Time Doctor writes "Linux and Mac gamers will be happy to hear that America's Army 2.0 is out of private beta, and available via mirrors at 3DGamers and HappyPuppy, among others. See this news post on the AA site for the gameplay changes." We covered the release of the Windows version of AA 2.0 a couple of weeks back, as this free FPS recruiting tool continues toward its goal of "providing civilians with an inside perspective and a virtual role in today's premiere land force, the U.S. Army."

ubiquitin writes "expocity is a project to patch metacity and lets you switch between applications in the metacity window manager. After pressing a keystroke, your window manager will present you an overview of all open windows and you can select the window, you want to switch to, visually. For an idea on how this works, check out this screenshot."

akpoff writes "Have you ever made a promise while in tech-support hell to let everyone know how bad the product is? The Neistat brothers followed through after the batteries in an iPod died and Apple told them it would cost US$250 to replace them. The tech rep told the guys they might as well buy a new iPod. The brothers thought differently and made a movie showing how they got the word out in a large metro area. Of course it was made on a Mac with iMovie." Their statement is a bit misleading: many people have iPods that have lasted a lot longer than 18 months (the iPod was released over two years ago). But the batteries don't last forever. What is their life expectancy? Does Apple notify consumers of a life expectancy?

joekra writes "The author of DeCSS is back in the spotlight with a new application called QTFairUse. The new application attempts to convert DRM'd AACs to non-DRM'd AACs on Windows machines. MacRumors has done some limited testing on it and has found it doesn't yet work as advertised... but they do offer a look into how it works."

Joe writes "I've put together some info and pictures of the aquarium I made out of a G4 cube case Here It's a lot cleaner looking than the old fashioned Macquariums, and is pretty easy to make ... as long as you're willing to sacrifice your Cube." Indeed, it's quite sharp-looking. Apparently, this Cube was already dead, so all you Cube enthusiasts can put down your meat cleavers and relax.

turkmenistani writes "It's about time. After much complaining from iPod owners, Apple has finally started an official Official iPod Battery replacement (requires a free Apple ID). Although battery replacements have been available for older iPods for some time now, Apple has finally taken heed to their user requests and are now offering the service. From the Support page: 'If your iPod fails to hold a charge and it's more than a year old, you may need a new battery. Click Continue to order iPod battery service for $99 USD. This program is not available in Europe at this time.' Although the service is $99, they state in the article 'iPod equipment that is sent in for battery service or service requiring other repairs will be replaced with functionally equivalent new, used, or refurbished iPod equipment. You will not receive the same iPod that was sent in for service.' So make sure you back up that music before shipping it off!"

Rick and Roll writes "In a story on Wired, entitled Feel Free to Jack Into My iPod, an iPod owner shares experiences he has had with other iPod owners, namely the plugging of his headphones into a stranger's jack. It began when a woman in her 30's walked up to him while he was on a walk, unplugged her headphone jack from her iPod, and motioned for him to plug his in. They then listened to each other's music for about 30 seconds. He has then shared with about a dozen iPod listeners, with most of the strangers reciprocating. According to the article, the practice has also cropped up in other communities. Listeners acquire tastes for different kinds of music, just like on internet/LAN file sharing networks. An interesting read."

An anonymous reader writes "MacSlash posted a story about a vulnerability in Safari. The exploit allows someone to steal any of your domain-based cookies (passwords, private info, etc.) from any website. Mozilla and Internet Explorer had the same bug in the past."

bigjnsa500 writes "Starting in December, high school teachers and students in the sleepy south Texas town of Pleasanton will be receiving Apple iBook wireless laptops. The school has installed wireless access points throughout the campus, including classroom buildings, the shop areas, gym, field house and press box at the football stadium. It will be first high school campus in South Texas to go high-tech." Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't that $2.2m over four years be better spent on books and teachers?

(rfm)2 writes "In a Wired interview, Bill Joy mentions he just got a new dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac with 8 GB RAM and half a terabyte of internal disk. He is clearly underwhelmed by Linux: 'Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.'"

BSDForums writes "The Darwin team is pleased to announce the availability of the Darwin 7.0.1 Installer CD. This is a single Installer CD that will boot and install Darwin on Macintosh computers supported by Mac OS X 10.3, as well as certain x86-based personal computers. The version of Darwin installed by this CD corresponds to the open source core of Mac OS X 10.3. Check out the release notes for more information." dmalloc writes "The Fink team has announced that their binary distribution versioned 0.6.2 is ready for use now. It is a bug-fix release to alleviate issues that came up in 0.6.1. Along with the bug fixes, it introduces an enhanced package manager which is now capable of using the finkmirrors.net-supplied rsync and distfiles mirrors."

