farmdwg was one of several readers to submit stories about Apple backing away from FireWire. The latest generation of iPods no longer ship with FireWire cables, but instead use USB 2... although FireWire can still be purchased seperately.

vallette writes "Reuters is reporting that Apple may be interested in buying TiVo. Seems like a good fit to me. Both companies stock price is up on the rumor."

norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser) writes "Mac OS X Server 10.3 Panther is one of the latest in Peachpit Press' Visual QuickPro guides (not to be confused with the beginner "QuickStart" series) and is written by one of the best IT/Mac trainers in the industry, Schoun Regan, with assistance by his devoted sidekick and co-trainer at itinstruction.com, Kevin White. Peachpit and the authors have produced a book with excellent content and delivery; the installation and setup of Mac OS X Server and Web services is explained with clarity and precise detail." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

TheRaven64 writes "Apple seems to have quietly updated the iPod Photo and iPod Mini lines. The Mini now comes in 4GB and 6GB flavours, priced at $199 and $249 respectively. The iPod Photo now comes in a 30GB flavour for $349 - only $50 more than the 20GB iPod with a mono screen and shorter battery life."

thelemmings writes "Today, Apple released Security Update 2005-002 for Mac OS X. It fixes a bug in the Java 1.4.2 implementation where an untrusted applet could gain elevated privileges and potentially execute arbitrary code. Sounds scary."

tabkey12 writes "Drunkenbatman posts this impressive article with a pointed quote from Apple co-creator Steve Wozniak and 24 others from all parts of the Apple Software world, criticising Apple's stance against a 23-year-old pre-med student, desicanuk, who distributed a pre-release Tiger build over a popular Mac Bittorrent site. There's also an interview with desicanuk on drunkenbatman's site. (Original Slashdot article here.)"

AC writes "A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Apple. The plaintiffs allege that Apple failed to fully honor service contracts and warranties, didn't get repair and service businesses properly licensed, stole trade secrets from its own resellers, and sold used computer equipment as new."

ido writes "Apple has agreed to hold off on serving subpoenas related to their John Doe civil suits against some free press journalists to reveal sources releasing Apple's "trade secrets." This is related to a previous article." The original story has some more background info as well. While Apple is notorious for its secrecy before MacWorlds, Apple probably figured out that dragging people into court usually does little for one's popularity.

sutterpants writes "The BBC is carrying a story on the legal battle between Apple and free press advocates. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has joined in the fight to protect journalists from revealing their sources. Which carries more weight: the right of Apple to protect their trade secrets or the rights of journalists to protect their sources?"

amichalo writes "Topping today's earlier news that Nokia and MS are collaborating on digital music in a cell phone, Motorola announced the E1060, a cell phone available Q4 2005 that supports MPEG-4/WMV/WMA/MP3 formats. Interestingly, Motorola is not locking themselves into Apple's iTunes, but also support Real Player. Reuters has more."

wikinerd writes "After the hype about Mac mini, a Linux consultant wrote a detailed guide on how to install Debian on Mac mini. The whole procedure takes about an hour, but you will need to erase the hard disk and learn to live without the AirPort Extreme, since it's unsupported. The guide also explains how you can dual-boot with Mac OS X and Debian and gives you ideas on how to set up your partitions."

rocketjam writes "Forbes reports that Napster plans an aggressive marketing campaign against Apple's iPod as part of its subscription service full launch later this quarter. Napster's service uses Microsoft's Janus technology to enable DRM protected music files 'bought' through subscription services to be transferred from a PC to a portable music player. Napster CEO Chris Gorog said the company is betting heavily that their monthly 'all you can eat' subscription service will win the battle for online digital music services, claiming, 'It's exactly what consumers want to do. Napster To Go is very similar to the P2P experience.' He believes the best way to market the service is to emphasize its advantages over iTunes and its iPod-only compatibility. 'We're going to be communicating to people that it's stupid to buy an iPod.' Maybe I'm too old to get it, but I fail to see the attraction of paying a monthly fee for as long as I want to have access to my music." Of course, if Napster To Go supported iPod, they'd have a much larger install base to convince to use their service, instead of still pleading people to buy a portable player with compatible DRM installed.

neosar82 writes "Yahoo has a story about Apple's stock split. Apple Computer Inc. whose shares have almost quadrupled in value over the last year on the success of its iPod music player, on Friday said it set a 2-for-1 stock split, and its shares rose almost 4 percent. Under the share split, Apple shareholders of record at the close of business on Feb. 18 will receive one additional share for every outstanding share held. Apple said trading will begin on a split-adjusted basis on Feb. 28."

Quicksilver31337 asks: "I am currently taking an Assembly course which requires that I be able to compile ASM for the intel x86; however, I am stubbornly a Mac user. Having no desire to switch from my Powerbook, what can I do to work with, compile, and run x86 ASM short of running VirtualPC?" While Mac OS X does use gcc and its associated tool-chain, an old Slashdot discussion seems to imply that cross-compiling is better under OpenDarwin than Mac OS X. Has anyone tried cross-compiling under both operating systems? If so, what suggestions on setting up a working tool-chain do you have?

foobar01 writes "MythTV 0.17 has been released. Changes include Mac OS X frontend support, big improvements to DVB and HDTV support, "timestretch" feature (for changing playback speed but not the pitch so you can watch shows more quickly), firewire capture support for cable boxes with firewire output, and widescreen user interface support. See the changelog for the full list of changes."

Michael Stroeck writes "Want that nifty scrolling on your portable but have an older one? No problem, Daniel Becker has written a free alternative driver for older PowerBooks and iBooks that works like a charm. It is based on Apple's AppleADBMouse-209.0.10 driver from Mac OS 10.3.7 that is available as part of the publicly released Darwin source code. As such, the driver is covered by the APSL (Apple Public Source License)."

An anonymous reader writes "Remember those iPod Satellite rumors last December? Mel Karmazin, the CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio, announced at the 2005 Media Summit that he had discussions with Steve Jobs about the possibility of putting Sirius' technology in future iPods. Steve's response? Not interested."

Demolition writes "You just knew that someone would get around to this, didn't you? In this how-to article from AppleTalk Australia, a step-by-step guide describes how to transplant a Mac mini into a micro-ATX case and a method to connect standard 3.5" hard drives to it (using do-it-yourself 2.5"-to-3.5" IDE adapters). Only some minor case modifications and some added cooling are needed to complete the project."

Richard_at_work writes "Get it while its hot, or -- if you are less brave -- wait and see if there are any issues. From the download page, the two top points of this update are 'improved OpenGL technology and updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers' and 'improved file sharing and directory services for mixed Mac and PC networks'. More information."

Phoenix-IT writes "How many of you remember the classic strategy game Archon? Curve Software is remaking the original game for DirectX with support for network play. Distribution details are undetermined. There are long term plans to port to Macintosh and UNIX environments, but no details at the moment. The game is not open source because it contains some of the original 8-bit code, which was donated to the project, but a public beta might be on the way!"