The Champaign-Urbana Computer Users Group

The Status Register - January, 2008


This newsletter will never appear on CUCUG.ORG before the monthly CUCUG meeting it is intended to announce. This is in deference to actual CUCUG members. They get each edition hot off the presses. If you'd like to join our group, you can get the pertinent facts by looking in the "Information About CUCUG" page. If you'd care to look at prior editions of the newsletter, they may be found via the Status Register Newsletter page.
News     Common     PC     Linux     Mac     Amiga     CUCUG

January 2008


To move quickly to an article of your choice, use the search feature of your reader or the hypertext directory above. Enjoy.


January News:

The January Meeting

The next CUCUG meeting will be held on our regular third Thursday of the month: Thursday, January 17th, at 7:00 pm, at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The Linux SIG convenes 45 minutes earlier, at 6:15 pm. Directions to the FBC-CS are at the end of this newsletter.

The January 17 gathering will be one of our split SIG meetings. The Macintosh and PC SIGs are open for anything anyone wants to bring in.

ToC

Time to Renew!

The time has come for us to ask you to renew your CUCUG membership for 2006. If you have already renewed, thank you! If not, you'll want to join us for the January meeting and show your support for CUCUG's activities. If you cannot make it to the meeting on Thursday, the 19th, you can renew your membership by mail.

Membership is still only $20. You could save that easily with just one answer to a vexing computer question. That makes the fun free!

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Welcome New and Renewing Members

We'd like to welcome our new and renewing members Joe Dewalt, Quentin Barnes, Emil Cobb, Mike Latinovich, Todd Anderson (new), Paul Neubauer, David Noreen, Jerry Feltner, Jim Berger, Michael Hart, Rich Hall, Jim Lewis, and Anderson Yau.

We also want to express our appreciation to our Lifetime members Kevin Hisel and Richard Rollins for sticking with us.

We welcome any kind of input or feedback from members. Run across an interesting item or tidbit on the net? Just send the link to the editor. Have an article or review you'd like to submit? Send it in. Have a comment? Email any officer you like. Involvement is the driving force of any user group. Welcome to the group.

ToC

CUCUG Officers for 2008

In line with the December election results, the CUCUG officers for 2008 are:

President:
Richard Rollins
(rrollins@cucug.org)
Vice-President:
Emil Cobb
(e-cobb@uiuc.edu)
Secretary:
Kevin Hopkins
(kh2@uiuc.edu)
Treasurer:
Richard Hall
(rjhall1@uiuc.edu)
Corporate Agent: Kevin Hisel (khisel@kevinhisel.com)

Thanks to our returning officers.

ToC

Betamax's revenge

A format war in consumer electronics is like the US presidential primaries: victory requires momentum. That is certainly the case with high definition DVDs. Consumers are indifferent between the Blu-ray standard championed by Sony and Toshiba's HD-DVD - they are similar in capability if not in design - but they do not want to buy the loser and find it obsolete within a year. It now looks, however, as if this war has been won.

<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f4876c0-bd51-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html>

Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD-DVD after Warner Brothers' just recent backing of Sony's Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD-DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end.

<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dc409afa-bd75-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1>

Paramount is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD-DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner Bros. backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.

However, looming over all of the talk of high definition DVDs is the contrarian view that, as a means of content distribution, Blu-Ray may have won this "war" but that in actuality this was really just a battle in an even larger war, which may well have already been lost. According to Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate Technology, the winner in the Blu-ray and HD DVD war is the hard drive.

"People are saying Blu-ray won the war but who cares? The war is over physical distribution versus electrical distribution, and Blu-ray and HD lost that," he said during a breakfast meeting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. "In this, flash memory and hard drives are on the same side. The war is over and the physical guys lost."

<http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9845372-7.html>

Related link:

Death Ray - <http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/01/11/03>


ToC

NASDAQ delists SCO Group

URL: <http://ir.sco.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=283418>

LINDON, Utah, Dec. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The SCO Group, Inc. ("SCO") , a leading provider of UNIX(R) software technology and mobile services, today announced that it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007 indicating that as a result of having filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel has determined to delist the company's securities from the Nasdaq Stock Market and will suspend trading of the securities effective at the open of business on Thursday, December 27, 2007.

About SCO

The SCO Group is a leading provider of UNIX software technology and mobile services. SCO offers UnixWare for enterprise applications and SCO OpenServer for small to medium businesses. SCO's highly innovative and reliable solutions help customers grow their businesses everyday, especially into the emerging mobile market. SCO owns the core UNIX operating system, originally developed by AT&T/Bell Labs and is the exclusive licensor to UNIX-based system software providers. The Me Inc., product line focuses on creating mobile platforms, services and solutions for businesses and enhances the productivity of mobile workers.

Headquartered in Lindon, Utah, SCO has a worldwide network of thousands of resellers and developers. SCO Global Services provides reliable localized support and services to partners and customers. For more information on SCO products and services, visit http://www.sco.com.

SCO and the associated logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of The SCO Group, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.

ToC

AVG Pro for free

AVG Pro usually goes for $29.95, but Computeract!ve is giving away free licensed copies through Jan 18, 2008.

<http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/12/26/download-avg-anti-virus-pro-for-free/>

ToC

The Internets

On The Media, January 11, 2008

If there's one essential quality of the world-wide web it's that it is, well, world-wide. But recent moves by the body that governs the net may be opening the door to individual webs, starting with countries like China and Russia. Tim Wu, professor of internet and law, explains the implications of a many-webbed world - the Balkanization of the Internet.

<http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/01/11/04>

ToC

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use

By Marc Fisher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 30, 2007; Page M05
URL: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122800693.html>

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

Still, hardly a month goes by without a news release from the industry's lobby, the Recording Industry Association of America, touting a new wave of letters to college students and others demanding a settlement payment and threatening a legal battle.

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

RIAA's hard-line position seems clear. Its Web site says: "If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you're stealing. You're breaking the law and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages."

They're not kidding. In October, after a trial in Minnesota -- the first time the industry has made its case before a federal jury -- Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $220,000 to the big record companies. That's $9,250 for each of 24 songs she was accused of sharing online.

Whether customers may copy their CDs onto their computers -- an act at the very heart of the digital revolution -- has a murky legal foundation, the RIAA argues. The industry's own Web site says that making a personal copy of a CD that you bought legitimately may not be a legal right, but it "won't usually raise concerns," as long as you don't give away the music or lend it to anyone.

Of course, that's exactly what millions of people do every day. In a Los Angeles Times poll, 69 percent of teenagers surveyed said they thought it was legal to copy a CD they own and give it to a friend. The RIAA cites a study that found that more than half of current college students download music and movies illegally.

The Howell case was not the first time the industry has argued that making a personal copy from a legally purchased CD is illegal. At the Thomas trial in Minnesota, Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,' " she said.

But lawyers for consumers point to a series of court rulings over the last few decades that found no violation of copyright law in the use of VCRs and other devices to time-shift TV programs; that is, to make personal copies for the purpose of making portable a legally obtained recording.

As technologies evolve, old media companies tend not to be the source of the innovation that allows them to survive. Even so, new technologies don't usually kill off old media: That's the good news for the recording industry, as for the TV, movie, newspaper and magazine businesses. But for those old media to survive, they must adapt, finding new business models and new, compelling content to offer.

The RIAA's legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed. Four years of a failed strategy has only "created a whole market of people who specifically look to buy independent goods so as not to deal with the big record companies," Beckerman says. "Every problem they're trying to solve is worse now than when they started."

The industry "will continue to bring lawsuits" against those who "ignore years of warnings," RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said in a statement. "It's not our first choice, but it's a necessary part of the equation. There are consequences for breaking the law." And, perhaps, for firing up your computer.


This is what John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine says about the MAFIAA's current tactics:

"The greed never ends. The RIAA, the MPAA, and industry executives are seldom berated in public or spat upon, since, luckily for them, the public is generally docile. But docile or not, the public - especially the younger generation - is changing its buying habits, and it will continue to do so until these industries give their customers the freedoms they demand. Personally, I'd like to see the RIAA executives brought up on extortion and racketeering charges and imprisoned for their actions, but I guess that's just wishful thinking, given that our legal system favors the corporation over the citizenry and the public good."

<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2242789,00.asp>.

[Editor's Note: My thanks to David Noreen for submitting this article for the newsletter.]

ToC

U.S. Spy Chief Wants Authority to Monitor All Internet Traffic

In "The Spymaster," an upcoming article in the January 21st issue of New Yorker magazine, Lawrence Wright profiles Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. Wright, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," reports McConnell's desire for the authority to read all information crossing the Internet in the United States, including personal email messages. McConnell is drafting a plan to rewrite the rules for online surveillance by the nation's spy agencies. He told the magazine the debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will "be a walk in the park compared to this."

Related links:

<http://downloads.newyorker.com/mp3/outloud/080121_outloud_wright.mp3>

<http://www.newyorker.com/>
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/01/21/080121on_audio_wright>
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_wright>

<http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/104-2139897-6677509?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Looming+Tower&x=0&y=0>

ToC

Common Ground:

Google Goes After Wikipedia

by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#908/17-Dec-07
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9360>

A blog posting from Google's Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, fires the first shot in a competition that will at least prove interesting, if not world-changing. In the post, Manber announces Google Knol - a "knol" is a Google-invented word standing for "a unit of knowledge. The basic concept behind Google Knol is that anyone (eventually; it's in private testing for now) will be able to create a well-designed, automatically organized Web page on any topic - Google's goal is that knols will be the first hits people looking for information will find.

<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html>

This sounds a lot like Wikipedia, and that's intentional. Anyone can already create an article in Wikipedia on any topic, and Wikipedia articles already sit atop the search results for a vast number of terms - try a Google search for "Hurricane Katrina," for instance, and the first hit is the comprehensive Wikipedia article on the topic. So why would Google be attempting to replicate Wikipedia?

<http://www.google.com/search?q=Hurricane+Katrina>

Put yourself in Google's business shoes for a moment. Google is happy to provide the search that reveals the Web pages that people want to find because of the ads that appear on the search results page. But wouldn't you be even happier if you owned the results of that next click too? Google has long been adding services that keep you within the Google orbit longer, so, for instance, if you search for "New York weather," Google presents you with a mini report and forecast rather than send you off to another site right away. Similarly, if you search for "recipe spaghetti," Google dumps you into a recipe-specific search interface (this doesn't yet happen with all recipe searches, or even for all people).

<http://www.google.com/search?q=New+York+weather>
<http://www.google.com/search?q=recipe+spaghetti>

So if a Google knol becomes the top result for related searches, Google has the opportunity to display ads on that page. Here's where Google Knol departs from the Wikipedia approach. Google knols will have a single author, who will be credited and will decide if ads are to be displayed, sharing in the revenue if so. Manber makes a big deal about how authors have faded into the background on the Web, saying "...somehow the Web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors' names highlighted." That's hooey - there is no systematic lack of credit to authors on the Web in general, with nearly every article, blog post, comment, and home page providing a clear mark of authorship. Heck, the basic idea of having authors create topic-specific pages isn't even new - About.com (now owned by The New York Times Company), has been doing this since 1996.

<http://www.about.com/>
<http://beaguide.about.com/>

That's a huge split from the community-based approach that Wikipedia uses, where every article is the result of a collaborative writing and editing effort from many different people. And, of course, where ads have no place.

According to Manber, Google Knol will include community-based features as well, with people being able to "submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on." But the key word there is "submit" - the implication is that the primary author remains in control of the content and can choose to address or ignore comments and edits as desired. Google even says, "All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors."

Speaking as an author, and as a publisher who has worked with hundreds of authors over the last 18 years, I think this is a huge mistake. Maintaining content is hugely difficult and time-consuming, and not something that most authors do well (if at all). The beauty of the Wikipedia approach is that anyone who wants can contribute as much or as little as they want, as frequently as they want. If one person loses interest, there's always room for another to take over.

There's also an implication in Manber's post that knols will be of high quality because of this authorial ownership. That will be true of some, but the reality of the situation is that most people, even if they are expert in some topic, can't write their way out of the proverbial paper bag. Many won't even have the necessary skills to organize the source material - this stuff isn't nearly as easy as it sounds.

Google's answer to this is that they don't care, claiming that their search rankings will separate the wheat from the chaff, and will in essence arbitrate between good and bad knols on the same topic. Since Google is providing no editorial or organizational oversight, duplication is nearly guaranteed, which results in dilution of interest from the community. Editors who might donate some time to fixing up Wikipedia pages won't have the same interest in working on multiple similar knols, especially those that stand to benefit the author.

Worms abound in the Google Knol can. What happens when there are copyright infringement claims against knols that plagiarize content from elsewhere? Will knol authors start by just stealing Wikipedia articles, and will Google act to prevent that? Will Google's policies disallowing specific content for services like Google Groups apply to Google Knol? What happens when a knol author gets busy, becomes bored with a knol, or dies? Will Google be able to argue in international court that it has no oversight over illegal content created using its own service? There's nothing new here, but the bigger the company, the bigger the target.

Don't get me wrong. Google will undoubtedly do a much better job than Wikipedia in terms of user interface and hosting technology, and the Google Knol pages will undoubtedly be better designed and more attractive. Generalized wiki technology simply can't compete with a purpose-built tool designed and run by the dominant company on the Web.

