sympleko (Matthew Leingang) writes "In Neal Stephenson's manifesto In the Beginning was the Command Line , he writes about his favorite command-line utility: wc. As simple as can be, wc counts characters, words, and lines in a file. There's no GUI analogue, perhaps because anybody tempted to make one would add too many "features" that cluttered its ease of use. Think: do you know how to count the words in a Word file? BBEdit is a little easier, if you know the button to click." Read on for Leingang's review of Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther, which seeks to reconcile the conception of user friendliness in OS X's Aqua with the sometimes-denigrated command line.

mijkal writes "Panic's Audion music software has been retired and made freely available. The developer has a nice write up on his experiences with Audion in relation to early-MP3 days, failed AOL deals, and the could-have-been iTunes app. It's an inspiring read on the history of a shareware developer and his adventures thus far."

Pirogoeth writes "The fine folks over at Engadget have figured out how to get your new iPod Photo to play movies. According to the article, you use Quicktime Pro to export the movie as thousands of individual frames which you export to the iPod, send the soundtrack to the iPod as well, then, if you haven't guessed by now, while playing the soundtrack, put the iPod into slideshow mode and use the scroll wheel to manually keep the frames in synch with the sound. Sound impossible? Here's a video (in mov or wmv) of the Episode III trailer in action..."

bzlman asks: "I just broke my finger and instead of conventional x-rays, the ER gave me a CD with huge picture files on it from the company called FilmX from sorna.com. Unfortunately, the software to read the pics is for Windows, and the file type for the images (each about 10 MB) is 'command line' (the files are of no conventional type). I've tried opening the files with every image program for Mac OS X and Classic, to no avail. These are high quality images I want to see, and I hope someone can help me find a Mac OS X way to view them. Thanks."

joestar writes "Less than two weeks after the release of Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official for x86, Mandrakelinux 10.1 for PPC has been released! The interesting news is that this version of Mandrakelinux is now a community-driven project. This means that Mandrakesoft is not anymore behind the PPC port. Hardware requirements and release notes are available online at Mandrakelinux WiKi. Any volunteer for SPARC & Alpha?"

daveschroeder writes "The November Top 500 supercomputer list has been published at SC2004. Topping the charts is IBM and the US Department of Energy's 'BlueGene/L DD2' beta system, at 70.72 TFlops, followed by NASA's 'Columbia' at 51.87.TFlops. For the first time in several publications of this list, Japan's Earth Simulator is no longer in the number one slot, falling to third. Virginia Tech's 'System X' Xserve G5 cluster, while 20% faster than the original cluster that debuted at number 3 last November, has fallen to number 7 due to the new entries, but remains the fastest supercomputer at an academic institution. Here's an excellent cost comparison (Google cache) of the top machines ('System X' is significantly cheaper than anything else in the top 20, not to mention cheaper than many things far below it in performance)."

Ton writes "Apple has published a discussion of Spotlight, the radical systemwide search technology that will be part of Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger'. The really interesting part is that metadata will be playing a big role in Spotlight while just a few years ago people were afraid metadata in Mac OS X was going the way of the dodo."

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has released the Mac OS X 10.3.6 update via Software Update as well as their downloads page. List of improvements is available. In short, the improvements are in remote file server issues (AFP, NFS, SMB/CIFS), OpenGL, ATi and NVidia drivers, Safari, Calculator, DVD Player, Image Capture, and also previous stand-alone Security Updates. Hurry up and get the update! ... and tell us if I should go to get it, too. ;)" A Mac OS X Server update is available as well.

Andreas writes "Apple users could be glad to know that YellowDog Linux 4.0 is shipping. As always, Terrasoft, YDL producer, is selling PowerMacs with YDL pre-installed. Soon we could see ISOs available for free downloads, as in the past."

islandroots writes "Arlo Rose, developer of the popular Konfabulator widget, is moving his application from Mac OS X to Windows. Back when Apple unveiled their next OS, Mac OS X Tiger with Dashboard, Arlo Rose accused Apple of copying his application. 'We're all diehard Macintosh developers here, but we recognize that Windows is the dominant platform,' Rose said in a statement. 'When you have a great idea, you want more than 2 percent of the global market to have access to it.'"

