Stan's List

iLife Support 8.3
iLife Support provides system software components shared by all iLife ‘08 applications. This update improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues. It is recommended for all users for iLife ‘08.

iMovie 7.1.4
This update addresses general compatibility issues, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.

iPhoto 7.1.4
This update contains new holiday greeting card and postcard themes for use with Apple print products. This update also addresses general compatibility issues, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.

iWeb 2.0.4
This update addresses general compatibility issues, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.

Minimum requirements:

QuickTime 7.5, Mac OS X 10.4.11, iPhoto 7.1 or later.

Mellanox’s 40Gb/s InfiniBand technology is part of the equation. VT has replaced their G5’s, possibly out of economics especially if Apple has had anything to do with it. The cluster is quite impressive. Even a fraction of it would compliment most science and math departments.

The new system consists of 324 Apple® Mac® Pro Servers with the total of 2592 CPU cores efficiently connected with ConnectX® 40Gb/s InfiniBand adapters and InfiniScale® IV switches, and 40Gb/s copper cables from Amphenol and W.L. Gore & Associates. The system’s performance is ranked among the Top 100 systems of the June 2008 Top500 list of supercomputers. CHECS will be leveraging the system and the new InfiniBand capabilities of congestion control and adaptive routing for expanding high-end computing research activities, in particular in the areas of power aware systems, transparent distributed shared memory systems and high-performance distributed storage systems.

Apple had a stellar announcement today.

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2008 third quarter ended June 28, 2008. The Company posted revenue of $7.46 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.07 billion, or $1.19 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $5.41 billion and net quarterly profit of $818 million, or $.92 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 34.8 percent, down from 36.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 42 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Apple will provide live streaming of its Q3 2008 financial results conference call utilizing QuickTime®, Apple’s standards-based technology for live and on-demand audio and video streaming. The live webcast will begin at 2:00 p.m. PDT on Monday, July 21, 2008 at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsQ308/ and will also be available for replay.

Leopard includes modifications to the command-shift-4 command, allowing selection of a rectangular area, rather than the entire screen.

• Press Shift to grow along one axis only
• Press Option to grow from the center (rather than from the top-left corner).
• Press Spacebar to lock the rectangle’s size and drag it to a new position

Watching Apple has descriptions and diagrams of the new options for that command.

AppleInsider has links to Apple Discussions of 3rd party app crashes or hangs. Other reports of lags in the interface operations and audio echoing. Unreliable GPS mapping and non-working tilt sensor reported by a few users.

iPhone 3G Lag is intolerable! Video examples included.

iPhone 3G bluetooth echo

iPhone 3G GPS Problem

Volume changes on its own?

iPhone ring volume resetting

None of these issues affect the original iPhone even running 2.0.

Also reported is that Apple is working on a 2.0.1 update.

Silicon Alley Insider: The second major threat, however, comes from a company that Microsoft once left on the edge of death: Apple (In fact, Microsoft actually helped save Apple once, by becoming a shareholder, so it could demonstrate to regulators that it did, in fact, have a competitor. At the time, it didn’t).

Editorial; At the time we were confused, it really did not make sense. Later, Apple had QuickTime, and MS wanted it. Apple caught MS incorporating it in media player. That is why MS made a $150 million investment. MS could have calculated that it was in their best interest to maintain a “competitor”, but I wager their best interest was to avoid embarrassment.

Yearly growth of 38%, casued Apple to over take Acer, Gateway and PackerBell. Apple is to announce their next quarter earnings next week. We’ve come expect good reports. Acer was down 20%, actually causing the exchange of places. Again, Apple is not recognized for consistency. 10% is the magic number, making revenue and profit advance seemingly exponentially. 2.4 million Mac sales will be a nice announcement. Apple 2.0 cooperated with AppleInsider.

OpenOffice 3.0b2 has been release in Aqua, making X11 unnecessary. With NeoOffice, the long time Aqua representative of the open office suites, it will be interest to watch its future. The 3.0 Beta 2 - Release Notes has what is new. OpenOffice comes in Intel and PPC versions

Firefox 3.0.1 fixed several stability issues:

Fixed an issue where the phishing and malware database did not update on first launch. Under certain circumstances, Firefox 3.0 did not properly save the SSL certificate exceptions list.

Fixed a Linux issues where, for users on a PPP connection (dialup or DSL) Firefox always started in “Offline” mode (bug 424626).

Plus 3 security patches:

MFSA 2008-36 Crash with malformed GIF file on Mac OS X
MFSA 2008-35 Command-line URLs launch multiple tabs when Firefox not running
MFSA 2008-34 Remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter

In an acknowledgement that the introduction was bungled, Apple states you qualify for the extension if you meet one of the following:

* you were a .Mac member whose account was active as of July 9, 2008
* you are a new MobileMe member who created your account on or before July 15, 2008 at 7:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time

Apple has a FAQ on the subject answering a number of membership questions, further clarifying who qualifies.