512 Pixels

AppleInsider:

A developer Friday told AppleInsider the drive on his Mac mini was only used a handful of times before the attempted install of Snow Leopard. After he inserted the installation disc for Mac OS X 10.6, the drive would not mount any other optical discs. Now, he said, the drive will not read or write any CD or DVD.

“Unfortunately, I have not been able to get Apple’s cooperation on resolving this,” the developer said. “For now, I am advising all my Mac clients not to upgrade and I am not guaranteeing that any solution I build will run on Snow Leopard.”

He also cited a colleague who had a similar problem on a two-year-old MacBook Pro. After the user attempted to install Snow Leopard, an error code was displayed. The drive would read CDs, but stopped mounting DVDs. When Apple replaced the SuperDrive in the MacBook Pro, the problem was not resolved.

The SuperDrive is the most mechanical component in any Mac — with even more parts then a hard drive. These things fail.

I was working as a Mac Genius when 10.5 came out, and we saw a bunch of dead optical drives and hard drives the weeks after the launch. It’s not hard to understand why — the two parts have to move a lot of data during an OS install. It’s like having a sprained ankle — you can walk around your house just fine, but if you try to run, it’s going to hurt like hell.

Now at an Apple-Authorized Service Provider, I’ve seen the same thing with 10.6. This isn’t unusual, and having two failures back to back — like in AppleInsider’s anecdote — isn’t unheard of either. The unit may have had a bigger issue, or the customer’s replacement drive was bad out of the box. Sucky? Sure. Unusual? Not especially.

The New York Times:

“It’s been a challenging year for us,” said John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T. “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones,” he said. “There’s just no parallel for the demand.”

No kidding.

Sophos:

So, lets explain what’s going on here. Imagine you have a Mac. Imagine you have been really diligent about keeping your copy of Adobe Flash up-to-date (Adobe is commonly targeted by the bad guys, and so Adobe has been releasing regular security updates for Flash and PDF Reader)

Now, imagine (like me) you got your copy of Snow Leopard on Friday, and have now updated your computers.

Unfortunately during the course of that update (and unknown to you) Apple downgraded your installation of Flash to an earlier version (version 10.0.23.1), which is known not to be secure and is not patched against various security vulnerabilities.

The version you should be running is the latest version of Flash Player for Mac - 10.0.32.18.

Mac users are not informed that Snow Leopard has downgraded their version of Flash without permission, and that they are now exposed to a raft of potential attacks and exploits which have been targeted on Adobe’s software in recent months.

You can update your Flash plugin here.

MacFixIt:

We’re moving! We’re currently migrating all MacFixIt articles to our new home in CNET. We’ll be redirecting all traffic to the new site this afternoon, but if you want to get a sneak peak you can visit the site now at http://reviews.cnet.com/macfixit.

It’s kinda sad to see it go.

Gizmodo linked to this Cisco ad that blew my mind. Watch, but be warned, there’s partial nudity. And lots of sweet Cisco gear.

Creation from Re:Birth Films on Vimeo.

Mann’s had some issues, it seems:

Yes, I will update my apps on five computers. Yes, I will buy or borrow as many rubber chickens as I need to return all my preferences that have magically albeit subtly disappeared. Yes, the new Dock is pretty. Yes, I can’t wait to see all the cool apps people build using the extra gigawatts afforded by the 64-bit flux capacitor.

But, fucking A, guys. I realize you’re having a big, beardy lemon party about all these homeopathically non-obvious new features, but come on.

Don’t wag your finger at people like me for pointing out shit that shipped empirically broken. Let’s not conduct an auto de fe on the heretics who pose sensible, relevant, and acceptably reverent questions about whether parallelization is literally the body of Christ. Even when the screen hangs for 40 seconds for no Godly reason.

Backblaze, the online backup company, has posted a lengthy blog entry about the custom hardware they’ve designed to store customer data:

A Backblaze Storage Pod is a self-contained unit that puts storage online. It’s made up of a custom metal case with commodity hardware inside. Specifically, one pod contains one Intel Motherboard with four SATA cards plugged into it. The nine SATA cables run from the cards to nine port multiplier backplanes that each have five hard drives plugged directly into them (45 hard drives in total).

The design is impressive, but the fact the company is open about their design is even more impressive.

John Siracusa of Ars Technica has written incredible reviews of each OS X release for years — 10.5 Leopard, 10.4 Tiger, 10.3 Panther, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.1 Puma, the original release of OS X, and even the public beta.

His take on Snow Leopard is no different. All 23 pages of it are great. He covers the installation process, the 32- vs. 64-bit debate, QuickTime X, new development tools, various tweaks throughout the OS, performance increases and more.

Here’s the crux:

Though it’s obvious that Snow Leopard includes fewer external features than its predecessor, I’d wager that it has just as many, if not more internal changes than Leopard. This, I fear, means that the initial release of Snow Leopard will likely suffer the typical 10.x.0 bugs. There have already been reports of new bugs introduced to existing APIs in Snow Leopard. This is the exact opposite of Snow Leopard’s implied promise to users and developers that it would concentrate on making existing features faster and more robust without introducing new functionality and the accompanying new bugs.

On the other side of the coin, I imagine all the teams at Apple that worked on Snow Leopard absolutely reveled in the opportunity to polish their particular subsystems without being burdened by supporting the marketing-driven feature-of-the-month. In any long-lived software product, there needs to be this kind of release valve every few years, lest the entire code base go off into the weeds.

There’s been one other “no new features” release of Mac OS X. Mac OS X 10.1, released a mere six months after version 10.0, was handed out for free by Apple at the 2001 Seybold publishing conference and, later, at Apple retail stores. It was also available from Apple’s online store for $19.95 (along with a copy of Mac OS 9.2.1 for use in the Classic environment). This was a different time for Mac OS X. Versions 10.0 and 10.1 were slow, incomplete, and extremely immature; the transition from classic Mac OS was far from over.

Judged as a modern incarnation of the 10.1 release, Snow Leopard looks pretty darned good. The pricing is similar, and the benefits—to developers and to users—are greater. So is the risk. But again, that has more to do with how horrible Mac OS X 10.0 was. Choosing not to upgrade to 10.1 was unthinkable. Waiting a while to upgrade to Snow Leopard is reasonable if you want to be sure that all the software you care about is compatible. But don’t wait too long, because at $29 for the upgrade, I expect Snow Leopard adoption to be quite rapid. Software that will run only on Snow Leopard may be here before you know it.

Should you buy Mac OS X Snow Leopard? If you’re already running Leopard, then the answer is a resounding “yes.” If you’re still running Tiger, well, then it’s probably time for a new Mac anyway. When you buy one, it’ll come with Snow Leopard.

I noticed today just how much smaller the box has gotten since 10.0:

Mac|Life has discovered 100 tweaks on Snow Leopard — including some very obscure ones. It really shows the level of detail Apple went to on this release.

Mashable:

Last week, the Newspaper Association of America posted the quarterly financial data of the U.S. newspaper industry. It tracks both print and online revenues for the industry as a whole. But unlike past updates, the NAA did not promote these numbers. When you look at them, it’s easy to see why.

In Q2 2009, newspapers made $6.8 billion in print and online revenues. In the same quarter last year, the newspapers made $9.6 billion, a nearly $3 billion difference in the span of a year, or a full 29% from 2008 to 2009.

Ouch.

Reuters:

Apple Inc said on Monday that it would host a media event next week, when the company is widely expected to unveil an updated line of iPod media players.

Apple declined to say what products would be featured at the September 9 event, which was announced in an invitation emailed to members of the media.

The invitation featured an iPod and the tagline: “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it.”