Episode VI I thought the Ewoks were a good touch at first but devolved into very silly party fluff at the end as the movie turned into a wrap party. Nobody will ever convince me that after annihilating inhabited planets and cutting off arms, giving the Ewoks at least a shadow of that Gremlins edge wasn't a more credible way to go. It was weak, but the movie was uneven not completely lame.
I would argue that Episode I's first 20 minutes was the highlight of the series. The anticipation, the surprise attack, light sabers versus security doors, watching the trade officials sweat as the plasma pokes through the door. Good quality stuff. As Jar Jar opens his mouth for his first line there is an abrupt, spine jarring turn that defies the laws of physics and the shark has been jumped. Episode II fights against that tide in spots, everyone loves Yoda's dueling scene. Jedi's at the arena, nice. But does not fully redeem itself, much less the series. Episode III was so badly written it hurt to watch. Anakin's massacre is totally Deus Ex Machina, the Jedi are whiny losers, the only character worth following through these three episode is Yoda, and he betrays his own faux zen sensibilities on love and attachment (as expressed repeatedly toward Anakin) when he goes ballistic over the massacre.
Russia was not seeking or accepting such "assistance". And would have been outraged had it been suggested. The bridling over the Western insistence on assistance for securing nuclear weapons and materials was faced down by the West only because of the imminent threat of catastrophe.
And the price of every item includes a steep "value-added tax" (VAT) that is added on at each stage of manufacture, analogous to our state sales taxes but at a much higher rate and with a much higher cost of compliance.
And the labor laws and unionism assure that upwards of 50% of British twenty-somethings entering the job market go unhired because of the much higher expense of firing.
I have known top level British executives whose primary career goal was to establish themselves in the US job market due to the much greater ease of doing business.
The differences are many, even though the British are probably as close to the US in general sensibilities and values as any European country.
The 7130e is a completely different design. Battery consumption varies for me wildly based on reception and Internet use. Heavy use will bring it down to a few hours. Worst case: I lost my car charger for awhile and on an hour commute it would lose 50% of battery. Used just as a phone in a good reception area with very few calls (e.g., vacation) and battery life is as long as a week.
I like the phone, and consider the "on/off" issue a minor quirk not a serious complaint.
Cory Doctorow is pretty small potatoes by SFWA lights, and personally I have never found his work to my taste. He netted one significant award nomination back in 2003. Served one term as an SFWA rep in 1999. Amazon has his latest, Overclocked, at a sales rating of 162,307. One Comes to Town, One Leaves Town is the most successful I found on Amazon at 75,988. Those numbers are better than they sound, he has clearly found an audience, but in no way outstanding, top of the industry stuff. Starship Troopers, by comparison, a long in the tooth reprint by Amazon standards with movie legs, is 8,000. To the professional ear, "creative commons" is simply a less expensive approach to the vanity press concept.
To me, Doctorow's performance in the Ars Technica article indicated the bitter peevishness of the passed over author. He makes not the slightest nod to the interest of the SFWA in protecting their membership from significant unnecessary financial harm by infringement, focusing solely on the "outrage" of his having missed two days of exposure on a free site. A harm, if it can even be called that, more than made up for by the round of articles in the minor press.
The thing that is stopping a mass copyright infringement suit in the case of YouTube is probably that YouTube has started making significant efforts to accommodate the rights of intellectual property holders. The Kazaa verdicts with their 8 and 9 figure settlements and Napsters' buyout in the face of same fate are great big red flashing warning signs.
Of course, those of us using phones that get snarky about shutting down, like my Blackberry, usually can solve the problem by popping the battery. The "off" button on my 7130e is a sleep button that leaves the antenna powered and wakes automatically when there is a call. To save power overnight one has to turn off the antenna and then put the phone to sleep, or just pull the battery. On occasion, the antenna power down stalls and never completes. Failure to turn off the antenna results in a serious overnight drain on the battery many nights, so the battery being removable is an important feature to me.
Steve's insistence on non-removable batteries in the smaller electronics has kept me from considering those products. A multi-day denial of service to change batteries while Apple does the job for me and the inability to take spare batteries on the road or extend the life of an older battery as a spare is simply unacceptable.
As for the "new" AT&T, this is business as usual for them. I had a pager with Cellular One, which they transparently provisioned through SBC. Then, a couple of years later they stopped providing the pager service but didn't tell me until I brought the pager in to get it fixed because I wasn't getting my pages. They said that had to buy a new phone and sign a new, pricier contract if I wanted the features they'd dropped. So I passed and kept an eye out for a better deal. About two years after that, SBC started billing me for pager services that Cellular One, now Cingular, hadn't been providing me for quite awhile. When I called Cingular to get it straightened out, the supervisor I spoke to told me I was an idiot, in those words, for calling him and not SBC. I pointed out that it was Cingular that had lied to SBC while selling them closed accounts and he hung up. I had a new phone with a new provider 12 hours later, and will not be doing business with the "new" AT&T aka Cingular & SBC & the old AT&T & some others that I misplaced somewhere.
The phone was also useless outside the country because of roaming charges resembling college tuition bills, but I remembered 1990 when these same telcos sold 800 numbers for use as pay calling instead of free calling and the usual suspects circulated free prize announcements and other lures at the other end of 800 numbers that consumers expected would be toll free, and instead got stuck for the message fee "$1-10" per minute depending on the scam, as I recall. This continued long after the 900 series numbers for pay calls began.
