Not to sound like a jerk -- but when you have to start worrying that accepting a software upgrade on the iOS side will mean it breaks functionality with the piece on the OS X side, that's your sign that it's time to upgrade OS X.

I know all about the people clinging onto Snow Leopard because of either a claimed need for Rosetta, or being one of those systems that was kind of "caught in the middle" when things were transitioning -- with a "Core" series CPU, yet one that's only 32-bits.

But I don't think you can really expect Apple to keep supporting your environment any longer, if you're still holding on to OS X 10.6. Like it or not, Apple has pretty clearly been following a trend of giving support only for the current revision of OS X and the previous version. So far with Mavericks, they've actually been extending that support back 2 versions (both Lion and Mountain Lion), but regardless? When you're a full 3 versions behind the current one, you really shouldn't expect Apple to give you answers other than "upgrade" when you complain about a lack of security patches or functionality with newer software releases.

Personally, I don't even believe Rosetta is needed by many of the people who think it is. There's a free product called SheepShaver out there which emulates classic MacOS even under Mavericks, and I know of at least one project out there that uses it as the "engine" to run the old WordPerfect for Mac software on today's machines. So that's one way to make even pre PPC era software run on a new machine.

I'm sure there are other niche cases, such as older software synthesizers that never got upgraded past the old PPC versions, but why would you even need such a machine to stay online all the time, and therefore need the latest security fixes? Just leave it on Snow Leopard or whatever and use it as a stand-alone music creation box.

Same is true for cars..... yet not everyone is interested in all the extra work that entails.

The quality of his analogy isn't really that relevant. The fact is, he's right.... The way theft is handled with just about every other piece of consumer electronics gear you can think of is to make the OWNER responsible for its safe-keeping. If it's stolen, you can potentially make an insurance claim, and certainly you can file a police report. But giving a third party (such as the cellular carrier) the ability to issue remote wipes? That's just asking for a slew of lawsuits against carriers for improperly erasing someone's personal data. (Most "hacking" is just social engineering.... Someone pretends to be a person they're not, makes a phone call or two and says the right things, and convinces some customer service person to do their bidding.)

The fact you can blacklist a phone from ever getting activated on a carrier's network is already an extra theft-deterrent not available to most electronics products people might steal (such as digital cameras, car stereos, etc.).

going back to around that time-frame, I was still married to my ex-wife, who also enjoyed video games. We had a pretty regular ritual of battling each other in a RTS game like Age of Empires or Warcraft in the evening. Neither one of us were too big on watching television so that kind of took the place of it for us.

These days, I still play the occasional online first person shooter, just to unwind or kill some time. But it's not as big a deal anymore. I've actually received coupon codes to download new games and didn't even bother for months, because that's how little I'm enthused by them. If I get bored enough some Sunday afternoon, that's when I might look at one of those, and give it an hour or two of my time.

But truthfully, I get a lot more out of reading things on message forums or informative web sites than just gaming, these days. Maybe that's all part of "getting old"? Or maybe I just feel like most games I see are rehashes of stuff I've played before, so I just don't care?

The Internet wasn't originally designed to handle MOST types of traffic it handles today. Never-mind the streaming video thing.... It certainly didn't envision VoIP telephony or P2P sharing protocols. I don't think anyone even thought about such things as IPSEC VPN tunneling back then.

In reality, the Internet should handle pretty much anything we can conceive of that can be sent over it following the basic rules of TCP/IP, as long as bandwidth is sufficient and latency low enough for the purpose.

If a business tries to offer a service (whether HD video streaming or anything else) that it lacks the Internet capacity to provide reliably, the whole problem lies with them and their implementation.

To abuse the ever-popular automobile analogy once again? Sometimes it's as though a company decides to build a vehicle so wide, it occupies 6 lanes of traffic. Then people start having a discussion about the problems it causes when it takes up an entire highway including a couple of lanes designated as "HOV" only. (I see the net neutrality arguments here as being somewhat like folks arguing over if the company building this super-wide vehicle should or shouldn't be allowed to buy a special permit to occupy the HOV lanes, so it can get through.)

The better question is probably asking why they decided to build something so darn wide in the first place? Maybe building it extra long, or just using multiple, smaller vehicles would have been a better design choice from the start?

If you're having issues pushing streaming SuperHD quality video reliably? Maybe you should quit concerning yourself with whether or not you can purchase a higher QoS over the existing infrastructure so it transmits better, and start asking if you're just trying to do something that's not technically advisable in the first place. We've come a long way with such things as improved video compression methods. There might not be a lot of room to squeeze more out of that... but maybe this is one of those areas where the existing cable TV infrastructure starts making more sense? (If you want to keep cable television subscriptions viable, morph them into super/ultra/whatever HD quality services delivered right to your set-top box over all that bandwidth the cable network has, and let people use the regular Internet to stream the lower resolution stuff.)

The scanning is done client-side, which means it's just an internal function of the software.

It isn't divulging any of your internet browsing or usage history. It's just combing the local cache for specific things, and is a process it doesn't even do in the first place unless a user is suspected of trying to abuse Valve's gaming environment by cheating.

If the TOS has to state an app is going to access your local DNS cache, then Windows operating systems are probably in violation themselves!

I'm not confident LTE 5G will really be much of a viable competitor?

I think it will be a great option for a lot of people who are still stuck in areas with no reasonable broadband choices. (You can put up a tower and suddenly provide this service to rural customers who could only do DSL at 3-6Mbits over a phone line, or go with satellite otherwise.)

But as even AT&T admitted in a talk about broadband deployment I attended a while back ... The wireless transmitters still rely on wired back-hauls to central offices. They just shift the need for a wired connection from individual customers to a little bit further away, where the antenna sits. If you over-subscribe wireless customers to any one tower, the bandwidth drops off significantly and you're back to slow, unreliable Internet for people.

Glad this was already modded up or I would have done so!

The content is garbage, by and large. Sure, you've got the fans of certain TV series' who go on and on about how great they are, and I don't really disagree. I may not personally find some of them interesting, but I can see that so many others do -- it'd be foolish to claim it wasn't entertaining television for many people.

I'm talking about the fact that when you randomly channel surf on a given day, you can go through 100 plus channels and not find a THING worth paying for! Typically on my FiOS subscription, I see a bunch of re-runs of old TV shows that I've seen for decades for free, via OTA local stations (stuff like Rosanne, Two and a Half Men, etc. etc.). Lots of reality TV nonsense of varying quality -- but nothing I'd willingly pay good money to pipe in each month. A few sports games going on (which again is worth zero to me, and probably not worth much to most people unless the particular teams playing each other happen to be on someone's personal favorite's list). Infomercials, TV evangelists and live televised masses in churches, home shopping network junk .... have I forgotten anything?

Only reason I haven't "cut the cord" on all of this is because my wife wants to pay for it, just so she can watch 2 or 3 shows she's into. It really makes no economic sense.

It's obvious the cable networks don't want to do a-la-carte because it would illustrate how worthless most of it is! Everyone would sign up for a few stations and 90% of them would have to be given away as "bonus" material to get people to take them.

If you ask me, the ones with quality, original series running regularly (mostly your former "premium movie stations" like HBO or Showtime) should just go online exclusively and cut the cord too! Tell the cable networks,. "Sorry guys... We can sell this content just fine without involving you piping it over your services first!"

From the summary of this article, I was just trying to wrap my head around how this college student could have gotten himself into this predicament. My first suspicion was he didn't read the terms and conditions carefully enough when he was asked for permission to share some of his photos. (I figured, "Ok... maybe he just saw the part about them wanting to put them on their Facebook page and didn't notice some fine print releasing the photos for all promotional uses?")

But unless there's more to this story than what's being told? "The Color Run" is simply owned by a guy who's being a complete asshole. Receiving a letter asking to be fairly compensated for the use of photographs in commercial material, after you *only* received permission to share them on Facebook, is hardly "extortion"!

And trying to add on additional charges against the student seeking just compensation, by claiming he owes them for trademark infringement because the "Color Run" name and logo showed up in some of the photos?! Yeah.... I think not, buddy.

Poolesville is a small town about an hour outside of Washington D.C. Our population is only about 5,500 and it's basically a farm community that grew into more of a distant bedroom community for DC metro area employees in the last decade or two.

Around here, they've been very efficient at clearing a path through the snow, even though we've got about 11-12 inches of it this morning (and expect 2 more in a second wave late this afternoon).

I've noticed with many of the more rural Maryland communities, they seem to do better job plowing snow and keeping the roads clear than the bigger cities do. I'm sure the fact we have a lot fewer roads to clear is a big part of it, but some of the towns like Brunswick are very hilly, so you'd think they'd be a difficult challenge. Nonetheless, they seem to have workers who have a real commitment to doing the job well, and perhaps the more rural upbringing makes them more adept at handling heavy equipment like snowplows and dump trucks? (I'm sure many of them know their way around large tractors and other farm equipment.)
 

Because I hate it when people start talking on their cellphone in a theater during a feature presentation!

There oughta be a LAW .....

Yep, it's about that stupid. Theaters have done just fine throwing people out of movies without the help of legislation for many decades.

Slashdot has become something greater than the sum of its parts, in many ways.

If I show this site to someone who has never seen it before, their first impression is that it's some type of technology blog. After examining it more closely though, readers soon realize that's not true -- because the site doesn't consist of articles written by staff members running the site. Then, they conclude that it's a technology news aggregator. This is a little more accurate, but still misses what makes it worthwhile.

Anyone can put together a site that collects up the latest news items posted by others in a certain topic, and almost all who do bolt on some type of comment system so readers can respond to the articles too.

Slashdot has grown to where it has an active community of regular users who often know as much or MORE about the topics than the people writing the original articles it references. IMO, it's quite rare to find this happening on the Internet. If you successfully get a group of very knowledgeable people together on one web site to regularly discuss their area(s) of expertise, it's typically a message forum -- which is a different format.

The magic that makes Slashdot special, IMO, is the fact that you can visit regularly to keep up with cutting edge technology news and happenings, but THEN by reading the comments, you get a much deeper understanding of each of the original topics. Perhaps you can even contribute insight of your own, and if you do - you'll receive feedback (by way of rating your post up or down), which in turn helps you know if your own contributions are really useful, or just a waste of people's time and bandwidth.

If Slashdot's owners are out to "modernize/pretty up" the site in hopes of attracting a bigger audience? I think they're on the wrong track. If that tactic attracts a bigger group of site visitors, it only does so by watering down the talent pool that makes Slashdot work. The core group using the site today are perfectly content with the current site layout, IMO, and any changes should just be functional ones. (You say you can increase site performance and reliability with a "beneath the surface" code improvement? Go for it! You say you can add some sort of new, improved search functionality? Ok, I'm all ears. But you just want it to draw more color images and use more font styles so it doesn't appear "dated"? Yeah.... I think I'll pass.....)

I never met a person yet who avoided using Craigslist to post a free classified ad because "the site just looks too plain with all that straight ASCII text".

Not a software developer myself, but I worked closely with a group of them for years....

I'd say MillerHighLife21 is absolutely right. Any developer who actually has *some* level of pride in his/her work will usually be happy to explain the code to you, if you've taken on working on their original project.

Someone else posted that you "can't win" because even if you fix it completely, it's the original author who will come back and take all the credit. That could well be true, but let's face it.... you're a contractor, not a full-time employee. IMO, that's part of the deal with working as a contractor. You're often paid to make somebody else look good. Your end of the bargain is a decent paycheck, at an hourly rate often as much as 2x or more what the full-time staff gets paid.

If that's an issue for you, then I'd have to ask why you aren't pursuing full-time employment, where the company has more of a vested interest in you (and you in them)?

I think you can accomplish this goal with the help of some communication with the original developer, and a tactful approach where you're not insinuating the problems with the code have anything to do with his/her lacking in coding abilities. (Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't -- but either way, the situation is what now affords you the opportunity to get paid to work on it!)

IMO, it's pretty childish to carry on about whether Linux is beating Max OS X in game sales, or which platform has the bigger market-share.

The reality of things is, OS X game development has always lagged far behind Windows because so many developers got behind Microsoft's Direct-X and didn't opt to code for OpenGL. In those cases, the only time you got a Mac release was when one of the Mac only companies deemed the game worthy of doing a ground-up conversion of the code to make it OS X compatible. (Aspyr and MacPlay used to be your two main companies with expertise in this area and I guess Feral Interactive is more of a contender now.) Typically, these Mac conversions not only ran with far poorer frame-rates than the Windows counterparts, but took 6 months to a year before getting released, after the Windows version was out and sold many, many copies.

Historically, when a popular game title was released for Windows with OpenGL support, OS X versions came along fairly quickly afterwards. (Doom 1, 2 and 3 for example.... the Quake series.... even games like Soldier of Fortune 1 and 2, Postal, Redneck Rampage, and pretty much all the stuff Blizzard ever makes) Usually, this meant, by extension, a Linux release was possible.

At this point though, I'd say the entire COMPUTER gaming market is a dying thing. Consoles have far surpassed everything else in sheer number of new titles. The SteamBox, while trying to pretend it's just another console like a PS3 or XBox, really has deeper roots in the computer gaming scene -- so I think its success or failure is going to have more to do with what the computer game devs decide to code, moving forward.

I'm of the opinion that a new title announcing Linux support is good news for Mac OS X users, because it shouldn't take a lot of work to port it as a Mac version. And the same holds true for going the other direction -- making a Linux version of something initially designed for a Mac. The real enemy for all of us are the big name console makers. Microsoft doesn't have a reason to care anymore if Windows game titles sell. They're just as happy to sell it to you for the XBox. Sony and Nintendo will keep on paying developers to build top notch new titles just for their proprietary systems, to encourage further sales of the hardware.

I will say, though, it's also worth noting that Apple REALLY needs to step things up in the graphics support department. Even the high $ new Mac Pro is proving to struggle in some areas when rendering using professional packages compared to Windows versions of the same software packages, simply because Apple's ATI drivers just aren't as optimized as the ones provided for Windows on FirePro series cards. I'm not sue any of that really caused Macs to lose out on getting new game titles though. I think when the software companies felt it would sell, they went ahead with Mac versions anyway and just quoted higher minimum hardware specs on the box to compensate.

I don't think "everyone does this" is any kind of justification for doing something wrong. An act doesn't become justified simply based on the number of people who engage in it.

IMO, spying is really something that needs to go away, except against enemy nations during wartime. It puts the person hired as the spy in a very risky situation, being paid to lie and steal information for a government that has no entitlement to receive it in the first place.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if most spy operations go on today primarily because, "The other guys are doing it back to us, so we HAVE to." Sounds like preschool logic to me.

So in that sense, I don't hold Snowden accountable for leaking some of that information. Most of the feigned outrage on the part of other nations is probably just posturing to begin with. Pretty sure the higher-ups already knew the U.S. was spying on them before Snowden "revealed" it.