UnknownSoldier writes: "Scot Hacker has posted a great follow-up to his Tales of a BeOS Refugee entitled Reactions to Tales of a BeOS Refugee. (Hopefully everyone involved in implementing 'Linux on the Desktop' will eventually incorporate the best ideas of Be and Mac OS X for smoother usability in Linux.)"

saintlupus writes: "There's an interesting article about the recent web browsing stats of Linux by Charles Moore, a fairly well-known web journalist in the Mac community. He asks whether OS X is the deathblow to Linux in the desktop and scientific computing markets. He also touches on the perennial "I'll run it on my Athlon or not at all" mindset of current Lintel hardware owners. Definitely worth a read." The article that Charles uses as his jumping point is the recent stats on Linux on the desktop. That article cites .24%, but Charles article has some pieces on why that number could be wrong.

We've had a number of posts noting that Boston.com's digitalMASS has a very decent article on Apple's OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard.

camateg writes: "I've yet to find news of someone who has done this with a single hard disk, but I'm sure someone has. However, I seem to be the first to make a web page about it having done it, correct me if I'm wrong. This page is just a small tuturial I came up with to describe how I *finally* got things working. No netboot, no ofwboot.xcf on CD, etc. Yeah, I should probably include yaboot to make it complete..."

Michael Simmons contributed this review of what he claims is the best of the very few books out there for folks who want to learn Cocoa programming. The field is so small, in fact, that he can give a nutshell review along the way of the only other one he's encountered, O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa. Update: 12/13 15:45 GMT by T : Please note: Simmons is thanked in the acknowledgements of Hillegass' book. He explains: "I went to the Big Nerd Ranch, where the author teaches an amazing Cocoa course. While there, I received a pre-release copy of the book (it's the coursebook, actually.) I had found a bunch of errors and typos, and helped Aaron correct those errors and inconsistencies, so I'm guessing he is thanking me for my contributions to quality." Just to clear that up!

WinkyN writes: "A story on Yahoo! is claiming Apple might release a flat-panel iMac for release in early 2002. Analysts for Morgan Stanley who cover Apple say the computer manufacturer has placed orders for component parts to build such a machine (in fact, build about 100,000 of them a month). Perhaps Steve Jobs will announce this at Macworld Expo in January?"

spav writes: "Looks like Apple will be embracing MPEG-4 for its new versions of QuickTime according to C|Net News.com. That could mean quicktime for Linux, but would we need it?" This sounds like a start toward OS-neutral video, but until companies decide not to add proprietary layers making otherwise widely-available formats unavailable, it won't be the end. The first half of this article dwells on QuickTime's 10th birthday, but then gives slightly more detail on the MPEG4 transition.

Anderson Silva writes "I just found this piece of news on MacSlash, and since I live in Maine, and I own an ibook, I thought I would pass the word along: The Maine Learning Technology Endowment has announced today that Apple has won the bid to provide Maine 6th, 7th and 8th graders with Apple iBooks and Airport wireless connection points."

An anonymous reader submitted a story about the 10th anniversary of QuickTime which might not seem like such a big deal unless you set your mental wayback machine to 1991 and remember what we didn't have back then. Bits from Brian Eno and others. Worth reading.

ijx writes: "Those of you with a hardware-hacking bent should enjoy this - a Mac Cube modded to accomodate dual processors, courtesy of AccelerateYourMac. It seems that it uses the same dual-proc module as a Sawtooth G4 Tower. My question: will it melt?"

Remember Apple's "free, plus $19.95 shipping" updater CD for Mac OS X 10.1? Turns out it's actually a full version of the operating system (which helps explain why it's so large) but it adds an extra little package called "CheckForOSX." Remove that and you can install 10.1 on any disk -- or at least, that's the secondhand version I got of what used to be at MacFixIt's Nov. 20 report, which yesterday was taken down after a note from Apple's lawyers. Here's the cease-and-desist story. We've included Apple's letter, below.

Josh Aas writes: "I've been looking for a way to learn PowerPC assembly language for a while now. My search for books only led to extremely out-of-date publications, and the whole ordeal was generally frustrating. I was amazed at the lack of documentation. Even Motorola and IBM's documentation resources (on the web) were lacking anything of use to me. However, it turns out that Apple provides a pretty good free tutorial on the subject. It's tailored for coding in Mac OS X, but I imagine it would be just as useful in any PowerPC environment. For some reason it includes instructions for the Intel architecture. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that Darwin runs on x86 as well."

DShadow noted that the Fink maintainer Christoph Pfisterer has resigned largely because of GPL violations by openosx and macgimp, as well as macosx.forked.net. There's definitely some tension between the mac world and the Open Source and GPL worlds. Certain amounts of culture clash are inevitable, but hopefully great projects like this will continue, and commercial vendors will be able to play nice without alienating developers. The good news for Macheads is that fink will continue just fine.

timbck2 writes: "Apple has just released a new and greatly improved version of their Airport 802.11b wireless network access point, with better WEP encryption (128-bit now instead of 40-bit), better non-Mac PC integration, and a new LAN connection port. Here are the tech specs." An anonymous reader pointed to Apple's rather bland press release as well. This is a good upgrade to the Airport, with thanks probably due in part to companies like Linksys who are making much less expensive 802.11 base stations (which work great with Airport cards, too), though lacking a modem.

Cheviot writes: "It seems Apple's new iTunes 2 installer deletes the contents of users' hard drives if the drives have been partitioned. I personally lost more than 100gb of data. More information is available at Apples Discussions board. (registration required). Apple has pulled the installer, but for hundreds, if not thousands, the damage is already done." The iTunes download page has a nice warning about the problem. Ouch.

The Infamous Grimace writes: "The folks at this Japanese web site have provided pics of the inside of an iPod. A quick breakdown of it in English is here. The FireWire contoller appears to be TIs TSB43AA82, the chip is PortalPlayers PP5002B w/ an ARM7TDMI-based core. Apparently it has encoding abilities as well. The hard-drive is Toshiba's MK5002MAL."

HomeBrewR writes: "Behold the power of MacOS X... Windows XP? Who cares! You guys arent going to believe what I was able to do in one bored day at work. http://www.mystaticip.com/homebrew shows my effort. I took OS X 10.1, installed fink with rootless Xfree86 with IceWM running BasiliskII [running MacOS 7.6]. OS X is also running ircle and VPC test drive running Windows XP. Simply amazing. The speed on this iBook 466SE of all the apps left much to be desired. This was a feasibility test. The speed of either one of the emulators running by themselves was decent if you turned off all the eye candy in Windows XP. I'm REALLY interested in getting BasiliskII up and running to be able to play all those games that OS 8 broke...stuff like Ancient Art of War and Vette. Check it out and have fun duplicating the effort HomeBrewR" The question I'm sure you're asking now is Why stop there?

Per Wigren noted that SpyMac claims to have pictures of the iWalk, the mysterious secret project scheduled to be announced any time now. It is apparently something between a subnotebook and a PDA running a scaled down OSX. Supposedly it can be a portable MP3 player, and it has apple's airport stuff built in. CT Nope. They announced the iPod instead, a lame MP3 player.

ckd writes: "The PowerBook Zone has a short interview with Bruce Gee talking about the evolution of the PowerBook design since the first PowerBooks. (Bruce was the PowerBook Product Manager back then.) Hearken back to the days when 20MB was a good-sized drive in a portable machine! Yes, the PowerBook 100 was not the first 'portable Mac' -- but it was the first to bear the name PowerBook." And of all the (handful) of portables I've owned, I have to admit that I've had the fewest problems with and most affection for the PowerBooks (and now an iBook).

AxsDeny writes: "It looks like Macslash is also reporting this, but Trolltech is now offering Qt for OS X. Long live cross platform development." Doesn't look like there's a Free version, but there is a non-commerical license called the "Qt Academic License," which "Allows schools and universities to acquire and use Qt for free in relevant courses."