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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 $130 price tag and the (somewhat) lack of backward compatibility."
Now if OS X only had apt-get it would be perfect. Is Debian Troll working on a version of apt-get for OS X when winaptget is finished?
Debian rocks!
you insensitive clod!
. It finds the new Expose feature and other security features
it also rubs the lotion on its skin....
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
M$'s service packs patch hundreds of holes. Panther offers 150 new *features*. I'd pay for features.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
Since when do we trust newspapers for a review of an operating system? Sort of:"Look at all the new features!!"
Your yearly Mac Tax is due. Why else would we call it FeeBSD.
(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.
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?
much as i hate random GUI improvements being given their own name, the expose concept is damn cool and damn useful. i expect that the KDE folks ought to be able to manage to slip it under the approaching-beta 3.2 release, thanks guys ;-) seriously, this is one feature that apple has really gotten right.
ps: there's really something to be said about incorporating the rendering power of modern graphics cards for eye candy and lightening the load of the CPU.
pps: i find the fast user switching animation a bit gratuitous though.
Hurts linux as well. Too often this is compounded with dependency problems and makes package installation a nagging pain for experienced users and a nightmare for new users. This is one thing that MS has done right. Granted, there's DLL hell on windows as well, but the problem is far smaller than on mac and linux.
Hackers and academics have uncovered one Windows security hole after another, turning Microsoft into a frantic little Dutch boy at the dike without enough fingers
I don't know about you, but the image I got in my head was definitely not G-rated.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
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
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 believe the text from the article is "you feel like it's yours"..
But hey..
that's a fairly modest price for an upgrade to boot. if you've got the chip and space, to me, it's a no-brainer.
ed
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.
That $130 cost won't matter to those people whose systems the new version won't run on.
Seriously though - and I've lost track of the number of times I've said this - if you don't want the new features then you don't have to pay for them. And, if you don't pay for them, you're existing system doesn't become any less productive or user-friendly.
It really amazes me that people act as if their computing experience has somehow been crippled just because they don't have the very latest thing, even though their own machine hasn't regressed in anyway and is just as useful as it was the day before.
Watch how this story will generate countless posts that proclaim that Apple has somehow stabbed its users in the back by releasing a significant upgrade packed with both new and improved features and (shock, horror) daring to charge for it.
Newsflash people: software costs time and money to develop. So either pay up or shut up. Apple is a business, not a charity.
And to those of you who just fail to qualify for a free upgrade (if there is such a thing), please, get over it. Life is full of upsets, big and small. In the end, it's an upgrade you're missing out on, not a heart-bypass operation.
Anyone else think that upgrade envy is becoming way too common, on computing platforms and elsewhere in life?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Since when are they cheaper to use? I've never heard anyone say that in my life. And that's going back to 1982, when they were pitted against the Radio Shack TRS-80's. They always have been more expensive hardware-wise as well as software-wise. So that defense you are referring to is already pretty dented...
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.
erm, actually registration isn't required for this article. i went straight in....
Linux cryptoloop requires you to separately mount the directory. Because you can only do that after you log in, the home directory itself can not be encrypted. Furthermore, you have to type in (and remember) another password, which is a major hassle. And read a bunch of HOWTOs before anything works. And recompile the kernel, since Crypto API is not defaulted in most people's kernels, if it is there at all. And you may need new version of lomount because the one you have probably only supports DES. And...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it lets you straight in.... strange boy..
Or get CDex for free.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Though it is nice that Apple is offering a discount to students and educators, if I remember correctly, they gave 10.2 for free.
The text of the original article is: "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 Mrs. Microsoft keeps peeking in on you."
Although it is quite popular with hackers, the "works for me" answer simply doesn't solve anybody's problems. The author of the article is referring to third-party applications (mentioning QuickKeys addon specifically), which stopped working. That most likely happened because it was using some undocumented API that got removed.
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.
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.
First it says:
....and the (somewhat) lack of backward compatibility."
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.
and then:
Gripes include the $130 price tag
Sorry. Not everything is for free. Especially a commercial product from a proprietary hardware/software vendor.
I've heard this is par for the course with Apple, but i didn't say that because i'll get modded down as a troll.
Oh well. FreeBSD 4.9 comes out today! w00!
do() || do_not();
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...
So it's too good for a 0.1 release, but not good enough for $130. Hmm...
How about a 0.2 release, and $99? Or we could leave the price, and bump the numbering up to 10.5 - that would be worth $130 of anyone's money!
Cheers, Paul
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.
Considering that the review was written by David Pogue who's books include "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition", "iMovie3 &iDVD: The Missing Manual", "iPhoto 2: The Missing Manual", "Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual", "Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual", "Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual", and of course "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition", he seems to know his stuff.
The Schedule dialogue box saves electricity and time by shutting down the Mac automatically each night, and turning it on just in time to greet you each morning.
Euhm, Either it goes to sleep and wakes up in time without saving energy. Or it shuts down, saves energy and...
Well, if it's shut down, how can it know how to wake up?
Perhaps there is an always awake chipset somewhere inside that stores the info, but then why did they wait until now to implement it? And if there isn't such a chip, how is it supposed to know when to power up.
anyway, I can't wait to get my hands on expose...
Microsoft, at least, has the decency to wait a few years between upgrades.
I know lame comments like these are essential to journalism and aren't meant to be taken seriously, but I'll bite --
What is indecent about releasing a major upgrade to your operating system after a year?
Should Apple sit on these changes for 2 more years?
If you don't want to buy the upgrade, don't. If you want to wait 2 more years, you'll likely get 10.5 with many more changes. You pay a premium to be a geek with the latest gadgets.
When the new iPod was released, I didn't expect Apple to give me a new one just because mine was only 6 months old. I sold mine on eBay and paid a substantial upgrade fee.
Cars are "upgraded" every year and most people don't drive the latest release because it's too expensive for them to upgrade. In fact, sometimes they only involve very minor cosmetic changes! And often they raise the price! Unbelievable!
Oh, but this is software and no physical manufacturing analogies apply.
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
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? --
For buyers of 10.0 or crafty upgrders who knew how to "hack" the free upgrade CDs available at participating locations. That said, 10.0 was unusable atrocity and there is no way Jobs could have gotten away with charging for 10.1.
"Diarrhea" wasn't in the actual NYTimes review. I believe that, along with "sodomy," was added by the helpful poster of the "complete" text for those who didn't want to register with NYTimes.
partner=GOOGLE in the url.
news.google can link directly to articles. I guess its the same technique.
