The only SCSI items in the store were in the Apple section. Belkin cables were available mail order for about $10 back then. All I can surmise is this: Apple users are used to paying more, so the retailers shaft them every chance they get, part of the mistique of owning an Apple. Time for the consumers to revolt...
Actually, you have it almost exactly backwards. Apple used to include SCSI as a standard interface on even their low-end systems, and they were the standard method for hooking up scanners and external disks. That made them a high volume item, so the price was low. Currently, the standard methods of connecting peripherals to Macs are firewire and USB. Check out the prices of USB and firewire cables; you'll find that they're as cheap as SCSI cables used to be. Today, SCSI cables are used about equally for Macs and Wintel machines, and are purchased pretty much exclusively to hook up costly high-end high-speed disks. They are a much smaller volume item, and the people who buy them are already shelling out for an expensive disk drive, so they don't balk at paying a premium price for the cable as well. As usual with pricing, it boils down to supply and demand.
iPod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months.
This was very briefly true, but as with these security problems, it has been fixed. Apple can reasonably be faulted for being a bit slow to realize that some iPod batteries would be failing already and getting a reasonable replacement program in place, but that is old news. Currently, you can send you iPod into Apple for battery replacement, or buy replacement batteries from a number of vendors.
Apple began offering the battery replacement program as early as November 14, before the ipodsdirtysecret.com domain name was even registered (November 20).
Apple can reasonably be faulted for being a bit slow in realizing that some iPods batteries would be failing already, and getting a reasonable replacement program in place. As always, 3rd parties got into the act quickly to compete with Apple, with the result that reasonably priced replacement batteries are now widely available. At this point, this is pretty old news, and it begins to look like these guys are pursuing some kind of a vendetta, or simply getting off on the media attention they've been able to generate--or perhaps, for the conspiracy-mined, being promoted by the manufacturer of an iPod competitor.
A replacement battery for my cell phone cost $10; one for my cordless phone cost $10; Apple is presumably making a good deal of money on their $99 replacements.
Actually, in many consumer products the battery is not easily replaceable or very expensive to replace. The manual to my electric razor (which costs about the same as an iPod) include instructions for the safe removal and disposal of the batteries when they cease to work. The user is then instructed to discard the razor. The batteries on my Dustbuster are not user-replaceable, and manufacturer replacement costs nearly as much as a new unit. Rechargeable electric toothbrushes do not have user-replaceable batteries.
Can't say that I've ever seen a kernal panic under 10.2.8, with Macs ranging from beige G3's up. I did have one beige that wouldn't boot into 10.2.8 (although it was fine with 10.2.7) until I replaced the hard drive.
Several early versions (and several prereleases) of OS X had really broken SCSI support. A coworker at my previous job was always trying the latest OS X version, and had an Adaptec SCSI controller with a SCSI drive hanging off it. She was always having problems with OS X chewing up and spitting out partitions on the SCSI disk.
Prerelease versions of software, and especially operating systems, are generally pre-release for a reason. If you use them, you should have the sense to expect that some things won't work. If your setup is anything other than absolutely stock, and you don't have time to futz around, it's a good idea not to be an early adopter of new software releases. This is true for all software, no matter who makes it. I've been using OSX with SCSI disks and scanners since the early days. I recall hearing about some problems with the very first release, but they were rapidly cleared up.
User: Hey, why doesn't my Apple scanner work with my new Macintosh?
Tech: Apple discontinued SCSI as a configuration option on non-Powermac models
Wrong answer. Correct answer: "You have a SCSI scanner that requires a SCSI port. You bought a computer without a SCSI port. Your choices are to 1) send the computer back and buy a model with a SCSI port, 2) Buy a USB to SCSI adaptor for your computer, 3) Buy a new USB scanner. Considering the fall in scanner prices, your cheapest and most reliable option is probably #3)". Note that this is exactly the same answer one would give if asked, "Why doesn't my SCSI scanner work with my new Windows laptop?"
This was usually due to the fact that Apple had made some change, rendering recent hardware (~2 years) useless. (i.e. changes like dropping floppies, dropping SCSI
So which Mac's are incompatible with SCSI? Or are you simply referring to the fact that Apple stopped including SCSI on every single system, and started doing what Windows machines have always done--i.e. if you wanted SCSI, you needed to order a system with a SCSI card installed. As for floppies, I still have floppy drives on some of our recent Macs. I don't know of any Mac that won't take a floppy drive--you just have to buy one.
