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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."
Not sure if you're trolling or not, but here ya go.
Debian on my desktop, OS X on my laptop, life has achieved perfection.
El riesgo vive siempre!
I dont know about that, but gentoo is working on a version of its portage... http://www.gentoo.org/news/20030620-metapkg.xml
that, and there is always fink for osx... which Im pretty sure uses apt-get anyways...
http://fink.sourceforge.net/
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
The article does not explain the risks of updating from 10.2 to 10.3 instead of installing a fresh copy of 10.3. It seems to me that a fresh OS install might present an obstacle for some users. Can anyone explain why a fresh OS install is preferable to an update OS install?
Since I heard Apple offers discounts to government employees and my dad works for the state govt, I looked at the "government employee discounted" version of Apple's online store. OS X Panther can be had for $65 bucks by state govt. employees! Hardware discounts are much more modest, however.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I ordered the Family Upgrade kit to update my 12" Powerbook and my wife's iMac.
To me the update seems worth it, but then in my previous life I bought Windows 95, Windows 98, and then Windows XP. What were they but new features and no bug fixes?
I also bought RH Linux 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0. I thought I'd support the distro I used and then they go and quit selling it. Don't see myself buying the Enterprise versions anytime soon.
Haven't got it yet so I can't comment on the review, it was a general decent review and didn't pick too many nits like some of the 'tech' reviews do. They get obsessed about one thing and miss everything else.
All in all, a decent wet the appitite type of review. Hopefully it'll show up before the weekend so I can see what happens when I try an upgrade my two machines. I'm interested to see how badly it trashes Norton Systemworks on the iMac. biggest mistake of my life to buy that.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
This isn't a technical review aimed at geeks or pro users. The NY Times is read by a hell lot of people. Average Joe might read the NY Times but this is aiming more at a large group of people and business man.
Can't be bad for Apple.
Actually Fink, Gentoo and Darwinports have combined forces. If anyone has run a beta release of 10.3, they've seen a very early build of the app that these groups have produced. Think finkcommander done with apple elegance.
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
So, does mail.app actually check ALL imap folders now and not just the inbox? If you use procmail to move messages around server side, mail.app never seems to find new messages.
Even just a subcribed list of folders would help the situation.
I think Pogue fairly and comprehensively sums up the mac's detractiions and benefits and brings them in into the present with this article.
I do agree a number of mac users are miffed about paying out $130 for the third time since initially upgradaing to OS X. I think the new finder does bring some uniformity into the interface as mentioned; though, many may not like the new brushed aluminum taking over their desktops recently. Panther certainly does borrow some functionality from Windows, and the wheel does keep turning about whether the cost of a mac desktop system is worth it's price. Windows is lacking as far as security is concerned, especially considering it's widespread use. All in all, I think the mac experience is summed up pretty well.
Seems like a fair review to me; it highlights the new security features and places them in the context of recent events, oohs and aahs a little over Expose, and raises questions about the cost and compatibility issues for the end user. This is not a good time for me to be presented with Panther, since I've vowed to pay off my iBook this month, but I know full well that as soon as I see it sitting on a shelf on Saturday, it's going to get bought...
The cost is a tricky issue; it's clear a lot of work has gone into Panther,and the results certainly look good to me. I've got no problem shelling out for the new features - if I didn't like doing that, I'd use Linux exclusively - but I think an upgrade path for existing users (short of buying a new machine) would be nice. Panther is 100 in the UK; 70 would seem like a reasonable price point for those who paid for 10.2. Still, I know people who still scrabble after cracked copies of XP Pro because they can't afford to buy a copy at 250 RRP; Panther is a bargain by comparison...
Wrong. I don't remember enabling anything crypto related in my kernel, but I use losetup with encryption to (wouldn't you know it) Encrypt my home directory.
.bashrc runs losetup, which prompts me for my passphrase, then mounts the encrypted home directory over the real one. Works flawlessly, and because the encrypted file is referenced by inode (not path), the kernel doesnt give a shit. When I logout it is simply unmounted and all is well.
In my physical home directory, there is a file containing the encrypted version. My
If you look at the bottom of this page, so does Apple: "Because Quartz and OpenGL can".
It's too bad Apple changed it, though. It used to read "Because we can," which was much cooler.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
I have heard that Panther has X11 support built in. Does this mean (for example) run OpenOffice without having to first start up X11?
That would make running "ported/recompiled" X11 apps much simpler.
Can someone with the developer version comment on how this works?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
The larger pattern this fits into is one that's seen lots of research recently: we don't like other people getting what we perceive to be "better" deals, even if their deals come at no marginal cost to us. The social disapproval at these "cheaters" who don't "pay their share" is pretty strong.
/. posts!