So let's see. This release is faster, more secure and contains many significant UI and system improvements - encryption, Expose, power on/off scheduling. Also improvements to the apps included as well - TextEdit, Mail etc.
Just because Apple is being modest and only calling it a 0.1 increase doesn't mean it's only a minor upgrade.
> should apple worry about undocumented API backward capbility just becasue App makers use them?
Yes, the should. But the solution is not to retain backward compatibility for undocumented APIs, but to not expose them in the first place. Then the programmers will tell them what they need and there will finally be a documented API out there. Otherwise you get software that stops working for undocumented reasons. Ever try TIOCL_GETSHIFTSTATE?
On the Apple web page you can notice the astronomical number of downloads for Fink: 49 (fourtynine)
http://twitter.com/gr
Would you mind writing a HOWTO on how you did that? I am sure lots of people want to know. Cryptoloop is seemingly impossible to get working on my RH8. Some hack to lomount seems to be necessary.
This view can only be supported by having a very static view of how software is used. I was using OSX 10.1 when 10.2 was released. I suddenly began running into many commercial and open source products that required 10.2. For example, virtually everything on osxgnu.org now requires 10.2, and this is not because these projects are using 10.2 specific features; they're binary compatibility requirements. Fink is another example, and they already note on their page that 10.3 will require a new install from them. I also encountered this in a substantial number of commercial apps and drivers. Apple itself removed the 10.1 dev tools from their page by the time I went to get them.
For some people, myself included, software is a living, dynamic thing. I don't want 10.3 because of whatever assortment of new features it has; I want it because I'm afraid of being cut off from a bunch of things on which I depend. And if I get it, it's going to force some painful transition choices on me by breaking some 10.2-dependent stuff. In some ways the transitions between these 10.x versions is more jarring than that from 9.x to osx; at least when 9.x was left behind, dual boot and emulation support was provided.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
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.
QuartzExtreme is Jaguar's last year feature.
http://twitter.com/gr
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.
ahem... A service pack is used to *maintenance existing software and features* - fix bugs and such. An upgrade *adds features and applications* that warrant a bump in revision number. This is definitely an upgrade my friend.
Perhaps that you do not know that Apple releases bug fixes [read: service packs] quite regularly, through their Software Update application?
Look ma! - No holes!
Someone, please shake me from this wide-awake nightmare.
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
Guess you guys didn't actually READ the article. How hard is it for someone to throw in bullshit in the text and still get knighted as a good samaritan?
iirc..
the reason people were bitter over 10.2 being $130 was that 10.1 was free.
O'Reilly posted an article 13 days ago: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/10/10/p anther.html
ServerWatch also posted one 14 days ago:
http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/308955 1
Someone, please shake me from this wide-awake nightmare.
The university that I work for has a site license for OS X. I get my copy for free. Better than free; it's like the university is paying me to use OS X!
The middle mind speaks!
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.
Never start a land war in Asia. No, wait, it was never send a monster to do the work of a mad scientist. No, wait, I remember.
Never publish a pro-Mac review by an author who is famously pro-Mac without disclosing it to your readership.
Hey, I'm writing this from a Mac. And David Pogue is a great guy, having written many wonderful Mac books. But NYT should have been more objective. Get a rabidly Mac guy to write a Mac review, and what are they going to say, something BAD about Panther? I doubt it.
A little useless trivia here. Pumas and Panthers are the same animal. They are also the same animal as Cougars and Mountain Lions. It seems like most people don't know this.
Just though I'd fill you in with some useless cat knowledge.
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.
Fink is another example, and they already note on their page that 10.3 will require a new install from them.
Although your point is still valid, Fink is a terrible example of it--like many tools out there, fink will have a new version of the software for 10.3, but will (presumably, since they do it now) continue to offer the 10.1 and 10.2 versions for download. Granted, not all the packages will stay available forever, but there's no reason you can't back up the working versions of all the 10.2 packages you want and call it a day.
While I understand what you are saying, you are choosing to live in a dynamic-software mode, which is probably not a good mode to live your life in if you don't like to pay for upgrades. I know people (in the CS field, not just Joe User) who almost never update anything, and they get along just fine. It's possible to live in a static software world if you are willing to make a few trade-offs. It's up to you to decide whether the money or the cutting edge of everything is most important to you.
Reading "PC Magazine" looking for current news or in-depth tech articles is just about as bad as reading it for articles on "the war in Iraq," as far as I could tell last time I picked up an issue. :)
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.
"but I think an upgrade path for existing users (short of buying a new machine) would be nice"
This is very funny to me, as 10.3 will run on any Mac since the Yosemite architecture (Jan 99). So you can have a machine that is almost 5 years old and run it fine. If you haven't upgraded your RAM and video card by now your already losing. There is a fine upgrade path don't let them fool you.
Microsoft is not evil because it makes money, it's evil because it makes money by squashing innovation and manipulating the market using its monopoly powers. Apple makes money by providing something that people find useful.
The idea that all software should be free is just silly. It's commercial software that has given us computers average people can use. Why? Because the profit motive forces companies to at least think about what most people want. Linux hackers only need worry about what they themselves want.
If OSX was "100% virus free", why would they have Virex, which has updates once a month? Are they writing their own virus and patching them just for fun?
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Even Penny Arcade.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Read this, then do a search for OS X here, followed by one for Windows.
That should answer a lot of your questions.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Newer Apple software packages generally require near current versions of the OS, and many other software vendors go the same route.
Clearly your experience is different, but I wouldn't agree with that characterization from my experiences. I find that the vast majority of software I use (which includes a fair amount of stuff) either requires something like 10.1.x (usually 3 or 5), or has both a 10.1 and 10.2 version available. Unless you mean the software that Apple itself releases... but the original poster's point is that these are essentially new features. Can't use the very last Quicktime? Who cares; the last version for your system likely still plays 99% of the movies the new version would play.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if you want to guarantee that you can use the latest and greatest of every piece of software you find, you need to keep your OS up-to-date. That's the way the world works. If you don't want to keep it up to date, then settle for continuing to use the products that have presumably served you well for the last year or two. There's always going to be a trade off; you can't expect to have it both ways in the software world (or anywhere else for that matter).
... 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!
I am trying to attract Spam to my test account. Please do not mod down, as I want to keep it on the main page so that it will be picked up by the Spam-bots! Thanks! ThisIsAnExampleAccountGL@yahoo.com
ThisIsAnExampleAccountGL@yahoo.com
Everyone always says that "Yeah Macs are more expensive, but the cost of ownership is lower compared to Microsoft".