So, Steve, to summarize, I need a removable battery and a phone company that knows its whatsits from a hole in the ground and hasn't made my list of pillage artists. Best of luck on that last one. Oh, and I'm watching whose security oddities verrrry closely as well and I don't care if a removeable battery costs me a little in thickness.
Wow, talk about matter difficult to respond to in a non-ridiculing manner!
While I have great respect for Pournelle as a writer, he should have read Doctorow's piece more closely.
Ignoring the obvious ad hominem, let's look at Jerry's arguments:
"I can say this: Scribd.com which Doctorow defends has the complete text of a number of works. One of them is Sheffield and Pournelle, Higher Education. I guarantee you that neither I nor Charlie's widow has given this outfit any permission to do this. They used to have more of my books, and Niven's, and many others. They also had a series of hoops one had to jump through to get those taken down. The procedure was onerous, and they didn't answer my emails."
Doctorow doesn't defend scribd, and he also voice no objection to authors (or their agents) sending DMCA notices in order to remove truly infringing content. His problem is with SFWA sending fraudulent notices (which of all things wasn't even in a proper format) that resulted in non-infringing material being removed. And those 'series of hoops' are what's required by the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. It is the law, not some arbitrary attempt on scribd's part in order to make the process more difficult than necessary. If he has a problem with the law he should take his complaints to Congress.
Mr. Doctorow's ill-considered attack on the action taken provides no verbiage distancing himself from scribd.com or the infringement issue. Instead he makes it very clear that he enjoys a long and cozy relationship with same.
"SFWA will have an answer to Doctorow. Doctorow does not seem to have done his homework regarding DMCA, but that too is hardly astonishing. DMCA has a number of legal requirements for both those asserting their rights under it and those asserting a right to post copies of works without the permission of the copyright owners. I am no expert on those matters, but SFWA has such experts among its membership and supporters."
I find it incredibly hard to respond to that in a non-ridiculing manner. Cory has been working with the Internet and copyright for so long that he should be able to quote the entire DMCA by heart by now (well, maybe not the rider bill concerning the sui generis protection of boat hull designs). If there is someone that doesn't understand the DMCA it is Burt, he didn't even manage to send a proper DMCA notification to scribd. If that's the level of "experts" that SFWA has available, I'd strongly advise them to get outside counsel post haste. Especially now that Burt has exposed the SFWA to liability due to perjury under DMCA 512(f).
While it remains for a judge to rule (and a judge will rule on this) by all appearances any liability from perjury will be infinitesimal when compared against the massive copyright infringement issues. I would urge any author with the wherewithal to retain counsel on this matter, or to pool with other like minded authors to do so.
And let me repeat; noone has said that sending notices in order to get infringing material removed is wrong. The entire issue is with SFWA sending notices that resulted in non-infringing content, and content from authors that have explicitly allowed for distribution being taken down.
And yet, Pournelle reports that they still have works of his that were on the infringement list posted. Only taking down the items they knew they could defend, the willfulness of the infringement appears to become obvious.
"They made it difficult for writers to ask that their works be taken off: we had to find them and request one at a time and provide them other materials."
That's the way the DMCA works. If he doesn't like, Congress is over there.
The hostile appearance of compliance is not compliance.
"[..] or that the right of Doctorow to have his work displayed on a site that uses piracy to get net traffic is far more importa
I remember an inaugural event, announced as a come one, come all, meet and greet with the people thing, that was reported a while back where the journalist focused on the controversy of the new President's people managing the gate, the quick construction of fenced off sections, the triage used to herd certain types into a holding pen with no line of sight to the media area, others into "away" areas, and pass-holders only (selected invitees) into the media-resident area. All documented in excruciating detail by the obviously appalled reporter, but buried deep in the A section by his editor.
At that time, the Arkansan President was the fresh face with high approval numbers.
That same fellow, by his second term, spoke for long stretches only from the Atcheson Auditorium in State Department HQ in front of his appointees. The State Department has far more political appointees than any other Federal department, and HQ probably has more political appointees resident any other building in Washington with the possible exception of the White House.
And, of course, when the going got tough for the Georgian he spoke only from the White House grounds.
Bush may turn out to have the first administration to fumble their strategy to the press, or may be the first to have it receive real media coverage, but he is hardly the first to baldly have such a strategy.
As for those other gentlemen, I am amazed to hear that they were Republicans, my recollection being otherwise.
The intended inference was likely that Vista has inspired the spike in XP sales, requiring vast new numbers of valid XP registration keys. My informal (and admittedly very unscientific) sampling of vendor web sites that sort offerings by "best selling" shows XP and outselling Vista for new boxes in those channels, even though the pricing on the Vista systems appears more competitive. Obviously, when faced with such data, Microsoft Bob will chatter endlessly on the enduring popularity of the XP product and, obviously,/. will seize on alternative interpretations insensitive to the feelings of Redmond zip codes.
To be Unix you have to pass the test suite and any other criteria. To make a credible claim to Open Group Unixness you have to pay them to do it. To be UNIX, you have to go buy UNIX or license UNIXness from whoever is holding the rights this week that originated with AT&T back when it was all about PDP6es and 8" floppies. To be unix you must successfully execute the autoconfig (if not the whole build/install process) for something real (e.g., vi) or esoteric (e.g., emacs) with certifiable (but never certified, in the grand tradition of the rebel unix alliance) unixy roots.
Or for a few cycles more the provider (or any intermediate hop on the packet's route) can brute force crack the encryption. 128-bit encryption wasn't particularly strong when it was made available for private browser use, many, many chip generations ago.
Ran across that last week building a new XP box. But the customer requires it, so I have been assimilated.
The prompt box said that I had to accept the WGA update to complete the Windows install, the license in the box said that by clicking I was attesting to my free and uncoerced acceptance of the wonderful benefits of WGA. And when I got compromised while still setting up and had to start over, I had to spend fifteen minutes on the phone to tell a live Microsoft rep that I was installing on only one box to get an activation code to turn off Microsoft's ticking self-destruct sequence. Having just shelled out over half a grand for their products, being run through the renowned Microsoft Customer Contempt, Revulsion, and Aggravation Process (CCRAP) was especially gratifying.
The only bright side is that the box will be used to port customer requirements from Windows to other platforms.
Definitely RTFA. The "debunking" language is incredibly weak, and puts strong reliance on some of the weakest data (e.g., ice core bubble composition). It also dodges the solar cycle challenge. My favorite nugget pins the current temperature upturn on the various clean air acts written into law in the 1970s:
The clean air acts introduced in Europe and North America reduced emissions of sulphate aerosols. As levels fell in the atmosphere, their cooling effect was soon outweighed by the warming effect of the steadily rising levels of greenhouse gases. And where is the theory that global warming is caused by that infamous government plot to lower the Earth's albedo and thereby send temperatures soaring, the use of black asphalt for roads and parking lots? Use of asphalt rose dramatically in the late 60's and early 70's in the US as local governments paved every back road and cow path. Shopping mall parking lots have exploded across the landscape. Ever crossed a blacktop in high summer barefoot? Jumped from white line to white line in a parking lot? Run for the grass, or the white sidewalk?
Who was that a few weeks ago advocating the rationing of toilet paper to one square per trip? Was that the asphalt lobby spokesperson?
I used all three and I range them in other direction. Perhaps you don't have fast enough disk or CPU for Vista? Good point! As someone who has seen performance improvements on my G3 systems with each new OS X release, just how many stock last millenium models does Vista support? And on how many of those does Vista outperform Win2K on benchmarks?
TFA cracked me up when they handed the performance point to Vista because it will be able to run the latest games better. On the IT side, OS performance is more concerned with being able to run the fully-invested body of legacy software without hiccup, not kowtowing to a planned obsolescence mentality. Not having to change boxes in eight years keeps the refresh cycles in the hands of the IT managers.
The net install feature that comes with OS X Server covers the standard tweakings on the Mac side. You can also use it to field customized application installs from disk images.
Jurisdiction is a core issue with the Internet, and becoming more so every day. There is content on the Internet to offend everyone, including legislators and judges and, especially, political candidates. The Internet upsets many apple carts in every country, and has cast light on the way speech is managed by power in every country. The issue is not US vs. Japan, it is Western Liberal Democratic tradition versus specific Japanese plaintiffs. Filtering at the border would probably be impalatable to the Japanese, but maybe not, Japanese Democracy has always been very paternalistic by Western standards.
And yes, tidal effects of the Internet aside, ultimately it is the Japanese people that should determine these questions for themselves. But also, their solution should in no way interfere with the rights of anyone beyond their borders.
In the United States, under the First Amendment to our Constitution, we have very clearly: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...." Given the influence of political candidates once elected, however, the US has silliness like the McCain-Feingold law, which explicitly dictates who may publish what in the final 60 days before an election. (My advice is to never vote for a politician that supports or has ever supported legislation managing political speech, unless it is to repeal such laws and restore the First Amendment. But if I posted this advice on the wrong date, the United States Federal Government, servants of the people, might interpret it as candidate advocacy and throw me in jail.)
Yes, "lesser" OS's do and always have received attention from the malware types. And some fools even on this very site have posted challenges with static IP to the malware crowd to crack a stock OS X box. (Folks, I do not recommend this kind of behavior. There are rocks that you do not want to turn over. There are some people in this life you do not want noticing you.) That mound of critical vulnerabilities wasn't much use. The big difference is that the OS X consumer product has a long history of being more secure than the Windows professional product. Compare OS X versus XP Home Edition for a more realistic view of the consumer experience. A very man-of-steel/woman-of-kleenex experience.
As for the number of vulnerabilities found per system and the number of people looking: To the degree that OS X is Darwin based (and the elements that would play a role in an exploit appear largely in the Darwin portion), there is a far higher quality of access to the source code to a higher percentage of the platform's developer community. It is far easier (and far, far less tedious) to track down and submit vulnerabilities when the source code is readily available.
Microsoft has argued to customers for over ten years that open source is less secure because the bad guys can just cruise the code. Security guys have known for decades that secret algorithms are inferior to published algorithms because the public algorithms continually undergo the crucible of public scrutiny. If Microsoft were right on this point, where are all those juicy Darwin exploits? It should be just soooo much easier.
Finally, I am very suspicious of the argument that says that a consumer should accept a higher risk of exploitation because that vendor has the "unfair disadvantage" of selling ten times as many copies. Or that the quality is somehow higher based on a perceived number of vulnerabilities while ignoring a massive imbalance in exploits.
I have consistently heard two complaints from the security industry about Apple: 1) They won't share their internal vulnerability list with the vendors making virus checkers, et. al.; 2) They are not always as responsive/attentive/solicitous to professionals coming forward with vulnerabilities and exploits as they could be. The first, I wouldn't tell them either. As an OS vendor I would prioritize, fix, and ship patches. I don't need third party vendors bumping around in my security arrangements, especially ones that are firmly in bed with my competitor. The second item is a credible general complaint, but hardly unique to Apple and some of it is the competition for recognition among professionals in a wickedly competitive and challenging field.
