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Review of Mac OS X 10.3
alphakappa writes "The NY Times has a review of all the new Panther features which states that the 150 odd features added are so good that calling it a 0.1 upgrade is not fair. It finds the new Expose feature and other security features (like being able to encrypt/decrypt the entire home directory on the fly) extremely appealing. Gripes include the $130 price tag and the (somewhat) lack of backward compatibility."
(somewhat) lack of backward compatibility
FUD.
I've been using Panther in a mixed environment with Jaguar, Cheeta and Puma releases with no fights.
If you don't already know about this, and your eyes are glittering with the prospect of encrypted home directories.. there is a way to do this in linux also. It's called the cryptoloop. This is a kernel loop extension that uses the CryptoAPI encryption options to create an encrypted loop of a mount for your system. Although I don't think there is anything to make it as automagic as they probably have set up in OSX, this is something that's out there for those of us that are ultra paranoid. You can visit the CryptoAPI site here where you can get everything you need, or look into the new 2.6 test kernels that have cryptoloop and the CryptoAPI options as a standard feature.
It's only 69.99 with the educational discount for those in high school, college, etc. That's how much I paid for it.
Apple's Latest 0.1 Adds a Lot
I believe the text from the article is "you feel like it's yours"..
But hey..
If you're a student or teacher it's only $69. And if you recently renewed your .Mac subscription, you could have chosen a $20 gift certificate to the Apple Store.
So, $49 is the perfect price for me.
And if you're still using a Beige box G3, you can't gripe about not being compatible. You should sell it or give it away and buy a new G5 or a G4 on clearance.
It's called "educational discount". $69.99. Up yours.
It worked beautifully, and most apps simply regenerated their system folder files so only a few required a reinstall.
To reign is to serve.
Been testing Panther since WWDC and the only real backwards compatibility problems remaining have to do with low level hacks, and you know those are prone to breaking (and yes, quickkeys can be qualified as such).
Applications that 'follow the rules' without much deviation work fine indeed.
erm, actually registration isn't required for this article. i went straight in....
Keep in mind that a "fresh install" on a Macintosh doesn't mean the same thing as on, say, Windows. A "clean install" means that the installer renames the previous System directory and writes out a new one, so you don't lose any data, settings, etc. The alternatives are:
- Upgrade: write the new OS over the old one. This sometimes has side effects, if you had system extensions installed (e.g. third party drivers) that don't work with the new version of the OS.
- Clean Install, preserve settings: do a Clean Install (as below), but preserves system and user settings, etc. This is the best choice, unless you're really short on disk space.
- Clean Install: renames the old System, and installs a clean new one. You then have a nice clean system, and can selectively copy third party drivers, application settings, etc., that you know you want.
- Format: reformat the drive, then do the install. This is for when you're doing an install on a random external drive, or wiping an old machine.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Or get CDex for free.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Since Pogue has been writing tech books for years,
I'd say he's fairly well qualified to write a review of the OS.
And for the most part, he's dead on. Expose has changed
the way I work, that feature alone is worth the upgrade cost for me.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
I did an upgrade from Jaguar yesterday (yes, I'm already running Panther), and everything went fine. Everything is now faster, including scrolling (both text and image-heavy pages) and bootup. I have my /Users directory on a different partition (5 users on this machine), and Panther had no problems with that.
The machine is a Rev. B iMac (G3 233 MHZ) with 160 MB of RAM. And it runs fine.
David Pogue is a respected technology author and columnist. He's been around forever, writing about personal computer stuff since the 1980's or so. He's written lots of books. He's so well-respected, in fact, that the New York Freaking Times gave him a column.
Pogue knows more about computers than you do. So shut the fuck up.
Mac users don't have to, either. But here's the thing: when I installed Panther on my G4 (WWDC seed), it felt like a brand new machine.
When's the last time Microsoft offered you a software upgrade, at any price, that made your computer significantly faster and easier and more fun to use?
