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Apple announces Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Developer Preview with deep iOS integration: Messages, Notification Center, AirPlay, Game Center, Twitter and more

 MacOS X  No Responses »
Feb 162012
 

Apple today announced Mac OS X Mountain Lion, the next major update to its desktop operating system. As 9to5Mac first learned back in October, Mountain Lion sports a bunch of major new features, including new apps iMessage and Notification Center – plus the AirPlay mirroring feature. According to the people Apple invited to a private briefing a few day ago, Mountain Lion is all about putting even more iOS into the bowels of Mac OS X. iOS-ification of Mac OS X continues in Mountain Lion with

With over a hundred million iCloud accounts now in use, Mountain Lion’s setup assistant will ask you to set up an iCloud account for the Documents in the Cloud feature. You will also be able to access your iCloud storage in Finder and drag and drop documents for manual syncing between iOS apps that support Documents in the Cloud and their desktop counterparts.

Mountain Lion Beta is available to Mac Developer Program members starting today whilst end-users will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store in late summer 2012. The company also pledged to update Mac OS X once a year from now on. Check out past the fold for full release, more features and two additional press shots.

 

 

Apple Releases OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview with Over 100 New Features

CUPERTINO, California—February 16, 2012—Apple today released a developer preview of OS X Mountain Lion, the ninth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system, which brings popular apps and features from iPad to the Mac and accelerates the pace of OS X innovation. Mountain Lion introduces Messages, Notes, Reminders and Game Center to the Mac, as well as Notification Center, Share Sheets, Twitter integration and AirPlay Mirroring. Mountain Lion is the first OS X release built with iCloud in mind for easy setup and integration with apps. The developer preview of Mountain Lion also introduces Gatekeeper, a revolutionary security feature that helps keep you safe from malicious software by giving you complete control over what apps are installed on your Mac. The preview release of Mountain Lion is available to Mac Developer Program members starting today. Mac users will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store™ in late summer 2012.

“The Mac is on a roll, growing faster than the PC for 23 straight quarters, and with Mountain Lion things get even better,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The developer preview of Mountain Lion comes just seven months after the incredibly successful release of Lion and sets a rapid pace of development for the world’s most advanced personal computer operating system.”

The developer preview of Mountain Lion features the all new Messages app which replaces iChat and allows you to send unlimited messages, high-quality photos and videos directly from your Mac to another Mac or iOS device. Messages will continue to support AIM, Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. Starting today Lion users can download a beta of Messages from www.apple.com, and the final version will be available with Mountain Lion. Reminders and Notes help you create and track your to-dos across all your devices. Game Center lets you personalize your Mac gaming experience, find new games and challenge friends to play live multiplayer games, whether they’re on a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Mountain Lion presents notifications in an elegant new way, and Notification Center provides easy access to alerts from Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, system updates and third party apps. System-wide Share Sheets make it easy to share links, photos and videos directly from Apple and third party apps. Twitter is integrated throughout Mountain Lion so you can sign on once and tweet directly from Safari, Quick Look, Photo Booth, Preview and third party apps. Mountain Lion also introduces AirPlay Mirroring, an easy way to wirelessly send a secure 720p video stream of what’s on your Mac to an HDTV using Apple TV.

More than 100 million users have iCloud accounts, and Mountain Lion makes it easier than ever to set up iCloud and access documents across your devices. Mountain Lion uses your Apple ID to automatically set up Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime and Find My Mac. The new iCloud Documents pushes any changes to all your devices so documents are always up to date, and a new API helps developers make document-based apps work with iCloud.

Gatekeeper is a revolutionary new security feature that gives you control over which apps can be downloaded and installed on your Mac. You can choose to install apps from any source, just as you do on a Mac today, or you can use the safer default setting to install apps from the Mac App Store, along with apps from developers that have a unique Developer ID from Apple. For maximum security, you can set Gatekeeper to only allow apps from the Mac App Store to be downloaded and installed.

Mountain Lion also has features specifically designed to support Chinese users, including significant enhancements to the Chinese input method and the option to select Baidu search in Safari. Mountain Lion makes it easy to set up Contacts, Mail and Calendar with top email service providers QQ, 126 and 163. Chinese users can also upload video via Share Sheets directly to leading video websites Youku and Tudou, and system-wide support for Sina weibo makes microblogging easy.

