The GPL does not restrict rights. It only grants them.
wrong. it restricts some rights to preserve others. you can argue whether this is right or wrong, but that's what it does. and it doesn't grant any rights. the copyright holder already has all the rights in question. the GPL preserves some of those rights for people downstream of the copyright holder by restricting other rights for the same people.
1) You correctly observe (implicitly) that virus writers are pretty much just in this for the "d00d! i l33t & have m4d skillz!" factor. This involves visibility, which precludes tiny or new OSs from being targets. But Apple falls into neither of those categories. While their market share is roughly an order of magnitude smaller than Microsoft's, they also make a big deal about their seeming immunity. being able to be the guy who produced the first OS X virus to propagate in the wild is a huge "win". The fact that nobody's capitalized on this shouldn't be understood to represent a lack of trying.
2) Let's look at a closely related realm: web servers. We frequently hear about attacks against IIS; attacks against Apache are exceedingly rare by comparison. Yet Apache runs 2/3 of the web sites out there. 2/3! That's a huge market share, and if market share were the dominant - or even a significant - factor, we should expect to see much greater incidence of Apache attacks in the wild - yet we do not.
So, yeah. Aside from getting above a certain minimal threshold of visibility, market share has a seriously limited effect on virus attack or infection rates.
hmm. well, it's generally true that the scientific community won't accept theories without strong evidence. portions of Einstein's theories, however, did gain significant support before any proof was available (unproved portions remain today) because they did a better job of coherently organizing the previously-observed data.
and, of course, that further undercuts the argument of the parent: evolution isn't accepted by the scientific community on a whim, but because it does a better job of organizing the data currently available than any other theory.
also, describing much of what einstein did as "a nice, simple theory" is... "creative".
i propose an experiment (modified from a suggestion by a co-worker) to help determine this. pick a message, something the NSA or the military-industrial complex generally would be interested in. the message should not itself be a threat or inducement to illegal action; say, the message "do not kill the president". encrypt said message with the encryption method to be tested, and send the encrypted message out daily to 10,000 hosts on the internet; preferably at least several in D.C., several in Saudi Arabia, and so on. do not disclose the key to anyone - there's no need to even keep it yourself. repeat this message for some non-trivial amount of time, say a few months, giving the NSA and friends time to notice the message (and possibly decrypt, although we won't know that until the experiment is concluded). then one day, simply stop transmitting the message. if the encryption method being tested is secure, nothing will happen; if it is not... well, enjoy Guantanamo Bay. you should probably inform a few friends of your plans before beginning the experiment, so that they can explain your "results" (that is, your disappearance).
this experiment, of course, assumes that the military-industrial complex would generally consider the assassination of the president to be a bad thing...
IMO, the true scientist witholds judgement until the experiments have been done and the data is in front of them.
bolderdash. so folks like einstein don't qualify? he was famous for jumping to conclusions well before data from experiments was available - well before we had the technology to even conduct such experiments. arguably, the ability to form "judgments" and then figure out what experiments or data would be needed to back it up is an important difference between a principal researcher or brilliant scientist and a lab tech.
This isn't so much a reply to you as a continuation; i figured it was better form putting it here than starting a new thread.
1) further, overloading ctrl on a unix-based system would be an awful idea. this is a minor annoyance for recent switchers or people who have to use OS X and Windows, but you get over it fast. also, claiming that it's the positioning that's the problem is questionable at best, given how idiosyncratic PC keyboards are. alt + ctrl don't move around as much as backtick or tilde do, but it's still not easily predictable.
2) after reading this, the first Apple app i tried, Mail, does in fact have this. i then checked the iWork apps, which don't. so, okay, it's inconsistent, which is probably bad. but yeah, i had to check since i use the cmd+S for save.
3) and here the author shreds any remaining credibility. beyond the fact that support for the feature he's asking for exists today, and has for a really long time, the fact that Apple has designed a UI which can be usable by novices easily (i've worked PC support; do you have any idea how hard it is to get novices to understand what a "right-click" is?) and still powerful for experts (right-click in most apps for a contextual menu, or chording cut-and-paste in my Plan 9 apps. mmm.) is a huge feature, not a bug.
4) it's good to know what's in a directory you're saving things too. example i hit yesterday: in one directory i have thingie-i'm-building.graffle and thingie-i'm-building.ooutline; knowing that both are there when i go to save a PDF is useful so that i can choose a more descriptive name than thingie-i'm-building.pdf, which would be ambiguous.
5) i can actually see this as potentially useful, but how would it work? this may be useful, but it's not as good as the existing sort-by-type (alphabetical, which of course puts all your folders together, at least), and having effectively two sort-by-type options would be confusing.
