feranick writes "Wired and Ars Technica are both running articles comparing Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, not for their business/technological achievements but for their humanitarian involvement. I am curious to see what you are thinking about the issue. What is more important, be a showmen technologist like Jobs or an humanitarian missionaire like Gates? And even more important: Is it important that donations from rich billionaires be public or should they remain private?"

mdeb writes "ZDNet Australia is running a story that claims Mac OS X 'contains unpatched security flaws of a type that were fixed on alternative operating systems more than a decade ago.' As an example, in August of last year, Apple patched the 'dsidentity' bug, which could easily have been exploited to grant a non-privileged user with admin rights the capability to create and remove 'root' user accounts."

mikeythecmptrguy wrote to mention a Forbes report on analyst predictions that Google may be gearing up to compete with iTunes. From the article: "Analyst Robert Peck speculated that it makes sense for Google to create a rival for the popular iTunes service by Apple Computer, given the explosive growth of unique visitors to the iTunes' Web site. 'Further, Nielsen indicates that iTunes users form a distinct target audience with brand preferences along autos, alcohol beverages, magazines, and television,' he added. "

madgunde writes "Looks like MacWorld magazine was a little premature in reporting that the new Apple iMac Core Duo doesn't live up to Apple's speed claims. The folks over at MacSpeedZone have done some performance testing of their own that debunks MacWorld's results and shows that the new iMac Core Duo DOES live up to the hype. Not only did the new iMac wipe the floor with the old model in their tests, but using MacWorld's own test methodology would allow MacSpeedZone to conclude that the new Intel iMac is almost as fast as a PowerMac Quad G5. " I see only one way to solve this: Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.

Lam1969 writes "Yuval Kossovsky has a hands-on review of the new 15" MacBook Pro. Besides the speed improvement with the dual-core 1.83-GHz Intel processor, he likes the built-in iSight camera, "MagSafe" power connector, and better WiFi antenna placement, among other features. But he laments the loss of the modem port and FireWire 800 connectors: '[Apple] has taken away by getting rid of the FireWire 800 connector slot and the modem. FireWire 800 was left off the motherboard of the new laptop largely because it has not achieved much a following among users. ... The loss of the modem jack may be a sign of things to come. I was told that Apple had found that 90% of PowerBook owners used the 802.11g AirPort wireless card, gigabit ethernet or a Bluetooth connection to a cell modem to get network access. So for cost and package size reasons, the modem was left out.'" Update: 01/26 17:25 GMT by P : Story and headline updated to clarify that only FireWire 800 was not included on the machine; FireWire 400 is present.

boxturtleme writes "Despite the sometimes lackluster reviews of the new Intel iMac over the past several weeks, what with speed tests and hardware bugs, the New York Times sure seemed to like it. And beyond the blazing review, the Times seems fully confident that someone will soon have Windows and OS X dual booting."

Chowser writes "Forbes is reporting Stanford University is now offering a wide range of content on iTunes. From the article: 'In an unprecedented move, Stanford University is collaborating with Apple Computer to allow public access a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes. No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student. The nearly 500 tracks that constitute "Stanford on iTunes" are available to anyone willing to spend the few minutes it takes to download them from the Internet.'" Talaper noted the Official Apple Page on the program is up as well.

jaredmauch writes "USA Today is reporting on a trend of selling iPods on eBay which are preloaded with music and movies. This raises interesting questions about the legality of the files, including those that offer seemingly legitimate services of transcoding DVDs for the iPod video (while selling you the DVD disc as well)." An example from the article: "A 60-gigabyte video iPod loaded with 11,800 songs, with a starting bid of $799. The iPod alone would cost about $400. 'I don't see how it's different than selling a used CD,' seller Steve Brinn, a Cincinnati pediatrician, wrote in an e-mail to USA TODAY. 'If the music industry asked me not to do it, I just wouldn't do it.'"

Pray_4_Mojo writes "Geek.com is reporting that Intel's errata (bug) documentation shows that the Intel Core Duo chip has 34 known issues found in the 20 days since the launch of the iMac Core Duo. (you can read the list) with only plans to fix one of them. While bugs in hardware is nothing new (the P4 has 64 known issues, at this time Intel does not plan to fix a single one) this marks one of the first times that Intel released a processor with known bugs, and some of the bugs are of higher severity than in the past. Also alarming is the rate the flaws have been found, at one and half per day since the launch of the iMac Core Duo."

An anonymous reader writes "The race is on. You can try to get the bounty for booting Windows XP on iMac. At this moment there is $2773 waiting for the winner. However several people have brickified their iMacs when playing with EFI." I imagine those tech support calls are hysterical ;)

jerbare writes "In attempting to run Linux and Windows on the new iMac Core Duo, people experimenting with configuring the EFI Console/Boot loader have found they can no longer boot the machine at all. Dave Schroeder of appleintelfaq.com comments, 'We have already irreversibly lost a couple of iMacs trying to load various EFI modules'. Instructions for breaking the iMac's are presently located at the bottom of the comments."

mahju writes "Hard Mac is reporting that Apple's, unoffical, response in Paris to the the lack of information on battery life, is that the MacBook Pro that were demoed at Mac World SF are only prototypes and the final versions are still under development. "

taskforce writes "Sun Microsystems Co-Founder Bill Joy claims that Apple nearly moved to Sun's SPARC chips instead of IBM's PPC platform, back in the mid-1990s. From the article: "We got very close to having Apple use Sparc. That almost happened," Joy said at a panel discussion featuring reminiscences by Sun's four cofounders at the Computer History Museum. An account of his entire presentation can be found on Cnet."

BlueDjinn writes to tell us that it appears a great deal of speculation over Disney's buyout of Pixar Animation Studios is in fact true. From the article: "[Pixar] is set to meet tomorrow to approve the company's $7bn (£3.9bn) takeover by Disney. The all-share deal will make Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, around $3.5bn and the single largest shareholder in Disney. Jobs created Pixar in 1986 when he paid $10m for the computer animations division of Lucasfilm, owned by Star Wars creator George Lucas."

An anonymous reader writes "Chris Seibold over at Apple Matters, has written up an interesting analysis on Steve Jobs' suggestion that Microsoft make their own mp3 player. He argues that it is more bait than business plan, a deft move by Steve Jobs to lure Microsoft into a can't-win war. The key, according to the article, is the licensing of FairPlay." From the article: "The folks who stick with Microsoft get to fight over, roughly, twenty percent of the market. The folks that go with Apple would be aligning themselves with what has become the industry standard. The players that license FairPlay would have access to the iTunes store, backwards compatibility with the songs consumers have already purchased, and a chance to compete on a perfectly level playing field with the iPod. It doesn't take a Stanford MBA to deduce that the potential rewards of opting to use FairPlay far outstrip the rewards of going with PlaysForSure."

mikeisme77 writes "According to the Washington Post, Pixar Studios is in discussions with Disney for a possible merger/buy out. Disney would own Pixar in exchange for $6.7 billion worth of stock in the Walt Disney Corp. Speculation has also arisen that such a deal may lead to Steve Jobs earning a position on Disney's board of directors. He would likely become Disney's largest individual share holder. Further speculation sees Jobs using his new found power to leverage Disney into releasing more content to the iTunes media service." Details also available from the Time Magazine site. We touched on this issue near the end of last year as well.

Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.' MacWorld (the publication) has been putting the iMacs through their paces. The results are a good deal less impressive than Steve's boast, showing an average performance increase of 10 to 25 per cent while performing a series of everyday tasks with software specially designed for the new systems." Ars Technica had another perspective on the new systems earlier this week.

Barry Norton writes "VNUNet reports that the Photocasting feature in Apple's iPhoto application violates core XML and RSS standards. Perhaps the worst part is that, in many cases, this isn't even a case of 'embrace and extend', but just plain doing it wrong. Dave Winer, essentially the creator of RSS, says, 'It's pretty bad. There are lots of errors, the date formats are wrong, there are elements that are not in RSS that aren't in a namespace.'"

SenseOfHumor writes "A Business Week article says that it costs Apple $898 for an Intel iMac before loading it with software and packaging. From the article: 'But for Apple, the switch to Intel chips is less about saving money in the short term, and more about hitching its wagon to Intel's longer-term product road maps, particularly in the area of notebooks. IBM's chips are power-hungry and generate a lot of heat, and therefore not suitable to notebook computers.'"

grandgator writes "TV Week reports on NBC's claims that iTunes downloads are boosting ratings for their primetime shows. Citing one example 'NBC's "The Office" delivered a 5.1-its highest ratings ever-last Thursday among adults 18 to 49, a bump the network credits in large part to the show's popularity as an iPod download. Such a connection between podcast success and broadcast ratings success is particularly significant because the NBC data is among the first available evidence of what network executives have been gambling on when striking their new media deals-that the new video platforms are additive because they provide more entry points into a show for consumers.'"