Where do they keep the key?
2048 bit encryption is useless if the key is protected by a short, english passphrase - you may as well just have the short english passphrase as the key. You have to separate key and data to make it worthwhile.
Unless the keys can be held on removable USB pen drives or similar then a simple brute force attack against the passphrase will give you the <many many bit> key required to decrypt the data.
This is the problem with many CD encryption programms - sure the disc is encrypted, but the encryption/decryption algorythm is on the disk as well, and so is the key - just obfusicated a little using a simple function that is keyed with a short passphrase that can easily (at least compared to finding the long key) be found.
However using the key that is held on your Mac to encrypt data that is on your iPad would be cool, as then it really can only be read where they key is available (home & work & wherever else).
Beep beep.
Both macs and many intel boxes have a bios feature to wake at a scheduled time. this is not new.
what you've done here is really lame.
/. community a little better than that.
I don't think it is very appropriate to edit the article like you have. While the edits are obvious (at least some of them) who knows what else you subtly changed without reading both versions as closely as possible. While you're not bound in anyway to provide the exact text, I think you should treat the
here's the lines that I noticed
When you use Mac OS X, you feel like sodomy; should be When you use Mac OS X, you feel like it's yours; when you use Windows, you feel as though you're using someone else's toys,
and
You can have incoming faxes automatically printed out, saved into a folder, smeared with diarrhea, sent to yourself by e-mail, or any combination of those.should be You can have incoming faxes automatically printed out, saved into a folder, sent to yourself by e-mail, or any combination of those.
Overall, I'm quite happy with it, but I've found a few bugs. yes, I've reported at least one to apple
1) iChatAV and a AD account - If I try to opena video chat to a person, and I am logged in via my Active directory account (i.e. authenticated to the AD domain), the video connection fails. Audio is fine, jsut video
2) If I open a chat to one particular friend, it causes my cpu to pegged. Fortunately the process is niced (iChat, that is) and so it's not particularly disruptive, but it's a very ahrd problem to diagnose (it's only him, other people with the same setup work fine)
3) using Mail.app to access an exchange server with an exchange mail account (i.e. you select "exchange account" when you set up your mail, different than the imap one), you cannot make rules that filter to subdirectories of Inbox. Very odd.
Otherwise, I'm pretty happy. You can't encrypt home directories of "network accounts" (read: AD accounts), even if you tell it to create a local home directory, but the home directory encryption is pretty slick. Expose, of course, is unique, and I've still not used it extensively. The asking for a password when coming back from sleep is a much needed repair.
As a whole I find that it's quite a lot faster than the previous version, and all the subtle tweaks are a good add. I didn't know about the command-tab switching. I use that a lot in windows.
Probably worth the $130
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Backup your home directory first and just do a regular install. There's really no need to do a clean install with Panther unless you have some nasty third-party hacks in your system folders.
I've installed it on three machines so far without any problems at all.
Panther is the first version of MacOS X that I really like. The stability of earlier versions was fine, but Panther has a lot more polish and is much, much faster.
If you like, you can check the SourceForge page, where the LifeSpan stats show that it's been downloaded 1,204,740 times.
El riesgo vive siempre!
That was actually PortsManager, and it's part of the OpenDarwin project. OpenDarwin are the people creating DarwinPorts.
I've briefly babble about PortsManager before over at MacSlash.
Install DarwinPorts, then use it to install PortsManager. Simple!
Here's a shiny image of PortsManager, in all its Aqua goodness.
As a word of warning however, the fink project hasn't yet been updated to work in 10.3. Check their sourceforge page for more info here.
Whilst I'd personally agree broadly with what David Pogue wrote, its worth reminding readers that he's the author of :
:
:-) So don't take it as an unbiased review....
Mac OS 9 - The missing manual
Mac OS X - The missing manual
Switching to the Mac - The missing manual
iMovie - The missing manual
iPhoto - The missing manual
The Flat screen iMac for dummies
MacWorld Secrets
More Macs for Dummies
Macs for Teachers
MacWorld Mac FAQs
The great Macintosh easter egg hunt
The iBook for dummies
Mac OSX Hints
and,
The Microsloth joke book
admittedly, in his defence he's also writtin
Windows ME - the missing manual
Windows XP - the missing manual
but from the list, I think you can get the gist of his personal OS of choice
~Pev
I would just like to note for the sake of doing so that if you install Panther over a Mac that can boot into OS 9 (alongside jaguar or something), you can still boot into OS 9 afterwards.
Also, the fast user switching is awesome!
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
With the educational discount, it was under $70. The funny part was, on the Apple Store website I clicked on the University Link, selected Temple (I do go there part time), and then was able to order Panther AND Office X without providing any proof I was a student.
I got MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage, plus OS X 10.3 for $220.
Pogue is - as other writers already has pointed out - somewhat biased in his choice of OS. You might want to check out britsh newspaper The Guardian for another positive review right here. Its not as thorough as Pogues, but still worth a read.
... double-click an X11 app in Finder, and X11 automatically starts up, then opens your app. And yes, X11 is installed by default when you install Panther. Check it out here!
So, "Tile Windows Horizontally" is the same as:
Shrink all visible applications to tiles on the desktop, allow the user to choose one, and then expand the applications back to their original sizes with the user chosen one on top?
Also, Expose doesn't resize windows, it scales them. In other words, the windows don't receive resize events because the aren't being resized. Instead, their presentation is being scaled by the vector graphics system in Quartz Extreme.
Have you ever actually used Tile Windows Horizontally? If so, have you ever actually seen or used Expose?
Justin Dubs
I don't have 10.3 but on 10.2 running X11 is straightforward: you double-click on the X11.app, and X11 is up and running in seconds. Then you can launch any X11 app from the terminal or from the X11.app menu. I suppose you can wrap X11 applications into AppleScript applets to make them double-clickable, but I am not sure.
If you put X11 in your startup items you will have it up all the time.
In summary, you may have to start X11 first (as on any system, if you think of that), but that's fast, and can be automatized.
Does anyone know where I can get document templates for OOO and the like?
The easiest way is to just buy StarOffice for $79 USD (I believe the license still allows 5 users to use a single "network install"). It comes with lots of clip art, doc templates, presentation templates, etc. Buy it here.
If you want less stuff, but for free, I believe you can find files here and here.
I posted this elsewhere, in a deeper comment, but I think it is worthwhile to address this to your original comment to stop the confusion that your comment might have caused.
2048 bit encryption is useless if the key is protected by a short, english passphrase - you may as well just have the short english passphrase as the key. You have to separate key and data to make it worthwhile. [newline] Unless the keys can be held on removable USB pen drives or similar then a simple brute force attack against the passphrase will give you the key required to decrypt the data. [newline] This is the problem with many CD encryption programms - sure the disc is encrypted, but the encryption/decryption algorythm is on the disk as well, and so is the key - just obfusicated a little using a simple function that is keyed with a short passphrase that can easily (at least compared to finding the long key) be found.
You are making a common mistake that many people not involved in crypto/security make regarding passwords and encryption. You believe that the AES key is stored somewhere, unlocked by a passphrase. It is not. The AES key is algorithmically derived from the passphrase.
When you enter your passphrase, that passphrase essentially acts as a source for a strong cryptographic hash function. The result of the cryptographic hash is the encryption key. There is never a time that your passphrase, your key or anything related to either is ever stored on the hard-drive.
Brute force against such hash functions with variable-length passphrases is VERY VERY HARD. In fact, there are very few techniques that provide better key retrieval security.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
It sounds exactly to me like the options you have when you right click on your Windows taskbar: Tile Windows Horizontally, Tile Windows Vertically, Minimize all Windows
It's entirely different. Expose rearranges some/all of your windows, but only for as long as you hold down the appropriate key. After that, they all snap back to their former location, unless you've done something to change that.
So you're working on a project and you need to get back to a window that's under 5 others, or you need to get to the desktop for a moment, and you don't want to move all your windows. You press a key, and the windows either shrink down so that you can see them all, allowing you to choose the one you want, or they all fly out of the way so you can manipulate stuff on the desktop. It's nice. It's a little whizzy, but it really does work well and is useful.
MS Windows' tiling features just make all your windows too small to be of any use.
Expose isn't really a virtual desktop application. You still have just one desktop.
:-)
What it is GREAT at is accessing any window immediately. If you want to get to Mail, hit F9, all the windows will shrink, click on it, and there you go.
What I use most though is F10, which shows all windows from the current foreground app at once -- to find that draft email that's behind the main mail window (say I was cutting and pasting from another window). Takes about a second, instead of the old "minimize click restore" of old.
And F11 gets you straight to the desktop... no need to manally hide every window to get to that thing you saved on the desktop.
I don't think it's going to change the world, I just know it saves me 3 or 4 seconds, about 20 times a day. So maybe it's only 3 or 4 more minutes of productivity per day, but it's for free (well, $129 amortized over 14 months... guess it more than pays for the OS just itself based on salary savings
If OSX was "100% virus free", why would they have Virex, which has updates once a month?
Mostly to kill Windows viruses that will affect Windows users if you mistakenly forward an infected email to one, or you if you're using a version of Office that can run VB viruses. There are some rare UNIX-based viruses, and probably, every once in a while, a genuine OS X virus, but I'd be surprised if the number of viruses that can do any harm on an OS X system without any MS products installed is more than 20.
Dude, that's the download ID, not the number of downloads.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I really don't understand the concept that people have that upgrades like this should get a new major number. From the article, and your post, it's reasonably easy to tell that you aren't quite familiar with Apple's naming scheme. The X in OS X is not just some arbitrary set of letters like XP, but it is the version number. OS X should be said "oh-ess-ten" not "oh-ess-ex"; saying the latter is a giveaway that someone is not a mac person in conversation. Just because they added new features, fixed stuff, and made it generally faster doesnt mean it should be made MacOS XI (11 for those that havent caught on yet), since its really mostly the same operating system. Changing the name of the whole thing is a microsoft thing.
I hate sigs...
10.2 and 10.3 are akin to Windows 2000 and Windows XP - very similar, but different.
Analogy fails. I have never started my Windows 2000 box and installed a program only to see "REQUIRES WINDOWS XP".
Right. You can force it to check for new mail in all folders by doing Mailbox | Synchronize "account".
I shelled into our mail server and moved an unread message from my inbox to a folder. Then in Mail, I clicked the "Get Mail" button in the toolbar. No unread messages appeared in the folder.
irb(main):001:0>
The article states that the 10.1 upgrade was $130.
The 10.1 upgrade was free. If you made an image of the CD, then removed one particular file of the image, and reburned the disc, you had a bonafide 10.1 full install.
But the discs were free. You could even get more than one if you asked nicely enough at the Apple store.
Vonal Declosion
Not only does Command-Backtick snd the front window to the back but Command-Shift-Backtick brings the rear window to the front.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I've been using the release build of Panther for a while, now, and, while I think it's a worthwhile upgrade, I strongly recommend not enabling FileVault .
I enabled it on my new 15" Aluminum PowerBook on Sunday and was seeing serious corruption of my files by Tuesday. My keychain was corrupted, my iTunes library metadata file was corrupted, my preferences were corrupted, and some of my Data Structures and Algorithms Java source files were corrupted. Beyond that, I stopped counting, backed up to my iPod, and reinstalled.
To be fair, this isn't a build I obtained from Apple or a retail store, so it's possible that it's not what's in the box (although the about box indicates build 7B85, and, from what I can tell, that's GM). It might be worth letting other early adopters check out the retail version of FileVault, however, before doing so yourself.