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Disgruntled Apple users get vocal as Macworld loomsDecember 31, 2003, 3:25 PM PST By Reuters Can a few bad apples--like product-quality complaints and potential lawsuits--spoil the bunch for loyal fans of Apple Computer ahead of their biggest party of the year? As enthusiasts devoted to Apple prepare to descend on San Francisco next week for the annual Macworld conference, at least two online petitions have collected hundreds of signatures from potential plaintiffs seeking to file lawsuits over claims of defects in the iBook laptop. Another growing source of complaints surrounds Apple's wildly popular iPod line of digital music players, which...

The 99¢ Solution Steve Jobs' new Music Store showed foot-dragging record labels and freeloading music pirates that there is a third way By CHRIS TAYLOR When Steve Jobs holds forth in public, it's usually to a mob of fawning Apple-ites—the true believers who still develop software and accessories for Apple products. Not so last month at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This crowd was more mack daddy than Macworld. Bono, Mick Jagger and Dr. Dre made video appearances. Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart was in the audience. Sarah McLachlan sang her latest hits live. What was pulling these musical...

<p>A week before the 2004 Macworld Expo in San Francisco, analysts and Web sites that track Apple Computer Inc. are speculating that the company will unveil a line of smaller, cheaper versions of its popular but pricey iPod digital music players.</p>

Blacksburg, VA — Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan knew that he wanted to build a world-class supercomputer. Also, he wanted to solidify the position of Virginia Tech’s world-class computer science program. But with only a fraction of most supercomputing budgets to spend, it seemed like a hopeless dream. He crunched numbers, solicited every likely vendor, examined and ultimately discarded all possible options using other platforms and chips. Then in June of 2003, news of Apple’s Power Mac G5 hit the airwaves. At last, Varadarajan realized, he’d have as much 64-bit processing as he needed to power his dream, without overtaxing his budget....

Macs Are Not Invulnerable Windows Isn’t the Only System With Serious Flaws Commentary By Lance Ulanoff PC Magazine Dec. 11— I know this is wrong, but in one respect I was happy to learn earlier this month about the discovery of a significant security hole in the Jaguar and Panther versions (10.2 and 10.3, respectively) of the Apple operating system (OS). I was tired of the "We use Macs because they don't get attacked by viruses and hackers" refrain from Mac nuts. I generally counter with what is apparently a secret carefully hidden from Mac zealots: "That's because only a...

The Mac @ 20 Happy Birthday, Mac! Quentin Hardy 12.15.03, 12:00 PM ET It ought to be dead by now, beset by time and big competitors. Be grateful it isn't. For in all its iterations since it was introduced to the world in January 1984--the Macintosh, then such sequels as the Mac II, PowerBook, Power Mac, iMac--the world's most persistent computer brand has done the most for all computer users. Not through market share, of course--bad business decisions, bad luck and bad behavior from friends and foes ruled that out years ago. But the Mac, always built by the...

Image Archiving On a rainy afternoon in Washington, D.C., John Jones leans back in his chair in an office populated with Macs and watches digital images fly by on one of the displays. “The Macs are doing a lot of work while I’m talking on the phone,” he chuckles softly. “It’s an important part of our approach to archiving.” Jones began managing images for the Smithsonian Institution when, in 1989, he joined the museum after graduate school to help catalog and preserve the work of Peter A. Juley. From 1896 to 1975, Juley and his son, Paul, operated the largest...

Apple Macintosh and iSight Video Conferencing technology . . . There's a lot of junk in technology, a lot of hassle and frustration, a lot of disappointment. But this moment was like a TV commercial. It was an emotional, powerful, simple, perfect example of how technology can change a moment, solve a problem, and despite the gulf of time and distance, bring you face to face with the people you love.

Since its October 24th release, Apple's latest iteration of its BSD-based OS X software, version 10.3 or "Panther," has received more plaudits than pans throughout the high-tech community Indeed, aside from a couple of initial glitches, including a hard drive-damaging flaw that has since been fixed, the launch has been seen as a highly positive development. BusinessWeek technology columnist Stephen Wildstrom called Panther "the best operating system available to consumers." And on the eve of Panther's release, The Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walter Mossberg wrote that Panther "can network easily with Windows computers and is packed with lots of...

22nd Edition of TOP500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers Released MANNHEIM, Germany; KNOXVILLE, Tenn.; & BERKELEY, Calif. – In what has become a much-anticipated event in the world of high-performance computing, the 22nd edition of the “TOP500” list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was released today (November 16, 2003). The Earth Simulator supercomputer retains the number one position with its Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 Tflop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second). It was built by NEC and installed last year at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan. The list of cluster systems in the TOP10 has grown...

