mac writes "Silicon Grail's web site has an interesting update: it has been acquired by Apple. Their product RAYZ and Nothing Real's Shake are the two major products, as far as compositing software goes. Nothing Real was bought by Apple also back in February. With both companies held by Apple, who will fill the void in the Windows and Linux?"

Qwerpafw writes "While there have been the usual small announcements about Mac OS X security problems, there has been nothing so major as to make me worry about the security of my own box. However, I recently learned that for some reason, Mac OS X only understands passwords of up to 8 characters. Any other characters typed in are discarded as 'garbage.' Well, this worried me, as 8 characters is generally regarded as a rather small keysize, with only 256^8 maximum possibilities (or about 1.845 * 10^19). This is a very real hole in Mac OS X. To make things worse, I was able to find no mention of this at Apple's website, and you are never alerted of this when trying to enter password greater than eight characters." This is generally not regarded a security "hole", and has existed in BSD for many years (though most current BSDs have moved beyond the limitation). It is something to be aware of, and it would be nice if there were a workaround ...

Oddbod writes "Hot on the heels of yesterday's gold news, Bioware has announced that IG arm MacSoft will publish the Mac version of Neverwinter Nights. They hint at porting the toolset over to Mac, which originally wasn't expected, but no promises so far."

beckett writes "Yahoo is reporting that TrentSoft has released EphPod, software that allows Windows users to use all the features of the iPod. I'm suprised that it took a third party to provide support." Also note the previous story on the XPlay, a similar software package.

Jeff Stys writes "Xicons.com has launched a new Open Source section of its website. The idea is to aid the Open Source software community by providing high-quality sets of toolbar icons and other user interface graphics for their Open Source programs." Many of them are very nice, indeed, and are specifically geared for use in Mac OS X.

paradesign writes "Apple now has WebMail Beta 2 up with new improvements! Get to your software update pane... oh wait, go here."

Anonymous Coward writes "eWEEK reports on a memo from Steve Jobs announcing that Apple's education sales and marketing have been combined under the direction of John Couch. Couch was the vice president and general manager in charge of Apple's Lisa project and was frequently at loggerheads with Jobs before exiting the company in 1982."

JHromadka writes "Apple has setup a special website with real users explaining why they switched from the PC to the Mac. There's a full compliment of commercials, Mac OS X reviews, the works. Now we know why they didn't renew that agreement with Microsoft. :)" I like the commercials, they're funny, though probably not so much intentionally. Apparently the commercials begin airing this week.

Xenex writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.1.5 a few days ago, Carbon applications now have access to Quartz anti-aliasing. However, we have to wait for developers to release updated versions of their applications to take advantage it. The people at Unsanity have decided that they didn't want to wait, and have released a 'haxie' called Silk. It forces Carbon applications to use the new Quartz anti-aliasing, and my experiences with it have all been perfect. So, now you can have a beautiful Snak, Mozilla, IE ... if it's Carbon, it's made pretty."

maxphunk writes "So you can boot anyone's Mac using a CD or (for newer machines) mount the hard drive using target disk mode. Therefore, your machine isn't secure, right? Stock, yes; otherwise, no. Apple has a neato utility described here that eliminates this problem and more, using Open Firmware Password Protection. I have installed it on my iBook (late 2001) and I am definitely pleased with the results." It requires Mac OS X 10.1 or greater, and prevents things like starting up in single user mode, verbose mode, resetting PRAM, and more.

gigawattwarlock asks: "As an almost new Mac OS X user (I've been adminning my wife's Mac for a while now), I am used to writing Perl scripts for her Mac, which work just fine. Simply put, I have become spoiled with the GTk bindings for Perl on Linux. I love being able to use and abuse a robust GUI, quickly and easily. And to make matters worse, I find the Aqua interface near addictive ... enough so that the idea of installing another desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, et. al) just seems a little silly, and a bit of overkill, to me. Does anyone know if there are any perl bindings in the works for Mac OS X or maybe even an already existent alternative graphical library or interface within Mac OS X?"

krugdm writes "The Mac OS X 10.1.5 update which was hinted at in the MS Office update changelog is now available through Software Update. From the updater: 'Update 10.1.5 delivers enhancements which improve the reliability of Mac OS X applications, delivers improved networking, security, support for PC Card serial communication devices, and expanded peripheral device support.'"

pinqkandi writes "Apple released the cool and cheap eMac a few weeks ago -- but for educational purposes only. Today, they announced that it is now available to everyone, for only $1099, making it the cheapest G4 Mac ever. I'll buy one." I won't, but I am glad people who want to buy it, can. It's a nice little machine. I guess Apple doesn't see it cutting into iMac G4 sales, but I wonder if iMac G3 sales (starting at $800) will suffer.

krugdm writes "Apple has announced that a public beta of QuickTime 6 is now available. MPEG-4 support is there, as well as support for other technologies, such as JPEG2000, and Flash 5. The beta expires in October. An interesting in the FAQ's says that, '... because QuickTime 6 will include royalty-bearing technologies, a new QuickTime Pro key will be required to unlock pro functionality in the final release.'" It is available for Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Windows, and supports AAC audio too. I also wonder why MPEG-4 is ".mp4". ".mp3" isn't for MPEG-3, after all. Flummery!

M. Uli Kusterer writes "After the recent problems with its .com domain expiring and the notice from dotster being eaten by mac.com's over-eager spam filter, MacSlash now has registered the www.macslash.org domain. So, tell your friends and surf over there again :-)" It came back up for me over the weekend. Read of the events that led up to this. The short of it: mac.com, without MacSlash's knowledge, filtered as spam their domain renewal notice, and someone swiped the domain when it expired.

techwolf writes "Microsoft put out a patch to Office v.X that touts more than 1000 performance improvements. In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time."

ikioi writes "It looks like Apple will have 17" and 19" flat panel iMacs later this year." It's funny- the publicity photos of the 15 inch macs really make it look a lot nicer then it is. I finally saw one up close a few weeks ago- the arm and screen is super smooth, but the base looks like a cheap toy. That said, larger screens for the iMac definitely push it into a new territory... not sure if it would convince me to buy one, but it sure would add magic shell to the ice cream.

Ryan writes "Apple recently published an article on using CVS with Mac OS X. 'This article covers some of the most commonly used features of CVS, with emphasis on using CVS with static and interpreted web files (HTML, PHP, Perl, etc).'" It's a decent article, a good primer on how to get started, and it's nice that Mac OS X comes with a CVS server. Personally, I really dig maccvs for my CVS client, and there are plenty of other clients for Mac OS out there too.

Erik K. Veland writes "Mathew Ruben of MacOpinion has written a long article titled Celine Dion killed my iMac!. An interesting take on the whole CD-issue, the criminalization of the user and a comparison of the technology to cable box-zapping."

MacSlash's Robert Daeley writes in to tell us that the domain name for MacSlash, the Mac news site, is incorrectly pointing to a generic "Dotster" page, either by accident or by malicious domain theft or squatting. They have registered macslash.net and hope to be back up again soon, and have as yet been unable to get word from "Dotster" regarding how this all happened.