drive of some sort which will cost you more than $75. In any case, there is significant financial incentive to not use it.
I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them. It's not enough to point out that the other developers have problems, too. Get pissed off and help them be better next time.
Wait a bug that has affected about 100 reported users is on the front page of Slashdot and a dozen other tech news sites and that's what you call being given a free pass? Are you insane?
Seriously it sucks that this bug exists and I'd be pissed as hell if it happened to me but I don't understand how you can claim this is a major bug and Apple is being given a free pass. This affects users who are in the 20% or so using snow leopard who are also in the subset that they upgraded from Leopard and the further subset that had a guest account enabled under leopard and the subset of that that had a crash while using a guest account and rebooted and opened an admin account. And for that small subset, it does not even happen consistently. That's a pretty unusual and edge case bug, only notable because the results are so devastating. It's probably a lot less common than people who lose their data because of a catastrophic hard drive failure. And it's being billed as a major failure an Apple's part. That's just one of those bugs that QA is unlikely to have found, even if they're being thorough. Getting pissed at Apple won't do much good other than to make Apple developers decide users and the press are unreasonable and there's no point in trying, since any weird edge case bug will be get them as much bad press as if they had a major easily detectable bug.
Right, I can see how that would go. It's not a great idea in the first place though, so the GP is right.
It isn't a good idea to have a process not accessible by the guest account wipe the guest account? It would be a pretty annoying security hole otherwise, since the guest user could then disable the wiping process and use the machine like a normal user. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a special guest account then, since a user could login to a public machine as guest and install keystroke logger or trojaned app and then prevent it from being deleted before the next guest user got to it.
Having said that, I'd like to ask the affected people why they weren't backing their systems up. When your system comes with a backup utility that you can literally turn on and forget about until you need it, it's pretty damned stupid to not use it.
Time Capsule - $299.00
That's pretty significant incentive for the average user to not make use of it. The procedure is not turn on and forget, but buy an expensive external hard drive, plug that in, then turn it on and forget. Most people don't want to shell out all the extra money.
...an average user is more likely to get hit by it as they are more likely to have the Guest account "feature" active.
I seriously doubt that. In my experience average users don't even know such a feature exists or care at all about security. They just share a single account with their family and friends and would not see the point of having a separate account for guests.
The guest account feature is probably used mostly by people who surf porn on the family computer and are moderately savvy about hiding it and by more advanced users who set up a machine for their whole family or who let friends use their machine to look something up. Any feature that is off by default is unlikely to be used by the average user.
I'm more amazed that the system ignores user permissions (aka when you're not logged in as an user with admin permissions) and it proceeds to nuke files the user doesn't have "permission" to touch.
Lots of system services have permission to do things the currently logged in user cannot. For example, people logged in as guest users can still see the correct time, despite them having no ability to access the NTP client. That's because the system takes care of business regardless of the user. The problem here is the system, which has access to delete files and change settings the guest user does not, is somehow overzealous i tis cleanup. A similar situation would be an antivirus program running that does not know how to deal with guest accounts that hoses its own permissions and stops working when a guest account logs out. It's not that the guest has permission to mess with the antivirus, just that the OS screws up when the guest account is used for anything.
Your argument is still that antitrust law is wrong, but you still demonstrate you don't even understand what it is. You don't understand economics enough to know what the markets and customers involved are or why antitrust law restricts leveraging one into another. You're hopeless. Frankly, I think you're a moron. You want to argue an issue, but you're too lazy or too stupid to understand the issue first and you just want to argue without bothering to comprehend when I try to provide you with an understanding. Your mind is made up and knowing what the hell you're talking about isn't going change it. I don't see any point in continuing to discuss things with you, since all you will do is continue to miscomprehend and try to find ways to argue without understanding anything I say.
You say antitrust law is wrong in what it is doing to MS. You don't understand why it is doing that. You don't have any suggestions for what antitrust law should do differently because you don't understand what it is doing now or why. You don't understand the underlying economics and so can't even begin to understand the reasons. You don't bother looking into the history so you don't see what happened before we had these laws and why they exist. So what good are you?
