Oh! It's BACK! Clicked it again, checked updates, none. Clicked over to Featured, it's gone again. What's interesting is that, yes, I did download Yosemite after the "1 new" bubble disappeared, so now, at this point, my download has been recorded by the App Store. I haven't installed it yet (as I said, I'll be doing that this evening, on my own time), but I've certainly interacted with it by now. Yet there's the notification again; and it disappeared again as soon as I viewed the Featured tab.
Go ahead, install Yosemite, then get back to me regarding this.
Well bully for you. If it was a software update, why was it not listed in my Updates tab? And why did it go away when I let the Featured tab load into view? I haven't installed (or even downloaded) it yet; I'll do that this evening, when I'm not trying to work.
Let me reiterate: It was there before I installed updates (indicating 1 new item, while there were 3 updates). I installed all available updates. It was still there. I viewed the Featured tab. It went away. There was absolutely zero interaction between the Updates tab and that notification (and, in fact, there was no notification of the available updates, at all, until I manually navigated to them), but there certainly was interaction between that notification and the Featured (e.g. ads) tab.
It may have been triggered by me running the Yosemite beta, but it was a notification of an ad. Period.
I'm qualified to say that the reason Google Docs sucks is because it's a web app.
First of all, what qualifies you to say that? Second, that's not what you said; you said the reason they were so limited that I don't like them was that they're a web app, which fails on two parts; first, they're native on Android and iOS; and second, it's the interface I don't like, they're actually quite capable tools.
They are file formats. They are not methods of handing off open documents between different devices without first saving them somewhere. Completely different thing.
Oh? Well, if that's what you're after, what happened to FTP, SFTP, SCP, HTTP, el-al? Not good enough, because it first has to be saved somewhere? Well, you're saving to iCloud, and that's somewhere; don't be fooled into thinking a temporary file isn't created somewhere on your disk, which is precisely how you would enable any of the other file transfer technologies we've had for decades to work in exactly the same way. In fact, nearly every cloud storage provider (including iCloud) uses HTTP as a primary transfer method.
And even they are fucked. Documents moved between different office apps tend to break. Still. In 2014.
But at least they open. I'd rather have to do some reformatting when changing providers or applications than lose access to my data altogether.
It's a sync service, that works on open files. And that's hard. Very hard. Always has been. And if you don't know that, that's your incompetence.
So, then, you're saying I should be able to have the same document open on two devices, edit it, on one, and see the changes immediately on the other? That's actually not that difficult unless you're also tracking cursor position, which there's typically no need for. I do the same thing in my IDE with Git and automated commits and pulls (I automate squashing of the automated commits, as well, so I don't have millions of commits at the end of the day). Once per minute, the live update branch is fetched, and local changes are committed and pushed back to the branch; any decent IDE can update the display when the file contents change. Yes, there are files involved, but then, there's always a temporary file involved. It would be stupid not to use a temp file; what happens if you lose connectivity, or power goes out between cloud updates?
Even tracking cursor positions is simple, though; you just use a different mechanism for it, either a direct connection between users, or a connection to a central location, where the information is exchanged in real time. It's active state data, not persistent, so there's no need to store it.
And yes, I'm a developer that has programmed with iCloud, and worked in the same office as the sync team for another OS company, so I do have a little insight into this.
Congrats. You clearly didn't look behind the scenes, or you'd know there are temp files (e.g. local files) in use, at a very minimum as a cache in case connectivity is lost or there is a power failure or system crash. You know, you you don't lose that data. If I'm wrong about that, then you have two options: ignore it, or call me out as wrong and admit that iCloud is plagued by a massive data-integrity flaw; luckily for you, the decision won't come up.
Repeat after me: file formats and sync are not the same thing. The only reason that you think it's easy is because it's not a problem you've ever been exposed to.
See above. Yes, it's easy, and yes, I've been exposed to it. You certainly assume a lot; for instance, you assume that your experience is all that exists and that anything that you find difficult is difficult for everyone else.
He said it was taboo, not that it offended him. Taboos are commonly offensive, not personally offensive; the difference being that a commonly offensive thing is likely to offend a given individual, while a personally offensive thing actually offends them.
The same statement, but without the f-bombs thrown in, is less likely to rile the listener and to get a reasoned response. "What is the problem?" as opposed to "What the f*** is the f***ing problem?"
And yet she criticizes another sister for sounding like someone with Tourette's.
Well, yes, there's a vast spectrum between never swearing and "Fuck you, you fucking fuckity fuck fucker." I'd venture a guess that the sister she criticizes falls somewhere near the latter end of that scale.
And the reason why the Google Docs are so bad you don't like them is they are limited by the fact that they are web apps.
So now you're qualified to tell me what I do and don't like? then, please, Mr. Psychic, tell me what I don't like about the interface of Apple's native document editing apps. I'm sure it's nothing to do with them being web based, since, you know, they're not. In short, you're wrong for reason I'm sure you'll never be able understand.
If there was a quality existing standard for handing off between different Office apps on different apps/OSs, then Apple might use it. But there's not.
ODF is pretty damn standard. Hell, even Microsoft has an open standard in use, currently. In fact, I can exchange documents between OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Star Office, and Microsoft Office in either format. Yes, between operating systems, as well. What makes you think the OS matters? It's not parsing the file, the software is. In short, yes, this thing you say doesn't exist does, in fact, exist. It's existed for years, and been used widely for just as long.
Furthermore, there have been major growing pains with iCloud over the years even with it just being used from Apple's own APIs. Making it generic would introduce more problems.
Well, I'm not sure what I can say about this without sounding like an Apple basher, so fuck it, I'll bash them on this, because I feel it's deserved. iCloud is nothing more than an online storage service. It takes data from one device and makes that data available to other devices. If they can't get that right, that's not growing pains, that's incompetence. Not that the whole company is incompetent, but the iCloud team sure seems to be. What they're doing with iCloud is so deceptively simple; the requirements are:
A) An interface that allows files to be uploaded, modified, and removed
B) An interface that allows for either push notification of polling of new, changed, and removed files
C) An interface that allows files to be downloaded
They've gotten much more complex systems right in the past, there's simply no excuse for them not to be able to do this.