In any game of cops and robbers the questions are: how many crimes were foiled, how many permitted, how long was a spree allowed to run. And how much money was spent to secure the system per system sold to get the result. Vulnerabilities cannot be counted as if they were exploits. When you are pitching a no hitter, that deep pop fly out in the 7th is a warning, not the whole ball game. I know Bill Gates is thrilled to have sold enough copies to make 9 figures worth of botted systems (according to the boys at the beeb, at least). From what I can find, and I knock wood as I say it, Steve appears to be pitching no hitters.
Yes the same drives that are used in Apple systems are used in Windows systems. But only a handful of the drives used in Windows systems are used in Apple systems. And yes, the observation was anecdotal, just as every assertion in your reply was completely unsubstantiated. Welcome to/., thanks for playing.
Apple would shut it down in a heartbeat. Back in 80's there was a thriving market in Mac clones that only needed the OS ROM chip to operate. Some friends of mine owned a retail business and arranged such deals, until their chip source was arrested. Convicted. Served hard time. Chilled the market, big time.
And if you are reinstalling a box that was shipped without the SP2 patch, the article makes it very clear why you should bring patches up to date before calling it a night!
Of course nobody is demanding for the procut to be perfect. But when someone claims that their product, in opposition to the competition, "just works", you can understant that it has fewer defects, vulnerabilities and problems than the competition. And that's mathematically not the case, not by a long stretch. It's not? Apple is way out in front, mathematically, in the categories that matter most to me. Number of exploits in the wild? Percentage of systems exploited? Mean time to bothood when connected to an Internet exposed IP address? Depth and breadth of UNIX support? Forced, surreptitious upgrades to IE7 with serious known holes pushed out as security upgrades. OK, I miss Madden Football. A little. But it was headed off the deep end anyway. And there are many more security product vendors selling bigger lines of security products for Windows. The demand just doesn't seem to be there for Mac. Do not get me wrong, measures can and should be taken on the Mac (ClamXav and Little Snitch are a good place to start). Just because the Mac isn't a script kiddie paradise doesn't mean it will dodge all of the bullets forever. Oh, and I just had to replace a hard drive in a Mac for the first time in 20 years (11 Macs total, including a IIci, the only ones to die so far was a Blue & White G3 Yosemite after six years of hard service and an iMac that also provided six years of service). The laptop drive started to die at 15 months and was replaced at 18 months. Between five HP and IBM laptops I only had one Windows laptop last beyond 18 months. You are right that, mathematically, there is no comparison.
Business clients do occasionally require Windows tools. Heck, there's one that I wouldn't want do without when doing serious XML. But Windows development tools run fine on the Mac under VirtualPC on PPC systems, including Visual Studio. With networking turned off. (Running it with the network off also saves hundreds of dollars in network security software!) The "Month of Apple Bugs" was a lot of huffing and puffing over barely anything (see here for a detailed recap). The major lesson was, don't use an Admin account as a login account on a Mac. I urge Apple to stress to update their install scripts and documentation to reinforce that lesson. (The motivation is difficult when the security balance is already so lopsided in Apple's favor.) Among the biggest security risks routinely cited in security pieces is running Microsoft software on the Mac (Internet Explorer, Office, Windows Media Player).
Let's see. We can hammer Steve using the interpretation that "Just Works" means infinite time between failures, an engineering impossibility for mortal men, or we can take the interpretation that common use cases require minimal-to-no technical knowledge to execute. Connecting a hard drive, a camera, a network, finding a printer on the network. Scheduling a backup, restoring a backup, making a slide show of family photos.
Apple has done a good job of streamlining use cases in their consumer products to bring more capability to the lay user. In fact, they regularly set a new industry marks. For me, the technical user, it means more time spent on my clients' tasks and shared with my family and less time wasted on the "IT" aspects of running a business. And 20+ years of UNIX experience and a few years of NeXT experience means that I can jump under the hood and do magic when the occasion calls for magic. The fact that Apple's efforts are not (and never can be) perfect is a fact of life. Steve isn't competing with perfect, he's competing with Windows and Linux.
But why are you making this switch? If you want stability and security over all else then get Linux.
In the hands of a good IT shop, the security improvement transitioning from Windows to either Linux or Mac OS X Tiger is huge.
Usability for the mainstream user will be stronger with Mac (and the related IT support requirements easier to support). Linux has made wonderful strides, but Mac user interface has the advantage (from a user support point of view) of being pathologically monolithic. Pre-OS X there were a billion gizmos and options to tweak the user interface, just as with Linux today. With OS X, Apple as a consumer-level customer support company made the decision to reverse policy and lock down that kaleidoscope of options that was making phone support far harder than it would be otherwise.
Legacy Windows apps and legacy "other UNIX apps" these days will mostly be a tie, but mileage may very (BSD vs. AT&T vs. Solaris nuances, etc.) with lock-in always being a consideration.
Where the end user is technical, my only questions, in order, are:
1) What do you have to use to accomplish the job. 2) What are you most happy using.
Then I'd put a firewall between tech groups (development, support/help desk, NOC) and a firewall between tech groups and users and a firewall between production servers and everybody else and let God sort them out.
On top of that, they've thrown in 3rd party apps to fill out the month. The OS does have some responsibility for limiting the damage a user-space app can do, which goes hand in glove with OS X/UNIX multiuser architectures (including NT and its descendants). If the user decides to download and run an application it is an act of trust. If the user makes a mistake in a UNIX context, the expectations include:
1) That user's resource and publicly editable resources are at risk. 2) The OS may succumb to denial of service, cease to operate effectively, but should not compromise other user's data or system data (including applications).
So it is unfair to throw in 3rd party apps that trash or exploit the user's resources, but not 3rd party apps that establish rootkits, escalate privileges, and otherwise exploit weaknesses in the OS to break down those barriers.
Of course, no sooner had Microsoft started selling Windows NT than the practice of applications routinely patching or replacing outright Windows system libraries was all the rage. This sort of arrangement implicitly delegated Microsoft's responsibility for wholesome, stable system libraries to every application vendor, including competing ones with an ax to grind or chain gang programmers, as a common practice. The compatibility issues spiraled out of control. It boggles the mind. It institutionalized the weekly NT reformat/reinstall ritual. This one practice was sufficient to annihilate the system/application barrier in NT systems. It made Win32 the exploit SDK of choice for a generation of script kiddies. The NT project hired liberally from DEC VMS and UNIX system shops, where the issues were well understood from a decade of timesharing mainframe and minicomputer experience. They built up a vast and fairly sophisticated security infrastructure, and then cheerfully neutered it with this ham-handed system patch competition. They just can't help themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly the first thing to do is check /. threads for the proper, step by step procedure for accessing the Internet with a stolen computer.
Episode VI I thought the Ewoks were a good touch at first but devolved into very silly party fluff at the end as the movie turned into a wrap party. Nobody will ever convince me that after annihilating inhabited planets and cutting off arms, giving the Ewoks at least a shadow of that Gremlins edge wasn't a more credible way to go. It was weak, but the movie was uneven not completely lame.
I would argue that Episode I's first 20 minutes was the highlight of the series. The anticipation, the surprise attack, light sabers versus security doors, watching the trade officials sweat as the plasma pokes through the door. Good quality stuff. As Jar Jar opens his mouth for his first line there is an abrupt, spine jarring turn that defies the laws of physics and the shark has been jumped. Episode II fights against that tide in spots, everyone loves Yoda's dueling scene. Jedi's at the arena, nice. But does not fully redeem itself, much less the series. Episode III was so badly written it hurt to watch. Anakin's massacre is totally Deus Ex Machina, the Jedi are whiny losers, the only character worth following through these three episode is Yoda, and he betrays his own faux zen sensibilities on love and attachment (as expressed repeatedly toward Anakin) when he goes ballistic over the massacre.
Russia was not seeking or accepting such "assistance". And would have been outraged had it been suggested. The bridling over the Western insistence on assistance for securing nuclear weapons and materials was faced down by the West only because of the imminent threat of catastrophe.
A positive result from calling vendor tech support! And resolution in record time!
And the price of every item includes a steep "value-added tax" (VAT) that is added on at each stage of manufacture, analogous to our state sales taxes but at a much higher rate and with a much higher cost of compliance.
And the labor laws and unionism assure that upwards of 50% of British twenty-somethings entering the job market go unhired because of the much higher expense of firing.
I have known top level British executives whose primary career goal was to establish themselves in the US job market due to the much greater ease of doing business.
The differences are many, even though the British are probably as close to the US in general sensibilities and values as any European country.
The 7130e is a completely different design. Battery consumption varies for me wildly based on reception and Internet use. Heavy use will bring it down to a few hours. Worst case: I lost my car charger for awhile and on an hour commute it would lose 50% of battery. Used just as a phone in a good reception area with very few calls (e.g., vacation) and battery life is as long as a week.
I like the phone, and consider the "on/off" issue a minor quirk not a serious complaint.
Cory Doctorow is pretty small potatoes by SFWA lights, and personally I have never found his work to my taste. He netted one significant award nomination back in 2003. Served one term as an SFWA rep in 1999. Amazon has his latest, Overclocked, at a sales rating of 162,307. One Comes to Town, One Leaves Town is the most successful I found on Amazon at 75,988. Those numbers are better than they sound, he has clearly found an audience, but in no way outstanding, top of the industry stuff. Starship Troopers, by comparison, a long in the tooth reprint by Amazon standards with movie legs, is 8,000. To the professional ear, "creative commons" is simply a less expensive approach to the vanity press concept.
To me, Doctorow's performance in the Ars Technica article indicated the bitter peevishness of the passed over author. He makes not the slightest nod to the interest of the SFWA in protecting their membership from significant unnecessary financial harm by infringement, focusing solely on the "outrage" of his having missed two days of exposure on a free site. A harm, if it can even be called that, more than made up for by the round of articles in the minor press.
The thing that is stopping a mass copyright infringement suit in the case of YouTube is probably that YouTube has started making significant efforts to accommodate the rights of intellectual property holders. The Kazaa verdicts with their 8 and 9 figure settlements and Napsters' buyout in the face of same fate are great big red flashing warning signs.
Of course, those of us using phones that get snarky about shutting down, like my Blackberry, usually can solve the problem by popping the battery. The "off" button on my 7130e is a sleep button that leaves the antenna powered and wakes automatically when there is a call. To save power overnight one has to turn off the antenna and then put the phone to sleep, or just pull the battery. On occasion, the antenna power down stalls and never completes. Failure to turn off the antenna results in a serious overnight drain on the battery many nights, so the battery being removable is an important feature to me.
Steve's insistence on non-removable batteries in the smaller electronics has kept me from considering those products. A multi-day denial of service to change batteries while Apple does the job for me and the inability to take spare batteries on the road or extend the life of an older battery as a spare is simply unacceptable.
As for the "new" AT&T, this is business as usual for them. I had a pager with Cellular One, which they transparently provisioned through SBC. Then, a couple of years later they stopped providing the pager service but didn't tell me until I brought the pager in to get it fixed because I wasn't getting my pages. They said that had to buy a new phone and sign a new, pricier contract if I wanted the features they'd dropped. So I passed and kept an eye out for a better deal. About two years after that, SBC started billing me for pager services that Cellular One, now Cingular, hadn't been providing me for quite awhile. When I called Cingular to get it straightened out, the supervisor I spoke to told me I was an idiot, in those words, for calling him and not SBC. I pointed out that it was Cingular that had lied to SBC while selling them closed accounts and he hung up. I had a new phone with a new provider 12 hours later, and will not be doing business with the "new" AT&T aka Cingular & SBC & the old AT&T & some others that I misplaced somewhere.
The phone was also useless outside the country because of roaming charges resembling college tuition bills, but I remembered 1990 when these same telcos sold 800 numbers for use as pay calling instead of free calling and the usual suspects circulated free prize announcements and other lures at the other end of 800 numbers that consumers expected would be toll free, and instead got stuck for the message fee "$1-10" per minute depending on the scam, as I recall. This continued long after the 900 series numbers for pay calls began.
So, Steve, to summarize, I need a removable battery and a phone company that knows its whatsits from a hole in the ground and hasn't made my list of pillage artists. Best of luck on that last one. Oh, and I'm watching whose security oddities verrrry closely as well and I don't care if a removeable battery costs me a little in thickness.
While I have great respect for Pournelle as a writer, he should have read Doctorow's piece more closely.
Ignoring the obvious ad hominem, let's look at Jerry's arguments:
"I can say this: Scribd.com which Doctorow defends has the complete text of a number of works. One of them is Sheffield and Pournelle, Higher Education. I guarantee you that neither I nor Charlie's widow has given this outfit any permission to do this. They used to have more of my books, and Niven's, and many others. They also had a series of hoops one had to jump through to get those taken down. The procedure was onerous, and they didn't answer my emails."
Doctorow doesn't defend scribd, and he also voice no objection to authors (or their agents) sending DMCA notices in order to remove truly infringing content. His problem is with SFWA sending fraudulent notices (which of all things wasn't even in a proper format) that resulted in non-infringing material being removed. And those 'series of hoops' are what's required by the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. It is the law, not some arbitrary attempt on scribd's part in order to make the process more difficult than necessary. If he has a problem with the law he should take his complaints to Congress.
Mr. Doctorow's ill-considered attack on the action taken provides no verbiage distancing himself from scribd.com or the infringement issue. Instead he makes it very clear that he enjoys a long and cozy relationship with same.
"SFWA will have an answer to Doctorow. Doctorow does not seem to have done his homework regarding DMCA, but that too is hardly astonishing. DMCA has a number of legal requirements for both those asserting their rights under it and those asserting a right to post copies of works without the permission of the copyright owners. I am no expert on those matters, but SFWA has such experts among its membership and supporters."
I find it incredibly hard to respond to that in a non-ridiculing manner. Cory has been working with the Internet and copyright for so long that he should be able to quote the entire DMCA by heart by now (well, maybe not the rider bill concerning the sui generis protection of boat hull designs). If there is someone that doesn't understand the DMCA it is Burt, he didn't even manage to send a proper DMCA notification to scribd. If that's the level of "experts" that SFWA has available, I'd strongly advise them to get outside counsel post haste. Especially now that Burt has exposed the SFWA to liability due to perjury under DMCA 512(f).
While it remains for a judge to rule (and a judge will rule on this) by all appearances any liability from perjury will be infinitesimal when compared against the massive copyright infringement issues. I would urge any author with the wherewithal to retain counsel on this matter, or to pool with other like minded authors to do so.
And let me repeat; noone has said that sending notices in order to get infringing material removed is wrong. The entire issue is with SFWA sending notices that resulted in non-infringing content, and content from authors that have explicitly allowed for distribution being taken down.
And yet, Pournelle reports that they still have works of his that were on the infringement list posted. Only taking down the items they knew they could defend, the willfulness of the infringement appears to become obvious.
"They made it difficult for writers to ask that their works be taken off: we had to find them and request one at a time and provide them other materials."
That's the way the DMCA works. If he doesn't like, Congress is over there.
The hostile appearance of compliance is not compliance.
"[..] or that the right of Doctorow to have his work displayed on a site that uses piracy to get net traffic is far more importa
I remember an inaugural event, announced as a come one, come all, meet and greet with the people thing, that was reported a while back where the journalist focused on the controversy of the new President's people managing the gate, the quick construction of fenced off sections, the triage used to herd certain types into a holding pen with no line of sight to the media area, others into "away" areas, and pass-holders only (selected invitees) into the media-resident area. All documented in excruciating detail by the obviously appalled reporter, but buried deep in the A section by his editor.
At that time, the Arkansan President was the fresh face with high approval numbers.
That same fellow, by his second term, spoke for long stretches only from the Atcheson Auditorium in State Department HQ in front of his appointees. The State Department has far more political appointees than any other Federal department, and HQ probably has more political appointees resident any other building in Washington with the possible exception of the White House.
And, of course, when the going got tough for the Georgian he spoke only from the White House grounds.
Bush may turn out to have the first administration to fumble their strategy to the press, or may be the first to have it receive real media coverage, but he is hardly the first to baldly have such a strategy.
As for those other gentlemen, I am amazed to hear that they were Republicans, my recollection being otherwise.
The intended inference was likely that Vista has inspired the spike in XP sales, requiring vast new numbers of valid XP registration keys. My informal (and admittedly very unscientific) sampling of vendor web sites that sort offerings by "best selling" shows XP and outselling Vista for new boxes in those channels, even though the pricing on the Vista systems appears more competitive. Obviously, when faced with such data, Microsoft Bob will chatter endlessly on the enduring popularity of the XP product and, obviously, /. will seize on alternative interpretations insensitive to the feelings of Redmond zip codes.
Also, Earth shall rotate.
To be Unix you have to pass the test suite and any other criteria. To make a credible claim to Open Group Unixness you have to pay them to do it. To be UNIX, you have to go buy UNIX or license UNIXness from whoever is holding the rights this week that originated with AT&T back when it was all about PDP6es and 8" floppies. To be unix you must successfully execute the autoconfig (if not the whole build/install process) for something real (e.g., vi) or esoteric (e.g., emacs) with certifiable (but never certified, in the grand tradition of the rebel unix alliance) unixy roots.
Or for a few cycles more the provider (or any intermediate hop on the packet's route) can brute force crack the encryption. 128-bit encryption wasn't particularly strong when it was made available for private browser use, many, many chip generations ago.
Ran across that last week building a new XP box. But the customer requires it, so I have been assimilated.
The prompt box said that I had to accept the WGA update to complete the Windows install, the license in the box said that by clicking I was attesting to my free and uncoerced acceptance of the wonderful benefits of WGA. And when I got compromised while still setting up and had to start over, I had to spend fifteen minutes on the phone to tell a live Microsoft rep that I was installing on only one box to get an activation code to turn off Microsoft's ticking self-destruct sequence. Having just shelled out over half a grand for their products, being run through the renowned Microsoft Customer Contempt, Revulsion, and Aggravation Process (CCRAP) was especially gratifying.
The only bright side is that the box will be used to port customer requirements from Windows to other platforms.
Who was that a few weeks ago advocating the rationing of toilet paper to one square per trip? Was that the asphalt lobby spokesperson?
TFA cracked me up when they handed the performance point to Vista because it will be able to run the latest games better. On the IT side, OS performance is more concerned with being able to run the fully-invested body of legacy software without hiccup, not kowtowing to a planned obsolescence mentality. Not having to change boxes in eight years keeps the refresh cycles in the hands of the IT managers.
The net install feature that comes with OS X Server covers the standard tweakings on the Mac side. You can also use it to field customized application installs from disk images.
Jurisdiction is a core issue with the Internet, and becoming more so every day. There is content on the Internet to offend everyone, including legislators and judges and, especially, political candidates. The Internet upsets many apple carts in every country, and has cast light on the way speech is managed by power in every country. The issue is not US vs. Japan, it is Western Liberal Democratic tradition versus specific Japanese plaintiffs. Filtering at the border would probably be impalatable to the Japanese, but maybe not, Japanese Democracy has always been very paternalistic by Western standards.
And yes, tidal effects of the Internet aside, ultimately it is the Japanese people that should determine these questions for themselves. But also, their solution should in no way interfere with the rights of anyone beyond their borders.
In the United States, under the First Amendment to our Constitution, we have very clearly: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...." Given the influence of political candidates once elected, however, the US has silliness like the McCain-Feingold law, which explicitly dictates who may publish what in the final 60 days before an election. (My advice is to never vote for a politician that supports or has ever supported legislation managing political speech, unless it is to repeal such laws and restore the First Amendment. But if I posted this advice on the wrong date, the United States Federal Government, servants of the people, might interpret it as candidate advocacy and throw me in jail.)
Where to begin...
/., thanks for playing.
Yes, "lesser" OS's do and always have received attention from the malware types. And some fools even on this very site have posted challenges with static IP to the malware crowd to crack a stock OS X box. (Folks, I do not recommend this kind of behavior. There are rocks that you do not want to turn over. There are some people in this life you do not want noticing you.) That mound of critical vulnerabilities wasn't much use. The big difference is that the OS X consumer product has a long history of being more secure than the Windows professional product. Compare OS X versus XP Home Edition for a more realistic view of the consumer experience. A very man-of-steel/woman-of-kleenex experience.
As for the number of vulnerabilities found per system and the number of people looking: To the degree that OS X is Darwin based (and the elements that would play a role in an exploit appear largely in the Darwin portion), there is a far higher quality of access to the source code to a higher percentage of the platform's developer community. It is far easier (and far, far less tedious) to track down and submit vulnerabilities when the source code is readily available.
Microsoft has argued to customers for over ten years that open source is less secure because the bad guys can just cruise the code. Security guys have known for decades that secret algorithms are inferior to published algorithms because the public algorithms continually undergo the crucible of public scrutiny. If Microsoft were right on this point, where are all those juicy Darwin exploits? It should be just soooo much easier.
Finally, I am very suspicious of the argument that says that a consumer should accept a higher risk of exploitation because that vendor has the "unfair disadvantage" of selling ten times as many copies. Or that the quality is somehow higher based on a perceived number of vulnerabilities while ignoring a massive imbalance in exploits.
