Oh yeah. I misremembered Linus' original usenet post about Linux. I thought he was saying it was a rip off of Hurd, but actually he said it was a rip off of Minix, and since then others have speculated that if he hadn't release it, then Hurd would have been completed much faster. Good call catching my memory fart.
Also, I'm aware that X11 has been around almost forever, but when you're replying to an MS troll there's only so much info you can pack in at once. That said I do think a lot of the later GUI stuff in Linux has been inspired by Windows, since most programmers coming up today start out on Windows and only later learn about Free/Open Software.
I didn't say Bill Gates is a moron, I said his recent track record is shite. Re-read "The Road Ahead" sometime: Do you have a digital wallet? Yes, Bill Gates has steered his company quite profitably throughout the years, but that has been in spite of his track record at predictions, not because of it.
The company whose operating system led to the rise of the personal computer and, in turn, the internet.
That's wrong on a lot of different levels: 1.) The first successful personal computer was the Apple II, not anything from Microsoft. 2.) The internet's foundations were laid before MS-DOS was QDOS. Ever heard of ARPANET? 3.) The first web server was written on a NeXT machine -- the computer that Steve Jobs made after he got the boot at Apple. 4.) In 1995, which did Microsoft would be better to bundle with their new OS, a web browser or a cheap AOL knockoff? That's right, a cheap AOL knockoff. They didn't get religion on the importance of the internet until long after the train had left the station. That's the one reason we have the small sliver of inter-platform compatibility on the web that have today: Microsoft had to support the webpages that Netscape supported, so they couldn't make it proprietary, as was their plan with MSN.
The company who, without, Linux (every/.er's favorite OS) would almost certainly not exist.
Linux isn't my favorite OS, and it's admittedly a young man's attempt at ripping off Hurd, not Windows NT. Yes, the GUI of Linux is ripped off of Windows, but that was ripped off of Mac anyway (which in turn was an improvement on Xerox).
And he is 100% right. There is a huge market for well-implemented and well-marketed tablet PCs.
Yes, there is a big potential market there. Just like there's a big potential market for phone computers. But Gates' company didn't successfully capitalize on the tablet thing, just like they won't capture the phone market.
Let's face it, if you were a phone company or phone manufacturer, would you trust Microsoft? The digital music player crowd did and look what happened: Microsoft screwed over the "Plays For Sure" players and music services when they released the incompatible Zune! Way to stab your friends in the back, Microsoft! The phone companies would be nuts to let Microsoft gain more than a tiny fraction of the phone market -- Microsoft is too dangerous to trust as a business partner.
Anyhow, you're clearly trolling me, but it was fun to point out just how wrong you are.
"It's a PC that is virtually without limits and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." -- Bill Gates on Tablet PCs in 2001.
1) That's a feature not a bug. "Hey, I want to get to my browser -- Cmd-Tab." "Hey, I want to get to my other document window -- Cmd-`." It gives you a way to switch to two different things with one keystroke, and saving keystrokes is good.
2) Don't listen to those guys telling you how to make pointless AppleScript: What you want is already built into Mac OS X! Go to System Preferences, click "Keyboard and Mouse," click "Keyboard Shortcuts," scroll down the list to "Keyboard Navigation" and find the item underneath it called "Move the focus to the active window or next window," give it a better keyboard shortcut (the default is control-F4). I personally see no need for it, and either use Cmd-Tab, Cmd-`, or the Exposé functions, but if you love Windows-style window switching for some reason, there it is -- built in.
A)It's kilograms B)That's earth weight. On the moon that's close to a ton of rock every 30 mins.
Point B is redundant/incorrect. Kilograms are not a measure of weight and are the same everywhere +/- the effects of Relativity, so once you say "it's kilograms" there's no need to say "earth weight," since kilograms are the virtually the same on the Earth and the Moon and are not a weight.
It might however be helpful to say, "the machine will move 150kg on Earth," since you are right that a machine that can move 150kg on the Earth will probably be able to move 900kg on the Moon, but bear in mind that it's not necessarily the case. Say for example we're talking about a machine that pushes 150kg blocks over an icy surface on the Earth. It would not be helped by the lower gravity on the Moon and would have the same limitations as on Earth. Similarly, a conveyor belt digging system might be more limited by inertial forces than gravitational ones. On the other hand, these digging systems are mostly about moving the rocks up rather than out, so that would probably be the limiting factor for the design, in which case they could move a Moon-ton of rocks.
