What kind of madness is it to link a dynamic forum message to slashdot? It is really irresponsible as there may be actual people needing to post/reply to that forum. What happened to linking a basic.txt file as "release notes.txt", even pdf wouldn't crash a server.
If I was a KDE user/ 4 adopter and needed official help, I would be really pissed now.
You still don't get the purpose of KDE 4 series, just like most of Linux/FreeBSD guys.
KDE 4 will be "KDE" on Windows, it doesn't install any POSIX emulation library etc. unless you tell it to do so. Let me tell the degree of integration, future KDE media framework will use Quicktime framework on OS X and Windows Media framework on Windows.
So that is why KDE 4 will be a revolution and why it is such a huge, complex upgrade. In future we may even see Symbian (foundation) S60 phones/PDAs coming with KDE 4 as GUI and app collection.
iPod is very well established on Windows market too. There are no "OS X exclusive" features of iPod or anything. That is the trick.
If Apple didn't know Linux/FreeBSD people are allergic to DRM and closed source, they could release both iTunes and Quicktime if there is market for them. MS can't. They are still in "Don't use Windows? Take that!" mood.
PS: If you check GNU Step, you can understand how easy in fact for Apple to release Linux software.
We, Microsoft, being number 1 software company for Apple Macintosh OS X don't have any kind of support for that device on OS X. Why? It is not they are incapable, I can't imagine how complex application their Office/OS X must be.
That is the question Windows Mobile team ask themselves too. I recently plugged a iPhone (I reject to buy) to a Windows XP box and very impressed with its compatibility down to photo import. Try to connect a Windows Mobile to OS X and see what happens. (address book and net connect doesn't count, even Nokia S40 can do it).
I had a major fight with my Cable ISP and removed the line, moving to 56K until I find a good DSL provider. It was like 3-4 months for me and you know what? Only phone bill bothered me as we actually pay for Internet dial up (separate price but still exists).
I didn't go into "crisis" or something. I just bought more DVDs and Audio CDs, paid to better Satellite paytv subscription.
I know very important academic figures who doesn't have broadband access because they simply don't need it. All they do is check the mail (and mailing lists), Usenet and browse couple of news sites or academic sites. They should have a good clue about what the Internet is since they remember Gopher etc. access. They are way more experienced than those P2P/Youtube broadband guys but they simply don't care about it. Such people doesn't spend money to TV set (LCD/Plasma) too. Can we call them ignorant?
If I wanted to spy a guy/woman and he had both Windows and OS X laptops, I would go for OS X. Why? Because he/she won't be likely running any security software or would really care about how the system works. Also thanks to the underlying state of art code like launchd, unix compatibility and not so paranoid system behaviour (as no need yet), my backdoor would work way better than windows alternative.
"It can't get infected to anything" false impression is the biggest threat to OS X security. There are lots of zombie "bootcamp" or "parallels" macs running windows because user somehow doesn't feel the need to install an antivirus or doesn't know how evil new stuff can be.
You guys are really getting to the "ridiculous" point. They develop and sell Internet Security software for Macintosh and let me remind you, they code very good native OS X applications although there isn't much need for them (yet.). So they found a trojan which may develop to worm and have let public know about it. What is your point exactly?
I'd rather blame Clam guys who rejects to get various trojan (e.g. variants of RSPlug) sigs from Intego and other vendors because they THINK it is not a real threat. Yea, like those 400.000 windows viruses they detect are all top of the line, polymorphic and state of art code which requires no user interaction.
The use of "Services" that way sounds like a Windows malware developer coded it. There is no "services.exe" on OS X, the "Service" on OS X is something really different.
Also as launchd is not abused, this must be some guy other than that "quicktime codec" black hat/lamer.
Trojan is using very old school tactic, StartupItems is more like 10.3.x stuff but it must have right permissions since OS X 10.4.x/10.5 will display a very tough warning about them
The parent you reply to forgets Apple security business is years behind of Windows, especially Intego doesn't have a standard (symantec like) online virus database (yet). I am almost sure they will post details of how to remove soon.
Autorun thing was "invented' on Windows 95 right? There were thousands of evil MS-DOS viruses back that time which are sometimes way more advanced than the Visual basic junk of today.
What makes me shrug is that fact. It is not like MS-DOS was virus free and they already had reports of windows 3.1 breaking because of DOS viruses. First thing they invent on a DOS Hybrid OS? Autorun which will run anything said on autorun.inf file. Well, lets say in Windows 95 times, a CD-R really costed too much. What about Windows 98?
In fact Windows already have a manual (but GUI) auto install which is way more safe. "Add remove programs" has/had "Install new Software" which basically asks you to insert the CD/Diskette of software you want to install. They could disable autorun and put "Install programs/games" as a separate control panel.
for a bigger shocker, the first PC (not in sense of IBM) virus was a Mac Virus. "In the home" , Richard Skrenta 1982. It is a joke got out of hand.
I really hope nobody/no company codes a virus/worm for operating systems which are considered "super secure" by their clueless users. Results would be disastrous as there is almost no security software running on such systems.
Funny is, they copy everything from OS X regarding ease of use but they don't stop a second and think why Apple, the king of usability stayed away from autorun/auto play. Doesn't Apple have a similar feature? Of course, if you set a special bit/file (not sure, Roxio Toast and Apple does it), it auto opens a Finder window when CD/DVD inserted only showing its contents and nothing else.
If it wasn't shouting "security/stability risk", Apple would put that feature back in MacOS days.
Also lets not forget when the home user buyable SSD arrives, people will look for reliability, better support, better OS support etc. It will be more like tape/lp to CD audio transition. It won't be the quality of magnetic stuff but the quality of parts and reliability to make the choice.
If Seagate does things I have never heard of that brand like publishing buggy firmware, they don't have a single chance in SSD transition. I am very surprised of recent lack of quality as I am running same SATA drive from Seagate for almost 4 years now as my boot drive on OS X. Not a single bad sector, smart warning , lost byte and most important, no sound. In fact, I got a way older Seagate 20 GB which actually works when plugged to USB case.
Always think about Average Joe. Guy has single HD having one partition or 2 at most and he downloads the "Firmware update thing" from Seagate, using Windows. Burns to CD, boots using CD and his only disk becomes unbootable.
This is more like a broken BIOS update where you know you can still reflash but you lack knowledge and/or equipment to do it. So you throw away your mainboard and never buy from that brand again.
Seagate and other vendors should find a way to "online" and "safely" (with backup, tests and easy restore CD) update firmwares without need of CD burning/booting.
Adobe, Real Networks, Apple (Quicktime) and even Java from Sun. Here is 98% of web media for you, all working fine under PowerPC and it takes considerable time for vendor companies to maintain them. Do you know what they earn by doing so? Respect and scalability.
MS drops PPC support because they aren't really serious in media player business. They saw whole web even including Real Networks going for standard codecs derived from mpeg 4 base. Real even abandoned their own ATRAC fantasies (which they paid huge money to Sony) and went with AAC and AAC+.
As a person doing business in Video, I know couple of things down to first 56K Video streaming experiments. MS is the last company to trust your media if you really want to make a setup which will extend to EVERYTHING.
They copy every UI aspect of OS X but yet they don't really look to stuff like how Apple could deal with their own filesystem backwards compatibility issues while moving to Unix. It is actually very interesting to read as MacOS HFS+ isn't really a "designed for Unix" filesystem.
Apple added everything virtually in a way that even old MacOS apps using MacOS archaic methods have no problems finding their files and yet you are running a certified UNIX same time.
It can be done, they could get rid of that C: junk even back in first NTFS Windows NT but they have chosen not to. NTFS is actually a resource aware filesystem and only backdoors/rootkits use that feature! I really don't get it, they still use that fs as "enhanced DOS FAT". If you used OS/2, you can easily say HPFS/NTFS even exceeds Mac filesystems when not used in archaic way.
That OS is decent, the idea behind it and the technologies coming with it are so good that they got "imported" to other operating systems, IMHO eventually it will be used just like Mach found a use on OS X after all years. Issue is, UNIX is so good and "already working" so nobody cares!
Quote from Eric S. Raymond:
""Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough."
Perhaps MS should start reading quotes of "UNIX" guys?:)
They have like 5-7 years to figure that such criticism will always happen, especially from foreigners and they will learn not to take serious that much eventually.
If there is a single topic on Slashdot I don't really care to comment, moderate or even care to read... It is about my own country and people. I don't really care but in China case, Americans trying to teach them human rights even while that "W" disaster still in office... Perhaps, they have right to get trolled?:)
Slashdot Mirror
KDE 4 series runs natively on OS X and Windows. I think good willing ones will try KDE 4 and it will serve to Linux/FreeBSD eventually.
KDE has been always targeted by trolls, it is not a FOSS matter, it is side effect of "desktop wars" and even GTK/Qt philosophy, C vs. C++ thing.
After buying a 2 Gig SD memory card for my phone finding out it is 1800 MB , I call the situation hopeless. 200 MB really matter on that level.
Even Apple adopted their fake GB to disk utility not to confuse users, it says 1800MB (2 TB) I bet.
What kind of madness is it to link a dynamic forum message to slashdot? It is really irresponsible as there may be actual people needing to post/reply to that forum. What happened to linking a basic .txt file as "release notes.txt", even pdf wouldn't crash a server.
If I was a KDE user/ 4 adopter and needed official help, I would be really pissed now.
