The were labelled "iPhone" with the Apple logo. The police were only called when several unsuspecting consumers reported getting sever burns on their ears when attempting to make a call. One person lost an index finger just trying to dial police.
What the state representative is reacting to is not law, but policy. The use of "nude-o-scopes" and invasive pat-downs are not codified in federal law, so restricting their use is fair game. The supremacy clause arguably applies only to laws, not regulations or policies enacted outside of the law.
The TSA screeners aren't law enforcement officers. They cannot themselves arrest you or prevent you from passing through security without the aid of a local or state police officer. If the state and locality decide not to respond to an individual breaching security -- well, the breach happens. A state could simply make a rule preventing police officers from arresting people that refuse certain types of screening and permitting them to, essentially, bypass security.
States also don't have to their waive public safety laws (such as those pertaining to radiation exposure and operator requirements for such devices), nor sexual battery laws (TSA screeners are not law enforcement officers, and even if they were, the touching of breasts/genitals would only be permitted by court order or with reasonable cause). Technically speaking, my state would be well within its rights to enforce it's current laws on operation of X-ray emitting equipment if it is shown that the operator is not a licensed radiologist, if the use of the device is not for a medical purpose, and if the devices are not inspected and tested on the required schedule. That'd be a $25 fine per person screened, and perhaps a couple of weeks in prison for the operator.
In Adobe's announcement regarding the end of mobile Flash support, they stated that they were conceding to HTML5 in the web browser and will be focusing on moving Flash to desktop platform application development. While I suppose it was subtly stated, the implication was that they intend to phase out Flash as a browser plug-in entirely. Linux/X11 was already the most difficult for them to implement and had the highest cost/benefit, so it makes perfect sense for it to be the first to go. I imagine Google wants to keep Legacy Flash for Chrome on Linux if for no other reason than to secure another leg up on the browser competition. Overall, Google probably would just assume Flash die off, but if they can get buy-in from Linux users and push WebM and Dart in the process, then it's worth the effort.
The article is based on speculation. One of the bits of speculation, that CUPS would do away with PPD support, shows a lack of knowledge about how CUPS works on OS X and how the driverless print system (to support iOS devices) works. Namely, the PPDs are still required for the printer server (computer) to setup the printer with the appropriate features, color spaces, etc. CUPS requires a filter to translate the driverless print job (PDF or JPEG) to the raster protocol used by the device as specified in the PPD. For OS X, it's true that it's Quartz and Linux the filters will be different, but this is not so different than how it's been all along anyway.
The one thing that does ring true, however, would be moving from CUPS' proprietary CUPS-to-CUPS automatic discovery protocol to Zeroconf (Bonjour). There's a whole number of reasons that would make sense (for Linux just as much as OS X).
At $10,000 for a license, the software you sell is not a consumer product. That's not to say that a consumer may not want to use it, but that you've already discounted them as a customer. You should simply not trouble yourself with thwarting them because they would never be able to pay for it. They aren't your clients and by familiarizing themselves with your product, they may well turn their employer or future employers into clients. Some companies even embrace the idea by offering unsupported no-cost versions for non-commercial use.
Once you've decided that your customer base will only be professional / commercial customers, then the license is the important part. A commercial customer stands to loose A LOT if they are caught using unlicensed software. For them, they should consider the software part of their cost of doing business. If your product is too pricey, they should select another, otherwise, they need to purchase it and expense it. If you catch a customer using unlicensed copies, contact them and give them an opportunity to true up (after all, sometimes companies simply loose track of how many licenses they purchased - crappy license management is rampant). If a company still continues to use unlicensed versions of the software, then have a lawyer draft a demand for payment (and consider terminating their licenses; mind you, you'll loose them as a customer). When all else fails, file an infringement claim against them.
There's simply no DRM scheme that's 100% effective, and it only needs to be cracked once for it to become widely available. DRM schemes cost vendors like you lots of money to implement, and they are invariably a nuisance to the customers that legitimately license your software. Ultimately, DRM makes the pirated copies more valuable -- they are more portable between systems as they are upgraded, there are no dongles, issues with license key management, etc. It would be hard to make the case that DRM is likely to pay for itself.
Monsanto spun off it's chemical business in 1997 as Solutia, in part to distance itself from the liability of Agent Orange and PCBs. In 2000, Monsanto merged with Pharmacia (who had bought Solutia earlier), and the company was gutted and restructured, and left as a seed company with the glyphosate division. Shortly thereafter, Monsanto was spun off as a separate company again (Pharmacia mostly wanted GD Searle). The chemical business (at that point, part of Pharmacia), Solutia, went bankrupt in 2003.
There's the question whether the modern Monsanto is the correct party to hold liable. For a short period in 2000-2002, there was no separate company called Monsanto, just a brand. The current Monsanto is pretty much Dekalb Genetics with a new name.
It's interesting that Monsanto is considered the sole liable party.
In this particular case, the gist of the method is widely known, understood, and, frankly, obvious to anyone that cared. They simply applied artificial selection on the population to select for strains with a higher virulence -- no genetic engineering or manipulation involved.This is already an obvious inexpensive and simple approach to anyone that wanted to try it, provided that they had an inkling of biology knowledge and a desire to do so. Further, it highlights that there's a series of natural mutations that could occur in the wild to the same effect. Presumably, it suggests that we should be prepared for the eventual natural occurrence of this strain.
It's important to note that the product of these experiments was not something that's highly transmissible or deadly to humans, but rather to ferrets. It's presumed that it may (or some variant may) be a threat to humans, but that was never assessed.
For a typical terrorist, being able to control the distribution would be key. Part of a terrorist act is showing that you are in control of the situation and the other party is not. To that end, they'd prefer something stable outside the human body, transferrable by physical contact, with a long enough gestation time to be able to distribute to a large area before the outbreak is recognized. High mortality would probably be preferred, but debilitation would be just as good.
Something highly infectious by contact and aerosol would be good for a sociopathic ecoterrorist, but the key would really be to get a strain that remains as asymptomatic as possible post-infection but ultimately has high mortality. If people get sick the day after exposure, it's likely to be contained. If you developed a strain where there was an infectious period of 3-4 weeks before symptoms set in but still had high mortality, you'd kill off most of the industrialized world.
I have always mused about how a grass-roots citizen intelligence agency that monitors the government and it's agents might be realized. It's not a matter of turn-about being fair play, but one of the notion of checks and balances. The US system of government only functions properly to the degree that it's transparent and accountable. There's lots of practical issues, not the least of which is that closely monitoring the government or blowing the whistle can often be illegal under current law. Nonetheless, Anonymous already exists as a Citizen's Intelligence Agency of sorts, and I think that's a trend that will continue.
Doubtful. The paint is only part of the puzzle and a piece that they already have. The most valuable part is probably in the firmware. If they can unencrypt it, they can understand how to better jam it's command functions and also what electronic countermeasures it has.
They mean the IP address of my gateway, not *MY* IP address. Even then, it's not *MINE*, it comes from a pool of IPs handed out by my ISP's DHCP server and it changes periodically. The address assigned my gateway today could have been last used by the Disney Princess Bootleg Video Mafia, and I'd be a little offended if I found that I was being impugned as a distributor of low-brow animated bastardizations of classic fairy tales. Doubly so if some numb-nuts from Disney's legal department gets all uppity and litigious about it.
It's that they are poorly thought out. I generally like Apple products, but things like iCal annoy me. It's not that I think that Apple is treating me like a simpleton by making it look like a cheap desktop calendar. I dislike it precisely because it's not a cheap desktop calendar nor it is meant to be; the UI becomes a distraction or obstacle to the fundamental function of the application.
The ribbons in Office don't make the user feel like an idiot, but they do several undesirable things: they make the user relearn (unnecessarily) an application they were already familiar with, they use a silly amount of screen real-estate (I'm working on a document, not a menu bar with a document widget below), they add quite a few manipulations to get the same effect, and they eliminate indicators for accelerators (e.g., what key-combo to hit to trigger a function).
I prefer applications where the thing I'm working on is the dominant feature of the UI, where the path to a feature is as short as possible, where attributes of things I'm operating on are clearly displayed, and the paradigm where interaction with UI elements treats the elements and the data as objects and the interactions as operators on the objects (painting styles onto text, dragging and dropping media elements, etc.).