Anyhow, just relax. I was merely pedantically pointing out a minor mistake in your use of terminology. There's no need to get upset about it and tell me to "get a clue."
Kilograms are a measure of mass not weight, so your mass in kilos is the same on the moon (well, minus the fairly miniscule relativistic effects of changing your frame of reference), even though your weigh in pounds will go down. The SI unit of weight is the Newton.
My friend told me that when he went to a Catholic high school, he had one teacher who was always really serious, a real hard ass who would say things like, "You kids need to know what kind of world is out there. Be serious. There's more to life than just who is going to the school dance," and such. One morning when all the students had came in he said in a really serious voice, "World War III just started this morning," and made it seem like the Soviet Union had declared war and the bombs were on their way. (This was during the Cold War.) Needless to say, after everyone was scared gutless at the prospect of nuclear annihilation, he admitted it was all a stunt to get them to think more about whether they're ready to meet the afterlife and such. It was really unexpected though, because none of the students thought that the teacher would ever be the type to pull a prank or a joke.
My friend ended up getting MAs in religion and philosophy, so I guess maybe it had an impact on him.
I wonder if US publishers have ever thought to publish a title in Japan in time for Golden Week (much like they time holiday season releases in the US)...
Golden Week isn't a gift giving holiday. It's a chance to travel somewhere. So, sales of games are actually pretty flat during GW. The big gift giving holiday is (sort of) New Years. At New Years, kids get money from their relatives, then they go out to the stores and blow it on toys. That's as close as Japan has to our holiday rush.
Nintendo's usual strategy is to dribble out games slooooowly, so that there are never too many hits in the marketplace at one time consuming each other's oxygen. That makes sense--usually. But right now is a completely different case. Nintendo needs to maintain its sales rate advantage if it's going to overtake the 360 in the US and maintain its lead over the PS3 in Japan. A slow second half of 2007 could cause the Wii to lose momentum and fall at a time when it's crucial to reach escape velocity. If by December 2007 the Wii is still in the lead, developers are going to start moving all their new projects to the Wii. Once that happens, if you want the game you need the system, and Nintendo has it made. If the Wii juggernaut slows in the second half of 2007, then the developers will split. US devs will follow the 360, and Japanese devs will follow the PS3. If that happens, Wii is going to be stuck in the middle and (while doing quite well) won't dominate. Thus, the pressure is on for Nintendo to churn out as much as possible as soon as possible. We'll see how that works out for them...
Given that violent crime dropped dramatically from the mid-90s on (during the same time period in which the first generation to grow up with violent videogames came of age) the burden of proof for this lies on the side that proposes a link between videogames and violence. Unless there is really clear proof that violent crime would be even lower than it already is, I don't see much of a positive correlation between the two in the real world.
I think the thinking behind not being able to customize the ribbon was that it's pretty common in pre-2007 versions of Office for unsophisticated users to accidentally rip off a tool bar, resize it, shrink it, close it, whatever and then later they can't find it, and when you're on the phone with them you can't tell them where to click since their screen is completely different from the default screen. So, in order to protect the lame users, they stopped the power users from moving around the ribbon that much, except for the area on the title bar next to the Office button. (Personally, I find it deeply bizarre that they would put stuff on the title bar, but whatever.)
Anyhow, I don't know if I would have made the same choices as MS, but I think they at least had a rationale for what they were doing this time. A lot of stuff about Windows and the old Offices clearly had no rationale whatsoever and were completely random.
People sometimes talk like strong enforcement of Unix-style permissions is sufficient to provide local security. I find that argument totally unconvincing. Yes, it's nice to have the confidence that with modern OSes like Linux, OS X, and (probably) Vista I won't end up like the old Windows where you have to reformat a disk to try to clear the deeply dug in roots of some spyware crap from the system, but there's still the pretty damn big issue of all my data. Namely, having to reinstall the OS would be a pain, and I'm glad I don't have to waste an hour doing it, but losing all my data (documents, photos, music, and to a lesser extent application preferences) would be devastating. The data on my PowerBook is my life, and the reassurance that at least I don't have to reinstall OS X would be cold comfort at best. True, I do make a monthly backup onto an external drive that is normally unplugged (and thus out of range of rm *ing attacks), but probably most users don't follow this practice. Besides, a subtler virus could just silently corrupt my data over a period of months, so that I don't notice what's going on until my backups are no longer any good!
There is a solution to the problem, but it requires a deep rooted change in how things are done. What I propose is that we shift from permissions by user to permissions by application. Right now, any app that my user launches can erase any of my files. That's ridiculous! Much more logical would be allowing me to decide which subset of my files each app can user and how. So, for example, I would let FireFox write downloads to my desktop and its preferences and caches to subfolders of the Library, but I wouldn't want it to be able to erase any of my other files under any circumstances. In fact, most of the time I don't even want FireFox to be able to read my local files, but I'd be willing to put in a password to let it do on a time limited basis so during uploads and the like.
Basically, what I'm proposing amounts to sandboxing every app. This may seem harsh, but why not do it? What's the advantage of letting any app destroy any of my files? Make them at least beg me for permission first, I say!
So, that's what's on my wishlist for the future of OS level security.
Seriously, the parent completely misstated the intensity of hawking radiation. I can't believe it got modded up to 4 in the first place.
Now, black holes are often surrounded by bright clouds, but the clouds are bright for reasons completely unrelated to hawking radiation. As stuff falls into a black hole, it gets accelerated until it's going really fast. Once it gets fast enough, the light generated by the friction of the things falling in gets blue-shifted until it moves into the x-ray range. Now, this does occur a lot, so many black holes are detectable as the presumed center of giant x-ray vortexes, but that is completely different from hawking radiation since this is caused by material external to the black hole falling in.
"Hard prison time" is way out of proportion for most mistaken arrests, but I agree in principle that police officers should be liable for things done on the job that cross certain lines. For example, in the US justice system currently, if a cop gets a confession from you but didn't tell your rights, you go free and the cop faces no punishment. That's exactly backwards! Presuming the confession was legit, the crook should be locked up as normal, but the cop should be fired or at least severely demoted. Similarly, if a cop uses force to extract a confession, then that cop should go to jail, and the confession itself shouldn't be used in trial, since people will confess to anything under torture, but that doesn't mean the alleged crook should necessarily go free. What should be done is another investigation into the objective clues about the guilt or innocence of the accused.
I predict that Microsoft will win the hardcore gamer market and possibly the video delivery market.
US or Japan? I agree with you if we're talking about the US market, but the 360 is dead in Japan in spite of already having some great releases out. In Japan, Wii is already the best selling next-gen home console, but the PS3 has also overtaken the 360. Now, I guess it's possible that the 360 will bounce back in Japan, but I just wonder why it hasn't done that well yet. I think what we're going to be looking at is a market split with Japan lining up behind the Wii and PS3 but the US going for the 360 and Wii. Nintendo will laugh all the way to the bank, and the next next gen systems will all be launched a little early (4 years instead of 5) and the market will reconfigure again.
If a computer like it were sold not running OS X but just Linux or something, you wouldn't expect to pay a full $300 for it.
Emphasis added for clarity. Yeah, such a computer doesn't exist. But the power in the AppleTV is in the general neighborhood of the original Xbox and Wii, which both sell for less. So, if someone did want to make a computer like the AppleTV but without the OS, and they mass produced it, they might be able to make it a little cheaper.
No, the relative lowness of the price compared to other Apple products is because the Apple TV is a pretty underpowered PC. If a computer like it were sold not running OS X but just Linux or something, you wouldn't expect to pay a full $300 for it. The cost of OS X is more or less built into the cost of the machine as is.
171. But suppose now that industrial society does survive the next several decade and that the bugs do eventually get worked out of the system, so that it functions smoothly. What kind of system will it be? We will consider several possibilities.
172. First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better that human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decision for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car of his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite -- just as it is today, but with two difference. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless the may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
175. But suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence, so that human work remains necessary. Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at th
Along with that, it would be nice if we could load some of the Virtual Console games from the Wii onto the DS. The PS3 and PSP already allow downloading PS1 games and playing them portably. It would be nice if Nintendo would do the same. Obviously, you couldn't make all the games work like this, since the DS only has so much memory (4MB according to Wikipedia), but it should be enough for any NES game and maybe some of the SNES ones, depending on the amount of space you need for the emulator.
I agree completely. When I hear people say, "Oh, it's not a root exploit, so whatever," I find that argument totally unconvincing. Yes, it's nice to have the confidence that with OS X I won't end up like Windows where you have to go to the extreme lengths of reformatting a disk to try to clear the deeply dug in roots of some spyware crap from the system, but there's still the pretty damn big issue of all my data. Namely, having to reinstall OS X would be a pain, and I'm glad I don't have to waste an hour doing it, but losing all my data (documents, photos, music, and to a lesser extent application preferences) would be devastating. The data on my PowerBook is my life, and the reassurance that at least I don't have to reinstall OS X would be cold comfort at best. True, I do make a monthly backup onto an external drive that is normally unplugged (and thus out of range of rm *ing attacks), but probably most users don't follow this practice.
There is a solution to the problem, but it requires a deep rooted change in how things are done. What I propose is that we shift from permissions by user to permissions by application. Right now, any app that my user launches can erase any of my files. That's ridiculous! Much more logical would be allowing me to decide which subset of my files each app can user and how. So, for example, I would let FireFox write downloads to my desktop and its preferences and caches to subfolders of the Library, but I wouldn't want it to be able to erase any of my other files under any circumstances. In fact, most of the time I don't even want FireFox to be able to read my local files, but I'd be willing to put in a password to let it do on a time limited basis so during uploads and the like.
Basically, what I'm proposing amounts to sandboxing every app. This may seem harsh, but why not do it? What's the advantage of letting any app destroy any of my files? Make them at least beg me for permission first, I say!
So, that's what's on my wishlist for OS X.6. Linux dudes, you're encouraged to start hacking it out now and make OS history!
The sad, but obvious fact is that Word runs fastest natively under Windows on a PC (in this case a brand new Vaio which I had to buy to replace the MacBook Pro). Both of these computers had exactly the same specs.
WTF? If you supposedly tried all those other virtualization solutions, when they were too slow, why did you go to all the expense of buying a new computer with the same specs? That makes no sense. Just use BootCamp and boot into a full install of Windows, and it will run at the same speed as the Vaio, because it's 100% real Windows with no emulation whatsoever. But why buy new hardware, when the hardware you have is supposedly up to spec? That detail doesn't add up and makes your whole story sound made up.
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Oh yeah. I misremembered Linus' original usenet post about Linux. I thought he was saying it was a rip off of Hurd, but actually he said it was a rip off of Minix, and since then others have speculated that if he hadn't release it, then Hurd would have been completed much faster. Good call catching my memory fart.
Also, I'm aware that X11 has been around almost forever, but when you're replying to an MS troll there's only so much info you can pack in at once. That said I do think a lot of the later GUI stuff in Linux has been inspired by Windows, since most programmers coming up today start out on Windows and only later learn about Free/Open Software.
I didn't say Bill Gates is a moron, I said his recent track record is shite. Re-read "The Road Ahead" sometime: Do you have a digital wallet? Yes, Bill Gates has steered his company quite profitably throughout the years, but that has been in spite of his track record at predictions, not because of it.
/.er's favorite OS) would almost certainly not exist.
The company whose operating system led to the rise of the personal computer and, in turn, the internet.
That's wrong on a lot of different levels: 1.) The first successful personal computer was the Apple II, not anything from Microsoft. 2.) The internet's foundations were laid before MS-DOS was QDOS. Ever heard of ARPANET? 3.) The first web server was written on a NeXT machine -- the computer that Steve Jobs made after he got the boot at Apple. 4.) In 1995, which did Microsoft would be better to bundle with their new OS, a web browser or a cheap AOL knockoff? That's right, a cheap AOL knockoff. They didn't get religion on the importance of the internet until long after the train had left the station. That's the one reason we have the small sliver of inter-platform compatibility on the web that have today: Microsoft had to support the webpages that Netscape supported, so they couldn't make it proprietary, as was their plan with MSN.
The company who, without, Linux (every
Linux isn't my favorite OS, and it's admittedly a young man's attempt at ripping off Hurd, not Windows NT. Yes, the GUI of Linux is ripped off of Windows, but that was ripped off of Mac anyway (which in turn was an improvement on Xerox).
And he is 100% right. There is a huge market for well-implemented and well-marketed tablet PCs.
Yes, there is a big potential market there. Just like there's a big potential market for phone computers. But Gates' company didn't successfully capitalize on the tablet thing, just like they won't capture the phone market.
