Interesting and useful information for the computer geek inside us all. If you like reading about Apple Computers or Microsoft and their software then this is the Blog for you! I also cover Green Tech and Digital Photography as well as FOREX & Futures trading. In addition you will find Travel topics are covered here as well.
SAN FRANCISCO & RENTON, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MacIT Conference – Parallels® (www.parallels.com/mac-pro), a global leader in cross-platform solutions, today announced results of its commissioned survey of more than 200 IT decision makers about their attitudes toward Macs in the enterprise. The results are telling – almost half of businesses (45 percent) currently offer their employees Macs, and more than nine out of 10 businesses (95 percent) that don’t currently provide Macs would be more likely to offer employees Macs if they had a single central management system for both Windows PCs and Macs.
Macs are in high demand – and respondents who already support Macs shared the top reasons why:
Eight out of 10 businesses (77 percent) say Macs are more reliable overall than Windows machines
Seven out of 10 (65 percent) say they are easier to support
Seven out of 10 (65 percent) say offering Macs would likely help attract employees (a very important factor given the competition for talent)
"I’ve never owned a Mac. Though I’ve seen them from afar – one has always been within reach at work or at school – I’ve never been tempted to buy one aside from the indelible lure of using Final Cut Pro. The reason isn’t so much a dislike for Apple products as it is a preference for the Windows format. As crazy as this may sound, I’ve always liked Windows. I like its design, its programs, and most of all its freedom to run just about anything.
Over the years, Apple has slowly worked its way into my life. From the stone-age iPod that didn’t have a color screen (or much of a “screen” at all) to the iPod Touch that I could not wait to use, Apple’s innovations were as appealing as they were groundbreaking."
"The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates — Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection. Steve was willing to take extraordinary chances in trying new product areas but it was always from the vantage point of being a designer. So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing."
"A new, faster, better version of Microsoft Office is coming out Oct. 26. But it isn’t for Microsoft’s own Windows operating system. It is for the Macintosh computers made by the software giant’s archrival, Apple. And, among other things, it will bestow upon the Mac a benefit heretofore available only on Windows: Outlook. The popular email, calendar and contacts program is finally arriving on the Mac in a version that looks and works very much like the Windows version."
There are less then 200 Mac malware (that’s viruses, worms, Trojans, etc) programs. Having researched these a bit further as many were unfamiliar, I discovered that they are all years old, some going back as far as a decade or more. Study the list closely and you see that many of them are variants, that is slightly different versions of the same piece of code.
As impressively long as the list looks, this is in fact a fair chunk of ALL the malware that has afflicted the Mac in the last decade. Is this the best the Mac malware writers can do? One of the examples is a reheated virus from - no kidding - 1989."
"Apple antivirus company Intego has discovered a backdoor malware attack targeting Mac users OSX.HellRTS.D. As with so many of the small number of Mac-specific malware attacks that come up from time to time, this one is a variant of an attack from 2004, the company said, which will sound quaint to Windows users hit by thousands of variants on most days."
Charlie Miller has a habit of upending Apple's security claims.
Charlie A. Miller loves his Macbook Pro laptop. And his four other Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) PCs, the iPhone he uses daily and two older iPhones he keeps for tinkering. But his relationship with the company that created those gadgets is somewhat more complicated.
In March, for instance, the 36-year-old security researcher publicized his discovery of 20 security vulnerabilities in Apple's software. Each would allow a cybercriminal to take over the computer of a user who's tricked into opening a certain PDF attachment or who simply visits an infected Web page using Apple's Safari browser.
That haul of bugs is a record even for Miller, who over the last four years has become perhaps the world's most prominent Mac hacker. It may also be definitive proof that Apple devices aren't safe "right out of the box," as the company has claimed for years. "When I first began saying that Macs were less secure than Windows, everyone thought I was an idiot," says Miller. "So I had to prove it again and again and again."
In 2007 Miller became the first to hack the iPhone, using a flaw in its Safari browser to remotely gain control of the not-so-smart phone. Six months later he hacked a Macbook Air in two minutes at a competition in Vancouver. Last summer he revealed a method that allowed him to virally hijack the iPhone using text messages spread via a user's contact list.
Miller says his latest research doesn't aim to show off his elite hacking skills,most of which he learned over five years as a global network exploitation analyst for the National Security Agency. Instead, he wants to show just how easy it is to find chinks in the armor of commonly used software. Miller used a technique known as "dumb fuzzing" to find flaws. He ran the procedure more persistently than most hackers, leaving his fuzzing program to throw junk information at each target for three weeks before mining the data for exploitable flaws.
As for Apple, Miller says the company has learned to accept, if not appreciate, his work. He usually gives Apple weeks of notice before publicly describing its bugs. "They're always very polite," he says. "But I suspect they wish I didn't exist."
"Macs are often the black sheep in the many enterprise environments which have been dominated by Windows for nearly two decades, but the growing consumerization of IT is slowly changing that perception. Though Macs often have a higher up-front price than many business-class PCs, Macs are usually believed to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) due to lower support costs. A recent survey of IT professionals in large enterprise environments that have a mix of Macs and PCs overwhelmingly agree that Macs cost less than PCs to support.
