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USB 3.0 will crush eSATA, FireWire
InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Awards - Apple and Microsoft Top A List Of 40
Former Governor Mike Huckabee Gets A MacBook
Apple Retail Visit Numbers Are Dropping
Has Apple Gotten Lazy?
Apple's Future: It's In The touch
Firefox to Adopt Chrome's Tab Ordering Feature
PC Mag: The Best Free Software of 2009
The Mac Night Owl: So Where Are The Missing Apple Desktops?
USB 3.0 will crush eSATA, FireWire
ZDNet Australia's Alex Serpo says:
Intel demonstrated a working version of USB 3.0 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Here's why it will make eSATA and FireWire obsolete.....
....USB 3.0 promises a theoretical maximum rate of 5Gbps, meaning it's 10 times faster than USB 2.0. USB 3.0 is also full duplex, meaning it can upload and download simultaneously (it's bi-directional); USB 2.0 is only half duplex.
Put side by side with eSATA and FireWire 800, USB 3.0 is far superior. eSATA, an external connection that runs at the same speed as the internal SATA 1.0 bus, has a maximum theoretical of 3Gbps. This makes USB 3.0 faster than eSATA and about six times faster than FireWire 800 (full duplex at 800Mbps).....
For the full commentary visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/84gq8a
InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Awards - Apple and Microsoft Top A List Of 40
InfoWorld says:
Apple and Microsoft topped the list of InfoWorld's annual product award winners this year, nabbing three and four Technology of the Year Awards, respectively. Announced today, InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Awards recognize the best hardware and software products evaluated by InfoWorld reviewers during 2008....
Apple swept the awards for end-user hardware, taking Best Notebook Computer, Best Ultranotebook, and Best Smartphone. The MacBook Pro, still the best notebook you can buy, won for the second year in a row. The iPhone won for the first time, having added important business-oriented features in the 3G edition - closing the gap with BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile - and leaping ahead of the pack with the amazing App Store....
You can check it out at:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/01/13/02TC-toy-2009_1.html
Ubuntu Leads the Fight To Free Your Computer's OS
CIO Today's Ashlee Vance reports:
The notion of a strong Linux-based competitor to Windows and, to a lesser extent, Apple's Mac OS X has been an enduring dream of advocates of open-source software. They champion the idea that software that can be freely altered by the masses can prove cheaper and better than proprietary code produced by stodgy corporations. .
In December, hundreds of these software developers gathered for one week at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. They came from all over the world, sporting many of the usual signs of software mercenaries: jeans, ponytails, unruly facial hair and bloodshot eyes.
But rather than preparing to code for the highest bidder, the developers were coordinating their largely volunteer effort to try to undermine Microsoft 's Windows operating system for PCs, which generated close to $17 billion in sales last year.....
For the full report visit here:
http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=0310033A9H47
Former Governor Mike Huckabee Gets A MacBook
Macworld's Cyrus Farivar reports:
In what may be the only opinion that Mike Huckabee and I actually share, the new Fox News commentator said Sunday that he'd recently switched to a Mac. In his segment, after dissing an airline and a computer company that he'd had bad experiences with, he lauded his new experience of moving to the Mac.
For the full report visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/8uy2t2
Apple Retail Visit Numbers Are Dropping
Low End Mac's Tim Nash reports:
In Phil Schiller's Macworld keynote, he stated that 3.4 million was the number of retail visitors per week. Assuming this was the average for the last quarter and not the best week, there were 44.2 million customer visits..
While this total is up slightly on the September quarter's record 42.7 million, the average number of stores open is also up 10%. This means the average store has had about 800 fewer visits per week in a quarter when visits in previous years have gone up - from 3% in 2005 to over 30% in 2007. However, visits are still up by over 1,000 per week from the December quarter in 2007 and up over 40% from 2006 and 2005.
Foot traffic is down everywhere, so many of these "lost visits" may be passersby who wanted to check email and compare online and retail prices. At the end of the quarter, I twice went to the Regent Street, London store. Both times I was able to get on a MacBook whenever I wanted. This has never happened before....
For the full report visit here:
http://lowendmac.com/nash/09tn/building-retail-traffic.html
Has Apple Gotten Lazy?
The Apple Core's Jason D. O'Grady says:
I know it's hard for a company to reinvent itself on essentially a semi-annual basis, but the fact of the matter is that Apple's over all product line has become stagnant. iPod hasn't had a huge enhancement since video, iPhone, although intrinsically software upgradable to add valuable feature releases, hasn't seen anything great since Exchange support (despite much publicized need of several enhancements), and the entire desktop line hasn't received much needed attention in a very long time. Once a revolutionary and now evolutionary force in design, Apple has gotten lazy.....
For the full report visit here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=2773
Apple's Future: It's In The touch
ZDNet's Sam Diaz says:
A guest post on ZDNet yesterday posed the question: Has Apple gotten lazy? It's not the first time I've heard it asked, considering Apple's headlines in recent months: a pullout from Macworld, the distractions of Steve Jobs' health and relatively low-key announcements out of Macworld. Sure, upgrades to iLife, iWork and the Macbook line were each newsworthy, just not keynote worthy. That doesn't make Apple lazy.
Still, I think the author of the post is on to something when he says that Apple will need to do something soon if it wants to keep Wall Street (and the fan base) happy.....
In terms of a breakthrough gadget, the next big thing is already out there - and has been for more than a year. The iPod Touch (horrible name for it) is the real breakthrough device here, not the iPhone.....
For the full commentary visit here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=11452
Firefox to Adopt Chrome's Tab Ordering Feature
ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez reports:
One of the best features in Google's Chrome browser is the way it handles tabs. In Chrome, when you click a link, the tab that opens appears to the immediate right of the current tab. It may seem like a small thing, but when you have so many tabs open in
Firefox that they spill off the sides of the screen, having to scroll to the end to see the new web page is annoying and inefficient.
According to Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox at Mozilla, the Firefox web browser will soon be changing the way in which new tabs are opened......
For the full report visit here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefox_to_adopt_chromes_tab_o.php
PC Mag: The Best Free Software of 2009
The best things in life often actually are free. Here, a list of 173 of the best things in life-free software, for launching apps, networking, backup, synchronization, entertainment, and more.
To read more, go to:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2338803,00.asp
The Mac Night Owl: So Where Are The Missing Apple Desktops?
All right, so we know that Apple doesn't really like trade shows, and I'm sure some of you feel that maybe this year's announcements were toned down and Steve Jobs pulled from their final keynote to send a message to you and, of course, to the folks who run the Macworld Expo.
Here's the URL for today's commentary:
http://www.macnightowl.com/2009/01/so-where-are-the-missing-apple-desktops/
Notes: You can also access our new RSS feed, available at:
http://www.macnightowl.com/rss
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