I will probably buy Maia a MacBook after MacWorld January 18.

They usually come out with new products then and drop prices. I’ll
probably also replace our family PC (for Daniel and Sophia) with a
mac-mini running both OS X and either Win XP or Vista – the Mini isn’t
much but I can replace the PC CPU and still use the monitor, mouse and
keyboard from the old PC. While BootCamp (free with mac) lets you boot
in Windows (purchased copy), Parallels or VMWare Fusion lets you run
both at the same time.

One thing to consider is how you are introducing the MS Windows safety problems for Internet and networking when you install these.  Take the new release of Parallels Pro 3.0 – they bundle software to help with this. By the way – not so great reviews of Parallels – seems like the readers at AppleInsider prefer VMWare. They also point out that it is better to “sandbox” your Windows VM to protect the computer. Kinda makes me want to simply use Boot Camp on and only run Windows without any network connections.

10.5 OS X Leopard file moving bug:

I got my latest copy of Macworld today – if you want a great overview
of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) its a good set of articles. Apple OS X is
10.0 – each point release is code named. There won’t be a 10.6 until
they come up with a new big-cat. In the mean time they did release a
10.5.1

It fixed the file transfer issue. It had something to do with
specifically “moving” not copying the directory or files. This isn’t
something I do often – I usually copy and then delete in two steps, so
it never happened to me. In fact, I didn’t know you could do it in
one step, apparently if you hold down the “command” button while
dragging and dropping it moves instead of copies. Basically -
Leopard’s Finder had a glaring bug in its directory-moving code,
leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears
while a move operation is in action. It was wrong right down to the
underlying UNIX code the OS is built on.

More details at places like AppleInsider and MacNN forums.

AppleInsider had an article on Nov 6:
“It appears that Leopard’s Finder (as well as Finder versions dating
back to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther) fails to check the integrity of the
directory copied to the destination drive before deleting the source
directory from the source drive. Therefor, if a directory move is
interrupted partially through the move process, the Finder assumes the
move was successful and deletes the original directory from the source
drive, leaving a directory with only partial file contents on the
destination drive.”

Yuck!

It was fixed, however,

Categories: Software