When your Mac freezes (crashes) typically, you’ll notice things start to slow down, the hard drive might become noisy, and you’ll keep seeing the “spinning wait cursor” (its official name, but commonly known as the “beach ball” or “wheel of death”).

In case your system freezes or crashes in the event of working on a certain document; you should be prepared for the situation that you fear most. In such a case, you are liable to lose the entire specific document with all the alteration you did make on it forever. For your safety it is important to ensure that your command your system to save whichever work you are doing at any moment you pause. Generally, the little time the system takes to save this document engulfs the frustrations that otherwise comes when your Mac freezes in middle of something important and urgent.

Why Does Your Mac Freeze/Crash?

The most common reasons for your Mac freezing / hanging and slowing down are:

- An application has a bug that is causing it to consume too many resources
- An application is legitimately resource intensive and your computer is slow
- Your Mac has too little memory for your demands
- Too many applications are running at the same time
- You have multiple applications all trying to use the disk at the same time

How To Act If Your Mac Freezes?

Saving your work from time to time works best in ensuring that your data is secure. However, crashing or freezing of your system can result to other severe troubles. For instance if the hard disk crashes you should be sure of losing all your data or having it corrupted forever. Crashing of the hard disk definitely means wiping out all your data from it. Avoiding such conditions is the need of backing up your entire data to other different location.

What Happens When Mac Freezes?

Freezing is anomalous behavior of your Mac computer. In this event, the mouse cursor moves normal way but a click do nothing the clock of your system may continue ticking. However, the keyboard behaves in a disconnected manner from the system. Moreover hearing the churning away sound of the systems drive is an indication of it working on something abnormal. You can completely do nothing on a frozen system.

How Do You Fix the Freezing of Your Mac?

The Mac freeze troubleshooting process requires you to follow various steps in thawing your frozen Mac computer. The trouble shooting process includes force quitting, resetting of the system and many others. You therefore have the option of choosing on which way to thaw your Mac computer. There are various steps to follow for an efficient force quit.

1) In case your Mac freezes in the cause of working with it; you should before attempting to do anything on the system press the Command-S button. This enables the system to save what you had not saved.

2) After the fast step, force quit the system. To force quit you need to press the Command-E button. This displays you a message in accordance with a button that reads Force Quit.

Pressing on the cancel button helps your Mac to get things in operation as in the normal way.

Guest Author: This is a guest article by Tim Edmonds, who is a technical writer with over a decade of professional experience. He is currently interested in Mac freeze troubleshooting.

According to John Gruber of Daring Fireball, the vulnerability exists only in apps that don’t follow Apple’s app validation advice. For example, some apps check only for a valid receipt, without checking whether the receipt matches the app’s bundle ID.

Apart from this simple file replacement crack, some hackers claim to have cracked Apple’s security for the Mac App Store, according to Gizmodo. The crack will not be available until February 2011 though, according to Dissident, the hacker who created the hack – Kickback.

In late December, Dissident announced that the crack, named KickBack, would not be released “until well after the store’s been established” in an effort to ‘protect’ developers. “When we feel that [the Mac App Store] has a lot of crap in it, we’ll probably release Kickback,” said Dissident. So basically they’re giving Apple time to make a patch for a crack that isn’t even out yet.

At any rate, it indicates that the security of the Mac App Store is very easy to circumvent. Though developers reported support for Mac App Store receipts in early builds of Mac OS X 10.6.6, there’s no evidence that the Mac App Store was broadly or externally tested by Apple.

However, the way in which the App Store has been cracked does not endanger your personal security unless you download pirated versions of the apps from untrusted sources that could package the pirated versions with malware. It is pretty hard to have a complete computing experience without some third party software on any OS.

Most people use social networking clients, online games, Adobe software, and etc. Piracy just allows the possibility that the third party software you are using is a carrier for malware. Moreover, this opens the door to wide piracy, which is not good for anyone, developers and users alike in the long term.So Apple is right, at least in this case — stay away from piracy to stay protected!

The Apple-I, the forerunners of the iPad, iPhone and other latest gadgets, first went on sale in July 1976 at a price of $666.66. The device will be sold at London-based auction house Christie’s Nov 23.

According to the Daily Mail, Apple-1s came with a tiny 8K memory – 524,000 times less than today’s Apple computers’ standard memory. It would not have the capacity to store one song. The device comes with the original packaging, instruction manuals and a signed letter by Jobs, who is still head of the company.

