This article was written on March 28, 2007 by CyberNet.
OpenOffice 2.2 was just released after about a month’s worth of delays. The official announcement has yet to be made on the homepage, but the downloads for OpenOffice 2.2 are currently available on their FTP.
This version actually fixes three highly critical vulnerabilities that were recently found. One of them only applies to a Linux/Solaris system, but the other two apply to all distributions:
StarCalc Vulnerability – If a user opens an untrusted StarCalc document it can potentially run arbitrary code supplied in the file.
URL Handling Security Vulnerability (Linux/Solaris) – If a user running OpenOffice.org from a shell terminal in Linux or Solaris opens an untrusted URL, malicious code could be arbitrarily executed on the user’s computer.
Besides for the vulnerabilities being fixed, there are also some new things that are worth mentioning:
Improved text display throughout the entire office suite.
Enhanced PDF export functionality that supports user-definable form fields and bookmark creation.
Cosmetic changes in Vista (example: New File dialogue box).
Apple Mac Intel has several stability improvements.
OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet has received additional enhancements to its support for Microsoft file formats, including improved support for Pivot Tables and some specialized trigonometric functions.
OpenOffice Base, the database component, has improved SQL editing functionality as well as a new “Queries within Queries” feature.
OpenOffice Impress, the presentations component, offers improvements in the handling of hidden slides which has been made more intuitive.
Here is the What’s New page for the last release candidate of OpenOffice 2.2, which also happens to be what got released as the final product. There’s quite a bit of information on there though, and most of you probably won’t want to sift through it.
I briefly flipped through the OpenOffice forum to see what user’s first impressions were of the new release. One of the last comments on the forum says:
No new features that I have noticed with my daily use of Writer and Calc. I have reverted back to the 2.0.4 Novell Edition and actually ‘gained’ many new features. … I used to look forward to new releases of OOo with more enthusiasm. But lately there hasn’t been a whole lot to look forward to. In all honesty, the Novell Edition has been a pleasant surprise on Windows for me.
I actually feel the same way as that user. New versions of OpenOffice are being released every few months, but where are those awesome features that will help set it apart? I did find the page for the Novell version of OpenOffice that the person mentioned in the forum, and here are the special features that it is supposed to have:
Enhancements to Writer
Enhanced Support for Microsoft Office File Formats
E-Mail as Microsoft Office Document
Excel VBA Macro Interoperability
Improved Data Pilot Support
Enhanced Fonts
ODMA Integration
Multimedia Support in Presentations
I haven’t tried the Novell edition myself because the regular version of OpenOffice has always done just fine for me. However, I do a lot of work with Excel VBA Macros and for that reason I think I will give it a shot. It will take a little while for me to download the whopping 440MB ISO image though.
The next release of OpenOffice is planned for June 5. They are typically on a 3–month schedule, but they have decided to change things up a bit by making every other release dedicated purely for bug fixes. That would mean the June 5 release will not have anything new included and will only be bug fixes. Then after that makes it out the door their focus will be on version OpenOffice 2.3 which is expected around September 4.
You pick up your iPhone, switch on your DSLR, and they start talking to each other. The camera beams its point-of-view wirelessly back to the phone, you tap the screen and the camera focuses. Tap the on-screen “Fire” button and the picture is taken, appearing seconds later on the iPhone’s screen. You tap and zoom in to check focus.
This futuristic scenario tok place today in my office, with one important addition: a computer. The software is called DSLR Remote, by Onone software, and it allows you to control your DSLR camera over a wireless network using an iPhone or iPod Touch. It also requires a computer connected directly to the camera’s USB port.
I have been playing with the application for the last day and it is a lot of fun, and in some situations it could be a very useful tool. But it is far from ready in a proper professional environment where bulletproof software is required.
First, you hook up the camera to a computer. On that computer you need the to install some companion software (Mac or PC) called DSLR Camera Remote Server, which is what does the actual controlling of the camera. Here, too, you can specify where images are saved and have a copy made to be sent off to Adobe Lightroom for an (almost) instant preview.
Once this is running (after the first use you can forget about it), you fire up the iPhone app and see the simple main screen, with access to various settings. From here you can control picture format (anything the camera can do, pretty much, including RAW plus various qualities of jpg), white balance and, depending on which mode the camera is in, shutter speed and aperture. There are also easy exposure compensation and ISO settings.
