Apple is currently offering corporations Mac OS X Server v.10.6 “Snow Leopard” for a free trial.
Mac OS X Server v.10.6 “Snow Leopard” has everything you need to deliver standards-based workgroup and Internet services, providing an ideal solution for education, small businesses, and large enterprises. The amazing features in Snow Leopard Server make it easy to share contacts and calendars, collaborate on projects, access information remotely, create and distribute podcasts, and more.
Snow Leopard Server offers countless behind-the-scenes features, which greatly reduce IT time and effort, improve compatibility in mixed environments, enhance support for iPhone and iPod touch users, and boost the already robust security of Mac OS X Server. With a full 64-bit operating system, Mac OS X Server is designed to maximize the computing potential of today’s Xserve and Mac Pro systems and dramatically increases the total number of simultaneous system processes, threads, and network connections that the server can utilize. Designed to handle the most demanding server operations, Snow Leopard Server is up to twice as fast as its predecessor.
All you need to do to receive your copy is fill out the form located here. You must be a USA citizen however.
In the last week or so we have been having a lot issues with a few of the Macs in the office and in particular changing the admin password. I thought I would just write a quick article letting everyone know how we fix this.
You need to enter terminal and create a new admin account:
1. Reboot
2. Hold apple + s down after you hear the chime.
3. When you get text prompt enter in these terminal commands to create a brand new admin account (hitting return after each line):
* mount -uw /
* rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
* shutdown -h now
4. After rebooting you should have a brand new admin account. When you login as the new admin you can simply delete the old one and you’re good to go again!
Hope this works for everyone!
Last Friday I treated myself to a new 17″ MacBook Pro (that’s a story for another post though!) One thing that always puts me off is as soon as I buy one a new one comes out, so I thought I would be safe buying a couple of weeks after the WWDC when it was upgraded. Of course the other big news at the WWDC was the upcoming official release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard due to be released in September.
It made me think, do I have to pay the full price to upgrade my OS even though it’s not far away and I’ve just spent a small fortune in the Apple store?
So a bit of poking around on the Apple website came up with an interesting page (one I might add that is not well linked to!)
UK – http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/uptodate/
US – http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/
So the deal is simple if you bought a new Mac on or after June 8th you get a special upgrade price! $9.95 USD and £7.95 GBP (gotta love Apples currency conversions!) You have to claim within 60 days of purchase and before December 26th 2009 but it seems well worth it.
You can apply at the above links pay by credit/debit card and it will be shipped upon release. Makes a nice change for Apple to do something nice seeing as they charged me £20 to buy a Mini-Display Port to DVI adaptor!!!!
Yes, the operating system that you’ve never wanted to use is celebrating 40 years of life. As you may know, Unix represents the basis for all Linux distributions; but did you know that also Mac OS X based their operating system versions in Unix? Well, what this operating system represents it’s a lot more that you may think.
Born in 1969 as “Unics” from two guys named Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, has a long way and a lot of history. Written originally in Assembler programming language, quickly changed the code since one of the founders also developed the “C” language. Bill Joy, in 1978 created 1BSD, operating system also based in Unix, that will later represent in other important developments like BSD, FreeBSD, SunOS and Mac OS X.
Other ramifications of this development, produced Minix OS for academic proposals, that later Linus Trovalds will use to build the first Linux distribution in 1991. Here’s a very nice picture that will help you understand a lot more of these ramifications:
Closing the article, here’s a quote from Joel Spolsky that talks about Windows and Linux:
“What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that’s the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.”
Apple has always been known for innovation. They’ve had a lot of failures, but they are one company not afraid to push the boundaries of usability and design. A lot of people are still not on the Mac band-wagon, and there are those that making the conversion as we speak, but as a whole are we really ready for a 3D experience with our OS?
Back on July 11th of this year I reviewed AT&T’s Pogo browser, an attempt for a 3D environment based OS that failed miserably simply because the application was so taxing on the computer’s resources. Having moved on, Pogo has faded into obscurity with little or now usage as far as I know.
Fast forward five months, we now have Apple looking at a 3D environment for Mac OSX. According to the AppleInsider, designers are looking for ways to maximize screen real estate while creating a new experience. While appreciated, earlier attempts have failed, but perhaps it was the execution.
Below is an image that shows the environment, attribution goes to AppleInsider:
Here is another thanks to AppleInsider:
These are just a few of the patent images that Apple has filed, and you can see more on AppleInsider.
What are your thoughts on the 3D environment? Necessary or just eye candy. In my experience, Pogo was not a good option because of how taxing it was on resources, but can Apple overcome that downfall and streamline it to integrate flawlessly into their systems?
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