Julian Wilson, of Christie’s, was quoted as saying: “Before the Apple-1 you would have to put together your own motherboard and would need soldering skills.”

“This is the forerunner of the iPod, iPad and iPhone. It worked straight out of the box, which was the original concept.”

That is Steve Jobs. I don’t shave, nobody cares. Steve does not shave, Apple shares drop by 20%. He is the man with the talent and the best (albeit, sometimes controversial) sort of marketing skills. He has consistently brought innovative technology to the world; technology, which made our lives better and smarter. First computer with mouse; the renowned Macs, portable music players otherwise called as the iPods, tablet PCs – iPad and a many more.

He was also the CEO of PIXAR studios, which delivered some cool movies like Toy Story, Wall-E and so on. His name fascinates a huge crowd and he has a huge group of fan following him. Some criticize him, some praise him. Ask me! I praise him. He has given so much to the world of technology that nobody could ever imagine. I have collected some awesome quotes said by the genius. Do share, if I have missed any:

1. We’re gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make “me too” products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it’s always the next dream. Interview about the release of the Macintosh (24 January 1984)

2. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me. On the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal (Summer 1993)

3. When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

4. Nobody has tried to swallow us since I’ve been here. I think they are afraid how we would taste.

5. It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

6. Pixar is the most technically advanced creative company; Apple is the most creatively advanced technical company. As quoted in Fortune

7. Click. Boom. Amazing! MacWorld “Intel Inside” keynote address (January 2006)

8. I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.

9. No one wants to die. Even people who wanna go to heaven don’t wanna die to get there.

10. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

11. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

12. A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.

13. Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

14. Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

15. Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

16. Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?

17. You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

18. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

19. The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.

And the best of all…

20. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

]]> http://techchunks.com/technology/ultimate-collection-of-top-20-inspirational-steve-jobs-quotes/feed/ 14 http://techchunks.com/technology/kaspersky-releases-anti-virus-for-mac/ http://techchunks.com/technology/kaspersky-releases-anti-virus-for-mac/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:23:10 +0000 TechChunks http://techchunks.com/?p=774 Apple Macintosh computers have long been thought to be unattractive to malware, virus writers and hackers, but the scenario is fast changing, as it appears. At the moment, Mac computers are quickly becoming more and more popular with hackers and other online scam artists, prompting security software vendors to unveil Mac versions of antivirus applications.

Taking initiative recently Kaspersky Lab rolled out Anti-Virus for Mac, the latest in a string of new Mac-centric security products designed to protect the roughly one in 10 people who aren’t using a Windows PC. This new antivirus for Mac is meant to shield the Mac OS against viruses, worms and Trojan as well as similar problems on other operating systems such as Windows and Linux.

Kaspersky officials said this new antivirus suite prevents users’ Macs from becoming “incubators” for malware and from inadvertently harboring and spreading PC and Unix malware to colleagues and friends.

“Since 2005, there has been a marked increase in the number of vulnerabilities in the Mac OS which can be used to conduct an attack via the Internet,” said Gun Suk Ling, managing director for Kaspersky Lab, Southeast Asia.

In an interesting recent survey by security software vendor Sophos found that 93 percent of Mac users believe malware writers will increasingly target their beloved machines in the future.

“The single most concerning issue for Mac security today is having these machines used as hosts for PC malware,” Justin Priestly, Kaspersky Lab’s senior vice president of consumer sales, said in a statement. “These threats may not damage the Mac they live on, but they can be passed to a friend’s PC by sharing a USB flash drive or spread from a graphic design department to infect PC-colleagues across a network.”

Compatibility: In terms of compatibility, the Kaspersky Anti-Virus can work with versions of Mac OS from 10.4.11. A Macintosh with the Intel processor, 512 MB available RAM and 80 MB available hard drive space are the other technical requirements. Company officials said the security applications automatically scan files, downloads from the Web and e-mail attachments in real time, disinfecting corrupted files as it goes along and protecting users from more than 30,000 new malware threats — including many tailored specifically for Macs, each day.

Pricing: Anti-Virus for Mac is now available for download from the Kaspersky Web site as a 30-day free trial. A year license is available for $39.95 for one machine or $59.95 a year for up to three machines.
Update! Looks like they have revised their pricing now to $59.95 a year for ONE machine.