In market warfare, just as in military warfare, one of the key tools is the analysis of Critical Failure Points. The essential element is that a opponent may have mistaken assumptions about its strengths or strategy or the intentions of the opposition, and those elements constitute a set of critical failure points that can be…
John Martellaro
John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. With degrees in astrophysics (B.S.) and physics (M.S.), he has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include chess, science fiction and astronomy. John is the host of the TMO podcast Background Mode.
Articles by John Martellaro
Microsoft Admits Outlook for Vista is Bleak
Microsoftis quarterly earnings call with Wall Street told the tale of two diverging franchises: MS Office is doing well, but Vista growth was just 2 percent, and the company acknowledged that Vistais future is bleak for the rest of 2008, according to Computerworld on Friday. The mere 2 percent growth, with revenues of US$4.22B, concerned…
Absoft Releases Xcode Plug-in for Pro Fortran 10.2
Absoft announced the immediate availability of its Xcode 3.1 plug-in for the Absoft Pro Fortran v10.2 product on Wednesday. The Intel Mac only plug-in allows Xcode development of 32- and 64-bit Fortran applications. It is included free of charge with the Fortran distribution. The plug-in is being released as an alternative to Absoftis own multi-platform…
Former Apple Team Raids the Mac Storage Industry
A team of former Apple employees has formed a startup company to pick up where Apple left off with RAID 5 storage. Active Storage in Torrance, California is building and delivering XRAID, a powerful RAID 5 system especially designed for Macintosh customers with up to 16 TB of storage in a sleek 3U case. Alex…
Developing Cocoa Apps with MacRuby
Appleis Developer Connection recently posted a tutorial on developing Mac apps with MacRuby. The advantage of MacRuby is that it bypasses the technology of the Ruby-Cocoa bridge and sits directly on top of core Mac OS X technologies such as Objective-C runtime, the generational garbage collector, and CoreFoundation. As the tutorial explains, “Creating a bridge…
Psystar Files to Oppose Dismissal of its Counterclaim
Psystar has filed a motion in opposition to Appleis motion to dismiss its counterclaim. Psystar believes it has found relevant case law to support single product relevant markets and supporting antitrust argument. Previously, in response to Appleis original copyright infringement case against Psystar, a counterclaim was filed which emphasized possible antitrust action by Apple. Apple…
Intego Advises to be On Guard for MacGuard
Intego, as part of its routine security alerts, has sent out an advisory warning Apple customers to be wary of a rogue security program called MacGuard. The software itself may be dangerous, and also may simply be harvesting credit card numbers, Intego said. The advisory said, in part: “Intego has discovered a rogue program claiming…
Steve Jobs Responds to Fire Storm over FireWire
On Tuesday, Apple released new aluminum MacBooks without a FireWire port of any kind, some customers have been greatly annoyed, and they let Apple know about it on Apple forums. Steve Jobs has responded to one customer via e-mail, according to AppleInsider. In his first response to an Apple customer, Mr. Jobs said, “Actually, all…
TMO Reports - Apple vs. Psystar Case Takes a Detour
In the Apple vs. Psystar case in the Northern District of California, both parties have agreed to Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). Which party asked for this cannot be known at this point, or even if they did. Sometimes a judge will strongly urge the parties to enter into voluntary ADR. An attorney, who is following…
AMEX Digital Announces External Blu-ray Drive for Macs
its USB external Portable Super Multi-Drive for Intel Macs. The slot loading Blu-ray drive has the following features: Latest Technology can supports the 12cm and 8cm disc BD-RE/-R (SL) 2X Speed Writing / Reading BD-RE/-R (DL) 1X Speed Writing / 1.6X Speed Reading BD-ROM (SL / DL) 2X Speed Reading Writes DVD+R DL and DVD-R…
TMO Reports - Apple's Pricing Strategy Different Than the Street
On Monday, many analysts were predicting that Apple would price the new MacBooks aggressively, based on a recognition of the current economy. However, Apple has a very different outlook, both for the health of the economy and their Mac sales. When Apple didn’t announced an aluminum MacBook for US$899 on Tuesday, Apple’s stock slid about…
Apple Upgrades MacBook Air with Larger Storage Options
