Hasta La Gadget!

The Apple Store has come back online and its pretty obvious announcement is confirmed. Snow Leopard will ship out starting August 28th as a $29 upgrade. The Friday launch should make for a wild, crazy weekend. [Apple] Full press release:

Apple to Ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard on August 28

CUPERTINO, Calif., Aug. 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today announced that Mac OS® X v10.6 Snow Leopard(TM) will go on sale Friday, August 28 at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple’s online store is now accepting pre-orders. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard® users for $29.

“Snow Leopard builds on our most successful operating system ever and we’re happy to get it to users earlier than expected,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “For just $29, Leopard users get a smooth upgrade to the world’s most advanced operating system and the only system with built in Exchange support.”

To create Snow Leopard, Apple engineers refined 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects that make up Mac OS X. Users will notice refinements including a more responsive Finder(TM); Mail that loads messages up to twice as fast;* Time Machine® with an up to 80 percent faster initial backup;* a Dock with Expose® integration; QuickTime® X with a redesigned player that allows users to easily view, record, trim and share video; and a 64-bit version of Safari® 4 that is up to 50 percent** faster and resistant to crashes caused by plug-ins. Snow Leopard is half the size of the previous version and frees up to 7GB of drive space once installed.

For the first time, system applications including Finder, Mail, iCal®, iChat® and Safari are 64-bit and Snow Leopard’s support for 64-bit processors makes use of large amounts of RAM, increases performance and improves security while remaining compatible with 32-bit applications. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) provides a revolutionary new way for software developers to write applications that take advantage of multicore processors. OpenCL, a C-based open standard, allows developers to tap the incredible power of the graphics processing unit for tasks that go beyond graphics.

Snow Leopard is the only desktop operating system with built in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and it allows you to use Mac OS X Mail, Address Book and iCal to send and receive email, create and respond to meeting invitations, and search and manage contacts with global address lists. Exchange information works seamlessly within Snow Leopard so users can also take advantage of OS X only features such as fast Spotlight® searches and Quick Look previews.

Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard, the next major release of the world’s easiest to use server operating system, will also go on sale Friday, August 28. Snow Leopard Server includes innovative new features such as Podcast Producer 2 and Mobile Access Server and is priced more affordably than ever at $499 with unlimited client licenses. More information and full system requirements for Snow Leopard Server can be found at www.apple.com/server/macosx/.

Pricing & Availability

Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard on August 28 at Apple’s retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers, and online pre-orders can be made through Apple’s online store (www.apple.com) starting today. The Snow Leopard single user license will be available for a suggested retail price of $29 (US) and the Snow Leopard Family Pack, a single household, five-user license, will be available for a suggested price of $49 (US). For Tiger® users with an Intel-based Mac®, the Mac Box Set includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife® ’09 and iWork® ’09 and will be available for a suggested price of $169 (US) and a Family Pack is available for a suggested price of $229 (US).

The Mac OS X Snow Leopard Up-to-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller between June 8, 2009 and the end of the program on December 26, 2009, for a product plus shipping and handling fee of $9.95 (US). Users must request their Up-to-Date upgrade within 90 days of purchase or by December 26, 2009, whichever comes first. For more information please visit www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate. Snow Leopard requires a minimum of 1GB of RAM and is designed to run on any Mac computer with an Intel processor. Full system requirements can be found at www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html.

Nokia doesn’t make phones. It makes portable devices. And it appears the Finnish company also doesn’t make netbooks. Instead it makes “mini-laptops”.

Announced today is a brand-new, 3G equipped min-laptop, the Booklet 3G. The 10.1-inch screen and Atom processor put it clearly in the netbook market, but it comes with some extras you won’t find elsewhere; the kind of extras you’d expect from a cellphone manufacturer.

First, the thin (2cm) aluminum case holds an HDMI-out port, along with the usual webcam, Bluetooth and SD card reader. It also has a 3G radio in the form of HSPA and a hot-swappable SIM card slot, and faux-GPS (Wi-Fi triangulation) hooked up to Ovi Maps.

The price? That will be announced on September 2nd, but expect to see this heavily subsidized on a cellphone plan, at least in Europe where people actually buy Nokia phones, sorry, devices.

Nokia Booklet 3G mini laptop unveiled [Nokia]

Apple, it seems, is all about the hits. The iPod, the iPhone and the MacBook are all phenomenally successful, both as designs and as commercial wins. These highlights, though, lead us to expect a lot of the company, and serve to make the misses stick out all the more. Apple has some embarrassing techno-skeletons in its beautiful white iCloset. Here are five.

The Hockey Puck Mouse

For a company that built itself on the first commercial, mouse-equipped computer, it’s odd that Apple has never made a good mouse. Even the current Mighty Mouse isn’t so mighty, pretending as it does to have just one button while actually sporting two, and inexplicably copying the ThinkPad’s red nipple instead of using a scroll wheel.

