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Archive for March, 2008

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Monday, March 31st, 2008

It wasn’t so long ago that Microsoft had a fearsome presence in the PC industry. If you got on their bad side for any reason, were viewed as a potentially serious competitor, or some combination of both, you had to prepare for them to trounce you. Certainly Netscape felt their wrath, as did companies that tried to push alternatives to the MS-DOS operating system way back when.

However, a read of the filings involved in a certain class action lawsuit against the Windows Vista marketing scheme presents the picture of a company forced to kowtow to Intel and other partners in order to create the false impression of Vista readiness.

A full summary of the sad tale is described in an excellent piece over at the Ars Technica site.

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Sunday, March 30th, 2008

If you take those published reports at face value, the vaunted security of the Mac OS is just an illusion. During the annual Pwn2Own hacking contest this past week, someone easily exploited a supposedly unknown vulnerability in Apple’s Safari on a MacBook Air within a mere two minutes, earning a ten thousand dollar paycheck for his efforts.

Now, because of a nondisclosure agreement, we don’t know just what vulnerability was present in Safari that was handled so easily, but it sounds to me like a put up job. If you believe the claim, the security flaw was so blatant that it was easily discovered, and that’s extremely unlikely.

Consider that, on the first day of the contest, nobody could attack any of the test computers, running the Mac OS, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux, remotely. Thus the original $20,000 prize went unclaimed. On day number two, the terms were relaxed, so the participants could actually work directly on the computers to locate and exploit possible vulnerabilities.

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Thursday, March 27th, 2008

I suppose we ought to pity those who have been around the tech universe for a long, long time, such as yours truly. I mean, some of the things we accepted as state-of-the-art in those days, such as 800K floppy disks and 100MB hard drives, seem downright primitive today. Please don’t get me started about using tape drive for basic data storage, as opposed to backups.

And didn’t Bill Gates once say you’d never need more than 640K of RAM on your PC? In those days, when I got my first Mac with 8MB RAM, I thought I was in memory heaven. That was until System 7 came along, and I realized the system could take up to half that amount, and leave me a lot less for running real applications.

Well, certainly you don’t to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear. After all, personal computing has come an awful long way since then, and just having Macs running real Unix under the guise of Mac OS X has provided a huge dose of stability and security.

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Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

You and I both know that the next great version of Mac OS X probably isn’t going to arrive until some time in 2009, if then. However, that doesn’t mean it’s too early to say something now. You see, with Leopard settling down for most of you, I rather suspect any updates from here on will be largely to fix those remaining defects rather than add new features.

Certainly, with the 10.5.2 release, they fixed the Stacks feature to incorporate most of the previous elements of handling folders in the Dock. That way you can make your own decisions how best to deal with the look and the feel. You can also turn off menu bar transparency (I’ve left it on), so some of your treasured desktop backgrounds can appear without making the menu bar invisible.

The Dock’s 3D look? All right, you have me there, but after all, if it upsets you so much, you can pin it to the left or right ends of your display or use a third party utility, such as TinkerTool, to turn it back to 2D. That ought to be sufficient to handle the most significant complaints.

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