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The debate over the financial advantages of various OSes first sparked around 15 years ago, when the Gartner Group industry analyst firm came up with the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO). Since then, a number of other theoretical models have also been coined to weigh the business pros and cons of various OSes.

aha - the complement to SSH

This article is packed with great tips that you won't find in other introductory tutorials. Therefore it is a bit heavy to read, and worth dipping into even if you have used Macs for a year or two.

About a year ago, we bought an Intel-based Xserve with a pair of 80 GB SATA drives to act as our primary Web server. When the boot drive went flaky on us in October 2008, we were able to recover from the backup on the second drive and off-site backups, if a little shakily (see "TidBITS Outage Causes Editors Outrage", 2008-10-07). But although we were able to bring the machine back online, we didn't trust the drive that had failed. Since the Xserve has three drive bays, the obvious solution was to purchase another drive. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Not so much.

A place where new Mac users can find comprehensive, unbiased information about using a Mac, and Mac Pros can share the years of wisdom they have acquired

HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Way back in the early days of Macintosh, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint & nature photography fame) developed a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data to the 1 bit black & white Mac video display. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher quality than the now-a-days ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or "Error-diffusion" filter (used by QuickTime, PhotoShop).

The dither matrix was implemented an option in Apple's HyperScan software (A HyperCard stack with some XCMDs/XFCNs) that would connect to a flatbed scanner. HyperScan, and hence the most-excellent Atkinson dithering routine, has been unavailable for many, many years-but not forgotten! I was able to email Bill Atkinson in January, 2003 and inquire about the details of the algorithm; he was kind enough to respond with a brief write up of the routine-15 minutes later I had it up and running.
It's taken a few spare afternoons since 2003 to pack everything into a nice little application with documentation and an icon-better late than never!

Here's an app that you don't see every day. I always find myself adjusting the display brightness when I wake up, and then forget to turn it down through at least half the night. Staring at this white screen I don't really know what kind of impact my eyes are going to suffer in a few years. Yet, I still do it. The only relief is knowing that I'm not alone in doing this. Proof? Now there's an app for just that!

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2009 first quarter ended December 27, 2008. The Company posted record revenue of $10.17 billion and record net quarterly profit of $1.61 billion, or $1.78 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $9.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.58 billion, or $1.76 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 34.7 percent, equal to the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 46 percent of the quarter's revenue.

For the second year running, Apple Inc.'s computers are the most reliable, and its support is the most dependable of all computer makers selling in the U.S., a national chain of computer service shops said today.

CUPERTINO, California-December 16, 2008-Apple® today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Expo. Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year's Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple's last keynote at the show. The keynote address will be held at Moscone West on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Macworld will be held at San Francisco's Moscone Center January 5-9, 2009.

With the launch of MacBook Air, an improved iPhone and smashing sales in the App Store, Apple sliced through the global economic gloom of 2008 and turned in a solid year.

Oh!

Rumors about the Apple Mac mini go both ways. Some indicate that Apple will actually discontinue the little box others actually say we would see a new one this month.

Apple made its latest big move into new territories last year with the launch of the now ubiquitous iPhone, expanding beyond the desktop and into the choppy waters of mobile. What ought to be Apple's next leap of faith? Here are a few ideas for where Apple should go next.

Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X market share has passed the 8% mark for the first time, a research company reported today. In September, Apple's operating system ran on 8.2% of the computers that accessed the 40,000 sites monitored by Net Applications for clients, the company's data showed. The Mac's share of the operating system market was up over August's by nearly four-tenths of a percentage point, the biggest one-month gain since May. Apple tends to post significant increases in September, according to Net Applications. Last year, for example, Mac OS X climbed by 0.45 points that month

A whole lot has been happening in iPhone-land lately. The 3G iPhone is now available unlocked…in China. If you want to write a nasty note about an iPhone Application, you're going to have to pay for it first. Lastly, Apple has lowered the number of iPhones it will manufacture this year, but has raised the number it thinks it will sell.

When RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky downgraded his Apple rating on Monday - helping spark the sharpest selloff in the company's shares in eight years - he cited a survey that RBC conducted with ChangeWave that suggested that sales of Apple's hot-selling computers were cooling off. RBC's version of the survey showed that the percentage of technology consumers who plan to buy a Mac in the next 90 days had dropped from 34% in August to 29% in September, the biggest such decline in more than two years.

What's the one thing you hate about gadgets? I hope you answered battery life, because that's at the top of my list. Battery life has gone downhill, and it probably has everything to do with convergence, at least when it comes to cell phones equipped with music players, video cameras, and video games. iPhone 3G users have been complaining about the phone's battery life since its release, and the battery on my first gen iPhone has been doing worse since I updated the software earlier this year. So what's an iPhone owner to do?

Almost a year ago Apple gave us Leopard (OS X 10.5), and along with it came virtual desktops for the masses, in the form of Spaces. For many this was an interesting new way to expand their workspace virtually. For the rest of us [power users?] it was a letdown in execution. What was worse, the third party options looked to be dwindling as well. Last November I called for third party developers to bring the competition - let's take a look at the result of that call to arms.