What happens when you're chillin' on the street, and your arch nemesis has hacked your favorite coffeeshop's PoS system, nabbing your account details, phone identifier, and photo, and proceeds to stalk you all over town from a distance of 100 feet?
What happens when your arch nemesis has hacked your favourite coffee shop's PoS system right now and proceeds to steal all the credit card numbers that go through it... how is the new scenario any worse?
As weak as credit card numbers are as a security measure, the countermeasure defense is largely for credit-card issuers (and/or the processing networks) to monitor traffic very heavily for anything vaguely resembling fraudulent activity. Cardholders are largely protected by law (though merchants aren't).
The special sauce here is the location tracking. The system seems to assume that vendors are at a fixed location, but there's probably no reason a mobile device couldn't be constructed that functions as a PoS, and with hacked data/credentials, it could be used for tracking purposes. Say, with a number of confederates (or a good make-up job), charging stuff to your account while you're in the area. Or insert intelligence, criminal, stalker, jealous ex, etc., scenarios.
I'm increasingly in favor of cold hard cash for transactions rather than divulging my personal information in ever increasing amounts and rates.
I find that committing parts of a file in GitX is much easier than using interactive mode in the terminal. That's not a question of understanding the git model, it's just choosing the best tool for the job.
I completely agree. For many tasks the command line sequence of add, commit, push may be sufficient, but sometimes I don't care to wade through my editor merging and selecting portions of diffs to commit. The GitX interface is much more usable in that instance.
I started feeling the same way a few months ago. It is hard to define exactly what changed. Some of the time I question whether it might have been me that changed rather than Gruber. It's validating that other's are starting to feel the same way though.
Does google consider gmail users to have value? Be it via ad views or good will, etc. If so, then is it in their interest to provide a commensurate level of support to their users? Sure there's no legal binding contract, but at what point does it cross from being benign to being bad business.
The fact is that this is a common complaint that Google seems content to ignore. Which is their right, but is it the best choice from a business perspective? I don't know.
When I bought my first Macbook Pro a few years ago, I purchased it for the hardware and intended to use it to run Windows in Bootcamp. After spending a little time with OS X I came to appreciate it and I now use it exclusively. But my favorite thing about it is the UNIX like underpinning. Which in a sense makes it less locked down than Windows.
However I may feel about iPhoneOS, Mac OS X is a beast that nothing else can compare to. At least for a consumer unix experience where everything just works.
For values of "everything just works" that don't include standard developer tools. Getting a new macbook into configuration for (for example) web development is a PITA compared to any distro I've used that came with a decent package installer (apt, yum) out of the box. You have to hack up the damned keyboard settings just to get home and end keys to work.
That is because you are trying to use your Mac like it's a Linux box. Use the OS X keyboard shortcuts (which happen to be the same as Emacs, Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E respectively) and grab MAMP and you are good to go.
You don't even have to grab MAMP or Xcode, since Apache, PHP, Ruby, Python, emacs and vim come preinstalled with OS X. So you just have to get the database server. Until you have to compile something.
I don't see the difficulty with compiling. Just get out your install disk, open up the optional installs, install XCode. You now have all the standard Unix developer tools (in addition to the XCode app, which you don't have to use).
I agree, I don't see it either. The whole point of my previous comment was to show that OS X ships with so many things that you don't have to install anything to start programming in PHP, Python or Ruby. "Until you have to compile something" refers to the fact that this claim doesn't hold anymore when you have to compile, for example, a native extension to those languages.
Honestly, do yourself a favor and check out MAMP. It works great and won't gack the next time apple updates php, mysql, etc. I even kicked in and bought MAMP Pro and its arguably the biggest time saver on my laptop.
Might I suggest running a VMWare image with the same flavor of linux that your production server uses? I've been using this set up happily for years. As a bonus you can copy the dev image to other developers or use it to set up larger dev server.
