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Excerpt - Big crowds turned out at Apple Stores from coast to coast Friday to mark the release of Mac OS X 10.5, the OS X update known as Leopard. In New York’s SoHo neighborhood, even pouring rain and gusty winds didn’t deter early adopters from queuing up. The sidewalk in front of the store and around the corner was a sea of colored umbrellas as about 200 people lined up to be among the first to purchase Leopard in North America. Those who hadn’t prepared for the weather hunched under pieces of cardboard or just got wet, as people...

"Perhaps overcome with excitement (and forgetting that Apple doesn't like such pre-emptive disclosures), Sun's Jonathan Schwartz announced today at Sun event in Washington D.C. that Apple would be making ZFS 'the file system' in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard (video link, requires RealPlayer)," longofest reports for MacRumors. In fact, this week you'll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developer Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS 10. longofest reports, "ZFS has a long list of improvements over Apple's current file system, Journaled HFS+." Full article here. MacDailyNews Take: Yes! If true — and it certainly...

Apple on Tuesday offered QuickTime 7.1.6, an update to its core multimedia software for Mac OS X and Windows. Among the issues adjusted in this release is a fix for an exploit in QuickTime for Java that first came to light at a security conference two weeks ago.QuickTime 7.1.6 addresses numerous bug fixes and includes support for Final Cut Studio 2, and timecode and closed captioning support in QuickTime Player. Apple recommends the update for all QuickTime 7 users. It is available for download from Apple’s Web site or from the Software Update system preference.“An implementation issue exists in QuickTime...

Dino Dai Zovi, the New York-based security researcher who took home $10,000 in a highly-publicized MacBook Pro hijack on April 20, has been at the center of a week’s worth of controversy about the security of Apple’s operating system. In an e-mail interview with Computerworld, Dai Zovi talked about how finding vulnerabilities is like fishing, the chances that someone else will stumble on the still-unpatched bug, and what operating system — Windows Vista or Mac OS X — is the sturdiest when it comes to security. Friday, the vulnerability was first identified as within Safari, but by Monday, QuickTime was...

Apple on Thursday released a statement noting that Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” won’t be released until October. The cause of the delay? The iPhone. “iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is,” reads a statement published by the company. Getting the iPhone ready for its June launch has had an unintended consequence, however: QA and “some key software engineering” resources allocated to Mac OS...

We have just gotten an anonymous tip from a source that indicates that Apple is planning a special event on February 20 to introduce Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07 as well as updated Mac Pros. Mac Pros will be available immediately with a free upgrade to 10.5 when it ships, and the ship date for 10.5 will be confirmed for 3/24/07 as we have been predicting for quite some time now. There is some speculation that we may see a week earlier or later for this event, depending on the status of Leopard, but this...

Excerpt - The lines between the Mac OS and Windows are starting to blur. And that portends major changes going forward in the world of PCs. At MacWorld, a little company called Parallels won awards for the latest version of its hit product, which enables you to run both operating systems at the same time on a Macintosh. It's a major breakthrough. While the last version of Parallels allowed you to run both operating systems at once, it still required you to switch back and forth between the two. Now, however, Parallels' Coherence product, which the company says will ship...

XP Successor Doesn't Break New Ground on Ease of Use, But It's Best Windows Yet A new version of Microsoft Windows, the world's most popular and important computer operating system, will finally arrive for consumers on Jan. 30. It has taken the giant software maker more than five years to replace Windows XP with this new version, called Windows Vista -- an eternity by computer-industry reckoning. Many of the boldest plans for Vista were discarded in that lengthy process, and what's left is a worthy, but largely unexciting, product. Vista is much prettier than previous versions of Windows. Its icons...

A security researcher has published attack code for an unpatched flaw in Mac OS X.The proof-of-concept code exploits a security hole in the way Apple's operating system handles disk image files, the researcher wrote on a blog devoted to a 'Month of Kernel Bugs' campaign which promises to reveal details of a new flaw in low-level software every day this month.The researcher, who goes by the initials 'LMH', wrote: "Mac OS X com.apple.AppleDiskImageController fails to properly handle corrupted DMG (disk image) image structures, leading to an exploitable memory corruption condition with potential kernel-mode arbitrary code execution by unprivileged users." The...

For the performance of Clovertown you'll have to wait a bit longer as we're not allowed to disclose it just yet, but we wanted to let you know that so far it's looking like you'll be able to upgrade your Mac Pro to 8 cores in the not too distant future.