So consumers get pissed when Amazon tries differential pricing, and people will moan about how they should have bought a Powerbook this month, and not last month. Combine this with the "all MP3s and software should be free" crowd, and that will generate a lot of
"Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible" -Jacob Bronowski
If I had the cash, no doubt I'd pick up a G5 also, but as it stands, I can build my own tower out of commodity parts, whiz-bang it out with geeky toys like neon lights and the like, install Debian, and I'm good to go. I have a primary desktop/file server storage for mp3z and pr0n (sweet, sweet pr0n). Add a PowerBook, and I have all the application and ease-of-use userspace things that I lack with Debian; iTunes (there is no better mp3 player), Word (I know, I know, but the fact of the matter is Word is a pretty good piece of bloatware. Does anyone know where I can get document templates for OOO and the like? 'cuz I'll switch if I can get those), iTunes (no seriously, it's good), not to mention games, Adobe and Macromedia products, the list goes on. Plus PowerBooks are sexy with the backlit keyboard and all.
So I'm good for the time being.
El riesgo vive siempre!
The biggest improvement in Panther is simply the speed. On an oldish G3 or G4 the performance increase in doing everything is incredible. After this Expose has to be next best improvement. This really makes managing windows a whole magnitude easier. I've simply never seen a nicer way of doing this. I've set it to activate on the click of mouse button 4.
The problem I've had with the crypto loop stuff is that the format and tools keep changing. I have many encrypted files that I now can't access because I have no idea which version of the loop stuff they were encrypted with. Most of the time I only encrypt archived data so often by the time I need it again the whole crypto API has changed. There are too many tiny tools and such needed to make it work. You need a kernel module, plus the loop tools like losetup, and then special mount tools. All of those can and have changed over the years.
As a result I have over 20 GB of encrypted data that I now can't get to. I've tried older versions of the tools and stuff. It's just too hard to get everything to match up again. I've stopped using the encrypted loopback stuff for now. This is where commercial solutions really shine because good companies make it easy to either upgrade your encrypted data or keep backwards compatibility. All too often open-source projects slap you in the head with incompatibilies. Sure, this lets you stay on the bleeding edge but some of use like to get work done.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
That's true. According to this this the encryption key is your login password. (Or a master password).
It's hard to see how this couldn't be vulnerable to brute force/dictionary attacks.
What I want to know is whether there is an upgrade price that's cheaper than the $130 for the "new release". If not, that's just !@#$ insane on Apple's part. There may be lots of nice new features, but I ain't paying $130 for them, especially if they're labelled as a dot release.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
You're not familiar with Apple's versioning scheme. Going from OS9 to OSX (Full version number shift) is a comparible shift to going from Windows 98 to Windows 2000/XP (entirely new operating system).
.0.x release (i.e. 10.2.5 to 10.2.6). These are free and happen all the time.
Going from 10.0 to 10.1 or 10.2 to 10.3 (.x version shift) is like going from Windows95 to Windows98 or Windows 2000 to Windows XP (same underlying OS, new features and enhanced interface).
The Apple equivalent to a service pack is a
MS doesn't give users free upgrades from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. Apple gave students/teachers free upgrades from 10.1 to 10.2, $65 upgrades from 10.2 to 10.3. This is pretty decent pricing for the level of upgrade.
The main difference is that Apple has been developing meaningful changes and enhancements to their OS more quickly than Microsoft in recent years.
and tha passphrase is going to be just as suscpetible to a brute force attack as a simple password mechanism.
Let us speak practically now.
AES-128 has 3.4 x 10^38 possible keys. So a key attack is effectively impossible given current technology, and practically impossible given the context in which such an attack would take place. But the thing is, a key attack is easy. You just have to feed a sequential key generator into an AES-128 decryption tool, and give it the disk image to chew on. (That's assuming you had some good way of testing whether the disk image had been successfully decrypted. But let's just take that as read, okay?)
A passphrase attack is going to be significantly more difficult to pull off, however. You'd have to start by calculating the hashes for all possible passphrases: a big job, to be sure. Then you'd have to feed those hashes in one by one to an AES key generator. That would take a mountain of compute time. And then you'd still have to have some way of testing the cleartext to see if your key was correct; another mountain of compute time.
Breaking FileVault is practically impossible. That is to say, it is not possible to do it practically.
Theoretical conversations about it are neither useful nor interesting.
And when exactly does your Mac ask you to enter the AES key? Oh, it doesn't, it asks you to enter a passphrase to unlock the AES key.
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.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Apple initially released a binary API in 10.0 that would allow as much compatibility as possible with existing tools (mostly the stuff they grabbed from NeXT), but they had every intention of moving to the new one as soon as they could. With the release of 10.2, they made that change.
Sure, this broke the old apps, but they needed to do it, and wanted to do it as soon as possible so that other application developers wouldn't be hit so hard by it. Would you rather have had them wait until this revision to make the change? The amount of third party applications out there right now is significantly larger than it was when they released 10.2.
You are assuming that Apple will change the API again - which is not the case at all. They had to make a change, and they did it as soon as they could. Given the (relatively) seamless transition from OS 9 to OS X as a whole, I can forgive them this single issue.
Finally, this is hardly an Apple only issue. Anybody remember having to bump glibc versions? By hand? With some legacy apps that didn't like the new version? On a live system? I sure do...
Culture is more than commerce
Anybody remember having to bump glibc versions? By hand?
:)
I'll call your glibc versions and raise you a.out to ELF. Hehe. Those were fun days, always tinkering with the guts of the system, but now I find myself more and more just wanting to get things done. Mac OS X is it for me, and I can't wait to get Panther tomorrow!