Mac OS based servers, like MS-DOS based servers, were pretty damn secure because they had little to no remote access.
There was definitely remote access, file and web sharing in Mac OS, just a different way of doing it. The old MacOS had networking on a completely separate layer. If you didn't have the credentials to get out of the network layer, there was no access to anything else. In any other type of machine, like Unix or Windows, if you could establish a network connection, you were in the kernel.
Don't think people aren't pounding on OS X machines - they are but failing to get anywhere unless you're just dumb about security. A friend's Mac desktop was owned by someone from Spain installing an IRC server on his machine - twice. This guy made his username and password the same so he could remember it, which is how they got in. The initial complaint was he couldn't login. His password was apparently changed so I told him how to change it back.
After the second time two weeks later, I went and looked. SSH was turned on along with ALL the other sharing stuff. I removed the software (cleverly hidden in/var/tmp/.bash and/var/tmp/dos/.m), changed the password to something more secure and that was the end of it.
OTOH, my Father-In-Law's XP machine (fully patched and triple anitvirused) has been taken down about eight times in the last couple year's while his wife's Mac has been running fine exposed directly to the Internet for the last five years. He's got a Mac now.
That calls into question how the duplicate was made. Clearly, it wasn't made by playing a CD in a player and recording the output, so error correction was likely not used. This isn't a modern day story either, so the equipment they were using was probably marginal compared to today's Walmart CD player. I'll try to contact these guys and get some details.
Having been involved with creating DVD Audio disks, I can tell you there's absolutely a big difference that ordinary people can hear between 24bit/96Khz and 16bit/44.1Khz. It really is a BFD - like someone cleaned your ears out. The source material we were using was all original analog master tapes from the 1960's and 1970's and 1980's from that building in LA that looks like a stack of records. Some was remixed into 5.1 Surround and encoded as DTS on the disks. The sound quality was fabulous! Our monitor speakers for authoring were Tannoy Reveal 6 but we mixed with Genelec 1032s. Doing the old A/B switch really told the tale.
I know two audiophiles - professional audio mixers, to be exact, who absolutely have golden ears. They listened to a CD of an album master and frowned like something was wrong. The "image" wasn't right; "smeared" somehow. Turned out they could hear the difference between a master CD and a copy of the CD. The difference? Clock jitter. Yes, they could hear the effects of clock jitter. Both of these guys are legally blind which apparently sharpens other senses.
You can certainly tell when someone is squatting on a domain as opposed to having content that has anything to do with the name. The pages full of links on some web sites which looks exactly like the other 850,000 web sites these guys own should be the first tip. To me, that's not "using" the domain name. It's like scalping tickets. There are laws about that and it's a huge issue. Concerts are sold out in six seconds by scalpers using software to buy blocks of tickets for resale at 10x the box office rate.
There's no law against scalping domain names but cornering the market and slowly monopolizing names is already choking the availability of human readable domain names making the internet difficult to navigate. It's only going to get worse until most of the.com space is tied up in non-working names. Something needs to be done or the internet is toast. It's already toast in some circles.
I don't have a good solution to this... but what if the ICANN could mark a domain as being squatted and disqualify the name. If the domain squatter wanted $100,000 for a domain name, what if ICANN told the squatters "ok, pay us $100,000 to renew for a year or turn it loose and take your chances to buy it back for $35". Just a thought.
Since this kind of affront breaks most city noise ordinances, it should be relatively simple to shut down. If not, filing enough complaints will do the same.
That's trademarks. You have to use trademarks to keep them.
Brings up a question: if the ICANN (or whoever) is so bent over about following Trademark laws on infringers, why don't they also follow the "use it or lose it" part of the Trademark laws as well? That would be more balanced in this space.
Yes. OS X not nearly as needy for human interaction as most other installations. When I'm back from lunch, I stick in my Admin account, do two simple update swings and deliver the machine to the user.
it took me hours of work just getting it up to what I would consider basic functionality.