And it's made under the assumption that people buy new computers every time Microsoft releases a new operating system.
It's just false for at least some percentage of users, just as it's true for some percentage of Mac users. There are plenty of people still running Windows 98, and there are plenty of people running Mac OS 9. There are some people that buy new Macs as often as upgrades are released, and there are some people that buy new computers as often as Service Packs are released for Windows.
Personally, if I had to buy an OS upgrade every year just to keep it up to date, I think I'd go nuts. If I had to replace the entire computer to make a significant processor and motherboard upgrade I'd lose it.
On the other hand, if I buy a laptop, Apple becomes much more pallatable, because very few companies allow significant hardware upgrades on laptops (I heard Alienware makes a laptop with upgradeable graphics cards, but I'd like to see how that plays out in the long run). It'd also help if they made Tablet-style notebooks, although many people seem to think these are fairly useless.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
So you're saying you read the mass media for accurate, informative articles on the war in Iraq?
Excuse me a second, I think I just snorted coffee through my nose.
Actually forget I said that, I've got this bridge for sale...
-Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience-
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
Mail.app in 10.2 checks all IMAP folders for me. Maybe your IMAP server is broken?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
...is that the Finder has been completely rewritten from the ground up using Cocoa. Going from 10.2.x -> 10.3 feels like a hardware upgrade. (Like the jump from 10.1 -> 10.2) I would say $130 is well worth it for this one.
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
It's called Parameter RAM, or P-RAM, and it's kept alive by the motherboard battery or a trickle feed from the wallplug. It keeps settings like time, date, hardware prefs etc. I think it's been on Mac motherboards since the late 80's, or even '84. The wake up / shut down automation has been part of the Energy Saver panel since at least System 8.0 or earlier... I remember setting the damn thing as an alarm clock with a really obnoxious start up sound in 1993, so that would be System 7.1 or so.
The old macs really were amazingly automate-able, and it was easily extended with scripting. Nothing new here.
Damn those pesky terrorists
What industry would that be?
"Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines."
Is it really completely virus-free? I find it hard to believe that there aren't any Mac viruses out there.
.Mac, I wouldn't even be running antivirus software on my G4 running OS X.
There are zero known OS X viruses in existence right now. A very few of the Office macro viruses could affect Macs as well as Windows machines, but for the most part a Mac with a virus-infected normal.dot file would just become a carrier and not see any negative effects itself.
There were a handful of "classic" Mac OS viruses around back in the late 80's, but few were malicious and most are extinct. In 12 years of using Macs, I have seen two of them, way back in 1991, and both were benign and easily removed by rebuilding the desktop file on the infected floppy. Until maybe 10 years ago, the leading Mac anti-virus software was a free product a guy maintained in his spare time. If I didn't get it free with
Anyhow, being more secure through obscurity is something that comes with any non-Windows platform. It's certainly an advantage, but it's difficult to say that this is somehow a failing of Windows.
Bullshit. No version of the Mac OS ever automatically executed code stuck in an e-mail message. When Apple came out with AppleScript about 10 years ago, it couldn't even read or write to files for security concerns. Now it's much more powerful and there's little you can't do with it, but the only malicious use of AppleScript we've ever seen was a trojan that had to be actively run by the recipient, and that was around 5 years ago. Outlook and Outlook Express could trigger some viruses just by clicking on the message and having it display in the preview pane. You still can't even effectively run as a non-admin user in Windows, because there are quite a few things that won't work that way. In Mac OS X, even running as admin you still have to authenticate before the system will let you do things like install software. Hell, the root account is disabled out of the box, and there aren't even any ports open by default. Apple has almost always gotten security right, and with OS X they're batting 1.000.
Microsoft spent years putting gee-whiz features ahead of security, and now they are reaping what they've sown. They're getting embarassed by critical exploit after critical exploit. They've drawn the ire of non-Windows-using internet users whose inboxes were crammed full of copies of SoBig and whose internet connections were slowed to a crawl or knocked out by Slammer. And they're trying to blame these things on their customers for not practicing safe computing, when it's Microsoft that is to blame for marketing a complex, high-maintenance system as a simple, low-maintenance one.
They expect people who can't be bothered to set the clocks on their VCRs to be proactive about watching for Windows updates, and then spend hours downloading tens of megabytes over a dialup connection. I just had to upgrade a client's machine from 98SE to XP. It took THREE HOURS and countless reboots to install the OS from CD and then download and apply all of the updates, and that was on DSL. Instead of just giving up and starting over with security at the foundation, Microsoft is attempting to bolt security onto their existing mess after the fact-- which is why they will continue to fail miserably at this "Trustworthy Computing" nonsense.
I'll bet any amount of money that no matter how many Macs you have in the world, even if the marketshare numbers are reversed, there will never be a Mac Slammer, a Mac Blaster, or a Mac ILOVEYOU.
~Philly
They've been doing this one for a long time now.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Ehh... I can understand both sides of it, really. On one hand, I'm a big proponent of recycling/refurbishing older hardware and putting it back in use where it makes sense.
Just recently, I sold a number of old Pentiums (75-120Mhz) and even a Dell 486DX2-66 desktop (in like-new condition, mind you - or else I probably wouldn't have bothered with it). I made complete, Internet-capable systems out of these with network card and modem, included a VGA monitor, and sold them for under $100 a pop.
They're just the thing for some people. (For example, a manager of a fast food restaurant was very happy to find that Dell 486 I was selling. He wanted something just like that to run some point-of-sale software he had.)
By the same token, I work for a guy who rebuilds old Apple Macs, loads them up with educational programs, and sells them as "first computers" for kids. Everything we have is under $200, with some complete systems as low as $45 each. People spend more than that on a single Playstation 2 game!
But all of this has it's limits... If you originally shelled out the multiple thousands of dollars it cost for something like a Beige G3 Mac tower when it was new - you obviously had much more than just a "passing interest" in computers. It's always tough for these people to "let go" of their purchase - yet they still have the interest in computing technology that keeps them yearning for the new versions of OS's and software.
Do I think Apple is overcharging for Panther? No.... really, I don't. At least your money is buying a very respected and stable product. People spend more than that every day on buggy, insecure copies of Windows XP.
But people "whining" that their beige G3 or 3rd. party processor-upgraded pre-G3 PowerMac won't run Panther? I'm caught in the middle. Yes, they should probably accept the fact they've got to "pay to play" and upgrade their hardware. But no, I can't say I don't understand their pain, either. Computers are one of the worst "investments" around, as far as their resale value goes. New OS releases are usually an unpleasant reminder of why....
desktop publishing / journalism
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
It's funny (strange) that Mr. Pogue makes such a big deal ("Now the big one:...") about the $130 upgrade price. I'm willing to bet that his copy of Panther didn't cost him even $0.01. He probably got a "review copy" or a "not for resale copy" or somesuch.