From here you can head to settings, for more tweaking and to switch on Live View. This gives you a live video feed from the camera, and when you tap the image, the camera will focus. You can’t choose the focus point like you can with the iPhone’s built-in camera: what the camera focuses on depends on in-camera settings.
So far, this is all quite responsive. I tried it out on my MSI Wind netbook, which runs OS X, and it worked, although oddly the iPhone app was very jittery, with disappearing pictures and buttons. Using it with a real MacBook worked fine, however. I have no idea why this should be.
When you finally take a snap, it appears a few seconds later on your iPhone’s screen, and a few more seconds after that it shows up in Lightroom (if you are using this. You don’t have to). Double-tapping the image zooms to that point, but it’s neither very responsive nor accurate. And once you are zoomed in you can’t drag around the image with a finger, an odd omission for the iPhone. In fact, the entire viewing part of the experience is sluggish. I’m using a second-generation iPod Touch, so those with a faster iPhone 3GS might fare better.
Still, the app is only at v1.1 and is adding features. If you are shooting indoors, and especially if you are shooting sel-portraits, the ability to shoot tethered with a remote control and a live feed to check framing is very nice, and $20 is probably a fair price. The $2 lite version pretty much only lets your trigger the shutter from afar, and given that you’ll still need to lug a computer to do this, buying a dedicated remote may be more practical, if more expensive.
As fun and sometimes useful toy, we recommend it. For pro-use, not so much.
OS XSnow Leopard seems to do nothing really new. And yet, it could be their most important OS since 10.0.0. Updated the Bad Stuff section.
Snow Leopard, as a follow up to Leopard, is almost absurdly insubstantial at first glance. The new operating system takes the same old boring, every day tasks like opening files, for example, and makes them happen subtly faster. But that performance is not being utilized by any third-party programs right now. And there are practically no new first-party programs by Apple. Nope, mostly just rewritten old ones and dozens of little interface tweaks. Some fanboys will ask, incredulously, “This is a new operating system?!” Those people are missing the point.
On deeper inspection, Snow Leopard’s inconspicuous aspects—performance squeezed from underused CPU multicores/GPUs and basic UI tweaks—are found to be the kind of refinement generally reserved for virtuosity. These speed optimizations are deep, reminding me of when a master martial artist puts the entirety of his weight behind a strike (while a neophyte would flails his limbs like a henchman in a Bruce Lee movie). The little UI tweaks are no different than when a great sculptor’s chisel works to remove everything non-essential during the final steps on a statue. Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible.
And if you think that’s bullshit, well, I can’t say you’re completely out of your mind, but there’s always the consolation that this OS upgrade costs about the same as a used Xbox game.
Performance
After some benching on a first-generation MacBook Air, an older MacBook Pro 15 and a pair of current-gen 13-inch MacBook Pros, it’s clear that Snow Leopard is faster—sometimes drastically—but almost never in third-party applications. Some people like charts. If you feel like skipping them, here’s a summary:
• In preview, where opening six 35MB 20,000-pixel-wide images of Tokyo’s cityscape each took half the time in Snow. • Safari’s javascript processing, using Snow’s specific tech, is about 40% faster—useful for all those Ajax-heavy websites we all use now. • Time Machine backed up a 1GB dataset nearly 40% faster than on Leopard. • There was no discernible improvement in non-optimized 32-bit programs: Photoshop testing and Handbrake DVD ripping times were identical. High-def playback on QuickTime 7 (not the new QuickTime 10 version) was identical in CPU usage, too. • Synthetic benchmark results were interesting: The aging Xbench app, which tests everything from graphics to disks to memory, took a slight performance dip, implying older software may, too. Geekbench, a multicore optimized, newer benchmark available in both 32- and 64-bit saw a lift on Snow. But the test is only focused on theoretical CPU and memory performance, which may not translate into every day use.
Here’s a video of those JPEGs cranking open in parallel, rather than serial, fashion:
Impressed yet?! You shouldn’t be. Well, not by the act of opening images. But you definitely should once you realize what it really shows: Apple just pulled 2X performance out of my hardware, by software alone. Tada!
How is Snow Leopard Getting Faster?
There are three fundamental reasons for these performance increases: Better multicore processor support through what Apple calls GCD (Grand Central Dispatch—which we explain here); OpenCL APIs for utilizing the processing power in any graphics cards above the GeForce 8600 Series for video acceleration and general purpose computing; and they’ve rewritten almost all the applications that ship with Snow Leopard to run in 64-bit mode while taking advantage of GCD and CoreCL. So it’s making processing for today’s chips more efficient and easier for developers. And giving programs a way to utilize the power of the video card when it’s not playing games. It also allows programs to run in 64-bit mode, the main theoretical advantage of which is to allow these programs to access more than 4GB of RAM on systems that have it. (More on all that at the bottom of the page.*)
Snow Leopard is efficient in other ways too. Install size is down to 10GB from 16GB, most of that weight shed by losing printer drivers and the PowerPC part of universal binaries. (Snow Leopard runs only on Intel hardware and downloads printer drivers it needs from the net, as you need them.) Installation is also quicker by about 30% on any given piece of hardware (consistent with the smaller install footprint). And in a move that can only be categorized as showing off, Snow Leopard can finish its installation if you accidentally power it down midway through.
But I’m digressing. The bottom line on performance is that the programs included with this operating system will do just about everything faster on modern machines that support those technologies—that is, most of the multicore Macs or those running Nvidia 8600 series video cards or higher. And not just a bit faster, but faster on the scale of 25 to 50% which means there’s typically a good amount of latent processing juju in your video card and CPU. Great, but to be honest, it’s a bit less impressive than it sounds in real life today, because all the basic system tasks happen fast anyhow. (When was the last time you sat around while a JPEG opened up?) Again, no other apps that use GCD or OpenCL are available from software makers outside of Apple. But if the theoretical gains are here to be had via easier programming methods, I’d bet those apps will come soon.
Interface Streamlining
There are 5 major changes in the UI:
Finder Icons now scale, courtesy of a little slider on the bottom right of the pane, up to 512 pixels wide. It sounds wasteful, except that video files can be played directly from the finder window. Honestly, I don’t prefer it more than the QuickLook (hitting spacebar to popup a quick preview window) in Leopard and carried over in Snow Leopard. I don’t mind the option, but I have no use for this feature.
Dock OS X’s dock has been interactive for some time. You could drag a file to an icon there to somehow get the two to interact, but you could never use the dock to select which window instance of an app to use. Now clicking and holding (empty handed or with a file) triggers Expose, Apple’s window management doohickey, for that particular application. Being able to quickly pop out an app’s windows and then select the right one in a single step is terrific, but you still can’t use Expose to quickly find the browser tab you want within a window. That’s an increasingly big problem as the time spent in browsers goes up.
Expose Expose itself has been improved, too. When viewing all the windows for one application in Expose’s zoomed-out view, the items are now arranged in a grid instead of a single, impossible to read line, and each window has a text label. (That’s helpful when you’re trying to recognize a particular window amongst lots of similar looking—and rendered tiny by Expose—text documents or emails.) Minimized windows are also now shown at the bottom of the screen under a faint line dividing it from other maximized windows from the same application.
Stacks When Stacks made its debut in Leopard, the dock mounted quick file viewer was too twitchy to use. You’d try to move a file andit would snap close, offended you’d try to do anything but open a file. And the space was always too limited in fan or grid mode to display more than a few icons. Stacks improves on this by allowing scrolling in the Grid view, but by also adding a smart list view capable of showing numerous files at once. It’s an improvement.
QuickTime 10 Putting QuickTime in this list is questionable, but aside from its acceleration, there are some major changes here. That is, as you mouse away, the video screen loses all borders and buttons, appearing like the video equivalent of an infinity pool or one of those ultra thin LCDs. The program has a new capture system for encording video and audio clips and even voice annotated screen capture sessions. It also borrows the trimming thumbnail line from iMovie ’09. I love it.
Let’s face it, in the big picture, calling these changes “major” is generous. But there are literally dozens of even smaller examples, all welcome, all reducing friction points in the OS’s usage, eliminating clicks needed and making the OS less obtuse. You can read about all of these additions in the gallery below, or here on one page, if you’re curious to read about them all. If not, take my word for it: They all make things better.
While it’s not UI- or performance-related, one additional Snow Leopard benefit is free Exchange support, so your mail, address books and calendars can all sync through it. I don’t work at a corporation, so I don’t care, but you may.
Bad Things
What kind of sick fanboy would I be if I didn’t mention the imperfections?