But with this project, Google looks more like Microsoft than ever before: coming late to the game with a solution that's only a marginal improvement over the competition, all while talking as though it's a revolutionary change. Just as the open-source Linux has proven impossible for Microsoft to squash, Wikipedia's community-based approach, flawed and argumentative as it can be, will prove more compelling, accurate, and resilient than Google Knol in the long run.

ToC

Network Solutions: Domain Squatter

January 9, 2008 1:51 PM
URL: <http://tinyurl.com/2x5z37>

The biggest tech news of the week isn't at the Consumer Electronics Show. While bloggers and reporters attend the show, one of the most egregious abuses of public trust has become big news that has gone largely unreported. It's not Microsoft as the abuser, but registrar Network Solutions.

I'm so aghast, there are no words to properly describe my reaction to what Network Solutions apparently is doing. This morning, I tested what will be described in this post and can confirm what already appeared on DomainState. A search for a domain at Network Solutions makes it unavailable for registration through other registrars.

The domain-lock tactic is an obnoxious abuse of Network Solutions' position as a trusted registrar and former registrant monopoly. The action is self serving in the worst kind of way and should be reason for immediate ICANN sanctions against Network Solutions.

My colleague Steven J. Vaughan Nichols offers a concise chronology (<http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2247183,00.asp>), including sites that first reported Network Solutions' shenanigans and more technical detail than I will go into here.

ToC

Horsepower & Image Sensors

by Charles Maurer
TidBITS#908/17-Dec-07
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9364>

When people shop for a digital camera, the first thing they ask is how many megapixels it has. Megapixels are to digital cameras what horsepower is to cars, fundamentally important - to marketing, but not to performance on the street. Moreover, manufacturers' specs for resolution are flagrantly misleading. Manufacturers multiply the real number of pixels by four. (For an introduction to image sensors see "Sense & Sensors in Digital Photography," 2004-10-18 and "Digital Photography: Correction & Follow-up," 2004-12-06.)

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/7860>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/7906>

In fact, megapixels make for a meaningless specification because the eye does not see pixels or dots, it sees lines. As far as the eye is concerned, resolution is not millions of pixels, it is hundreds of line-pairs - and even line-pairs don't mean much because the eye's sensitivity to the thickness of lines follows a curve where equal increments are doublings. Because of this even a quadrupling of pixels is not a big deal. (For examples showing better enlargements with one-fourth the pixels, see "A Feast for the Fridge: Printing Digital Pictures," 2005-12-19.)

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8376#big>

Every camera on the market today has enough pixels to make big enlargements, but dynamic range is another matter. Dynamic range varies greatly among cameras and is more important than resolution. Dynamic range is the range of brightness from light to dark that a camera can record before the image turns blank white or dead black. This matters for enlargements because spots of pure white or black in a snapshot enlarge to broader areas noticeably lacking in detail. Also, the bottom of a camera's dynamic range is noisy, so that if the camera has a poor dynamic range, enlarging dark tones will enlarge noise.

Dynamic range is difficult to market because, like the handling of a car, it cannot be measured objectively. Dynamic range is limited by visual noise and the noise generated by two sensors may differ qualitatively. If two noises differ qualitatively, comparing them is like comparing two baskets of fruit. You can take measurements under standardized conditions to a thousand decimal places, but if you are comparing apples to bananas, or red noise to grey, the measurements do not mean a lot. (Some kinds of noise under some circumstances can even create an illusion of increased dynamic range. For an example of this, search for "One final consideration" in "Reality and Digital Pictures," 2005-12-12.)

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8365>

A New Sensor

Foveon makes uniquely sharp and efficient image sensors with a remarkable dynamic range, but they have had a hard time selling them, largely because the sensors do not sound competitive in resolution. Last spring, however, Foveon announced a new model that they advertise as though it has a V8 under the hood, claiming 14.1 megapixels for it, 40 percent more than its predecessor (and only three times what it actually has). Among Foveon fanciers this generated great excitement but - well, 40 percent more pixels means that the camera can record lines that are 15 percent thinner. The previous sensor already approximated the resolution of the human eye for the kind of information contained in photos. The improvement amounts to being able to read the 20/20 (6/6) line on the doctor's eye chart clearly instead of with difficulty. Under normal circumstances this will not matter because 20/20 lines are so fine that we virtually never notice them. I don't know any ophthalmologist who would recommend replacing a pair of glasses to effect so subtle an improvement.

<http://www.foveon.com/>

Foveon announced their new sensor at the same time that Sigma announced a camera employing it, the SD14. I was not impressed by those announcements. After I read them, my reaction was to purchase a second Sigma SD10, the model using the previous sensor. I did that because to fit 40 percent more pixels in the same area, Foveon needed to shrink each light-sensitive cell. If nothing else in a sensor's structure is changed, then shrinking cells will add noise and thus limit the detail that can be seen in shadows. Foveon's propaganda trumpets the increased resolution but provides no useful information about dynamic range.

<http://sigma-photo.co.jp/english/camera/>

Well, my cynicism was wrong. When I finally got my hands on an SD14 to test, I discovered that Foveon's marketing obscures a substantial improvement in the structure of the sensor. Despite its higher resolution, the new sensor captures more shadow detail than the old.

Testing Dynamic Range

To test dynamic range, I photograph a scene with a tonal range exceeding the capacity of any sensor, then I pull apart the tones in the highlights and shadows at the expense of the middle tones, to see what hidden detail becomes visible. I convert raw 12-bit files to 16-bit TIFFs without any manipulation, then I run a Photoshop action on each of them, an action that first spreads the image across 16 bits and then uses Photoshop's Curves tool to stretch the highlights and shadows. The photos below show the overall scene without any manipulations plus samples of three regions with the tones pulled apart. I enlarged the SD10's images to the size of the SD14's using simple bicubic interpolations without sharpening. There is no image from the SD10 for ISO 50 because the camera does not offer that speed.

Overall: This is the original image from each camera. The spotlight on the light painting fades rapidly off toward the side, leaving the painting on the right too dark to for any sensor to capture.

<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2007-12/Overall.jpg>

Bright Area: This compares the bright area of images taken at each ISO speed offered by each camera. For every pair of images you can see that the SD14's image shows just a bit more detail than the SD10's image.

<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2007-12/BrightArea.jpg>

Dark Area: The images from the SD14 are noticeably better than those from the SD10.

<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2007-12/DarkArea.jpg>

Very Dark Area: Here there's no real question of quality but the SD14 can extract at least some detail at ISO 200 and below, whereas the SD10 cannot.

<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2007-12/VeryDarkArea.jpg>

Comparing the SD10 and SD14

As cameras go, the SD14 and SD10 are very different. The SD14 has a clearer viewfinder than the SD10 and several more features. At first blush it looks more desirable but most of those features strike me as more important for marketing than photography, and they complicate the camera's controls. Also, although the SD14's viewfinder is larger and clearer, the SD10's viewfinder functions like a sportsfinder to facilitate framing moving subjects, and - a clear disadvantage - the SD14 lacks the SD10's protective cover for the LCD, which leaves the SD14 more fragile. All in all, ignoring the sensor, I don't see either camera as preferable to the other.

I cannot ignore the sensor, however. It is the sensor that captures images, not gadgetry on the camera, and the SD14's sensor shows less noise than the SD10's and does a better job capturing tonal extremes. I suspect that most people would not notice the difference but I frequently push the limits of the SD10, so I could not resist the improvement. Anybody care to buy a second-hand SD10?

[If you found Charles Maurer's discussion of megapixels, dynamic range, and image sensors helpful, he asks that you make a donation to Doctors Without Borders.]

<http://www.doctorswithoutborders-usa.org/donate/>

ToC

The PC Section:

WinInfo Short Takes

Paul Thurrott
URL: <http://www.wininformant.com/>

Amazon First to Sell DRM-Free MP3s from All Major Labels

And just like that, Amazon's MP3 download service is both the best and most comprehensive place online to legally purchase songs in unprotected MP3 format. This week, Sony announced that it would offer its songs in DRM-free MP3 format via Amazon MP3, joining the ranks of Universal, EMI, and Warner, the latter of which joined up with Amazon two months ago. Only one of the major labels offers its songs DRM-free via Apple's popular iTunes Store, and it's become clear that not offering songs through Apple is a not-so-subtle hint that the recording industry is tired of Apple's domination of their business. DRM-free songs sold via Amazon will work with any portable media player or PC-based music software on earth, including Apple's best selling iPod players.

Gates: No Microsoft iPhone

Nope, the software giant is content with its "big f***ing table." Microsoft chairman Bill Gates this week told a German publication, which was disappointingly not named "Sprockets," that his company would not try to create an iPhone-like device to compete directly with Apple. "No, we won't do that," he's quoted as saying. "In the so-called smart phone business we will concentrate solely on software with our Windows Mobile program. We have partnerships with a lot of device manufacturers from Samsung to Motorola and this variety brings us significantly more than if we would make our own mobile phone." Hey, that's neat. But I'd point out that these sorts of business relationships didn't stop Microsoft from completely screwing over all of its PlaysForSure partners to create the Zune. And since it's been at least ten minutes since I last mentioned it, Gates is also basically leaving the company in July. I'm sure a Gates-less Microsoft can make its own decisions about what it will and won't do five months from now.

OLPC Lashes Out at Intel

In an open letter to the Wall Street Journal that I enjoyed thoroughly on my Kindle this morning (now on sale at Amazon.com; I recommend it highly), OLPC president Walter "the guy that's not Nicholas Negroponte" Bender said that OLPC's recent fallout with Intel had nothing to do with competitive concerns over Intel's Classmate notebook. "OLPC's objection is to anti-competitive practices, not products," he said. "To object to unfair competitive practices is hardly a stance against competition. Intel didn't meet our cost, power or environmental specifications. In contrast, we have a very fruitful collaboration with AMD." There you go.

Xbox 360 Sales Strong During Holidays...

Microsoft this week revealed that it sold 4.3 million Xbox 360 video game consoles during the last three months of 2007, powered by hit games like Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3. The company has now sold a total of 17.7 million 360s since the console went on sale in November 2005, about two years ago. Those are actually pretty good numbers, but it's a virtual certainty that the Nintendo Wii has already surpassed sales of the 360, despite being on sale for a year less: Nintendo had sold 13.2 million Wiis by the end of September and the console has remained sold old since its November 2006 launch; Nintendo has yet to release holiday sales figures. In related news, Microsoft's blockbuster 360 title, Halo 3, has sold 8.1 million copies since its release in September. That's not too shabby for a second-rate sequel that, frankly, doesn't really add much to an already tired franchise. So what's next? Rumor has it that Microsoft will announce an HD DVD-equipped Xbox 360 Ultimate at CES next week. Stay tuned.

Office 2003 SP3 Kills Compatibility

When is an upgrade really a downgrade? When it removes functionality, of course. And that's exactly what users are experiencing when they install Office 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3), which actually removes support for older version of Microsoft's Office file formats (i.e. those versions that predate Office 97). Granted, there probably aren't many people who still need that support, but a little heads-up would have been nice. Microsoft has a good reason for killing the support, however. According to a note on its Web site, support for the older formats is "blocked" because "they are less secure and may pose a risk to you." See? It's just tough love.

Notebook Hard Drives Hit 500 GB

I guess size really does matter
This week, Hitachi announced that it has created a 2.5-inch 500 GB hard drive, perfect for notebook computers. That means you could literally get a terabyte of storage in a desktop replacement notebook with two hard drive bays, a prospect that I'm sure has some people salivating. As with many things technical, however, it seems like we're reaching some weird limits here, and even I'm having trouble imagining filling such a drive. Advancements are always welcome, of course. But this is just getting silly.

ToC

CES 2008 Kicks Off with Final Gates Keynote

Paul Thurrott
URL: <http://tinyurl.com/33gpe6>

With all due respect to the world's richest man, you've clearly worn out your welcome. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates delivered his first Consumer Electronics Show (CES) keynote address in 1994 when, in his words, "Windows 95 was just coming together (and) the Internet was just getting started." Since then, he's honed his consumer-oriented keynote into the entertainment equivalent of a golf game, slow moving with respectful chuckles and applause at all the right moments. His final CES appearance last night followed exactly the same path.

Unfortunately, what CES really needs is leadership. And as I scanned eagerly through all of the Microsoft and other corporate announcements that were made in the pre-show jitters of Sunday night, I can see I've clearly made the right choice by not attending this too-large show for the second year in a row. Despite its size and the attendance of virtually every important consumer electronics company on earth, CES has become a something of a non-event. And it only has itself to blame.

Part of the problem is that Apple next week will unleash the 2008 rendition of its own tradeshow, Macworld. Despite being much smaller than CES, Macworld is far more influential and important because it features the most powerful consumer electronics company on earth, Apple, and its mesmerizing if mercurial CEO, Steve Jobs. If CES is serious about mattering again, it should already be in talks with Apple to get Jobs to keynote next year. My guess is that will never happen.

But the biggest problem for CES isn't the competition, it's internal. And you only need to look as far as Microsoft to see what's wrong. Despite headlining the event, Microsoft didn't make a single major announcement last night, let alone acknowledge that some of its biggest announcements from last year--Windows Vista, new Media Center Extenders, or an IPTV-based Xbox 360--have yet to materialize or have any real positive impact on the market if they have.

Let's take a look at what Microsoft did announce last night, skipping neatly over the vague promises of a utopian future.

Windows Vista. Microsoft announced that it has sold 100 million Windows Vista licenses since the product first became available in November 2006. This is about 100 million fewer licenses that I would have expected in this span of time, given that PC makers sold over 250 million machines in 2007.