Let's face it, if you were a phone company or phone manufacturer, would you trust Microsoft? The digital music player crowd did and look what happened: Microsoft screwed over the "Plays For Sure" players and music services when they released the incompatible Zune! Way to stab your friends in the back, Microsoft! The phone companies would be nuts to let Microsoft gain more than a tiny fraction of the phone market -- Microsoft is too dangerous to trust as a business partner.
Anyhow, you're clearly trolling me, but it was fun to point out just how wrong you are.
"It's a PC that is virtually without limits and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." -- Bill Gates on Tablet PCs in 2001.
1) That's a feature not a bug. "Hey, I want to get to my browser -- Cmd-Tab." "Hey, I want to get to my other document window -- Cmd-`." It gives you a way to switch to two different things with one keystroke, and saving keystrokes is good.
2) Don't listen to those guys telling you how to make pointless AppleScript: What you want is already built into Mac OS X! Go to System Preferences, click "Keyboard and Mouse," click "Keyboard Shortcuts," scroll down the list to "Keyboard Navigation" and find the item underneath it called "Move the focus to the active window or next window," give it a better keyboard shortcut (the default is control-F4). I personally see no need for it, and either use Cmd-Tab, Cmd-`, or the Exposé functions, but if you love Windows-style window switching for some reason, there it is -- built in.
Point B is redundant/incorrect. Kilograms are not a measure of weight and are the same everywhere +/- the effects of Relativity, so once you say "it's kilograms" there's no need to say "earth weight," since kilograms are the virtually the same on the Earth and the Moon and are not a weight.
It might however be helpful to say, "the machine will move 150kg on Earth," since you are right that a machine that can move 150kg on the Earth will probably be able to move 900kg on the Moon, but bear in mind that it's not necessarily the case. Say for example we're talking about a machine that pushes 150kg blocks over an icy surface on the Earth. It would not be helped by the lower gravity on the Moon and would have the same limitations as on Earth. Similarly, a conveyor belt digging system might be more limited by inertial forces than gravitational ones. On the other hand, these digging systems are mostly about moving the rocks up rather than out, so that would probably be the limiting factor for the design, in which case they could move a Moon-ton of rocks.
Anyhow, just relax. I was merely pedantically pointing out a minor mistake in your use of terminology. There's no need to get upset about it and tell me to "get a clue."
Kilograms are a measure of mass not weight, so your mass in kilos is the same on the moon (well, minus the fairly miniscule relativistic effects of changing your frame of reference), even though your weigh in pounds will go down. The SI unit of weight is the Newton.
My friend told me that when he went to a Catholic high school, he had one teacher who was always really serious, a real hard ass who would say things like, "You kids need to know what kind of world is out there. Be serious. There's more to life than just who is going to the school dance," and such. One morning when all the students had came in he said in a really serious voice, "World War III just started this morning," and made it seem like the Soviet Union had declared war and the bombs were on their way. (This was during the Cold War.) Needless to say, after everyone was scared gutless at the prospect of nuclear annihilation, he admitted it was all a stunt to get them to think more about whether they're ready to meet the afterlife and such. It was really unexpected though, because none of the students thought that the teacher would ever be the type to pull a prank or a joke.
My friend ended up getting MAs in religion and philosophy, so I guess maybe it had an impact on him.
'I make fifty cents just for showing up, and the other 50 cents is based on my performance.'
I wonder if US publishers have ever thought to publish a title in Japan in time for Golden Week (much like they time holiday season releases in the US)...
Golden Week isn't a gift giving holiday. It's a chance to travel somewhere. So, sales of games are actually pretty flat during GW. The big gift giving holiday is (sort of) New Years. At New Years, kids get money from their relatives, then they go out to the stores and blow it on toys. That's as close as Japan has to our holiday rush.
Nintendo's usual strategy is to dribble out games slooooowly, so that there are never too many hits in the marketplace at one time consuming each other's oxygen. That makes sense--usually. But right now is a completely different case. Nintendo needs to maintain its sales rate advantage if it's going to overtake the 360 in the US and maintain its lead over the PS3 in Japan. A slow second half of 2007 could cause the Wii to lose momentum and fall at a time when it's crucial to reach escape velocity. If by December 2007 the Wii is still in the lead, developers are going to start moving all their new projects to the Wii. Once that happens, if you want the game you need the system, and Nintendo has it made. If the Wii juggernaut slows in the second half of 2007, then the developers will split. US devs will follow the 360, and Japanese devs will follow the PS3. If that happens, Wii is going to be stuck in the middle and (while doing quite well) won't dominate. Thus, the pressure is on for Nintendo to churn out as much as possible as soon as possible. We'll see how that works out for them...
