No, the ApplePay CC number is not transmitted in any way, only the one-time token is transmitted. If the credit card reader is compromised it is theoretically possible to issue a payment using the one-time token before the payment can be issued by the vendor, but not really practical. And once a payment has been issued the token becomes worthless so the vendor will find out very quickly that they have been compromised (as in, within a few hours, possibly even in real time, rather than months later).

-Matt

Well, its pretty obvious that the so-called fraud rate is a made-up number. It would be insane if it were true. But most likely... it's insane because the author made it up.

-Matt

In terms of convenience, ApplePay is about as easy as a contactless credit card. It takes me about 3 seconds to pay with ApplePay and at least for me it's faster than even a contactless card because I keep my phone in a more accessible pocket than I do my wallet.

More importantly, ApplePay is significantly easier to use than chip-and-pin or traditional cards, which is where its competition really is (because that is what most people use in the U.S. who are just now starting to migrate). And also significantly more secure for the user.

It is certainly far more convenient to use than Google Wallet or any Android payment scheme to-date which require you to turn on your phone and/or push into an App to use. Not sure why anyone is even arguing about Google Wallet or other Android pay schemes any more, they've already very obviously have lost that war and will need significant hardware upgrades to even come close to ApplePay's convenience or security.

Touching your wallet to the reader is a bit of a misnomer... works great if you have just one card in your wallet. Doesn't work reliably if you have more than one. Another interesting little tidbit on the contactless payment cards is that if you are standing in line and the person in front of you is paying, and your card is anywhere near the reader, the reader can pick up your card accidently. That has happened to a friend of mine several times, to the point where he now keeps his contactless card in a faraday-cage card slip. That doesn't happen with ApplePay because you have your finger on the fingerprint reader to complete the transaction.

-Matt

I just squiggle when I have to sign a credit card slip. I don't bother using my signature at all, and haven't for about 20 years (even longer). Nobody cares. I did try using a big 'X' a few times but actually got some pushback on that. But I've never gotten pushback when I use a random scribble.

-Matt

Wish more people would leave, its getting crowded here. But, alas, idiotic opinions on slashdot don't translate into reality.

-Matt

Well, I think it was a combination of things, and Linux was certainly a part of the reason. But not the whole reason. There are several reasons why Sun finally died:

(1) Sun hardware just couldn't keep up with Intel. The many-threads model really only worked well for parallelization of database operations and not much else. Each individual cpu thread simply became too slow. And people stopped caring about database benchmarks because they were more a function of rapidly improving storage and networking technology than anything else. CPU performance stopped mattering so much and Sun's super-optimized core hardware advantage went right out the door along with it.

(2) Sun's utility software quickly fell behind linux and the BSDs. I began noticing this long before Sun actually sold out to Oracle. Sun's kernel stayed fairly relevant, Solaris wasn't bad... very solid in fact. But competing operating systems were also becoming more solid. But, OMG, the utililties were all 80s crap. Nobody growing up in today's world (or even the world of a decade ago) would be happy with a base Solaris install.

(3) Sun basically became like IBM... corporate only sales and screw making anything that could be bought by up-and-coming students. Solaris for x86 was never taken seriously by Sun, and thus never taken seriously by people outside of Sun. With students growing up on Linux (the younger age group) and the BSDs (my age group), Sun started losing market power as these generational shifts began moving into the workplace. Also, system needs by the web began changing. Sure there are still huge backend databases, but most of the services (and the related hardware) were becoming heavily distributed and Sun's hardware just didn't fit the model.

In fact, this is similar to the problems that SGI had. They were married to their hardware (don't get me started on Solaris for x86), the hardware became non-competitive and unpurchasable by smaller businesses or individuals, and the base software was locked into an 80's snapshot of hell. The system programmers lost sight of what people wanted and got tunnel vision, super-optimizing database paths and ignoring everything else. Problem is, people were more interested in the 'everything else' part.