Windows Live. Microsoft highlighted such online services as Windows Live Calendar (currently in beta), Windows Live Events, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Spaces, and Windows Live Mobile. The company also mentioned that its Windows Live properties provide a single sign-on across all services.

Microsoft Surface. The company announced its table PC platform last year and promised to ship it by the end of 2007. That never happened, but this year Surface was back with more prototypes. "We see Surface showing up in many, many different situations, maybe even here in Las Vegas as a new flexible interface," Gates said.

2008 Olympics. Microsoft announced that NBC will (sort of) utilize Microsoft's Silverlight Web technologies for its 2008 Olympics. What's really happening is that MSN will be broadcasting video highlights from the Olympics and since MSN is owned by Microsoft, they'll use Silverlight to make it happen.

Xbox 360. 2007 was the "biggest year ever in videogame history in the United States," according to Robbie Bach, the president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division. He wasn't referring to Microsoft's record $1.1 billion warranty hit to the Xbox 360, which was caused by massive and widespread hardware failures of the device, and not on sales (Microsoft has sold 17.7 million Xbox 360 consoles since November 2005 and 4.3 million since September). Instead, this claim is based on revenues: "In the US, through November, we did US$3.5 billion of business," Bach said. "That's $1 billion more than Nintendo did on the Wii, and it's $2 billion more than Sony did on the PS3." Bach also highlighted Xbox Live, but failed to mention that the service was offline for much of the week following Christmas, angering customers and leading to a free game giveaway. There are now over 10 million consumers signed up for Xbox Live, though Microsoft failed to mention that most of them are not paying for Xbox Live Gold but are rather using the free version of the service.

TV shows and movies on Xbox Live. The company announced that ABC and Disney (which are the same company) will be bringing their TV shows to Xbox Live this month. Likewise, MGM is bringing their movie collection to Xbox Live.

Media Center Extenders. Microsoft announced Vista-based Media Center Extenders at last year's show and they never materialized in time for the 2007 holiday selling season. This year, the company announced that Samsung and HP will build the technology into new set top boxes and TVs this year. Really.

Mediaroom. Last year, Microsoft showed off an IPTV-based Xbox 360 console that never materialized. This year, the company announced that Mediaroom, its IPTV-based service for "HD television, DVR and interactivity," will ship via top service providers like British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, AT&T and 17 others around the world. Microsoft is adding a technology called DVR Anywhere to the mix: This lets you record Mediaroom content at home and distribute it to other TVs in the home that are connected via a home network. BT will offer a Mediaroom-based Xbox 360 console that works as an IPTV-based set-top box.

Zune. Microsoft didn't release sales figures for the second generation Zune but revealed that it is "doing very, very well." No new features or improvements were discussed, but Microsoft said it would sell the Zune outside of the US and Canada "this spring."

Zune Social. Microsoft's beta Web service for the Zune, which essentially copies the Xbox 360 Gamertag system, was demonstrated. I believe it's still in beta.

Microsoft Sync. In 2007, Microsoft introduced its Sync automobile platform, a voice controller for music players, cell phones, and other devices. The software is currently used in Europe by Fiat and in the US by Ford. "Ford expects to ship nearly a million Sync-enabled cars next year," Bach noted. The company announced an upgrade to Sync called 911 Assist.

Windows Mobile. No new announcements here, but Bach did claim that "Windows Mobile today outsells Blackberry, outsells iPhone. We're on pace this fiscal year to sell 20 million phones, which is almost double what we sold last year, with Windows Mobile software on it."

Scanning through this list, you may discover, as I did, that there are lots of topics discussed, but no major blockbusters. It will be interesting to compare and contrast this with Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote address next week. But surely there were other interesting news items out of CES Sunday night. Here's what's happened so far.

Warner Bros. Drops HD DVD, Adopts Blu-Ray Exclusively. Late last week, Warner Bros. (and its New Line subsidiary) announced that they would drop support for HD DVD to focus on Blu-Ray exclusively. This announcement had a number of immediate ramifications: The HD DVD camp cancelled their CES press conference, HD DVD backer Toshiba slashed prices on its HD DVD notebook computers, and Microsoft scuttled plans for an HD DVD-based Xbox 360 console. Folks, the format wars are over: Blu-Ray has won.

Napster Will Adopt DRM-Free MP3. Online music seller Napster announced that it sell music in DRM-free MP3 format. "There's now enough top-tier content out there," Napster CEO Chris Gorog said, as if this were the plan all along. However, Napster still plans to focus on its subscription music business, which will continue to use Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format and digital rights management (DRM) technologies. Napster is also raising the price of its basic subscription plan from $9.95 to $12.95 a month beginning at the end of January. The company has 750,000 paid subscribers.

And... that's about it. I'm sure we'll see more throughout the week. In the meantime, call me jaded if you must, but CES has lost something. My advice to the industry is simple: Move the show closer to the holidays and ensure that anything you're showing off will actually ship that year. Focus more on product and less on the nebulous vision stuff. And for crying out loud, start talking to Steve Jobs. That the most influential consumer electronics company in the world isn't at CES is a crime.

ToC

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 RC Refresh Public Availability Program

URL: <http://www.activewin.com/awin/default.asp>

Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh is pre-release software and will change before the final release. Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh is for individuals, organizations, and technical enthusiasts who are comfortable evaluating pre-release software and is provided for testing purposes only. Microsoft does not recommend installing this software on primary or mission critical systems. Microsoft recommends that you have a backup of your data prior to installing any pre-release software.

Download here: <http://tinyurl.com/2vdrfb>

ToC

Logitech shares surge on talk of Microsoft bid

Posted by Steven Bink on January 10 2008, 3:00 PM with no comments
URL: <http://bink.nu/news/logitech-shares-surge-on-talk-of-microsoft-bid.aspx>

Shares in Swiss-based computer peripherals maker Logitech International SA gained up to 12 percent on Thursday amid speculation Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) would launch a takeover bid, traders said.

But board member Daniel Borel, who is the group's largest shareholder, said he had no reason to sell his 6 percent stake and declined to comment on the market speculation.

"I am a co-founder of Logitech. Would you be willing to sell your child?" Borel told Reuters in an interview.

"I have no reason to sell. But I will not be the one to decide. I own only some 6 percent so I will neither enable nor prevent a sale of Logitech."

Traders said rumors circulated that Logitech, which has a market capitalization of around 7 billion Swiss francs ($6.3 billion), would receive a takeover bid at 48 francs per share from Microsoft.

This would represent a premium of 38 percent to Wednesday's closing price of 34.80 francs and value the firm at 9.16 billion francs.

"Rumors are rumors. I can't make any specific comment on them," Borel said.

Microsoft and Logitech were not reachable for comment.

ToC

[Editor's Note: My thanks to Kevin Hisel for submitting all the previous articles in this section of the newsletter.]

ToC

Review: Windows XP

codingsanity
Friday, December 14, 2007 2:06 PM
URL: <http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx>

I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop.

Look & Feel

Windows XP has quite a cartoony look and feel compared to the slick look of Aero Glass; this is mostly offset by the lack of strange screen artifacts caused by malfunctioning graphics code. You know, almost like static on the screen. This was a once or twice monthly occurrence on my laptop, and happened on my desktop whenever I logged in, and also whenever I played a 3D game after leaving Vista running for a couple of hours. I also miss the "orphaned windows" I got on Vista, dialog boxes that would not go away, in a sense they became part of the desktop, since you could drag a selection from within them, despite the fact that the Glass would render the selection below them. Such crazy graphics bugs appear to be a thing of the past.

Performance

Well, here there appears to be no contest. Windows XP is both faster and far more responsive. I no longer have the obligatory 1-minute system lock that happens whenever I log onto Vista, instead I can run applications as soon as I can click their icons. Not only that, but the applications start snappily too, rather than all waiting in some "I'm still starting up the OS" queue for 30 seconds or so before all starting at once. In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to <gasp> Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP. With the amount of multi-core processors around today using a multitasking operating system like XP makes a world of difference.

[Image: A doomed attempt to cancel a file copy, I had to hard reset the computer after this.]

In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codec's pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.

Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you're surfing, a nice touch.

Device Support

XP comes with some impressive device support. In fact, every peripheral I've collected over the years works perfectly with it. Many have the device drivers preinstalled on XP, making their installation a snap, but for the rest it was easy to find device drivers on the Web. In addition I found the drivers quick and reliable, a far cry from the buggy, slow and sparse driver support in Vista. I'm glad to see that with their new flagship OS, Windows XP, Microsoft have finally learnt from the mistakes they made with the Vista launch. In addition, support for mobile devices seems to be significantly improved.

I've also found that XP seems much lighter on the hardware than Vista, when it's inactive the hard drive very rarely spins up, a major advantage for me, since I often sleep near my laptop. No longer do I have to try and ignore the continual hard drive drone, but can now sleep soundly just like my computer. I never did figure out exactly what Vista was doing with my hard drive the whole time, but I'm sure it degraded its lifespan with all that spinning.

Reliability

All I can say is "wow!" You can see that a lot of work has gone into making XP more reliable than its predecessor. The random program crashes, and hangs appear to be a thing of the past.

[Image: The Lack-of-Solutions tool]

Internet Explorer 7 is much more reliable on XP as well, and has so far not crashed once whilst viewing GMail, when it used to do this several times a day. In addition, I can now actually close the thing down normally every time, instead of sometimes having to kill the process. Error collection seems to be far better as well. Instead of a dialog taking a minute or two to collect the information it needs, the dialog comes up and is ready to send error data almost immediately. I am sad to see the back of the Solutions tool though, it may have hardly ever delivered any valid solutions, especially for the standard random crashes, but at least you knew that something under your control was tracking that information. Please, Microsoft bring it back.

[Image: The much-missed reliability report]

Speaking of which, I notice that the Reliability Report is also gone, again a sore loss, I really enjoyed charting the downward spiral of my Vista reliability, there were those occasional humps that got you all excited, and then the graph would continue its steady sojourn downwards. Of course, the fact that it only appeared to pay attention to a tiny fraction of the actual problems was a bit of an issue, but I'm sure they could have resolved that for the XP release. Ah well.

I also am pleased to note that Ctrl-Alt-Del does actually have an effect nowadays. Many times in Vista, I wished that they would make this more reliable so I could kill off the inevitable hanging Windows Explorer process (as a matter of fact, this is the situation I find myself in right now), in XP it actually does something as opposed to being part of the usual Vista eternal hang. Speaking of which, please excuse me for a few minutes, Windows Explorer has now been 100% hung for 5 minutes, despite my asking Vista to restart it, and despite me pushing Ctrl-Alt-Del several times over those 5 minutes. So I'm going to have to hard-reset my laptop. This process, by the way, is also something that amazingly seems to almost never be required in the clean and sparkling new XP.

Right, I'm back, thanks for being patient. I mentioned how much quicker you could start using programs from a boot in XP; I must admit that, appealing though that feature is, you won't actually find it that useful. XP almost never appears to require a reboot, so you hardly ever take advantage of a wonderful improvement like that, which otherwise would save you at least 15-20 minutes a day.

Gaming

This is another area where Microsoft has really excelled in Windows XP. Games are significantly more responsive, get much higher frame rates, and are far more reliable than in Vista. If you're a gamer, the upgrade to XP is mandatory. Whilst there are a few games that won't work as well in XP than in Vista, you'll find that on the whole XP supports almost all the games you'd want to play. In addition, it's vastly increased reliability means you'll spend much more time killing things than restarting, a welcome change I can assure you. You'll also find that non-X-Fi soundcards with EAX are much improved by their support in XP, which can really add a bit of excitement to your gaming experience.

Multimedia

Multimedia support on XP is vastly better than on Vista. Whilst content-creators had insisted on all sorts of intrusive features in Vista that made the multimedia experience a living hell for Microsoft users, thankfully with XP Microsoft were able to insist that their customers' needs came ahead of the content creators outdated business model. It's nice to see a corporation like Microsoft stand up to the cyber bullies at the MPAA and refuse to assume that its loyal customers are criminals. In any case, the DRM built into Vista was broken shortly after its release anyway.

Conclusion

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Well done Microsoft!

ToC

The Linux Section:

INQUIRER guide to free operating systems

By Liam Proven
24 Dec 2007 | 12:02 GMT
URL: <http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/24/inq-guide-free-operating>

Linux for Cynics

XP IS GETTING a bit long in the tooth, Vista is a pig and you don't want to buy a Mac and join the Jobs Cult. So, you're thinking of having a look at Linux, but are bamboozled by the hundreds of flavours and don't want to spend a weekend discussing it with disturbingly intense bearded men in socks and sandals. So here is the Inquirer's guide to Linux: quick, clear, opinionated and unfair.

There are scores and scores of minor players but only about half a dozen big ones that are worth looking at. We'll ignore all the single-floppy efforts, mini-CDs, routers and firewalls, security toolkits and so on, because they're specialist and there are too many to enumerate.

Which leaves the big, general-purpose distros, the one-size-fits-all, do-anything offerings. But first, ask yourself some questions. Are you willing to pay? If so, a bit or a lot?

Another significant difference is the desktop. Basically, there are two, both fairly Windows-like. GNOME is simple (some say too simple), clean and in places very slightly Mac-like. KDE is fiddlier, perhaps even cluttered, resembles Windows a bit more but offers more opportunity to tweak and customise. Your choice.

