Stan's List

Sales of both the iPhone and all the iPods, not surprisingly, hare been slow. Consumers have throttled back their discretionary spending with the possibility of a recession.

9to5Mac has received information that Apple will reduce the price of both iPhone and iPod Touch by $100 and discontinue the 8GB iPod Touch and iPhone. One reason could be memory prices have fallen. Also, with the 3G iPhone only months away, this creates some price spacing. Lower sales are the most likely. More …

The new prices are expected to be

16GB iPod Touch 16Gb iPhone - $399

32GB iPod Touch $399

The Shuttle Atlantis is at the space station with the much delayed lab in its cargo bay. Watch the installation on NASA TV? What channel?

NASA live TV is available for viewing by RealPlayer or by QuickTime via the Flip4Mac plugin (Media Player format) or of course, the poorly reviewed MS Media Player.

The RealPlayer url is http://www.nasa.ram/35037main_portal.ram. In RealPlayer “Open Location…” under the file menu. Once loaded in the viewer, save to favorites. The advantage of RealPlayer is you can watch and/or listen and continue browsing the internet.

If you go to the NASA TV web page and have Flip4Mac, the video will be displayed in the browser window with QuickTime.

MacNewsWorld article, The Mac Gaming Renaissance, Part 1, provides an update on Mac gaming. In the past, the Mac has had wonderful features, such as high quality monitors, and video cards were adequate. Yet, it was the move to Intel that increased market share. Recently reported by some as nearly 10 percent, this is the important factor for game developers. What is keeping developers from rapidly bringing games to the Mac?

The DOJ does not care about a single company creating a music store, internet or otherwise. Neither does Apple, as there has not been one, expect Amazon.com, that has keep Apple awake at nights. Yet, when you have a number of music companies thinking about starting the their own music store, the alarms go off at Pennsylvania Avenue. The Wall Street Journal reports “Universal and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the No. 1 and No. 2 music companies in the world, by market share, have gotten letters of inquiry from the Justice Department.”

This FireFox release fixes a number of security and stability issues discovered in Firefox 2.0.0.11. A list of fixed security issues is available.

As with FireFox, SeaMonkey 1.1.8 closes several security vulnerabilities and fixes several smaller problems found in previous versions. Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users.

The Adobe Reader 8.1.2 update addresses a number of customer workflow issues and security vulnerabilities while providing more stability.

The release notes list a number of resolved issues

ars technica has a review of both models of the MacBook Air. Is the extra cost of the SSD option worth it?

The $1,300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn’t cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity … Speedy read times are great, too, but they are balanced out by pokey write times.

The review includes benchmarks

This QuickTime update addresses CVE-ID: CVE-2008-0234:

The update is available for: Mac OS X v10.3.9, Mac OS X v10.4.9 or later, Mac OS X v10.5 or later, Windows Vista, XP SP2

Impact: Visiting a malicious website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution

Description: A heap buffer overflow exists in QuickTime’s handling of HTTP responses when RTSP tunneling is enabled. By enticing a user to visit a maliciously crafted webpage, an attacker may cause an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved bounds checking.

Available via Software Update or direct download.

ProKit 4.5 improves reliability for Apple’s professional applications and is recommended for all users of Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Express, Aperture, Logic Studio and Logic Express.

iPhone 7.1.2 addresses issues when publishing photos to a .Mac Web Gallery, improves overall stability, and fixes a number of other minor issues.

More specifically:

A format string vulnerability exists in iPhoto. By enticing a user to subscribe to a maliciously crafted photocast, a remote attacker may cause arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved handling of format strings when processing photocast subscriptions.