This week Apple launched the iTunes match service, which will hold up to 25,000 songs in your personal library in their cloud, to downloaded and played on your cloud connected iOS devices. The service is 25 dollars per year. The service's real selling point is that as iTunes scans though your music library it will issue a license for each of your songs, no matter the source.
iTunes match, however, is not without its limitations, among them is that you may not stream your music to your iOS devices, you must download them. Also is the inherent issue that the service limited to iOS environments. What that means is that if you have an android, black berry, or any non-apple device, the music stored in iCloud will not be accessible to you on those devices.
Also launched this week is Google’s Music 11. The Google Music service allows users to upload up to 20,000 songs into the Google’s music cloud. The service is free, and gives you access to your music on PC, Mac, Android, Blackberry, and Nokia devices. There are some restrictions with Google Music. First of all, users are not allowed to download music to PC’s that were not purchased on Google Music (you may however stream). There is also no official iOS application for Google Music. Users may either go directly to music.google.com, or download the gTunes app.
Both services have their limitations, and the choice between one of the two of them really comes down to the need of the individual user. If you do not have a need to stream you music, and 25 dollars per year is worth the cost of having licenses for your all of digital music, then iTunes match is a lock. Those users looking to stream media across multiple platforms, or who are looking for a more cost effective cloud based music solution, may find the Google Music will fit their needs. Either way it goes you really can’t go wrong with these two fantastic services.
With the influx of iPhones and Android phones now being used in the office, we have the ability to be productive almost anywhere, but the opposite can also true. Personal email, texting, web surfing and social networking have the possibility of becoming huge time leaches. These items are now literally available at your fingertips. Many people are using their work time to conduct personal business or chat with friends and this is not always done from the user’s PC anymore. The enormous amounts of apps that are available have put a lot of people at risk of “playing” on the job.
This also goes for some additional items such as iPads and Android tablets. The ability to watch streaming media as well as downloading games and movies to these devices is very easy to do. This can also make it very tempting to enjoy these things on the company clock. This also gives the ability to view inappropriate data such as porn in the workplace. This leads us to another discussion altogether.
Both smartphones and tablets have the ability to be security risks as well. People can download files to these devices via their USB connections or over a Bluetooth connection. This opens companies up to the possibility of having sensitive data taken offsite without anyone knowing. A lost smartphone, can allow someone access to company email if it not setup for password protection or to have the data wiped if the device is lost.
Smartphones and tablets do have their place in a work environment and can help those want to be productive do so. It can also help those who are less apt to stay on task follow that path. Each company should have a policy on their employee’s usage.
A lot of discussion has been had in our office recently, especially in light of the passing of Apple founder Steve Jobs, as to whether or not Mac products really have a place in the corporate environment. I am specifying Mac products, not Apple as whole. By now most people accept iPads and iPhones are viable office tools. Thus we can, for the sake of this blog; omit those products and focus squarely on Macs. Whether it is the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini, or the Mac Pro we want to focus on devices running OSX 10.6 or higher. Just to be clear here, I am talking about Intel Macs, not Power Mac G5’s or any of that rubbish. The reason why I am focusing on Intel Macs is because they can run Windows natively with Boot Camp, which really opened up the Mac experience to those outside of its traditional niche market.
Before we begin let’s look at some quick facts:
- Most PC users are still using Windows XP, at around 35%
- Windows Vista has a larger percentage of market share than Mac OSX
- October 2010, was the first time since the 1990’s that Apple had more than 10% of the PC market share
- As of September 2011, OSX had achieved 13.3% total market share worldwide and 15.4% market share in the U.S.
In today’s corporate world Windows, no matter which flavor, is still king. Hardware prices are more affordable than ever, and even with the price of Windows operating systems, being more than triple the cost of Mac OSX, Windows PCs are still more affordable than most Macs. As an example a brand new 15” MacBook Pro with an i7 CPU @ 2.4 GHz and 4 GB’s of DDR3 Ram costs $2199 before taxes. A Sony Vaio 16.4” laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit with similar specs and a Blu-ray drive retails for $1149.99. Adding to this fact is that at the end of the day, most applications are written to run in the Windows environment. All of these factors have combined to secure Microsoft’s place at the top of corporate mountain over the past two decades.
The reason for Mac’s recent growth in the market is twofold; the first reason is more users are exposed to Apple products than before due to the domination of the iPhone and iPad in the mobile consumer market, and number two, the introduction of Intel chips have made application support, and running Windows applications on Mac Hardware truly viable for the first time. Whether it be through virtualization apps such as Parallels or just loading up Boot Camp, Mac users are now able to take full advantage of the simplicity of Mac OSX, while have the productivity of the Windows environment all under one workstation. This versatility has opened the enterprise and corporate environments up to Mac hardware for the first time in decades.
Remember the transporters from Star Trek? Did you ever think how cool it would be if we could do that? Wouldn’t it be something if someday we could actually recreate objects on the other end of a data stream? Beaming me up Scotty, might be closer than you think. Check out this video below to see what we are capable of today with 3D printers.
We’ve recently been seeing a rash of people infected with seemingly real but in reality what is completely fake anti virus malware. The user reports that they were surfing the web innocently enough and suddenly a window appears that looked like it came from Microsoft informing them that their system is seriously infected. The window wouldn’t close when clicked and when they restarted their machine the fake anti virus software appeared to have become installed on their machine and couldn’t be removed, urgent warnings of infections are appearing everywhere, popups to embarrassingly raunchy websites are coming up and the machine is basically unusable. Uttimately the software wants you to subscribe in order to remove these “infections” and this is the object of Fake Anti-Virus it's all about getting your credit card.
If this should happen to you, DO NOT CLICK on anything and do not attempt to navigate through the Fake Anti-Virus user interface, It is not legitimate and all roads lead to you inputing your credit card. Immediately restart your computer.
Hopefully you have caught it in time but if after the reboot, you find your machine is infected, you can try to restore it to an earlier time if you are familiar with how to do this but if all else fails call a professional to clean your computer as malware infections can be very difficul to remove and you may actually damage your computer if you're not sure what you are doing or following bad or incorrect instructions.
Check out the video below from SophosLabs to see a Live Demo of Fake Anti Virus in action.
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