If you're the kind of guy who wants to get a lot of free stuff - books, gadgets, hardware, etc. - you can hardly do better than to become an author and reviewer. Write one or two books, and suddenly every other author in that field wants your name and a quote on the back of their book. I believe Dave Barry has written on this subject, and he's a lot funnier than I am, so I'll leave it to him.
Anyway, the upshot is that you should pretty much ignore anything that any hardware or software reviewer says about money, because they likely haven't spent any of theirs on hardware or software in quite a while.
One thing that is very, VERY good about Mac OS X is the excellent I18N of the system, which works right out of the box. I use Japanese, English and French on a daily basis and the new improved Japanese input method makes this task quite manageable. An excellent idea was also to make the terminal (which still mostly sucks, but still) but UTF-8 by default. Including vim was also a smart move but WHY OH WHY did they have to compile it without multibyte support? It then becomes useless on the terminal they provide... fortunately this is easy to fix yourself.
Just in case all the descriptions aren't quite enough, people might want to check out this demo page at Apple to see Expose in action.
it's not about the karma, it's about the whuffie
That line isn't in the original article, by the way.
But I, among others, hold the double standard, and the reason is pretty simple:
- We love Macs and the Apple software that makes them shine
- We really, really hate Microsoft Windows.
In that context, then, we resent paying Microsoft, but we line up at the Apple Store at 8:00pm Friday just to pay for Panther.Many of us are more than happy to pay for something approaching greatness (MacOS X), and we are not happy to pay for something that isn't great or even all that good (Windows XP and friends).
Did that help?
D
I'm curious how Apple came up with the 149 trillion year strength of encryption. They may use a zillion bit key for encryption, but encryption is eventually as strong as the user's password.
"Software should be free," is not a double-standard. It's an ideal.
When you hear people griping about spending tons of money on MS products, it's because they are overpriced, bloated, insecure hacks from a corporate megalith that hates innovation because it means they might miss the Next Big Thing. Like the music industry, they don't want surprise hits; they want engineered hits.
Apple, on the other hand, has a corporate philosophy that respest, even *loves*, the computer. I believe this is Wozniak's biggest legacy: the love of the computer. So when Apple makes a product, it is often well worth the admission price.
You are confusing two orthogonal issues: the ideal of free software, and the judgements of the current state of corporate, commercial software. Just because some of us hold the Free Software ideal does not mean we don't hold valid opinions about the commercial software industry.
I hope this helps clarify the issue.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Expose sounds interesting but why don't they just add the ability to lower a bloody window or push it to the bottom of the stack like you can in X11.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Tell your friend to go to his iChat video preferences and limit the bandwidth down a few notches. I found that I had mine set to "Unlimited" and when I connected to one of my friends, I was flooding him with data which killed his CPU. Lowering my end took care of it and we could then video chat nicely.
"Is it really completely virus-free? I find it hard to believe that there aren't any Mac viruses out there. Anyhow, being more secure through obscurity is something that comes with any non-Windows platform. It's certainly an advantage, but it's difficult to say that this is somehow a failing of Windows."
Yes, it is 100% virus free. There has never been a virus released in the wild for Mac OS X. In case you don't know, Mac OS X and Mac OS are two totally different operating systems. OS X runs on a BSD base.
"The Windows naming scheme may be a bit confusing, but MacOS is hardly better - especially since this operating system started out at version 10, taking the same name as a previous different OS. This seems an odd point to pick on - both companies are guilty of naming their products for marketing rather than for technical reasons."
Nope. Mac OS Classic never had a version 10. The last release of Classic was 9.2, and that came out after OS X was initially released. As for the "point" issue, the upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP (a large upgrade) was WinNT 5.0 to WinNT 5.1. I suggest everyone start using the version numbers with Windows, it makes things easier. As for Apple, Mac OS started with I believe version 7. The operating systems before that were older Apple operating systems, going back to Apple OS 1, on the original Apple 1 computer, built by Woz in his mother's garage. The numbering system is measuring Apple's OS's, not Mac OS's. (Frankly I wish they'd stop calling them Macs in the first place, it'd get across the point that OS X is a whole new OS.)
"I can't say I have this trouble, but maybe that's because I'm on 2000 and not XP."
The author is referring to Windows Messenger, a "feature" of XP designed to destroy AIM. OS X's iChat AIM client can be uninstalled (or the Safari browser, or anything else really) by dragging the application's icon to the trash, and emptying it.
"This seems an entirely subjective comment. Macs are one of the platforms that I've felt least at home on, but I realise that this isn't an objective point."
The author is considered an expert by the nespaper or else they wouldn't be publishing his opinion. That's all the whole article is - his opinion.
"Well the point is, I don't. Pro-Mac articles often try to polarise the computing world into a Mac-vs-Windows argument. I'm not really pro-Windows at all, despite what I've written here - but there are a plenty of other non-mainstream OSs I like or would like to investigate."
Good for you. The last thing we need on this Earth are more people feeling they are forced into using Windows.
This is essentially correct, but the situation is actually a little worse. You can buy a 32-bit Intel machine with more than 4 GB of RAM (try www.swt.com) and have all the "64-bitness" that you get on a G5 except for the hardware handling of 64-bit integers (whoopie!). The G5 systems they deliver do not "break through the 4 GB barrier" in any real way; they see the barrier the same way any other 32-bit system does.
Please, people... Apple owes anyone who bought a G5 system a FREE upgrade to a genuine 64-bit system. I'm just glad I didn't pay their frightening price to get 8 GB in mine.
Had they simply been honest about this in the first place, it might be OK, but they weren't.
Okay, fine. Let's go so far as to call 10.2 OS XI, and 10.3 OS XII.
Do you agree with Apple's strategy of releasing OS X, releasing OS XI a year later for $120, and then requiring OS XI for the applications which are considered a strong part of what I'll call "The Mac Advantage"? Do you agree with them, about another year later, releasing OS XII and doing the same thing?
Call it what you want, OS X 10.3, OS X 2004, OS X SP2, OS XII... it's still making your users pay $120 each year.
If you checked his bibliography, you'll see that David Pogue has also written several books for Windows, such as The Missing Manual series for Windows XP and Windows Me.
