If you’ve been waiting for more Mac desktop power, now might be the time to buy Apple’s new Mac Pro configuration outfitted with eight cores of processing power – but it will cost you. Speaking of price, Geoff Duncan, TidBITS editor at large and professional musician, offers his take on the Apple/EMI deal to offer DRM-free music at a premium. Also in this issue, Joe Kissell looks at the new Google Desktop for Mac beta, revisits the field of online backup services, and notes the release of VMware Fusion Beta 3. Adam passes along a simple but useful tip for locating strong Wi-Fi networks, cautions owners of third-generation iPods about using some speaker systems, and looks at a study that points out the dangers of using an iPod while driving. Lastly, Glenn Fleishman drives a stake through the heart of WEP security for Wi-Fi networks.
For those who have been waiting for new Mac desktops to land, Apple has one message: eight is great. Last week the company added an 8-core Intel Xeon processor configuration to the Mac Pro
Like most other Mac users, when I'm travelling, I often need to connect to a Wi-Fi network to access the Internet for email and Web browsing. But what if there are multiple available networks and I don't know which would be best to use? In the past, I would usually bring up iStumbler (MacStumbler hasn't been updated in years), but Take Control author Sharon Zardetto Aker alerted me to a simpler method that's built into Mac OS X
[Editor's Note: We weren't able to touch base with Editor-at-Large Geoff Duncan in time for last week's "Apple and EMI Offer DRM-Free Music via iTunes" (2007-04-02), but his extensive experience in the recording industry makes his commentary essential reading for anyone following the situation
Google has released the first public beta version of Google Desktop for the Mac, an application that rapidly searches files on your computer, messages in your Gmail account, and Google's existing index of Web pages, all in a single interface
Last week VMware released Beta 3 of its Fusion virtualization software for running Windows on an Intel-based Mac. Among several new features are two that are obvious attempts to overcome advantages offered by competitor Parallels Desktop: support for booting from a copy of Windows installed under Boot Camp and an Easy Install option to automate the process of running the Windows installer
The oldest form of Wi-Fi network encryption, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), is now truly, honestly, deeply dead. Yes, it was dead before, but now it's even more dead
A recently published study by Dario D. Salvucci, Daniel Markley, Mark Zuber, and Duncan P. Brumby in the Department of Computer Science at Drexel University has been making the rounds, since it's the first bit of research to confirm what everybody knows: that manipulating an iPod while driving isn't the safest of ideas
I recently set up a JBL On Stage Micro speaker device with an old iPod for Tristan so he can listen to music when he goes to sleep and can wake up to music at the ungodly hour of 5:50 AM on weekdays
A number of years ago, when the commercial Internet was still young and hard drive capacities were usually measured in megabytes rather than gigabytes or terabytes, I subscribed to an online backup service
New Ebook Covers AirPort Networking with 802.11n -- 802.11n is a newcomer in the world of wireless networking standards, and it's also new in the version of the AirPort Extreme Base Station that Apple began shipping in February
SpotDJ -- Readers test out SpotDJ, a service for recording and sharing your own radio spots that Adam wrote about recently. (3 messages)
Digital watermarks -- How difficult is it to circumvent a digital watermark, such as those that could be embedded within digital music files