The thing is, as crime goes, terrorism is rare and the threat hasn't change appreciably in 50 years ( no matter what the evening news says ). The type of criminal activity in the US and international finance industries, however, is unprecedented and capable of causing far more damage. Unfortunately, we don't bring as many resources to bear on the greater threat to the country.
Major changes to a GUI are an expensive (time AND money) venture. They aren't changed without reason, and if it were just to change the proverbial drapes then all you'd need to do is develop a simple theming system once and you'd be done. Changes are being made because of a perception that there's something wrong, or that people are changing the way they use their computer - and they're right. Think how much more you use a browser and mail-contacts-calendaring uber-client now than you did 10 years again.
Chrome that provides feedback or contextual cues is good design. It's good design for physical hardware, and it's good for software. People are naturally very visual. Changing layouts and interactions to handle different modes of input (touch and gestures as opposed to keyboard or mouse movement), also very important.
What's happening now is that developers of GUIs are awakening to the fact that the elements of the UI define the ergonomics of interaction. Just like in the physical world, you can't turn screws with a hammer or pound nails with a screwdriver (you can, but not effectively). GUIs are no different. To make a GUI an efficient means of operating a computer, you need to consider the means of input, the ratio of input to output, and the most frequent operations so that you can remove as much overhead as possible from the interaction. The use of appropriate cues, consistency in the UI, and references to well understood symbols or real-world objects are effectively symbolic documentation and can be very efficient.
The OS X sandbox feature (first came out with Leopard in 2007) is functionally equivalent to Android's "uses-permission" and "uses-feature" portions of the application package manifest. In OS X lingo, the permissions and features are called "entitlements". You can even sandbox apps from the command-line for apps that aren't sandboxed on their own.
Basically, it means that applications need to declare up front the resource access they need and they don't get anymore. They can specify "I need access to the whole filesystem" (in which case, they can see whatever the user can according to the regular file ownership and permissions rules). If a sandboxed app was tricked / hacked such that it attempted to access a resource it didn't request an entitlement for, then it access is denied. Sandboxed apps gain temporary entitlements to files and folders that users specify through Open/Save dialogs or applications dropped on the app icon as well as their list of recent files.
It's pretty flexible, actually. I'm a little confused why there are USB-device entitlements and not a FireWire equivalent, but perhaps that's because of a difference in the way the APIs for both are implemented. Also, that an application needs to explicitly name the Applications to which it wants to send event messages to could be annoying.
This really has nothing to do with locking apps to the App Store or making it so only App Store apps will run. There's nothing remotely antitrust about it either. I think it can be annoying for the developer, but probably isn't anything but good news for the user.
Not quite. Applications will only be able to see parts of the filesystem that either: they request to see when they are written, or that the user specifies.
That is to say, by default an application can only see a private directory of its own. It can't read or write anywhere else. If it would like to ask a user to specify a file or directory to get access to, it can ask (through the Open or Save file dialogs), but it could only access them. If it would like to access some other directory or file without explicit user permission, then it needs to be included in the entitlement list. An entitlement list could contain things like, "The user's Pictures folder", or "/etc/services". The application could then access those things, but if somehow tricked to specify some other folder, it couldn't do it. Likewise, if the app would like to receive network connections, it needs to specify an entitlement that says as much. If it doesn't, then it can't access the network and can't be made to do so by a hack (other than altering the entitlement list and resigning the application with the original signing key).
It works very similarly to the Android "uses-permission" and "uses-feature" parts of an Android application manifest, if you are familiar with those.
Under the OS X sandbox model, an application can still do any of those things but would require administrator privilege for unfettered access to the filesystem (which it requires anyway because of the UNIX filesystem ownership and access rules).
Access to SD cards not much different in the Sandbox model than without. First, if a user specifies the SD card volume in a dialog, then access is permitted regardless. The sandbox grants access to files / directories explicitly selected by the user. There are existing APIs that would provide SD card access, and then you could also explicitly request USB mass storage direct access with the com.apple.security.device.usb entitlement.