Also, it's worth saying: if you tried Linux a few years ago, it's time to take another look. In the Free software world, things move a great deal faster than in the big commercial software houses: releasing a new version every two years is seen as slow, stately and considered and several distros put out a fresh edition twice a year. Linux knowledge from last year is old-fashioned and from a few years ago is positively ancient.

So, in strictly alphabetical order...

Debian

Debian <http://www.uk.debian.org/> is the daddy. It's one of the oldest surviving distros, partly because its designers thought hard about the software packaging problem way back when, sorted it and moved on. It has few frills, but it does offer a vast selection of applications, focused on capital-"F" Free code. The snag - well, it's not exactly renowned for its user friendliness. If you need the advice of this article, you don't want to mess with Debian.

Fedora

You hear a disproportionate amount about Fedora <http://fedoraproject.org/>, because it's American. Development is sponsored by Red Hat, the US Linux giant. Red Hat used to give away its eponymous product for free. Since 2003, though, it's gone for the enterprise market bigtime. The free OS disappeared, replaced by Red Hat Enterprise Linux <http://www.redhat.com/> which costs big bucks. It's well-liked by the sort of suits who think that unless you paid more for the software than you give each month to the poor sods who maintain it, it can't be worth anything. RHEL is what you want if you took out a maintenance contract on the office loo. It's safe, reliable and staid.

If you want to try it for free, though, there's CentOS <http://www.centos.org/>, compiled from the source code to RHEL, which Red Hat makes publicly available.

To fill the gap left by the end of the official free version, Red Hat created Fedora. It's a sort of free rolling technology testbed for stuff Red Hat might stick into the grown-up version later. With two releases a year, we'd call it an ongoing beta except that it's had some distinctly alpha-ish moments. It has lots of enthusiastic and helpful users, so you can get help fairly easily. For years, the official software installation tool, the Red Hat Package Manager, RPM, was very poor, lacking facilities that rivals had had for a decade, but it's catching up now with more advanced from ends like Fedora's YUM.

One problem shared by many free Linux distros offered in the USA and certain other jurisdictions is that they can't legally give away for free proprietary tools like MP3, Flash and Java - so out of the box, you can't open these kinds of files. A sign of the corporate mindset behind Fedora is its solution to this problem: it tells you where to go to buy licensed commercial versions. Very helpful.

Gentoo

Gentoo <http://www.gentoo.org/>is the distro for those who disdain Debian and Slackware for being too easy. The idea is that you compile it all yourself from source, so ending up with something perfectly tailored to your hardware. Think Vauxhall Nova with plastic body kit, LEDs in the screen jets, an exhaust you could stick your fist up and a boot full of bass speaker.

Linspire, Freespire

Linspire <http://www.linspire.com/> is a shiny colourful desktop distro aimed at the pile-'em-high, sell-'em-cheap market. It's designed to be basic, really easy to install and to closely resemble Windows. Indeed, it used to be called "Lindows" and offered a built-in - and somewhat ropey - facility to run Windows programs, until Microsoft sent the boys round. It used to be based on Debian, but more recently has moved to Ubuntu - more on that later. It doesn't come with much software included - it was cheap and the company hoped you'd buy extra apps from their online "warehouse", where they sold an assortment of software that's mostly free anyway. There's a free version now, too, called Freespire, <http://www.freespire.org/>and much of the contents of the online store is free these days too. Both flavours are pretty good on the proprietary codecs and drivers front, but it's a relatively minor player.

Mandriva

Mandriva <http://www.mandriva.com/> used to be called Mandrake until its makers bought Brazil's Connectiva. Not much of the Latin Americans' technology survived but a couple of syllables of the name did, so that's all right. Mandrake started out as "Red Hat with KDE", when Red Hat was still free and the dominant distro, and KDE was the trendy new desktop GUI, which Red Hat didn't offer because bits of it weren't entirely Free. Nowadays, though, Red Hat /does / offer KDE, since which time, Mandriva has set out to distinguish itself as the friendliest Linux. It doesn't always make it but it's a good effort. The main product is commercial and updated annually, but there are free single-CD GNOME and KDE editions. The success of the company's efforts at simplification and polish can be judged from the fact that there's a free spinoff of it called PCLinuxOS <http://www.pclinuxos.com/>, designed to make it more polished and easy.

Slackware

Slackware <http://www.slackware.com/> is another survivor from the early days, like Debian - and similarly is best left for the beardies. Compared to the others, it's dead basic - its startup files and software packages stick to ancient Unix methods, avoiding the trendy bells and whistles of younger Linuxes, although it's gradually gaining some modern features like automatic updates.

SUSE

Novell has got into Linux in a big way, by acquisition - notably, GNOME programmers Ximian and German distro producers /Software- unt Syst em-Entwicklung/, or SuSE. Now, SUSE <http://www.novell.com/linux/> is Novell's brand of Linux. Formerly a heavily-KDE-based distro (KDE was also a German project at the start), SUSE was best-known for its inexpensive commercial product SUSE Linux Professional, a big boxed set with umpteen CDs and DVDs containing everything you could ever want and pretty decent dead-tree manuals. Novell's changed all that and now follows a more Red Hat like strategy.

Broadly, there are four lines. Open Enterprise Server is " reassuringly expensive" and bundles Netware services on top of a Linux server, which is also available rather more cheaply on its own as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). There's also a client, *SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). Basically these are the core, most tried-and-tested bits of the distro, bundled with support, updates and so on. New releases come every two or three years, to suit sluggish corporate timescales.

For cheapskate home users, there's openSUSE <http://www.opensuse.org/>. (There /are/ free evaluation versions of the enterprise products, but since Novell doesn't offer free updates, in effect they're sort of time-bombed demos.) You can download either a GNOME or KDE edition as a single CD image, or a DVD image with both, or buy it as a boxed set with media, manuals and a few months' support. If you opt for the CD, there are lots of additional components online. OpenSUSE is rather sleeker than the old boxed set and it comes with some codecs preloaded. Like Mandriva, it's based on RPM and new releases come roughly annually.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu <http://www.ubuntu.com/> is the brown one, possibly because it's got a tan from hogging all the limelight. The name is African, untranslatable from the isiXhosa but roughly m eaning "be nice to people for a change". It was set up by a young South African called Mark Shuttleworth who became absurdly rich by setting up a dot-com and selling it to Verisgn at exactly the right time. After a US$20,000,000 trip to the International Space Station, Ubuntu is what he did next, more or less his way of giving something back.

Shuttleworth's original plan for Ubuntu was straightforward and similar to that of the abortive UserLinux project: to pick one best-of-breed program from each main category of application - desktop, web browser, office suite and so on - and bundle them up with Debian into a single CD, so there were no confusing choices or options when installing. The team picked GNOME as an easy, all-Free desktop.

KDE has a massive following of its own, though, and a version of Ubuntu based around KDE and KDE applications instead of GNOME quickly followed. It's called Kubuntu and has been officially adopted as a sister product, as have several other spinoffs from the many as-yet unofficial derivatives. The GNOME version is still the official main product, though, with a distinctive look based on shades of brown and orange, African imagery and sound effects.

Ubuntu is still a little raw in places - both SUSE and Mandriva have better setup and admin tools, for instance - but with two releases every year, it's maturing very fast. It's a smooth, polished desktop OS, with decent driver support. Due to its Debian roots and good design, software installation easier than on any rival operating system, Macs and Windows included. The project hosts a collection of many thousands of applications on its web servers and you can install any of them by ticking one box and clicking OK. This includes a single package called "ubuntu-restricted-extras" which adds support for MP3 and other proprietary formats with just two mouse clicks.

Sponsored by its multimillionaire founder, there are no commercial or paid-for versions of Ubuntu: all flavours are completely free. The company will even ship you professionally-made CDs for no charge if you don't fancy downloading and burning your own. The plan is that ultimately the company becomes self-financing by selling support and consultancy services to corporate customers.

Xandros

Xandros <http://www.xandros.com/> is the OS you will meet if you buy one of the Asus EEE super-cheap mini-laptops. A distant relative of Linspire, it's another Debian derivative, originally developed and sold by Corel as Corel LinuxOS, arguably the first really simple, pared-down desktop Linux for non-experts. It's still commercial, although a slightly dated and slightly limited free demo CD is available for download. There are several editions, aimed mainly at corporate and business desktops, with a new Server variant that comes with an MS Exchange-compatible groupware server. Its main claim to fame is that it goes out of its way to be Windows-like and Windows-compatible. Its desktop is a modified version of KDE with a Windows Explorer-like file manager and it can both join Windows domains and run some Windows applications. A slow, corporate-friendly release cycle means that it's not state of the art, but it's a good choice if interoperating with Windows is your top priority.

Rounding up

Frankly, despite the embarrassment of riches, we reckon the choice is pretty clear. Avoid the geek distros. Fedora is too experimental. Linspire doesn't really have much going for it. Xandros does, but it costs and it's not flashy or pretty. Mandriva and openSUSE are good solid offerings, but Ubuntu has them beat. It costs nothing and you don't lose out on any bonus extras reserved for paying customers. The free online support and help are excellent, too.

Ubuntu first appeared in just 2004, but already it's claimed more than half the "market" according to the Open Source Development Labs' 2007 Survey <http://devresources.linux%20-foundation.org/dev/dtl/ survey2007/SurveySummary.html>. It has more than twice as many users as Debian and about three times as many as Fedora or SUSE.

Ubuntu Server is still very basic - big businesses wanting a server should evaluate Red Hat and SUSE and small ones Xandros or the free SME Server <http://www.smeserver.org/>.

As for the future - for now, Ubuntu looks unstoppable. Give it a go.

First time around, don't use a laptop - use a desktop machine with a wired network connection. Don't dual boot it if you can avoid it - use a PC you can wipe clean. Don't try something state of the art, as there may not be free drivers yet. Most hardware vendors are too selfish to provide free documentation for open source developers, so everything must be reverse-engineered. You don't need much - just the same sort of spec as for XP. Half a gig of RAM, although more won't hurt, a 2GHz CPU and 20G of hard disk will be plenty. It's faster and easier to install than Windows, and once it's on, all your applications will be right there ready to use, and it only ever needs a single online update rather than half a dozen visits to windowsupdate.microsoft.com <http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/>, rebooting each time.

Look at it this way. It's free. If you love it or hate it, either way, you're guaranteed to get your money back!

ToC

The Macintosh Section:

Macworld leads tech out of the desert

Posted by Tom Krazit
January 11, 2008 4:00 AM PST
URL: <http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9848481-37.html>

Apple has the third week of January all to itself this year, and although it probably won't top last year's Macworld, the company will likely make everyone forget about the Consumer Electronics Show.

Trade shows are a necessary evil in the tech industry. Everyone claims to hate them, but the opportunity to have all the major players in the same town at the same time is too much of a draw. And usually, the parties are decent, leading more than 140,000 business types to CES in Las Vegas this week for a chance to make deals and network inside crowded booths and over the craps tables.

Contrast that with Macworld, scheduled for next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. About 40,000 people are expected to attend the 23rd such gathering, according to conference presenter IDG World Expo. And, like last year, Tuesday's Macworld announcements will probably overshadow anything announced in the Nevada desert.

Hundreds of ordinary people will start lining up for Macworld on Monday night for a chance to sit 300 feet away from their hero. They'll be swapping stories and talking tech all throughout the chilly night with their fellow line-standers. They're anticipating the Stevenote, the two hours of the year when the tech world stands still, waiting for Apple CEO Steve Jobs to introduce the company's latest products.

The buzz this year doesn't seem to be approaching the heights reached last year, when Jobs unveiled the iPhone. The best bets this time around appear to be new slim notebooks and a movie rental service with several of the world's largest studios joining forces with Apple.

Apple's stock, which usually follows a "buy on the rumor, sell on the news" pattern prior to Macworld, is actually down quite a bit from last week. Granted, it was a bad week for just about everyone, but it's still a little surprising that Apple's performance was below the market's in the week leading up to Macworld. With a recession looming in the minds of many economists, perhaps some investors are wondering whether people forced to choose between a growing mortgage payment, filling up the tank, or buying a new Mac might opt to keep the roof over their head and the car moving.

However, it's also pretty hard to introduce products every year that will generate buzz on the order of the iPhone. New notebooks seem like a given, coming off the introduction of new mobile processors from Intel and the two-year gap between next week and the last significant overhaul of the MacBook design template.

Much of the speculation has centered on an ultraportable notebook, a 3-pound or so laptop currently missing from Apple's slate of Macs. But it's also likely that the company will take the occasion to update the regular notebooks in its arsenal.

The more significant news, should it come to pass, would be the announcement of a movie rental service through iTunes. Reports have been flying out of Hollywood that Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, Lions Gate, and, of course, Disney will have rental agreements to announce with Apple.

Apple's attempts to replicate the success of the music portion of the iTunes store in the video market haven't exactly taken off, especially when it comes to movies. While people may indeed want to own their music, they seem less interested in having to buy movies just to check them out. Details of exactly how Apple's rental service would work are still sketchy, but for a few dollars, you'd likely download a file that would last a predetermined amount of time (24 hours is the popular bet) and then disappear from your hard drive.

Given how many people are using iTunes, this could be one of the first Internet-download services to break through to average consumers. The concept has been around for a while through companies like Wal-Mart and Movielink, but no one has managed to turn the idea into a hit. Apple has a fighting chance to pull that off, and if it does, it'll also dramatically expand the usefulness of Apple TV.

