read more | digg story

read more | digg story

read more | digg story

It’s a good thing hardware is becoming more powerful. The new Mac OS will feature apps such as Disco builtin to the operating system. Disco burns CDs and DVDs…and smokes while it does it.

FYI, Disco has been around for a while now, so if you don’t want to wait to have your Mac smoke you can get it here (http://www.discoapp.com/).  Click here if you want to see what it looks like in this Google video.

read more | digg story

The same way that software developers tend to develop for platforms that allow them to reach the largest possible audience, hackers and virus writers target systems for maximum return. It is simply human nature. People do not expend effort to receive minimal returns. For this reason, IE and Windows have both been heavily targeted where for the time being, the Mac is simply a curiousity for malware authors.

Please understand that i’m not making a statement about whether one operating system is more or less secure than the other. I make my living developing software for both platforms and enjoy the unique features of each. I’ve enjoyed the rivalry between the two companies and believe that the users have thoroughly benefited from the constant one-upmanship. What I am saying is that the state of security for each is not relevant. As long as humans use computers, there will be a way to exploit systems and take advantage of their users.

Currently, there are hundreds of viruses with thousands of variants for Windows operating systems. For the Mac, every single individual vulnerability makes the news partly because there are so few and partly because the Mac is marketed as a much more secure operating system.

I predict that the number of viruses, exploits, spyware and other security problems experienced by the Mac will be directly correlated to its market share.

First, it assumes that you only have a single partition on your hard-drive with Mac OS X. When you first run Boot Camp, you must have a single HFS partition on your hard-drive that takes up all available space. When I first tried to install Boot Camp, I decided to pre-partition my hard-drive with an HFS partition, an NTFS partition and an ext3 partition along with a linux swap partition. Turns out, I wasted my time. Boot Camp simply didn’t want to operate in that environment.

What I also didn’t realize at the time was that the partition table was a dummy partition table. The Intel Macs use EFI instead of a traditional BIOS and uses a GPT (GUID Partition Table) which is quite an improvement over the old-style partition tables but to maintain backward compatibility the EFI standard includes a dummy partition table at the beginning of the drive just before the new GUID partition table. When I rebooted after parititioning the drive, OS X didn’t recognize the new parititions which was simply due to the fact that while I had created entries in the old parition table, the GPT had no record of the new partitions. Boot Camp, however, recognized that something was different and wouldn’t allow me to continue…considering that the GPT wasn’t setup properly, it was probably for my own good.

 So, I started from scratch and reinstalled OS X cleanly so that the partition used the entire drive. By this time, I’m so engrossed in the process that I almost forgot that I was trying to install Windows on my Mac. Once I finished the OS X reinstall, I ran Software Update and reinstalled Boot Camp. This time, Boot Camp was willing to cooperate.

The first step was burn a driver CD. This was simple enough. I placed a CD-R into the drive and pressed the “Continue” button.

Once this step was complete, I could start the installation process. This was also push-button simple. Boot Camp imformed me that it was creating the Windows partition and gave me some size options. I was given an option to create up to a 32gb partition. I chose the full 32gb. After that, I was prompted to insert my Windows XP Pro w/SP 2 install disk to start the install. The remainder of this process became a normal windows installation with the caveat that I had to select the correct partition in which to install Windows.

After the Windows installation was complete, the system rebooted into Windows automatically and other than a few complaints about unrecognized hardware, it looked good. Then I inserted the driver disk and saw an executeable titled “Install Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP.exe”. This seemed like the thing to do, so I ran it and playing the role of install-monkey and clicking “Next” a couple of times, the installation was complete. Pretty much everything worked great right off the bat. The iSight camera worked, the video driver was working and the wide screen looked great. The sound worked. I was off an running, except…I couldn’t right-click on anything since my MacBook didn’t have a right mouse-button and the keyboard driver didn’t seem to support Ctrl-click. After a little research, I finally gave up and connected a standard USB mouse with a right mouse-button and all was right with the world.

Upon reboot, I discovered (after reading the manual) that holding down the option key allows you to select between booting OS X and Windows. I also noticed that the “Startup Disk” option under “System Preferences” showed both OS X and the Windows partitions allowing me to select my default boot OS. Good stuff!