There's a few things that are ambiguous about how you request an entitlement for, but I've not run into a situation where you simply couldn't do something.
That way, when you get up to the TSA kiosk at security, if your ticket develops the words "I have a bomb" on it, you go into the "I have a bomb" line, and everyone else goes into the "no bombs, it's just a diaper, my boyfriend is an astronaut, long story" line.
No. Paul doesn't suggest such a thing, nor does he suggest he's in favor of making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. Forgiveness of the debts simply isn't feasible.
Article 1, Section 8, the first of the enumerated powers of Congress states that collected taxes are to be used "to pay the Debts and provide for the common defence and general Welfare". That phrase has traditionally, even while the founders were still alive, had a very broad interpretation. At the time, there was no student loan program to speak of, but I'm pretty sure that sort of program would have fit with the overall goals of "providing for the general welfare" and "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts".
The student loan program really isn't "giving away" money either, as the money must be repaid -- one cannot even dispose of the debt in bankruptcy (student loan debt is the only debt you cannot discharge in that way). So the net cost, death of the student notwithstanding, is zero -- save possibly the adverse affects substantial debt has on the individual and the economy (reduced buying power, higher probability of requiring public assistance later in life, etc.).
Also, it's important to note that the government isn't giving away "your money", but rather "our money". A small chunk of that may have come from you, but how much of that chunk came from you is between you and your representatives. From the standpoint of federal law, the student loan program is on pretty decent ground as being a legitimate use of government funds. Not that Paul is wrong - I'm sure the availability of loans and grants does increase the cost of education, the schools will charge whatever they can get - but perhaps the focus on the student loan program isn't the best place for reform.
Just because the computer in question shared a file doesn't mean anyone in the house did it or was even aware of it. For that matter, there are trojans and viruses more than capable of establishing a personal computer as a file-sharing node without the knowledge of the owner / operator. The person at fault is the person that intentionally caused the content to be shared, not the computer owner or operator(s).
Media companies violate copyright all the time, using various image purloined from the Internet, distributing GPL'd software without the source code, etc.
Simply find a major media company that has made an infraction, report it, and make a stink when their Internet access isn't cut-off. Lather, rinse, repeat. At some point, the hypocrisy will start to become obvious even to a casual observer. Also, for those that get caught they can say: "Your honor, Sony violated this law 50 times last year and their website is still accessible; doesn't it seem improper that you'd take away mine after one infraction?"
I guess there's a wrinkle in that the law only seems to cover P2P (more or less), though any major player using Akamai or similar is effectively using P2P (as far the law is concerned) for distributing copyrighted content.
For all sorts of reasons, not the least of which being license and security reasons, they are going to wipe the computer and put their own software on there. There's too much liability in using software transferred with the computer (are the licenses valid, are they transferrable) -- and who knows what malware or spyware may be on there (even if you tell them you wiped it, how can they trust that you didn't reinfect it by accident or intentionally put spyware on it).
Really, your only concern should be to securely wipe the hard disk to prevent recovery of your won data. At that point, they may want to an OS on there to at least demonstrate that the machine boots, and then they will (if they have any clue), wipe it again.
I've used PostgreSQL for years and never used templates the way you described. To create a database I've always used:
CREATE DATABASE mydatabase;
or the createdb command-line utility. Similarly, creating tables:
CREATE TABLE example ( myfield CHAR(16) NOT NULL );
The only things that are tricky by comparison are related to user authentication and authorization. At the server, level, there's host-based authentication rules and mechanisms that don't exist in MySQL, and in the database you have the concepts of groups and roles that don't exist in MySQL.
Exactly. Apple's looking at serving the small-business and home server market, not the enterprise. They aren't pretending otherwise. Of course you aren't going to put a bunch of Apple-branded servers in your data-center as the center of your multi-national enterprise. You may, however, put one on the shelf in your real-estate office, or a closet at your catering business.
It's the 21st century. There's school-kids putting up servers for their scout troops, and servers in flower-shops, and print-shops. That's the sort of thing Apple's going for. The majority of the people that could use a server don't need enterprise-scale and cannot accommodate racks and data-rooms.
