Stack_13 writes "Wall Street Journal reports that Apple will agree to use Intel chips. Neither Apple or Intel confirm this. Interestingly, PCMag's John C. Dvorak predicted this for 2004-2005. Are even cheaper Mac Minis coming?"

jaketheitguy writes "Over at KernelThread.com, Amit Singh has released a commandline app called FSLogger for looking under the hood of Tiger's Spotlight. You can watch all kinds of filesystem changes going on in realtime. The utility apparently intercepts and displays filesystem change data as it goes out to Spotlight from the kernel. It even tells you which app is making the changes. Looks like Apple has included some pretty powerful API's in Tiger and there may be some othre really interesting uses of this API as mentioned on the app's page. I for one would really like to be able to tell if somebody changed ANY files on my system without my knowledge. I think you can do that with Singh's program, but how do you make sure somebody cannot disable the program?"

Anonymous Coward writes "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted. Additionally, Spotlight doesn't come with a manual to teach you how to create complex queries. Most simple available queries --style popup menu selection-- are not powerful enough to be really useful. A tutorial on http://www.scribent.com/ will explain how you can optimize Spotlight's behaviour and get the most of it, but all in all it seems like Apple has been overhyping in the extremes."

Tammy Fox writes "The Mac mini is all the rave. Discover how to install the soon-to-be-released Fedora Core 4 on this tiny desktop appliance, including new features in Fedora Core 4 to support the new hardware."

doubleacr writes "The Register is reporting that Apple is recalling batteries in 12 and 15 inch Powerbook and 12 inch iBooks sold between October 2004 and May 2005. Apple has set up a page with info on model number and serial numbers of batteries affected, and also how to get a replacement."

An anonymous reader writes "Running Debian (or Linux generally) on a Mac mini is old news. Silas installed rechargable batteries inside the case, delivering a couple of hours of runtime while retaining the small form factor. Although it runs fine without wires, he had to plug in the monitor to be able to show that it was really up."

ElectroBot writes "I received a email today with an invitation to the Grand Opening of the first Apple Store in Canada. The Store is opening on May 21st at 9:30am at the Yorkdale Shopping Center in Toronto. There's also a contest for a Digital Lifestyle Collection valued at $2,985. On top of that the first 1,500 people to arrive at the opening will receive a free Apple T-shirt."

Sabah Arif writes "Apple began the eighties with two major flops under its belt: the Apple III and the LISA. Both machines were attempts at breaking into the business market. They were technologically advanced, but major flaws prevented their success."

peterdaly writes "As a proud new owner of a Mac mini, I quickly discovered the internal hard drive performance was so pathetic compared to what I was used to that I needed to do something about it ... preferably on the cheap. I ended up trying a FireWire attached storage enclosure and using an older 80GB drive I had in my closet from a dead PC. My mini got about a 75 percent disk performance increase for about $50 (or $100 if you need a drive). Here is a benchmark of before and after as well as information about my research and upgrade. If you already have at least 512MB RAM, this may be the best performance bang for your buck if you're looking for your mini to be faster and more responsive."

MrBadbar writes "Software Update just informed me that an update to Mac OS X (10.4.1) is now available. The updates include mail, address book, dashboard widgets, Safari, iLife, and other miscellaneous fixes. At this rate, it's only about 18 more weeks until 10.5."

An anonymous reader writes "Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. So what is Mac OS X's kernel? The Mach microkernel. The debate around Monolithic (Linux) and Micro (Mach) kernels continues, and there is a great chapter online about the Mach system from the very good book 'Operating System Concepts'. Which design is better? I report, you decide." Warning: link is to a PDF.

An iPod Speculator writes "Is Apple developing a Video iPod? Recent contracts and software releases suggest that a video enabled iPod is forthcoming. If so, what kind of features will it have? I offer some insight into why video is the next step for the iPod and how it might come about in this article."

Final Fantasy Online Warcry has the news that iTunes is now carrying Final Fantasy scores and music from the Black Mages. Square Enix has a listing of all of their iTunes offerings, which includes music from FFI - FFXI, a live concert offering, and two albums by the Black Mages (Nobuo Uematsu's rock band).

wallykeyster writes "As predicted in previous discussions the judge has ruled against TigerDirect's request for injunction to prevent Apple from using 'Tiger' in their advertising." I heard that both people who still held respect for TigerDirect no longer do.

bonch writes "Apple has quickly patched a previously reported security hole that allows websites to auto-install potentially malicious widgets without prompting the user. The fix is one of over three dozen miscellanous fixes to be included in OS X 10.4.1, code-named 'Atlanta', and may appear by the end of the week. Users will now be prompted before a widget downloads to their hard drive."

trent42 writes "Firefox lead developer Ben Goodger has had harsh words on his blog for the KDE project, in light of its public tiff with Apple over the KHTML rendering engine. Goodger says 'Safari's renderer is vastly superior to the KHTML used by Konqueror,' and that the KDE developers should follow Apple's lead and focus more on the needs of users, instead of insisting on software perfection."

puggsincyberspace writes "What do you do when your mom washes your iPod? Fix it, of course. A teenager in Australia found out the hard way that messing with the insides of his iPod is dangerous and needed medical attention after it exploded."

Johnny Mnemonic writes "CNET has a story that describes the divergence between the code base of Safari and KHTML. Although there were high hopes that Apple would contribute significantly to the OSS project, that optimism has all but disappeared. Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend? Can OSS code and goals harmonize with the goals and needs of corporation designed code? Is it that Apple mismanaged the relationship, or that the KHTML guys expected too much? Interesting warning for other OSS-corporate marriages." We've previously reported on the frustration in the OSS community on this issue.

An anonymous reader writes "The Mac mini is an ideal low-cost, high-performance PowerPC development platform for numerous applications. Learn how to install and configure Linux on the mini. Future articles will add the software required to make it into a stand-alone multimedia appliance."

LadyDeath writes "After a year in development, Yahoo has launched its competitor to Apple's iTunes and Napster To Go, a subscription and download music service priced at only $4.99 per month. Tracks are offered in 192Kbps WMA, and can be transferred to portable devices. Perhaps most interesting to the Slashdot crowd is that the Yahoo! Music Engine is built on an open platform that facilitates plug-ins - both DLL and Web based. Podcasting and video playback plug-ins are already available." Update: 05/11 13:06 GMT by T : ian c rogers, formerly of Nullsoft, just led the build of the media player, and writes with information about "the the plugin architecture it supports as well as some of the 20 plugins that are already available for it. I've posted my thoughts on why someone should or shouldn't use the Yahoo! Music Engine on my blog."