The Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii both jumped into the game console ring to compete against Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Who is going to win? A half decade ago, many analysts projected a close race between the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, but they were wrong. Here’s how things turned out, and what’s changed.
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RDM

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Interesting look at how Apple and Microsoft have followed identical development patterns — so similar they are almost spooky — and how those patterns play out in comparing Leopard and Vista.
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RDM

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Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard and Microsoft’s Vista follow different strategies in their prerelease marketing, product positioning, and market positioning. Here’s a look at how both differ in product integration.
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RDM

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PC enthusiasts like to scoff at the market share of Macs in comparison to worldwide computer sales. They view the worldwide PC market like a simple board game of Risk, where market leaders Dell and HP have more armies scattered over more territories, and Apple only has armies places in a few.
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RDM

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Saw this posted on the gym wall this morning.
Made me wonder how many years of work are sitting on flash memory. The millions of ‘priceless memories’ that exist as JPEGs on digital cameras and mobile phones. Entire music collections on MP3 players.
Most of them won’t be backed-up. Terabytes of data, all of it an absent-minded moment, or a ‘format this drive’ away from oblivion.
I haven’t backed up my laptop for weeks.
I’ll be doing it this evening.
Contributed by: Brett Jordan

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Apple’s latest EFI updates noted improved support for Boot Camp functionality. This was in the form of updated code to Apple’s Compatibility Support Module (CSM). The CSM virtualizes BIOS functionality and allows “legacy” operating systems such as Windows and Linux to run on Intel-based Macs.
One of the largest criticism’s of Apple’s CSM was its lack of support for DOS-based applications. All other Intel system boards with EFI could run DOS-based applications without problem. Appple EFI/CSM criticism has not been delivered just by users, but also by developers such as Linus Torvalds.
The good news is that CSM support has been updated to include basic DOS support. While DOS does not work fully, some applications such as Maxtor’s PowerMax now do work. These low-level diagnostic tools allow you to check, test, and repair components on your Mac with the low-level capacities of PC-counterparts.
Most of these tools are now commonly offered in .iso format, and can be burned to a CD-R with Disk Utility. However, such support is currently limited. Apple’s CSM does not support a key DOS mode, A20, which is needed for many higher-memory calls. As such, most utilities still will not run. That said, you can now start diagnosing many hard drives with the same level of performance that you used to need to plug the drive into a PC to check.
Contributed by: Christopher Price – www.pcsintel.com

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Apple is strongest where Microsoft is weakest, and vice versa. Despite the intense interest in pitting Apple against Microsoft, Leopard and Vista simply aren’t direct competitors.
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RDM

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The biggest hurdle in directly comparing Mac OS X Leopard against Windows Vista is that Apple and Microsoft have very different marketing strategies, particularly when it comes to prerelease software. Why is Apple so Secretive? described this in greater detail. Here’s the difference of ‘known knowns.’
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RDM

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To counter Apple’s FairPlay DRM used in the iTunes Store, Microsoft worked with media producers to design a comprehensive DRM technology framework it named after the Roman god Janus. Here is why it failed.
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RDM

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The market for digital music was repressed for nearly a decade prior to the arrival of Apple’s iPod. Here’s why digital music languished for so long, how Apple was able to build a digital business, and why rivals are struggling to turn back the clock and return digital downloads into a legal black hole of onerous restrictions.
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RDM

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