Pogue might enjoy Macs, but he's hardly a Microsoft-bashing zealot.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Here little Spam-bot!
Heeere little Spam-bot!
(...holding out a piece of roast beef and wiggling it...)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Call it what you want, OS X 10.3, OS X 2004, OS X SP2, OS XII... it's still making your users pay $120 each year.
Unless Steve Jobs breaks into your home, holds a gun to your head, and demand you to buy MacOS X 10.3 or else, it's stupid to say Apple is "making" users do anything.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
My original post was actually intended for another, similar-sounding post that said it wasn't worth the money, I just clicked reply on the wrong one.
It does seem odd that apple can't (or won't) maintain some sort of backwards compatibility, even if only to a limited extent. That said, I imagine the value of the time saved in a year for an average worker using a Mac instead of a Windows machine is probably more than $130.
I don't own a mac personally - my OS comes with free upgrades every few hours (Gentoo).
Should teach me to hit submit instead of preview.
Anyway, to say that a user has put themselves into a dynamic software mode is ridiculous. That is simply the nature of 99% of the software released today. Even large programs suffer from this, and fixes are released daily for many of the programs we all use, no matter what platform, no matter what product. In order to completely avoid this, as you suggest, a user must select those programs which have already been thoroughly, thoroughly tested, to ensure that no upgrades or other changes to the software will be required. To hold a personal user to such a standard is ludicrous.
New comercial OS releases at least. Open source OSes do sometimes "de-support" old hardware, but normally only when the hardware is so old that nobody that ran beta versions of the hardware were avilable to test it! I have an ISA sound card bought in 1991 or so that worked under FreeBSD until about 2001. If I had really wanted it to keep working I could have spent a day or two figuring out what bit rot killed the driver and then submitted a patch and made the 3 other people on earth who still owned that card happy. I ended up spending $18 on a replacment, and leaving the work to on of those other 3 folks.
In fact I know someone who has been dilligantly working on adding MCA support to NetBSD (I think). He has been going to HAMfests and buying any MCA gear he hadn't seen before so he can code up a driver. Odd hobby, but I'm sure someone somewhere is thankful.
So why doesn't the beige G3 run Panther? Well I understand that Apple probbably doesn't see enough reason to assign testers to make sure it works, and it would probbabl ytake far more programmer time to fix the bugs then it did to code up the rotating cube while switchign users eye candy. Yeah, I understand that. But...
...do you really think once it is released the same folks that made Darwin boot on unsupported-by-Apple-old-Macs won't do their magic again and make the beige G3 work?
I betcha $5 it'll work by the end of November.
I got mine for $69, including free shipping, and it will be here tomorrow afternoon. (In other words, I won't have to wait for 8:00.
Ah, the perks of being a student.
It's worth it either way. Sure, financially, it seems like a good thing to be running Windows XP for five years, but that little "Search Dog" is going to seem pretty old by 2006. I'll take my innovation in large, annual chunks, versus the Windows way of annual, bug-fix Service Packs, followed by a big, garish upgrade every 5 years.
I just tried your idea. I right clicked on the taskbar and selected one of the options you told us about. It moved AND resised all my windows. This is not the same as Expose. Expose shrinks and arranges the windows so I can pick the one I want, then it returns all the windows to where they were before the option was run. Very different, but that's just my opinion I guess.
so johnpaul191 sez:
"If you don't want to upgrade, then don't. Many many many people still use OS9. At some point there will be less choice for web browsers supporting the latest features, but most everything else will work as it does today and did 2 years ago. My mom still runs OS9 and she can still check email, and she still will after 10.3 hits the shelves tomorrow."
Until this past March, I was happily using System 7.6.1. When I changed out the 5400/180 logic board for a 5400/200 board, I jumped directly to OS 8.6.
I'm really happy with 8.6. Although, now that I have a 5500/225 logic board installed, along with a Sonnet 400Mhz G3 upgrade card plugged in the logic board, along with 128MB of RAM, OS 9 might be an interesting experiment.
But I digress.
What I've got now suits my needs quite well. Eudora still works. iCab still works, Graphic Converter and Photoshop still work, SoundJam MP still works. Text Edit-Pro still works. I do regret that I can't access the iTunes Music Store, but as I don't have an iPod yet, I can live without it.
If I had a suitable Mac that could run OS X, I wouldn't mind paying the yearly upgrade fee. After all, it works out to something like US$10.00 a month. People pay more than $10.00 PER DAY for two cups of Hot Cup Filler from Charbucks!
I think that the average OS X user can squeeze out $10.00 a MONTH for the annual upgrade.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Analogy broken. I can start up Windows 2000 and don't get messages that say I need Windows XP to run this application.
Let's face it... the majority of mac users aren't looking for the cheapest thing out there. $130 for a brand new OS is fine... if you bought 10.2, or 10.1, or 10.0, you still have upgrade cupons, and can get your upgrade for cheap (I think it's $20 or $40, or something.. haven't looked yet). And hey, if you are poor, there is no activation or anything, I mean, you COULD pirate it extremely easily.
This isn't like a "bugfix release" like a windows service pack.. they fixed a lot of stuff, added stuff.. and I have to say, if apple continues to improve OS X in the ame way they have been so far, with each release, it's well worth the $130.
Yes, I know I could do all these same things with linux, but it would take 10x the effort.
Later,
Phil
I know Windows pretty well. I work with it professionally and have an MCSE in Win2k (I'm not bragging, I swear). I wouldn't use it at home though. Product activation? Trustworthy computing? Please. And if that doesn't change your mind like a bolt of lightning, well I guess you're just a stupid head.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Now THAT is some fine editing. Do they not realize that X is a roman numeral? I know that oh-ess-ex sounds cooler in that "TO THE X-TREME!" kind of sense, but you might want to actually figure out how to SAY the name of the product you're publishing a review of in the New York Times.
Wes - Crazy like a fox.
Nevermind the fact that if this was MS, you'd see such hell raised here that has not been seen before...
Based on everything else I've read in the comments, Apple does not make all of its software backwards compatible. By doing such, they are making users upgrade to use the latest software. If you're okay with paying, that's great, but it represents a significant departure from the accepted practice of backward compatibility in OSes and applications.
Besides, writing "Mac OS XI" might have almost made his joke funny.
Actually, since I use it, there is something to see here. And there won't be an Intel version for all the reasons that have already been beaten like the proverbial dead horse.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
That said, I imagine the value of the time saved in a year for an average worker using a Mac instead of a Windows machine is probably more than $130.
