Reports of a potentially critical Snow Leopard bug that can erase a user’s account data have continued to surface since the operating system’s debut [Updated with Apple official comment].
Since Mac OS X 10.6 launched in late August, numerous reports online have detailed the issue, which is triggered by logging in and out of a guest account on a Snow Leopard machine. Upon logging back in to their regular account, users will find that it has been wiped of all data.
Photos claiming to be shots of the final box art for Apple’s upcoming operating system, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, have been posted, suggesting the product could be very close to retail.
The photos, sent to MacRumors, show what is alleged to be the Portuguese packaging and disc art. The art on the disc is consistent with the OS install icon found on the reported Golden Master of the software, Mac OS X 10.6 build 10A432.
Summary:
You can use the Open Firmware Password application to set up low-level password protection with Mac OS X v10.1 and later.
Apple Open Firmware Update 4.1.7 and later provide the groundwork for password protecting computers at a low level (Open Firmware Password Protection). This feature is off by default. Apple provides the Open Firmware Password utility for use only with Mac OS X v10.1 and later. Apple does not endorse or provide technical support for this feature when used with earlier versions of Mac OS or with any third-party software utilities.
Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard upgrade currently occupies two of the three top spots on Amazon’s software top seller list. The pre-sale prices are $29 for a single computer and $49 for a 5-user family pack.
Microsoft occupied the same two spots last month when it was pre-selling the Windows 7 Home Premium edition upgrade for $50 and the Professional edition for $100.
There’s a profound difference between the $29 Apple is charging, and Microsoft’s $50 offer: Apple’s price won’t expire.
There are two ways to do this, the 1st one which is the geeky way is by using a terminal, the other one is by downloading the application.
The 1st method:
1) Open Terminal (Application => Utilities => Terminal.app)
2) Type in this code:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder
The 2nd method:
1) Download the application Houdini
2) Press “Toggle File Visibility” to turn off/on file visibility.
That’s it!
Enjoy
Remember when it was first revealed the Windows XP could be installed and booted off of a USB flash drive? Well, great for Windows users. What about Mac users? We were left out in the cold. If one were to search hard enough in the vast Web index that is Google, one could find just the snippets of how to boot a system from a USB drive, how to set a drive as bootable, yadda yadda yadda. Nothing guiding the way to creating a bootable installation of Mac OS X on a flash drive. I’m here to help.
Based on corporate desktop operating data between Q3 2008 and Q2 2009, Forrester Research is reporting that Windows XP is slowly being pushed to the sidelines to make room for Windows Vista and Macs in the enterprise.
Windows Vista is now installed on almost one out of eight corporate desktops. Mac OS X has also made recent gains, though Windows’ share of corporate desktops remained dominant. Windows had 96.2 percent of the enterprise market, with much of that still accounted for by Windows XP. Nevertheless, the numbers are starting to move.
Forrester had the following summary of the good news for Microsoft and Apple:
The Conficker Virus is Windows only but it’s garnering a lot of attention, so if you’re on a Windows LAN at home, work, or school, you may want to check if the Windows machines are vulnerable or infected with Conficker. You can do this from your immune Mac OS X machine pretty easily with a cool command line utility called nmap. Here are the steps:
1) First you need to install the command line tool nmap, you can download the OS X install package from the official nmap site here. I recommend downloading the latest beta version to have the most up-to-date scanning scripts.
If you regularly read and annotate PDF documents, you need Skim. It’s more powerful than Preview, but lighter on its feet than Acrobat Profesional. As well as making notes, you can bookmark sections, search content, capture snapshots and read files in full-screen mode. Skim also makes a decent presentation tool, as you can add transitions and ise the Apple Remote to control it. If that’s not enough, you can download remote PDF files, preview internal links and focus on specific sections using a reading bar.
When Apple unveiled the iPhone 3.0 OS and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard at WWDC recently, I was struck that one of the most significant additions to Snow Leopard came from the iPhone 2.0 OS: support for ActiveSync and native Microsoft Exchange.
More than that, two of the cool-factor features in Snow Leopard also came from the iPhone: support for Chinese character input via trackpad gestures, and time-zone auto-detect based on Wi-Fi router “fingerprints.”