Hundreds of new APIs give developers access to new core technologies and enhanced features within OS X. The Game Kit APIs tap into the same services as Game Center on iOS, making it possible to create multiplayer games that work across Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A new graphics infrastructure underpins OpenGL and OpenCL and implements GLKit, first introduced in iOS 5, to make it easier to create OpenGL apps. Using Core Animation in Cocoa apps is easier than ever, and new video APIs deliver modern 64-bit replacements for low-level QuickTime APIs. Enhanced Multi-Touch™ APIs give developers double-tap zoom support and access to the system-wide lookup gesture. Kernel ASLR improves security through enhanced mitigation against buffer overflow attacks.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

 Posted by lsb at 3:23 pm

How to Install rTorrent/ruTorrent on Debian/Ubuntu VPS

 Linux, Neat, Server(s)  No Responses »
Feb 152012
 

This tutorial will guide you through the setup of a fully-featured seedbox running on a Debian or Ubuntu system, including:

  • libtorrent 0.13.0
  • rTorrent 0.9
  • ruTorrent Web UI (3.0)

This guide has been tested with Debian 6 (x86_64) and Ubuntu 11.04 (x86_64).

To start, access your VPS via SSH (as the root user) and do the following to update your platform and install some required dependencies:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install subversion build-essential automake libtool libcppunit-dev libcurl3-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev unzip unrar-free curl libncurses-dev
# apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-cli php5-curl

Enable scgi for Apache:

# apt-get install libapache2-mod-scgi
# ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/scgi.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/scgi.load

Install XMLRPC:

# mkdir /install;cd /install
# svn checkout http://xmlrpc-c.svn.sourceforge.net/…mlrpc-c/stable xmlrpc-c
# cd xmlrpc-c
# ./configure –disable-cplusplus
# make
# make install

Intall libtorrent:

# cd /install
# wget http://vps6.net/src/libtorrent-0.13.0.tar.gz
# tar xvf libtorrent-0.13.0.tar.gz
# cd libtorrent-0.13.0
# ./configure
# make
# make install

Install rTorrent:

# cd /install
# wget http://vps6.net/src/rtorrent-0.9.0.tar.gz
# cd rtorrent-0.9.0
# ./configure –with-xmlrpc-c
# make
# make install
# ldconfig

Create required directories:

# mkdir /home/seeder1/rtorrent
# mkdir /home/seeder1/rtorrent/.session
# mkdir /home/seeder1/rtorrent/watch
# mkdir /home/seeder1/rtorrent/download

Setup .rtorrent.rc file (rTorrent config):

# cd ~/
# wget http://vps6.net/src/.rtorrent.rc
# cp .rtorrent.rc /home/seeder1/

(Edit the settings in .rtorrent.rc, like max upload/download speed, max connected peers, etc, as needed.)

Install rTorrent:

# cd /install
# wget http://vps6.net/src/rutorrent-3.0.tar.gz
# tar xvf rutorrent-3.0.tar.gz
# mv rutorrent /var/www
# wget http://vps6.net/src/plugins-3.0.tar.gz
# tar xvf plugins-3.0.tar.gz
# mv plugins /var/www/rutorrent
# rm -rf /var/www/rutorrent/plugins/darkpal
# chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/rutorrent

Secure /rutorrent:

# a2enmod ssl
# a2enmod auth_digest
# a2enmod scgi
# openssl req $@ -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out /etc/apache2/apache.pem -keyout /etc/apache2/apache.pem
# chmod 600 /etc/apache2/apache.pem
# htdigest -c /etc/apache2/passwords seedbox seeder1

(Enter a password of your choice when prompted, you will use this to log in to the ruTorrent web UI.)

# cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
# rm -rf default
# wget http://vps6.net/src/default
# a2ensite default-ssl
# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Install screen:

# apt-get install screen

Start rTorrent in a detached shell using screen:

# screen -fa -d -m rtorrent

(To start rtorrent automatically when the VPS is booted, add the above command to /etc/rc.local)

You can now access ruTorrent at http://xx.xx.xx.xx/rutorrent/ (replace xx.xx with your server’s IP address). You should be greeted with a login prompt, where the username is “seeder1″ and the password is the one you set above in the “secure /rutorrent” section.

 Posted by lsb at 8:37 pm

Why ACTA Is Unacceptable

 FUCKED UP!  No Responses »
Jan 312012
 

acta.pngSo, we’ve shot down SOPA and PIPA. Congratulations Internets for a job well done. Mission accomplished, right? Not so much. While that’s two bad pieces of legislation pushed back, there’s much more where that came from. Leaving aside existing nastiness like the DMCA, we also have the even nastier Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) (PDF). How bad is it? Bad enough that the European Parliament’s rapporteur for ACTA (Kader Arif) resigned over it today (January 27, 2012). Unfortunately for those of us in the United States, President Obama has already ratified ACTA on behalf of the United States.

