Steve Jobs today announced at the Macworld Keynote that Mac OS X 10.2 will be available August 24 for $129. "That's less than $1 for each major feature," he quipped. Updates will be available in some cases for $19.99. Also introduced were iTunes 3, iPod updates, iChat, iCal, iSync, a 17" iMac, and a lot more.

Miguel Angel Blanch Lardin writes "Arianne is a Game Engine to build Internet games and applications. You can use it to create your own games, from RPG to Realtime strategy games, arcade or Turn based strategy ones." We noted Arianne two years ago.

Warlock7 writes "Apple has made the 1.8.3 version of AppleScript available. You can get the update through Software Update." It's available for both Mac OS and Mac OS X, though, as usual, a detailed list of changes is hard to find, though some are in the accompanying About AppleScript file. It appears they've fixed bugs with coercing Unicode text (now I can fetch and use text from iTunes via Apple events), and Apple says it provides increased stability of scripts, and runs applications created with the latest version of AppleScript Studio.

Torulf would like to start an ongoing discussion on books that anyone in the IT field would benefit in having in their library: "Here's a topic that might generate some interesting discussions. I'm a student trying to get general knowledge of the IT business. The question here is about what is regarded 'basic knowledge' and where to find it. As we all know (I hope), a lot of knowledge can really only be learned through experience. In many cases, however, a read through the theory will save you a lot of time. As books are also easier to look up than experience, below is a suggestion of a reading list that might give a decent general knowledge in the field. Please fill out the gaps with what you think is required knowledge for anyone working in the industry. Mostly this is about a general overview of the different areas of the IT industry, but if you have suggestions of good material for becoming an expert in some particular field, by all means, share your knowledge." Torulf has compiled a fairly long list of books, below, however your own suggestions are always welcome.

Ryan writes "Apple recently published an article on using CVS with Mac OS X. 'This article covers some of the most commonly used features of CVS, with emphasis on using CVS with static and interpreted web files (HTML, PHP, Perl, etc).'" It's a decent article, a good primer on how to get started, and it's nice that Mac OS X comes with a CVS server. Personally, I really dig maccvs for my CVS client, and there are plenty of other clients for Mac OS out there too.

AnamanFan writes "A new version of OmniWeb 4.1 Public beta 7 has been released by The Omni Group. It is available for download for English only (3.3MB) and Internationalized (6.5MB) versions; read the release notes for more information. This is one of the popular web browsers for Mac OS X, and one of the few that are not direct ports from other systems. The must be doing something right for getting two Apple Design Awards for 2001!"

hysterion writes "Just came across the nice Unix Porting Guide (pdf) posted by Apple earlier this month. Topics include NetInfo, using Project Builder with gnumake, autoconf, XFree86, Tcl/Tk, Qt ... it is a bit short on scripting languages, and they speak as if KDE were already ported, but other than that I found it an informative read." They also didn't mention fink, and they put "Unix" in all caps. However, they were honest about the shell scripting limitations of AppleScript, although they didn't mention that AppleScript -- especially via osascript -- is pretty buggy in Mac OS X right now (this is my annoyance of the week, so allow me to indulge myself).

We put up the original Talk to Sun's 'Open Source Diva' call for questions on January 10, 2002, which makes this the longest lag we've ever had betweeen a set of Slashdot quesions and their answers, a record previously held by the late Douglas Adams, whose question post went up on May 2, 2000, but didn't get his answers to us until June 21, 2000.

Lisa writes "O'Reilly announced Monday, at WWDC, the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference to be held in Santa Clara Sept 30-Oct 3rd. The call for papers has gone online if you're interested in presenting, and they're soliciting ideas for 'a panel discussion or a particularly provocative group of panelists that you'd love to see square off.' To submit your suggestions, send email to: macosx-idea@oreilly.com."

ZigMonty writes "Apple has updated their Kernel Programming docs (May 1st). They are a lot more substantial now (read: they say something other than 'don't')."

KeithOSC writes "Looks like Apple may have one more step closer to real parallel computing. Myricom has just released its drivers for their high-speed cluster computing interconnect. I've been beta testing for two months now. With my findings, Mac OS X may be a real Beowulf cluster option. (Now, if Apple would just give us faster memory and PCI buses.)"

cpk0 writes "Well, we finally have Photoshop on Mac OS X. Now that must have been one heck of a year over at Adobe, cause this piece of software is pretty elegent. Even on my iMac 600 it's pretty swift and smooth. There's no official Adobe press release yet, but there's a VersionTracker page for it, and that makes it official enough for me."

LiquidPC writes: "Lance M. Westerhoff from AppleLust has written a superb article on the history of BSD. The article talks about the first versions of BSD and continues with the stories of NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BSDi, and it finishes off with Darwin/MacOSX."

Johnny Mnemonic writes "Apple is asking for feedback specifically from PC users about why you might be considering a Mac purchase, or if you recently purchased a Mac for the first time, why you made the switch. A good opportunity to sound off about your Apple peeves, but also a chance to let Apple know what you think they're doing right. The Mac OS X feedback page, originally from the Public Beta, is still up and accepting feedback, also."

pinqkandi writes "Terra Soft Solutions just released their new GVS 9000, a dual G4/1GHz 2U rack system. With Mac OS X and Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed, along with the Black Lab clustering suite, these boxes pack quite a lot of power. $3,839 + shipping." Another user adds, "As an added bonus, now you know where to go to find Linux users who look like Cindy Crawford." Yes, well.

Eric Zelenka writes "Apple has released a new document called 'Integrating Mac OS X with Active Directory.' This document describes how you can use the information stored in Microsoft's Active Directory to authenticate Macintosh users and provide file services and home directories for them on Mac OS X Server. It is available for download from the Mac OS X Server web site." I want my Mac OS X box to self-destruct if it comes into contact with a Microsoft server; does Apple have a document for that?

mattsimerson writes "Looking for a more secure and reliable alternative to BIND for serving DNS on Mac OS X? Look no further than the article I wrote up on the topic. I use djbdns extensively in a large network environment (hundreds of thousands of zones and servers) and it works just as well on my G4 laptop. If you're a heavy duty DNS guy, you might enjoy my other DNS links." Excellent. I am just a dumb programmer, not a sysadmin. It takes me hours to figure out how to configure something relatively simple in NetInfo, so this HOWTO is very welcome.

JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an interesting interview with David Faure, the french KDE developer who works for Mandrake Software. His code can be found on Konqueror, KFM, KWord and he is also the main bug hunter for KDE. David talks about KDE 3's enhancements and speed improvements, the future of KWord, the debugging tools under Linux, and even Gnome2, .NET, MacOSX and Mozilla."

Slashback. Updates and second thoughts tonight (below) on Borland's restrictive EULA, now much improved; another ueber-patch for MSIE; happy trails on the long ride from mediaone to aatbi; and how BSD suddenly topped Linux on the desktop.

Don Negro writes: "Found this on Apple's Developer site. A solid overview of the OS X kernel - what bits are Mach, what bits are BSD - and a good level a detail. This is the first installment. As they say in the introduction 'Only you can prevent kernel panics.'"