Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Who’s More Closed Than Apple and Adobe? AT&T

There’s been a significant amount of chatter lately around the Adobe v Apple we’re-more-open-than-thou pissing match, but AT&T has proved once again that vendor lock-in and control in the software industry is nowhere near as bad as the cell phone industry (heck, Verizon will even disable GPS devices in phones to make sure users have to pay for their navigation service).

AT&T has done so by announcing it is nearly doubling its early termination fees on smartphones and netbook data plans. This announcement has some seriously unfortunate timing after rumors of an iPhone able to run on the Verizon network emerged once again and seem to have been validated by AT&T’s rate hikes. As if the fee hikes weren’t enough, AT&T also seems to have taken a really idiotic stance on how it will keep its customers as well.

The money quote from the Wall Street Journal from this last week is that “about 80% of AT&T’s customers are on family-talk plans or business-discount plans, which are very ’sticky.’” That’s it? That’s the reason AT&T isn’t scared? Because it’s a big pain to switch away? Because I’d have to switch more than one phone at once and that would be annoying? How about: “We’re not scared because we have better coverage and our customers know it” or “We’re not scared because our network is faster” or even “We’re not scared because our customer service is the best”? Instead, we get: “We’re not scared because it’s way too freakin’ expensive to switch.”

Why doesn’t AT&T list any of those reasons as the primary reason? Well, I think the answer is obvious. I work about 2 miles from the Apple headquarters, where you would think coverage on the iPhone with its exclusive provider would be top-notch, if nowhere else. But, alas, I drop calls and don’t get audio on calls all the time. This just doesn’t happen with my Verizon phone (I have an iPhone from work and a Verizon phone for personal use).

All right, now that the rant is over, when I imagine AT&T execs making this decision, all I can think of is:

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Filed under Rants : Comments (0) : May 23rd, 2010

Soon We Will See Just How Loyal Search Users Are

With today’s announcement that Canonical is changing the default search provider to Yahoo, Apple’s rumored talks with Microsoft, and cell phone providers such as Verizon also jumping to Bing, we may get to see just how big of a role the default settings have on people’s search preferences. Google has been dominating the search market pretty much since the beginning with a significant boost coming from the fact that Google is the default in several of the world’s browsers, though some of it is some good old-fashioned branding and marketing.

Canonical’s decision to change the Ubuntu default search engine and rumors that Apple may be soon to switch the default provider on the iPhone (I’m assuming with regular old Safari soon to follow), Google will no longer be the default on most of the major desktop OS’s of our time. Verizon has also struck a deal with Bing and made it the default search provider on its mobile phones. I personally was pretty mad the day that the Bing icon on my BlackBerry, but that’s a story for another day.

Citing concerns over privacy, there have been several who have spoken out against Google as well. Google has even stated that it is considering pulling out of the huge market of China.

Despite these things, Google’s search market share has continued to increase month after month. These next few months will be interesting to see what happens to market share as these talks fall into place. The true test of the Google brand will be for those users who have to go out of their way to choose Google as their search provider, rather than Google enjoying its nice defaults that it has enjoyed over the past few years.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 28th, 2010

Easy and Free Network-based Time Machine Backup

I’ve been looking for a network-based (free) solution for backing up a couple of Macs using Time Machine at home for some time. Plugging external drives into our two Macs was doable, but not exactly convenient. There’s plenty of how-tos out there on setting up a Linux machine to offer up an AFP share and then hacking it to support Time Machine, but those seemed more like a hack to me and users reported mixed luck. I needed something that ‘just worked’. Enter: FreeNAS.

I actually was setting up and playing with FreeNAS after reading about it on an article from MaximumPC. I’d set it up before and played with it, but I didn’t quite realize how much progress they had made. When playing with the AFP settings, I ran across the Time Machine option in the interface.

Setting up Time Machine to backup to your FreeNAS is pretty straight forward. First, you’ll want to start with a base install of FreeNAS with enough space to hold your backups. There’s plenty of good how-to’s out there including the one I mentioned earlier, so I don’t really see a point in me covering it here.

First, you’ll want to enable AFP on the server. You just have to simply go to Services -> AFP in the interface, check the “Enable” check box on the far right, enable local user authentication, and click the “Save and Restart” button to turn AFP on.

auto-disk-discovery-time-machine

Next, you’ll need to add a user. In the interface menu, go to Access -> Users and Groups. Add a user and call it what you like.

Now, hop back to the AFP management and click on the Shares tab. Add a share. When you add the share, be sure to add your user as a user that can read and write to the share as well as enable automatic disk discovery and set the discovery mode to “Time Machine”. Once finished, be sure to click the “Apply changes” button (a step I’ve missed a time or two :) ).

On my Mac, I had to authenticate to the AFP server once in Finder. Then, go into the Time Machine preferences and you should be able to add your new share as a Time Machine disk. I’d suggest making sure that you plug into a wired network for the first backup if you normally wander around with your Mac on wireless.

So far it’s working pretty solidly and was simple to setup. In my case, the whole thing was free as I am running it in VMware on a machine that would be on anyway.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 8th, 2009

Upgrade to Windows 7 Because.. It Sucks Less?

Well, after a busy couple of months I’m finally back. I did miss the release of Windows 7 on my blog, but I definitely enjoyed watching the fireworks between Apple and Microsoft through their commercials on tv. Microsoft has definitely come out with a product that the public seems to like (which ultimately is all that matters). One of the commercials, however, caught me a bit off guard.

In the commercial, ‘Angela’ says: “I don’t want to worry about my computer freezing or crashing … and suddenly, Windows 7″. Uh, what? Did we just hear an admission from Microsoft that Vista had problems? I hate to add to my anti-Microsoft list of blog posts, but seriously, what are they thinking with this ad? They should’ve just said: “Upgrade to Windows 7, it sucks less than previous versions”. Definitely not the positive spin on Windows that I was expecting.. With a product out the door that the company can definitely be proud of, I expected them to tout some cool new features, but that’s not the stance we’ve seen from previous versions.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (3) : Nov 4th, 2009

Why No Camera On the New iPod Touch?

Today Apple gave its iPod lineup a bit of a refresh with a new version of the iPhone firmware, iPod Touches with larger capacity and a slick new Nano with a camera. The iPod Nano looks pretty slick with its new camera, YouTube/Facebook publishing, and various other new fun features. So slick that I’m thinking that I want one and I don’t really get excited about devices all that much. Problem is, I’d like to run apps and have WiFi.. So I need a Touch.. doh!

I really don’t get it. As far as I understand, they were able to add the camera to the Nano without adding any width to the device. I’m sure there’s reasons that they can’t add the camera without adding width, but I’d gladly sacrifice a little bit of width if I gained a camera. Besides, the iPhone has it. Now Apple’s going to have to come up with some crazy chart like the Windows 7 product comparison chart to decide which model to buy..

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 10th, 2009

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