ZackSchil writes "Apple has released security updates for both Mac OS X 10.3.1 and, as promised, 10.2.8. The update to 10.3.1 updates OpenSSL and zlib's gzprintf() function. In addition to those updates, the 10.2.8 update contains changes to gm4, groff, Mail w/CRAM-MD5 authentication, Personal File Sharing, and QuickTime for Java. Run Software Update for more information and to install the updates."

joekra writes "Today, Apple released a new 20" iMac and a Dual 1.8GHz PowerMac G5. Both were accurately rumored at the last minute by the usual suspects. In fact, the Dual 1.8GHz G5 configuration was rumored back in July to shift demand away from the popular 2.0GHz PowerPC G5s." I'm holding out for a couple rounds of price drops, but I think a G5 is definitely in my future.

(54)T-Dub writes "Cricket Media recently released 'Netflix Fanatic', an OSX based shareware app that lets you manage your rental queue without logging on to Netflix. An article on Think Secret reveals the reason behind it's mysterious disappearance. Apparently the developer's employer, Apple, has claimed ownership over the application's name and source code. The developer claims that under Section 2870 of the California Labor Code this is illegal. The law states that if a company has an employment agreement with provisions saying employees must assign the rights of their inventions to their employer, those sections do not apply if the employee developed it on his or her own time, without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information. Within Apple, there's unsubstantiated speculation that Apple wants to include the Netflix Fanatic code in a new version of Sherlock." Also, they're presumably not too worried with employee morale.

An anonymous reader noted that according to Wired, it will be announced officially on Monday the Big Mac supercomputer is the third-fastest super-computer. The article also talks about some of the amazing supercomputers in the planning stages. The sort of stuff that will make Big Mac look like that old TI-85 collecting dust in your drawer.

Anonymous Coward writes "A Windows user slams Panther. 'Apple has implemented some basic desktop composition features in Mac OS X "Panther." But the basic problem with Mac OS X isn't going away: It's a classic desktop operating system that doesn't offer anything in the way of usability advancements over previous desktop operating systems. Today, Windows XP and its task-based interface are far superior to anything in Mac OS X. In the future, Longhorn will further distance Windows from OS X. (sic) From a graphical standpoint, there won't be any comparison. As Microsoft revealed at the PDC 2003 conference, Longhorn is far more impressive technically than Panther.'"

evil_liam asks: "In our office we've been running an older 5gb iPod with both Macs and PC's (using Xplay), but when we installed iTunes for the PC the iPod stopped working. Songs and playlists transfer over fine, and you can see them and play them in iTunes, but you can't listen to them on the iPod, itself. It shows the song details and so forth, but skips through the tracks, playing 0 seconds of each one until it finishes. This only applies to tracks added since iTunes was installed. No amount of reformatting, or rolling back firmware seems to work. When I called Apple, they stated that they simply don't support the use of the older Mac iPods on PC's and are not responsible, even though they admit that it was their own software that caused this. We're not alone, see this thread at Apple. I'm not quite suggesting that this was deliberate, but they are aware of it and don't seem to care." Does anyone have ideas on possible fixes for the afflicted iPods?

Joey Patterson writes "CNET reports that an independent software developer has released a program called MyTunes that allows people to share and download each other's MP3s on a network via iTunes." This is very much like a Mac program I saw a while back called itunesdl, which allowed one to download MP3s from friends who were sharing their playlists, exactly as MyTunes claims to do.

newkid would like some assistance getting to the core of this issue: "Apple likes to refer to its server software as an industrial-strength server based on Apple's modern OS. However, there are serious flaws in the authentication system (netinfo): I am locked out of four of my remote servers (even root has been disabled, and that is unacceptable), and the instability is well documented here, here and here. I have successfully reinstalled one server and replaced another one with FreeBSD, but I have not decided what to do in the long run. What is your experience? Should I completely forget OS X for my servers and switch to something else? Or should I move to Panther (it uses LDAP instead of NetInfo to control user accounts)? I would like to know about your experience with OS X Server and if your have made the switch to something else." What experiences have you had with NetInfo on your Mac OS X boxes, and do you have any other hints and tips on recovering the NetInfo database in the event that it does develops amnesia?

jesse12345 asks: "Here's probably an easy one for you Unix masters. I travel a fair amount and use Mail in OS X. I'm always using lots of outgoing mail servers. What I can't figure out is how to delete outdated ones. There seems to be no GUI for this within the Mail.app. Is there some way to do this in UNIX?"