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Dunno if you're trolling or not, but you'll have to explain how Nick DePlume and his site, Think Secret are less journalistic than any other website. I have yet to read a single thing on his site that wasn't completely accurate. He always explains exactly how well confirmed his news is.

The NYT recently posted an article suggesting that Apple was making a cellular telephone. Their only source was the fact that Jaguar's features seemed like they would nicely compliment a cell phone.

What has he ever done to betray his readers' trust? Defend your statement.

Well, you're in luck. (maybe). According to Think Secret, ATI is developing an All-In-Wonder card for the mac.

Well. MOSR is the only site that's both constantly incorrect and constantly paid attention to. There are other sites that are just as full of crap, but MOSR gets attention... well... because they act like they get attention.

The frustrating thing with MOSR is that they seem to never fucking learn. They might always have well placed sources for their info, but... those sources are so overly optimistic that they consistently make MOSR look like idiots.

ThinkSecret and MacRumors are both much better rumor sites, and I don't believe that they detract from Apple's sales in the slightest. Nick DePlume of Thinksecret seems to care enough about accuracy that he doesn't make many long-distance predictions. I've never seen him be very incorrect. His steadfast accuracy has made me reconsider purchase of a PC desktop, lately, because he says ATI is working on an all-in-wonder card for the mac. I believe him completely.

MacRumors has a much higher volume of information, so sometimes they come up with crap, but they never make it sound more authoritative than it is. They don't act like you can bet the farm on their information.

At this point, MOSR needs to curl up and die. Back in the day, they had enough viewers and sources that they could have been the premier rumor site indefinitely. Even with Jobs' crackdown on leaks. But their BS predictions (and crappy management) probably alienated as many sources as it did readers. So now those sources go to Thinksecret.

Mac of All Trades Getcher used macs here! Pretty visuals, delicious prices, detailed info. Selection could be better and there's no old stuff at all but I can deal with that. Have I bought from them yet? Nope. Am I likely to in the future? Yep.

MacResq The best place I've found overall to pick up gear. Even the guys in that article figured that out.

Powermax Cheesy setup, improving selection, good prices.

Shreve Expensive, distracting, but the best place to get weird low-end stuff like Mac Plus manuals and Daystar cards.

Small Dog Shrinking selection, great quality, excellent service, annoying interface. Bottom line, these are the guys to turn to for premium service, support, and savvy. Been around quite a while and, hey, they enclose coupons for Ben and Jerry's.

Guide to Mac CPUsThis is Apple's own site for detailed specs on all their machines ever. I'm starting you off on the page for older machines to remind you that a well-configured 1996 Mac w/ a USB/Firewire card can run OSX just fine, thank you very much.

Focus of Mac Hardware good workaday resource for doing mods. No cool toys. Considerable good data.

Missoula Mac User Group, Yeah, I know that you haven't heard of them; neither has anybody else outside of Montana AFAIK. Best place for overall newbie resources.

ResExcellence In the old days I would have suggested MacFixit, but these guys have taken their place. If you've been in the Mac world for a while you'll recognize them as the old-time source extraordinaire of ResEdit hacks.

Think Secret The only rumor site I like that I forgot to mention yesterday.

Okay, moving right along. CPUs. Those yahoos think that the only option is to start from scratch. Get a clue. The last pre-Jobs big boxes kicked almighty ass. Amelio may not have been a gifted businessman but he was a much better heavy gear guy. As far as I'm concerned your best bet for DIY is to buy an 8600. It'll be $230, tops. You get a great case, big power supply, floppy drive, cables, and so on. Probably also a Zip, for which I will pity you as that model of Zip just LOVED to come down with the Click o' Death. Even if you flat throw out all the electronics you're still way ahead of starting from a place like Tom's.
Next, processor speed. When will those yahoos figure it out? Before you get obsessed with latest and greatest ask yourself, "what exactly will I be DOING with this machine?" If you're running stuff like BBEdit (ah, my one true love!) or Photoshop for still work then any 400MHz box with fast drives and plenty of RAM will be, for all intents and purposes, instantanteous. Buying anything faster just means that you're acting like the small-donged dimwits who buy $20K stereos to get fidelity five times better then they can hear.
Drives. I'm always amazed at how terrified Windoze-damaged (let alone *nix) folks are at the thought of external drives. Get over it, already. On a Mac all that driver clash claptrap is a distant and not very credible folktale. Get a basic little 6 Gig internal and invest your money in external Firewire devices. You think this LAN party stuff is cool? On a Mac pretty much any well configured boot drive will boot any similar recent Mac. Stop carrying your entire box with you; stick to drives. Even better, get two or three smaller ones instead of one big one and, short of FBI seizures and vast fires, you become crash proof. Mac dies? Plug your drive (you did remember to back up your core data, right?) into another Mac and you're up and running again in minutes.
The future. If you're such an almighty techie that you just *need* to build a new cooler world every year or so, then remember, Mach kernel plus gigabit ethernet equals mongo shared resources. Even if you're too lazy to set up a formal Beowolf system, it's pretty damned easy to just keep adding machines and splitting the jobs between them. Instead of buying a whole new box, maybe you should just buy a second one and start spreading load to it.
OSes. Yup. No question, Jaguar is pretty spiffy. But almost every vendor site above (as well as eBay and co.) will sell you older legit disks and serial num.s for about fifty bucks. If you buy from a place like Small Dog you'll even be clearing out some of that famed Apple back inventory.
That's it. You want more? Then go to my site already (though best to wait a few weeks for my next redesign). Want more then that? Then pay me and I'll think about it.
Promising to not ever again use up time posting tutorials on /.,
Rustin