6) i never use this, so don't really care. sure, stick it in as long as you don't clutter the UI to do it.
the author asks "why can't Apple do a little copying back?" first, copies of copies are lower quality than the original. also, Apple, much more than Microsoft, is very sensitive to the UI integration and experience for the user, rather than just a feature list; simply copying in features from somewhere else doesn't get you that.
you want a feature from Windows i want in OS X? no problem: Half Life 2 and Command and Conquer.;-) beyond that, i really can't think of any.
let's take the $150,000-over-5-years and $25/month-per-user benefit numbers at face value (ignoring the comments of earlier users in here). somebody check my math: $25/month = $300/year = $1,500 over 5 years 1500 * 100 = 150000 so they just need to get 100 users per square mile to break even, given these assumptions? am i the only one who finds these numbers to be a tremendous argument for benefits outweighing costs? add to this the fact that most people are paying more than $25/month for internet access, and i think that's exactly what this shows.
Pretty much every aspect of how to run a company differs between a hardware-focused company and a software-focused company. OS X is a differentiating factor for Apple's hardware which allows them to stay out of the price war Dell and all the other commodity hardware producers have to engage in. OS X, in turn, is funded by the hardware sales. Apple would not be able to do further innovative research and development on OS X without the high margin hardware sales.
I wish I could move there, but I doubt there's much work for a software developer in a country nobody's heard of until today.
first off, do not assume that all of your peers (in whatever sense you read that) to share your ignorance (taken in the literal, not the pejorative, sense). lots of people know Mauritius; among other things, it's a very popular vacation spot. while i'm inclined to agree that it's not a hotbed of software development activity, anything with active tourist or travel industries is bound to have significant IT positions. my company serves the communications industry, and we have customers there.
i had a philosophy professor who, in an effort to illustrate some point or other, announced to the lecture hall that the grading system was being revised such that, rather than being based 35% on exams, 35% on papers, 20% on regular assignments, and 10% on attendance, it would now be graded 100% on phrenology. he and the TAs had discussed this at length, he explained, and while none of them actually believed the "science" was valid for predictive or investigative uses, they thought it was "kinda fun". while their decision was final, reaction from the class was solicited.
my response? i was thrilled. i told him that most of my professors seemed to be grading based on random elements unrelated to class performance, and i was excited to have one actually admit it.
With XML, if it sees a tag it doesn't understand, the parser ignores it. If a binary file format loader sees stuff it doesn't understand, it bails out with an illegal file format error.
while i agree generally with your reasoning, this is far overstating the problem. it is entirely possible to write an XML interpreter that barfs on invalid XML - most will, if given "properly" invalid XML - or a binary format reader that is handles errors and/or ignores parts it doesn't understand. The scenario you described is far more common, but it's not categorically true.
And, in the case of OpenSSH (for instance) the copy actually is better than the original. I rest my case.
i'm sure you do. and that's exactly the problem. i agree that OpenSSH was an improvement over the original in many ways, but that's not the point: incrementally improving on the original is not innovation. it's excellent software work, good architecture and design work, and OpenSSH is a prime example of good open source working well as a component of a development methodology. but it is not an example of innovation.
i used to be a huge fan of trackballs. i've used various kinds, my two favorites (for different reasons) being the kensington one with the very large ball and a button at each of the corners of the square and the logitech one with three buttons like a mouse and the ball under the thumb. especially with the large kensington one, i found it much easier to point accurately quickly, and more comfortable.
trackballs break down, however, when you have movement and button interaction like drag-and-drop, or (more dramatically, but less commonly) chording, like in Plan 9's Acme. the ball-in-the-center models are awful for that sort of stuff, and the ball-under-thumb models are still hindered by the fact that you have much better isolation between the mussels in your arm and your fingers than in your thumb and your fingers. that's put me back to mice exclusively these days.
i'm very glad you wouldn't wish to be. i wish i could agree that institutionalized bigotry is dead, but i think it's just a little more hidden, and not very deeply.
well, that might be somewhat overstating things, but yes, the U.S. does give Israel an inordinate amount of military and financial support. it's an odd dichotomy: middle america seems to be okay with Jews in Israel, but not in their town. if you'd like to come out to the town in New Jersey i grew up in, however, i can point you at clubs that won't allow Jews to join "because they control all the money" (they also won't allow Italians to join "because they're in the mob"). if you're not familiar with this (assuming you live in America), you're either very lucky or intentionally missing it.
Why is that Christianity is the only religion it is still ok to hate?
two answers:
it's not. particularly in the past five years, it's become quite a bit more than "okay" to hate Islam in many circles in America. and of course mainstream America still has the more subtle anti-Jewish sentiment, as well as the anti-things-we-don't-understand sentiment. (yes, i'm making an assumption that you're an american; i've never seen this sort of frustration from anyone else)
second, we deserve it. i'm not even talking about the Crusades or the Inquisition (oy, Ratzinger. bloody friggin' hell). but America is, statistically, a Christian nation (no claim to Christianity being intentionally foundational to the country nor criticism of separation of church and state intended), as is our leadership; what have we done with it? we've got a president who describes his actions in the middle east, responsible for an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths as a "crusade"; we've got ministers preaching hate and condoning violence against homosexuals and doctors who practice abortion; we've got Falwell, Robertson, and, God help us, we've got Fred Phelps. we draw greater criticism because we have greater power and, therefore, responsibility. i believe people would be a lot more accepting of Christianity as understood by CS Lewis, Tolkien, most of America's founding fathers, and St. Francis, for example, if we would more consistently speak up against the perversion of the gospel into a message of hate.
...if the Department of Homeland Security is reading this, you might want to investigate who has been reading That Hideous Strength. They might be potential terrorists.
this is very interesting. how did you do this? particularly, how does one mount a.dmg at boot time? any other caveats to worry about?
Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
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· Score: 0, Troll
You have no concept of numbers.
funny, i was thinking the same thing about your post. either that or you have no concept of Unix. let's examine this statement:
Unix and its children and cousins on the back and front end probably double the total number of apple boxes out there.
well that's fascinating. really. OS X, of course, is a unix system, so your statement essentially boils down to (A + B + n) >= 2A. that's certainly not hard to believe, but it's also not particularly interesting or informative. and none of these numbers say anything about GCC use - of any version.
of course, my more general question is where any of your numbers come from. Unix handles "close to 50% of the backend of the internet"? at least among things which run any sort of "real" OS (that is, not Cisco's IOS, for example), i'm pretty sure the numbers are much higher than that. but what does "the backend of the internet" mean, anyway? database servers? DNS server? surely you're not talking about the real infrastructure components, or Unix drops probably by an order of magnitude.
hey, i've just got my first mod-bombing, i think! 3 post of mine in this discussion - which is quite old - were all modded down within a day of each other. i wonder who i pissed off? i wish i knew what i said... so i could repeat it more loudly and often!
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1) You correctly observe (implicitly) that virus writers are pretty much just in this for the "d00d! i l33t & have m4d skillz!" factor. This involves visibility, which precludes tiny or new OSs from being targets. But Apple falls into neither of those categories. While their market share is roughly an order of magnitude smaller than Microsoft's, they also make a big deal about their seeming immunity. being able to be the guy who produced the first OS X virus to propagate in the wild is a huge "win". The fact that nobody's capitalized on this shouldn't be understood to represent a lack of trying.
2) Let's look at a closely related realm: web servers. We frequently hear about attacks against IIS; attacks against Apache are exceedingly rare by comparison. Yet Apache runs 2/3 of the web sites out there. 2/3! That's a huge market share, and if market share were the dominant - or even a significant - factor, we should expect to see much greater incidence of Apache attacks in the wild - yet we do not.
So, yeah. Aside from getting above a certain minimal threshold of visibility, market share has a seriously limited effect on virus attack or infection rates.
hmm. well, it's generally true that the scientific community won't accept theories without strong evidence. portions of Einstein's theories, however, did gain significant support before any proof was available (unproved portions remain today) because they did a better job of coherently organizing the previously-observed data.
and, of course, that further undercuts the argument of the parent: evolution isn't accepted by the scientific community on a whim, but because it does a better job of organizing the data currently available than any other theory.
also, describing much of what einstein did as "a nice, simple theory" is... "creative".
this experiment, of course, assumes that the military-industrial complex would generally consider the assassination of the president to be a bad thing...
This isn't so much a reply to you as a continuation; i figured it was better form putting it here than starting a new thread.
;-) beyond that, i really can't think of any.
1) further, overloading ctrl on a unix-based system would be an awful idea. this is a minor annoyance for recent switchers or people who have to use OS X and Windows, but you get over it fast. also, claiming that it's the positioning that's the problem is questionable at best, given how idiosyncratic PC keyboards are. alt + ctrl don't move around as much as backtick or tilde do, but it's still not easily predictable.
2) after reading this, the first Apple app i tried, Mail, does in fact have this. i then checked the iWork apps, which don't. so, okay, it's inconsistent, which is probably bad. but yeah, i had to check since i use the cmd+S for save.
3) and here the author shreds any remaining credibility. beyond the fact that support for the feature he's asking for exists today, and has for a really long time, the fact that Apple has designed a UI which can be usable by novices easily (i've worked PC support; do you have any idea how hard it is to get novices to understand what a "right-click" is?) and still powerful for experts (right-click in most apps for a contextual menu, or chording cut-and-paste in my Plan 9 apps. mmm.) is a huge feature, not a bug.