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The were labelled "iPhone" with the Apple logo. The police were only called when several unsuspecting consumers reported getting sever burns on their ears when attempting to make a call. One person lost an index finger just trying to dial police.
What the state representative is reacting to is not law, but policy. The use of "nude-o-scopes" and invasive pat-downs are not codified in federal law, so restricting their use is fair game. The supremacy clause arguably applies only to laws, not regulations or policies enacted outside of the law.
The TSA screeners aren't law enforcement officers. They cannot themselves arrest you or prevent you from passing through security without the aid of a local or state police officer. If the state and locality decide not to respond to an individual breaching security -- well, the breach happens. A state could simply make a rule preventing police officers from arresting people that refuse certain types of screening and permitting them to, essentially, bypass security.
States also don't have to their waive public safety laws (such as those pertaining to radiation exposure and operator requirements for such devices), nor sexual battery laws (TSA screeners are not law enforcement officers, and even if they were, the touching of breasts/genitals would only be permitted by court order or with reasonable cause). Technically speaking, my state would be well within its rights to enforce it's current laws on operation of X-ray emitting equipment if it is shown that the operator is not a licensed radiologist, if the use of the device is not for a medical purpose, and if the devices are not inspected and tested on the required schedule. That'd be a $25 fine per person screened, and perhaps a couple of weeks in prison for the operator.
In Adobe's announcement regarding the end of mobile Flash support, they stated that they were conceding to HTML5 in the web browser and will be focusing on moving Flash to desktop platform application development. While I suppose it was subtly stated, the implication was that they intend to phase out Flash as a browser plug-in entirely. Linux/X11 was already the most difficult for them to implement and had the highest cost/benefit, so it makes perfect sense for it to be the first to go. I imagine Google wants to keep Legacy Flash for Chrome on Linux if for no other reason than to secure another leg up on the browser competition. Overall, Google probably would just assume Flash die off, but if they can get buy-in from Linux users and push WebM and Dart in the process, then it's worth the effort.
The article is based on speculation. One of the bits of speculation, that CUPS would do away with PPD support, shows a lack of knowledge about how CUPS works on OS X and how the driverless print system (to support iOS devices) works. Namely, the PPDs are still required for the printer server (computer) to setup the printer with the appropriate features, color spaces, etc. CUPS requires a filter to translate the driverless print job (PDF or JPEG) to the raster protocol used by the device as specified in the PPD. For OS X, it's true that it's Quartz and Linux the filters will be different, but this is not so different than how it's been all along anyway.
The one thing that does ring true, however, would be moving from CUPS' proprietary CUPS-to-CUPS automatic discovery protocol to Zeroconf (Bonjour). There's a whole number of reasons that would make sense (for Linux just as much as OS X).
At $10,000 for a license, the software you sell is not a consumer product. That's not to say that a consumer may not want to use it, but that you've already discounted them as a customer. You should simply not trouble yourself with thwarting them because they would never be able to pay for it. They aren't your clients and by familiarizing themselves with your product, they may well turn their employer or future employers into clients. Some companies even embrace the idea by offering unsupported no-cost versions for non-commercial use.
Once you've decided that your customer base will only be professional / commercial customers, then the license is the important part. A commercial customer stands to loose A LOT if they are caught using unlicensed software. For them, they should consider the software part of their cost of doing business. If your product is too pricey, they should select another, otherwise, they need to purchase it and expense it. If you catch a customer using unlicensed copies, contact them and give them an opportunity to true up (after all, sometimes companies simply loose track of how many licenses they purchased - crappy license management is rampant). If a company still continues to use unlicensed versions of the software, then have a lawyer draft a demand for payment (and consider terminating their licenses; mind you, you'll loose them as a customer). When all else fails, file an infringement claim against them.
There's simply no DRM scheme that's 100% effective, and it only needs to be cracked once for it to become widely available. DRM schemes cost vendors like you lots of money to implement, and they are invariably a nuisance to the customers that legitimately license your software. Ultimately, DRM makes the pirated copies more valuable -- they are more portable between systems as they are upgraded, there are no dongles, issues with license key management, etc. It would be hard to make the case that DRM is likely to pay for itself.
