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The Low End Mac Link Archive, July 2001
Low End Mac Reader Specials
Memory To Go Special: MacPro 8 Core 8GB kit $232 / 4GB kit $116 / 2GB kit $72. New Macbook 2GB DDR3-$65. HARD DRIVES available -- Free shipping / LIfetime warranty.
LA Computer Company: Specials on AppleCare, iMac's, Apple Batteries and Apple A/C Adapters. Also Great prices on Used Apple Computers. Call 1-800-941-7654 Click Here.
External news links are listed below by the date of publication
with the most recent articles listed at the top, older ones below
them. Other monthly archive indexes are linked on the right. Links
were correct when originally posted. However, we cannot guarantee
that these links are still active.
Webmaster Alert:
Don't eat the yellow links, Slashdot, 07.31. Like MS Smart
Tags, KzZaA TopLinks may already add unwanted links to your site.
Here's how to opt out.
Opinion: The
G4 Cube has died, so where are we going?, Tristan Moore,
Appleinks, 07.31. "After my experiences with the Cube, I want one
so badly I'm going to break my long standing tradition of buying
PowerBooks."
Opinion: Dmitri
Sklyarov still rotting in a Las Vegas jail while feds dither,
Charles W. Moore, Applelinks, 07.31. "Mr. Sklyarov still languishes
in jail, puzzled, no doubt, about how a free society can jail
someone for writing code that was legal where written, just because
he comes to the United States and gives a report on encryption
weaknesses."
Opinion:
MacDonald's, John Scheeser, The Mac Mind, 07.31. "What if Apple
would franchise the Apple Stores?"
Benchmarks: New
G4/867 vs. old G4/733, Bare Feats, 07.31. Of course it's
faster, but how much faster is it?
Web:
Yahoo testing pop-under advertising, Yahoo/News.com, 07.30
[
Slashdot]. "A report . . . found that the format
increases brand awareness, but at the cost of the company's
image."
Low End: My
emailing Mac Plus, Jeff Garrison. A Mac Plus, a second floppy,
a modem, System 6, Eudora Lite - email on the cheap.
Dark Side: Truce
or dare, Michael R. Zimmerman, eWeek, 07.30 [
Slashdot]. Business Software Alliance's campaign having
unintended results - many of the threatened are leaving for
alternative software, including open source.
Macinschool: Despite raves for
iBook, tide still turns against Apple, Chronicle of Higher
Education. "College technology officers . . . say most of
the big commercial software systems they use for payroll, course
scheduling, student record-keeping, and other operations work more
reliably on computers that use the Microsoft Windows operating
system." More reliably?!?
Tech: The
HyperTransport revolution, David K. Every, iGeek, Working Mac,
07.30. "HyperTransport isn't just a new bus implementation that's a
little faster than its predecessors. It's a whole new bus
architecture, designed to grow over time."
Humor: Spammers
need help, John H. Farr, Applelinks, 07.26. "If there isn't a
support group for stressed-out spammers somewhere, perhaps we
should start one."
Opinion: Megahertz
madness, Del Miller, Difference Engine, Mac Opinion, 07.25.
"Multiprocessing is a completely legitimate and time honored
architecture for computing systems. Nobody ever claimed that Cray
made a slouchy computer...."
Opinion:
Return to grace, part 2, Joel Davies, 07.25. 1998 - "I've been
fairly annoyed a these advertisements claiming how slow my Pentium
II computer is compared to these new fangled G3s."
News: Macworld
Expo attendance a record, Macworld UK, 07.25. Biggest tech expo
in New York, outperforming PC Expo and Internet World.
Virus: Spread of the
Code-Red worm, David Moore, CAIDA [
Slashdot]. "On July 19, 2001 more than 359,000 computers were
infected with the Code-Red (CRv2) worm in less than 14 hours."
Web: c|net reports Q2
loss, sets layoffs, Yahoo/Reuters, 07.24. Lost $218 million in
quarter, but remains confident in the power of Internet
advertising.
Rights: Protesters
prepare to lay siege to Adobe, Andrew Orlowski, The Register,
07.23. Cryptographer arrested for demonstrating weakeness of eBook
"security." Yes, in America.
Rights: Hacker'
fury at Adobe's FBI snitch, Macworld UK, 07.23. "Hackers angry
about the FBI's arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have
spawned a campaign against Adobe...."
Trivia: A brief
history of @, The Industry Standard. Where the @ symbol came
from and what it's called around the world.
Dark Side: Never use caps
in a Hotmail email, The Register, 07.20. Email with all caps
subjects dumped as spam (hooray); URLs within email redirected
through MS server (boo).
Analysis: Taking a breath at
Macworld Expo, Stephen Beale, WorkingMac, 07.19. "...Apple is
doing pretty well at a time when the PC industry as a whole is
mired in a serious downturn."
Analysis: Special
report for education, Steve Wood, Educators' News, 07.18. Apple
retains 400 MHz iMac, 533 MHz Power Mac for education market.
OS: Macs Only! has an
interesting comparison of Mac OS X vs. Windows XP. You don't
want to hear how the Celeron 633 beat the dual processor G4/533 -
but you should.
MWNY: Fujitu
expands magneto-optical line, MacCentral, 07.16. New drive
mechanism can write 2.3 GB to $30 3.5" magneto-optical disk - and
it's fast.
Opinion: Microsoft's .NET:
Bill's gate to the cyber toll bridge, Noah F. San Tsorbutz,
osOpinion, 07.16. "There will be cyber-tollgates built right into
.NET, and just like the Golden Gate Bridge, unless you pay, no San
Francisco."