But the prize for Worst Mouse Ever goes the the “hockey puck”, which shipped with the original iMacs in 1998. Not only was it ugly, it was hard to hold due to size and shape, and frustrated users with a too-short cord. Rarely for Apple, style not only triumphed over substance, it utterly buried it.

The iPod Hi-Fi

Apple’s $350 speaker lasted just 18 months before it was taken out back, shot and sprinkled with lime. It was an odd product from Apple, which normally leaves these kinds of accessories to a healthy third-party market. The Bose-designed box had stereo speakers and an iPod dock on the top, and the high price tag and poor performance meant market failure.

Earbuds

Just like the lack of a good mouse, the dearth of decent headphones from Apple is another paradox. The sound quality may be comparable to or even better than the bundled ‘buds from other manufacturers, but they’ll break, and the $30 Apple wants for a new pair is better spent almost anywhere else.

I have gone through a lot of them, and the longest any set lasted was a few months. This includes the latest, remote and microphone-toting model, which managed to last about six weeks before dying.

QuickTake

Long before Apple put a terrible camera in the iPhone, it put a terrible camera into a camera: The 0.3-megapixel (640 x 480) Apple QuickTake. The camera had no way to focus, and zooming was done by walking closer to your subject. Neither could you blast away like we do with the digicams of today: The QuickTake 100, built by Kodak, could fit just eight pictures into its 1-MB memory.

The problem was that the market was immature, and the QuickTake was one of the first consumer digicams on the market. Compare this to the successful strategy of Apple since the iPod: Wait until the market has been established, then make a simpler, better product than anyone else.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

iTunes

It started so well back in 2001. Apple’s jukebox software was built on the third-party SoundJam which it bought the year before, and was a slick, quick and easy-to-use music player for a long time.

Then Apple decided that iTunes should be the conduit for the iPhone, and kept piling on bloated features. What had started as a pared-down, single-minded and simple application started to sync with Outlook, gained the useless cover flow view and, on the Mac at least, appeared to have a monopoly on the spinning beach-ball of death.

Worse, the iTunes Store, a fantastically user-friendly music store, gained weight in the form of the awful, hard to navigate App Store.

Of course, these days we have a new, simple and fast music app. It’s called Spotify. Apple, though, has shafted itself. The problem with selling a revolutionary device which is an iPod, a cellphone and an internet device, all in one, is that the software to support it needs to be similarly multitasking.

Anything we missed? While these failures are big, we have restricted them to the modern-day Apple, and ignored the Jobs-less wilderness years of beige boxes and overpriced printers. Feel free to add more in the comments.

See Also:

• 10 Gadgets We’d Like to Throw Into a Black Hole
• Top 5 Worst Things About The iPhone
• Wired.com Readers’ Best iPhone Dongleware Inventions

If you’re keeping score at home, Microsoft needs to bring two heavies to a fight with Google, but it can lay the smack down on an AV software firm like Sophos all by itself. Richard Jacobs, chief technology officer and master of inflammatory rhetoric at Sophos, points out that Windows 7’s XP Mode makes computers vulnerable to attack due to it operating independently from the underlying OS and therefore not having the same firewall and anti-virus protection. For those who actually go to the trouble of buying and updating security software — like say, most businesses — this essentially doubles costs for each new Windows 7 machine. Microsoft has countered with the fact that big businesses will be using its MEDV management software, while smaller shops will be able to update the virtualized XP in the same fashion as they would a physical PC. Storm in a teacup, then? Absolutely, but you’ll want to give these a read if only for the passive aggressive silliness that ensues.

[Via The Register]

Read – Richard Jacobs on XP Mode
Read – MS chief security adviser for EMEA Roger Haibheer retorts
Read – Jacobs retorts to the retort
Read – MS developer James O’Neill threetorts

Filed under: Software

Sophos decries XP Mode vulnerability, Microsoft offers chill pill originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

This article was written on December 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

If you tried to hunt down a Wii this holiday season there is a good chance that you walked away empty handed and with a pounding migraine. The Wii is essentially a money printing machine for both retailers and Nintendo, but a nightmare for consumers who were trying to find one for their kids.

Amazon just published a press release outlining some of the stats from the holiday season. The busiest day was on December 10th where 5.4 million items were ordered…that’s 62.5 items per second! And guess what, when they had Wii’s in stock those were flying off the shelves at an amazing 17 units per second. If you tried to call up one of your friends to let them know that Amazon had Wii’s in stock, about 250 of them would have been sold by the time you dialed and your friend answered. Every 5 minutes that they had Wii’s in stock equates to over 5,000 units. And you wonder why they were so darn hard to find!

Amazon posted a lot of other stats as well, but many of them were not all that interesting. One that did catch my attention was that they shipped 160,000 packages to APO/FPO addresses, which are army/military addresses.

Congrats to you if somehow you managed to snag a Wii this holiday season!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Wal-Mart Selling Toshiba HD DVD Player for $198HD DVD Causes Toshiba a $1 Billion Dollar LossDell Might Release AMD Computers By SeptemberApple Employees Will Help Sell Macs At Best BuyRetailers Already Selling Consumer Versions of Vista