4) it's good to know what's in a directory you're saving things too. example i hit yesterday: in one directory i have thingie-i'm-building.graffle and thingie-i'm-building.ooutline; knowing that both are there when i go to save a PDF is useful so that i can choose a more descriptive name than thingie-i'm-building.pdf, which would be ambiguous.
5) i can actually see this as potentially useful, but how would it work? this may be useful, but it's not as good as the existing sort-by-type (alphabetical, which of course puts all your folders together, at least), and having effectively two sort-by-type options would be confusing.
6) i never use this, so don't really care. sure, stick it in as long as you don't clutter the UI to do it.
the author asks "why can't Apple do a little copying back?" first, copies of copies are lower quality than the original. also, Apple, much more than Microsoft, is very sensitive to the UI integration and experience for the user, rather than just a feature list; simply copying in features from somewhere else doesn't get you that.
you want a feature from Windows i want in OS X? no problem: Half Life 2 and Command and Conquer.
let's take the $150,000-over-5-years and $25/month-per-user benefit numbers at face value (ignoring the comments of earlier users in here). somebody check my math:
$25/month = $300/year = $1,500 over 5 years
1500 * 100 = 150000
so they just need to get 100 users per square mile to break even, given these assumptions? am i the only one who finds these numbers to be a tremendous argument for benefits outweighing costs? add to this the fact that most people are paying more than $25/month for internet access, and i think that's exactly what this shows.
Pretty much every aspect of how to run a company differs between a hardware-focused company and a software-focused company. OS X is a differentiating factor for Apple's hardware which allows them to stay out of the price war Dell and all the other commodity hardware producers have to engage in. OS X, in turn, is funded by the hardware sales. Apple would not be able to do further innovative research and development on OS X without the high margin hardware sales.
i had a philosophy professor who, in an effort to illustrate some point or other, announced to the lecture hall that the grading system was being revised such that, rather than being based 35% on exams, 35% on papers, 20% on regular assignments, and 10% on attendance, it would now be graded 100% on phrenology. he and the TAs had discussed this at length, he explained, and while none of them actually believed the "science" was valid for predictive or investigative uses, they thought it was "kinda fun". while their decision was final, reaction from the class was solicited.
my response? i was thrilled. i told him that most of my professors seemed to be grading based on random elements unrelated to class performance, and i was excited to have one actually admit it.
you (and the community) have better examples.
i used to be a huge fan of trackballs. i've used various kinds, my two favorites (for different reasons) being the kensington one with the very large ball and a button at each of the corners of the square and the logitech one with three buttons like a mouse and the ball under the thumb. especially with the large kensington one, i found it much easier to point accurately quickly, and more comfortable.
trackballs break down, however, when you have movement and button interaction like drag-and-drop, or (more dramatically, but less commonly) chording, like in Plan 9's Acme. the ball-in-the-center models are awful for that sort of stuff, and the ball-under-thumb models are still hindered by the fact that you have much better isolation between the mussels in your arm and your fingers than in your thumb and your fingers. that's put me back to mice exclusively these days.
Sure they do: commercials.
i'm very glad you wouldn't wish to be. i wish i could agree that institutionalized bigotry is dead, but i think it's just a little more hidden, and not very deeply.
well, that might be somewhat overstating things, but yes, the U.S. does give Israel an inordinate amount of military and financial support. it's an odd dichotomy: middle america seems to be okay with Jews in Israel, but not in their town. if you'd like to come out to the town in New Jersey i grew up in, however, i can point you at clubs that won't allow Jews to join "because they control all the money" (they also won't allow Italians to join "because they're in the mob"). if you're not familiar with this (assuming you live in America), you're either very lucky or intentionally missing it.
Nothing says "Good Italian food in Canada."
this is very interesting. how did you do this? particularly, how does one mount a .dmg at boot time? any other caveats to worry about?
of course, my more general question is where any of your numbers come from. Unix handles "close to 50% of the backend of the internet"? at least among things which run any sort of "real" OS (that is, not Cisco's IOS, for example), i'm pretty sure the numbers are much higher than that. but what does "the backend of the internet" mean, anyway? database servers? DNS server? surely you're not talking about the real infrastructure components, or Unix drops probably by an order of magnitude.
well, sure, but that'll block the apple stories, too.
hey, i've just got my first mod-bombing, i think! 3 post of mine in this discussion - which is quite old - were all modded down within a day of each other. i wonder who i pissed off? i wish i knew what i said... so i could repeat it more loudly and often!