On Tuesday, Apple announced new storage options for the MacBook Air: a 4,200 RPM, 120 GB hard disk or a 128 GB SSD. The graphics were also upgraded to the NVIDIA 9400M which should run a little cooler than the previous graphics, according to Steve Jobs. The other specifications for the MacBook Air remain unchanged…
John Hodgman Hosts SPAMasterpiece Theater
On Boing Boing tv, John Hodgman, famous and known to Apple customers for his Apple ads with Justin Long, continues his SPAMasterpiece Theater series, part II, featuring “true tale[s] of romance, adventure, infamy, and low-cost prescription drugs, all culled from the reams of actual, unsolicited emails, received here by us and people like you –…
Woz Reflects on His Career, Future of iPod
In the course of discussing his career and love for computers, Steve Wozniak predicted that the iPod has peaked and will eventually die out like the transistor radio and Walkmans, according to the Telegraph in the U.K. on Tuesday. Rupert Neate engaged Mr. Wozniak who reminisced about the early days with Hewlett Packard, his shyness,…
Serious Problems with Microsoft Ads Analyzed
Microsoft allowed their brand to be diminished, remained quiet for too long, then came out with ineffective, inconsistent ads according to Therese Poletti at MarketWatch on Thursday. Given the current economy, one way for Microsoft to save some money is to just kill the whole campaign. In March, Microsoft hired a rebel but hot ad…
GIMP 2.6 Released, Offers Major Changes to Interface
Gimp.org announced on Wednesday that version 2.6 has been released. The new version was described as an important release and features changes to the user interface that address the most frequent complaints. It also introduces the GEGL graph-based image processing library that will eventually bring high bit-depth and non-destructive editing to GIMP. User interface improvements…
Restrictions on Search and Seizure of Laptops Proposed
The “Travelersi Privacy Protection Act” bill has been introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate. The law seeks to curtail the ability of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents to demand passwords, search and seize notebook computers and other small digital devices without probable cause. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI)?introduced S. 3612 along with…
iPhone 2.2 Beta Can Still be Jailbroken
The iPhone Dev team said on Friday that, for now, the iPhone 2.2 software, still in beta, remains susceptible to jailbreaking on all but the iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G. Do demonstrate what’s been achieved, the team showed the terminal app open on an iPhone 2G running the 2.2 beta. Their blog noted, “Hardware…
Piper Jaffray Says Fear Outweighing Fundamentals for AAPL
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said on Monday in a note to investors obtained by TMO, that fear is outweighing fundamental analysis as investors arenit seeing the light at the end of the investment crisis tunnel Mr. Munster wrote: Consumer [spending] is slowing, but Street models reflect the slowdown. Our FY08 Mac unit growth estimate…
Firefox 3.0.3 Fixes Password Issue
On the heels if Firefox 3.0.2 last week, Firefox 3.0.3 was released on Friday and fixes an issue that kept users from retrieving or saving new passwords. The release notes for 3.0.2 detailed the security and stability fixes along with some Mac-specific issues. However, shortly after the release, it was discovered that users were having…
Parallels Offers Special App Bundle for US$50
Until September 30, Parallels is offering their virtualization software, Desktop 3.0, along with eight others Mac apps, valued at US$300 for just $49.99. Parallels Desktop normally sells for $79.99 by itself.
YML Tonight: Making A Mint From the iPhone
Your Mac Life (YML), with Shawn King, which airs every Wednesday night, has a “jam packed” show if there ever was one. Mr. King will chat with an iPhone developer whois earned a quarter million dollars so far, a TSA representative on “checkpoint friendly” laptop bags, and Adam Engst who will talk about his new…
CW: One More Thing for the New MacBooks - Wireless USB
Last week, Seth Weintraub at Computerworld made a list of likely technologies to appear in the new Apple MacBooks. On Tuesday, he spotted something that caused him to add one more thing to the possible list: Wireless USB. What caught his eye was a photo uploaded to flickr which, while it may not be authentic,…
CNET: Key to Windows 7 Success is Geeks
The way to maintain the reputation of an OS is to make it appeal to the resident geeks because they are the ones who make or break its reputation, according to Don Reisinger at CNET on Monday. Microsoft didnit do that with Vista, but Apple did with Mac OS X. The downfall of Vista was…