My upstairs neighbors are bats. They're relatively quiet, though sometimes they make some noise up there. When we had the roof replaced a year ago, the previous upstairs neighbors, a family of racoons (seemingly a new litter every spring from the sound of it) were evicted.

Human upstairs neighbors? That must suck.

The Middle East is increasingly irrelevant in the international scene.

Many places are finding their energy needs elsewhere. Soon, hopefully, the demands of autocrats and dictators in M.E. countries will be mostly irrelevant.

This fact, of course, has the usual suspects sputtering and furious. 'Fracking,' pipelines from western Canada, and all that.

Plus the only real Video editing setup you can buy is on OSX only. Avid has gone to crap over the past 8 years so Final Cut is the only real choice anymore.... No the toys from adobe and sony are not real video editing ,those are toys used by wedding videographers, guys who wish they could get a real gig.

'Real' video editing is done on specialized equipment. There are studios all around the room filled with said equipment. It's not done on dinky little pee cees of any brand or make.

IBM is a Business Machine company. They used to make card punches, and card sorters (usable for 'sorting data in the form of stacks of punched cards with or without a computer) and time clocks, and photo copiers. Hell, I have a large 'Simplex' wall clock in this room I am sitting in, Simplex was an IBM spinoff after they stopped making timepieces (kind of the 'clock' equivalent of Lexmark or Lenovo.) IBM has and is about Business, and the equipment businesses need to function.

Yes. Apple is doing very well selling sugar water to kids.

He's looking more like Mick Jagger every day.

If you look at Apple in this light, you'll notice that Apple looks looks and acts like a wide-eyed teenager while Microsoft looks and acts like a gumpy old man. IMO.

What Apple looks like is the weird middle-aged fucker who spends his time hanging around teenagers and people in their 20's. A striving for perpetual adolescence, which is not a good thing.

From what I heard in the posts I saw, the exploit has been known and existed for at least a month now. They held off on releasing a jailbreak for the latest iPods until the iPad release, so that it could liberate all the brand new iPads very near release day. Now that the iPad is out I have grand hopes of liberating my 3G iPod Touch in the near future.

I should add as a postscript that I am someone who hates Apple. I installed NetBSD on an SE/30 just as an in-your-face effort, for example. It's pretty cool, but a painfully tiny 1-bit X11 display has it's limitations. TWM runs great on it, though. And Xchess is quite playable.

People who buy this device are buying into the environment created for the device by Apple.

Not necessarily. I got my iPod Touch because my wife had just gotten her bonus and we were at Frys and she kept saying 'just buy it' and, well, it's easy to buy a new toy when you're being coaxed. Now I have it and being the kind of person I am I'm exploring all my options for how to expand it's usability. That includes shitcanning Apple's security measures which are designed to prevent me from doing certain interesting things with it.

Mine is a generation 3 iPod Touch, so up until now there hasn't been a jailbreak for it. My understanding from reading the iPod jailbreaking sites is that they had an exploit waiting to release, but they were waiting for the iPad release before putting it out there, because they didn't want the exploit patched before the iPad release. So I expect soon to have ssh access to my touch.

I have the accelerometer on my iPod Touch (yes! I bought some Apple shit new at retail for the first time in my life recently!) and all that I can tell is that it's made to insure that no matter what position I hold it when reading web sites and other stuff in bed, it will flip and twist and swivel the text to avoid my reading comfort.

And they don't have a feature in the Settings to flipping disable it. There are some apps that you can turn off the flip-screen, but not all, pointedly not Safari. I am waiting for a 'drill here to destroy accelerometer' web page to come out before I disable it that way....

I swear half the accounts on /. these days were purchased recently from eBay. There's such a lack of clarity in posts, such a lack of thinking that it makes me wonder. Or was it always this bad and I never noticed?

With an 852,xxx account number, it's highly unlikely you were around to notice what it used to be like here, before they brought the apple.slashdot.org domain out.

Apple has always been considered a joke by hackers. At least since the launch of the Macintosh. I remember hearing Steve Jobs speech before the National Press Club at the launch of the Macintosh where he said it was 'hacker proof' in a jubilant tone of voice, and knew that it would never ever be the preferred platform for 'the rest of us.'

Or maybe you're like me, and your 800k account is your fifth or sixth or fifteenth slashdot account. In which case, didn't you notice the tide change when the oh-so-fash Apple enthusiasts started showing up?

I couldn't find the source code for Carbon on that list. Do I have to get that from a torrent site instead?

Even if you had a bike made out of the most expensive components on the market, I suspect you'd make sure it was painted to look ugly. Why? Because you seem to have a clue about such things. I would do the same. You want your street roller to look as ugly as possible. It wards off thieves.

I wonder how long it'll take the otherwise intelligent geeks at /. to finally figure out that Apple is just as dangerous as Microsoft.

That happened long, long ago. But the Apple folks have also crowded on here in the last handful of years. Hell, there's a whole apple.slashdot.com domain now for them. When Slashdot first started, Macintosh was a joke, not anything people here took seriously. When Apple was taken over by NeXT and they facelifted NeXTStep OS it's face lift (after spending hundreds of millions of dollars proving that the programmers at Apple weren't capable of producing a robust worthwhile OS on their own- there are two major failed attempts and who knows how many others) a number of people jumped over to 'Mac' because it seemed 'cool' and the GUI layer Apple was capable of slapping on top seemed pretty nice.

Apple has ALWAYS been as dangerous, or more dangerous, than Microsoft. The whole Windows Monopoly is the fault of Apple. Back in the early years of the Graphical User Interface, there was the Mac, and there were a handful of competitors, most of them running on 'PC Compatible' hardware.

Apple SUED THEM ALL and drove most of them out of business. They killed GeoWorks. They killed the GEM desktop.

They couldn't kill Microsoft. In effect, Apple did Microsoft's work for them, running all their competitors out of the marketplace, preparing the way for the Windows Dominance we now have.

Yes. Apple's practice of SUING ALL COMPETITORS is what drove the market to Windows. The Windows dominance is Apple's fault.

Then again, all that Apple ever wanted was to be an elite boutique platform, so it suits them just fine to have created Windows For The Rest Of Us