It might be fine for the older IT types, but all the newcomers had grown up on Linux and the middle-agers had grown up on the BSDs. Their rotation into the workplace spelled Sun's death in very loud, clear terms that Sun pretty much ignored.

-Matt

While some things have improved in Firefox, much of the browser has gotten worse over time. Simple illustration... it leaks huge amounts of memory. After only 3 days of sitting around:

    UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND
    101 164892 1738 128 230 0 1.45G 1.02G - R2L ?? 3d09:44 firefox -geometry +2820+80

After around 2 weeks the machine starts to swap. I've seen the image grow to over 6GB (with 4GB *active*) before I've had to kill it and start a fresh copy. WTF is firefox using all that memory for? It makes no sense whatsoever.

Other problems include severe instability, particularly with the file requestor (when uploading files), which results in seg-faults. And even with all the threading there seem to be severe interdependencies between tabs running javascript, so if one tab is javascript-heavy, it messes up the performance of other tabs.

The menu system is in a complete shambles, and I was really unhappy when the last upgrade changed my default search preferences to Yahoo without so much as a by-your-leave.

-Matt

Rents in Mountain View for a nice apartment run around $2500/mo. The cost of not having to commute can be high. But there are plenty of other places with relatively good BART access that will run significantly lower. They certainty don't run $7K/month unless you are renting a large house.

-Matt

Kinda Apples and Oranges. UL testing is fairly straight-forward. The quick explanation - they stress the device in various ways and see if it catches on fire. Checking a crypto setup to a reasonable level of satisfaction can't be done externally. The code for the entire system must be examined, and that is relatively difficult to do.

-Matt

Linux and the BSDs have been chasing desktop usability for ages. Hell, I've been chasing desktop usability for ages.

Microsoft has it easy. The produce windows and all the laptop, desktop, and server vendors spend hundreds of millions of dollars making sure their designs work with it.

Apple makes their own PCs, they don't have to chase hardware.

And us? Every time a new machine comes out (which is often). A new model, a new chipset, a different combination of on-board devices, whatever.. every single time that happens we developers have to write new drivers or modify existing drivers. We have to work out the kinks, the broken mobo hardware, the broken ACPI implementations, the broken sound hardware that doesn't follow vendor specs or has major exceptions because vendors are lazy. We have to glue the whole mess together not just once. Not just twice. But 20 or 30 times a year. Every year. Forever.

Until that equation changes, the general population simply can't depend on any of our open source code to work on whatever new cool computer they want to buy. And that puts us in the backseat in terms of adoption. Every time.

We can make our stuff work with specific machines, at least if the stars align (that is, if we have the chip specs for the chipsets that have changed and we can write drivers for them fast enough). Making our stuff work with everything, out of the box... it just doesn't happen on a macro scale.

In some small way the collapse of the external chip vendors into a much smaller set of companies has helped. Only two major video companies that we have to worry about now, plus whatever Intel is doing (which they at least provide some specs on now, finally). Only two WIFI chipsets that really matter, maybe three. Only a half dozen ethernet chipset families really matter now. Only two cpu vendors really matter. It's getting better but not because the companies are altruistic. Simply because there are fewer of them and we don't have to write as many drivers or make as many driver mods whenever new hardware comes out. But it isn't enough. Not nearly enough to make us competitive.

That's the #1 problem.

The #2 problem we face is that there is no suitable desktop that works as well as either Windows or Mac desktops. I've tried them all. In linux even. They ALL SUCK. They all break in one way or another and it's just as bad in the linux community as it is in the BSD community due to rampant N.I.H. syndrome. The desktops fail on many levels. Apple doesn't have this problem because Apple enforces a unified ABI for accessing major media subsystems such as audio and video. Microsoft doesn't have this problem either, for the same reason. Linux and the BSDs have no unified ABI, essentially forcing application writers to target their apps to specific user interfaces or hardware subsystems.

It annoys the hell out of me but I don't see anything on the horizon that can really solve the problem.