Can users upload arbitrary files to iCloud? Yes? Then any application that can read from, and write to, "~/Library/Mobile Documents/" (does it get much more generic?) can use it. Sure, the location is different on an iDevice, but it's there, as well. All that's missing is file format support; the same thing that's missing from every other solution; though Google Docs (and, likely, Office 360) can sure import a hell of a lot of formats.
I guess, really, what I'm asking for is a solution that we've actually had for decades. The ability to open a file in a common format, from the media of my choice. Why is that so hard? Why does it seem that nobody is capable of that once a mobile device is involved? I mean, the parsing logic is already written, many times over, for the formats in question, publicly available and freely licensed in most cases, and they're already interfacing with at least one cloud provider. It's really not hard, I could do it in my sleep.
What *is* hard is making a full-featured editor that display documents (once parsed) nicely. If I could do that, well, we wouldn't be having this discussion. The thing is, the people I'm complaining about have already done that hard part; what I'm asking for is the easy part.
Oh? But it also displays... well, I'm not entirely sure what it's displaying, as I go straight to the Updates tab...
This morning, I did see the "1 new" bubble next to it. I had 3 software updates, those are now installed, no reboot required, and I still see the "1 new" bubble.
Let me go check on that before I finish writing this post...
OH! It wanted me to let the Featured tab finish loading! YAY! Now it's gone!
NOT acceptable! Notifying me because there is some new featured software you want me to see is not acceptable on an OS that it not primarily intended as a content consumption system; yet, that's exactly what this was. In this case, it was Apple notifying me that OSX Yosemite is currently featured, and I'm willing to accept that as I'm still running the beta and do need to install that; however, it's not a software update, it wasn't (and still is not) on the Updates tab, it's an advertizement, and I don't need to be notified of those.
If this is the only instance where they pop the "1 new" bubble up for an ad, whatever, that's actually useful, that's fine, I'll let it go. If I see it again, Yosemite is the last version of OSX I use; Ubuntu still runs great on a MacBook Pro.
Right, like I pointed out there's a desktop app with this solution. As for "hooks for third parties to implement it in their applications", yes, the cloud side of things; you know, like DropBox, or Google Docs, or any other cloud provider with both a mobile and desktop cloud sync app the provides a filesystem-based interface. When they start using interchangeable file formats that are compatible with other software, then I'll be impressed.
Don't get me wrong, TextEdit is great for taking notes, and I use it a LOT for jotting down quick thoughts I'm going to work with, process, and the get rid of (I use OneNote for things I'm going to keep, though the Mac version is lacking in a few features; I've been impressed by how much effort Microsoft is putting toward fixing that, though). I wouldn't use it to draft anything where formatting and display are important, though; and I'm not a fan of Apple's solutions in that arena, either, which makes Apple's current solution a whole lot of useless for me. Awesome, for anyone already using Pages and whatnot, really, good for them, their lives just got that much better; but, until all of these cloud documents vendors (I'm not just poking at Apple, here) implement support for something like ODF (and maybe MS Word), they're simply setting themselves up as systems of obvious and easily avoidable lock-in, preventing users who actually care about their data from using them for anything of any importance.
Document editor vendors, listen up, here is what you can do to differentiate yourself from the competition:
A) Let your application open one or more standard and widely used formats for whatever type of document your application works with.
B) Let your application interface with *at least* two cloud providers, preferably via a plugin system, so more can be added as time progresses.
That's it. Those two things will allow users to choose which desktop and mobile interfaces they prefer, which will guide adoption of these technologies for a wider audience, including users who actually care about their data.
As in, for example, you start typing a document on your desktop, like you normally would, and you can continue it on your phone seamlessly and automatically if you have to go out.
I've been able to do that for years with and desktop and smartphone OS combination, via Google Docs and Office 360, amongst other solutions. It's nothing new, and I'd argue that Apples way is no different, and certainly not better. I don't do it often because I generally don't like the interfaces for any of the apps that have the capability, so I tend to only use one of said apps (in my case Google Docs) when I know, in advance, that I'm going to be editing a document on the go. Beyond that, the ability to use a full-on desktop editor and its full-on mobile counterpart (or some other developer's compatible software, if you like their interface better), sticking a cloud provider in between them (which is what Apple is doing, here), rather than using anyone's web interface (a-la Google Docs and Office 360) has been around for just as long. The difference is, with Apple's solution, if your phone is not an iPhone, you don't get the capability at all and, if your phone is and iPhone, you still don't get the option of using compatible native alternatives; though, you can still use Google Docs or Office 360 if the web interfaces float your boat (yes, there are native mobile apps for both, what's lacking is the desktop side of those solutions).
Don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic to see more companies getting into this, more interfaces being developed, and, all around, more interest in it. What bothers me is that every implementation uses its own cloud, its own file format, and its own interface, as its own form of lock-in. I'd love to see some competition here, some interoperability between the different solutions, and, most importantly, some standardization of file formats, so you can use any arbitrary solution you like on your desktop and any arbitrary solution you like on your phone or tablet, and have at least a chance of it working.
Apple, please, pioneer this while I'm still on your platform.
The more content consumption "tools" that are bundled with the OS, and the more of them you have to interact with to get things done, the more the OS becomes a content consumption tool, itself. Sadly, Apple is slowly moving OSX in this direction. I still use it, it's still my OS of choice, but I'm not sure for how many more releases that will be the case.
Case in point, the removal of the "Software Updates" item from the Apple menu. Yes, the button simply launched the App Store, and you can get to Software Updates by clicking App Store, waiting for the Featured tab to start loading (the tabs are disabled until Featured starts loading, though it doesn't have to finish), and clicking the Updates button, but this used to be a one-step process that didn't attempt to expose the user to advertizing. Now it's a 3 step process, and one that may confuse some less attentive users who didn't pay enough attention in 10.7-10.9 to notice that Software Updates was just a tab in the App Store. It's, admittedly, a minor niggle, but it's one of many, and they are starting to add up.
I have no affiliation with Intel, but here's your answer: Most Android apps are written in DALVIK and, for those, it really doesn't matter. It does, however, matter for native C/C++ apps, or apps utilizing native C/C++ components; if there's only an ARM build for the app you use, you don't want an x86 CPU.
Well, yes, the way in which I was right was the context of user education, which is the topic of the post to which I was replying. My point was that user education only works for users willing to be educated, and those users, by and far, don't need to be taught, because, like you and me, they've already taken the time to learn. In short, anyone who has these problems repeatedly has not only refused to ask how to prevent them, they've also refused to listen when told.
So, you're saying that just because something you don't believe happens (alien anal probes, which I won't argue) leaves no trace, that something else that leaves no trace also doesn't happen? I'm not sure you fully understand logic, but I digress.
You're approaching me as though you assume I'm a Linux user. Well, you're half right; my desktop of choice, at the moment, is OS X, I and maintain a couple of Windows boxes, but my servers all run Linux. I have to agree, KDE4 is garbage, but I loved KDE3 when I used it; Ubuntu's Unity DE isn't bad, but I'm not really a big fan. I could make KDE3 work on a modern distro (there's the choice bit I was talking about) and if I ever decide to run Linux as a desktop platform, I probably will.
Don't make me laugh by saying the current iteration of Windows isn't ugly as fuck, though; even Win7, which has IMO the best interface of any version of Windows, looks silly until you turn off all the eye candy, the Win8 tiles interface is ugly as hell by most peoples' accounts, and really only useful on a touchscreen. I say this as a Sony Vaio Duo owner. I don't mind the interface as much on the Duo's touchscreen, but there's a reason the Duo sits in my closet and it has nothing to do with the performance of the machine, itself; my Win7 machine does everything I need to do in Windows and the interface doesn't make me want to blow my brains out.
Seeing the direction OS X (again, my current desktop of choice) is heading, running the Yosemite beta, I sincerely hope MS heads back in the direction of Win7 before Apple's interface becomes really and truly obtrusive. If not, at least I can stick KDE3 on Ubuntu and roll with that as a primary desktop. Choice is good.
As an aside: Ubuntu really does come a long way toward what you're looking for from Linux; might I suggest you give it a try? They even have an app store now, just like Android, which you seem to think is the deciding factor when determining whether an OS is complete or not. I guess we didn't have a single "complete" OS until Apple released the first version of iOS to include an app store?
While I don't disagree with the point you are making in this post, I think you're greatly missing *my* point. As an informed user and sysadmin, I keep an eye on current CVEs use that information to know when to expect new patches, which allows me begin testing and applying them long before media or social circles pick up the information and, often, some time before vendor notifications or any automated update processes. Most sysadmins, and nearly all users, aren't as attentive and they do rely on media and social circles for this information; knowing this, it is extremely irresponsible to misrepresent facts relating to a vulnerability in such a way, especially knowingly.
If you can't get behind that, I sure as hell hope you aren't in a position even remotely related to system administration or securty.
The point is that failure to make the distinction between a bug only affecting Linux and a bug affecting a library or application (such as a shell) that can run on any arbitrary platform usually means that only Linux users of that library or application end up taking immediate action to correct the issue, leaving users of the library or application on other platforms vulnerable until the next time they apply system patches for another issue. In some cases it's a difference of days, in others it's weeks, months, or years, when it could have been hours had the distinction been made.
It's not about a pissing contest between platforms, it's about keeping people informed so they can act appropriately. Imagine yourself a FreeBSD user; if you heard of Heartbleed as a Linux bug, would you think to look for an OpenSSL patch? No, you'd laugh at the stupid Linux users and go about your day, remaining vulnerable. On the other hand, if you hear about an OpenSSL bug, and oyu know you're using OpenSSL, you're going to check regardless of platform. That's why the distinction is important.
If you see a huge flashing "It's a trap!" sign hanging over a big red button labeled "Push Me", and oyu push the button anyway, it's not really victim blaming to blame you for whatever happens next. Just sayin'. When you see the same people get owned the same way, over and over, and you explain to them how it happened, why what they did exposed them to the attack, and what they should do instead, and they come back to you a week later having done the same thing, with the same results, so you explain it again, week after week, yes, it's time to blame the victim, no amount of user education will fix that.
Now, I'm not saying user education is useless, but it'll do nothing to help the types that take their computers in to Geek Squad, et-al. And there are a ton of those.
I'll start with your last comment first. Your files, online and off, may have never been modified or deleted by someone other than yourself but that doesn't mean they haven't been hacked. A good hack leaves no trace and an expert hacker would copy your files without altering them.
Everything else you say... well... It's true that Linux often lags in support for the newest video and graphics cards, and some cheap shit scanners that only ship with binary blob drivers (I've experienced this and Linux was doing me a favor, when I got it working on Windows and saw the crap quality, I realized this), but it sure beats the pants off Windows in support for pretty much everything else. Cant' really beat CUPS for printer support, for example; at the office, we have a networked HP laser printer, pretty old but still functions flawlessly so why replace it? It's a good thing we're a Linux and OSX house, because our Win7 testing box doesn't have a driver for it. I don't have time to list every instance of this I've encountered, so I've provided one example on each side, take that however you will.
I'm not sure what 1990's technology you were running Linux on when you supposedly tried it in the past, but font rendering has been decent in most Linux distros for at least a decade. I haven't seen X eat CPU since I started using a supported accelerated graphics card (e.g. anything from Intel and anything not brand new from AMD or nVidia) and, honestly... you're gonna say Linux has ugly DEs while using that tiles interface? If you don't like your DE on Linux, you install a different one, or configure it however you want. Done. Don't like the Windows DE? Do what most people do, skip the upgrade and forego patches until MS releases something you do like again. Have fun with that.
As for hours, days, and weeks of wasted time on Windows, yes, if you're managing more than a handful of machines and aren't a super-competent admin, it happens. Look at any school or government IT department for examples. Of course, it happens with any OS; Linux has a decent enough community that you can usually find someone to help you out of a bind if you get stuck, though; maybe I wasn't in the right communities, but I never had that when I was a hardcore Windows user. Once you get your system set up the way you like, regardless of OS, you can image it so it's quick to clone or restore; upgrades are a bit easier with Linux, though, IMO, since a new release of your distro may introduce a new DE, but you're welcome to keep using the old one if you like it. Really nice after you've spent the time to customize it.
I'll take those two OpenSSL and Bash vulnerabilities any day! That's an important distinction, and not making it lulls anyone using OpenSSL or Bash on a non-Linux system into a false sense of security and may prevent them from patching. That's either a good or bad thing, depending entirely on the color of your hat.
Yes, Heartbleed and Shellshock both had the potential to be much, much worst than this bug. However, those were only exploited after being found and disclosed, and patches being made available, while this and other Windows flaws are only patched after being found, disclosed, and exploited for a while. Where there were patches issued for Heartbleed and Shellshock within hours of disclosure, this won't be patched until Patch Tuesday. Mind you, that's today, but it's still coming not only days after the disclosure, but months after active exploits.
...since Bash can run on *anything*, that makes it and "anything running Bash" issue, including your precious Windows...
Well, yes, I stated the fact that anything running Bash is vulnerable; I never denied that. Where, dear sir, did I state that they were equally vulnerable? We're back to "you can't quote it because I never said it", despite what you claim.
Shellshock is a fixed issue on 'nix systems, for anyone keeping their system up to date. Well, except for OSX Yosemite beta testers, for whom an incomplete patch was released on 9-30; still vulnerable to one of seven known exploits. Windows systems that are vulnerable, no matter how few those might be (MinGW has over a half million weekly downloads, so I would still posit that the number is higher than you admit), remain vulnerable as MinGW hasn't seen an update in nearly a year and Cygwin in almost 5.
I'm not ragging on Windows here; like I said, it's a platform I make use of fairly consistently. I'm just saying, while Shellshock was a doozey of a bug, in the end it cost me maybe an hour of my life to patch well more than a handful of systems and it's done; were I running a POSIX layer on my Windows machines, however, that would not be the case; and, with over a half million weekly downloads of one of the most popular Windows POSIX layers, I'm thinking it's not safe to assume it's a non-issue for Windows servers.
Clearly, we're going to have to agree to disagree on this point, but the facts are as I've stated.
Nothing's perfect, but I do have to stand by a system that gets patches out quickly; assuming your point about testing patches before deployment stands (and in most cases, it does; in this case, any application broken by the patch was broken to begin with), Bash users had a patch to test against within hours. Do you not test Microsoft's patches before you apply them? You know, weeks or months after the vulnerability is disclosed publicly.
You are correct, Cygwin hasn't seen an update since December 2009. However, I said MinGW, which has been updated a bit more recently. Please don't make assumptions about what I run and how I administer my systems based on my stated observations of the *rest* of the industry; you'll note that I said, and I quote:
I use Windows, OSX, and Linux in roughly equal proportions
Which probably means I use Windows where I need Windows and I use Linux where I need Linux; OSX is my desktop of choice at the moment, though that is subject to change, as it has changed a number of times over the past 20 years. That doesn't change the fact that I see a fair number of shared hosting providers (of which I am not one) running MinGW on Windows as a means to reduce the incidence of having to tell a customer who insists on using Windows they have to switch to Linux hosting to do what they want. I'm not saying this is the correct way that the user should be running their site, just that yes, less administratively-inclined users sometime make ridiculous demands that you, as a business owner, must bend over and cater to if you want their money. If you simply tell them "You have to move to Linux hosting if you want to do that", they'll tell you when you can deactivate their account after they find a host who'll make it work on Windows. That's how the shared hosting market currently works; there are a million providers and, no matter how ridiculous one's requirements, at least thousands of those millions will cater to those needs without a second though as long as the bill is getting paid.
My best friend got tired of it and sold his hosting company last year, after a very successful 13 year run. As a customer of his (who did not make such ridiculous demands; rather, I opted for Linux hosting, as that's what I needed) for several years, I volunteered my time in his support chat (a few hours a week, whenever I was bored, usually while BSing with him in the evenings) and fielded quite a number of these ridiculous requests (anything at that level of ridicule was beyond my power, as a volunteer, to handle and was forwarded to him) so I can tell you first hand, the idiots who want to do something like this are not only out there, they're plentiful.
I'll repeat the question (and correct a typo; thanks, autocorrect):
Did I say both are equally vulnerable, or are you making shit up in an attempt to discredit me?
Of course, I'm repeating this in response to this bit of snark:
You're right; ShellShock really is as bad a ball-ache in Windows as *nix, no really!
It was originally said in response to this bullshit:
I love the fact you try to equate Windows and Linux for this epic bug as if they're both as vulnerable.
In case you missed the question the first two times, here it is again:
Did I say both are equally vulnerable, or are you making shit up in an attempt to discredit me?
And, in case you decide to say something along the lines of "Yes, you said both are equally vulnerable" I might ask that you quote me.
PROTIP: You won't be able to, because I never said it. If you want to win an argument with me, you have to attack what I'm actually saying; the minute you start attacking what you say I said, you've already lost. You're attacking your own words, not mine. Game. Set. Match.
I'm not seeing another post from you in this thread... What claim did you make? I think we're in agreement, though; by necessity, shells give you all kinds of ways to hang yourself, most of which are in o way obvious to an unseasoned user. That's just the price of the added power and control, and it comes with a responsibility to learn your tools and lear and afollow best practices when developing on or for an environment that makes use of a shell, whether you're using that shell directly or not. Best practices, like sanitizing your inputs, mitigate this on all platforms.
Am I attempting to divert negative PR, or am I simply stating facts? Did I say bithe are equally vulnerable, or are you making shit up in an attempt to discredit me?
I don't have a dog in this race, I use Windows, OSX, and Linux in roughly equal proportions. More people run POSIX layers on their Windows servers than you likely realize; in the hosting world, you give your users what they want, and users want to run that prewritten PHP script that relies on some UNIX userland element that Windows doesn't provide, and some subset want to run it on Windows. Hosts offering a Windows solution often install MSYS/MinGW by default to cut down on support calls for rhese scenarios, so the incidence of it being installed will naturally be higher than the incidence of it being necessary.
Also... give this a try on your Windows machine:
C:\Usersl>set foo=bar^&ping -n 1 google.com
C:\Usersl>echo %foo%
Seems as though you don't need Bash for Windows to be vulnerable, after all. C U Next (patch) Tuesday.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, a triple post... rare for me, but I just closed App Store and... the bubble is *back*.
Oh! It's BACK! Clicked it again, checked updates, none. Clicked over to Featured, it's gone again. What's interesting is that, yes, I did download Yosemite after the "1 new" bubble disappeared, so now, at this point, my download has been recorded by the App Store. I haven't installed it yet (as I said, I'll be doing that this evening, on my own time), but I've certainly interacted with it by now. Yet there's the notification again; and it disappeared again as soon as I viewed the Featured tab.
Go ahead, install Yosemite, then get back to me regarding this.
Well bully for you. If it was a software update, why was it not listed in my Updates tab? And why did it go away when I let the Featured tab load into view? I haven't installed (or even downloaded) it yet; I'll do that this evening, when I'm not trying to work.
Let me reiterate: It was there before I installed updates (indicating 1 new item, while there were 3 updates). I installed all available updates. It was still there. I viewed the Featured tab. It went away. There was absolutely zero interaction between the Updates tab and that notification (and, in fact, there was no notification of the available updates, at all, until I manually navigated to them), but there certainly was interaction between that notification and the Featured (e.g. ads) tab.
It may have been triggered by me running the Yosemite beta, but it was a notification of an ad. Period.
I'm qualified to say that the reason Google Docs sucks is because it's a web app.
First of all, what qualifies you to say that? Second, that's not what you said; you said the reason they were so limited that I don't like them was that they're a web app, which fails on two parts; first, they're native on Android and iOS; and second, it's the interface I don't like, they're actually quite capable tools.
They are file formats. They are not methods of handing off open documents between different devices without first saving them somewhere. Completely different thing.
Oh? Well, if that's what you're after, what happened to FTP, SFTP, SCP, HTTP, el-al? Not good enough, because it first has to be saved somewhere? Well, you're saving to iCloud, and that's somewhere; don't be fooled into thinking a temporary file isn't created somewhere on your disk, which is precisely how you would enable any of the other file transfer technologies we've had for decades to work in exactly the same way. In fact, nearly every cloud storage provider (including iCloud) uses HTTP as a primary transfer method.
And even they are fucked. Documents moved between different office apps tend to break. Still. In 2014.
But at least they open. I'd rather have to do some reformatting when changing providers or applications than lose access to my data altogether.
It's a sync service, that works on open files. And that's hard. Very hard. Always has been. And if you don't know that, that's your incompetence.
So, then, you're saying I should be able to have the same document open on two devices, edit it, on one, and see the changes immediately on the other? That's actually not that difficult unless you're also tracking cursor position, which there's typically no need for. I do the same thing in my IDE with Git and automated commits and pulls (I automate squashing of the automated commits, as well, so I don't have millions of commits at the end of the day). Once per minute, the live update branch is fetched, and local changes are committed and pushed back to the branch; any decent IDE can update the display when the file contents change. Yes, there are files involved, but then, there's always a temporary file involved. It would be stupid not to use a temp file; what happens if you lose connectivity, or power goes out between cloud updates?
Even tracking cursor positions is simple, though; you just use a different mechanism for it, either a direct connection between users, or a connection to a central location, where the information is exchanged in real time. It's active state data, not persistent, so there's no need to store it.
And yes, I'm a developer that has programmed with iCloud, and worked in the same office as the sync team for another OS company, so I do have a little insight into this.
Congrats. You clearly didn't look behind the scenes, or you'd know there are temp files (e.g. local files) in use, at a very minimum as a cache in case connectivity is lost or there is a power failure or system crash. You know, you you don't lose that data. If I'm wrong about that, then you have two options: ignore it, or call me out as wrong and admit that iCloud is plagued by a massive data-integrity flaw; luckily for you, the decision won't come up.
Repeat after me: file formats and sync are not the same thing. The only reason that you think it's easy is because it's not a problem you've ever been exposed to.
See above. Yes, it's easy, and yes, I've been exposed to it. You certainly assume a lot; for instance, you assume that your experience is all that exists and that anything that you find difficult is difficult for everyone else.
He said it was taboo, not that it offended him. Taboos are commonly offensive, not personally offensive; the difference being that a commonly offensive thing is likely to offend a given individual, while a personally offensive thing actually offends them.
The same statement, but without the f-bombs thrown in, is less likely to rile the listener and to get a reasoned response. "What is the problem?" as opposed to "What the f*** is the f***ing problem?"
Sometimes you want to rile the listener.
And yet she criticizes another sister for sounding like someone with Tourette's.
Well, yes, there's a vast spectrum between never swearing and "Fuck you, you fucking fuckity fuck fucker." I'd venture a guess that the sister she criticizes falls somewhere near the latter end of that scale.
And the reason why the Google Docs are so bad you don't like them is they are limited by the fact that they are web apps.
So now you're qualified to tell me what I do and don't like? then, please, Mr. Psychic, tell me what I don't like about the interface of Apple's native document editing apps. I'm sure it's nothing to do with them being web based, since, you know, they're not. In short, you're wrong for reason I'm sure you'll never be able understand.
If there was a quality existing standard for handing off between different Office apps on different apps/OSs, then Apple might use it. But there's not.
ODF is pretty damn standard. Hell, even Microsoft has an open standard in use, currently. In fact, I can exchange documents between OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Star Office, and Microsoft Office in either format. Yes, between operating systems, as well. What makes you think the OS matters? It's not parsing the file, the software is. In short, yes, this thing you say doesn't exist does, in fact, exist. It's existed for years, and been used widely for just as long.
Furthermore, there have been major growing pains with iCloud over the years even with it just being used from Apple's own APIs. Making it generic would introduce more problems.
Well, I'm not sure what I can say about this without sounding like an Apple basher, so fuck it, I'll bash them on this, because I feel it's deserved. iCloud is nothing more than an online storage service. It takes data from one device and makes that data available to other devices. If they can't get that right, that's not growing pains, that's incompetence. Not that the whole company is incompetent, but the iCloud team sure seems to be. What they're doing with iCloud is so deceptively simple; the requirements are:
A) An interface that allows files to be uploaded, modified, and removed
B) An interface that allows for either push notification of polling of new, changed, and removed files
C) An interface that allows files to be downloaded
They've gotten much more complex systems right in the past, there's simply no excuse for them not to be able to do this.
Can users upload arbitrary files to iCloud? Yes? Then any application that can read from, and write to, "~/Library/Mobile Documents/" (does it get much more generic?) can use it. Sure, the location is different on an iDevice, but it's there, as well. All that's missing is file format support; the same thing that's missing from every other solution; though Google Docs (and, likely, Office 360) can sure import a hell of a lot of formats.
I guess, really, what I'm asking for is a solution that we've actually had for decades. The ability to open a file in a common format, from the media of my choice. Why is that so hard? Why does it seem that nobody is capable of that once a mobile device is involved? I mean, the parsing logic is already written, many times over, for the formats in question, publicly available and freely licensed in most cases, and they're already interfacing with at least one cloud provider. It's really not hard, I could do it in my sleep.
What *is* hard is making a full-featured editor that display documents (once parsed) nicely. If I could do that, well, we wouldn't be having this discussion. The thing is, the people I'm complaining about have already done that hard part; what I'm asking for is the easy part.
Oh? But it also displays... well, I'm not entirely sure what it's displaying, as I go straight to the Updates tab...
This morning, I did see the "1 new" bubble next to it. I had 3 software updates, those are now installed, no reboot required, and I still see the "1 new" bubble.
Let me go check on that before I finish writing this post...
OH! It wanted me to let the Featured tab finish loading! YAY! Now it's gone!
NOT acceptable! Notifying me because there is some new featured software you want me to see is not acceptable on an OS that it not primarily intended as a content consumption system; yet, that's exactly what this was. In this case, it was Apple notifying me that OSX Yosemite is currently featured, and I'm willing to accept that as I'm still running the beta and do need to install that; however, it's not a software update, it wasn't (and still is not) on the Updates tab, it's an advertizement, and I don't need to be notified of those.
If this is the only instance where they pop the "1 new" bubble up for an ad, whatever, that's actually useful, that's fine, I'll let it go. If I see it again, Yosemite is the last version of OSX I use; Ubuntu still runs great on a MacBook Pro.
Right, like I pointed out there's a desktop app with this solution. As for "hooks for third parties to implement it in their applications", yes, the cloud side of things; you know, like DropBox, or Google Docs, or any other cloud provider with both a mobile and desktop cloud sync app the provides a filesystem-based interface. When they start using interchangeable file formats that are compatible with other software, then I'll be impressed.
Don't get me wrong, TextEdit is great for taking notes, and I use it a LOT for jotting down quick thoughts I'm going to work with, process, and the get rid of (I use OneNote for things I'm going to keep, though the Mac version is lacking in a few features; I've been impressed by how much effort Microsoft is putting toward fixing that, though). I wouldn't use it to draft anything where formatting and display are important, though; and I'm not a fan of Apple's solutions in that arena, either, which makes Apple's current solution a whole lot of useless for me. Awesome, for anyone already using Pages and whatnot, really, good for them, their lives just got that much better; but, until all of these cloud documents vendors (I'm not just poking at Apple, here) implement support for something like ODF (and maybe MS Word), they're simply setting themselves up as systems of obvious and easily avoidable lock-in, preventing users who actually care about their data from using them for anything of any importance.
Document editor vendors, listen up, here is what you can do to differentiate yourself from the competition:
A) Let your application open one or more standard and widely used formats for whatever type of document your application works with.
B) Let your application interface with *at least* two cloud providers, preferably via a plugin system, so more can be added as time progresses.
That's it. Those two things will allow users to choose which desktop and mobile interfaces they prefer, which will guide adoption of these technologies for a wider audience, including users who actually care about their data.
As in, for example, you start typing a document on your desktop, like you normally would, and you can continue it on your phone seamlessly and automatically if you have to go out.
I've been able to do that for years with and desktop and smartphone OS combination, via Google Docs and Office 360, amongst other solutions. It's nothing new, and I'd argue that Apples way is no different, and certainly not better. I don't do it often because I generally don't like the interfaces for any of the apps that have the capability, so I tend to only use one of said apps (in my case Google Docs) when I know, in advance, that I'm going to be editing a document on the go. Beyond that, the ability to use a full-on desktop editor and its full-on mobile counterpart (or some other developer's compatible software, if you like their interface better), sticking a cloud provider in between them (which is what Apple is doing, here), rather than using anyone's web interface (a-la Google Docs and Office 360) has been around for just as long. The difference is, with Apple's solution, if your phone is not an iPhone, you don't get the capability at all and, if your phone is and iPhone, you still don't get the option of using compatible native alternatives; though, you can still use Google Docs or Office 360 if the web interfaces float your boat (yes, there are native mobile apps for both, what's lacking is the desktop side of those solutions).
Don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic to see more companies getting into this, more interfaces being developed, and, all around, more interest in it. What bothers me is that every implementation uses its own cloud, its own file format, and its own interface, as its own form of lock-in. I'd love to see some competition here, some interoperability between the different solutions, and, most importantly, some standardization of file formats, so you can use any arbitrary solution you like on your desktop and any arbitrary solution you like on your phone or tablet, and have at least a chance of it working.
Apple, please, pioneer this while I'm still on your platform.
The more content consumption "tools" that are bundled with the OS, and the more of them you have to interact with to get things done, the more the OS becomes a content consumption tool, itself. Sadly, Apple is slowly moving OSX in this direction. I still use it, it's still my OS of choice, but I'm not sure for how many more releases that will be the case.
Case in point, the removal of the "Software Updates" item from the Apple menu. Yes, the button simply launched the App Store, and you can get to Software Updates by clicking App Store, waiting for the Featured tab to start loading (the tabs are disabled until Featured starts loading, though it doesn't have to finish), and clicking the Updates button, but this used to be a one-step process that didn't attempt to expose the user to advertizing. Now it's a 3 step process, and one that may confuse some less attentive users who didn't pay enough attention in 10.7-10.9 to notice that Software Updates was just a tab in the App Store. It's, admittedly, a minor niggle, but it's one of many, and they are starting to add up.
I have no affiliation with Intel, but here's your answer: Most Android apps are written in DALVIK and, for those, it really doesn't matter. It does, however, matter for native C/C++ apps, or apps utilizing native C/C++ components; if there's only an ARM build for the app you use, you don't want an x86 CPU.