There's also likely to be the fabled "one more thing." A lack of preshow buzz might mean Apple has been ratcheting down expectations for this year, but it might also mean it's done a better job keeping its secrets secret. After all, there's no way Jobs can talk about notebooks and movies for the scheduled 90 minutes, and some feel that this week's introduction of the Mac Pro and Xserve was done to free up some time in his keynote for something else.

Contrast that with the "news" coming out of Las Vegas. Despite hours of keynote speeches from some of the titans of the American technology industry, there didn't seem to be anything radically new or different this year that changed the way the industry looks at a certain segment or captured the attention of the average person. The iPhone managed to do both of those things last year at Macworld.

For the most part, people leave Las Vegas drained from the experience of the daily trek across the equivalent of a small town, listening to the same stump speeches from the same industry visionaries who want you to imagine that all of the things they said would happen last year (and the year before that, and the year before that) actually did happen.

Jobs has managed to avoid falling into that malaise so far. Last year, he introduced the iPhone. That seems to have worked out fairly well. The year before that, he introduced the first Intel-based Macs. People have clearly responded to those as well.

Every time he does this, however, the expectations grow. Apple has done a masterful job with Macworld the last several years, but it will become more and more difficult to outdo itself every year.

But until the Intels, Microsofts, Yahoos, and Comcasts of the tech industry start doing the same thing at CES--introducing products that captivate ordinary people--that show will always be more about schmoozing and gambling. And Apple will continue to own January.

ToC

MacBook Air Highlights Macworld Expo 2008 Keynote

by Jeff Carlson
January 15, 2008 10:58 AM
URL: <http://tidbits.com/article/9401>

Today's Macworld Expo keynote promised "something in the air," but the highlight actually came from a business-sized envelope during Steve Jobs' presentation. We'll have more in-depth coverage soon, but for now here's a rundown of this morning's developments.

Catch Some Air -- The new MacBook Air [1], dubbed the world's thinnest laptop, is a half-inch thick portable with a full-size keyboard, 13.3-inch LED screen, 1.7 GHz or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo processor (extremely small and custom made by Intel for Apple), 80 GB hard disk (with an optional 64 GB solid state disk drive also available) - and no optical drive or Ethernet port. It's available for pre-order today starting at $1,799, and shipping in two weeks.

Movie Rentals -- Jobs also introduced a movie rental service [2] through the iTunes Store, with features available for $2.99 ($3.99 for new releases), and high-definition movies for just $1 more. After renting a title, you can keep it for up to 30 days; once you begin watching it, it expires after 24 hours. The movies can be synced to an iPod, Mac, iPhone, or Apple TV, too. Powering this is iTunes 7.6, which is available now via Software Update.

iPhone and iPod touch Software Update -- On the iPhone [3] front, a software update available today adds smart location tracking to Google Maps, Web-clipping capabilities, a customizable home screen, the ability to send SMS messages to groups, and chapters and other features to video playback.

iPod touch [4] owners can pay $20 to upgrade to a version of the operating system that includes the same applications as the iPhone (Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes, Weather) as well as the improvements found in the iPhone.

Apple TV 2.0 -- To handle the new iTunes movie rentals, Apple introduced Apple TV 2.0 [5], a free software update for existing Apple TV owners that untethers the set-top box from your computer. It can order content directly (which then gets synced to your computer), including high-definition (HD) content. The update will be available in two weeks. Apple also reduced the cost of the Apple TV itself to $229 for new buyers.

Time Capsule -- When Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was introduced, one capability missing from the Time Machine feature was wireless backups, something that had been demonstrated months earlier. Apple made up for that today by introducing Time Capsule [6], an AirPort wireless base station that includes a "server grade" hard disk of either 500 GB ($299) or 1 TB ($499) capacity for wireless Time Machine backups.

  1. <http://www.apple.com/macbookair/>
  2. <http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/movies.html>
  3. <http://www.apple.com/iphone/>
  4. <http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/>
  5. <http://www.apple.com/appletv/>
  6. <http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/>

[Editor's Note: You can watch the Keynote address at <http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/keynote/>.]

ToC

MacBook Air Introduced as World's Thinnest Notebook

by TidBITS Staff
January 15, 2008 2:09 PM
URL: <http://tidbits.com/article/9405>

Billing it as the world's thinnest notebook computer, Apple announced the MacBook Air [1], a 3-pound Mac that fills out the company's portable line between the inexpensive MacBook at the low end and the powerful MacBook Pro at the high end. During his keynote address at Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs demonstrated the new machine's slim profile by sliding it out of a standard interoffice manila envelope (a trick that also appears in a new television ad [2]). The slightly wedge-shaped computer ranges in thickness from 0.76 inches (19.3mm) on the hinge side to a mere 0.16 inches (4mm) at the front.

[image] [3]

The MacBook Air offers many whizzy features that you'd expect from a new Apple laptop: a full-size, backlit keyboard with an ambient light sensor; a built-in iSight camera; 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) wireless support; a magnetic latch; and a 45 watt power adapter with a MagSafe connector. Its "generously sized" trackpad borrows gesture support from the iPhone's multi-touch display, meaning that with various combinations of finger movements you can zoom, pan, rotate photos, move windows, and perform other actions without having to worry about the exact location of your mouse pointer or manipulating tiny on-screen controls. The gestures are customizable in the Trackpad view of the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane.

Apart from the power connector, the only physical interfaces on the MacBook Air (all hidden beneath a small flip-down door) are a single USB 2.0 port, a micro-DVI video port, and a headphone jack. Notably absent is an Ethernet port, although Apple offers a $29 USB-to-Ethernet adapter as an option. In addition, the MacBook Air is the first Apple computer since 2000 not to include any form of FireWire port, and it even lacks a slot for a security cable (a real pity given how tempting it will be to swipe one of these machines). Another interesting omission is that of an Apple Remote, though users can purchase one for an additional $19.

The MacBook Air features a glossy 13.3-inch, 1280-by-800-pixel display with LED backlighting - the same physical size and resolution as the existing MacBook's display. At Apple's request, Intel created a special version of the Core 2 Duo CPU for the MacBook Air; the processor is 60 percent smaller than those in Apple's other laptops. It's also slower, with the base model clocking in at only 1.6 GHz and an option to switch to a 1.8 GHz processor. The computer comes standard with 2 GB of RAM, which is not upgradeable.

In order to save space, the MacBook Air uses a 1.8 inch hard drive (the same size found in some iPod models). The standard configuration features an 80 GB, 4200-rpm drive. However, Apple also offers, for the first time, a 64 GB solid-state drive, which is somewhat faster - especially compared to the relatively slow 1.8-inch drive - and enormously more shock-resistant, and has slightly lower power requirements (though at a significantly higher price).

Apple claims 5 hours of battery life for the MacBook Air, even with wireless networking active; Apple told us that battery life could be increased slightly by disabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Although one would suspect that figure would increase with the solid-state drive option, Apple said in a briefing that the difference is negligible. It's a good thing the battery life is so long, too, since the battery is not removable - another first in an Apple laptop. It can be replaced at an Apple Store for $129 without being sent in for service, Apple said. The battery, like that of the iPhone, is expected to retain at least 80 percent of its capacity after hundreds of complete recharge cycles.

The machine has no optical drive, though an external USB SuperDrive is available for $99. However, Apple thinks most users won't need one, thanks to new technology called Remote Disc, which enables the MacBook Air to mount CDs and DVDs inserted in other computers - even Windows PCs - with the permission of the computer's owner. A preference can also be set to allow automatic mounting.

Remote Disc even allows network-based installation and upgrade of Mac OS X through a network boot, a feature previously found only in Mac OS X Server, meant as a tool for network administrators. This feature requires a choice at startup - probably holding down certain keys as with the server-based Net Install - that we were unable to determine the specific details of.

Remote Disc can be installed to share discs on any Tiger, Leopard, Windows XP, or Windows Vista system. However, Apple told us that Remote Disc would only work for mounting on a MacBook Air. We hope Apple expands the availability of the feature - likely requiring firmware changes in other models - as an additional option for flexibility and disaster recovery for other Mac owners.

Steve Jobs made a special point of enumerating the environmentally friendly features of the MacBook Air. It has a fully recyclable aluminum case; a mercury-free display with arsenic-free glass; circuit boards that are BFR-free and PVC-free; and retail packaging that occpies 56% less volume than that of the existing MacBook.

Apple is now accepting preorders for the MacBook Air, which Jobs said would begin shipping in two weeks. The base model, with an 80 GB hard drive and a 1.6 GHz processor, costs $1,799. Swapping the hard drive for the 64 GB solid state drive adds a whopping $999 to the price, while upgrading to a 1.8 GHz processor adds $300.

  1. <http://www.apple.com/macbookair/>
  2. <http://www.apple.com/macbookair/#ad>
  3. <http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2008-01/macbookair.jpg>
ToC

iTunes Movie Rentals and Apple TV Take 2

by TidBITS Staff
January 15, 2008 2:09 PM
URL: <http://tidbits.com/article/9403>

Furthering Apple's expansion into consumer electronics and entertainment, Steve Jobs today announced a significant change to the iTunes Store business model - movie rentals [1]. Interestingly, Jobs introduced the movie rentals by talking first about the iTunes Store successes - 4 billion songs and 125 million TV shows sold - before admitting that the company wasn't happy about selling only 7 million movies so far. By adding the movie rental business to the iTunes Store, Apple was able to sign up all the major movie studios along with a number of smaller ones, a feat that had previously eluded the company.

By the end of February 2008, Apple plans to have 1,000 movies available for rental in the United States (with an international release of the program slated for later this year), and new releases will appear in the iTunes Store for rental 30 days after the DVD release. Jobs did not say whether movies would remain available for sale, or if movie rentals were replacing movie sales entirely. The movies will be available in DVD quality (at roughly 640 x 480 resolution, depending on the movie's aspect ratio) and, where possible, HD quality, with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. Older movies cost $2.99 in DVD quality and $3.99 in HD quality; new releases are $3.99 and $4.99. Once you've rented a movie, you have 30 days to watch it, and you must finish watching within 24 hours after you start. (This is comparable to the viewing restrictions on movies rented via Amazon Unbox, which only supports TiVo DVRs and Windows computers.)

Movies can, of course, be watched on Macs and PCs in iTunes, on the current generation of iPods, and on the iPhone. But as Jobs noted, most people watch movies on large screen TVs, and in another burst of humility, he admitted that the Apple TV has been disappointing, associating it with failed efforts from numerous other companies. That served as the springboard for the next announcement, of a significant software update to the Apple TV [2] that enables users to rent movies directly from the iTunes Store without the need for any computer. The Apple TV update, which will be a free software update available for all owners in two weeks, has a completely redesigned user interface that also provides access to audio and video podcasts, can display photos from Flickr and .Mac, plays videos from YouTube, and lets users purchase music and TV shows from the iTunes Store for direct playback and syncing to computers.

Jobs also announced that the Apple TV's price, previously $299, would drop to $229. It would have been more interesting had Apple seriously slashed the price, say to $99, in an attempt to drive a vast number of purchases and associated movie rentals.

  1. <http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/movies.html>
  2. <http://www.apple.com/appletv/>
ToC

Time Capsule Bundles AirPort Base Station and Backup Disk

by TidBITS Staff
January 15, 2008 1:56 PM
URL: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9402>

Time Machine backups from Leopard can now fly through the air with the greatest of ease, not just over a Wi-Fi network to another Mac running Leopard, but to a new "backup appliance" called Time Capsule. According to Steve Jobs, the Time Capsule [1] is a "full 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station with all the ports in the back." Showing a slide with a laptop connected to an external drive, Jobs bemoaned the annoyance of connecting and disconecting the cable.

Time Capsule, which looks like a larger version of the square AirPort Extreme Base Station shipped in 2007 (7.7 inches or 197mm versus 6.5 inches or 165mm), is intended to back up multiple Macs - for instance, all Macs in a household or small office workgroup - and it includes either 500 GB or 1 TB of storage. The new device costs $299 or $499, depending on drive capacity, which puts the 1 TB model at a bit of a premium in comparison to the average prices of raw drives.

Previously, Time Machine could not back up to a NAS (network attached storage) drive, such as one that you might attach via USB to an AirPort Extreme Base Station. Apple had originally promised Leopard would include AirPort Disk backups to AirPort Extreme-connected drives, but that feature was dropped prior to Leopard's release.

While 802.11n can offer speeds as fast as 90 Mbps when using the less widely used 5 gigahertz (GHz) band, it also supports the slower 802.11g (roughly 20 Mbps at best) and 802.11b (5 Mbps) standards - supported by the original AirPort Extreme and the original AirPort. Backing up over 802.11g could be painfully slow and clog the rest of the network.

Given that Jobs announced software updates to other hardware devices, such as Apple TV and the iPod touch, at the keynote, the lack of an announcement about the existing 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Stations would seem to indicate that Apple does not have an update for them that will enable Time Machine support for NAS drives. That's strange, since it would seem that the technical problems that reportedly caused AirPort Disk support to be dropped from Time Machine would also afflict the Time Capsule, so perhaps a future software update will restore that promised functionality. Apple also gave no indications when Time Machine will fully support FileVault encrypted user accounts, another important feature for security-conscious mobile users.

One thing that's a bit odd about Time Capsule is that it is absolutely not NAS - its disk has one purpose, and one purpose only: Time Machine backups. That's probably a good thing. In the years we've written about backups at TidBITS - starting with floppies; moving through early, middle, and late tape systems; and continuing now with hard drives - we've consistently complained about the lack of a simple, configuration-free software and hardware offering that would pair with a Mac. Now we have it.

For those who haven't already settled on a serious backup strategy or invested in backup drives, the Time Capsule may prove to be a popular device, especially for backing up multiple 802.11n-enabled Macs on the same network. For a single Mac, if you can cope with the horror of a cable, a regular external drive is a significantly cheaper option. Further, Time Capsule seems best for those who don't already have older gear or an established backup strategy: those who already have NAS drives and AirPort Extreme Base Stations may be frustrated at the apparent lack of an upgrade path, and those backing up Macs with slower 802.11 standards will likely find that Time Machine backs up too slowly to be usable. However, in shipping Time Capsule, Apple has further emphasized how serious they are about Time Machine as a core feature in Leopard.

  1. <http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/>
ToC

New Mac Pro Goes Eight-Core Before Macworld Expo

by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#910/14-Jan-08
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9381>

A week before Steve Jobs was set to take the stage at Macworld Expo, Apple cleared away any need to talk about professional-level Macs to concentrate on what we presume are more interesting announcements. When a new Mac Pro that Apple advertises as "the fastest Mac ever" (sure, the latest professional Mac is always the fastest Mac ever, but still...) doesn't make the cut for the Macworld Expo keynote, even the more jaded among us start salivating.

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/01/08macpro.html>

The new Mac Pro features eight-core processing, thanks to a pair of Intel's new 45-nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running at 2.8 GHz, 3.0 GHz, or 3.2 GHz. Actually, there is a build-to-order option with only a single 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processor, but that feels like a throwaway to keep the price of the lowest-end Mac Pro down, and I usually avoid such oddball configurations when the direction is clearly toward eight cores across the board.

<http://www.apple.com/macpro/>

Apple claims the new Mac Pros are up to twice as fast as the previous top-of-the-line 2.66 Quad-Core Mac Pro when using processor-intensive applications like Maya and Logic Pro. Additional performance comes from a whopping 12 MB of L2 cache per processor, a high-bandwidth hardware architecture, dual-independent 1600 MHz front size buses, and support for up to 32 GB (8 slots) of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory.

<http://www.apple.com/macpro/performance.html>

In terms of storage expandability, the new Mac Pro features four internal hard drive bays with direct-attach, cable-free installation of SATA drives, giving it support for up to 4 TB of internal storage. A SuperDrive with double-layer support is also standard, with a second open optical drive bay available for another SuperDrive... or perhaps a Blu-ray drive in the future.

<http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html>

Graphics processing is also important for the professional crowd, and although I'm not deep in that world, the specs sound impressive. The standard video card is an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256 MB of video memory, but build-to-order options include the Nvidia 8800 GT with 512 MB of memory or Nvidia Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5 GB of memory. You're not limited to just one of these cards (each of which can drive a pair of DVI monitors) - the Mac Pro provides a total of four PCI Express slots, making it possible for a Mac Pro to drive a total of eight 30-inch monitors running at 2560 by 1600. Who needs Spaces when you can address over 32 million pixels? Clearly, Apple is looking to move into the stadium display market.

On the communications front, the Mac Pro comes standard with a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports (with support for jumbo frames), Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, an optional 802.11n AirPort Extreme card, and an optional Apple USB Modem. Anyone who buys a modem for this machine deserves a wedgie.

Other specs include a pair of FireWire 800 ports (one in front, one in back), a pair of FireWire 400 ports (one in front, one in back), five USB 2.0 ports (two in front, three in back), front-panel headphone minijack and speaker port, optical digital audio input and output Toslink ports, and analog stereo line-level input and output minijacks.

Apple says the new Mac Pro is available immediately, with pricing starting at $2,799 for a model that includes a pair of 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processors, 2 GB of RAM, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card, a 320 GB SATA drive, and SuperDrive, along with all the other standard stuff. The only slight disappointment? The industrial design remains the same, and while there's nothing wrong with the "cheese grater" case introduced nearly five years ago with the Power Mac G5, we'd sure like to see a hot new case design.

ToC

New Xserve Goes Eight-Core Too

by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#910/14-Jan-08
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9382>

Hot on the heels of Apple's pre-Macworld announcement of the new Mac Pro comes the release of a long-awaited update to the Xserve, the company's 1U rackmount server. Given that the Xserve typically finds itself racked in supercomputing and enterprise data centers, hardware updates seldom warrant mention during the Macworld Expo keynote anyway. This makes it unsurprising that Apple is releasing specifications and taking orders now to avoid the Xserve upgrade stealing any keynote thunder.

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/01/08xserve.html>

Like the new Mac Pro, the Xserve's top-end models feature eight-core processing, with a pair of 2.8 GHz or 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processors. There's also a base model sporting just a single 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processor. All models include 12 MB of L2 cache per processor, a high-bandwidth hardware architecture, dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses, and support for up to 32 GB (across 8 slots) of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory.

<http://www.apple.com/xserve/>

In terms of expansion, the Xserve provides three drive bays that support either SATA or SAS drives, a pair of PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots that can accept multi-channel 4-gigabit Fibre Channel, and 10-gigabit Ethernet cards.

Standard features include internal graphics support that can drive anything up to a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display, dual gigabit Ethernet jacks, two FireWire 800 ports (but no FireWire 400 ports), three USB 2.0 ports, and, of course, an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server 10.5 Leopard. The base Xserve configuration, shipping immediately, includes a single 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a single 80 GB SATA Apple Drive Module for $2,999.

<http://www.apple.com/xserve/specs.html>

Apple boasts that the new 45-nanometer Intel Quad-Core Xeon processors improve on energy efficiency, with the processors drawing a maximum of 80 watts and dropping as low as 4 watts when idle.

As with the Mac Pro, the industrial design of the Xserve remains largely unchanged, which will cause disappointment in some quarters. We've heard complaints from data center operators that the Xserve's 30-inch (76.2-cm) depth makes for awkward spacing in standard racks. (The original Xserve was 28 inches (71.1 cm) deep.) Also, Apple's policy of selling the Xserve's drive sleds only with drives makes it expensive to upgrade storage with drives from vendors other than Apple; that appears to be unchanged.

In a mixed blessing, Apple removed the FireWire 400 port from the front panel and replaced it with a USB 2.0 port. That's a good step, since it makes it easier to attach a keyboard and mouse for troubleshooting, but doesn't go far enough, since rack-mounted servers also usually need a monitor attached for troubleshooting, and the video port remains at the back of the Xserve.

Chuck Goolsbee, Vice President of Technical Operations for hosting company digital.forest, suggests that "user-related" ports, such as USB, video, and FireWire be accessible from the front panel, whereas "system-related" ports like Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and power be relegated to the back. (USB and FireWire should exist in both places, of course.) The reason is that ideal data center design calls for hot aisles and cold aisles, with the hot backs of servers facing each other and the cold fronts facing each other. That way, the hot aisles can be enclosed and cooled more effectively. But that's not feasible if the staff needs regular access to the backs of servers for troubleshooting, as the Xserve requires due to the placement of its video port on the back.

<http://chuck.goolsbee.org/archives/497>

All that said, we've been needing new server hardware for some time and this looks like the unit we've been waiting to order!

ToC

Introducing the new Xserve - the most powerful Apple server ever

[Jan 08, 2008]
URL: <http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/01/08xserve.html>

Starting at just $2,999, the new Xserve has up to two Quad-Core 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors for 8-core performance, a new server architecture, faster front side buses, faster memory, up to 3TB of internal storage and two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots for greater performance and flexibility. "With the latest Intel processors and no client access licenses, Xserve offers unbeatable server performance and value for under $3,000," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

ToC

QuickTime 7.3.1 Fixes RTSP Vulnerability

by Jeff Carlson <jeffc@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#908/17-Dec-07
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9363>

Apple has released QuickTime 7.3.1, a security update that patches a potentially serious exploit (see "Protect Yourself from the QuickTime RTSP Vulnerability," 2007-09-07). Unlike many recent security issues on the Mac, malicious code that took advantage of the QuickTime RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) vulnerability was active in the wild: a specially crafted Web page could install malicious software on your computer. According to Apple's security release notes, QuickTime 7.3.1 fixes the flaw in RTSP as well as holes in QuickTime's Flash media handler.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9333>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307176>

Apple recommends the update for all users: it's available via Software Update and in standalone form for Leopard (52.6 MB), Tiger (48.7 MB), Panther (50.9 MB), and Microsoft Windows XP and Vista (20.3 MB).

<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731forleopard.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731fortiger.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731forpanther.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731forwindows.html>

ToC

Security Update 2007-009 1.1 Released with Important Fixes

by Rich Mogull <rmogull@securosis.com>
TidBITS#909/07-Jan-08
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9369>

Shortly before the end of the year, Apple released Security Update 2007-009 to patch 41 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X 10.4.11 and 10.5.1. Many of these vulnerabilities can allow an attacker to take over your computer by simply sending you a malicious file or having you visit a malicious Web site. The affected applications and services include Address Book, CUPS (the printing service), and Quick Look.

(A few days after the initial Security Update 2007-009 was posted, Apple released version 1.1, which corrected a problem with Safari introduced in the prior update.)

Be aware that the Quick Look update will block any Quick Look plug-ins. We suspect this is a temporary fix and Apple will safely re-enable plug-ins in the (hopefully near) future.

A full listing of the updates can be found in Apple's security release notes. It's available through Software Update and in stand-alone form for Leopard (a 35.6 MB download) and Tiger (Universal) (a 27.4 MB download) or Tiger (PowerPC) (a 15.9 MB download).

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307179>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/securityupdate2007009111051.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/securityupdate20070091110411universal.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/securityupdate20070091110411ppc.html>

This is an extremely important update fixing multiple critical vulnerabilities. You should apply this as soon as possible, since many of these are the kinds of vulnerabilities favored by Internet attackers.

ToC

Update Fixes Unresponsive Laptop Keyboards

by Mark H. Anbinder <mha@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#909/07-Jan-08
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9373>

If you think your recent Mac laptop has decided to slack off, an update released at the end of 2007 might be the solution. For Intel-based laptop owners, the MacBook, MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1, fixes a problem wherein the keyboard occasionally stops responding for a minute or longer. (I've wondered what that was all about!) This update requires that the Mac OS X 10.5.1 update be installed first. (No word on whether the problem can affect 10.4 users.) The update is less than 1 MB and can be downloaded from Software Update or the Apple Web site.

<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macbookmacbookprosoftwareupdate11.html>

ToC

Get DivX Pro for Free for a Limited Time

by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#908/17-Dec-07
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9357>

For an unspecified limited time, DivX is giving away free serial numbers to their DivX Pro software, which makes it possible to create DivX-encoded videos on the Mac (a Windows version is also available). DivX is a compressed digital media format for video, much as MP3 and AAC are compressed digital media formats for audio. Read all about it on Wikipedia if you're interested in the gory details.

<http://www.divx.com/dff/index.php?version=mac>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divx>

Normally $19.99, DivX Pro for Mac is a bundle of four applications, DivX Player (for playing DivX videos on the Mac), DivX Web Player (for extending playback functionality to the Web), DivX Pro Codec (necessary for encoding video in DivX format), and DivX Converter (the application that works with the codec to create DivX videos).

<http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/>
<http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/player/>
<http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/webplayer/>
<http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/codec/>
<http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/converter/>

If you don't create video at all, there's nothing wrong with downloading the free version of DivX Pro, but you can get just the parts you need to play DivX-encoded videos for free any time. The DivX for Mac bundle includes the DivX Player, DivX Web Player, and the DivX Community Codec, which I gather can only decode DivX video, with encoding being restricted to the DivX Pro Codec.

<http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/>

ToC

Quay Sticks It to Stacks

by Matt Neuburg <matt@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#908/17-Dec-07
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9332>

This is certainly an exciting time for those of us who have found ourselves hampered by Leopard's superficial silliness. Of the Leopard features I complained about in "Six Things I Hate about Leopard" (2007-10-26), three have already been skewered by good old user ingenuity.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9265>

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9276>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9320>

<http://brockerhoff.net/quay/>

Here's how you use Quay (the name, by the way, is evidently a pun on "Dock"). First, drag any folders out of the Dock so that they vanish in a puff of smoke. Those old folders are Stacks, and are just what we're trying to avoid. Next, start up Quay. For each folder you'd like to see in the Dock, instead of dragging it directly into the Dock, drag it onto Quay's window; Quay then produces an icon (which you can customize quite extensively), and you drag that icon from Quay's window into the Dock. When you've populated the Dock with folders, you can quit Quay.

Now, with any of those Dock folders that you created with Quay, if you simply and quickly click the folder's Dock icon, a hierarchical menu of its contents appears. This menu is actually better than the old Dock hierarchical menus were: the menu for each folder can be sorted by name, date, or kind, and the menu's items can have small, large, or no icons - plus the menu can optionally display invisibles and/or package contents. To determine these menu display options, Option-click the folder icon. To open the folder, double-click it. What you should not do is Control-click the folder icon, or hold the mouse down on it for any length of time, because that will display the Dock's own menu for the item instead of Quay's.

That brings me to how Quay works its magic. This is largely guesswork, but I take it that what's going on here is that the things you're putting into the Dock with Quay are actually documents, not folders at all. (That's why they live in the correct location, the right side of the Dock, where both folders and documents go.) The originals of these documents are created behind the scenes by Quay, and are stored in your Application Support folder; they are concealed inside a package so you can't accidentally mess with them. When you single-click on a "folder" icon, since this is really a document, what happens is what always happens when you single-click a document in the Dock - the document is opened by the application that owns it. That application is not Quay itself, but an invisible background process that lives inside Quay's package. The invisible application's response to one of its documents being opened is to produce the hierarchical menu representing the contents of the folder to which that document is tied. (That's why Quay itself does not need to be running in order for you to use the Dock "folders" it produces.) Double-clicking a "folder" is seen as an attempt to open the same document twice in quick succession; the invisible process interprets this as a request to open the associated folder.

Quay is not perfect: For example, you can't Command-click on a "folder" in the Dock to reveal it in the Finder, and sometimes you can't double-click a "folder" in the Dock to open it either, because after the first click the hierarchical menu appears and, if it's large enough, it blocks the Dock so your second click can't get through. And the double-click feature is unreliable in other ways: Sometimes I find that it reveals the folder without opening it, and other times it opens the folder. In general, the double-click feature is unreliable, and it would be better if the hierarchical menu itself included options either to open or to reveal the original folder. Plus, of course, you can't drag an item onto a "folder" in the Dock to copy or move that item into the actual folder, because the thing in the Dock is just a document and no application is even aware of your drag. Finally, the Quay documentation warns that "Quay may get confused if you have several copies of it scattered around;" that's a little worrisome, since, with Time Machine making backups of everything, there certainly will be multiple copies of Quay (the documentation goes on to warn you to prevent this).

Nevertheless, the Quay approach is elegant, simple, and fun and easy to use, and of course this version is just 1.0; so I recommend that you give it a try. Quay costs 7 euros (about $10 at the moment); you can download it as a demo, but until you register, the hierarchical pop-up menu will work only on one of your Dock "folders."

<http://www.brockerhoff.net/quay/Quay.dmg>

Now if only someone would do something about the darned tiny type and icons in the sidebar of Finder windows!

ToC

Default Folder X Tames Leopard's Open/Save Dialogs

by Matt Neuburg <matt@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#908/17-Dec-07
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9358>

Jon Gotow's St. Clair Software has just released version 4 of Default Folder X, and in order to explain what that means to me, permit me to remind you of a couple of themes I've been harping on going back many years.

<http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/>

First, why aren't Open and Save dialogs more like the Finder? The Finder is for browsing and navigating your file hierarchy; so are Open and Save dialogs. The Finder is good for opening files; so are Open dialogs. So why are they such totally different worlds? Why are they so disconnected? Why is it still all too easy to save a file, have the Save dialog close, and then go, "Oh, darn, what folder did I just put that into?" In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, when you want to open or save a document from within an application, why are you not, in some sense, in the Finder?

This was a riddle I posed way back in the day (see "Apple's Dirty Little Secret," 2001-10-15), when Finder windows and Open and Save dialogs looked nothing like one another. Nowadays, Apple has gone to some lengths to obscure the differences between the two: Open and Save dialogs have acquired the power of Spotlight (see "Spotlight Strikes Back: In Leopard, It Works Great," 2007-11-01), the Finder sidebar (and, in Leopard, the ability to customize it), views that are sort of like the Finder's views (including, in Leopard, icon view), the capability to summon the Get Info dialog (by, uh, switching to the Finder), and so on. But Open and Save dialogs lack many Finder features, and the fact remains that these are two distinct worlds. They operate differently, and they aren't directly connected, even though you can use both simultaneously. How many times have you screamed at your computer, as it presented you with an Open dialog, "It's right there, dummy - the thing I want to open is sitting right there in a Finder window, behind you! Can't you see it?" No, alas, it can't. True, these days, you can drag from the Finder into an Open or Save dialog to help tell it what folder it should be in; but with all the windows you usually have open, arranging to make that little move can be like solving a Sokoban puzzle.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/6594>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9283>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban>

Second, whatever happened to Boomerang, which was first mentioned in TidBITS in "Boomerang Makes Good" (1990-10-01)? For readers born since those days (and I worry that, by now, we might really have some), Boomerang was a brilliant hack that helped Open and Save dialogs remember where you'd opened and saved things from, so you could get back there again. It was bought and mutated and re-mutated (for some great ancient history on this topic, see Jerry Kindall's "Get a Piece of the ACTION Files," 1998-06-15), but it was essential to my Mac usage since, gosh, System 6. Slowly, over the years, Apple has realized that Boomerang's functionality might be a Good Thing and has incorporated some of it into the system; but it doesn't really work very well (that's putting it kindly). Sure, an Open or Save dialog contains a Recent Folders section in the pop-up menu, but you know something? I never know where the heck it's getting that list from - most of the time, it doesn't remind me of the places I've recently opened or saved in this application - and it's usually a paltry two to five items in length. Does Apple think we're a bunch of weenies who only open documents from two to five places?

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/3757>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/4931>

All of which brings me to Default Folder X. I see we've been writing about this utility since 1991 (back when it was called DFaultD - wow, I'd actually forgotten that: see "DFaultD 2.22," 1991-11-18), and you can follow its history right up through 2005 ("Default Folder X 2.0.2 Now Available," 2005-09-05), which takes you up to Tiger; now, it's Leopard time.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/3335>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8231>

Default Folder X (it's a System Preferences pane with an application wrapped up inside it) can do a whole lot of things and has a whole lot of options; so any description threatens to be inadequate or confusing. Suffice it to say that it tries very hard to bridge the gap between Open and Save dialogs and the Finder, as well as adding some delightful extra navigational features. When an Open or Save dialog appears, Default Folder X notices this, and places a bar with five icons next to it. Each icon summons a menu:

<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2007-12/defaultfolderx_v4.png>

I should also emphasize Default Folder X's "Boomerang" feature, since this, for me, is worth the whole price of admission. When an Open dialog opens, not only does it open to the folder you were last viewing, it selects the file you last opened. This is hugely important, not just because this is the file you are most likely to want to open again, but also because if you are processing a series of files, you now know instantly which file is next in the series. I've been using Open dialogs this way, as I said before, since System 6, and I find it hard to live without this feature.

Some people might not like Default Folder X's new black-and-white semi-transparent windows, modeled after Leopard's "heads-up display" window style; but I think that they, and the new Leopard animations as you summon a menu, are the bee's knees. (That's a term of strong approbation.) Despite the mind-boggling array of options in the preference pane, the Leopard version of Default Folder X feels clean and useful, simple and powerful. Nonetheless, I'm sure I've described Default Folder X and its value inadequately, so please check the St. Clair Web site for yourself (it is best simply to read the entire manual), and download and try this indispensable utility. To find it working so beautifully on Leopard is a joy; I think you'll agree. Default Folder X is $34.95, with a 30-day free trial download available.

<http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/manual/>
<http://www.stclairsoft.com/Main/download.html>

ToC

NTFS Options for Mac Expand

by Joe Kissell <joe@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#908/17-Dec-07
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9351>

One of the irritating things about using Boot Camp, especially if you've formatted your Windows volume using NTFS (which is mandatory for Vista), is the awkwardness of transferring files between your Mac partition and your Windows partition. While running Windows, you can't see your Mac partition at all. While running Mac OS X, you can see your Windows partition, but you can make changes to files on it only if it uses the FAT32 format. If it uses NTFS, you have read-only access.

As a result, accessing files from one operating system while using the other requires you to jump through some hoops. One way is to use an intermediate volume that's visible to both Mac OS X and Windows, such as an external hard drive, an optical disc, or a server. If you have Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion installed, you can use either of them from within Mac OS X to access your Boot Camp partition (or any other NTFS volume), though this is a rather roundabout approach. Another option is to install MacDrive under Windows, which gives you seamless access to your Mac partitions but doesn't enable you to see your Windows volume when running Mac OS X.

<http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/>

Almost a year ago (see Chris Pepper's article "MacFUSE Explodes Options for Mac File Systems," 2007-01-29), Google released MacFuse, a system that lets developers create plug-ins supporting access to other file systems under Mac OS X. One of those plug-ins, NTFS-3G, provides read-write access to NTFS volumes, including those used by Boot Camp. As both of the required components are free, many people have been using them to get easier access to their NTFS volumes. Although the MacFUSE+NTFS-3G combo works reasonably well if your needs are modest, it has been criticized for problems such as inadequate transfer speeds, a lack of documentation, and difficulty getting support.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8835>
<http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/>
<http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/>

But now, an interesting new option has emerged that promises to solve these problems and more. Install Paragon Software's NTFS for Mac OS X, and your Mac acquires the capability of writing to any NTFS volume, including your Boot Camp partition, at respectable speeds and with complete transparency. In fact - and I never thought I'd say this - it may be too transparent for its own good.

<http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/>

Out of Sight

NTFS for Mac OS X 6.0 (the first release for the Mac, despite the version number) is a low-level driver that does its thing invisibly in the background. When it's installed, your NTFS partitions switch from read-only to read-write - and that's pretty much that. There's nothing to configure. It works silently, and in normal circumstances you'll never notice it at all - you'll just notice that you can write to your NTFS volumes.

Well, you may notice a couple of other things too. Under Leopard, Disk Utility gains the capability to repair NTFS volumes as well as format new or existing volumes as NTFS (NTFS-3G can also do the latter). Or, if you prefer, you can use supplied command-line utilities for these tasks (under Tiger, only the command-line utilities are available). In any case, this integration, too, is as seamless as can be.

One of the interesting implications of being able to write to an NTFS volume is that you can, if you want, back up your Boot Camp volume using the Mac backup program of your choice (rather than backing up within Windows). Strictly speaking, you could always do that, but now you can easily restore backed-up files, too, which obviously makes those backups a little more useful!

Just One Problem

Ordinarily, I'd say that the more transparent a piece of software is, the better. After all, Apple ought to have built full NTFS support directly into Mac OS X, as they did for FAT32; one could argue that with NTFS for Mac OS X installed, your Mac behaves the way it should have all along. And yet, in the weeks that I've been using NTFS for Mac OS X, I've found myself strangely uneasy. When random problems have occurred, one of my first thoughts has been, "Could this new driver possibly be the culprit?" Sure, I have all sorts of other third-party software on my computer with no explicit user interface, but for some reason, I've found myself unusually bothered by the fact that NTFS for Mac OS X has no on/off switch, no convenient way to check the version number, and no auto-update mechanism to tell me if a new version is available. The only way to know if it is in fact causing a problem is to uninstall it and see if the problem goes away.

As it turns out, when I did exactly that on one occasion, I learned that NTFS for Mac OS X had indeed been causing one of my problems. Last week I downloaded the FileMaker Pro 9.0v3 update, and when I ran the updater, it scanned all my mounted volumes looking for previous copies of FileMaker Pro. When it got to my Boot Camp volume, the updater hung - for several hours, until I force-quit it. I tried again a few more times, and each time, it hung in the same place. I then uninstalled NTFS for Mac OS X and the problem went away - the updater zipped right through the entire scanning process. (Paragon says they're looking into this problem.) In the absence of any user interface, a user might easily forget or overlook the existence of NTFS for Mac OS X, and thus have a harder time tracking down conflicts like this. Something along those lines of a simple preference pane would make me a happier user of NTFS for Mac OS X, especially if it included a way of disabling its functionality without having to completely uninstall it and restart.

Other than that single (and not-terribly-serious) issue, I haven't encountered any problems with the software; everything else has, so far, worked as advertised. Which is simply to say: I can add, delete, and modify files on my Boot Camp volume while I'm in Mac OS X, and thereby avoid some complicated workarounds for moving between my Mac and Windows environments. I've found read and write speeds to be entirely adequate, and the company has been responsive to my support inquiries. NTFS for Mac OS X has an introductory price of $29.95 (regularly $39.95). It runs for a 10-day trial period without a license, and is a 2.3 MB download.

ToC

MacTech Benchmarks Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion

by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#909/07-Jan-08
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9370>

Our friends over at MacTech have taken on the laborious task of running benchmarks on the popular virtualization programs Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, comparing them against each other, running both Windows XP and Windows Vista, against Apple's Boot Camp, and against a standard PC laptop.

<http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.24/24.02/VirtualizationBenchmark/>

MacTech's tests included real-world activities in each of the main Microsoft Office 2007 applications (Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), along with tests for network and filesystem I/O, Internet Explorer, and cross-platform tasks that involve working with the host operating system (like viewing a PDF attachment to an Outlook email message in Apple's Preview).

The full MacTech article makes for a fascinating read, but it seems to boil down to the following conclusions.

Keep in mind that these conclusions are relevant only for the things MacTech tested, which did not include gaming (where Boot Camp probably has the edge over both virtualization options) or applications that can use multiple processors (where VMware Fusion would probably outperform Parallels Desktop).

If you want to analyze MacTech's results further, you can download an Excel spreadsheet containing all the test data.

ToC

The Trick to Adjusting Dates in iPhoto Calendars

by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#909/07-Jan-08
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9374>

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment. You spent a bunch of time in June designing and laying out a calendar in iPhoto as an anniversary present, complete with photos on the blank dates for each month and birthdays and anniversaries imported from iCal for everyone in your family. It's gorgeous, your wife loves it, and she wants to give copies of it with a few different events to her relatives for holiday presents. That's a great idea, so you head off into iPhoto to make the changes and... that's when your troubles begin.

Although iPhoto makes it fairly easy to create a calendar from scratch, making a near-duplicate of a calendar you've already created comes with some gotchas, ranging from losing photos you placed on dates to reimported event text coming in with incorrect styles. But with the process I outline here, you should be able to create a near-duplicate calendar with relatively little fuss.