Yeah, sounds great! Except you just made it up. You say at the end of your post that you use neither system (I use windows, but no mac), so I doubt either of us have the perspective to say which one is cheaper to run, or saves more time, except for the slashdot perspective, which we all know is slanted.
Later,
Phil
Also, until Bill G, or Darl McB, is doing the same, I want to see no talk of MS or SCO "making" people do anything. Cause we all know it takes a gun to the head to coerce users to do something.
The article says that it's such an upgrade that incrementing it .1 is offensive, yet it grips about the $130 price tag!
So, let me get this straight... The reviewers say that this should be a whole number version number (OS XI?) but complain that it costs too much? Sounds a bit hypocritical to me.
I'd paypal you a thousand dollars if you could find ANY 10.2 machine that upon boot-up, declared you need to upgrade to 10.3. Or did you mean to say that certain apps will require 10.3? Obviously. Developers who want to take advantage of new features will require 10.3.
If you've got more than one Mac to upgrade, remember that the Apple Store sells family packs -- 5 OS licenses for $199 instead of $129 for just one license. License says they have to be installed in Macs in the same "housing unit", so I don't know how that might affect machines that move somehow or another to another "unit"....
...as an aside, since it includes Xcode, it's just perfect for the family that develops and compiles their own code together!
My Mac is less than 12 months old and they want me to pay $129 for an upgrade?
New features look cool, but as someone who recently "switched" from Intel/MS, I feel a little cheated.
I'd pay less than $50 for the upgrade. One more of these and I'll give in and learn linux.
Recommendation for a linux distribution for me (one that lets me install the OS on a Intel box with a CD and instructions that would fit on one page)?
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
You don't need to update your software. If a new version with bug fixes gets released, nobody is forcing you to upgrade to it. Your existing version is still just as useful as it was yesterday, just like your existing OS. If it was good enough to use then, why is it so urgent to upgrade?
And if it is so important to you that you have the latest and greates software and bugfixes that you get your panties in a knot over this whole thing, then perhaps being able to have the latest stuff is worth $130 US to you.
Students, facualty, or really anyone that recieves a pay check from an educational institution. If your pay stub has an educational institution on it, you get the discount.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
My iMac is about 4 years old now, and has had two paid upgrades in that time, with Panther making a third if I can find room on my credit card for it. I paid for 10.0 and 10.2. Each gave me new capabilities that I didn't have before, and 10.3 will add still more features and reportedly faster speeds.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
They want you to upgrade yes, but your computer will not magicaly stop working, your software will not stop working, you'll probably be able to use some new apps, but obviously some apps will use features built into the new OS and as such will not likely run on your current OS, but such is life in the computer world. Besides, wait a month or two after the release and you will see the price in most places drop to at the most $99. If you have a friend who's a student, a teacher or works in an educational institution, they can get it for you for $79. I think the same applies to government employees.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Wrong. You are ignorant and misinformed.
If you had named that industry as being David Pogue, you would have had a point.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The only way passphrases can be secure is if they are not easily typeable. Adding the "easily remembered, easily typed" constraint on a key is a huge constraint!
Brute force this: "My turtle is 3ke"
Pretty easy to remember, and to type. Completely resistant to dictionairy attacks because of the 3 random characters at the end of the phrase (which are easy to remember). Your search space to find this is essentially the same as that when you are trying to break a variable length passphrase of random characters. You could brute-force it with efficiency on the order of 36^17 ~= 36^16+36^15+36^14+... because it is 16 characters out of a pool of 36, variable length (assuming the brute force starts at length 1 and keeps going). This equates, roughly, to about 87 bits of keying material without taking into account additional bits generated through salting in the key generation function (log2(36^17)).
So, perhaps we should add punctuation "My turtle! is 3ke" - this should change efficiency to something around 64^18. This equates, roughly, to about 108 bits of keying material without salts, much more with salts (log2(64^18). Nothing to scoff at, considering the difficulty of breaking >100 bit symmetric keys.
Conclusion: With proper keygeneration and salting, this technique can easily give high bit keyspaces from small dictionairy-resistant passphrases.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Yeah, I'm sure Panther will be on Beige G3's by the end of the year, at worst.
The problem is, "unsupported" is still "unsupported" - any way you slice it. Those "old world" Macs running Darwin via patches and helper apps still don't really have everything functional. (Last I checked, things such as sound recording and the volume control for audio output were broken.)
I regularly see reports of Beige G3's that do weird things with OS X - including trash the whole partition on a weekly basis, making it impossible to really use it. Sure, it works on many of them without issues - but just as often, weird glitches happen. I had a Beige G3 with a Sonnet G4 upgrade board in it, and I ran OS X on it. It worked, but I'd occasionally get problems where it wouldn't boot when first powered on. If I hit the reset button, then it was ok on the second try. Not a "show stopper", but still behavior that's frustrating.
I've just used it.
.mpkgs of the software I require.
Personally, I just use Finder to connect to http://packages.opendarwin.org/ via WebDAV, and install the
However, your comment highlights many of the issues facing the DarwinPorts project - do they wish to adopt the ease of the Macintosh, or stick to their stuffy, difficult-to-use BSD roots.
Mis-read/Convoluted language by me. I did not mean a message on startup of the OS, but of an incompatible application.
"Works for me" is quite popular with a lot of people, not just hackers. Windows defendants for example use "it works for me so your computer must be broken" as an argument to defend Windows.
And when hackers say "works for me", that's that an excuse: that's a fact. How can they fix it if they can't even reproduce the problem?
I've been using Mac's since I was a wee lad and am calling Panther OS X 3 (oh-ess-ex three). Just makes things easier.
(FileVault uses an encoding scheme so thorough, Apple says, that a password-guessing computer would need 149 trillion years to break it. Just enough time for Apple to reach Mac OS X 11.)
I think he meant just enough time for Microsoft to release Longhorn...
The standard of "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" cannot be proven with closed source apps. Nobody except Apple is able to scan FileVault for backdoors, and even they don't claim to be doing so. There is no guarantee of a program's integrity with closed source code, and Apple won't even answer emails asking them about the possibility of backdoors. They refuse to be questioned or doubted. They give the image that they are above suspicion. They are not, of course. You have NO REASON to trust Apple. If your security is important, you cannot trust a company you are not in active business partnership with, one who does not have a stake in your success. And even then, double-check it yourself. Don't you think Apple would roll over on you if the IRS or Dep't of Homeland Security wanted access to your data? Definitely.
