Egg Freckles

It is a shame that some of the best and brightest technology journalists to ever cover the Apple beat, have been hired away by their favorite fruit company and reduced to farming cultivated stories from within the high walls of a private orchard.

I don’t blame them for following the money, and I certainly don’t blame them for wanting to work behind the curtain of the muse that has fascinated them for so many years. (Given the same opportunity, I too might have surrendered to the mothership.)

But because I remain outside the ring, or because I don’t lean on the App Store to deliver my technology news, I will never read any editorial from these virtuosos ever again.

Technology reporting and the Open Web as a whole has suffered at Apple’s insistence to lock them away.

This post was inspired by this tweet and this link that I can"t open on my Mac. As it turns out it was my fault for running an incompatible two year old version of Apple's Macintosh operating system.

Does anyone remember a story from the early 2000’s where a guy was trying to make a business of selling Apple Power Mac G4 repair parts in a custom molded pizza box case?

Long story short Apple Legal stepped in and persuaded the chap that he couldn't use Apple repair parts for this purpose. I remember reading about this story while I was in college, but I can't find an article anywhere.

Personally I would love to purchase a Mac Pro logic board and outfit it with a CPU, RAM, and and off the shelf AMD graphics card. But even if I got an Apple Certified Repair Center to see me one hooking it up to a conventional ATX power supply would be the greatest challenge.

As for a case and cooling, i am pretty sure I would just wing it, using commodity third party PC parts. Nothing elegant like an Apple Mac Pro case, but I think Apple's professional desktop logic board would look really great on an open air test bench under tempered glass.

Obviously there are all kinds of hardware incompatibilities and economic obstacles I am not even considering at this point. But as soon as I hit up one of my ACMT friends and figure out the stock price for a 2019 Mac Pro motherboard I will let you know.

nWith the SeaMonkey 2.49.5 release the 2.49.x line comes to an end. Unless a catastrophic bug is discovered 2.49.5 will be the last ESR 52 based version. Backporting security fixes and at the same time working on the next, already overdue, major release is not possible with the few remaining developers.n

nPlans are to do further interim 2.53 versions based on a much enhanced Gecko 56 base while working on bringing you the next ESR 60 based 2.57 version. After 2.57 we will decide about the future. The current Mozilla Gecko codebase has seen a flow of constant major changes and api removals in the last 2 years and is no longer really usable for our needs. By the end of the year the SeaMonkey project is expected to be completely independent of Mozilla. We will see how this pans out but we are doing our best and already have a new infrastructure in place where we do builds and website hosting.n

nWe would also like to remind everyone again that this a community project independent of Mozilla. So if you want to continue seeing future SeaMonkey releases please help by either donating money or even better help out with development. We are still committed and hope you are too. n

I first dialed into the Internet during the Summer of 1995 and Netscape 2.0 was my browser.nBesides being a great browser, Netscape 2.0 also included a full mail reader called Netscape Mail,nmaking it one of the first Internet Suites.

Since the demise of Netscape Communications and the advent of Mac OS X,nI have switched browsers several times (Camino, Safari, SeaMonkey, then Firefox),nbut the idea of a Internet Suite — a one click stop for email, RSS, newsgroups, and the Web — still sounds appealing.

I am sorry to hear SeaMonkey is suffering,nbut hopefully new sponsors and a few generous donations will turn the fate of the Internet Suite around for the few of us who still browse different.

Stephen Hackett, writing for 512 Pixels, outlines some of the differences between the entry level 2019 MacBook Air and entry level 2019 MacBook Pro.

With today’s revisions to the Mac notebook line, choosing between a new MacBook Air and a new MacBook Pro has gotten a little more interesting.

The machines are similar in many ways. They both come with two Thunderbolt 3 ports, Touch ID, 8 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. Both can be stepped up to 16 GB of memory … [but] once you start poking around, you can see some differences.

That being said there are great deals to be had on last year’s MacBook Air. Microcenter is offering 2018’s MacBook Air with 128 GBs of storage for $799. Not only that, but you can get it in gold!

After reading about some of the new features available in macOS Catalina it became clear to me Apple is working towards an immutable design.

Dedicated system volume
nmacOS Catalina runs in a dedicated, read-only system volume — which means it is completely separate from all other data, and nothing can overwrite your critical operating system files.

By enforcing a read-only system volume, Apple can ensure that every installation of macOS Catalina is immutable.nThat means that every installation of macOS Catalina is identical to every other installation of the same version,nand the operating system on your Mac’s hard disk is exactly the same as the operating system on the hard disks in the Macs at Apple Park.

An immutable design comes with some big advantages.nmacOS Catalina should be more stable, less prone to bugs, and easier to test and develop for than previous versions of Mac OS.nSystem updates can be installed faster.nNo need to wait for patches to be applied; simply reboot to the newest version.

Mac OS Catalina’s immutable design should also be more secure.nLending itself towards the deployment of containerized apps that are kept separate from system software.nEvidence of which be seen in another one of macOS Catalina’s published features.

DriverKit and user space system extensions
nPreviously many hardware peripherals and sophisticated features needed to run their code directly within macOS using kernel extensions, or kexts. Now these programs run separately from the operating system, just like any other app, so they can’t affect macOS if something goes wrong.

Of course should anything go wrong, macOS Catalina’s immutable design makes recovery easy.

Restore from snapshot
nIf your third-party software is incompatible with an update you just installed, use macOS Recovery to restore from a snapshot of your computer taken right before the installation. macOS and all your apps will work just as they did before you installed the update.

The ability to restore your Mac’s system software from a snapshot is made even more efficient when the state of that snapshot is not only predictable, but no longer unique to your Macintosh.

Of course an immutable design comes with some drawbacks.nDeveloper’s who rely on modifying Catalina’s underlying UNIX environment will need to move to container-based software development.nAt first this may seem like a burden, but developer’s have been supplementing the Mac’s outdated UNIX userland tools for years.nDeveloping on macOS Catalina should be no different, except these tools will need to be kept separate from the system volume, increasing consistency, reliability, and security during the development process.

As a system administrator, macOS Catalina’s dedicated system volume, immutable design, and subsequent features, promise to be the most important advancements in the next version of the Macintosh operating system.

Update:

As Steve Troughton-Smith points out:

macOS Catalina still respects your System Integrity Protection setting and lets you write to to the hard disk root if SIP is off.

I don’t know if this liberty will make its way into the final version, but if it does most of the benefits of macOS Catalina’s immutable design will be lost.