If you haven’t heard much about ACTA, don’t be surprised. You see, you really weren’t supposedto hear anything about ACTA until well after it was ratified and far too late for the rabble to do anything about it. That’s what, in large part, led to Arif’s resignation.

As Wayne Rash wrote earlier this week, “ACTA is, in effect, a treaty, negotiated in secret by the U.S. Trade Representative, Ron Kirk… Until recently, the actual text of ACTA was so secret that only a few lawyers outside of the White House and the USTR offices had actually seen it. And those people were required to sign non-disclosure agreements.”

What ACTA Is

The goal of ACTA, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is “to create a new standard of intellectual property enforcement above the current internationally-agreed standards in the TRIPs Agreement and increased international cooperation including sharing of information between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies.”

The EFF backgrounder also provides some insight to ACTA. While President Obama is carrying the torch for ACTA right now, the treaty goes back to October 2007 (or farther) when the U.S., Japan, Switzerland and the European Community said they’d be working on a new intellectual property enforcement treaty.

ACTA isn’t the only area where (as the EFF puts it) “copyright industry rightsholder groups have sought stronger powers to enforce their intellectual property rights… to preserve their business models.” But it is getting closer to reality.

Note that our own Scott Fulton observes that some of the protests against ACTA object to provisions that have been removed from the treaty. What this doesn’t note is that many other objectionable provisions remain. Fulton also says “you can’t be arrested for an ACTA violation.” This is true, but only half the story. People can and will be arrested for violations of laws that result from nations complying with the treaty.

The word is that ACTA probably doesn’t change U.S. law. Probably? Nobody’s entirely sure. But as Techdirt calls out ”it certainly does function to lock in US law, in a rapidly changing area of law, where specifics are far from settled.” It also, of course, serves to dictate compliance in other countries.

Why ACTA Is Unacceptable

 

  • ACTA was negotiated in secret – For me, this is reason enough to oppose any legislation or regulation. I don’t care if it’s the “Hugs for Puppies and Kittens Act,” if people aren’t given an opportunity to engage with their lawmakers about a law, it shouldn’t be enacted.

 

  • Ridiculous damages – ACTA specifies “presumptions for determining damages” that basically assume that all of the infringed goods had sold. To put it another way, ACTA takes the position that if a user uploads a song to a file-sharing network, damages should be calculated as if the recipients would have paid for the work in question. This is ridiculous, as has been explained any number of places. Many people who download illicit copies would simply never have purchased the work in question had it not been available for free.
  • It may be unconstitutional – The Obama administration is claiming that ACTA not a treaty, but an “executive agreement” and thus not subject to legislative approval. As Rash notes in his eWeek piece, Congress does not agree.
  • It’s over-broad – It’s worth noting that not all of ACTA is necessarily bad. Some of the agreement is targeted at countering counterfeit goods that may be actively harmful, like counterfeit prescription drugs. But ACTA goes well beyond single areas of intellectual property and essentially tries to bear-hug everything IP-related. Not good.
  • The ACTA committee is not accountable – ACTA creates a body outside of national and even international bodies, called the “ACTA Committee.” (At least the name is honest.) The committee would not be accountable to the people governed by the agreement. Folks in the United States can vote out Lamar Smith and others who endorsed SOPA/PIPA, but we would have no real influence on the ACTA Committee.
  • Low threshhold for violations – As the European Digital Rights group points out (PDF), ACTA’s unclear wording would make it very easy for unintentional copyright infringement to rise to the level of a criminal act.
  • No fair use provisions – As this opinion on ACTA by Eddan Katz and Gwen Hinze notes, ACTA would “export one half of the complex U.S. legal regime” but “without accompanying exceptions and limitations.” In short, ACTA would not include fair use provisions and such that we expect in the U.S.
  • Criminalizes what used to be a civil offense – An opinion prepared by Douwe Korff and Ian Brown notes, “ordinary companies and individuals could be criminalised for innocent activities or trivial breaches of copyright, or for technical breaches that serve a wider, overriding public interest (as in whistleblowing), without an appropriate defence.” The EFF says ”If the real intent behind introducing expanded criminal sanctions is to address infringement on the Internet, this provision is not likely to do so, but is likely to cause significant collateral harm to consumers.”
  • Locks In DMCA-Like Provisions – As the EFF notes (PDF) in its submission to the USTR, ACTA would “lock in” some of the controversial aspects of the DMCA that require legal enforcement against circumventing copy protection, etc. In other words, don’t get too set on the idea of jailbreaking that iPhone.
  • ACTA could be used against legitimate medications – As I noted earlier, looking to crack down on counterfeit drugs is good. Going after legitimate “grey market” drugs, that’s another story. Yet as Techdirt notes ”there are very reasonable concerns that ACTA will be used to crack down, not on actual counterfeit medicines, but on “grey market” drugs – generic, but legal, copies of medicines. Some European nations, for example, already have a history of seizing shipments of perfectly legal generic drugs in passage to somewhere else.”