So the well-reasoned article explaining why Apple's way of doing things is okay basically says "they're following RFC2131, so they're okay." But it is a well-known and much-lamented fact that DHCP provides no security. So if you depend on DHCP to be secure, you are not secure. At all. That's not well-reasoned, at least in my book.
So Apple should do what? Design their systems not to work with DHCP, even though it is virtually universal and often required for network compatibility? All security is a compromise. When one uses DHCP, one is implicitly accepting the fact that one's security depends upon the ability of system administration to make sure that there are no rogue servers. There are certainly some contexts in which DHCP spoofing can be a concern--using public WiFi networks, for example--but under the circumstances encountered by most users, allowing DHCP provides a massive increase in ease of use and a negligible loss of security.
Frankly, at this stage of development, possible cures for serious diseases are pretty much a dime a dozen. If you are in the field, you probably hear at least one a week. The vast majority fail to pan out for one reason or another.
Well-done research is never "wasted", because you always learn something. It may not be what you wanted to know, and it may not be immediately applicable, but it adds to people's knowledge, which makes it useful.
Not everything useful is equally useful. Very often, one of the possible outcomes of a line of research is "the 500th confirmation of something that you were already pretty sure that you knew." And, if you are a pharmaceutical firm and hope to stay in business, "useful" must also equal profitable.
I wonder...could they have fixed the hack that Mr. Johanson made? Even on the windows version?
Do you think they care? I think Apple's protection is intended to be closer to the chain on your front door than to Fort Knox: not intended to stop the experienced thief, but simply to reduce temptation to passersby.
This might simply be shaky english. Yes, the author is ultimately responsible, and errors appear in refereed papers all the time. Nevertheless, a legitimate response to criticism is, "Hey, it passed peer review." In effect, it raises the bar for criticism. The fact that at least a couple of presumably qualified reviewers failed to find errors doesn't mean that there aren't any, but they are unlikely to be glaring or trivial.
Any paper-base receipt is suseptable to abuse. Specifically, this allows someone to confirm how another person voted. Bought votes are possible this way.
However, a crypto-based system has been developed which provides paper receipts that make it possible to confirm that a vote was correctly counted without revealing what that vote was.
Basically, the "flaw" is that Mac OSX uses defaults that are appropriate if users are on trusted networks. Until recently, this was almost universally true, and it is still true for the vast majority of users. But WiFi has brought a change in how people use their computers, and more and more, people are logging in at convention centers and coffeehouses, where this sort of vulnerability is is relevant, or carelessly setting up unsecured WiFi networks at home. So it is probably time for Apple to reconsider these default settings. They could readily ship with these options turned off and an appropriate warning about turning them on.
Still, the Windows folk must be pretty desperate if they are seizing upon one outdated configuration default as equivalent to the dozens of Windows flaws, emerging at a rate of about one a month, most of which are exploited by known and destructive worms.
Live playback is pixelated, not recorded shows. Once I take the TiVo out of the mix, problem goes away.
When viewing TiVo, all playback is recorded, there is no "live." This is what enables you to pause or rewind "live" TV. If you have another TV receiving broadcast direct (i.e. without a TiVo) you will observe that it is a fraction of a second ahead of your TiVo's live TV.
Generally TiVo's seem to be quite robust. The two I've bought just run; they don't even ever crash, and they seem to tolerate power failures and the like quite well.
The odd thing is that the average person's idea of relative biological hazards is almost completely backwards. Lets consider the things we can do with living organisms, from most dangerous to least dangerous.
(Most dangerous) 1. Moving a wild-type organism from one place to another (or in the case of a microorganism, from one host to another).
There is no doubt that this is a horrible risk, even though we do it all the time. There are numerous real, not theoretical, ecological disasters that have arisen this way. An organism in its natural environment is generally relatively stable (because if it wasn't, it would have long ago gone extinct). Move it somewhere else, and its natural prey and predators may be absent, and it may choose a new prey, while its numbers go unchecked because of the absence of natural predators. Similarly, most diseases and parasites are adapted to spread in ways that are not excessively destructive to their natural hosts. Move them to a new host, and the same mechanisms will not be "quite right." There are many examples of organisms that produce little or no disease in their natural host, but are destructive in a different host. Of course, when you move an organism to a new environment, you also are exposing any diseases it has to a bunch of potential new hosts.
2. Conventional domestication by selective breeding
Again, there are numerous examples of ecological disasters produced by species domesticated by ancient technology of selective breeding. Because such species are propagated by humans, they can have very "unbalanced" properties. The are also frequently maintained by human populations in large numbers. For example, dogs bred to hunt particular species become very destructive to those species when they go feral, even if they are incapable of surviving independently in the wild for long. Cats are extremely destructive of bird populations. Domestic animals and plants, often maitained in large numbers with limited genetic variability, also constitute a major reservoir of infection by microorganisms and parasites.
3. Selection of targetted mutants or selective mutagenesis.
It is possible to develop techniques of selection of spontaneous mutants that intentionally favor the development of microorganisms that are resistant to important therapeutic agents. Many agricultural and medical practices result in unintentional selection to the same effect. Targetted mutation is a somewhat more efficient way of achieving basically the same thing. Biowarfare agents developed by these methods are potentially extremely damaging if they accidentally escape into the wild. Because the genes mutated are natural genes, they are generally appropriately regulated within the organism, and do not impose a high cost on the organism, so such mutants may persist in the environment even in the absence of further selection.
(least dangerous) 4. Introduction of a foreign transgene.
This is probably the least risky of all. Transgenes generally are driven by strong, unregulated promoters, such as viral promoters, and are overexpressed at substantial cost to the organism. Because the organism has not evolved to accomodate such genes, they may have deleterious physiological effects. As such, trangenic organisms typically suffer a disadvantage in the wild and are unlikely to persist. Although there is much fear of allergic reactions to transgenic foods containing "foreign" proteins, the fact is that people routinely eat novel foods containing proteins unfamiliar to their immune systems. Severe immune reactions to foods are rare, and the most severe are not to foods derived from modern methods of genetic modification, but rather from the older method of selective breeding (e.g. wheat, peanuts, milk products).
Why do people persist in trying to lump breeding and GM together under the same "genetic engineering" umbrella? Repeat this until you understand it: Genetic traits that are expressed through breeding are utterly unlike genetic modifications that are only possible through human manipulation of a biological product's DNA.
However, this simply isn't true. They aren't "utterly unlike." In fact, they are generally very similar. Ultimately, they all come down to sequence changes. And even if it is easier to pull a gene out of another species, there is in most cases a good chance that it would be possible to achieve a similar end by selecting for modifications of existing genes. The difference is that a transgene is far less likely to lead to "runaway" organisms than is a modification of an existing gene. A transgene is typically expressed by some strong promoter, with little regulation, so it places a metabolic burden on the organism that will almost certainly be deleterious in the wild. In contrast, a mutational modification of an existing gene that has a sophisticated regulatory promoter that has evolved in the species is far more likely to survive, and possibly create problems, in the wild.
Like Creationists, the anti-GE crowd simply ignores science when it doesn't serve their purposes.
Like creationists, the anti-GE folks generally suffer from the mistaken notion that different species have very different genomes, and imagine that something drastic is likely to happen as a result of crossing species boundaries. In reality, the genes of different species are far more similar than different, because all species evolved from common ancestors. Most genes in one species have counterparts in another. Indeed, it is possible to find counterparts of most human genes in species as diverse as bacteria, yeast, and roundworms. Bizarre novel genes can just as easily (indeed, probably more easily) occur through mutations in a single species that splice one gene into another as through introducing "foreign" genes. The nightmare scenario of the expression of a transgene accidentally creating an "uber-organism" that runs wild and causes an ecological catastrophe makes about as much biological sense as the notion that being bitten by a radioactive spider will confer upon one the ability to climb walls.
More dramatic changes, as you put it, could also mean more dramatic results. In many cases, when changes (like cross-breeding types of corn) occur over a long period of time, nature has a better chance to adapt and "catch" errors before they get too drastic.
The notion that natural genetic changes are slow and that nature "adapts" and "catches" errors is wishful thinking, with little relationship to reality. In fact, there are numerous examples of species being wiped out because of a new disease or predator arising or invading and sweeping through a particular population.
By all means...before you know it, Indians will be cross-breeding types of corn to make better corn...oh...wait....they did.
Actually, it's more than that. Corn does not exist at all in the wild; it is entirely the product of early genetic modification, and could never survive without human cultivation. It's closest relative is a wild grass, teosinte, which doesn't look at all like corn. Indeed, corn differs far more drastically from its closest natural relative than any product of modern genetic engineering.
Selective breeding has limits that could arguably be called 'natural'. Ex: you can't breed a lima bean with a dairy cow, yet you could splice genes between the two organisms. Selective breeding and direct manipulation of DNA are not the same thing at all.
That might make some kind of sense if genes never moved across species without human intervention, but that is not true at all. After all, "genetic engineering" was invented by viruses long before people got around to doing it. Even naked DNA can be infectious under certain circumstances.