Given that violent crime dropped dramatically from the mid-90s on (during the same time period in which the first generation to grow up with violent videogames came of age) the burden of proof for this lies on the side that proposes a link between videogames and violence. Unless there is really clear proof that violent crime would be even lower than it already is, I don't see much of a positive correlation between the two in the real world.
I think the thinking behind not being able to customize the ribbon was that it's pretty common in pre-2007 versions of Office for unsophisticated users to accidentally rip off a tool bar, resize it, shrink it, close it, whatever and then later they can't find it, and when you're on the phone with them you can't tell them where to click since their screen is completely different from the default screen. So, in order to protect the lame users, they stopped the power users from moving around the ribbon that much, except for the area on the title bar next to the Office button. (Personally, I find it deeply bizarre that they would put stuff on the title bar, but whatever.)
Anyhow, I don't know if I would have made the same choices as MS, but I think they at least had a rationale for what they were doing this time. A lot of stuff about Windows and the old Offices clearly had no rationale whatsoever and were completely random.
People sometimes talk like strong enforcement of Unix-style permissions is sufficient to provide local security. I find that argument totally unconvincing. Yes, it's nice to have the confidence that with modern OSes like Linux, OS X, and (probably) Vista I won't end up like the old Windows where you have to reformat a disk to try to clear the deeply dug in roots of some spyware crap from the system, but there's still the pretty damn big issue of all my data. Namely, having to reinstall the OS would be a pain, and I'm glad I don't have to waste an hour doing it, but losing all my data (documents, photos, music, and to a lesser extent application preferences) would be devastating. The data on my PowerBook is my life, and the reassurance that at least I don't have to reinstall OS X would be cold comfort at best. True, I do make a monthly backup onto an external drive that is normally unplugged (and thus out of range of rm *ing attacks), but probably most users don't follow this practice. Besides, a subtler virus could just silently corrupt my data over a period of months, so that I don't notice what's going on until my backups are no longer any good!
There is a solution to the problem, but it requires a deep rooted change in how things are done. What I propose is that we shift from permissions by user to permissions by application. Right now, any app that my user launches can erase any of my files. That's ridiculous! Much more logical would be allowing me to decide which subset of my files each app can user and how. So, for example, I would let FireFox write downloads to my desktop and its preferences and caches to subfolders of the Library, but I wouldn't want it to be able to erase any of my other files under any circumstances. In fact, most of the time I don't even want FireFox to be able to read my local files, but I'd be willing to put in a password to let it do on a time limited basis so during uploads and the like.
Basically, what I'm proposing amounts to sandboxing every app. This may seem harsh, but why not do it? What's the advantage of letting any app destroy any of my files? Make them at least beg me for permission first, I say!
So, that's what's on my wishlist for the future of OS level security.
Seriously, the parent completely misstated the intensity of hawking radiation. I can't believe it got modded up to 4 in the first place.
Now, black holes are often surrounded by bright clouds, but the clouds are bright for reasons completely unrelated to hawking radiation. As stuff falls into a black hole, it gets accelerated until it's going really fast. Once it gets fast enough, the light generated by the friction of the things falling in gets blue-shifted until it moves into the x-ray range. Now, this does occur a lot, so many black holes are detectable as the presumed center of giant x-ray vortexes, but that is completely different from hawking radiation since this is caused by material external to the black hole falling in.
"Hard prison time" is way out of proportion for most mistaken arrests, but I agree in principle that police officers should be liable for things done on the job that cross certain lines. For example, in the US justice system currently, if a cop gets a confession from you but didn't tell your rights, you go free and the cop faces no punishment. That's exactly backwards! Presuming the confession was legit, the crook should be locked up as normal, but the cop should be fired or at least severely demoted. Similarly, if a cop uses force to extract a confession, then that cop should go to jail, and the confession itself shouldn't be used in trial, since people will confess to anything under torture, but that doesn't mean the alleged crook should necessarily go free. What should be done is another investigation into the objective clues about the guilt or innocence of the accused.
I predict that Microsoft will win the hardcore gamer market and possibly the video delivery market.
US or Japan? I agree with you if we're talking about the US market, but the 360 is dead in Japan in spite of already having some great releases out. In Japan, Wii is already the best selling next-gen home console, but the PS3 has also overtaken the 360. Now, I guess it's possible that the 360 will bounce back in Japan, but I just wonder why it hasn't done that well yet. I think what we're going to be looking at is a market split with Japan lining up behind the Wii and PS3 but the US going for the 360 and Wii. Nintendo will laugh all the way to the bank, and the next next gen systems will all be launched a little early (4 years instead of 5) and the market will reconfigure again.
"35 years old," but only one pair of original parts is left on it? Sounds like the Philosopher's axe!
If a computer like it were sold not running OS X but just Linux or something, you wouldn't expect to pay a full $300 for it.
Emphasis added for clarity. Yeah, such a computer doesn't exist. But the power in the AppleTV is in the general neighborhood of the original Xbox and Wii, which both sell for less. So, if someone did want to make a computer like the AppleTV but without the OS, and they mass produced it, they might be able to make it a little cheaper.
No, the relative lowness of the price compared to other Apple products is because the Apple TV is a pretty underpowered PC. If a computer like it were sold not running OS X but just Linux or something, you wouldn't expect to pay a full $300 for it. The cost of OS X is more or less built into the cost of the machine as is.
My wishlist for DS2:
I don't think that such a device will be launched before '08 at the earliest though.
Along with that, it would be nice if we could load some of the Virtual Console games from the Wii onto the DS. The PS3 and PSP already allow downloading PS1 games and playing them portably. It would be nice if Nintendo would do the same. Obviously, you couldn't make all the games work like this, since the DS only has so much memory (4MB according to Wikipedia), but it should be enough for any NES game and maybe some of the SNES ones, depending on the amount of space you need for the emulator.
Woohoo! Macs for Mac Users, beyotch!
I agree completely. When I hear people say, "Oh, it's not a root exploit, so whatever," I find that argument totally unconvincing. Yes, it's nice to have the confidence that with OS X I won't end up like Windows where you have to go to the extreme lengths of reformatting a disk to try to clear the deeply dug in roots of some spyware crap from the system, but there's still the pretty damn big issue of all my data. Namely, having to reinstall OS X would be a pain, and I'm glad I don't have to waste an hour doing it, but losing all my data (documents, photos, music, and to a lesser extent application preferences) would be devastating. The data on my PowerBook is my life, and the reassurance that at least I don't have to reinstall OS X would be cold comfort at best. True, I do make a monthly backup onto an external drive that is normally unplugged (and thus out of range of rm *ing attacks), but probably most users don't follow this practice.
There is a solution to the problem, but it requires a deep rooted change in how things are done. What I propose is that we shift from permissions by user to permissions by application. Right now, any app that my user launches can erase any of my files. That's ridiculous! Much more logical would be allowing me to decide which subset of my files each app can user and how. So, for example, I would let FireFox write downloads to my desktop and its preferences and caches to subfolders of the Library, but I wouldn't want it to be able to erase any of my other files under any circumstances. In fact, most of the time I don't even want FireFox to be able to read my local files, but I'd be willing to put in a password to let it do on a time limited basis so during uploads and the like.
Basically, what I'm proposing amounts to sandboxing every app. This may seem harsh, but why not do it? What's the advantage of letting any app destroy any of my files? Make them at least beg me for permission first, I say!
So, that's what's on my wishlist for OS X.6. Linux dudes, you're encouraged to start hacking it out now and make OS history!
The sad, but obvious fact is that Word runs fastest natively under Windows on a PC (in this case a brand new Vaio which I had to buy to replace the MacBook Pro). Both of these computers had exactly the same specs.
WTF? If you supposedly tried all those other virtualization solutions, when they were too slow, why did you go to all the expense of buying a new computer with the same specs? That makes no sense. Just use BootCamp and boot into a full install of Windows, and it will run at the same speed as the Vaio, because it's 100% real Windows with no emulation whatsoever. But why buy new hardware, when the hardware you have is supposedly up to spec? That detail doesn't add up and makes your whole story sound made up.