Well, yes, the way in which I was right was the context of user education, which is the topic of the post to which I was replying. My point was that user education only works for users willing to be educated, and those users, by and far, don't need to be taught, because, like you and me, they've already taken the time to learn. In short, anyone who has these problems repeatedly has not only refused to ask how to prevent them, they've also refused to listen when told.
So, you're saying that just because something you don't believe happens (alien anal probes, which I won't argue) leaves no trace, that something else that leaves no trace also doesn't happen? I'm not sure you fully understand logic, but I digress.
You're approaching me as though you assume I'm a Linux user. Well, you're half right; my desktop of choice, at the moment, is OS X, I and maintain a couple of Windows boxes, but my servers all run Linux. I have to agree, KDE4 is garbage, but I loved KDE3 when I used it; Ubuntu's Unity DE isn't bad, but I'm not really a big fan. I could make KDE3 work on a modern distro (there's the choice bit I was talking about) and if I ever decide to run Linux as a desktop platform, I probably will.
Don't make me laugh by saying the current iteration of Windows isn't ugly as fuck, though; even Win7, which has IMO the best interface of any version of Windows, looks silly until you turn off all the eye candy, the Win8 tiles interface is ugly as hell by most peoples' accounts, and really only useful on a touchscreen. I say this as a Sony Vaio Duo owner. I don't mind the interface as much on the Duo's touchscreen, but there's a reason the Duo sits in my closet and it has nothing to do with the performance of the machine, itself; my Win7 machine does everything I need to do in Windows and the interface doesn't make me want to blow my brains out.
Seeing the direction OS X (again, my current desktop of choice) is heading, running the Yosemite beta, I sincerely hope MS heads back in the direction of Win7 before Apple's interface becomes really and truly obtrusive. If not, at least I can stick KDE3 on Ubuntu and roll with that as a primary desktop. Choice is good.
As an aside: Ubuntu really does come a long way toward what you're looking for from Linux; might I suggest you give it a try? They even have an app store now, just like Android, which you seem to think is the deciding factor when determining whether an OS is complete or not. I guess we didn't have a single "complete" OS until Apple released the first version of iOS to include an app store?
While I don't disagree with the point you are making in this post, I think you're greatly missing *my* point. As an informed user and sysadmin, I keep an eye on current CVEs use that information to know when to expect new patches, which allows me begin testing and applying them long before media or social circles pick up the information and, often, some time before vendor notifications or any automated update processes. Most sysadmins, and nearly all users, aren't as attentive and they do rely on media and social circles for this information; knowing this, it is extremely irresponsible to misrepresent facts relating to a vulnerability in such a way, especially knowingly.
If you can't get behind that, I sure as hell hope you aren't in a position even remotely related to system administration or securty.
The point is that failure to make the distinction between a bug only affecting Linux and a bug affecting a library or application (such as a shell) that can run on any arbitrary platform usually means that only Linux users of that library or application end up taking immediate action to correct the issue, leaving users of the library or application on other platforms vulnerable until the next time they apply system patches for another issue. In some cases it's a difference of days, in others it's weeks, months, or years, when it could have been hours had the distinction been made.
It's not about a pissing contest between platforms, it's about keeping people informed so they can act appropriately. Imagine yourself a FreeBSD user; if you heard of Heartbleed as a Linux bug, would you think to look for an OpenSSL patch? No, you'd laugh at the stupid Linux users and go about your day, remaining vulnerable. On the other hand, if you hear about an OpenSSL bug, and oyu know you're using OpenSSL, you're going to check regardless of platform. That's why the distinction is important.
If you see a huge flashing "It's a trap!" sign hanging over a big red button labeled "Push Me", and oyu push the button anyway, it's not really victim blaming to blame you for whatever happens next. Just sayin'. When you see the same people get owned the same way, over and over, and you explain to them how it happened, why what they did exposed them to the attack, and what they should do instead, and they come back to you a week later having done the same thing, with the same results, so you explain it again, week after week, yes, it's time to blame the victim, no amount of user education will fix that.
Now, I'm not saying user education is useless, but it'll do nothing to help the types that take their computers in to Geek Squad, et-al. And there are a ton of those.
I'll start with your last comment first. Your files, online and off, may have never been modified or deleted by someone other than yourself but that doesn't mean they haven't been hacked. A good hack leaves no trace and an expert hacker would copy your files without altering them.
Everything else you say... well... It's true that Linux often lags in support for the newest video and graphics cards, and some cheap shit scanners that only ship with binary blob drivers (I've experienced this and Linux was doing me a favor, when I got it working on Windows and saw the crap quality, I realized this), but it sure beats the pants off Windows in support for pretty much everything else. Cant' really beat CUPS for printer support, for example; at the office, we have a networked HP laser printer, pretty old but still functions flawlessly so why replace it? It's a good thing we're a Linux and OSX house, because our Win7 testing box doesn't have a driver for it. I don't have time to list every instance of this I've encountered, so I've provided one example on each side, take that however you will.
I'm not sure what 1990's technology you were running Linux on when you supposedly tried it in the past, but font rendering has been decent in most Linux distros for at least a decade. I haven't seen X eat CPU since I started using a supported accelerated graphics card (e.g. anything from Intel and anything not brand new from AMD or nVidia) and, honestly... you're gonna say Linux has ugly DEs while using that tiles interface? If you don't like your DE on Linux, you install a different one, or configure it however you want. Done. Don't like the Windows DE? Do what most people do, skip the upgrade and forego patches until MS releases something you do like again. Have fun with that.
As for hours, days, and weeks of wasted time on Windows, yes, if you're managing more than a handful of machines and aren't a super-competent admin, it happens. Look at any school or government IT department for examples. Of course, it happens with any OS; Linux has a decent enough community that you can usually find someone to help you out of a bind if you get stuck, though; maybe I wasn't in the right communities, but I never had that when I was a hardcore Windows user. Once you get your system set up the way you like, regardless of OS, you can image it so it's quick to clone or restore; upgrades are a bit easier with Linux, though, IMO, since a new release of your distro may introduce a new DE, but you're welcome to keep using the old one if you like it. Really nice after you've spent the time to customize it.
