no_demons writes "This morning Apple iCEO Steve Jobs gave the keynote at the Apple Expo in Paris. The whole PowerBook line up got an upgrade, with the 15" model now sporting the much rumoured goods (1.25GHz, backlit keyboard, bluetooth, Airport Extreme), available from today. Apple also announced a new wireless keyboard and mouse."

snowtigger writes "The August 2003 GCC updater includes the new GCC 3.3 compiler in addition to other updates that will allow development of G5 optimized code with the December 2002 Mac OS X Developer Tools. This update is available to all ADC members from the Download Software area of the ADC web site (free registration required). It will be interesting to see what Steve Jobs will present in Paris tomorrow; is XCode ready?"

La Temperanza writes "Macworld has released yet another set of benchmarks of the full line-up of G5 desktops, along with Dual 1.42GHz and single 1GHz G4s. The results are very interesting indeed, and I think I can safely say they're not biased in the G5's favor." I dunno, it should not come as too much of a shock that a dual G4 can beat a single G5 in many tests.

blamanj writes "Apple Computer, which once got into hot water with the Beatles Apple record label, has been sued once again by the same group. Apple Records says iTunes and the iPod violate the previous agreement." Apple's broke their agreement in the past when speakers were first used with their computers to play music.

ptaff asks: "Web developing can burn some braincells when trying to get a page to render fine in all browsers. Using XHTML/CSS on Win/Linux, thou can get a 'satisfying' result among PC browsers (MSIE, Mozilla-and-derivatives, Konqueror, Opera) - but when it comes to Apple browsers (Mac-MSIE, Safari, Omniweb, iCab, and others), and there's no Mac around to test, how can you tell if things will work out fine? I personally experienced a CSS border directive on an input tag that completely messed up a simple document. There are some CSS compatablity sheets (this comes to mind), but can you test further than that? is there any way a web developer can check for Apple-browser-compliance without a Mac?" If only HTML validation were as simple as submitting pages to the proper emulator, and viewing the results.

Lawrence Person writes "Well, this has to be one of the stranger bugs in recent memory: 'If you used Open Firmware Password utility to create a password that contains the capital letter "U", your password will not be recognized during the startup process.' Straight from the mothership. I'm guessing that not too many people use Open Firmware Passwords, but it's a very nasty bug for those who do. Props to the always great As The Apple Turns for pointing this one out."

YourMacLife writes "On tonight's Your Mac Life, the Dean of Virginia Tech's College of Engineers, Hassan Aref, will talk about the G5 cluster the college is building and what it means to supercomputing. Questions can be sent in advance to onair@yourmaclife.com." See the web site for more details.

Durin_Deathless writes "According to a thread on the Gentoo/PPC forums, some Gentoo users have installed Gentoo on their new G5s without any problems whatsoever. Benchmarks are extraordinary: compiling kde on a G5 running at half speed takes 15 minutes, while it takes one hour on the fastest P4 available. Gentoo/PowerPC lead, Pieter Van den Abeele, reported that the machine currently runs at half speed due to fan controlling hardware not yet supported. The Gentoo team will post benchmarks, and will update installation instructions as soon as possible. There is some question as to what exactly was compiled, as the times seem impossibly fast even on the P4."

atallah writes "It looks like Apple has come out and explained its position on resale of songs. It is interesting that they didn't flat-out reject the idea. Check out this Business Week article."

hrbrmstr writes "Regular updaters will already know, but Apple issued an update to Java today. It adds the following enhancements: improved Java applet support for Safari and other web browsers that support the Java Internet Plug-In; improved drawing correctness and performance; changes to Java 1.3.1 that provide support for Oracle11i client applications on Mac OS X; improved stability, memory usage, and correctness."

danigiri writes "Detailed notes about a presentation at Virginia Tech are posted by by an attending student. copied most of the slides of the facts presentation and wrote down their comments. He wrote some insightful notes and info snippets, like the fact that Apple gave the cheapest deal of machines with chassis, beating Dell, IBM, HP. They are definitely going to use some in-house fault-tolerance software to prevent the odd memory-bit error on such a bunch of non-error-tolerant RAM and any other hard or soft glitches. The G5 cluster will be accepting first apps around-November." mfago adds, "Apple beat Dell, IBM and others based on Cost vs. Performance alone, and it will run Mac OS X because 'there is not enough support for Linux.'"

polarfleece writes "A report on Macteens that the latest build of Panther contains strong evidence that it is being customized for U.S. Government applications. I, for one, can't wait to see a whole lot of Apples being toted by gummint men (and women). Of course, do we REALLY want those gummint agents having access to the same technology we Apple users enjoy so much? On the other hand, to quote story author Clark Mueller, 'it just might be one of the more intelligent steps taken towards U.S. national defense.'"

Dilaudid writes "According to this story at MacWorld Apple has just announced three new iMac models - all with Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme. More importantly there are new iPods too. Cool." The iMacs got a speed bump up to 1.25GHz, and the iPods were capacity-bumped up to 40GB.

A reader wrote to us with a story from Wired about a gentleman who's hand-crafting Apple Is for ordering. He's been unable to get a response from Apple, but Woz has graciously responded.

NivenHuH writes "Bill Noll, an independent photographer, took some interesting pictures of his new PowerMac G5. Talk about Mac Zealot!"

lucas.clemente writes "OpenOSX has just announced a cheap alternative to Microsoft's Virtual PC for Mac OS X, OpenOSX WinTel. What's more, the OpenOSX version will be compatible with Apple's new G5 architecture, whereas Virtual PC users will have to wait until the next major upgrade for G5 compatibility." It's a frontend to bochs, which we've discussed before as a possible Virtual PC replacement, and the biggest obstacle seemed to be getting it up and running. Perhaps this product will fill that hole. Prices start at $25 for download, but it is covered under the GPL.

drdink asks: "I am an avid FreeBSD and Windows user. This semester for a class I'm having to use MacOS X for the first time, and I've also been pondering jumping into the Apple scene anyway. However, I am also visually impaired and I can't seem to find a way to do specific color theming in a way similar to Windows, KDE, and GNOME. I want to be able to say 'Text is white, backgrounds are black, but EVERYTHING ELSE is its normal color.' The only options I've found that are similar is using 'White on Black' in the Universal Access control panel. However, this results in me losing all display colors and my machine looking monochrome. I don't want to use a $2,000+ machine just to have no colors. Is there anybody out there who has actually managed to get Mac OS X to use the normal colors but have high contrast white on black dialog boxes? I am interested in the Apple platform, but I can't use it for useful things, if I have no color."

ehenning writes "SecuriTeam has posted a paper on some known vulnerabilities in Mac OS X. It lists methods for developing shellcode based on the PowerPC architecture. They note that there are similar vulnerabilities in Mac OS X and Darwin as in IA32 machines."

CousinVinnie writes "Previously noted in this Slashdot story, the administration of Virginia Tech has announced they're puchasing 1100 G5's (another story) in hopes to build a top-10 supercomputer by October 1. Tech will be spending $5.2 million over five years on the project, which should help it pull in more research money." Maybe VT can use the new computers to beef up their web site.

honestpuck writes "As digital video cameras spawn in the hands of you, me, parents and tourists like cockroaches in my kitchen we find ourselves needing the kind of technical and aesthetic help not really seen since the advent of 'desktop publishing'. Once again a 'Missing Manual' has come to my help." Read on for honestpuck's review of David Pogue's iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual.