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 It's not quite as cute, but I like my Cambridge Soundworks Model 88 (now superseded by the Model 730) as a laptop loudspeaker system.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.

cgjherr (Jack Herrington) writes "The Cult of Mac, a new book by Leander Kahney, is a love letter to the Macintosh community. The book seeks to simultaneously define and evangelize the Apple cultural phenomenon. With 25 million users (in the author's estimation) there is a lot of culture to go around. The tattoos. The modified machines. The pilgrimage to MacWorld. The sub-cult of iPod. It's all here." Read on for the rest of Herrington's review.

An anonymous reader writes "The National Security Agency has just released a Security Configuration Guide for Apple Mac OS X (pdf). The guide mostly contains common sense configuration information that applies to many Unix systems. It also includes specific discussion for Apple's unique features such as Keychain and FileVault. It should be useful to most Mac OS X users and will be particularly useful for US Government organisations that use Mac OS X and for commercial IT Departments that are supporting Mac OS X. A range of other NSA Security Configuration guides for other operating systems, applications, and IT kit are also available."

Jeff writes "Ubuntu is just sweet. For Mac users it is even sweeter, as you can read in this review: it supports hardware like a charm ad now with a live CD out everyone can taste ... sorry, test it." And Chris writes "Gnoppix 0.8.1 now appears to be Ubuntu Linux based. At OSDir, we've got over 50 screenshots of the Gnoppix 0.8.1 release, including the controversial Ubuntu desktop background images." (See this earlier story; the default background images have been changed in Ubuntu proper, so the "controversy" need not keep you up nights.) The Gnoppix version is a very nice Gnome-based live CD, with fewer apps but more polish than most live CDs I've tried. (Note that this is not the same as the official Ubuntu CD, and that the PPC version is not a live CD.)

artlu was the first of many to submit: "I was just watching my Dow Jones streaming news wire, and I saw that Apple is releasing a new iPod that will have photo captabilities. The news stated that the new iPod will be able to hold 25,000 photos as well as your traditional iPod functionality." Apple's got a page up about the iPod Photo and of course a press release.

Belgarath writes "Zelda Classic is a free homebrew clone of the original Legend of Zelda for the NES. Additionally, it allows people to create their own zelda quests and games using the handy editor (called z-quest) included in the software. Until now only windows versions have been available but there are beta test groups for the Linux and Apple platforms."

gonknet writes "According to CNET news and various other news outlets, the 1150-node Hokie supercomputer rebuilt with new 2.3 GHz Xserves now runs at 12.25 Teraflops. The computer, the fastest computer owned by an academic institution, should still be in the top 5 when the new rankings come out in November."

SuperBanana writes "After what seems like an eternity, Netatalk (an Appletalk server suite for unix) has caught up with the latest version of the Apple Filing Protocol (aka Appleshare). This means long filenames, files larger than 2GB, and other goodies that will bring much happiness for Unix sysadmins supporting Macintosh users (check out the human-friendly release notes for the full list). As with any major release, even though this has been through several release candidates- read the gotchas, review the known bugs in their bug tracker, test it out on something non-critical...and help stabilize the release by reporting any bugs you find. Of course, make sure you read a guide to reporting bugs first!"

Currawong writes "danamania, well known for making the most of 68k Macs, has done the ultimate, and installed Mac OS X Panther on an old Centris with 68MB RAM, a 25MHz 68040 and 4GB drive - an early 90's machine with about the same power as a NeXT cube. To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian, resulting in a severe performance hit, as generic emulation runs "about 500 times slower" according to the developers. On this approximately 0.05MHz G3 speed emulator, the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week! Regular updates are being posted as each milestone in the boot process is reached."

An anonymous reader writes "58 million transistors can drive a lot of power. Apparently, Apple appreciated the choices IBM processor architects made when designing the 970 family. This article provides the 64-bit architecture big picture for the 970 family (A.K.A. the Power Mac G5) and the critical issues in IBM's 64-bit POWER designs, covering 32-bit compatibility, power management, and processor bus design."

der Kopf writes "Jeff Raskin, one of the creators of the Macintosh and inventor of the click-and-drag interface, states in an interview for the British newspaper The Guardian that "the Mac is now a mess. A third party manual (Pogue's The Missing Manual) is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete. Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine."" While I think Raskin has some good points, I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP.

bfl writes "The BBC is running a story about Lowry Digital Images and how they used 600 dual G5s and 400 TB of storage space to clean the dirt off of the old Star Wars reels, and upgrade the resolution to get them ready for their DVD release."

GlenLow writes "It's amazing what some Apple Design Award winners do in the name of science. This one subjected his to a cone beam CT scan and revealed Apple's design sense extends even to a competition trophy. What's with Mr. Jobs and the cubes, cubes, cubes anyway?"