Monsanto spun off it's chemical business in 1997 as Solutia, in part to distance itself from the liability of Agent Orange and PCBs. In 2000, Monsanto merged with Pharmacia (who had bought Solutia earlier), and the company was gutted and restructured, and left as a seed company with the glyphosate division. Shortly thereafter, Monsanto was spun off as a separate company again (Pharmacia mostly wanted GD Searle). The chemical business (at that point, part of Pharmacia), Solutia, went bankrupt in 2003.
There's the question whether the modern Monsanto is the correct party to hold liable. For a short period in 2000-2002, there was no separate company called Monsanto, just a brand. The current Monsanto is pretty much Dekalb Genetics with a new name.
It's interesting that Monsanto is considered the sole liable party.
In this particular case, the gist of the method is widely known, understood, and, frankly, obvious to anyone that cared. They simply applied artificial selection on the population to select for strains with a higher virulence -- no genetic engineering or manipulation involved.This is already an obvious inexpensive and simple approach to anyone that wanted to try it, provided that they had an inkling of biology knowledge and a desire to do so. Further, it highlights that there's a series of natural mutations that could occur in the wild to the same effect. Presumably, it suggests that we should be prepared for the eventual natural occurrence of this strain.
It's important to note that the product of these experiments was not something that's highly transmissible or deadly to humans, but rather to ferrets. It's presumed that it may (or some variant may) be a threat to humans, but that was never assessed.
For a typical terrorist, being able to control the distribution would be key. Part of a terrorist act is showing that you are in control of the situation and the other party is not. To that end, they'd prefer something stable outside the human body, transferrable by physical contact, with a long enough gestation time to be able to distribute to a large area before the outbreak is recognized. High mortality would probably be preferred, but debilitation would be just as good.
Something highly infectious by contact and aerosol would be good for a sociopathic ecoterrorist, but the key would really be to get a strain that remains as asymptomatic as possible post-infection but ultimately has high mortality. If people get sick the day after exposure, it's likely to be contained. If you developed a strain where there was an infectious period of 3-4 weeks before symptoms set in but still had high mortality, you'd kill off most of the industrialized world.
I have always mused about how a grass-roots citizen intelligence agency that monitors the government and it's agents might be realized. It's not a matter of turn-about being fair play, but one of the notion of checks and balances. The US system of government only functions properly to the degree that it's transparent and accountable. There's lots of practical issues, not the least of which is that closely monitoring the government or blowing the whistle can often be illegal under current law. Nonetheless, Anonymous already exists as a Citizen's Intelligence Agency of sorts, and I think that's a trend that will continue.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Custodiret eos,
Doubtful. The paint is only part of the puzzle and a piece that they already have. The most valuable part is probably in the firmware. If they can unencrypt it, they can understand how to better jam it's command functions and also what electronic countermeasures it has.
They mean the IP address of my gateway, not *MY* IP address. Even then, it's not *MINE*, it comes from a pool of IPs handed out by my ISP's DHCP server and it changes periodically. The address assigned my gateway today could have been last used by the Disney Princess Bootleg Video Mafia, and I'd be a little offended if I found that I was being impugned as a distributor of low-brow animated bastardizations of classic fairy tales. Doubly so if some numb-nuts from Disney's legal department gets all uppity and litigious about it.
It's that they are poorly thought out. I generally like Apple products, but things like iCal annoy me. It's not that I think that Apple is treating me like a simpleton by making it look like a cheap desktop calendar. I dislike it precisely because it's not a cheap desktop calendar nor it is meant to be; the UI becomes a distraction or obstacle to the fundamental function of the application.
The ribbons in Office don't make the user feel like an idiot, but they do several undesirable things: they make the user relearn (unnecessarily) an application they were already familiar with, they use a silly amount of screen real-estate (I'm working on a document, not a menu bar with a document widget below), they add quite a few manipulations to get the same effect, and they eliminate indicators for accelerators (e.g., what key-combo to hit to trigger a function).
I prefer applications where the thing I'm working on is the dominant feature of the UI, where the path to a feature is as short as possible, where attributes of things I'm operating on are clearly displayed, and the paradigm where interaction with UI elements treats the elements and the data as objects and the interactions as operators on the objects (painting styles onto text, dragging and dropping media elements, etc.).