That said, Apple's cool, their stuff is pretty good quality, but they're still a company, and as such, are not bound by ethics, but by expediency; that means that they will roll over on you, and backdoors in their software are actually quite probable, in order to better comply with government requests, if they should arise. Apple NEEDS to be able to assist the government if they need help. That means backdoors are a precaution that must be taken, but never revealed. To reveal them would be to destroy their utility.
Well, at least the poster wasn't whoring for karma.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
ha. i have it. i have panther a full day early. and it only cost me $1099.
oh yea, they threw in an ibook as well.
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
What if it doesn't work 'mightily [sic] fine?' How easy/difficult is it to restore the arcived system folder? Having not done it and expecting panther in a few days, I'm just curious as to my options should I want to go back (for whatever reason)'
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
No, but it sounds like everything is "Brushed Metal" now. Bleah.
It's ~$129 every year for Mac, or ~$199 every 2 years for Windows (if you're using the Pro version, which is closest in functionality to OS X). Supposedly MS is going to go a bit longer this time before upgrading Windows, but I wouldn't be surprised if the "super service pack" everyone is talking about for next year is called "Windows XP Second Edition" and comes with at least a $100 upgrade price tag.
Until FCP can take advantage of the added power, it doesn't benefit us enough to warrent the huge early adoptor mark-up.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
...which probably isn't the default because it's freakin' slow.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
Unlike Windows versioning scheme that went from 3.1 to 95 (+91.9) to 98 (+3) to 2000 (+1902, whoa!) to Me (NaN) to XP (NaN), Apple use 10.major upgrade.minor update naming scheme.
Besides, I always thought X (read: 10) is a playful pun on its Unix roots, like XWindows or X11, while at the same time it was a continuation from version 9.2. So, it will be a long time before Apple use XI. They still have 6 more upgrades before they have to decide whether it will be 10.10, 10.11, etc. or 11.0, 11.1, etc.
Overall, I'm quite happy with it, but I've found a few bugs. yes, I've reported at least one to apple
Fire up Safari (or click on the feedback icon) and file the rest fo the bug reports. Apple is currently culling the feedback looking for bugs to fix for 10.3.1, every little bit helps!
In this case the reviewer is David Pogue, who, in addition to be the columnist for "State of the Art" (http://www.davidpogue.com/emailcolumn.html), is a very popular Mac-oriented (but not exclusively Mac-oriented) tech writer, creator and prinicple author of Pogue Press / Missing Manuals (a sub-imprint, or "brand", of O'Reilly and Associates, THE prestige publisher in the computer industry), and author of a good chunk of the Missing Manuals themselves. So this isn't just another "mass media" tech article.
The main reason I ordered Panther is that Jaguar's samba support is far from sufficient. Connections constantly get lost when I am dealing with large files, and the whole system hangs quite often upon resume.
I do agree with you in that we should pay for new features, but I don't think it is fair to shell out $130 because of defects in the orginal product.
Please mod the parent up so his experiment works. Small price to pay.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
until i got my G4 400MHz a few years ago i was using an 8100 that i eventually put a Sonnet G3 250MHz card in..... it was Nubus so other expansion was very limited (no USB, limited vid cards etc)..... anyway it worked adequately for a while.
Right now i am typing on the G4 400MHz. I upgraded the video card and when ram was cheap i got it up to a gig. I fully intend to install 10.3 when my copy shows up tomorrow, and from everything i have heard... the machine should actually run faster than it does today.
I still use a 7600 with the stock PPC604e at work running 9.1 and that works fine. I would like a faster machine, and some web pages make it choke but hey........
what software stopped working within a year? i guess if i were a M$ windows user i would have till 2006 to worry about those pesky OS upgrades.
I only take one major exception to the claim of the story that expose is "the biggest graphical breakthrough that operating systems have achieved in years" I don't deny it's a nice feature. That's why it's been so nice that Enlightenment has had it for several years now.
You can't easily use more than 4gig in a _single_ application on a PC without .. well, many many hacks.
On a 64 bit OS, I can just go "OS, give me 5 gig of RAM" and it'll quite happily do so. In a single chunk.
So, yes, its a bit misleading, but the only real misleading thing I have a problem with is the "first 64-bit desktop machine". *cough* Alpha.
it's funny that if this was an MS release, they'd dub it WindowsXX or something alone those lines to hide the fact that they aren't using a new kernel and are instead version upgrades. Windows 2000 is running the NT5 kernel, hence 5.0.x with x being service packs and minor updates) Windows XP is 5.1.x, and Win2k3 is 5.2.x
;)
sure, apple could take the MS route and dupe buyers, but they're sticking to their nomenclature and adding real features instead of changing the theme, name, and patching some security holes like most of MS's 'upgrades'.
oh, and osx sounds sexier than osxii
This response was e-mailed to David Pogue in reply to his New York Times article":
> "..that far more software is available for Windows (true; "only"
> 6,500 programs are available for Mac OS X).."
I'm afraid I'm going to have to take exception to the above statement. While it's true that there are more native Windows applications, I think that this is a misleading metric.
The Macintosh is by far the most compatible platform. It runs Classic applications, Mac OS X applications, BSD applications, Linux applications, and X11 applications. As surely you know, the Mac will even run Windows applications via Virtual PC.
This being the case, it's a reasonable conclusion that "far more software is available for Windows" is a false statement. I thank you kindly for an otherwise excellent article.
--- Fox
I know this thread is dead but I don't care.
Remember, if those five computers are networked together, Xcode's shared compiling will take advantage of unused cycles on other machines.
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.
# dd if=/dev/zero of=~/e.fs bs=1M count=512 # losetup -e blowfish /dev/loop0 ~/e.fs
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/loop0
Then, in your bashrc
losetup -d /dev/loop0 # Delete any old loops
losetup -d /dev/loop0 ~/e.fs
mount /dev/loop0 ~
voila
Of course you'll need an fstab entry for /dev/loop0, and losetup has to be suid root, but you get the picture. Your home directory now appears to contain everything in the encrypted file.
I don't ever recall setting up the Crypto API, but that works for me.
"And Safari, Apple's smooth, fast Web browser, is better than ever, with its pop-up blocker and its Google search box right in the toolbar."
these features where in version 1.0 of safari...
I got a bad feeling this reviewer doesn't even own a mac.
Dude where's my Sig?
Woops. Serves me right for not previewing.
/dev/loop0 ~/e.fs /dev/loop0
/dev/loop0 # Delete any old loops losetup -d /dev/loop0 ~/e.fs /dev/loop0 ~
/dev/loop0, and losetup has to be suid root, but you get the picture. Your home directory now appears to contain everything in the encrypted file.