Reader PoC wrote to give us a heads up on RPGmp3.com, a site that (wait for it) allows you to download reviews of D&D modules in audio format. These include live, unscripted excerpts from gaming sessions trying out the modules. If you've never played D&D before, this is a safe and cheeto-free way to check it out. They even have exerpts from sessions in the awe-inspiring ($100 US) World's Largest Dungeon.

thelemmings writes "Aspyr today announced that it will (finally) publish Doom 3 for the Macintosh. The game is scheduled for release Q1 2005 and the system requirements indicate that a G5 processor will be required, which seems quite surprising as it will leave iBooks and Powerbooks owners on the side of the road. Too bad iD Software didn't release a free OSX client like they previously did for linux version of the game."

LabRat007 writes "Playlist has a review of the Bose SoundDock, the desktop speaker system for the iPod that Bose has lately been promoting the holy hell out of. The long and the short is that it sounds great--better than any other iPod-specific speaker system--but for $300 is lacking in many features even cheaper setups have, like the ability to actually use the SoundDock as a syncing dock. Oh, and it has no line-in, so you can't use the SoundDock as output for anything else, like a PC or laptop, for instance." It's not quite as cute, but I like my Cambridge Soundworks Model 88 (now superseded by the Model 730) as a laptop loudspeaker system.

An anonymous reader writes "After reading this article, I was pretty excited about trying an Ubuntu live CD on my Mac, because I've heard a lot about the distro. But it turns out the only live CD is for x86. Looking around for PPC live CD's that support modern hardware (like a G5) and demo modern versions of KDE and Gnome has proven fruitless so far. Does Slashdot know of any current projects that have released or are working on releasing a nice PPC live CD?"

ptorrone writes "Never did we think we'd need to do a How-To on something which should be part of the basic functionality of a portable music player, but once you put your tunes on an iPod unfortunately it's a one-way sync unless you know the tricks for getting them off. Here's how to get your stuff off for free on a Mac or PC and how to re-enable a useful tool with a Hex editor." Cory Doctorow has been writing about this on boingboing recently; he discusses Apple's message to iPod owners.

floop writes "Vendetta Online, a MMORPG trader/shooter with decent PvP action, came out of beta on Nov. 1st for Linux, Mac and Windows. I've found pirating hapless n00bs and hunting other pirates being the 2 most fun aspects of the game so far. It has an engrossing back story and pretty screenshots. The guys putting this out are a small operation, and this is their first project. "

rocketjam writes "The British security firm mi2g has concluded a comprehensive 12-month study to identify the safest 24/7 computing environment. In the end, the open source BSD and Mac OS X came out on top with the fewest security breaches against permanently connected machines worldwide in homes, small businesses, large enterprises and governments. The study found Linux to be the most breached environment 'in terms of manual hacker attacks overall and accounts for 65.64% of all breaches recorded'. Windows was the most breached environment in government computing and led Linux, BSD and Mac OS X by far in economic damage caused by breaches." We mentioned their previous study too. As before, the study ignores the thousands of automatically-spreading viruses for Windows.

DanTheMan writes "For every great game there is for Mac OS X, there are at least two for Windows. It's sad, but it's a fact. This article proposes a solution, and it's for Apple to port games. By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now. Would you buy a Mac if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2? What other games are missing from Mac OS X?"

Jrod1080 writes "I decided to be an iPod for Halloween this year. I didn't just want to be walking around in a box, so I made it a fully functional costume. I finally found a good use for a tablet PC, and used that for the display. A rewired USB mouse served as the 'Forward,' 'Reverse,' 'Play/Pause' buttons, and a bit of Java code played and displayed the MP3s. Some battery powered speakers provided the sound. It all worked out well, and I even won the costume contest!"

phaedo00 writes "Arstechnica is reporting that Google today announced that they are pursuing a Google Desktop for Apple's Mac OS X. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt saying it had to be rebuilt from the ground up because of the fundamental differences between the Mac OS and Windows. 'We intend to do it,' Schmidt said." Update: 10/30 23:51 GMT by M : Seems like Reuters and others may have heard wrong about a potential Mac version.