The Enterprise Desktop Alliance, which seeks to make it easier to integrate Macs in Windows-centric IT deployments, surveyed IT admins from companies that made large deployments, including universities and government agencies. Responses included in EDA's analysis include those from environments with a mix of Macs and PCs that had a total of 50 servers or over 100 Macs.
A majority of respondents said that Macs cost less in terms of time spent troubleshooting, user training, help desk calls, and system configuration. Admins generally agreed that costs related to software licensing and supporting infrastructure were the same between the two platforms."
PC vs. Mac deathmatch: Snow Leopard beats Windows 7
"Windows 7 was built to fix the problems that plagued Vista, and it unquestionably succeeds in doing that. It's a bit less bloated, and it runs a bit faster. The annoying security alerts from User Account Control have been quieted. And the compatibility issues with third-party software and hardware device drivers have largely been ironed away; after all, it's been two and a half years since Vista debuted. Windows 7 even includes a virtual "XP mode" for running legacy programs.
Windows 7 goes a few steps beyond merely repairing Vista. It borrows --and improves on -- tricks from the Mac's playbook to make it easier and faster to organize files and launch programs. Like Apple's operating system, Windows 7 not only looks good, but it has tools and shortcuts that help you work more efficiently. If there were ever a Windows that could challenge Mac OS X, Windows 7 is it.
Still, once you've had Mac, can you ever go back?"
Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard has landed. This time around, Apple goes light on the glitz in favor of some heavy work under the hood. John Siracusa dives deep into Apple's new OS offering to see what's new, what's still the same, and whether it's worth upgrading.
In June of 2004, during the WWDC keynote address, Steve Jobs revealedMac OS X 10.4 Tiger to developers and the public for the first time. When the finished product arrived in April of 2005, Tiger was the biggest, most important, most feature-packed release in the history of Mac OS X by a wide margin. Apple's marketing campaign reflected this, touting "over 150 new features."
All those new features took time. Since its introduction in 2001, there had been at least one major release of Mac OS X each year. Tiger took over a year and a half to arrive. At the time, it definitely seemed worth the wait. Tiger was a hit with users and developers. Apple took the lesson to heart and quickly set expectations for the next major release of Mac OS X,Leopard. Through various channels, Apple communicated its intention to move from a 12-month to an 18-month release cycle for Mac OS X. Leopard was officially scheduled for "spring 2007."
As the date approached, Apple's marketing machine trod a predictable path.
Apple even went so far as to list all 300 new features on its website. As it turns out, "spring" was a bit optimistic. Leopard actually shipped at the end of October 2007, nearly two and a half years after Tiger. Did Leopard really have twice as many new features as Tiger? That's debatable. What's certain is that Leopard included a solid crop of new features and technologies, many of which we now take for granted. (For example, have you had a discussion with a potential Mac user since the release of Leopard without mentioning Time Machine? I certainly haven't.)
Mac OS X appeared to be maturing. The progression was clear: longer release cycles, more features. What would Mac OS X 10.6 be like? Would it arrive three and a half years after Leopard? Would it and include 500 new features? A thousand?
At WWDC 2008, Bertrand Serlet announced a move that he described as "unprecedented" in the PC industry.
That's right, the next major release of Mac OS X would have no new features. The product name reflected this: "Snow Leopard." Mac OS X 10.6 would merely be a variant of Leopard. Better, faster, more refined, more... uh... snowy.
This was a risky strategy for Apple. After the rapid-fire updates of 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 followed by the riot of new features and APIs in 10.4 and 10.5, could Apple really get away with calling a "time out?" I imagine Bertrand was really sweating this announcement up on the stage at WWDC in front of a live audience of Mac developers. Their reaction? Spontaneous applause. There were even a few hoots and whistles.
Many of these same developers applauded the "150+ new features" in Tiger and the "300 new features" in Leopard at past WWDCs. Now they were applauding zero new features for Snow Leopard? What explains this?
It probably helps to know that the "0 New Features" slide came at the end of an hour-long presentation detailing the major new APIs and technologies in Snow Leopard. It was also quickly followed by a back-pedaling ("well, there is one new feature...") slide describing the addition of Microsoft Exchange support. In isolation, "no new features" may seem to imply stagnation. In context, however, it served as a developer-friendly affirmation.
The overall message from Apple to developers was something like this: "We're adding a ton of new things to Mac OS X that will help you write better applications and make your existing code run faster, and we're going to make sure that all this new stuff is rock-solid and as bug-free as possible. We're not going to overextend ourselves adding a raft of new customer-facing, marketing-friendly features. Instead, we're going to concentrate 100% on the things that affect you, the developers."
Using remote access software, a Miami man helps cops track down and recover his two stolen laptops.
"This is a true story about sex, computers, the Internet, spying, theft, intrigue, and the police--and it all began this past February when David Krop made the mistake of leaving his two laptop computers inside a locked SUV in a parking garage.
While Krop, 41, attended a brief business meeting in downtown Miami Beach, Florida, a smash-and-grab thief stole the two laptops, a Toshiba and an Apple Macbook. When he returned to his SUV, Krop saw the shattered passenger window and realized that his computers were gone.