# dd if=/dev/zero of=~/e.fs bs=1M count=512
# losetup -e blowfish
# mkfs.ext3
Then, in your bashrc
losetup -d
mount
voila Of course you'll need an fstab entry for
I don't ever recall setting up the Crypto API, but that works for me.
You're right, calling it an 0.1 upgrade ISNT fair.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Nothing new here.
I used to sell QuickKeys from 1993 to 1997 (when I left retail) and it was always sensitive to even minor updates to the Mac OS - it seems it's just one of those apps that doesn't like change. I'm therefore hardly surprised that 10.3 breaks it again.
Suitcase (a font management utility for the Mac) was (is?) similarly afflicted. I'm curious to see how it reacts to 10.3...
Is the AppleTalk 45sec timeout for a missing volume fixed? Ever try to walk off with a powerbook that has a shared volume mounted? Good luck trying to take notes in your next meeting!
Or how about giving the Finder the ability to transfer files using ftp or scp? In both directions? Is that there yet? How can they call the Finder a Unix GUI when it can't do this stuff?
Good to hear the TextEdit and Preview are improved, But what about giving us a simple html editor? Did they do that yet? It was there for a while in the public beta, and was removed in favor of rtf.
How about Mail.app? Does it deal with mail servers that aren't accessible a bit more gracefully? Can a message be dragged to a folder yet? Does dragging attachments off a message work more reliably? Can folder titles be live edited yet?
Anyone know about such stuff?
ThosEM
I'm not disagreeing with your point but I think a little history is needed to here:
Anyone else remember the changes that took place between the Mac's System 7.0 to 7.6? There was a lot of changes and many, many programs that about the time 7.5 was released required System 7.5 or higher. It apears that Apple has a histroy of using dot releases to introduce significant changes. Bug fixes are double dot releases (i.e. 10.2.1) Conclusion: If you're a long time Apple user then you're used to this pattern. - Apple only changes the major version number when the way you interact and configure the system is overhauled, i.e. control panels, contextual menus, Quartz)
What's different today? Apple used to bend over backward to make sure old Apps worked on the new hardware/OS, and apparantly that's no longer the case. (Think about 680x0 apps running on PPCs)
--Aaron Greenberg
Shouldn't this really be OSX.III
You sound like the kind of person who wouldn't pay a shareware fee since according to your personal pet peeve, it should be free.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
It's not ridiculous, because I know, to take the most interesting example, a CS professor who is still using netscape 4, Acrobat Reader 3, older versions of TeX, MatLab, Ghostview, OpenOffice etc. etc. and gets along just fine. He publishes papers, creates class notes, sends and recieves email, interacts with a (non-homogenous) campus network, and basically gets along just fine without upgrading anything.
Can everyone do this? No. Can many more people than actually do? Yes. The web, email, and word processing have all been around for quite some time. There are programs which do most or all of what most people need that are years old, which work fine for most uses. As often as not, it is simple upgrade fever that drives people to get the new software. Yes there are bug releases... but the vast majority of people might never in their life encounter the bug that some release fixes.
It is possible for most computer users to live life without continuous upgrading. I'm not claiming that everyone can, and I'm not claiming it's 100% easy; there are, as I said, real trade-offs. But you can't tell me it's a ludicrous position, because I know many people who live, quite successfully, with a static-software mindset.
The Finder on my Apple IIgs (laugh all you want, but it was my primary computer until 1998) says System 6.0.1.
Check out this if you don't believe me.
I'm 99% sure that numbering system is correct. Does anyone else know if there was anything before System 7 on Macintosh?
Safari is not part of the OS in the "embedded so deeply you can never remove it" sense. It's simply a nice program which happens to be a perk of having the lastest version of OS X... Apparently I should have said "a side-benefit of the OS" so you couldn't willfully misinterpret my statement.
In OS X, changing your default browser is a one step process with no hassles, and throwing away Safari is a two-step process (counting emptying the trash) with no side effects.
In Windows, actually removing IE renders the system inoperable. That's the difference.
While I respect more of your comments KFG, I simply don't agree that a normal user would get dll with all but shitty shareware or Windows 98 designed programs.
.DLL problem was Windows 98. I guess you could get the problem if you have a lot of third party apps doing dumb things.
I mean all normal users have some flavour of Windows, Office, some Games, IE, WMP, Winamp, some CD burning software, Outlook Express or just Hotmail, a bunch of drivers for there little gizmos(camera,etc).
And last time I noticed a
U R Sooooo Kewl :)
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
In fact Panther tries to improve this by letting you build your target for different versions of the OS (10.1, 10.2 and 10.3) and InterfaceBuilder will also show how many incompatibilities would be present in the nib-file, if used on a 10.1 system.
As a developer though, I would always write for the latest version, due to bug fixes and new enhanced APIs, not to mention the new binding system in 10.3.
I guess you haven't seen the Dual G5s.
How do you get losetup to accept -e blowfish? Mine only takes xor and des (and none). If you look at lomount.c in unix-utils-2.11r, you will discover that those are indeed the only options it supports. Examination of the password input switch statement suggests that each different encryption type requires a different passphrase format (is that true?). So how do I get it to support more formats?
The cool thing is that instead of merely resizing your windows, it actually scales them. No matter how many open windows are on your screen, it will scale them all to a small size so that none of them overlap each other, allowing you to pick the one you want to bring to the foreground.
Then, poof! The windows spring back to be exactly the way you left them, except with your newly selected window on top.
It looks very slick, and I can't wait to use it in Logic, where it's quite common to have a dozen or more windows open at a time!
Hello,
/System/Library/Keychains: X509Certificates, and I tried adding the CA's certificate to that keychain also, but Mail.app still complained.
There is a new feature that needs to be addressed for those connecting via an SSL-encrypted connection to an IMAP server that uses a home brewed certificate using Mail.app.
Mail.app in previous releases did not complain about mail servers with SSL certificates from unknown CA's, but does in Panther.
I have tried adding the certificate for the CA into the X509Anchors keychains -- this process works for allowing Safari trust SSL certificates issued by that CA. However, Mail.app does not seem to use the same keychain.
I noticed that in Panther that there is another keychain in
I also tried specifying for this CA cert that it should always be trusted (as opposed to using the system defaults), and Mail.app still complained.
By the way, when Mail.app complains, it asks you whether you want to cancel or continue. Continuing apparently does not have it connect and pick up messages.
Any direction anyone can provide would be most appreciated.
Thanks!!
The Mac OS started at v1.