I seem to recall it was IBM who came knocking at Microsoft's door.
So, what does that have to do with it?
No, it's saying they have to improve their product in a competitive fashion.
But they _can't_, because they are hamstrung by *not being allowed* to implement equivalent (or better) functionality as their competitors.
They're hamstrung and can't compete when they're forced to implement things the same way as competitors? Their competitors can't bundle things with Windows either. That's the point. Because no one can, including MS, there is a competitive market for all the add ons and consumers decide based upon the merits of the product, rather than going with the one they're forced to pay for when they buy Windows.
Competitors integrate a browser into their platform ?
There aren't any viable competitors! That's the point. Apple doesn't license their OS into the market because there is no way to compete with a monopoly. Linux accounts for what 1%? And you think MS needs help in the desktop OS market? Apple sells complete systems and compete against Dell and HP. MS has won the desktop OS market and is in no danger of losing it. The markets that are in danger are any MS tries to take over using their desktop OS monopoly. That's why the law says they can't leverage that monopoly into new markets, like Web browsers, because other companies can't bundle their browsers with Windows and win regardless of the merits of said browser. Why are you so opposed to MS having to make a better product in order to win a market? Why is that so abhorrent to you?
Competitors integrate search into their UI
There aren't any fucking competitors in the desktop OS market. HP is going to license Windows for inclusion on their desktops whether it has search or not. If MS wants to include it, all they have to do is make Windows modular and create a module for search. Then they can market it against anyone else who wants to do the same when selling computers to Dell or whoever. They won't automatically win in the search plug-in market, but a good product will emerge, probably better than what happens on other systems because of competition.
But lets cut the crap. You think you can do better? What's your proposal. Would you just get rid of all antitrust laws? Would you modify them in some way. What's your alternative proposal?
Clearly, the idea and definition of a "pre-existing market" needs to be examined. The idea that - even with their customers clamouring for some feature, and every other platform including and integrating it - Microsoft aren't allowed to implement it (therefore punishing their userbase for choosing their product) because somebody, somewhere, had already written a program to do something similar, is fundamentally broken and utterly anti-innovation and anti-customer.
Antitrust law uses market because that is what economics works on. Are you proposing changing the definition to "features" which you provide no definition for? Remember anything you change has to apply to all antitrust issues going forward including to the way the economy adapts to new things. Is a telephone a feature of a telephone system? Does that mean according to your new proposal AT&T should still be forcing us all to rent our home telephones since it would not be illegal for them to bundle them with your service? And does that mean they should be able to ban all VoIP applications, since that is no longer a competitive issue?
It's the same thing as patent trolling - come up with some vague and obvious idea, wait for someone else sufficiently large to come up with the same thing, then sue them.
No it isn't since you have to be running a business profiting from a product of it to be an antitrust issue. With Patent trolls, they just register a patent with no
Slashdot Mirror
...It probably won't benefit single cores at all...
Actually, it should reduce management overhead for applications on a machine using a single core.
GCD is a mechanism to let one central authority dispatch threads across multiple cores, for all running applications (including the OS).
er... isn't that what modern preemptive multi-tasking OSes already do?
Sort of, but GCD is about what application developers can do. Using current development methods the average developer decides how many threads to spawn and the OS tries to give them all equal priority. Further if you break your app into too many threads performance drops because of management issues. If you break it into fewer threads than there are cores, cores sit idle.
GCD lets app developers break up their app into chunks that can be threads or can be the same thread and let the OS decide how far to break it up and what to send to what core and what to send to the GPU. It basically lets developers who use good practices fire and forget apps and not have to really worry about profiling and optimization for cores.
Agreed. If bandwidth capacity becomes concentrated upon the same entities that are content providers, then the next logical step is the erection of barriers to competing content.
I think you're misunderstanding what this article is talking about. It is about users of Google and other big content providers bypassing the tier 1 operators of the network core. There's no way Google can erect barriers to anyone but themselves in this scenario.
It will be in their interest to create an artificial scarcity of bandwidth, either through network architecture or legislation, so that they can monopolize the delivery medium, much in the same way that TV networks and Radio stations were able to because of the real scarcity in the open-air EM spectrum.