Since OS X (at least the later versions) have read-only support for NTFS, I was able to access my Windows partition from within OS X which makes sharing files between the two possible in a limited manner. After the fact, I now think that I should have used a FAT filesystem for my Windows installation which would have allowed two-way filesharing between OS X and Windows since OS X has read-write support for a FAT filesystem. Oh, and a search for an HFS driver for Windows did not turn up very much of interest.

Ok, so both OS’es were running perfectly and I had worked out the quirks but, I wanted more. First, I wanted to install Windows Vista RC1 to see if I could get away with it. Then I was hoping to install a copy of Linux and triple-boot my MacBook. I’ve read on the that others had succeeded but I obviously had a little ways to go before I got to that point.

I’m planning this as a three part article. Part 1 (this article) is the original installation of Boot Camp. Part 2 is the installation of Windows Vista (see Windows Vista “Borrows” Features from Mac OS X) which i’ve already done and simply have to write the article. Part 3 will be the installation of a Linux distro. I’ve read that others have had success with both Ubuntu and Gentoo. I expect that the Linux installation will involve reinstalling just about everything. It will also probably break Boot Camp since it assumes that it controls the partitioning scheme on the hard-drive and will only allow an HFS and a Windows partition. But, we’ll see.

Enter Windows Vista…the fact is, looks do matter and Windows Vista looks gorgeous! Vista seems to be all about eye-candy from its transparent windows and title bars to the new alternative Alt-Tab interface.

A notable new feature called Microsoft Gadgets has been been introduced with Vista. Gadgets can be displayed on your desktop or in a sidebar that attaches to the side of your screen. I have attempted to use Widgets on my Windows PC in the past and simply wasn’t happy with the performance. The Mac OS X implementation uses a “Dashboard” concept that overlays the entire screen requiring you to “activate” the dashboard before you can use your widgets. Windows allows you to display your widgets in the sidebar or on the desktop making them available at a glance. Microsoft’s gadgets remove the performance issues and adds some new twists that makes this feature something that may well become one of those “can’t live without” items.

The second item that reminds me of my Mac OS X system is a little less obvious but probably much more important is the new security system in Vista. Microsoft has built the OS with security as a primary consideration which makes this probably the most secure version of Windows yet. A new feature called User Account Control (UAC) prompts the user for permission before actions such as installing new software.

Wandering thought: I have two children, a son and a daughter. Spyware and viruses became such a large problem on their computers that I finally took the extreme step of creating a separate network and running Windows NT on their computers and giving them user accounts. This turned out to be more of a hassle for me since their computers continued to be infected with spyware even on the reduced privilege accounts but I still needed to install and update any applications they wanted on their computers. Hmmm. Finally I gave up and let them run XP Home with antispyware and antivirus. They were still infected most of the time since the infections came from software they downloaded and installed themselves but my computers were safe since they were on a separate network. I wonder if the new security features of Windows Vista will be up to the task of keeping their computers clean? I’ll definitely let you know after Vista is released.

I realize that Microsoft probably didn’t borrow this feature from OS X but it does feel very much the same. My first experience with Vista had security popups that felt very much like OS X as a I was installing applications and configuring the system for use.

In my opinion, operating systems will never be completely safe since their will always be a human factor and a lot of the spyware and viruses are using built-in social engineering tactics to get themselves installed on user’s computers. But the new security features in Vista are definitely a step in the right direction.

Finally, the directory structure that Vista uses is becoming more Mac-like. Again, this is how it feels to me so don’t start in with all the differences and reasons why the two are not the same. User accounts have been pulled from their original location at documents and settings are are now located in a directory called “Users”. Sound familiar? The directories under each user account use simpler names with no spaces (with the sole exception of “Saved Games”) and are named things like “Pictures” and “Music”. Again…sound familiar? One might point out that this is obvious and is not a structure that can be claimed solely by OS X but again, I was struck by the familiarity with my OS X system.

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Ironically, this copy of Vista is running on my MacBook Pro using Apple’s Boot Camp software to dual-boot Vista with OS X…more on that later.

For those of you who like pictures, here are a few more.