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Time For OS X... Resources I'm what the marketing gurus call an "early adopter" in some ways, but not in all. That's why I'm still running OS 8.6. Back in the stone age, installing 7.0, 8.0 and then 8.5 and being first on my particular block to do it used up a lot of time and gave me lots of grief, mostly in finding sundry updates to some of my stuff so that it would continue to run properly, and then discarding other stuff because it no longer worked but that was actually more useful than the new features of the new OS. Anyone else remember Now Utilities? Updating to OS 9 just looked to be too expensive, too much work, too risky, and for too little result. And hey, OS X was right around the corner, Real Soon Now, and Just Too Incredibly Cool. That's what King Steve said, anyway. So OK, I'll wait for it, I decided. Now how about OS X Beta? Well, right now, while we're in the Caribbean, I'm sharing my Powerbook G3 with my wife. For some unaccountable reason, she doesn't want to spend hours and hours either hacking away or learning new ways of doing old tricks. She just wants to use the G3 to get her work done, email with her friends back in Canada, surf the net for new recipes and pictures of Vizslas, and boring stuff like that. And if things don't work the way she's used to having them work, she puts on that deceptively innocent-looking face and asks what the advantage is of the new way of doing things. And for some reason which I've never figured out, she expects answers to stupid questions like that. So no, I'm not in the van of OS X progress right now. For those who are or would like to be, though, there's a site well worth keeping up with. And no, I'm not talking about the official site -- OK, well I guess it's worth mentioning since it IS official and what the authors write goes through the filter of the marketing department and sundry management bureaucrats. That shows too. So, visit that first: But, there's another site that's well worth keeping up with: Mac OS-X FAQ. A lot of it is fairly technical UNIX stuff, and quite why Nigel, Ken, and the rest of the guys are doing it all is a bit of a mystery to me, but the Mac community has to be indebted to them. Anyway, follow Mac OS-X FAQ every few days, and when the Magic Date of March 24th comes along, you'll be all ready to go. [Editor's Note: OK... we are so close to the release of OS X that many of you are reading this post-release... deal with it ;)] On the whole, Mac OS-X FAQ is a pretty serious and techie kind of site, but I did find a really hilarious link on the home page: http://www.yaromat.com/macos8/index.htm Hope this link still works when you read this [Editor's Note: Comment about reasonableness of deadline removed]. Another fun site, and one that's very useful and informative as well, is themacjunkie [Editor's Note: Not to be confused with a column of the same name that I penned years back at Apple Wizards]. There are occasional misspellings and other egregious mistakes [Editor's Note: You're one to talk, Dennis], and most of the news on the intro page is the same as what we see in plenty of other places, but there's a lot of less usual stuff too, like genuinely-useful reviews of freeware. At first blush, shareware and particularly freeware reviews seem a bit useless. After all, you can check the whole thing out for yourself if you're interested, at no cost. At no cost in money that is. Macjunkie has the kind of review that helps you decide if the app is worth the download and the work to learn it, and then sets you up for using it more efficiently if you decide to go ahead. The best part of this site, though, is the commentary. Much of it has a nice irreverent ring to it. For example, read this:
My kind of stuff. And actually, in this case, justified outrage. How'd you like to have a hard drive protection scheme that gives your new drive a unique identifier so that (amongst other things) "you wouldn't be able to copy data from your own hard drive to another drive, or back it up, without permission from some third party. Every drive would have a unique ID and unique keys, and would encrypt the data it stores -- not to protect YOU, the drive's owner, but to protect unnamed third parties AGAINST you." Too fantastic to be true, you say. Well, it's the National Committee on Technology and Information Standards that's proposing it, and the "4-C Entity," an alliance of IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba. And "if it proceeds, we should see copy protective hard drives for both the OEM and replacement/upgrade drive markets by this summer, with every drive being branded with a unique identifier during manufacture." Read the full article here. Better at least read the article; I'm always leery of links like the one I've quoted, but if the link itself doesn't work, it shouldn't be too hard to surf over to the article from the MacJunkie home page. And ask yourself the question: how come we don't read things like this in the corporately-owned print and electronic media? Every month, I say to myself that oh well, that's pretty much it for worthwhile Mac sites. But every month, I find more. One more month, though, and I'm through, and I'll find some other places to surf over to and write about. At least that's how I feel at the moment. And space has run out for this month. [Editor's Note: Comment about tyrannical editors removed.] So in place of the actual material you'd maybe hoped for, here's a promise instead. Next month's column will have more current-affairs sites in it than Mac sites. And it will be So Cool, So Exciting, So Sexy, that... [Editor's Note: I'm cutting you off, Dennis.]
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