Owning both an iPhone and an iPad, I was interested in details, interested if I can stop this in any way (as in denying individual apps access to the GPS-data).

But then I remembered (and a quick look at the discussion told me I was right): This Is Slashdot!

What that means is, that 80% of all postings are Apple-haters telling themselves and the world how bad apple is and 20% are fanboys in denial. There used to be a time when you would actually find interesting information about a topic on slashdot if you read the comments. Nowadays you can just plain forget about that, at least if the topic has anything to do with Apple (or Microsoft, Google...).

*sighs sadly*

People are stupid (or rather they are uninformed).

That's what the law is there for (amongst other things): to protect the uninformed masses and the stupid so you don't have to be an expert in every field you encounter in your daily life.

The main benefit of OS X is that it just works. It can do so mainly bevause Apple controls the software and the hardware.

Without OS X, Apple hardware would lose a lot of customers, that's true. Mind you, it would still be some of the most beautifully designed hardware out there, but I doubt that people would be willing to pay the premium.

But likewise, without the hardware, OS X would be far less compelling. There's be driver issues, compatibility issues and (a point that's often forgotten) apple innovates by introducing siny new stuff that requires software and hardware components to "just work".

And who would want such a thing?

OK, you would, obviously. I, too, would appreciate it. Most /.-readers might find it useful. and just about everyone else would hate it, since it would diminish the (perceived) security of their machines.

Well, thank Google for that. BETA as in Gmail, that was in Beta for years while being both reliable and (compared to webmail in general) functionally complete.

So to the google generation, beta means free and no support, but finished never the less.

just watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
Absolutely must see.

If successful, it wouldn't surprise me to see the Mozilla folks include this feature in a future release of Firefox.

Heaven forbid, please no!

We don't need a rendering engine for every arcane formalt ever developed incorparated into a browser that's deployed on millions of desktops. Just remember, each supported protocol adds new complexety, new errors and with this new secutiry-issues that'll lead to exploits, bad press, compromised machines and painful bugfixing.

Stuff like this should never be part of the browser, it should be an addon.

Drive stick.

If the accellerator gets stuck, press the clutch. Motor revs to max, hits the limiter (preventing damage to the motor) while you break and come to a stop.

You wanna kill the engine now in case the key is stuck as well or the start / stop button won't help? Put in a hight gear and let the clutch go abruptly while staying on the brake. The engine will be off immediately without too much stress to the drivetrain, motor, breakes etc.

All articles I see refer to business week.

Can we have a second independent source, please?

It sounds implausible enough to drive business week's webtraffic. It includes all bis three in IT, a sure way to generate traffic. It implies that Apple-Fanboys will soon support the arch-enemy, a sure way to boost webtraffic.

I don't buy it, not without a second source.

I'm a multiplyer. I set up my PC, my gf's PC, my parents' PC, my steppatrnts PCs... whatever I do will affect a number of people.

Many PCs are configured by multiplyers like me. We pushed the use of firefox over that of IE in Germany. And we implement adblockers.

Now, why do we do that? It's not because we were asked for it. The people whom we help don't know that ads can be blocked before we tell them. No, we want to have less work.

How do we minimise our workload for administration of relatives' PCs? We secure them. Part of securing a PC is to make sure that only intended content is executed on it. That's why we install adblockers on so many PCs.

One or two years ago, a web-advertising company called "Falk AG" in germany got hacked. They had their banners on all sorts of resprctable sites like major newspapers. Suddenly, when you were visiting the websites of the leading German magazines, your PC would be hacked through manipulated ads served by Falk.

Again, we want to reduce the time we have to spend on those machines, therefore we want to keep them as clean as possible, therefore we make them block ads. What type of ad? Flash, animated gif, static image? I don't care. If it's not loaded into the browser, it cannot exploit a weakness.

Now for google.

If something needs to be found, it will be searched for, most likely using google. If all other ads are blocked, only the text-ads served by google on the google result-page will ever be seen. It increases their value.

Why would google care about banners on other people's sites?

And even if Chrome would not allow adblocking, what if a user actually found something in an ad he likes? He wouldn't have to google it. Google loses.

So, I'm actually surprised it's not google themselves who provide an adblocker for Chrome.

In its attempt to make google look bad and to discourage usage of the plugin, Microsoft looks at it with great scrunity, possibly examining it in greater detail than their own software.

This is a good thing because it means that more errors are found more quickly and solved more timely.

At the same time, the error sounds less severe than what's in IE right from the start anyway...

I've read numbers 1 through 8. It's the Mac OS X dialog you see when you need sudo-rights plus a graphical icon for Admin-acounts.

I'm absolutely stunned how novel and non-obvious this slight modification to Apple's OS is, how innovative and worthy of a 20 year monopoly on implementation of such an astounding improvemant over what Apple ships for years.

Granted, but let's be honest:
- have you ever done this?
- would you know how to debug the application?
- do you believe that you'd be able to just debug the kernel or some complicated framework, understand the coding, write a fix and be sure that it won't break all other applications because your fix breaks some other expected functionality?

I agree that with colsed source, you just can't do it. But let's be honest, for most of us, we still wouldn't do it if we (technically) could because we lack the skills and the knowledge about the underlying layers of software.

This comes from a software developer currently doing development support (that means fixing bugs in our applications). If something goes wrong in someone else's coding - hand the issue to them, don't touch it; chances are you'd break something you didn't understand.

Without the CCTVs, it's not really that different from homes for the elderly.

Except it's "non-negociable2 meaning "forced on families" and highly invasive to their lifes. I'd challenge it in the european courts for breach of human rights in a heartbeat. Thankfully, the united kingdom is part of an organization that does recognize those.