I have consistently heard two complaints from the security industry about Apple: 1) They won't share their internal vulnerability list with the vendors making virus checkers, et. al.; 2) They are not always as responsive/attentive/solicitous to professionals coming forward with vulnerabilities and exploits as they could be. The first, I wouldn't tell them either. As an OS vendor I would prioritize, fix, and ship patches. I don't need third party vendors bumping around in my security arrangements, especially ones that are firmly in bed with my competitor. The second item is a credible general complaint, but hardly unique to Apple and some of it is the competition for recognition among professionals in a wickedly competitive and challenging field.
In any game of cops and robbers the questions are: how many crimes were foiled, how many permitted, how long was a spree allowed to run. And how much money was spent to secure the system per system sold to get the result. Vulnerabilities cannot be counted as if they were exploits. When you are pitching a no hitter, that deep pop fly out in the 7th is a warning, not the whole ball game. I know Bill Gates is thrilled to have sold enough copies to make 9 figures worth of botted systems (according to the boys at the beeb, at least). From what I can find, and I knock wood as I say it, Steve appears to be pitching no hitters.
Yes the same drives that are used in Apple systems are used in Windows systems. But only a handful of the drives used in Windows systems are used in Apple systems. And yes, the observation was anecdotal, just as every assertion in your reply was completely unsubstantiated. Welcome to
Apple would shut it down in a heartbeat. Back in 80's there was a thriving market in Mac clones that only needed the OS ROM chip to operate. Some friends of mine owned a retail business and arranged such deals, until their chip source was arrested. Convicted. Served hard time. Chilled the market, big time.
And if you are reinstalling a box that was shipped without the SP2 patch, the article makes it very clear why you should bring patches up to date before calling it a night!
Business clients do occasionally require Windows tools. Heck, there's one that I wouldn't want do without when doing serious XML. But Windows development tools run fine on the Mac under VirtualPC on PPC systems, including Visual Studio. With networking turned off. (Running it with the network off also saves hundreds of dollars in network security software!) The "Month of Apple Bugs" was a lot of huffing and puffing over barely anything (see here for a detailed recap). The major lesson was, don't use an Admin account as a login account on a Mac. I urge Apple to stress to update their install scripts and documentation to reinforce that lesson. (The motivation is difficult when the security balance is already so lopsided in Apple's favor.) Among the biggest security risks routinely cited in security pieces is running Microsoft software on the Mac (Internet Explorer, Office, Windows Media Player).
Let's see. We can hammer Steve using the interpretation that "Just Works" means infinite time between failures, an engineering impossibility for mortal men, or we can take the interpretation that common use cases require minimal-to-no technical knowledge to execute. Connecting a hard drive, a camera, a network, finding a printer on the network. Scheduling a backup, restoring a backup, making a slide show of family photos.
Apple has done a good job of streamlining use cases in their consumer products to bring more capability to the lay user. In fact, they regularly set a new industry marks. For me, the technical user, it means more time spent on my clients' tasks and shared with my family and less time wasted on the "IT" aspects of running a business. And 20+ years of UNIX experience and a few years of NeXT experience means that I can jump under the hood and do magic when the occasion calls for magic. The fact that Apple's efforts are not (and never can be) perfect is a fact of life. Steve isn't competing with perfect, he's competing with Windows and Linux.
But why are you making this switch? If you want stability and security over all else then get Linux.
In the hands of a good IT shop, the security improvement transitioning from Windows to either Linux or Mac OS X Tiger is huge.
Usability for the mainstream user will be stronger with Mac (and the related IT support requirements easier to support). Linux has made wonderful strides, but Mac user interface has the advantage (from a user support point of view) of being pathologically monolithic. Pre-OS X there were a billion gizmos and options to tweak the user interface, just as with Linux today. With OS X, Apple as a consumer-level customer support company made the decision to reverse policy and lock down that kaleidoscope of options that was making phone support far harder than it would be otherwise.
Legacy Windows apps and legacy "other UNIX apps" these days will mostly be a tie, but mileage may very (BSD vs. AT&T vs. Solaris nuances, etc.) with lock-in always being a consideration.
Where the end user is technical, my only questions, in order, are:
1) What do you have to use to accomplish the job.
2) What are you most happy using.
Then I'd put a firewall between tech groups (development, support/help desk, NOC) and a firewall between tech groups and users and a firewall between production servers and everybody else and let God sort them out.
1) That user's resource and publicly editable resources are at risk.
2) The OS may succumb to denial of service, cease to operate effectively, but should not compromise other user's data or system data (including applications).
So it is unfair to throw in 3rd party apps that trash or exploit the user's resources, but not 3rd party apps that establish rootkits, escalate privileges, and otherwise exploit weaknesses in the OS to break down those barriers.
Of course, no sooner had Microsoft started selling Windows NT than the practice of applications routinely patching or replacing outright Windows system libraries was all the rage. This sort of arrangement implicitly delegated Microsoft's responsibility for wholesome, stable system libraries to every application vendor, including competing ones with an ax to grind or chain gang programmers, as a common practice. The compatibility issues spiraled out of control. It boggles the mind. It institutionalized the weekly NT reformat/reinstall ritual. This one practice was sufficient to annihilate the system/application barrier in NT systems. It made Win32 the exploit SDK of choice for a generation of script kiddies. The NT project hired liberally from DEC VMS and UNIX system shops, where the issues were well understood from a decade of timesharing mainframe and minicomputer experience. They built up a vast and fairly sophisticated security infrastructure, and then cheerfully neutered it with this ham-handed system patch competition. They just can't help themselves.