(You might wonder why I have you duplicating the calendar below, rather than just modifying it. My experience is that it's always best to work on a copy, just in case something gets messed up, since then you can toss the copy and start again on another copy. It's also useful to keep finished calendars around in case you discover some days later you want to order another copy.)

Duplicate the Calendar

First off, I assume you to want your second calendar to contain different or additional events, and if you made the original calendar with unusual start and end dates (June 2007 to May 2008, in my case), you need to change the date range too. But don't blithely modify the date range on your existing calendar, because when you do that, iPhoto removes all the photos you've placed in date boxes. Curses! So follow these steps to reduce the effort of remembering which photos go where:

  1. Select your calendar in the Source pane's Projects list, choose File > Print, and in the Print dialog, click Preview. This causes iPhoto to create a PDF and display it in Preview; you'll need this PDF to refer to as you replace photos in Step 4. Obviously, if you have the paper copy of the calendar handy, you could also just refer to it.

  2. Right-click your calendar in the Source pane, and choose Duplicate from the contextual menu. Rename the new calendar so you can differentiate it from the original.

  3. Click the Settings button, and in the Calendar view, change the dates as desired. Don't worry about importing new iCal calendars just yet. Click OK.

  4. Now comes the truly tedious step. Referring back to the PDF or paper copy of your original calendar, drag any photos from the available photos list to the desired date boxes on the calendar. I like to fill up all the blank boxes at the start and end of each month's grid.

Fix Dates

Now is a good time to check your calendar events in iCal and make sure they're correct and up-to-date. For instance, we welcomed new nephews on either side of the family in November, so I had to add their birthdays. Since we want separate iPhoto calendars for our respective sides of the family, we've created two iCal calendars, one for Tonya's family's birthdays and anniversaries, and one for mine. Of course, some events are duplicated.

(Even if you don't normally use iCal as your calendaring software, which I don't, it makes a lot more sense to create these calendars in iCal than to enter events manually in iPhoto. That way you can use the same iCal calendars next year, and take advantage of iCal's smarts for events like Thanksgiving, which takes place on the fourth Thursday of November.)

It's also important to make sure you have the appropriate holidays in iCal, which turns out to be trickier than I had hoped. I was unimpressed with iPhoto's built-in list of U.S. holidays, so I went looking for a more complete list. The best I found was the U.S. Holidays calendar at iCalShare; you can find lots of other calendars at iCalShare as well. Using it as a base, I copied those events I wanted to a new calendar of my own, and then I added a variety of other events from the Year 2008 Holidays Calendar, from Wikipedia's List of Commemorative Days, from Wikipedia's International Observances, and by going through a commercial calendar I had around to see which holidays they chose. How else would you find Towel Day, the Chinese New Year (Year of the Rat!), and Wright Brothers Day?

<http://iCalShare.com/article.php?story=20020912105939521>
<http://www.calendardate.com/year2008_holidays.php>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commemorative_days>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_observance>

Reimport Events

It would seem straightforward to reimport your updated iCal calendars, but that wasn't my experience. The problem was that in the Big Dates theme (and possibly others), clicking the Reimport button in the Calendar view of the Settings dialog brought in the events, but at least some of them came in with incorrect styles. This was particularly glaring in the Big Dates theme when the new events and their dates had black text, rather than the red text normally used for special dates. You can manually change the color of text you enter in iPhoto, but not the color of the date numbers.

It's possible that other themes don't suffer from this problem, but here's the workaround I discovered. The downside of this approach is that changing themes may cause you to lose text entered on the photo pages (though I didn't see that happen in my testing). Perform these steps:

  1. Click the Themes button and switch to another theme.

  2. Click the Settings button, and in the Calendar view, select the desired iCal calendars and click Reimport. This ensures that you have the latest events.

  3. Click the Settings button again, switch to the Styles view, click Restore Defaults, and click OK. This clears any custom formatting you might have done (or that iPhoto may think you've done; I suspect this is the culprit when styles aren't correct upon reimport).

  4. Click the Themes button again, and switch back to the desired theme.

  5. Go through every page and visually verify that all the events came in properly and are styled properly. When I did this, one photo with a description somehow had that description entered as a caption in the calendar, even though I hadn't set that. And on one occasion, all the events in November and December had the wrong styles even still; running through these steps again fixed the problem.

That's it! If, like me, you actually want yet another calendar with different events (I wanted another version to give as Christmas presents for my side of the family), duplicate your new calendar again, select different iCal calendars, and, if necessary, run through the Reimport Events steps again.

ToC

The Amiga Section:

Amiga Forever 2008: One Amiga per Child? :-)

URL: <http://www.amigaforever.com/news-events/20080105oapc/>

Udine, Italy -- January 5, 2008 - Cloanto Italia srl, Amiga software developers since 1986, were excited to preview details of Amiga Forever 2008 running without modifications on a One Laptop per Child XO laptop.

The new version of Amiga Forever, which is scheduled for imminent release, features several Amiga emulation environments for different platforms (including Windows, Mac and Linux), spanning more than 20 years of history, more than 100 games which are ready to run with a single mouse click, numerous demoscene productions, videos, and much more. Development remains intense on additional features and add-ons, and more surprise announcements are planned for 2008.

[Image - <http://www.amigaforever.com/news-events/20080105oapc/gfx/one_amiga_per_child_1024x768.jpg>]

Amiga Forever 2008 on One Laptop per Child hardware

The above configuration requires an OLPC laptop unlocked for USB storage access. Special thanks to our long-time Amiga friend Bernardo Innocenti, now working at OLPC, for his precious contribution and assistance. Links

One Laptop Per Child Home Page
- <http://www.laptop.org>

Amiga Forever Home Page
- <http://www.amigaforever.com>

ToC

The CUCUG Section:

Decemeber General Meeting

reported by Kevin Hopkins (kh2@uiuc.edu)

December 20, 2007 -- President Richard Rollins began the meeting by informing Board members that the Board meeting would be rescheduled to December 27th due to the Christmas holiday.

Richard then gave the annual Financial Report for Treasurer, Rich Hall, in absentia, from the prepared information provided by Rich. In short, we're in the black.

Next, Richard opened the floor for final nominations for club officers. There being none, Russ Gillen moved and Jim Berger seconded the nominations be closed and that the slate of current officers be accepted. The election vote was unanimous. Your new-old officers for 2008 are:

President: Richard Rollins
Vice-President: Emil Cobb
Secretary: Kevin Hopkins
Treasurer: Richard Hall
Corporate Agent: Kevin Hisel

The floor was then opened up for our Question and Answer session.

Kevin Hisel reported that Microsoft released some updates Tuesday before last and that they broke IE 6. However, a fix for this is available on the Internet. He noted wryly that MSN.com and Hotmail.com seem to be the sites most affected by the problem, ie. crashing, but that Jesper's Blog has the fix with a nice install program.

<http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/> <http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-6-crashes-after-you-install-security-update-942615-on-a-computer-that-is-running-windows-xp-service-pack-2.aspx>

Kevin said he is sticking with IE 6 on his server because it runs all of his batch files.

Joe Dewalt had a question about upgrading the RAM for his Dell, wondering if there was something special about Dell RAM and if it had to be purchased from them. The answer was no. Once you know what kind of RAM it is, you can get it anywhere. Kevin Hisel recommended crucial.com. Jon Bjerke said he got RAM for his Dell laptop at newegg.com. Todd Anderson recommended STT (Super Talent) memory from eWiz.com. It's $21 for a one GB stick. Richard Rollins recommended DealRam, or Ramjet, if you want to procure memory locally.

Wayne Hamilton had a question about constructing a NAS box [Network Attached Storage]. Todd Anderson recommended tech-unity.com as a good source of information. Joe Dewalt suggested a SimpleTech USB drive. The discussion then turned to Windows Home Server and HP Media Smart Servers. The web site Buy.com was mentioned. So, too, was the fact that for $6 you could get a four month home trial of Windows Home Server from Microsoft.

David Noreen had a question about printing pictures from the National Archives. He said his IE browser is cropping the pictures, not scaling them, when printing. He was told to use Irfanview.

<http://www.irfanview.com/>

Keith Peregrine had a question regarding XP Office 2000. At work, his boss is having a printing problem where all of the text is shifted to the left and is printed out overstriking itself. Her machine has 512MB as is continually running multiple programs. It was suggested he show her Task Manager. In particular, the memory usage portion - Control-Alt-Delete brings it up - and convince her to get more memory.

It was reported that two new service pack candidates for Windows are available: SP3 for XP (beta) and SP1 for Vista (beta).

A caveat was brought up, not to install the newest Mac upgrade. It'll trash Bootcamp. If you are Folding, it'll trash that, too. Stay tuned for a fix.

Jim Berger asked about Amazon's new Kindle and there was a brief discussion.

ToC

Decemeber Board Meeting

reported by Kevin Hopkins (kh2@uiuc.edu)

The December meeting of the CUCUG executive board took place on Tuesday, December 27, 2007, at 7PM, at Kevin Hisel's house. (For anyone wishing to attend - which is encouraged, by the way - the address and phone number are both in the book). Present at the meeting were: Richard Rollins, Kevin Hopkins, Jim Lewis, Anderson Yau, Joe Dewalt, Rich Hall and Kevin Hisel.

Richard Rollins: Richard informed us that Emil Cobb would not be at tonight's meeting, so he conveyed Emil's usual attendance report - there being 23 attendees at the general meeting. Twenty-fifth anniversary this coming October. Kevin Hisel conveyed a positive review on the snacks. Thanks to Vicky, Richard's wife, for the goodies. Room rent paid for next year (2008). Rent went up $5 per month. It's now $95 per meeting. Since Jim Lewis was at this meeting there was talk about the club's PC, a P3 - 1 GHz machine, which Jim built - Lo, those many years ago. Generally it is only used for surfing the Net at the meeting and everyone seems to think it is adequate for that task. There was a discussion of Richard's recent rehabilitation job on the machine - without reinstalling the OS. Jim said it has an OEM version of Windows XP Pro on it and that he left the install disc inside the machine's case. That seems to gone missing.

Kevin Hopkins: Kevin had nothing new to report.

Jim Lewis: Jim filled us in on what he's been up to recently. He said he has dropped his membership in the Phoenix PC Users group, making some colorful comments about retirement communities and how he seemed to have become the sole go-to guy for every question raised. [Jim, when you are a force of nature, you just have to learn how to deal.] He is very pleased to still be a part of CUCUG and a denizen of our online forums. He says he really misses Garcia's and Lil' Porgy's, stating he likes Phoenix, but ... Turning back to computing, Jim said he still does not use Vista. He then relayed a shopping horror story on Black Friday with a three and a half hour wait in line at Frey's.

Anderson Yau: Everyone welcomed back the long lost Andersonian. He said he made a special effort since Jim was back in town. When asked what he was running these days, Anderson said he was still using his dual Pentium 400 MHz machine, primarily for surfing the Web.

Joe Dewalt: Joe was also kidded a little for his absence recently. He noted he'd been gone for six month, since he was attending grad school in his spare time. Talked about purchasing a Mac. Jim proffered that twenty percent of Apple's revenue is being generated at their Apple stores. The discussion then turned to Windows Home Server.

Rich Hall: Rich went through annual financial statement, answering questions that people had.

Kevin Hisel: Kevin said he had nothing to add. He reported that the forums are running fine.

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The Back Page:

The CUCUG is a not-for-profit corporation, originally organized in 1983 to support and advance the knowledge of area Commodore computer users. We've grown since then, now supporting PC, Macintosh and Linux platforms.

Meetings are held the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The FBC-CS is located at 1602 N. Prospect Avenue in Savoy, on the NE corner of Burwash and Prospect. To get to the the First Baptist Church from Champaign or Urbana, take Prospect Avenue south. Setting the trip meter in your car to zero at the corner of Kirby/Florida and Prospect in Champaign (Marathon station on the SW corner), you only go 1.6 miles south. Windsor will be at the one mile mark. The Savoy village sign (on the right) will be at the 1.4 mile mark. Burwash is at the 1.6 mile mark. The Windsor of Savoy retirement community is just to the south; Burwash Park is to the east. Turn east (left) on Burwash. The FBC-CS parking lot entrance is on the north (left) side of Burwash. Enter by the double doors at the eastern end of the building's south side. A map can be found on the CUCUG website at <http://www.cucug.org/meeting.html>. The First Baptist Church of Champaign is also on the web at <http://www.fbc-cs.org>.

Membership dues for individuals are $20 annually; prorated to $10 at mid year.

Our monthly newsletter, the Status Register, is delivered by email. All recent editions are available on our WWW site. To initiate a user group exchange, just send us your newsletter or contact our editor via email. As a matter of CUCUG policy, an exchange partner will be dropped after three months of no contact.

For further information, please attend the next meeting as our guest, or contact one of our officers (all at area code 217):

   President/WinSIG:   Richard Rollins      469-2616
   Vice-Pres/MacSIG:   Emil Cobb            398-0149
   Secretary/Editor:   Kevin Hopkins        356-5026
   Treasurer:          Richard Hall         344-8687
   Corp.Agent/Web:     Kevin Hisel          406-948-1999
   Linux SIG:          Allen Byrne          344-5311

Email us at <http://www.cucug.org/contact/index.html>, visit our web site at <http://www.cucug.org/>, or join in our online forums at <http://www.cucug.org/starship/> .

CUCUG
912 Stratford Drive
Champaign, IL
61821-4137

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