"It's just a terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach," Krop, a vice president of marketing at Nationwide Diabetic says. He reported the theft to the police, who were not optimistic the laptops would be recovered. Then he drove home, thinking about the personal data stored on his laptops. He had never planned for a catastrophic event like this--in fact, he hadn't even bothered to set up a user password to shield the laptops' contents.
When he got home, though, Krop remembered that he had installed a trial version of remote access software called LogMeIn on his Toshiba laptop. LogMeIn is designed to allow a user to access the desktop of a remote PC; it doesn't have laptop recovery features of the type you'd find on, say, Absolute Software's LoJack for Laptops. Connecting to his stolen laptop might be a long shot, but it was the only shot he had."
"Did you catch the headlines? Macs get viruses. Macs can be hacked. Your Mac is in danger. You should buy virus protection software. Mac security is not as good as Windows. Will this nonsense ever end? The number of lies, distortions, mistruths, fabrications, and fear mongering makes the Mac seem like the Silicon Valley version of the health care hot potato in Washington. Who and what can you believe? Is your Mac in danger?
An education often results in a competition between facts and truth, and fear through misinformation. In any war, truth is often the first casualty. So it is in the desktop wars."
Sales of cars and homes are foundering but Apple has found steady customers.
BURLINGAME, CALIF. -- Walk into the local Apple store at 10:35 on a Friday morning and you'll notice something different: normal people.
These are not the mutants you'll find trolling Fry's for a new motherboard, a liter of Mountain Dew and packets of beef jerky. These are not the middle-aged pot-bellied dudes you'll find eyeing the latest big screen television at Best Buy ( BBY -news - people ).
These are people like your mom. Among the 20 customers at the store Friday were several older women. One was getting a quick tutorial on how to download digital movies.
What's up with that? I asked my mother-in-law. "There's always someone there to answer your questions," she said of Apple ( AAPL- news - people )'s stores. "I like that."
A lot of people do. Little wonder analysts expect to see increasing sales--and fat margins--when Apple reports earnings for the quarter ending in June. The report is due out on Tuesday afternoon. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect net income of $1.1 billion, or $1.16 a share, compared to net income of $1.1 billion, or $1.19, during the corresponding period a year ago. Sales are expected to rise to $8.2 billion from $7.5 billion.
Hulu Desktop is a lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer. It features a sleek new look that's optimized for use with standard Windows Media Center remote controls or Apple remote controls, allowing you to navigate Hulu's entire library with just six buttons. For users without remotes, the application is keyboard and mouse-enabled. Hulu Desktop is a downloadable application and will work on PCs and Macs. Sorry Guys Hulu uses Geo-Filtering and is a U.S. only service at this time.
Frequently helping friends switch over from the Windows dark side to the Macintosh is a time consuming task. However now there appears to be a neat solution to the problem. The ThunderBird LINK-E2 is a High-Speed USB File Transfer Adapter is the premier file and data sharing solution for PC and MAC users. The EasySuite or EasyMacCopy utility software is already embedded on the High-Speed USB File Transfer Adapter and will automatically load onto your system
USB 2.0 DRIVERLESS LINK-DATA TRANSFER CABLE for ME/2000/2003/XP and MAC OS X.xx
The Only MAC OS X to MAC or Vista to XP DriverLess Link on the Market, simple Drag and Drop Interface Built Right Into the Cable. No Drivers to Install.
"News Analysis. Macintosh is choice du jour for enterprises deploying operating systems other than Microsoft's Windows. Uh-oh. One Linux version is catching up.
Windows Vista dissatisfaction and concerns about Windows 7 compatibility and deployment costs have some enterprises looking at alternatives, according to the research. The economy is a factor, too, but more to the benefit of Linux than either Mac OS X or Windows. The number of businesses considering "an alternative to adopting Windows Vista or Windows 7" is 50 percent, up from 42 percent in 2008, according to the report."
CUPERTINO, Calif., Feb. 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Apple® today announced the public beta of Safari® 4, the world's fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.* Innovative new features that make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable include Top Sites, for a stunning visual preview of frequently visited pages; Full History Search, to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages; Cover Flow®, to easily flip through web history or bookmarks; and Tabs on Top, to make tabbed browsing easier and more intuitive.
"Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications."
Safari 4 is built on the world's most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.*
Safari 4 is a public beta for both Mac OS® X and Windows and is available immediately as a free download.
Stephen Shankland of CNET is reporting that "Showing signs that it's working to meet requests for new developments to its Chrome browser, Google on Friday said it hopes to release versions for Mac OS X and Linux by the first half of the year, and it released a new version Wednesday that paves the way for the most requested feature: extensions.
Google has high hopes for Chrome--in particular, the Internet giant wants better performance, so browsing the Web is faster and Web-based applications are more powerful. Now Google is filling in some missing pieces Chrome needs in order to attain wider usage.
Brian Rakowski, Chrome's product manager, said the company wants to release Chrome for Mac and Linux before the first half of 2009 is up."
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