I'll take those two OpenSSL and Bash vulnerabilities any day! That's an important distinction, and not making it lulls anyone using OpenSSL or Bash on a non-Linux system into a false sense of security and may prevent them from patching. That's either a good or bad thing, depending entirely on the color of your hat.
Yes, Heartbleed and Shellshock both had the potential to be much, much worst than this bug. However, those were only exploited after being found and disclosed, and patches being made available, while this and other Windows flaws are only patched after being found, disclosed, and exploited for a while. Where there were patches issued for Heartbleed and Shellshock within hours of disclosure, this won't be patched until Patch Tuesday. Mind you, that's today, but it's still coming not only days after the disclosure, but months after active exploits.
...since Bash can run on *anything*, that makes it and "anything running Bash" issue, including your precious Windows...
Well, yes, I stated the fact that anything running Bash is vulnerable; I never denied that. Where, dear sir, did I state that they were equally vulnerable? We're back to "you can't quote it because I never said it", despite what you claim.
Shellshock is a fixed issue on 'nix systems, for anyone keeping their system up to date. Well, except for OSX Yosemite beta testers, for whom an incomplete patch was released on 9-30; still vulnerable to one of seven known exploits. Windows systems that are vulnerable, no matter how few those might be (MinGW has over a half million weekly downloads, so I would still posit that the number is higher than you admit), remain vulnerable as MinGW hasn't seen an update in nearly a year and Cygwin in almost 5.
I'm not ragging on Windows here; like I said, it's a platform I make use of fairly consistently. I'm just saying, while Shellshock was a doozey of a bug, in the end it cost me maybe an hour of my life to patch well more than a handful of systems and it's done; were I running a POSIX layer on my Windows machines, however, that would not be the case; and, with over a half million weekly downloads of one of the most popular Windows POSIX layers, I'm thinking it's not safe to assume it's a non-issue for Windows servers.
Clearly, we're going to have to agree to disagree on this point, but the facts are as I've stated.
Regarding the CMD example, heres my source for that; fuck me for sharing it, right? Google "PowerShell command injection" and realize that every shell is vulnerable in one way or another; in fact, check out "PowerShell remote exploit" and realize that some of these flaws still exist in the wild.
Nothing's perfect, but I do have to stand by a system that gets patches out quickly; assuming your point about testing patches before deployment stands (and in most cases, it does; in this case, any application broken by the patch was broken to begin with), Bash users had a patch to test against within hours. Do you not test Microsoft's patches before you apply them? You know, weeks or months after the vulnerability is disclosed publicly.
I use Windows, OSX, and Linux in roughly equal proportions
Which probably means I use Windows where I need Windows and I use Linux where I need Linux; OSX is my desktop of choice at the moment, though that is subject to change, as it has changed a number of times over the past 20 years. That doesn't change the fact that I see a fair number of shared hosting providers (of which I am not one) running MinGW on Windows as a means to reduce the incidence of having to tell a customer who insists on using Windows they have to switch to Linux hosting to do what they want. I'm not saying this is the correct way that the user should be running their site, just that yes, less administratively-inclined users sometime make ridiculous demands that you, as a business owner, must bend over and cater to if you want their money. If you simply tell them "You have to move to Linux hosting if you want to do that", they'll tell you when you can deactivate their account after they find a host who'll make it work on Windows. That's how the shared hosting market currently works; there are a million providers and, no matter how ridiculous one's requirements, at least thousands of those millions will cater to those needs without a second though as long as the bill is getting paid.
My best friend got tired of it and sold his hosting company last year, after a very successful 13 year run. As a customer of his (who did not make such ridiculous demands; rather, I opted for Linux hosting, as that's what I needed) for several years, I volunteered my time in his support chat (a few hours a week, whenever I was bored, usually while BSing with him in the evenings) and fielded quite a number of these ridiculous requests (anything at that level of ridicule was beyond my power, as a volunteer, to handle and was forwarded to him) so I can tell you first hand, the idiots who want to do something like this are not only out there, they're plentiful.
Did I say both are equally vulnerable, or are you making shit up in an attempt to discredit me?
Of course, I'm repeating this in response to this bit of snark:
You're right; ShellShock really is as bad a ball-ache in Windows as *nix, no really!
It was originally said in response to this bullshit:
I love the fact you try to equate Windows and Linux for this epic bug as if they're both as vulnerable.
In case you missed the question the first two times, here it is again:
Did I say both are equally vulnerable, or are you making shit up in an attempt to discredit me?
And, in case you decide to say something along the lines of "Yes, you said both are equally vulnerable" I might ask that you quote me.
PROTIP: You won't be able to, because I never said it. If you want to win an argument with me, you have to attack what I'm actually saying; the minute you start attacking what you say I said, you've already lost. You're attacking your own words, not mine. Game. Set. Match.
I'm not seeing another post from you in this thread... What claim did you make? I think we're in agreement, though; by necessity, shells give you all kinds of ways to hang yourself, most of which are in o way obvious to an unseasoned user. That's just the price of the added power and control, and it comes with a responsibility to learn your tools and lear and afollow best practices when developing on or for an environment that makes use of a shell, whether you're using that shell directly or not. Best practices, like sanitizing your inputs, mitigate this on all platforms.
Am I attempting to divert negative PR, or am I simply stating facts? Did I say bithe are equally vulnerable, or are you making shit up in an attempt to discredit me?
I don't have a dog in this race, I use Windows, OSX, and Linux in roughly equal proportions. More people run POSIX layers on their Windows servers than you likely realize; in the hosting world, you give your users what they want, and users want to run that prewritten PHP script that relies on some UNIX userland element that Windows doesn't provide, and some subset want to run it on Windows. Hosts offering a Windows solution often install MSYS/MinGW by default to cut down on support calls for rhese scenarios, so the incidence of it being installed will naturally be higher than the incidence of it being necessary.
Also... give this a try on your Windows machine:
C:\Usersl>set foo=bar^&ping -n 1 google.com
C:\Usersl>echo %foo%
Seems as though you don't need Bash for Windows to be vulnerable, after all. C U Next (patch) Tuesday.