The thing is, as crime goes, terrorism is rare and the threat hasn't change appreciably in 50 years ( no matter what the evening news says ). The type of criminal activity in the US and international finance industries, however, is unprecedented and capable of causing far more damage. Unfortunately, we don't bring as many resources to bear on the greater threat to the country.
Major changes to a GUI are an expensive (time AND money) venture. They aren't changed without reason, and if it were just to change the proverbial drapes then all you'd need to do is develop a simple theming system once and you'd be done. Changes are being made because of a perception that there's something wrong, or that people are changing the way they use their computer - and they're right. Think how much more you use a browser and mail-contacts-calendaring uber-client now than you did 10 years again.
Chrome that provides feedback or contextual cues is good design. It's good design for physical hardware, and it's good for software. People are naturally very visual. Changing layouts and interactions to handle different modes of input (touch and gestures as opposed to keyboard or mouse movement), also very important.
What's happening now is that developers of GUIs are awakening to the fact that the elements of the UI define the ergonomics of interaction. Just like in the physical world, you can't turn screws with a hammer or pound nails with a screwdriver (you can, but not effectively). GUIs are no different. To make a GUI an efficient means of operating a computer, you need to consider the means of input, the ratio of input to output, and the most frequent operations so that you can remove as much overhead as possible from the interaction. The use of appropriate cues, consistency in the UI, and references to well understood symbols or real-world objects are effectively symbolic documentation and can be very efficient.
The OS X sandbox feature (first came out with Leopard in 2007) is functionally equivalent to Android's "uses-permission" and "uses-feature" portions of the application package manifest. In OS X lingo, the permissions and features are called "entitlements". You can even sandbox apps from the command-line for apps that aren't sandboxed on their own.
Basically, it means that applications need to declare up front the resource access they need and they don't get anymore. They can specify "I need access to the whole filesystem" (in which case, they can see whatever the user can according to the regular file ownership and permissions rules). If a sandboxed app was tricked / hacked such that it attempted to access a resource it didn't request an entitlement for, then it access is denied. Sandboxed apps gain temporary entitlements to files and folders that users specify through Open/Save dialogs or applications dropped on the app icon as well as their list of recent files.
It's pretty flexible, actually. I'm a little confused why there are USB-device entitlements and not a FireWire equivalent, but perhaps that's because of a difference in the way the APIs for both are implemented. Also, that an application needs to explicitly name the Applications to which it wants to send event messages to could be annoying.
This really has nothing to do with locking apps to the App Store or making it so only App Store apps will run. There's nothing remotely antitrust about it either. I think it can be annoying for the developer, but probably isn't anything but good news for the user.
Not quite. Applications will only be able to see parts of the filesystem that either: they request to see when they are written, or that the user specifies.
That is to say, by default an application can only see a private directory of its own. It can't read or write anywhere else. If it would like to ask a user to specify a file or directory to get access to, it can ask (through the Open or Save file dialogs), but it could only access them. If it would like to access some other directory or file without explicit user permission, then it needs to be included in the entitlement list. An entitlement list could contain things like, "The user's Pictures folder", or "/etc/services". The application could then access those things, but if somehow tricked to specify some other folder, it couldn't do it. Likewise, if the app would like to receive network connections, it needs to specify an entitlement that says as much. If it doesn't, then it can't access the network and can't be made to do so by a hack (other than altering the entitlement list and resigning the application with the original signing key).
It works very similarly to the Android "uses-permission" and "uses-feature" parts of an Android application manifest, if you are familiar with those.
Those aren't good examples.
Under the OS X sandbox model, an application can still do any of those things but would require administrator privilege for unfettered access to the filesystem (which it requires anyway because of the UNIX filesystem ownership and access rules).
Access to SD cards not much different in the Sandbox model than without. First, if a user specifies the SD card volume in a dialog, then access is permitted regardless. The sandbox grants access to files / directories explicitly selected by the user. There are existing APIs that would provide SD card access, and then you could also explicitly request USB mass storage direct access with the com.apple.security.device.usb entitlement.
