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Low End Panther Low End Mac's Dan Knight has upgraded to Panther on five of his family's Macs, the LEM eMac 700, his wife's 14" iBook 600, a son's 12" PowerBook G4/867, and a pair of 333 MHz iMacs.
Dan has run a set of quick benchmarks to test the veracity of that claim. On the (somewhat tweaked) eMac Panther results ranged from -8.6% to +68% compared with OS 10.2.8. On the 14" iBook with a modest 256 MB of RAM results were even more impressive, ranging from -20% in the CPU test (which Dan speculates may have been an anomaly) with seven others all in positive territory up to + 72% over Jaguar 10.2.8. For the 333 MHz iMac most of the results were positive gains as well, including a whopping 167% improvement in User Interface response. As Dan comments, "Although the iMac has an ancient video chipset (ATI Rage Pro Turbo) and only 6 MB of video memory, Panther makes the most of limited resources.
For the full report and benchmark results, visit:
They are just as scary, and just as incredibly great... Nitrozac and Snaggy's Mac O' Lanterns featuring the likes of David Pogue, Ellen Feiss, Steve Wozniak, and more, in the pumpkin flesh!
You can check it out at:
Mac Night Owl: The Panther Report: Houston, We've Got a Problem! Watch out for those FireWire 800 drives! Here's the URL for today's commentary: http://www.macnightowl.com/index.htm#problem WiebeTech has posted a firmware updater for its FireWire 800 drives, including Fire800TM desktop drives and MicroGB+800 pocket drives. The firmware updater is designed to run under OS X and resolves compatibility issues discovered with Apple's recent release of Panther (OS X 10.3).
The firmware updater is available from WiebeTech's website:
"It has been determined that this problem between Panther and FireWire 800 drives usually occurs in circumstances involving older, slower Macintosh computers where the FireWire 800 drive is attached to a FireWire 400 port on the computer, and the firmware level of the FireWire drive is 1.02," said James Wiebe, CEO of WiebeTech. WiebeTech strongly recommends that its FireWire 800 products (specifically, the Fire800 and MicroGB+800) be used only in conjunction with Panther after the firmware patch has been applied to the drives. It is important that these products first be unmounted from the Panther system, then firmware updated on a Jaguar system (OS X 10.2.8 or lower) before re-attaching the drive to Panther. As of October 31, WiebeTech is shipping all FireWire 800 products with this new firmware revision. Mac OS X Innovators Contest Winners Announced at O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference
Independent software developers can't help themselves--they keep creating cool, useful, even beautiful applications for the Macintosh platform. Proof can be found at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, where the winners of the third and final round of O'Reilly's Mac OS X Innovators Contest were announced yesterday: Sponsored by Apple Developer Connection (ADC), the contest rewards innovative Mac OS X applications, plug-ins, user interface widgets, or other creative original software. Entries are judged on innovation, ease of use, adherence to the Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines, and use of Mac OS X technologies. In a special presentation at the Conference, past and current winners gave status reports on their projects and fielded questions from the audience about how to develop award-winning apps for the Mac. After the presentation, conference-goers were treated to a reception hosted by ADC. "I'm particularly excited about the fact that all of our winners have involved their users in the development of these terrific apps," said Derrick Story, MacDevCenter managing editor. "Each one of them has done a great job of listening to the people who've embraced their applications, and then incorporating that feedback and making their software even better." Mac OS X Innovators Contest winners are:
First Place, US Category
OmniOutliner is an indispensable program for outlining and organizing information. It helps you kick-start your creativity, hatch new thoughts, and gradually organize a collection of preliminary ideas into a cohesive plan--anything from a grocery trip to a complex business proposal. OmniOutliner uses intuitive commands and an elegant interface to help you maintain multiple to-do lists, manage tasks, track expenses, take meeting notes, monitor project status--and much more.
Second Place, US Category
iBlog is an elegant desktop weblogging application that makes authoring and publishing your personal weblogs a breeze. Unlike other weblogging sytems, you don't have to be an expert database administrator or a Perl programmer to setup and use iBlog. You can preview and publish your weblogs to your iDisk with a single click of a button.
First Place, International Category
iStopMotion is a stop-motion animation (Claymation) and time-lapse recording software for the digital hub. Connect a DV video camera and have fun! Used in education, by movie professionals and at home, iStopMotion uses QuickTime, Cocoa, Quartz Extreme, OpenGL, and other fine Apple technologies to perform its magic.
Second Place, International Category
ACSLogo is an interpreter for the popular Logo programming language. Logo is a highly graphical language--by programming a turtle to move around a computer screen (drawing as it goes), the user can learn programming skills such as using procedures and recursion. This highly graphic nature is particularly suited to OS X--ACSLogo makes a lot of use of OS X features such as transparency, anti-aliased lines and text, standard color and font palettes, as well as providing help through the Apple Help Viewer, and drag-and-drop functionality. Pictures can be exported to TIFF, animations can be exported to Quicktime movies, and vector graphics can be exported to SVG.
Honorable Mention
F-Script is a lightweight, object-oriented scripting layer specifically designed for Mac OS X object system (i.e. Cocoa). F-Script provides scripting and interactive access to Cocoa frameworks and custom Objective-C objects. It aims to be a useful and fun tool for both beginners and experts, allowing users to interactively explore, test, and use Cocoa-based objects and frameworks.
For more about the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, visit: The Gimp, OS X Panther, and Apple's X11: How Do They Mix?
Macintosh the OS of the Anti-Modder? - "It's already stylish" Wil Harris, The Independent's "Rocking Modder," says:
"What?? What?!! I can see the disbelief in your faces now. Apple??!! Well, yes. My laptop is a G4 Powerbook, acquired last year for its untouchable combination of looks, display, power and battery life, providing thin and sexy WiFi way before we saw the introduction of Sentry-no.
"But with the release of OS10.3, the whole platform has matured a little, and, in the name of public education, I going to get all controversial and tell you all about my Mac and its new OS. Let's start with a the fundamentals - no, I'm not gay and no, I don't work in PR. You don't have to be gay to appreciate style - although, that said, looking at the rag-tag bunch that make up the UK's collection of IT journalists, I do wonder occasionally.
"So apart from the thin, sexy widescreen display of my Powerbook, its 3hr battery life and Radeon Mobility graphics, the operating system is my favourite part of using a Mac..."
"Yes, I'm a case modder, but this OS is the antithesis of case modding.
"It's already stylish...."
For more, visit:
Automatic File Defragmentation In Panther - Report According to PC Pro's Simon Aughton:
Lexmark Suffers Setback In DMCA Gambit
The Register's John Leyden reports:
"Microchips from Static Control Components (SCC) do not contravene the DMCA, the US Copyright Office ruled this week."
For the full report, visit here:
DMCA Exemptions For Archivists, Disabled
Also on the Reg., Andrew Orlowski notes that:
"The Library of Congress has the job of looking at rulemaking, or how the Act is interpreted, and it has identified four areas where copyright circumvention has legitimate, non-infringing applications. The DMCA criminalises circumvention of protected copyright digital material. But thanks in part to campaigner Seth Finkelstein, the oversight body has decided that for the next three years, bypassing access control in these areas won't result in a breach of the DMCA."
Find out more at:
Security Flaws Reported In OS X 10.2 Jaguar
TechWeb reports:
More detailed information, the advisories are available at:
eWeek: Could Server Uptime Bring Security Downtime?
Yet a better question to ask would be: "Who cares about uptime, per se"?"
Read more at:
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