Same here
I tried 3 different PCs to load GG - only the old P2 800 Dell worked. The idea was to see how this would fare against Windows machines (which I'm now replacing with Macs anyway and the operators are MUCH happier). Once I got Ubuntu working my reaction was "now what?". It felt very naked. I can't give this to anyone the way it is. It was quite clunky compared to Tiger which runs rings around it in many ways. It was great to see all the Mozilla and OO apps loaded already but as a civilian user I'd be looking for photo, music and other media management without using something completely alien or feature starved. So, now it's my SugarCRM test server and it works slowly but well enough.
Lets be honest, MS needed Apple around to have any hope of dodging an anti-trust ruling
That, too, but Apple is primarily Microsoft's R&D Department.
A previous poster had it right - the $150 million was a drop in the bucket compared to the cash Apple had on hand and it was indeed a patent settlement - a minor victory for Jobs. At the time, I read an article that Apple could continue to operate for several years even if they didn't sell one more computer.
The only thing Microsoft may have done to "save" Apple was to keep making Office for the Mac as part of the agreement. Those were the days when everyone swore Macs were incompatible with the entire planet. Now, it's clear to most people that attractive alternatives to Microsoft are everywhere.
Evil? Where's the evil, exactly? I'm not following here. Probably, it began as Microsoft supporting a valuable business partner - Toshiba. However, don't discount Microsoft fucking up another industry segment to keep a war going - hoping the parties beat themselves to death while they engineer an outcome favorable to Microsoft. If everyone hates the DRM so much (region locking? gimme a break) they'll do the opposite of whatever Microsoft is pursuing. Buy Blu-ray anyway.
...Chief executive Randall Stephenson let drop that a new version of Apple's iPhone will be introduced in 2008...
Doesn't Apple sue information leakers out of existence? Not that it takes an Einstein to guess that anyway.
Apple needing AT&T? Only for a few special iPhone features. If Apple opened the iPhone to any carrier and passed off that special feature set, AT&T would likely be everyone's last carrier choice so who needs who?
Yet one has received free updates since release, where as the other has had four $129 software updates since release.
You were supposed to have Longhorn two years after XP came out but Microsoft's inability to ship when promised is a good thing now? The businesses who paid for "Software Assurance" on XP must feel pretty stupid. They did pay and got nothing - bought Vista a few times over if they stayed with SA but didn't get it until years later with most of the significant features stripped out - and a large percentage declined Vista AFAIK. Mac releases are slowing down like they said - this one was 30 months between major releases and 10.1 was free anyway. As well as OS X works, I'll happily pay for it even though I don't really need to - nothing phones home, no begging for reactivation, no repurchasing XP after the third time it blows up... I can install or uninstall or jump versions of OS X client and server all day long.
Besides, you call those things from Microsoft updates? All the customers were just beta testing until SP2. I wouldn't discount what happens to OS X point releases as "Service Packs". There was a HUGE difference between the original 10.4.0 release and the last 10.4.11 - not the least of which was Intel support - for free.
A/C has missed the point... there's a huge leap between not having what the BSA calls a valid receipt and being a software pirate. That's a big difference. Not having all the old software manuals means your software is obviously unlicensed? Come on.
The bigger problem is that not having a receipt, box and/or specular label for software you actually bought lets these whores call you a "software pirate", even if the software is 10 years old. They say you're stealing when you're not.
The worst they have you for is breach of contract. There's a giant gulf between that and piracy in a real court of Law. That's why they settle everything out of court. They'd have to prove you stole software and they can't - but they can bully you with threats and that almost always works. Try finding the boxes and receipts for Office '97 and all the upgrades in your business and keep them in a safe place.
Remembering the early descriptions of the shuttle while under development, it was presented as a "Space Truck" - the rough equivalent of an 18 wheeler for space. Lifting ability is only half of it. It's also got a crew of workers with living quarters, a big crane to pull payloads out of the back, manipulate objects outside or place workers at a job site. It even has the ability to recover a satellite or part of the ISS and bring it back if necessary. You can fly it around a target and position it for whatever the mission requires. What booster is going to do any of that?
Now, if you just want to hurl stuff into space, a booster is fine for that. When the shuttle delivers something to space, there are probably dozens of other things going on in the payload bay that come back to earth.