And Safari 4’s ability to segment unstable browser plugins made itself useful when many more flash powered pages crashed in Snow Leopard than Leopard.
Other reviewers have discovered that Snow Leopard has disabled or quirk-ified some of their apps.
I’ve also noticed that Expose doesn’t work as smoothly with spaces now. You sometimes select a window on another virtual spaces desktop and it won’t bring the window up top.
If you’ve got some third part mission critical app that you need to run every day, you should double check its compatibility and wait for a new version before upgrading your OS. Look before you leap here. The OS isn’t so radically new that you have to have it right this moment.
Meow
The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you’re looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard’s biggest feature is that it doesn’t have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.
Uses latent multicore and GPU power to speed up the apps it comes with by relatively huge amounts
Costs $30 to upgrade
Still haven’t seen any third party apps rewritten to take advantage of Snow Leopard’s speed yet
*Performance Background: You May Skip This Section. Today’s chips have hovered in the 2-3.6GHz range for some time, with gains in theoretical processing power made by increasing the number of CPU cores on one chip and optimizing the silicon in those cores. Think about it as roof shingles: It’s easier to protect your roof with lots of little shingles than one huge one. Unfortunately, the power afforded by the additional CPU cores has largely gone to waste, because it’s difficult to write code that takes full advantage of multiple cores. The programmer has to write the application in a way that breaks down large problems into multiple smaller problems (called threads), each of which runs on a single CPU core. The application then becomes a traffic cop keeping threads in sync. If any part gets out of sync, the app crashes or hangs.
This problem is made more complex because many apps are written with a maximum number of threads in mind. While some workloads, such as video encoding or photo processing can take advantage of many cores innately, most need to have some work done to add support for more threads, so future-proofing has been difficult. I don’t know if programming GCD is easier than straight-up multiple-core programming—we cover some of those details here—but the key here is that Apple’s created a middleware that developers can write for, which automatically scales up to work with the number of CPU cores or other hardware in your system. The developer writes for GCD, while the system handles the gruntwork. Apple hopes more people will use this easier, more future-proofed way to tap into multiple-core power. Of course, no one has so far, except Apple programmers themselves. This explains why Finder, Preview and basically everything else that ships with Snow Leopard run faster. But in my tests, Photoshop, still a 32-bit program on the Mac and written without any support of GCD or OpenCL, showed less than 1% variation from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Still, as we can see from the system apps, there’s potential here. And let’s face it, the majority of us are not rendering Photoshop files all day, so this is performance you can put in your pocket today.
There’s a story of efficiency here, too, however. Because GCD is better at managing resources, a program like, Mail, for example, shows less system impact (thread usage, cpu usage) while sitting idle in Snow Leopard, than on Leopard. When testing OpenCL’s hardware acceleration, something Windows machines have had for awhile, by playing a 1080p trailer of James Cameron’s awesome new Avatar movie, CPU usage dropped drastically when machines were using the 64-bit CoreCL and GCD supported version of QuickTime. Any modern machine can play 1080p video well, but here, we were talking about Snow Leopard causing the strain on the system to take total CPU usage from 30% to 16% on the 13-inch MacBook Pros. Other apps will eventually be able to use these GPU superpowers, but what Apple claims is the real potential for GPU processing is that OpenCL will let computers use video cards for not only 3D acceleration, video encoding, and heavy math, but more general computing tasks, too, because its written in a non-specific (C-based) programming language.
Furthermore, there have been a number of good articles questioning the speed benefits of 64-bit computing. Apple only goes so far to claim that math-based tasks benefit from the larger bus, but generally the only concrete advantage of 64-bit computing is the ability apps gain to manipulate over 4GB of RAM, a 32-bit limitation. Apple’s dev docs go on to say that some apps will incur a penalty if going 64-bit. So, rewriting apps in 64-bit versions is not a surefire recipe for speed improvement.
In many cases, with many of the built-in apps, Apple attributes the performance improvements to all three core technologies above. That stuff that means not so much today, but might mean a lot tomorrow as GPUs get faster and CPUs gain more cores and there’s already an infrastructure in place to take advantage of all that.
Apple’s next operating system, Mac OS X 10.6, aka “Snow Leopard,” hits stores Friday. If you’re already a Mac user, you’re probably going to get the upgrade sooner or later, thanks to its low $30 price tag.