There's a few things that are ambiguous about how you request an entitlement for, but I've not run into a situation where you simply couldn't do something.
That way, when you get up to the TSA kiosk at security, if your ticket develops the words "I have a bomb" on it, you go into the "I have a bomb" line, and everyone else goes into the "no bombs, it's just a diaper, my boyfriend is an astronaut, long story" line.
No. Paul doesn't suggest such a thing, nor does he suggest he's in favor of making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. Forgiveness of the debts simply isn't feasible.
Article 1, Section 8, the first of the enumerated powers of Congress states that collected taxes are to be used "to pay the Debts and provide for the common defence and general Welfare". That phrase has traditionally, even while the founders were still alive, had a very broad interpretation. At the time, there was no student loan program to speak of, but I'm pretty sure that sort of program would have fit with the overall goals of "providing for the general welfare" and "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts".
The student loan program really isn't "giving away" money either, as the money must be repaid -- one cannot even dispose of the debt in bankruptcy (student loan debt is the only debt you cannot discharge in that way). So the net cost, death of the student notwithstanding, is zero -- save possibly the adverse affects substantial debt has on the individual and the economy (reduced buying power, higher probability of requiring public assistance later in life, etc.).
Also, it's important to note that the government isn't giving away "your money", but rather "our money". A small chunk of that may have come from you, but how much of that chunk came from you is between you and your representatives. From the standpoint of federal law, the student loan program is on pretty decent ground as being a legitimate use of government funds. Not that Paul is wrong - I'm sure the availability of loans and grants does increase the cost of education, the schools will charge whatever they can get - but perhaps the focus on the student loan program isn't the best place for reform.
... then Windows 8 fans can only be Metrosexuals.
Just because the computer in question shared a file doesn't mean anyone in the house did it or was even aware of it. For that matter, there are trojans and viruses more than capable of establishing a personal computer as a file-sharing node without the knowledge of the owner / operator. The person at fault is the person that intentionally caused the content to be shared, not the computer owner or operator(s).
Media companies violate copyright all the time, using various image purloined from the Internet, distributing GPL'd software without the source code, etc.
Simply find a major media company that has made an infraction, report it, and make a stink when their Internet access isn't cut-off. Lather, rinse, repeat. At some point, the hypocrisy will start to become obvious even to a casual observer. Also, for those that get caught they can say: "Your honor, Sony violated this law 50 times last year and their website is still accessible; doesn't it seem improper that you'd take away mine after one infraction?"
I guess there's a wrinkle in that the law only seems to cover P2P (more or less), though any major player using Akamai or similar is effectively using P2P (as far the law is concerned) for distributing copyrighted content.
For all sorts of reasons, not the least of which being license and security reasons, they are going to wipe the computer and put their own software on there. There's too much liability in using software transferred with the computer (are the licenses valid, are they transferrable) -- and who knows what malware or spyware may be on there (even if you tell them you wiped it, how can they trust that you didn't reinfect it by accident or intentionally put spyware on it).
Really, your only concern should be to securely wipe the hard disk to prevent recovery of your won data. At that point, they may want to an OS on there to at least demonstrate that the machine boots, and then they will (if they have any clue), wipe it again.
I've used PostgreSQL for years and never used templates the way you described. To create a database I've always used:
CREATE DATABASE mydatabase;
or the createdb command-line utility. Similarly, creating tables:
CREATE TABLE example ( myfield CHAR(16) NOT NULL );
The only things that are tricky by comparison are related to user authentication and authorization. At the server, level, there's host-based authentication rules and mechanisms that don't exist in MySQL, and in the database you have the concepts of groups and roles that don't exist in MySQL.
Exactly. Apple's looking at serving the small-business and home server market, not the enterprise. They aren't pretending otherwise. Of course you aren't going to put a bunch of Apple-branded servers in your data-center as the center of your multi-national enterprise. You may, however, put one on the shelf in your real-estate office, or a closet at your catering business.
It's the 21st century. There's school-kids putting up servers for their scout troops, and servers in flower-shops, and print-shops. That's the sort of thing Apple's going for. The majority of the people that could use a server don't need enterprise-scale and cannot accommodate racks and data-rooms.