For those looking for Virtual Desktops in OS X, look no further than Space.app, a GPL'd application that provides multiple desktops (configurable) and hotkeys to switch between 'em (also configurable). The concept of a "sticky" space is also supported.

As for easing the clutter on the desktop, if virtual desktops alone don't do it for you, check out Windowshade X - this brings back the functionality of being able to double-click on the title bar of a window and collapse the window to just the title bar, as in OS 9 (and most Linux WMs).

If you don't like the dock, get rid of it! As for the widgets, you'll be happy to know that the various buttons in OS X have been on Weight Watchers during Jaguar's development .. check out any of the screen caps at Think Secret to see the new buttons before Aug. 24th - while they aren't quite like the Java buttons, they are quite a bit slimmer and make the interface look quite a bit less like candy and more like a professional workstation.

Cheers!

Before you pre-announce, create a device that can transmit your discovery. Perhaps a cellular-enabled computer in a rugged enclosure. Bury it. Not just anywhere, mind you. Find a place where erosion is predictable. The marshlands of Louisiana come to mind, but drilling into an iceburg would work well too. The device should be designed to float to the surface and transmit the data when it is freed.

Another option is to release some silly Outlook trojan that has the data encoded within. Set it to go active when the time on time.windows.com matches some pre-set time. (This avoids incorrectly set clocks, and is the sort of network query one would expect from a windows box.)

Get a programmer with a wireless phone manufacturer on your side. Hide the code in the firmware for a wireless phone. The phone will transmit your data to both the owner and anyone else in the phone book. To avoid an overload, the phone should wait a unique time, perhaps based on a number derived from the owner's calling habits.

Hide it in a mass-produced media product. Many films and albums have used a password based web component for extra hype. (Swordfish and Wu-Tang Forever come to mind) Why can't the next Brittney CD have an ECD with several hidden features, each unlocked with a password... Including your little innovation.

Have Steve Jobs announce it at MacWorld. Oh wait nevermind.

now i'm just pricing some G4s.

Do not buy a PowerMac until the new models come out -- either in mid August or early September.

But Slashdot is targeted at the digiterati, and if you don't know what I just posted, then you're just another "user who just knows enough to be dangerous".

Just the same, here's why I posted:

• the TiBook aka Powerbook has a 15.2 inch mega-wide display that was introduced last year!
• VAIO and the Powerbook are in the same market segment, i.e. high-end consumer laptops
• with Macworld around the corner, a new round of hardware announcements is widely anticipated from Apple, including rumors of bigger screens on both the Apple laptops and the iMac
• CmrTaco is a Linux user and you can be sure he'll be loading up Linux on that VAIO (right Cmr?)
• Fink is a project to port Unix tools to Mac OS X.
• OS X is a *Nix (for your benefit, that's shorthand for a Unix-like system like Linux, Solaris and the ilk)
• and lastly, Slashdot is a FORUM so everybody (including you, sad to say), can post what they think

And BTW, I was the editor of our paper, and have been feted with numerous literary awards.

Its just that when you're talking amongst peers, you tend to conduct the conversation in shorthand.

See you around, anonymous coward.

The only thing macosrumors didn't immediately predict was the flat-panel iMac, but they didn't have to. They mentioned it almost a year before its release (along with a couple schematics of its design) and then left the rumor alone.

Rumor sites are fun but should not be trusted. Mainstream sites reporting off those rumors should not be trusted either. Think Secret in particular has no credibility, but they often publish tantalizing screen shots prior to releases so they are worth watching for that only.