Slashdot Mirror
There was definitely remote access, file and web sharing in Mac OS, just a different way of doing it. The old MacOS had networking on a completely separate layer. If you didn't have the credentials to get out of the network layer, there was no access to anything else. In any other type of machine, like Unix or Windows, if you could establish a network connection, you were in the kernel.
Don't think people aren't pounding on OS X machines - they are but failing to get anywhere unless you're just dumb about security. A friend's Mac desktop was owned by someone from Spain installing an IRC server on his machine - twice. This guy made his username and password the same so he could remember it, which is how they got in. The initial complaint was he couldn't login. His password was apparently changed so I told him how to change it back.
After the second time two weeks later, I went and looked. SSH was turned on along with ALL the other sharing stuff. I removed the software (cleverly hidden in /var/tmp/.bash and /var/tmp/dos/.m), changed the password to something more secure and that was the end of it.
OTOH, my Father-In-Law's XP machine (fully patched and triple anitvirused) has been taken down about eight times in the last couple year's while his wife's Mac has been running fine exposed directly to the Internet for the last five years. He's got a Mac now.
Perfect Solution! The "Air Gap Firewall"!
That calls into question how the duplicate was made. Clearly, it wasn't made by playing a CD in a player and recording the output, so error correction was likely not used. This isn't a modern day story either, so the equipment they were using was probably marginal compared to today's Walmart CD player. I'll try to contact these guys and get some details.
Having been involved with creating DVD Audio disks, I can tell you there's absolutely a big difference that ordinary people can hear between 24bit/96Khz and 16bit/44.1Khz. It really is a BFD - like someone cleaned your ears out. The source material we were using was all original analog master tapes from the 1960's and 1970's and 1980's from that building in LA that looks like a stack of records. Some was remixed into 5.1 Surround and encoded as DTS on the disks. The sound quality was fabulous! Our monitor speakers for authoring were Tannoy Reveal 6 but we mixed with Genelec 1032s. Doing the old A/B switch really told the tale.
I know two audiophiles - professional audio mixers, to be exact, who absolutely have golden ears. They listened to a CD of an album master and frowned like something was wrong. The "image" wasn't right; "smeared" somehow. Turned out they could hear the difference between a master CD and a copy of the CD. The difference? Clock jitter. Yes, they could hear the effects of clock jitter. Both of these guys are legally blind which apparently sharpens other senses.
You can certainly tell when someone is squatting on a domain as opposed to having content that has anything to do with the name. The pages full of links on some web sites which looks exactly like the other 850,000 web sites these guys own should be the first tip. To me, that's not "using" the domain name. It's like scalping tickets. There are laws about that and it's a huge issue. Concerts are sold out in six seconds by scalpers using software to buy blocks of tickets for resale at 10x the box office rate.
There's no law against scalping domain names but cornering the market and slowly monopolizing names is already choking the availability of human readable domain names making the internet difficult to navigate. It's only going to get worse until most of the .com space is tied up in non-working names. Something needs to be done or the internet is toast. It's already toast in some circles.
I don't have a good solution to this... but what if the ICANN could mark a domain as being squatted and disqualify the name. If the domain squatter wanted $100,000 for a domain name, what if ICANN told the squatters "ok, pay us $100,000 to renew for a year or turn it loose and take your chances to buy it back for $35". Just a thought.
Since this kind of affront breaks most city noise ordinances, it should be relatively simple to shut down. If not, filing enough complaints will do the same.
Brings up a question: if the ICANN (or whoever) is so bent over about following Trademark laws on infringers, why don't they also follow the "use it or lose it" part of the Trademark laws as well? That would be more balanced in this space.
Yes. OS X not nearly as needy for human interaction as most other installations. When I'm back from lunch, I stick in my Admin account, do two simple update swings and deliver the machine to the user.
OS X is the only OS I know of where I can consistently hit "Install", go to lunch - and come back to a working machine.
Same here
I tried 3 different PCs to load GG - only the old P2 800 Dell worked. The idea was to see how this would fare against Windows machines (which I'm now replacing with Macs anyway and the operators are MUCH happier). Once I got Ubuntu working my reaction was "now what?". It felt very naked. I can't give this to anyone the way it is. It was quite clunky compared to Tiger which runs rings around it in many ways. It was great to see all the Mozilla and OO apps loaded already but as a civilian user I'd be looking for photo, music and other media management without using something completely alien or feature starved. So, now it's my SugarCRM test server and it works slowly but well enough.
That, too, but Apple is primarily Microsoft's R&D Department.
A previous poster had it right - the $150 million was a drop in the bucket compared to the cash Apple had on hand and it was indeed a patent settlement - a minor victory for Jobs. At the time, I read an article that Apple could continue to operate for several years even if they didn't sell one more computer.
The only thing Microsoft may have done to "save" Apple was to keep making Office for the Mac as part of the agreement. Those were the days when everyone swore Macs were incompatible with the entire planet. Now, it's clear to most people that attractive alternatives to Microsoft are everywhere.
The customers should figure out what Einstein thought that up and insert a large object into him!
Eloquent, focused, tempered and practical as always, Daniel.
Why go through the trouble? In America, all you need are some alleged loose chads to win.
Yeah... the iPhone Nano or iPad isn't covered by that AT&T contract, is it?...
...but AT&T has a four year exclusiveCrap. That's right. Makes me wonder if AT&T just violated the NDA - [insert Apple lawyers searching for escape clauses here]
...Chief executive Randall Stephenson let drop that a new version of Apple's iPhone will be introduced in 2008...Doesn't Apple sue information leakers out of existence? Not that it takes an Einstein to guess that anyway.
Apple needing AT&T? Only for a few special iPhone features. If Apple opened the iPhone to any carrier and passed off that special feature set, AT&T would likely be everyone's last carrier choice so who needs who?
You were supposed to have Longhorn two years after XP came out but Microsoft's inability to ship when promised is a good thing now? The businesses who paid for "Software Assurance" on XP must feel pretty stupid. They did pay and got nothing - bought Vista a few times over if they stayed with SA but didn't get it until years later with most of the significant features stripped out - and a large percentage declined Vista AFAIK. Mac releases are slowing down like they said - this one was 30 months between major releases and 10.1 was free anyway. As well as OS X works, I'll happily pay for it even though I don't really need to - nothing phones home, no begging for reactivation, no repurchasing XP after the third time it blows up... I can install or uninstall or jump versions of OS X client and server all day long.
Besides, you call those things from Microsoft updates? All the customers were just beta testing until SP2. I wouldn't discount what happens to OS X point releases as "Service Packs". There was a HUGE difference between the original 10.4.0 release and the last 10.4.11 - not the least of which was Intel support - for free.
A/C has missed the point... there's a huge leap between not having what the BSA calls a valid receipt and being a software pirate. That's a big difference. Not having all the old software manuals means your software is obviously unlicensed? Come on.
The bigger problem is that not having a receipt, box and/or specular label for software you actually bought lets these whores call you a "software pirate", even if the software is 10 years old. They say you're stealing when you're not.
The worst they have you for is breach of contract. There's a giant gulf between that and piracy in a real court of Law. That's why they settle everything out of court. They'd have to prove you stole software and they can't - but they can bully you with threats and that almost always works. Try finding the boxes and receipts for Office '97 and all the upgrades in your business and keep them in a safe place.
Remembering the early descriptions of the shuttle while under development, it was presented as a "Space Truck" - the rough equivalent of an 18 wheeler for space. Lifting ability is only half of it. It's also got a crew of workers with living quarters, a big crane to pull payloads out of the back, manipulate objects outside or place workers at a job site. It even has the ability to recover a satellite or part of the ISS and bring it back if necessary. You can fly it around a target and position it for whatever the mission requires. What booster is going to do any of that?
Now, if you just want to hurl stuff into space, a booster is fine for that. When the shuttle delivers something to space, there are probably dozens of other things going on in the payload bay that come back to earth.
Ballmer? Is that you?
CHAIR!