There are already one cable provider and one phone line provider making a duopoly restricting access and introducing uncompetitive scarcity. And you're worried that Google and 29 other companies that provide about 30% of content are going to together exercise influence to create a new bottleneck? That's not particularly plausible or worrying.
All the more reason for the development and mainstreaming of reliable, high bandwidth peer-to-peer ad hoc networking over wifi or wimax, or something else not controlled by telcos and googles.
I wish wifi made for a viable solution, but I don't think it does reliably enough. The engineer in me says hard wired cabling for big bandwidth transfers makes a lot more sense than the latency of many hops through a peer-to-peer system. It makes a lot more sense in my mind to follow the lead of other countries and implement net neutrality rules or even a socialized backbone to provide competition and prevent abuse of power.
This is because the FCC has demonstrated its vulnerability to capture by the entities it's supposed to be regulating.
This is because we allow corporations to lobby congresspersons and donate to campaign funds when there is no legitimate reason for them to do so.
Umm, Google already does this, so does Yahoo and a bunch of others. Just take a trip to mainland China and see if Google works the same for you.
Gee, I think I'll book a trip to China to test an anonymous coward's theory. Or maybe you could provide a citation or at least details about what you're claiming. You say Google is degrading performance for users in China in order to extort more money? Also, how does a potential US law have any influence on this in any case?
With a few large, unregulated companies sourcing and directly distributing much of the Internet's traffic, the potential for self interested mischief grows.
Actually, most of the motivation to erect additional barriers and artificial costs is the result of gatekeepers on users. What motivation does Google have to try to charge users more for traffic to Google? What motivation do they have to restrict access by some subset of users?
This actually removes a potential problem, that being tier 1 providers using their position to extort money for not degrading performance to specific content providers. Still, I think the proposed network neutrality rules are important for network edge, last mile providers and it doesn't hurt to apply it across the board.
If it crashes your phone, there's something wrong with your phone, not the site.
Because clearly, when so many other pages work, and this one particular site causes my phone to crash, the fault is with my phone.
If a Website, even a maliciously crafted one, can crash your phone, then you have multiple problems with your phone. First your browser or browser plug-in is flawed. Second, your phone's OS is failing to properly handle a crashing program. There might be something wrong with the site as well, but your phone definitely has several things wrong with it.
It's quite possible that Apples market-share is over-inflated in some peoples minds, either that or it's under-inflated in my mind.
Since market studies show it as 73% of the music player market, it may well be the latter. Of course that does not count cell phone sales. Apple sells about 10 million ipods a quarter and there are about 30 million cell phone sales, a subset of which are music players and about 4 million of which are iPhones. So if we combine the markets, Apple sells about 14 million of the 43 million combined phone and music player market. So (roughly) better than 1 in 4 music playing devices in use is an Apple device. If you have more than 4 friends, you're bucking the curve.
Because Apple is a big corporation primarly interested in making money. Getting $10000 in design fees is a handy way of making $10000 more then if they just let you put it up for free.
Except that breaks Apple's business model. Apple makes money selling iPods and iPhones and Macs. They run the iTunes music store at near break even prices in order to sell more hardware. Charging high fees as a way to make money, limits content and gives people less incentive to buy the hardware that makes Apple money.
Of course since it turns out Apple was never charging $10,000 and they're opening the format up to everyone for free, it's kind of a non-issue.
MS managed to ship Win7 and be more compatible with older software than Vista. Apple freed up 7GB on a HDD and break backwards compatibility. Which would you rather have?
Apple broke backwards compatibility with older hardware, not software to any appreciable extent, excepting a short list of a few apps and applications that were built only for the PPC architecture and which did not work with the emulation mode. I'd note, they broke compatibility with a hardware platform MS is not supporting at all since Win2K and which was unusable even then.
Since the Guest account obviously has access to the Admin account's home directory somehow, this does expose a deeper security flaw.