That’s 10, but I’m sure there are more. As I wrote on January 18th, sending SOPA/PIPA to the legislative trashbin for the year is great, but not enough. SOPA/PIPA are not the only laws that threaten the free and open Internet. There’s plenty of bad policy to go around at the state, national and international levels. One round of annoyed phone calls to Congress is not going to do the trick. Even if it’s too late to stop ACTA, there’s even worse coming.

 Posted by lsb at 8:54 am

Stop ACTA

 FUCKED UP!  No Responses »
Jan 272012
 

Hi,

If you ever though that SOPA was bad, then its nothing compared to ACTA.

ACTA is just about as bad as it gets… check out this video…

Read more here: https://www.accessnow.org/ or ..

.. sign the petetion against ACTA: http://www.stopp-acta.info/english/get+involved/petition/petition.html .. and one more… http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet_spread/

By signing the above, you help raise your voice against this madness!

 Posted by lsb at 8:16 am

USB 2 vs. USB 3 vs. e-sata vs. SSD

 Gadgets, Reviews  No Responses »
Jan 262012
 

Quite as the topic says.. i decided to test out the actual performance.

The disk used is a 7200 RPM WD Disk with an external casing that supports both usb2+3+esata .. the Machine is a Dell Latitude E6220 with a Intel Series 510 SSD, 8gb memory and Windows 7

I used HD tach to test… now.. check this out…

USB 2.0 with and Average of 30 mb/s

USB 3.0 with and average of 80 mb/s and dropping to 50 mb/s

E-sata with and average of 110 mb/s and dropping to 50 mb/s

.. and offcourse.. the winner without any doubt…

Intel SSD, internally – going steady at 320 mb/s

.. god i love SSD :D

 Posted by lsb at 10:10 am

Run windows application on OSX with ease

 Apple, MacOS X, OSx86  No Responses »
Nov 202011
 

  • Want to be able to run Windows applications on Mac OS X without a virtual machine?

    Apple computer users have used virtual machines programs such as Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion to run Windows on their machines for ages now. Apple even implemented a feature called Bootcamp so that Mac users can install Windows on a second partition of their storage drive and boot up to it as a second operating system. But, what if you want to run Windows’ .exe programs directly from your Mac operating system? This has been impossible until now. In the Mac App Store, you can download an application called WinOnX. This application doesn’t require you to have any instance of Windows on your computer. Instead, you can download .exe (executable) applications to run directly from this program virtually. So in simpler words: you can run Windows applications on your Mac computer without Windows installed.

    Here’s how:

    Download WinOnX from the Mac App Store. It will cost you $4.99. After downloading WinOnX, find a .exe program that you wish to run, for example, Mozilla Firefox for Windows and download it. Once it downloads, you can double-click it to run it like you could with any .app application on your Mac computer. WinOnX will run you through installing and using the Windows application like you would on Windows, only on your Mac instead. Running Firefox for Windows on your Mac will yield this look:

    This option will cost you some money, but it uses a lot less disk space for Mac users. If you have a solid state drive like me, you may select this option instead of dual booting in order to save storage drive space. Redmond Pie recommends that you just buy a new PC to install Windows programs on, because Mac is beautiful on its own.

    Name: WinOnX
    Price: $4.99
    Version: 1.0.1
    Developer: Hisham El-Emam – NES Software
    Editor’s Rating:  3/5

    Alternatively, you can try the free application: WineBottler.

 Posted by lsb at 10:50 am

Advanced WebRanking (AWR) 8.5 and low resolution (fix)

 SEO  No Responses »
Nov 142011
 


Hi,

For those of you who is into SEO, then you properly also know Advanced Webranking.

With the latest 8.5 update they have added more neat features, wich is great.. well.. except if you are running low resolution – because then you will have a problem seeing all the icons in the sidebar.

The solution/fix is:

1. Go to Settings -> Applications menu and select Small font size

2. Go to the Settings -> Application menu and select the “Use default window decorations” check box.

 


.. and now you should have plenty of space in the sidebar again for many new features and fun.
//Leon
 Posted by lsb at 8:17 am
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