-Matt

Wow, someone other than me who uses fvwm (fvwm2 that is). For the same reason as well. I've tried many other window managers and they all have glitzy graphics and look pretty cool... and also all fall flat on their face if I have a lot of open windows. Spread over 4 virtual x 2 real screens. Dozens and dozens of open windows, usually a mix of xterms, firefox, and xpdf.

Fvwm? I configure a bunch of button bars and a couple of background clocks stuck to my screens. And, of course, a color-gradient title bar:

ButtonStyle 3 Vector 13 26x29@1 34x21@1 50x35@1 70x21@1 79x29@1 63x48@0 79x65@1 70x75@0 50x61@0 34x75@0 26x65@0 44x48@1 26x29@0

Yah, it definitely takes some messing around with the configuration file but what I love most about fvwm2? It's ultra stable and so is the config file. I don't care if its old, it does everything I need it to and it does it fast.

-Matt

But I can suggest that the best technology for this sort of thing is a stand-alone cellular modem, preferentially one that is on the same network as your cell phone. Wire the button into that and have it send a text message to your phone and to your gmail address.

There are certainly cellular modems that work over a serial link and I assume there are devices you can buy off the shelf that will integrate the whole thing into a panic button type of interface. But I haven't researched all-in-one solutions so I can't point you at one. We use cellular modem / texting for alarms and alerts for telemetry systems (replacing satellite paging systems which died out many years ago).

The message will flow through the fewest number of networks possible to reach its destination (typically just the telco's own network) and texting protocols are quite robust on the telco side. It's the most reliable solution possible. If you run the message through your home router it is likely traversing four or five completely different networks to reach its destination and that just isn't as reliable.

But frankly, still not at the level of quality needed for a serious medical condition.

-Matt

The way I see people using smartphone cameras these days is almost entirely for consumable pictures... pictures you take and gawk at for a few seconds, maybe post, and then are forgotten in the pile of tens of thousands of similar pictures. Only a very few are good enough to be memories and with the extremely narrow sweet spot of a smartphone camera or even a modern point-and-shoot, it is relatively difficult to create something that distinguishes itself. The medium and high-end DSLR camera vendors shouldn't try to go after that market.

But there is a market. Any vacation or long trip that you might want to create a memory with. You don't have to be a professional photographer. But if you want to create something memorable from that sort of trip and make a little (or big) book about it, a smartphone or point-and-shoot camera ain't gonna do it. You won't get something like this with a smartphone:

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~...

For anyone with an interest in travel, or even modestly-sized vacations closer to home, bringing along a decent camera (something bigger than a point and shoot) is what gives you that permanency after you've returned home.

Probably the younger crowd doesn't understand so much because you simply haven't taken enough pictures in your lives yet (even with a smartphone and social media). But you will understand once you get to the point where you are overflowing with crap in your photo archive to the point where you don't even bother to look at it any more.

-Matt

The GPS works quite well on the 6D, but the WIFI is basically unusable. There is no background upload option like the WIFI grip had and there is no way to connect to anything on the internet other than Canon's canned services (no way to upload to an FTP server for example). The pad-based remote control works only 'ok'... reviewing pictures on the pad works relatively well but it's a waste of time to try to do it while out in the field, so there isn't much of a point to it.

I'm not dissing the 6D, I have one... it's a great camera. But the WIFI feature is so bad it might as well not be there.

-Matt

AT&Ts U-Verse runs fiber to a corner box in the neighborhood and then dual-DSL over existing copper lines to homes. It's been a dismal failure. When they initially rolled it out they thought they could situate the corner boxes relatively far away from the homes but the copper had so much noise and cross talk it just didn't work, so they've had to move the boxes closer. And even then they barely get 20 MBits downlink and a really horrid uplink. Comcast is twice as fast at a minimum.

Sounds like BT hit the same problem. The only real solution is, as they said, make the copper portion of the run as short as possible (ultimately remove it entirely but that means a lot of retrenching).

-Matt