But it’s not a major upgrade. Apple has stressed that this OS mainly delivers a performance boost for Macs equipped with 64-bit Intel processors. Thus, many of the changes aren’t going to be immediately obvious.
Apple did not provide Wired.com with an official review copy, but we did have a chance to test drive the “Gold Master” version of Snow Leopard, which should be functionally identical to what’s in stores Friday. Based on our tests, here’s a list of things you should know about the OS before installing it on your machine.
It’s a Performance Boost, Not a Roaring Upgrade
The changes in Snow Leopard are, for the most part, invisible. This OS is built to take full advantage of faster 64-bit Intel Macs. That means all apps included with Snow Leopard have been rewritten for 64-bit processors. Apps coded by third-party developers who opt to rewrite their software with 64-bit support will also be snappier.
If your activities are not very processor-intensive, then you won’t notice a huge difference. If you’re editing movies or photos regularly, you’ll immediately be able to feel the improvement. We tested movie exporting in iMovie and photo editing in iPhoto, and both apps ran much more smoothly than on Leopard.
There are a number of other performance improvements that aren’t obvious. For example, when you wake up a MacBook from sleep, the AirPort connection will only take about a second to reconnect to your Wi-Fi network, compared with a few seconds on Leopard. Also, the Finder, which you use to navigate your files, is a lot less laggy than before: Thumbnails display almost immediately, and scanning through folders is smooth. Subtle and sweet.
Not All Third-Party Software Is Guaranteed to Work
As is often the case with OS upgrades, there are going to be some third-party developers who procrastinated on testing their software to ensure compatibility with Snow Leopard. Most applications working on Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, will most likely work in Snow Leopard. Leopard was a 64-bit system that also supported 32-bit software, and Snow Leopard is still compatible with 32-bit applications.
If a developer hasn’t rewritten his or her application for Snow Leopard, that most likely means it’s just not 64-bit capable. It’ll still work, but just not as fast as it could be if it were optimized for 64-bit computing.
However, if you’re running third-party software that you absolutely need, it’s always smart to check the developer’s website to see if the app has been tested on Snow Leopard. Adobe, for example, has already stated that Creative Suite 3 has not been tested on Snow Leopard and may have compatibility issues. We were able to test Adobe Photoshop CS 3 on Snow Leopard and thus far have had no problems. We also tested QuickSilver, App Zapper, Adium, Tweetie and Evernote, and all seemed to work fine. But do some research and pretest on a nonproduction system if you’re concerned.
Apple has promised that after installing Snow Leopard, the OS will note which applications are incompatible with it. On the test machine we saw, none of the apps became incompatible after upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
In short, if you’re running relatively new software, you probably won’t have to worry. With more dated apps (three years or older) you should consider double-checking.
Minor Tweaks to Interface, Usability
Don’t expect this to be a brand new experience: Most of the UI changes are small. For example, Exposé, the window-management tool, has been implemented into the Dock. Clicking a Dock icon and holding it down will show only the windows of the selected app, which could be useful if you’re a digital clutterbug like I am. (See screenshot at right.)
Another small but good change: When snapping screenshots, the images are assigned a file name containing a time stamp of when they were taken.
The most significant refinement to built-in software occurs in QuickTime, now dubbed QuickTime Player X. The player interface gets a makeover — a gray-and-black gradient (see screenshot at right). Other than that, there are new tools including movie recording from your webcam, audio recording from your microphone, and screencasting.
Hardware Requirements: No Support for PowerPC Macs
If you own an older Mac powered by a PowerPC chip (rather than Intel), then you’re out of luck: Snow Leopard won’t run on your machine. The requirements are as follows: You must own an Intel Mac equipped with at least 1GB of memory, and the install requires at least 5GB of free hard drive space for the install. And of course, you’ll need a DVD drive to be able to read the disc and run the installation. (MacBook Air owners: We hope you have an external optical drive.)
Not sure what kind of processor you own? Click on the Apple icon in the upper-left corner and select “About This Mac.” If the word “PowerPC” comes up in the “Processor” field, then you can not run this upgrade. If it says “Intel,” you’re fine.
You Get up to 7 GB More Hard-Drive Space
Snow Leopard is less bloated with system files than its predecessor, so after upgrading to it, you’ll get some free space. Apple promises the install “frees up to 7 GB of drive space.” The upgrade freed up only 3.5 GB of space for our test machine, but hey — we’re not complaining. More space is always better.