You're mistaken in believing a guest has the ability to wipe an admin account, but correct in that this is a security bug to some extent. The guest does not have a process that wipes their own account, a system service does that forcibly to the guest account, since you don't want guests being able to override that action. The point of guest accounts is to get rid or everything at the end of a session for use by guests at a home or for public terminals. Running the process to wipe the account as the guest would be a huge security hole.
What is happening here seems to be the system wants to wipe out the guest account, but if somehow the machine crashes after that task is scheduled but before it is executed and an admin logs in and has permission, the task will still be queued and will mistakenly delete the currently logged in account.
Theoretically this could be exploited by a guest user looking to do damage to the system. Apple should have implemented better error checking in this service and probably should have neatly sandboxed it to prevent it from being hijacked and intentionally misused. You'd think engineers building such a system would be more security conscious.
...if really wanted to allow someone limited local access to the machine, I would create a limited account for that purpose alone.
That sounds like a lot of work and hard to get right. Before Apple implemented a guest account, I had a limited rights account on the machine in my living room so people at parties and frineds who were over could check their mail or look something up without any security risk. Creating a properly restricted account is non-trivial. When Apple created it for me, they did a better job locking it down than I did and built a nice process to wipe the data every time, so one of my guests could not leave a trojan or keylogger for another. It's lot easier and safer than creating a new account every tie and them manually deleting it.
That doesn't sound like such a good idea, if for some reason the Guest user has managed to leave a nasty process running it would make sense to restore the account on logout.
That's probably what Apple did. This bug only appears after restarting after a hard crash, so what is probably happening is the process to wipe gets scheduled, then the machine crashes, is logged into the admin account and the wipe process executes. Since this only happens after some crashes, this explanation makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, Apple should have put better safeguards in place for the process and probably stuck it in one of their sandboxes so it is not a security issue either. That said, you can avoid the problem on your own system simply by making sure that if you're logging into an admin account, you know it was not crashed from a guest account first. If there is any possibility of that, log into a non-admin account first (even the guest account) then logout and log back into your admin account for whatever you were going to do.
Now, if this buzz didn't alert me, I would have upgraded and been none the wiser when my data got wiped out (luckily I use SuperDuper regularly).
The summary is misleading. Even if you had updated and had used the guest account it would not have wiped your regular account. If you had upgraded and used the guest account and the guest account crashed and the system rebooted and you logged in as admin as the next login, then the bug might have wiped your account, but not every time, just in some instances.
This is a really bad bug, but only for a very small subset of users who get unlucky.
Guest accounts are setup by default, IIRC.
They are not in Leopard.
data loss of any magnitude should be a Priority 0 fix right away bug, not something you leave off to sub-dot-release 10.6.2.
Agreed and I'm sure they're working on it as fast as they can, but so far it is not even clear they have ben able to replicate this edge case.
From what I read, I do fall into the "very small number of users" that this bug could catch. That is, I've had a guest account before upgrading to Snow Leopard. I guess that I've never been hit by this because I've never logged out of the guest account and then logged in to an admin account.
It is my understanding this bug only occurs if the guest account crashes the system, you reboot, and you then log into an admin account. Further, it only happens some of the time in that instance as everyone has had trouble replicating this bug. So you're probably pretty safe so long as you never log into the admin account unless you know a guest did not crash the machine and reboot before you got to it.
The average user should never have to worry about rightclicking...
You just have to click the action menu and select it from there. No right clicking is required.
Wait... Right Click on a Mac?!?! You mean they hid functionality into a context menu?
Apple never hides functionality in a context menu. They offer it in a right click context menu in addition to offering it in a location you get to with a single click. In this case, that is the action menu in each finder window (looks like a little gear). You can also get to it from the CLI just by using the "cd" command to navigate into the folder. That doesn't mean OS X now has the same usability as Linux.
$300 is not a "significant financial incentive" for anyone buying Macs.
For the average user that does not see the need for backups because they've never had a bad failure, yeah that's still a lot.
The cheapest Mac costs roughly $1000, and spending a third more for 802.11n wireless, a gigabit switch, automated backups, and the usual Apple "easy integration", is bupkis.
To you spending more on networking gear and backup hardware may not seem like a lot, but we're talking prices approaching that of the machine itself. You can and users do pick up a mac mini used for $450 bucks these days. While the additional cost may not seem like much to a well employed geek, there are plenty of people in a lot worse financial situations these days who still buy a Mac and probably save money on the TCO doing so. For an average user, buying a backup they may never need or buying 8 games for their Wii is not a hard choice and not the way you assert.
I don't see how you're addressing the point we were discussing. That being, you said this was a permissions problem and that an implementation that used permissions beyond that of the guest user was a flaw. As far as I know, that's how all guest implementations work and is the only way that makes sense.
I'm not arguing that Apple's implementation was not flawed or even that they architected the idea well, (that is clearly the case) just that the problem is not with the permission level, per se.
After a bit more thought on it, however, this would have been a perfect use case for Apple's ACL implementation, which would have made this service less of a security risk and caught this sort of anomalous and overzealous behavior. Still, traditional permissions, as most people consider them were not the problem here.
Uh, why do you have to buy a Time Capsule? I run Time Machine using a $75 external HD, works fine. Set and forget.
You don't ,but since a huge percentage of Mac users are using laptops, they have to either plug and unplug it regularly or buy a network capable drive of some sort which will cost you more than $75. In any case, there is significant financial incentive to not use it.
I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them. It's not enough to point out that the other developers have problems, too. Get pissed off and help them be better next time.
Wait a bug that has affected about 100 reported users is on the front page of Slashdot and a dozen other tech news sites and that's what you call being given a free pass? Are you insane?
Seriously it sucks that this bug exists and I'd be pissed as hell if it happened to me but I don't understand how you can claim this is a major bug and Apple is being given a free pass. This affects users who are in the 20% or so using snow leopard who are also in the subset that they upgraded from Leopard and the further subset that had a guest account enabled under leopard and the subset of that that had a crash while using a guest account and rebooted and opened an admin account. And for that small subset, it does not even happen consistently. That's a pretty unusual and edge case bug, only notable because the results are so devastating. It's probably a lot less common than people who lose their data because of a catastrophic hard drive failure. And it's being billed as a major failure an Apple's part. That's just one of those bugs that QA is unlikely to have found, even if they're being thorough. Getting pissed at Apple won't do much good other than to make Apple developers decide users and the press are unreasonable and there's no point in trying, since any weird edge case bug will be get them as much bad press as if they had a major easily detectable bug.
Right, I can see how that would go. It's not a great idea in the first place though, so the GP is right.
It isn't a good idea to have a process not accessible by the guest account wipe the guest account? It would be a pretty annoying security hole otherwise, since the guest user could then disable the wiping process and use the machine like a normal user. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a special guest account then, since a user could login to a public machine as guest and install keystroke logger or trojaned app and then prevent it from being deleted before the next guest user got to it.
Having said that, I'd like to ask the affected people why they weren't backing their systems up. When your system comes with a backup utility that you can literally turn on and forget about until you need it, it's pretty damned stupid to not use it.
Time Capsule - $299.00
That's pretty significant incentive for the average user to not make use of it. The procedure is not turn on and forget, but buy an expensive external hard drive, plug that in, then turn it on and forget. Most people don't want to shell out all the extra money.
...an average user is more likely to get hit by it as they are more likely to have the Guest account "feature" active.
I seriously doubt that. In my experience average users don't even know such a feature exists or care at all about security. They just share a single account with their family and friends and would not see the point of having a separate account for guests.
The guest account feature is probably used mostly by people who surf porn on the family computer and are moderately savvy about hiding it and by more advanced users who set up a machine for their whole family or who let friends use their machine to look something up. Any feature that is off by default is unlikely to be used by the average user.
I'm more amazed that the system ignores user permissions (aka when you're not logged in as an user with admin permissions) and it proceeds to nuke files the user doesn't have "permission" to touch.