You still don't get the purpose of KDE 4 series, just like most of Linux/FreeBSD guys.
KDE 4 will be "KDE" on Windows, it doesn't install any POSIX emulation library etc. unless you tell it to do so. Let me tell the degree of integration, future KDE media framework will use Quicktime framework on OS X and Windows Media framework on Windows.
So that is why KDE 4 will be a revolution and why it is such a huge, complex upgrade. In future we may even see Symbian (foundation) S60 phones/PDAs coming with KDE 4 as GUI and app collection.
iPod is very well established on Windows market too. There are no "OS X exclusive" features of iPod or anything. That is the trick.
If Apple didn't know Linux/FreeBSD people are allergic to DRM and closed source, they could release both iTunes and Quicktime if there is market for them. MS can't. They are still in "Don't use Windows? Take that!" mood.
PS: If you check GNU Step, you can understand how easy in fact for Apple to release Linux software.
We, Microsoft, being number 1 software company for Apple Macintosh OS X don't have any kind of support for that device on OS X. Why? It is not they are incapable, I can't imagine how complex application their Office/OS X must be.
That is the question Windows Mobile team ask themselves too. I recently plugged a iPhone (I reject to buy) to a Windows XP box and very impressed with its compatibility down to photo import. Try to connect a Windows Mobile to OS X and see what happens. (address book and net connect doesn't count, even Nokia S40 can do it).
I had a major fight with my Cable ISP and removed the line, moving to 56K until I find a good DSL provider. It was like 3-4 months for me and you know what? Only phone bill bothered me as we actually pay for Internet dial up (separate price but still exists).
I didn't go into "crisis" or something. I just bought more DVDs and Audio CDs, paid to better Satellite paytv subscription.
I know very important academic figures who doesn't have broadband access because they simply don't need it. All they do is check the mail (and mailing lists), Usenet and browse couple of news sites or academic sites. They should have a good clue about what the Internet is since they remember Gopher etc. access. They are way more experienced than those P2P/Youtube broadband guys but they simply don't care about it. Such people doesn't spend money to TV set (LCD/Plasma) too. Can we call them ignorant?
If I wanted to spy a guy/woman and he had both Windows and OS X laptops, I would go for OS X. Why? Because he/she won't be likely running any security software or would really care about how the system works. Also thanks to the underlying state of art code like launchd, unix compatibility and not so paranoid system behaviour (as no need yet), my backdoor would work way better than windows alternative.
"It can't get infected to anything" false impression is the biggest threat to OS X security. There are lots of zombie "bootcamp" or "parallels" macs running windows because user somehow doesn't feel the need to install an antivirus or doesn't know how evil new stuff can be.
You guys are really getting to the "ridiculous" point. They develop and sell Internet Security software for Macintosh and let me remind you, they code very good native OS X applications although there isn't much need for them (yet.). So they found a trojan which may develop to worm and have let public know about it. What is your point exactly?
I'd rather blame Clam guys who rejects to get various trojan (e.g. variants of RSPlug) sigs from Intego and other vendors because they THINK it is not a real threat. Yea, like those 400.000 windows viruses they detect are all top of the line, polymorphic and state of art code which requires no user interaction.
The use of "Services" that way sounds like a Windows malware developer coded it. There is no "services.exe" on OS X, the "Service" on OS X is something really different.
Also as launchd is not abused, this must be some guy other than that "quicktime codec" black hat/lamer.
Trojan is using very old school tactic, StartupItems is more like 10.3.x stuff but it must have right permissions since OS X 10.4.x/10.5 will display a very tough warning about them
The parent you reply to forgets Apple security business is years behind of Windows, especially Intego doesn't have a standard (symantec like) online virus database (yet). I am almost sure they will post details of how to remove soon.
Autorun thing was "invented' on Windows 95 right? There were thousands of evil MS-DOS viruses back that time which are sometimes way more advanced than the Visual basic junk of today.
What makes me shrug is that fact. It is not like MS-DOS was virus free and they already had reports of windows 3.1 breaking because of DOS viruses. First thing they invent on a DOS Hybrid OS? Autorun which will run anything said on autorun.inf file. Well, lets say in Windows 95 times, a CD-R really costed too much. What about Windows 98?
In fact Windows already have a manual (but GUI) auto install which is way more safe. "Add remove programs" has/had "Install new Software" which basically asks you to insert the CD/Diskette of software you want to install. They could disable autorun and put "Install programs/games" as a separate control panel.
for a bigger shocker, the first PC (not in sense of IBM) virus was a Mac Virus. "In the home" , Richard Skrenta 1982. It is a joke got out of hand.
I really hope nobody/no company codes a virus/worm for operating systems which are considered "super secure" by their clueless users. Results would be disastrous as there is almost no security software running on such systems.
Funny is, they copy everything from OS X regarding ease of use but they don't stop a second and think why Apple, the king of usability stayed away from autorun/auto play. Doesn't Apple have a similar feature? Of course, if you set a special bit/file (not sure, Roxio Toast and Apple does it), it auto opens a Finder window when CD/DVD inserted only showing its contents and nothing else.
If it wasn't shouting "security/stability risk", Apple would put that feature back in MacOS days.
Aren't you shocked that Autorun on USB class device (key) is enabled by default?
It is bricked for the average, single PC and perhaps Laptop HD owning and Windows booting customer of Seagate.
Well, Hitachi, the company bought their HD business made a good name in hard disks. So, the management and perhaps software outsourcing was the issue.
They still use "Deskstar" brand FYI.
http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/products/deskstar/
If someone named "Maxtorman" works at Seagate, we know where the problem comes from :)
Sorry couldn't stand remembering my 450 MB Maxtor drive *g*
Also lets not forget when the home user buyable SSD arrives, people will look for reliability, better support, better OS support etc. It will be more like tape/lp to CD audio transition. It won't be the quality of magnetic stuff but the quality of parts and reliability to make the choice.
If Seagate does things I have never heard of that brand like publishing buggy firmware, they don't have a single chance in SSD transition. I am very surprised of recent lack of quality as I am running same SATA drive from Seagate for almost 4 years now as my boot drive on OS X. Not a single bad sector, smart warning , lost byte and most important, no sound. In fact, I got a way older Seagate 20 GB which actually works when plugged to USB case.
Always think about Average Joe. Guy has single HD having one partition or 2 at most and he downloads the "Firmware update thing" from Seagate, using Windows. Burns to CD, boots using CD and his only disk becomes unbootable.
This is more like a broken BIOS update where you know you can still reflash but you lack knowledge and/or equipment to do it. So you throw away your mainboard and never buy from that brand again.
Seagate and other vendors should find a way to "online" and "safely" (with backup, tests and easy restore CD) update firmwares without need of CD burning/booting.
Does their roadmap include PPC/OS X. a plugin running under Cocoa browser plugin subsystem?
They exist for such apologies on behalf of Microsoft anyway. We will see the results soon if not already.
Adobe, Real Networks, Apple (Quicktime) and even Java from Sun. Here is 98% of web media for you, all working fine under PowerPC and it takes considerable time for vendor companies to maintain them. Do you know what they earn by doing so? Respect and scalability.
MS drops PPC support because they aren't really serious in media player business. They saw whole web even including Real Networks going for standard codecs derived from mpeg 4 base. Real even abandoned their own ATRAC fantasies (which they paid huge money to Sony) and went with AAC and AAC+.
As a person doing business in Video, I know couple of things down to first 56K Video streaming experiments. MS is the last company to trust your media if you really want to make a setup which will extend to EVERYTHING.
I have never said "lol M$ sux" type of thing.
Apple did it back in OS X 10.1 , 10.0 was way too buggy (imagine the size of such transition) and people who has bought 10.0 got 10.1 free upgrade.
Of course Apple had very real, big excuses and people didn't make it a big deal. They even thought it is all natural.
In case of Vista, free Windows 7 upgrade may make people really, really thankful even while MS is to blame for Vista quality.
They copy every UI aspect of OS X but yet they don't really look to stuff like how Apple could deal with their own filesystem backwards compatibility issues while moving to Unix. It is actually very interesting to read as MacOS HFS+ isn't really a "designed for Unix" filesystem.
Apple added everything virtually in a way that even old MacOS apps using MacOS archaic methods have no problems finding their files and yet you are running a certified UNIX same time.
It can be done, they could get rid of that C: junk even back in first NTFS Windows NT but they have chosen not to. NTFS is actually a resource aware filesystem and only backdoors/rootkits use that feature! I really don't get it, they still use that fs as "enhanced DOS FAT". If you used OS/2, you can easily say HPFS/NTFS even exceeds Mac filesystems when not used in archaic way.
Doesn't it sound like Plan9? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan9
That OS is decent, the idea behind it and the technologies coming with it are so good that they got "imported" to other operating systems, IMHO eventually it will be used just like Mach found a use on OS X after all years. Issue is, UNIX is so good and "already working" so nobody cares!
Quote from Eric S. Raymond:
""Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough."
Perhaps MS should start reading quotes of "UNIX" guys? :)
They have like 5-7 years to figure that such criticism will always happen, especially from foreigners and they will learn not to take serious that much eventually.
If there is a single topic on Slashdot I don't really care to comment, moderate or even care to read... It is about my own country and people. I don't really care but in China case, Americans trying to teach them human rights even while that "W" disaster still in office... Perhaps, they have right to get trolled? :)