SAN FRANCISCO: Nov 27, 2003 (PNS) - Jon Lech Johansen, 19, a young Norwegian has created a program called QTFairUse which circumvents Apple Computer's ITunes' anti-copying program MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding. Johansen is also known as DVD Jon because when he was 15 he developed DeCSS to view movies on Linux-based computers without DVD-viewing software and posting on the internet in 1999. DVD Copy Control Association is suing him again. Last January 7 he was acquitted by court on other hacking charges. The End.

iPod's 'dirty secret' wins Web fans Last modified: November 26, 2003, 12:06 PM PST By Matthew Broersma Special to CNET News.com Two filmmakers are getting attention around the Net for an "antiadvertising" project aimed at protesting what they call the "dirty secret" of the iPod music player--its battery life. Brothers Casey and Van Neistat, who collaborate on video projects using Mac editing software, said they were told by a technical support representative at Apple Computer that the cost to replace the dead battery in an 18-month-old iPod would be $255--comparable to the cost of a new device. Irked at what...

Mac OS X Security Advisory Vulnerability: Malicious DHCP response can grant root access Affected Software Mac OS X 10.3 (all versions through at least 26-Nov-2003) Mac OS X Server 10.3 (all versions through at least 26-Nov-2003) Mac OS X 10.2 (all versions through at least 26-Nov-2003) Mac OS X Server 10.2 (all versions through at least 26-Nov-2003) Probably earlier versions of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server Possibly developer seeded copies of future versions of Mac OS X Abstract A series of seemingly innocuous default settings can cause an affected Mac OS X machine to trust a malicious...

<p>SAN FRANCISCO -- The nasty hard-drive-eating bug in Panther has been resolved, according to Apple Computer. But some experts say poppycock -- upgrading to the latest version of Mac OS X is like playing Russian roulette with your data.</p> <p>As previously reported, there's a glitch in the Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) installer that renders some -- but not all -- external FireWire drives inoperable.</p>

<p>Mac users are roaring in rage because of a nasty installment glitch that erases data on external hard drives.</p> <p>After upgrading to Mac OS X 10.3, better known as Panther, they are finding external FireWire drives are no longer recognized by the host machine. In many cases, all the data the drives stores are also gone.</p>

Apple Computer Inc. said in a statement given to MacCentral on Friday that the company would be fixing security flaws uncovered in Mac OS X Jaguar by Cambridge, MA-based security research firm @Stake earlier this week. Some have speculated that Apple would not update the older Jaguar operating system since the release of Mac OS X Panther on October 24, 2003, but Apple has put that speculation to rest. "Apple's policy is to quickly address significant vulnerabilities in past releases of Mac OS X wherever feasible," Apple said in a statement given to MacCentral. "The shipment of Panther does not...

Apple Computer's latest version of its Mac OS X operating system, Panther, patches security flaws that affect previous versions of the operating system, leaving security experts wondering if users will have to pay the $129 upgrade fee to be secure. On Tuesday, Apple released an advisory that indicate that the Mac OS X 10.3 upgrade--which adds an improved Finder menu, better synchronization of files and a tool to help users find a specific window on a crowded desktop--also includes more than a dozen "security enhancements." However, Apple apparently doesn't intend to fix the flaws in previous versions of the software:...

After God casually looked up from His desk, glanced at the Cubs and the Red Sox and cleared His throat in a meaningful sort of way before returning to His paperwork, the phenomenon wherein hordes of amped-up souls gleefully line up at all hours to buy something the moment it becomes available retreated to its natural arenas: the next "Lord of the Rings" movie and Panther, Apple's latest major update to Mac OS X. Yes, people were lined up for Panther. Apple kept its retail stores open until midnight on Friday to accommodate everyone who couldn't contain themselves. Mac users...

ITunes for Windows is as fully featured as the Mac software - Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes music software rips and burns songs. It links you to a legal music store. It's easily downloadable. And now it's available to the 95 percent of computer users who depend on Microsoft Windows operating systems. and it's just as easy to buy songs online at Apple's iTunes Music Store. The catch is that if you want to transfer songs to a portable player, you've got to use an iPod, which start at $300. Still, compared with the Windows competition, iTunes can't be beat. Installation...

<p>The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to preliminary numbers.</p> <p>Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100 dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big and expensive Earth Simulator.</p>