There is nothing magical about moving genes from one species to another. Most genes in one species have near counterparts in other species, anyway. Genes are almost never invented by large, long-generation time organisms like beans and cows--we all inherited them from short-generation ancestors like bacteria and viruses, so there is a lot of commonality in the genetic heritage of all creatures. There is no reason to expect that a gene derived from a different species by modern techniques will be more "alien" or unnatural in its effects than one that arises through mutation or that crosses species lines by natural mechanisms such as hybridization or viral infection. Modern genetic engineering has yet to come up with anything as bizarre and unnatural as a banana or an ear of corn. Or any food as dangerously allergenic as a peanut.
Slashdot Mirror
iPod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months.
This was very briefly true, but as with these security problems, it has been fixed. Apple can reasonably be faulted for being a bit slow to realize that some iPod batteries would be failing already and getting a reasonable replacement program in place, but that is old news. Currently, you can send you iPod into Apple for battery replacement, or buy replacement batteries from a number of vendors.
Apple began offering the battery replacement program as early as November 14, before the ipodsdirtysecret.com domain name was even registered (November 20).
Apple can reasonably be faulted for being a bit slow in realizing that some iPods batteries would be failing already, and getting a reasonable replacement program in place. As always, 3rd parties got into the act quickly to compete with Apple, with the result that reasonably priced replacement batteries are now widely available. At this point, this is pretty old news, and it begins to look like these guys are pursuing some kind of a vendetta, or simply getting off on the media attention they've been able to generate--or perhaps, for the conspiracy-mined, being promoted by the manufacturer of an iPod competitor.
A replacement battery for my cell phone cost $10; one for my cordless phone cost $10; Apple is presumably making a good deal of money on their $99 replacements.
Actually, in many consumer products the battery is not easily replaceable or very expensive to replace. The manual to my electric razor (which costs about the same as an iPod) include instructions for the safe removal and disposal of the batteries when they cease to work. The user is then instructed to discard the razor. The batteries on my Dustbuster are not user-replaceable, and manufacturer replacement costs nearly as much as a new unit. Rechargeable electric toothbrushes do not have user-replaceable batteries.
Can't say that I've ever seen a kernal panic under 10.2.8, with Macs ranging from beige G3's up. I did have one beige that wouldn't boot into 10.2.8 (although it was fine with 10.2.7) until I replaced the hard drive.
Also nice to see all the other Security fixes happening. gg Apple!
Also nice to see Apple giving public credit to the people who reported these security holes.
I can only start to imagine the amount of paper cuts recieved in creating one of those bikes.
So didn't your parents ever warn you that motorcycles are dangerous?
User: Hey, why doesn't my Apple scanner work with my new Macintosh?
Tech: Apple discontinued SCSI as a configuration option on non-Powermac models
Wrong answer. Correct answer: "You have a SCSI scanner that requires a SCSI port. You bought a computer without a SCSI port. Your choices are to 1) send the computer back and buy a model with a SCSI port, 2) Buy a USB to SCSI adaptor for your computer, 3) Buy a new USB scanner. Considering the fall in scanner prices, your cheapest and most reliable option is probably #3)". Note that this is exactly the same answer one would give if asked, "Why doesn't my SCSI scanner work with my new Windows laptop?"
So which Mac's are incompatible with SCSI? Or are you simply referring to the fact that Apple stopped including
SCSI on every single system, and started doing what Windows machines have always done--i.e. if you wanted SCSI, you needed to order a system with a SCSI card installed. As for floppies, I still have floppy drives on some of our recent Macs. I don't know of any Mac that won't take a floppy drive--you just have to buy one.
Frankly, at this stage of development, possible cures for serious diseases are pretty much a dime a dozen. If you are in the field, you probably hear at least one a week. The vast majority fail to pan out for one reason or another.
Not everything useful is equally useful. Very often, one of the possible outcomes of a line of research is "the 500th confirmation of something that you were already pretty sure that you knew." And, if you are a pharmaceutical firm and hope to stay in business, "useful" must also equal profitable.
Do you think they care? I think Apple's protection is intended to be closer to the chain on your front door than to Fort Knox: not intended to stop the experienced thief, but simply to reduce temptation to passersby.
This might simply be shaky english. Yes, the author is ultimately responsible, and errors appear in refereed papers all the time. Nevertheless, a legitimate response to criticism is, "Hey, it passed peer review." In effect, it raises the bar for criticism. The fact that at least a couple of presumably qualified reviewers failed to find errors doesn't mean that there aren't any, but they are unlikely to be glaring or trivial.