Advice: Should you always
buy the latest and greatest?, Gene Steinberg, Mac Night Owl,
07.13. "It doesn't matter if its just off the production lines, or
a closeout deal, so long as the price is right."
Humor: Put
through the (rumor) mill, MacToolbox.com, 07.13. "By working
with the rumor sites, that also means we don't have to think for
ourselves so much anymore...."
Tech: Hitting the
wall at 150 GB/in2, John
William Toigo, Enterprise Systems. Hard drives expected to hit
capacity ceiling in 3-5 years. Still, that could get us into the
half-terabyte range for a 3.5" hard drive.
Opinion: The
marketshare expo, Del Miller, Difference Engine, Mac Opinion,
07.11. "The most important message from Macworld New York will be
Apple's all-out attack on marketshare."
Opinion:
Return to grace: Seduction to the dark side, Joel Davies,
Applelust, 07.11. "I grew up with Apple computers in my household,
but in college I was slowly converted to the Wintel world."
News: Apple
number one in education market, MacCentral, 07.09. Quality
Education Data says Apple, not Dell, has the top spot in the
education market, both the installed base and new purchases.
OS X: At least 256 MB for
OS X, Bill Fox, Macs Only!, 07.09. Testing finds OS X
really benefits from at least 256 MB RAM, especially if running
Classic mode.
Dark Side: "MS antipiracy"
hoax triggers paranoia attacks, John Lettice, The Register,
07.09. "Practically everybody in the world thinks that Microsoft
will get up to this kind of thing one day...."
Opinion: Anywhere but
Bethlehem, I hope, John H. Farr, Grack!, Applelinks, 07.09.
"The company has been labeled guilty, not exonerated, and yet they
continue to ratchet up the pressure on all fronts, something I find
akin to donning a Nazi uniform and soliciting donations from
synagogues!"
Dark Side: Microsoft
struggles to fix instant message glitch, Yahoo/Reuters, 07.06.
"Up to a third of Microsoft's 30 million worldwide MSN Messenger
users were unable to access the service" since Wednesday. I wonder
if the crashed server ran some version of Windows?
Web: PowerBook Source has a nice new look.
Digicams: Memory speed
matters, Dan Knight, Digigraphica, 07.06. Yes, faster
CompactFlash cards really can make a difference.
Opinion: Journalistic
objectivity or journalistic discretion?, Charles W. Moore,
Applelinks, 07.06. "I try to be fair, and reasonably evenhanded,
but ultimately, my biases, interests, and enthusiasms will play a
significant role in determining what appears...."
Dark Side: Win2K becomes a
spam relay, Thomas C. Greene, The Register, 07.06. "A flaw in
the Win-2K SMTP authentication scheme allows unauthorized users to
access the system using bogus credentials and bounce spam and death
threats off unwitting users' machines with impunity." Microsoft has
already released a
patch for the problem - it's somehow dated July 9, 2001. That's
right, next Monday, although you can download it now. Go
figure.
News:
Free service proves to be short lived, Winnipeg Free Press,
07.03 [
Slashdot]. Last October, Canada Post offered "free Internet for
life" with a $10 CD. It appears all users have died....
Dark Side: Iowa
family chained to MSN...., John H. Farr, Applelinks, 07.05.
Family unable to cancel MSN after 12 months required by
rebate.
Tech: Pentium
4 and G4e: An architectural comparison, Jon "Hannibal" Stokes,
Ars Technica, 07.05. "...the successor to the most successful x86
microarchitecture of all time is a machine built from the ground up
for stratospheric clock speed."
Opinion:
In the beginning was the command line, Neal Stephenson, ArtLung
[MrBarrett.com].
Fascinating discourse on computers, operating systems, sports cars,
HTML, the big difference between Macs and Windows PCs, Unix, Linux,
and much more. (Yes, it's also long.)
Web:
How MacMonkey survived the advertising recession, David Egger,
07.05. "If the website provides a service so valuable to people
that they are willing to donate money to keep it alive, then why
not?"
Analysis:
Nutty processors, David Fanning, Macworld UK. Apple needs to
find more demanding applications to drive the market for faster
computers.
Dark Side: Itanic prices
emerge, Tony Smith, The Register, 07.05. "The cheapest Itanium,
a 733MHz with 2MB of L2, costs $1177 in batches of 1000." (Be sure
to read Itanium or Itanic? for
our take on Intel's new CPU.)
Rights: Copyrights and
copywrongs, Siva Vaidhyanathan, MSNBC, 07.04 [
Slashdot]. "Copyright was created as a policy that balanced the
interests of authors, publishers, and readers."
Opinion: Switching teams,
Phonezilla.com [Applesurf]. "If you
told me just one year ago - heck, even just six months ago! - that
I'd be totally geeking over a Mac, I would have laughed you out of
the state."
Consumer: Apple puts
Power Mac G4 Cube on ice, Apple, 07.03. "Cube owners love their
Cubes, but most customers decided to buy our powerful Power Mac G4
minitowers instead."
Virus:
Hackers may profit from spam, ZDNet, 07.03. "Spamming trojan"
sounds like another Windows/Outlook only problem, but with a new
twist.
Opinion: HTML: The "M" is for
memo, CodeBitch, MacEdition, 07.02. "As a Web author who cares
about standards, few things irritate me more than seeing PDF
documents where HTML would be more appropriate."
Opinion: Cube
diary, weekend edition, Charles W. Moore, Applelinks, 07.02.
"This is the first day that I'm using my new Cube as a production
machine, after spending much of the weekend getting it set
up."
Advice: Making
a Power Mac 5200 useful, saintlupus. "The 5200, one of the
worst machines Apple ever put out, can actually be useful when
outfitted correctly for a particular purpose."
Ouch: 
Dark Side: