Leopard is here!

[Praxis]

Not really specific to Leopard, but has anyone found themselves getting too used to shortcuts? I command-Q to quit all the time, but I've on occasion accidentally Command-Q'd while an iChat or Adium window was in front and killed everything. It's habit!

[RThurmont]

Non-graphic artists using CRTs strike me as the sort of people who would be using Windows 98SE and saying how 'efficient' their setup is.

Well first of all, I do a substantial amount of graphics design as part of running my business (considering that it is, after all, a branding and corporate ID firm, which is 33% graphics design by volume). That said, however, most "graphics design" (as opposed to certain types of computer visualization) can be done just as well on flat panels with matte finishes (as opposed to the obnoxious glossy ones which are becoming standard).

Now, moving on to your argument about Windows 98. I would venture that if you could get it to run on modern hardware (and a fair amount of modern hardware should run it without any problems at all), and if you knew what you were doing, you'd probably stand to benefit, as Windows 98, for all its faults, was a very fast, lightweight, single user OS, and by all accounts a great operating system for gaming. As single user OSes went, OS/2 pwned it, but still. Also, critical web applications such as Firefox 2.0 Pidgin, and Thunderbird run on it just fine (as does Opera). There are still a fair number of Windows 98 users out there, and there are a lot of special purpose deployments of it that continue to run (for example, the kiosks at many Borders bookstores).

[Stark]

Oh dear.

[His Divine Shadow]

I still run windows 98 on an ancient IBM thinkpad laptop I am using for mobile surfing. It runs Firefox and Mirc without problems. But it's dying, bad sectors are cropping up here and there. I plan to replace it with a macbook.

[Xisiqomelir]

I'm not a fan of encourage apple fans to snicker at me or blame my computer for issues on a network, and casting it as a buggy piece of shit on the network is really crass.

It is your goddamn computer. All the fucking spam I get comes from rooted Winblows boxes. Why do I get spam in the first place? From cracked Outlook address books on someone else's piece of shit machine. How much bandwidth does that crap take up on the internet backbones that we all have to use? A plurality at the very least. And every day hundreds of thousands more nodes pop up on the millions-strong botnets and continue the spread of infection, and all because M$ can't make a secure operating system, something dozens of other organizations have done over the years.

phongn, Rthurmont

CRTs are super-sexy. I have a Trinitron that destroys every LCD people keep trying to push on me.

[DaveJB]

I still use a CRT.

CRTs are a must for gaming or graphics, IMO...you just can't get the same performance from any LCD I've seen (either in terms of refresh rates or the ability to display multiple resolutions correctly).

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking CRTs in general (although TFTs have caught up in most areas, IMO). I'm just saying that whoever put that icon in Leopard seems to be under the impression that most PC users are still using horrible, clunky-looking mid-90s CRTs.

Anyways, having been using Leopard since yesterday, I'm quite impressed. Spaces is pretty handy, and I can imagine Time Machine being useful if I ever get around to buying a bigger external drive, but the overall improvements come from tweaks throughout the OS, and make it feel more satisfying than Jaguar.

[Bounty]

It looks like there's a firewall glitch.

Upgrading to the latest version of Apple's operating system, might make a Mac less secure, say experts.

A test of Leopard revealed that installing it led to the firewall on a Mac being turned off and its default setting changed to leave it disabled.

Heise Security, who conducted the tests, said the failings meant users could not "rely" on the firewall to protect them.

Apple has yet to comment about the security shortcomings in Leopard.

Leopard, the newest version of OS X, was launched on 26 October and since then Apple claims to have sold or delivered more than two million copies of the software.

But a test of Leopard by Heise Security security expert Jurgen Schmidt found that the firewall in the updated software was set to off and allowed any and every incoming net connection.

Mr Schmidt also found that installing the software as an upgrade to a machine on which the firewall was turned on would lead to this protective software being turned off when that computer was re-started.

He also found that even when the firewall was re-activated it did not let users know about all the potentially vulnerable processes running on that machine.

Commenting for Heise Mike Barwise, editor of the site, said: "This as a serious problem: It provides a false sense of security, which is more dangerous than a lack of actual security that you know about."

Apple has yet to respond to a BBC request for comment on the Heise findings.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said: "Year after year, Macs continue to have these potential security problems.

"However, in practice they just don't seem to become real-world problems," he added. "The old wisdom still stands: if you want to avoid viruses and worms, get a Mac."

[RThurmont]

I still run windows 98 on an ancient IBM thinkpad laptop I am using for mobile surfing. It runs Firefox and Mirc without problems. But it's dying, bad sectors are cropping up here and there. I plan to replace it with a macbook.

Or perhaps you could just replace the HD on it. You might well sell it, its probably fine I reckon outside of the HD...those ThinkPads are incredible (and IMO in spite of Lenovo's suckiness, most ThinkPads still pwn Apple laptops, with the latter's horrible ergonomics and heftiness).

CRTs are super-sexy. I have a Trinitron that destroys every LCD people keep trying to push on me.

Trinitrons are nice. I used to have a 19" Trinitron that was the stuff of dreams. Sadly, Sony, in its infinite wisdom, discontinued the Trinitron, and the next best CRT out there, the Viewsonic (which is still being made) is nowhere near as good. I reckon eventually there will be a market for refurbished Trinitrons.

On the OS security front, one could observe that any OS that has a remote hole in it is "insecure" regardless of how awesome its ACLs are or how great the overall security design of the system is. Windows has had repeated remote holes and at times Microsoft has taken a disturbingly nonchalant attitude towards them.




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[His Divine Shadow]

I have a 17" Trinitron based CRT screen, no flatscreens for me, not that I wouldn't want one though... It's not Sony but a Mag Innovision, it's been working fine for 10 years, almost. It has the two faint lines going over it that is the sign of the trinitron technology.