The Upgrade Only Costs $30
Apple is advertising Snow Leopard as a $30 upgrade “for Leopard users.” If you’re upgrading from Tiger, Apple advises you to purchase the full Mac Box Set for $170. However, there don’t appear to be technical reasons preventing a Tiger-to-Snow Leopard upgrade.
Wired.com was able to confirm that the Snow Leopard upgrade can be installed on a machine running Tiger. Of course, the transition isn’t guaranteed to be as smooth as it would be from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and that’s because some older, Tiger-only third-party applications need to be upgraded to newer versions that work with Leopard or Snow Leopard.
Separately, Lifehacker has confirmed that it was able to erase a hard drive and install Snow Leopard. That means if you backup your files on Tiger, you should be technically able to buy Snow Leopard for $30, install it on a clean drive and then migrate your files over. Again, you’ll likely have to download newer versions of third-party software that are Leopard — or Snow Leopard — compatible. That extra work is probably worth it, because this OS is a pretty big performance upgrade if you’re switching from Tiger.
Of course, using the $30 upgrade to go from Tiger to Snow Leopard may violate Apple’s terms of service. We were unable to confirm this with Apple, which did not respond to our queries about Snow Leopard pricing.
Conclusion
This upgrade won’t deliver any radical interface changes to blow you away (not that we would want it to), but the $30 price is more than fair for the number of performance improvements Snow Leopard delivers.
Stay tuned for Wired.com’s full review of Snow Leopard as we continue to test it over the week.
Updated 6 p.m. PDT to correct a statement about Exposé functionality.
Apple’s next-generation operating system Mac OS X Snow Leopard is two days away, and the $30 price tag is a strong incentive for Mac users to upgrade. But this news might get some eager Mac fans to slam on the brakes: Adobe Creative Suite 3, including Photoshop, may have some compatibility issues with the new OS.
In a frequently-asked-questions document, Adobe said only its newer Creative Suite 4 has been tested for compatibility with Apple’s new OS. Adobe, however, could not make the same promise for Creative Suite 3.
“Adobe will support Creative Suite 4 software running with Snow Leopard according to its standard customer support policies,” the document states [PDF]. “Older versions of Adobe Creative Suite software were not designed to run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6), so you may experience issues installing and using the software for which there are no solutions.”
John Nack, principal product manager of Adobe Photoshop, said in his blog that this does not mean CS3 will not be supported at all. He said CS3 has not been tested on Snow Leopard and “The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation.”
Nonetheless, those who purchased Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 will undoubtedly be peeved. When it became available in 2007, the CS3 software bundle cost at least $1,700, and Creative Suite 4 came out just one year later.
Here at Wired.com we’ll put Adobe CS3 to the test when we get our hands on Snow Leopard. Stay tuned.
This article was written on May 30, 2008 by CyberNet.
One of the things that people complain the most about in Vista are the User Account Control (UAC) prompts, but they have actually started to prove themselves worth while. Over the past few months several people have asked me why the prompts can take awhile to appear, and also why the background dims itself. What they don’t realize is what’s going on behind-the-scenes to make UAC more than just a simple prompt.
Each time a UAC prompt is displayed the screen dims to indicate that Windows has switched to the Secure Desktop mode. This is significant because only trusted processes running as SYSTEM will be able to run while in the Secure Desktop mode.
The Secure Desktop mode is also used when you press Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and even on the login screen. The reason why this is important is that it doesn’t allow other applications (good or bad) to access those areas. For example, you wouldn’t want an application trying to snag your Windows password by monitoring the login screen, and Secure Desktop helps prevent that.
Similarly the Secure Desktop mode keeps malicious applications from trying to manipulate the UAC prompt. The UAC blog gives a good example of why the Secure Desktop is an important aspect of UAC:
So how does this spoofing attack work? You hide the real mouse cursor and show a fake one some number of pixels offset to the real one. So now when the user mouses over the elevation UI attempting to cancel it since the malicious software could brazenly announce itself as “I’m gonna own your PC.exe”, what’s really happening is that the hot spot of the mouse is invisibly over the “Allow” button. Click! Not what you thought would happen. This type of attack is also blocked on the Secure Desktop.