Lots of system services have permission to do things the currently logged in user cannot. For example, people logged in as guest users can still see the correct time, despite them having no ability to access the NTP client. That's because the system takes care of business regardless of the user. The problem here is the system, which has access to delete files and change settings the guest user does not, is somehow overzealous i tis cleanup. A similar situation would be an antivirus program running that does not know how to deal with guest accounts that hoses its own permissions and stops working when a guest account logs out. It's not that the guest has permission to mess with the antivirus, just that the OS screws up when the guest account is used for anything.
What a complete and utter FAILURE.
Your argument is still that antitrust law is wrong, but you still demonstrate you don't even understand what it is. You don't understand economics enough to know what the markets and customers involved are or why antitrust law restricts leveraging one into another. You're hopeless. Frankly, I think you're a moron. You want to argue an issue, but you're too lazy or too stupid to understand the issue first and you just want to argue without bothering to comprehend when I try to provide you with an understanding. Your mind is made up and knowing what the hell you're talking about isn't going change it. I don't see any point in continuing to discuss things with you, since all you will do is continue to miscomprehend and try to find ways to argue without understanding anything I say.
You say antitrust law is wrong in what it is doing to MS. You don't understand why it is doing that. You don't have any suggestions for what antitrust law should do differently because you don't understand what it is doing now or why. You don't understand the underlying economics and so can't even begin to understand the reasons. You don't bother looking into the history so you don't see what happened before we had these laws and why they exist. So what good are you?
I seem to recall it was IBM who came knocking at Microsoft's door.
So, what does that have to do with it?
No, it's saying they have to improve their product in a competitive fashion.
But they _can't_, because they are hamstrung by *not being allowed* to implement equivalent (or better) functionality as their competitors.
They're hamstrung and can't compete when they're forced to implement things the same way as competitors? Their competitors can't bundle things with Windows either. That's the point. Because no one can, including MS, there is a competitive market for all the add ons and consumers decide based upon the merits of the product, rather than going with the one they're forced to pay for when they buy Windows.
Competitors integrate a browser into their platform ?
There aren't any viable competitors! That's the point. Apple doesn't license their OS into the market because there is no way to compete with a monopoly. Linux accounts for what 1%? And you think MS needs help in the desktop OS market? Apple sells complete systems and compete against Dell and HP. MS has won the desktop OS market and is in no danger of losing it. The markets that are in danger are any MS tries to take over using their desktop OS monopoly. That's why the law says they can't leverage that monopoly into new markets, like Web browsers, because other companies can't bundle their browsers with Windows and win regardless of the merits of said browser. Why are you so opposed to MS having to make a better product in order to win a market? Why is that so abhorrent to you?
Competitors integrate search into their UI
There aren't any fucking competitors in the desktop OS market. HP is going to license Windows for inclusion on their desktops whether it has search or not. If MS wants to include it, all they have to do is make Windows modular and create a module for search. Then they can market it against anyone else who wants to do the same when selling computers to Dell or whoever. They won't automatically win in the search plug-in market, but a good product will emerge, probably better than what happens on other systems because of competition.
But lets cut the crap. You think you can do better? What's your proposal. Would you just get rid of all antitrust laws? Would you modify them in some way. What's your alternative proposal?
Clearly, the idea and definition of a "pre-existing market" needs to be examined. The idea that - even with their customers clamouring for some feature, and every other platform including and integrating it - Microsoft aren't allowed to implement it (therefore punishing their userbase for choosing their product) because somebody, somewhere, had already written a program to do something similar, is fundamentally broken and utterly anti-innovation and anti-customer.
Antitrust law uses market because that is what economics works on. Are you proposing changing the definition to "features" which you provide no definition for? Remember anything you change has to apply to all antitrust issues going forward including to the way the economy adapts to new things. Is a telephone a feature of a telephone system? Does that mean according to your new proposal AT&T should still be forcing us all to rent our home telephones since it would not be illegal for them to bundle them with your service? And does that mean they should be able to ban all VoIP applications, since that is no longer a competitive issue?
It's the same thing as patent trolling - come up with some vague and obvious idea, wait for someone else sufficiently large to come up with the same thing, then sue them.
No it isn't since you have to be running a business profiting from a product of it to be an antitrust issue. With Patent trolls, they just register a patent with no