However, a crypto-based system has been developed which provides paper receipts that make it possible to confirm that a vote was correctly counted without revealing what that vote was.
Still, the Windows folk must be pretty desperate if they are seizing upon one outdated configuration default as equivalent to the dozens of Windows flaws, emerging at a rate of about one a month, most of which are exploited by known and destructive worms.
When viewing TiVo, all playback is recorded, there is no "live." This is what enables you to pause or rewind "live" TV. If you have another TV receiving broadcast direct (i.e. without a TiVo) you will observe that it is a fraction of a second ahead of your TiVo's live TV.
Generally TiVo's seem to be quite robust. The two I've bought just run; they don't even ever crash, and they seem to tolerate power failures and the like quite well.
The odd thing is that the average person's idea of relative biological hazards is almost completely backwards. Lets consider the things we can do with living organisms, from most dangerous to least dangerous.
(Most dangerous)
1. Moving a wild-type organism from one place to another (or in the case of a microorganism, from one host to another).
There is no doubt that this is a horrible risk, even though we do it all the time. There are numerous real, not theoretical, ecological disasters that have arisen this way. An organism in its natural environment is generally relatively stable (because if it wasn't, it would have long ago gone extinct). Move it somewhere else, and its natural prey and predators may be absent, and it may choose a new prey, while its numbers go unchecked because of the absence of natural predators. Similarly, most diseases and parasites are adapted to spread in ways that are not excessively destructive to their natural hosts. Move them to a new host, and the same mechanisms will not be "quite right." There are many examples of organisms that produce little or no disease in their natural host, but are destructive in a different host. Of course, when you move an organism to a new environment, you also are exposing any diseases it has to a bunch of potential new hosts.
2. Conventional domestication by selective breeding
Again, there are numerous examples of ecological disasters produced by species domesticated by ancient technology of selective breeding. Because such species are propagated by humans, they can have very "unbalanced" properties. The are also frequently maintained by human populations in large numbers. For example, dogs bred to hunt particular species become very destructive to those species when they go feral, even if they are incapable of surviving independently in the wild for long. Cats are extremely destructive of bird populations. Domestic animals and plants, often maitained in large numbers with limited genetic variability, also constitute a major reservoir of infection by microorganisms and parasites.
3. Selection of targetted mutants or selective mutagenesis.
It is possible to develop techniques of selection of spontaneous mutants that intentionally favor the development of microorganisms that are resistant to important therapeutic agents. Many agricultural and medical practices result in unintentional selection to the same effect. Targetted mutation is a somewhat more efficient way of achieving basically the same thing. Biowarfare agents developed by these methods are potentially extremely damaging if they accidentally escape into the wild. Because the genes mutated are natural genes, they are generally appropriately regulated within the organism, and do not impose a high cost on the organism, so such mutants may persist in the environment even in the absence of further selection.
(least dangerous)
4. Introduction of a foreign transgene.
This is probably the least risky of all. Transgenes generally are driven by strong, unregulated promoters, such as viral promoters, and are overexpressed at substantial cost to the organism. Because the organism has not evolved to accomodate such genes, they may have deleterious physiological effects. As such, trangenic organisms typically suffer a disadvantage in the wild and are unlikely to persist. Although there is much fear of allergic reactions to transgenic foods containing "foreign" proteins, the fact is that people routinely eat novel foods containing proteins unfamiliar to their immune systems. Severe immune reactions to foods are rare, and the most severe are not to foods derived from modern methods of genetic modification, but rather from the older method of selective breeding (e.g. wheat, peanuts, milk products).
Actually, it's more than that. Corn does not exist at all in the wild; it is entirely the product of early genetic modification, and could never survive without human cultivation. It's closest relative is a wild grass, teosinte, which doesn't look at all like corn. Indeed, corn differs far more drastically from its closest natural relative than any product of modern genetic engineering.
There is nothing magical about moving genes from one species to another. Most genes in one species have near counterparts in other species, anyway. Genes are almost never invented by large, long-generation time organisms like beans and cows--we all inherited them from short-generation ancestors like bacteria and viruses, so there is a lot of commonality in the genetic heritage of all creatures. There is no reason to expect that a gene derived from a different species by modern techniques will be more "alien" or unnatural in its effects than one that arises through mutation or that crosses species lines by natural mechanisms such as hybridization or viral infection. Modern genetic engineering has yet to come up with anything as bizarre and unnatural as a banana or an ear of corn. Or any food as dangerously allergenic as a peanut.