As you can imagine switching into the Secure Desktop mode can take a few seconds, just like it does to bring up the Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen. You can disable the Secure Desktop mode while leaving UAC enabled, but that just leaves the door open for malicious applications to spoof any of the prompts. At that point you might as well just disable UAC all together.
To sum things up: there is a valid reason why your screen dims itself when showing a UAC prompt, and it’s not because it just looks cool.
We know that some of you streaming media fanatics have been indulging in this one for the better part of a month already, but just in case: tomorrow the kids at MediaMall officially announce the beta release of PlayOn for Wii. The software license runs $39.99, but there is a 14-day free trial — so you can see for yourself whether or not it makes sense to tie up your console with re-runs of CSI: Miami when you could be better off shakin’ your groove thing to Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party. Hit the read link and decide for yourself.
This article was written on June 23, 2008 by CyberNet.
Mac only Last week Windows users got the joy of carrying Firefox 3 in their pockets, and today Mac users can do the same thing! Earlier today Portable Firefox 3.0 for Mac OS X was released, and with it you can carry your browser around with you from one Mac to another.
One of the things that I really like about Portable Firefox 3 for Mac over the Windows counterpart is that it asks whether you want to import your existing Firefox profile into the portable version (as seen in the screenshot above). It will copy over your entire profile including bookmarks, passwords, extensions, history, cookies, and more. Of course Windows users can manually do this with their version of Firefox Portable, but you have to know where your profile is located.
Before getting started with Portable Firefox you’ll want to ensure that there is plenty of space on your memory card or USB drive. For the Mac version they recommend at least 57MB, and the Windows version is about 77MB.
This article was written on June 28, 2006 by CyberNet.
Microsoft has decided to let users remove or disable the WGA notifications, but they didn’t make it easy! They could have made some simple tool that you could download or even a patch, but no they make you go through and do the dirty work. Here are the steps that you need to take to DISABLE the notifications (removing the WGA checking is a long process):
Log on to the computer by using an account that has administrative permissions.
Make sure that the WGA Notifications version that exists on the computer is a pilot version. The version format for the pilot version is 1.5.0532.x. In this case, you can uninstall versions 527-532 only. For example, you can uninstall versions that range from 1.5.0527.0 to 1.5.0532.2. To find the WGA Notifications version, follow these steps:
Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
Double-click Add or uninstall Programs, locate and then click Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications, and then click Click here for support information.
In the Support Info dialog box, verify the version number, and then click Close.
Rename the following files by changing the extension to .old:
Rename %Windir%\system32\WgaLogon.dll to %Windir%\system32\WgaLogon.old
Rename %Windir%\system32\WgaTray.exe to %Windir%\system32\WgaTray.old
Restart the computer.
I would post the instructions for removing WGA as well but those are much much longer. If you want those instructions then you can follow the article Microsoft had posted on disabling/removing WGA. God speed to you!
Apple’s next-generation operating system, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, is due for release Friday.
The company on Monday issued a press release detailing the operating system’s new features and improvements, which include the following:
A more responsive Finder
Mail that loads messages up to twice as fast
Time Machine with an up to 80 percent faster initial backup
a Dock with Exposé integration
QuickTime X with a redesigned player that allows users to easily view, record, trim and share video
a 64-bit version of Safari 4 that is up to 50 percent faster and resistant to crashes caused by plug-ins.
Also, Snow Leopard will free up to 7GB of hard drive space for upgrading Mac users once installed, according to Apple.
Available for pre-order, the Snow Leopard upgrade costs $30 for current Mac OS X Leopard users, $10 for customers who purchased a Mac after June 8, and $170 for those using older versions of Mac OS X (i.e. Tiger, OS X 10.4).
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
OpenOffice 2.2 was just released after about a month’s worth of delays. The official announcement has yet to be made on the homepage, but the downloads for OpenOffice 2.2 are currently available on their FTP.
I haven’t tried the Novell edition myself because the regular version of OpenOffice has always done just fine for me. However, I do a lot of work with Excel VBA Macros and for that reason I think I will give it a shot. It will take a little while for me to download the whopping 440MB ISO image though.
Uses latent multicore and GPU power to speed up
Still haven’t seen any third party apps
No major new functionality might turn off
One of the things that people complain the most about in Vista are the User Account Control (UAC) prompts, but they have actually 
Mac only 