--Rick

Actually they were really the one's that broke the story way back on July 2nd. I guess figuring they had nothing to lose...

And also just as clarification they aren't banning people from the event - they're just denying them press passes. But as they mention in the article many press outlets were going to regular badges anyway because employees are being instructed not to talk to people with press credentials.

Actually of the usual rumors sites this one seems pretty reasonable and will probably be proven mostly right... As a rule Think Secret is the best "rumors" site at the moment.

=tkk

If you have a rumor fix, the site RumorTracker acts as a sort of rumor portal including rumors from seven different sites including MacOSRumors, ThinkSecret and SpyMac.

He replied that it was Apple's mistake, and that they need to fix it, not him.

He left that image alone, but released a Newer One that is in almost a completely different style- look at the tabs... and "firewal" is now fixed.

I will be SO MAD if apple does the .Mac sh*t. Since when do we copy Microsoft?

Think Secret's integrity as a rumors site is existent only in the fact that it is one of the few rumors sites remaining. This, in turn, is because I believe that Apple is playing them: feeding them doctored images, blatantly false rumors, and such. That would explain why they haven't gotten in trouble yet with apple... and would also explain why half the stuff there seems ludicrous!

I do have to confess, though, I do read Think Secret regularly. Definitely not for an authoritative source of information, but just for fun. Every thing they say should be taken with a grain of salt. No, change that, the whole salt shaker.

uh-oh, i'm 2 cents poorer

He replied that it was Apple's mistake, and that they need to fix it, not him.

He left that image alone, but released a Newer One that is in almost a completely different style- look at the tabs... and "firewal" is now fixed.

I will be SO MAD if apple does the .Mac sh*t. Since when do we copy Microsoft?

Think Secret's integrity as a rumors site is existent only in the fact that it is one of the few rumors sites remaining. This, in turn, is because I believe that Apple is playing them: feeding them doctored images, blatantly false rumors, and such. That would explain why they haven't gotten in trouble yet with apple... and would also explain why half the stuff there seems ludicrous!

I do have to confess, though, I do read Think Secret regularly. Definitely not for an authoritative source of information, but just for fun. Every thing they say should be taken with a grain of salt. No, change that, the whole salt shaker.

uh-oh, i'm 2 cents poorer

Actually, unless someone has been spending way too much free time in Photoshop, the .Mac thing looks pretty plausible. ThinkSecret has posted screen shots of an updated iTools interface with .Mac as the new name.

Having said that, the hoax potential is still there but there's no reason to discount it completely.

See here for screenshot

Spymac sucks... they're as bad as MacOS Rumors.

Think Secret and As the Apple Turns are the only reliable (heh) sources for good rumors.

MacMinute usually gets it right the day of the keynote.

Anonymous Coward,

No, Think Secret did not post news on the "iWalk" -- except to debunk it. The fact is, this report isn't speculation, rumor, hearsay...it's insider news, and it's affecting quite a large number of people right now.

I think our record speaks for itself -- thanks for reading!

-Nick dePlume
Publisher and Editor in Chief, Think Secret

The real problem is of course that Apple doesn't have any hardware that's up to the challenge. They need some good rack-mount servers similar to those that IBM sell. Rumors of these servers exist and should they be true, Apple will finally have what it needs to become a player in this industry.

There are still lots of "if"s but regardless, I'd like to see SGI, IBM, and Apple all fighing for this market. It should produce some great products...

Willy

I agree that JKH's comment that FreeBSD and OS X do not compete was confusing. How does his comment relate to Apple's "Thing 2" project, an attempt to make a rack-mounted Power Mac to run OS X in a server farm? See "Apple Rumored to be Developing Rack-Mounted Server Hardware" for more details.

In other news, thinksecret is reporting that CNET (which owns ZDNet) is closing ZDNet's macintosh coverage section.

So, its a nice OS, we like it, be we won't cover it.

Maybe it was redundant with another CNET news page or maybe they just couldn't compete with the other Mac news sites. I always thought ZDNet was a purely windows organization and never went there for Mac news.

There is actually a rumor on Think Secret that Apple is developing rack-mounted servers.

http://www.macopz.com/rumors/DP3/

http://www.thinksecret.com/

It's not quite the MacOS 8/9 look and feel is it? And it isn't as pretty as Aqua. More like the bastard child of both of them.

Why not go the whole hog and make Classic use the Aqua L&F? If that can't be done, why mess with the locations of the zoom and collapse buttons?

This is all too WinOS2ish for my liking. Different window widgets for different apps is ugly. Poo.