Well, it's not all peaches and cream on the Mac all the time. I just got a new external HD for the machine, and started setting it up. It was recognized right away, but it was (of course) formatted into NTFS. I've never had a problem just reformatting to a native FS, so I unmounted the drive, pulled up Disk Utility, and got started.

Oops.

It turns out, there are issues with these drives and Leopard - I could not get it formatted. Google to the rescue though - a quick search pulled up a support page with an email query tool. After I sent that, I got some nice (not linkable - gah!) information - with some fairly complex sounding directions, but hey - they worked. Now all I have to do is get my data reorganized....

Since that data isn't easily linkable, let me throw it here so other people might be able to find it - this is what you do if you tried formatting the drive, and it's now in a mostly useless state. If you have a Mac running Tiger around, there's a simpler answer - prepare the drive on the that, then move it. Otherwise:

1. Open Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
2. Select the external drive and click on the Partition tab
3. Click on the Current Volume Scheme drop-down menu and divide the drive into 2 (or more) partitions
4. Click Options. From the Partition Schemes provided, click on the GUID Partition Table radio button. Click OK.
5. Click Apply. The Partition Disk screen opens.
6. Click Partition. At this point, the volume dismounts from the desktop and the drive is partitioned and formatted into multiple drives with GUID Partition Table scheme.
   Note: When Volumes are created, Time Machine may open asking if you would like to use the volume for backups. Click Cancel to proceed.
7. When finished, select the Disk Utility from the Apple Menu and choose Quit Disk Utility (recommended)
8. Relaunch the Disk Utility, select the external drive
9. and click on the Partition tab
10. Click on the Current Volume Scheme drop-down menu and select One (1) partition.
11. Click Options. From the Partition Schemes provided, click on the Apple Partition Map radio button. Click OK. Select other options as desired (e.g., Volume Name, Install Mac OS 9 Drivers, etc.).
12. Click Apply. The Partition Disk screen opens.
13. Click Partition. At this point, the volume dismounts from the desktop and the drive is partitioned and formatted into multiple drives with Apple Partition Map scheme.
    Note: When Volumes are created, Time Machine may open asking if you would like to use the volume for backups. Click Cancel to proceed.
14. When finished, select the Disk Utility from the Apple Menu and choose Quit Disk Utility (recommended)

Technorati Tags: seagate, external hd, onetouch4 plus, leopard, onetouch4 plus macintosh, onetouch4 plus leopard

The "strategy" in my title is hardly worthy of the name, but it seems to be working for Apple in terms of corporate penetration:

So she launched a test, letting 600 Juniper staffers use Macs instead of the standard-issue PCs that run Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows operating system. As long as the extra support costs aren't too high, she plans to open the floodgates. "If we opened it up today, I think 25% of our employees would choose Macs," she says.

Funny thing is, she has never received a single sales call from Apple. While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference

We've had them come in bottom-up at Cincom, too. The initial trickle became something of a flood this last year, with both the Smalltalk groups and corporate marketing dipping fairly deep. From a pure business strategy standpoint, it's interesting to watch.

Technorati Tags: Apple, windows

It looks like Psystar isn't a hoax after all - Engadget has a benchmark test. I can say this - I wouldn't want one, at least not until they get the fan to not run all the time. It's loud.

Technorati Tags: mac clone

It's early days in this evaluation at IBM, but I think it represents a huge win for Apple to even be considered by IBM as a viable option in the "default platform for employees" sweepstakes:

The pilot programme was launched in October 2007, to check out the options and feasibility of moving a few of IBM's 300,000 employees to the Mac platform. Unsurprisingly, Cupertino is rubbing its hands in glee, and is doing its utmost to step up its level of Mac support for IBM's business applications.

This is the kind of "bake off" that Apple simply wasn't considered for until very recently. Here at Cincom, the Smalltalk team has been moving heavily in the Mac direction for awhile now. We use Parallels and/or VMWare for Windows and Linux on those systems, and it's been working out great.

Technorati Tags: windows, ibm

This summary:

In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple's computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn't come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple's platform-switching Boot Camp software -- and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

Simply put, Vista proved to be a more sluggish operating system than Leopard. Our PCs installed some software faster, but in general they were slower in our time trials. Plus, both PCs showed weaker performance on third-party benchmarks than the Macs. Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway's, purchase a copy of Vista to boot -- and still save $100.

has certainly been my experience. With a Windows box, it gets slower over time, as they pre load of apps (which is how MS makes things like Office seem faster) generates more and more of a boot time penalty. A year in with my MacBook Proo, it's still snappy - a year in with my old ThinkPad (meaning, a year after I initially got it) - it had degraded significantly. Buy the Mac :)

Technorati Tags: windows, vista, leopard

This is interesting - Psystar is selling hardware that is capable of running OS X (Or Windows, or Linux), and for a cost that's well under what Apple charges. I wonder whether Apple will try to find a way to go after them...

Update: Spelling Correction

Update: looks like it's all fake

Technorati Tags: apple

It's been a slow but steady process - over the last couple of years, we've been moving more and more to the Mac, and to Apple products in general. It started with the Mini we bought, just before Apple went to intel. Then came the iPods, one for me, one for the kid.

That was it for awhile, but then the MacBook Pro arrived last summer - I was sold enough that my wife got a MacBook - which she loves. Now I've upgraded my old iPod to a Nano, and my wife is getting one of the classic models.

This is a sea change for us - not too many years ago, I was arguing that Macs simply weren't worth the cost premium. Now? The sheer amount of time I haven't had to pound my head on the desk makes up for that differential.

Technorati Tags: apple, windows

David Weinberger is suffering from some fairly nasty sounding heisenbug on his MacBook - which goes to show that this kind of odd behavior, while far more common on Windows, is not unknown to Macs.