Author Archive | Ed Oswald

Windows 7 from a Mac Guy’s Perspective

Posted by Ed Oswald on February 3, 2009 at 8:51 am

I’m definitely a Mac. Saying that now is kind of weird, considering just three short years ago other than a brief stint in college the last time I used an Apple computer was in Elementary School. Apple’s ease of use sucked me in, and although yes there is a learning curve, once you get going things just work smoother.

No doubt Apple is resurgent at this point. Microsoft needed to do something to stop the bleeding before it would take some permanent damage. As I argued back in December, Windows stood to benefit from some Mac-like functionality, even though some Microsoft pundits seemed to disagree.

Now actually having the OS in front of me, I can honestly say for the first time in a long time I am impressed with Microsoft. Windows 7 actually is pretty slick. Instead of consisting merely of window dressing, this time it actually appears as if it may be worth it to upgrade.

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Hulu’s Super Bowl Ad Takes The Cake

Posted by Ed Oswald on February 2, 2009 at 11:30 am

I didn’t watch more than 2 minutes of the Super Bowl. I boycotted it. For those of you who know where I am located, you may be able to deduce why — I am a hardcore Philadelphia Eagles fan. The thought of sitting through that torture was just too much to bear.

So, I have not seen many of the commercials that aired until today. I will say out of all of the ones I’ve seen so far, the Hulu ad is one of the best.

The ad essentially claims to reveal Hulu’s “true secret,” delivered in a way that only Alec Baldwin could. The ad had to be good: yes us techies have known about Hulu for quite awhile, but most probably have not.

No doubt NBC was going to use its power as the carrier of the event in order to advertise it to the world. And its worked: according to all metrics, including site performance which was notably slow for hours after the commercial aired, it looks like people responded well.

Well played Hulu.

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Apple Store Traffic Flat, But Sales Are Down

Posted by Ed Oswald on February 2, 2009 at 9:11 am

Apple has taken quite a bit of pride in its successful retail operation, and rightly so. It has grown at a rate not seen by other electronics outlets as of late, and sales have been consistently higher every quarter.

Not so for the holidays. Traffic was essentially flat in the fourth quarter, down 1.8 percent. The real drop was in sales, falling 17.4 percent and showing that consumers are buying less, Needham analyst Charlie Wolf found.

“Consumers aren’t in a spending mood,” he quipped to Barron’s (subscription only).

Barron’s Mark Veverka also makes an astitute observation: Apple’s struggles at retail could reverberate. Malls will feel the difference as these stores have become attractions, bringing in new consumers that may have otherwise not shopped the mall.

Another effect is as Apple sells less, it produces less. This sends shockwaves backward into its whole supply chain. Companies that have produced iPod parts know this all too well: an adjustment in Apple’s ordering can cause them to completely miss their own financial goals (it’s happened).

While its certainly alarming to shareholders that one of Apple’s primary revenue drivers are falling upon hard times, consider this: Apple can afford some loss at retail.

As Doug McIntyre at BloggingStocks put it, these stores serve almost as a showroom of sorts for the company: “As long as Apple’s revenues are improving, there is hardly reason to complain,” he argues. I can’t argue with that.

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Windows 7 on a MacBook Pro

Posted by Ed Oswald on February 1, 2009 at 11:56 am

[NOTE: 2/2/09 – This is an updated version of the original post from Sunday.]

I am writing this for those of you who may be daring enough to attempt an install of Windows 7 on your Macs. Yes, it may be blasphemy, but even us Macheads are a little curious sometimes, right?

Anyway (to me) the install was quite painless. What you want to do is open up your Applications, then select Utilities. Open up Boot Camp Assistant and Follow the instructions. Even though it asks for a XP or Vista disk, the Windows 7 disc will work.

Just make sure you select the partition labeled BOOTCAMP! Any other one could wipe your Mac OS clean.

The install went without a hitch, but I ran into serious problems in getting any drivers installed. All the instructions I’ve seen (here and here) seem to suggest the Boot Camp installer on the Leopard disk works fine.

Not for me, I got this:

error

That doesn’t seem to be happening with other folks, however. The instructions don’t provide for this. I’m wondering whether or not the version of my disk (10.5.1) may have something to do with it: the Boot Camp Installer is different as its an earlier version.

There is a way to fix this however if Boot Camp is failing. It involves taking the following steps:

1) Create a folder on the hard drive. For the sake of convenience, I placed it on my desktop for easy access. Name it “BootCamp” or whatever you’d like.
2) Open up the CD’s contents. For you Mac folks, this process in Windows 7 is Computer > right click on DVD drive > Open.
3) Copy the entire contents to that folder you have just created.
4) Download this file: Bootcamp.msi.
5) Place that downloaded file in the Apple directory of the copied version of the DVD, it should overwrite the previous one.
6) Run the setup.exe file. Boot Camp should install properly.

In some cases, there has been reports that this has not worked. Let us know if it doesn’t for you. But it should for most.

So far all features appear to work normally, including sound. I have also noticed the residual benefit of a much quicker load time coming into Windows.

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Hey Apple, You Don’t Own My Contacts

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 31, 2009 at 11:02 am

Allow me to vent here for a second. As you may have read in my recent post about Mac products at Target, I have been in the midst of reloading things for my attempt at installing Windows 7 on the MacBook Pro. This included a wipe of OS X for good measure, which has been giving me some trouble anyway.

Part of that wipe took out my calendar and contacts–I knew I forgot to back something up, and that was it. Not to worry, though: I had them on my iPhone 3G, too. I could just merge them back on my first sync with my freshly-wiped and speedier MBP, right?

Not so fast.

I did not renew my service with MobileMe when it expired last December. Little did I know that once you sync once with the service, Apple all but owns your information.

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A Pleasant Surprise: Mac Software at Target

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 30, 2009 at 11:58 am

I may have missed the boat completely here and its been there a while, but while I was shopping my local Target for blank DVDs (so I can finally get around to installing Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro) I came across something I didn’t expect.

Sitting there all by their lonesome were several copies of Parallels 3.0 for Mac for $79.99 (although yes, we’re now at 4.0, which was released in November of last year). They were almost lost in a sea of Windows software, but yes, they were there. This surprised me–while I’d expect the software to be available at electronics retailers, I wouldn’t expect it here.

After all, those shopping in Target are likely not there to buy technical software like Parallels. Also, the stereotype of the Mac user is more affluent than what may be considered the “average” consumer for a Target or Wal-Mart type discount establishment. Who needs Mac software other than us techies? The Mac is still just an elite club…right?

Not anymore.

Even just a year ago, it would have been unheard of to see Mac software (or heck, hardware for that matter) anyplace but from Apple itself or its then considerably smaller network of Apple Authorized Resellers.

Now, with the Macintosh experiencing somewhat of a rebirth through the ‘halo effect’ of first the iPod and now the iPhone, jumping on the Apple bandwagon is in vogue.

Big name retailers like Target are much more cautious in deciding what gets put on their shelves because shelf space is at a premium. Everything must make money–they cannot specialize in one thing because consumers expect them to carry everything.

In other words, this means only a select number of products from each category make it onto the shelves. For Parallels to convince Target that it is indeed worth it speaks volumes to the Mac’s newfound retail power. Here’s hoping that this isn’t the last piece of Mac OS software to make it to Target.

So I’m curious. Where are you all finding Mac software and accessories where you haven’t before?

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Senate Passes DTV Delay Bill Again

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 30, 2009 at 8:11 am

The Senate has passed a slightly modified version of the bill it passed last week, bringing in compromises from the House and sending it back to the lower chamber for a second vote. As with the first one, the switch would be delayed to June 12. It is not clear whether this modified bill will be enough to pass the House: the last bill failed to get the needed supermajority for “fast track passage,” 258-168 (see Steve Wildstrom’s comment below for an explanation). The earliest the bill could be taken up is Monday, a little over two weeks before the transition is to take place.

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Make it Stop — More Tech Jobs Slashed

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 29, 2009 at 11:24 am

Since my last post mid-month, we’ve seen some acceleration in tech layoffs, and the overall jobs picture continues to look poor. Another 588,000 applied for initial unemployment benefits overall this week, which was worse than experts had forecast. The continuing rise of unemployment claims indicates the recession continues to intensify, and we’ll get a solid picture Friday when gross domestic product (GDP) numbers are released. So, who’s on the chopping block this week? Time Warner has announced it would cut 700 jobs, which would be about 10 percent of its workforce. SAP will be taking a similar route, cutting about 6 percent of its workforce during the year, which would amount to about 6,000 jobs. Sprint Nextel has the deepest cuts that we’ve seen: about 8,000 jobs or 14 percent of its workforce. With the deterioration of the financial position of the consumer, and confidence continuing to fall — there still appears to be no clear end in sight to the downturn, which means companies will continue to layoff at alarming rates well into 2009.

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New Gen iPhone Likely on Its Way Soon

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 29, 2009 at 10:10 am

Some developers have been taking notice of a strange new device type showing up in their website access logs, and it looks to be evidence of a new iPhone model. A developer told MacRumors that he had begun seeing the device type “iPhone 2,1” in his ad-serving reports for his iPhone-based applications.

Why is this important? This is the structure that Apple uses to identify it’ products. For example, the first iPhone is referred to as “iPhone 1,1” while the 3G is “iPhone 1,2”. The Cupertino company also has used the naming convention for the iPod touch, where the initial version was referred to as “iPod 1,1” while the heavily redesigned model was dubbed “iPod 2,1”.

In other words, whatever this new iPhone model is, it’s likely a drastic revision to the current device. What could be different? Speculation points to multi-core CPUs and GPUs, and you’d think they’d do quite a bit of work to start taking care of the memory issues that ever more powerful apps are struggling to deal with.

(God knows the phone still crashes for the littlest things when it’s pushed too hard, and that’s very annoying, no?)

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Economic Conditions Leading to More Click Fraud?

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 28, 2009 at 2:03 pm

Web advertising has always been vulnerable to those who attempt to game the system by clicking on their own site’s advertisements in order to generate additional revenue. This is referred to as “click fraud” and according to Click Forensics, a “traffic quality management” firm (whatever that means), it is at it’s highest level ever.

A full 17.1 percent of all clicks on ads in the fourth quarter of 2008 were fraudulent, jumping from 16 percent in the previous quarter, and from 16.6 percent a year ago. Some of the increase could be explained from the rise of the use of botnets: 31.4 percent of fraudulent clicks were due to that, up from 22 percent a year ago.

Click Forensics seems to think that the bad economy has something to do with the increase in click fraud. “Based on the data we tracked in Q4 2008, it seems that the online advertising industry is not immune to the growing tide of cybercrime during this recessionary period,” the firm’s president Tom Cuthbert said.

Google uses the firm in its AdSense program to report to its customers on the quality of clicks. No doubt click fraud affects the search giant most, since it is king when it comes to search advertising.

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