"The similarities are almost eerie. This year, readers gave us the lowdown on over 13,000 desktop PCs—enough data to rate eight of the country's leading brands. And the final tally looks an awful lot like last year's survey results," Cade Metz reports for PC Magazine on "The 19th Annual Reader Satisfaction Survey." Metz reports, "This year, you diehard PC Mag readers detailed your experiences with nearly 20,000 PCs (notebooks and desktops) and more than 6,500 printers (from mono lasers to color ink jet all-in-ones). And what you say about the leading manufacturers isn't always what we'd expect. No big...

In terms of performance, it's good news—with a caveat. While the fully-buffered memory, the screaming-fast Xeon 5150s, and the 1333MHz FSB are all great, Apple's video card choice is most definitely not. It's like having a can of Schlitz with filet mignon, or having an oompah band play Oktoberfest at Carnegie Hall. It doesn't fit, and it detracts from the overall experience. The ATI Radeon X1900XT offered as a build-to-order option would have been a fantastic choice, but given Apple's desire for a $2,499 price tag and high margins, that was not an option. Still, one of the GeForce 7600s...

The great experiment I was going to write up a big thing to post here. I was going to be all crazy eloquent and whatnot… then Chris wrote this as a draft of what he’d like to say. And his words cut to the point incredibly nicely. So here is what Chris has to say (and he speaks for both of us): You have ruined this for us.

"Apple Computer Inc. on Wednesday posted a 48 percent jump in quarterly net income as sales of iPods and Intel Corp.-powered Macintosh computers topped expectations, sending shares [over] 8 percent higher," Duncan Martell reports for Reuters. "Apple said it shipped 1.33 million Macintosh computers in the quarter and 8.11 million iPods, increases of 12 percent and 32 percent, respectively, year over year. iPod shipments topped some analysts' estimates of as low as 7.5 million for the period," Martell reports. "Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, said in an interview that the company had a 'fantastic quarter,' adding that its...

Excerpt - July 18, 2006 - With three weeks until Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, Think Secret has learned exclusively that CEO Steve Jobs will use his keynote address to announce the debut of movie rentals through the iTunes Music Store. While the announcement will undoubtedly be billed as a further extension of iTunes' dominance in digital media downloads, it represents a coup for the movie industry, which will have succeeded in standing its ground against Apple's pressures to offer consumers the option of owning movie downloads. Apple is said to have ironed out agreements with Walt Disney, Universal Studios, Paramount...

Excerpt - ~ snip ~ But what I believe Apple will push as its core strategy is what's behind Door Number Three -- something completely different for those who may not want to run Windows Vista, but want to run Windows XP, instead. XP is strangely compelling on Apple hardware, primarily because most users will already have XP licenses they can transfer and applications they not only own but are familiar with as well. Many people might argue, too, that OS X 10.4 (or 10.5) has many features slated to be coming in Vista, so running XP atop 10.4 could...

Accessibility Home / Developer Center / Security Topic Center / Security Zone / Security Bulletin APSB06-03 Flash Player Update to Address Security Vulnerabilities Originally posted: March 14, 2006CVE Identifier CVE-2006-0024Summary Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Flash Player that could allow an attacker who successfully exploits these vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system. A malicious SWF must be loaded in Flash Player by the user for an attacker to exploit these vulnerabilities. Users are recommended to update to the most current version of Flash Player available for their platform.Solution Adobe recommends all Flash Player 8.0.22.0 and earlier users...

Apple's newly acquired OS, NeXTstep was built on the Mach 3.0 kernel, the same microkernel used by GNU/Hurd. Though by then the Mach kernel was largely abandoned, another kernel, Linux, was gaining support and seeing rapid development. The project at Carnegie Mellon to develop Mach had ended in 1994, two years before Apple acquired NeXT. As early as 1991 papers were published documenting performance issues with the Mach kernel. At the time there was much debate over kernel design, 1992 marked the now famous flame war between Linus Torvalds and Andy Tanenbaum over monolithic vs. microkernel design. Even though Apple...

A self-professed Mac lover who jump-started a prize award for the first person to figure out how to boot Windows XP on an Intel-based Macintosh is confident that someone will step forward to claim the bounty, now at nearly $6,000. "I'm an optimist," said Colin Nederkoorn of Houston, Texas, and the creator of The Contest Web site. "I think someone will claim it." Nederkoorn's site spelled out his requirements and tossed $100 into the pot to get things rolling. As of mid-day Wednesday, he'd collected $5,747 as the prize for "the person/group that can make dual-booting Mac OS X and...

Familiarity breeds contempt, right? So it stands to reason that anyone who uses a product extensively can find fault with it. I’m no exception—my work requires me to use Mac OS X every day, all day long, and although I am generally thrilled with its capabilities and reliability, some things about it really drive me up the wall. Take a gander at my list of pet peeves; then share your own by posting to the Macintosh Weblog.