There is no doubt that Apple makes beautiful products, but their recent monitor offering, the Apple Cinema LED Display, while quite attractive, leaves a lot to be desired.

A new look, a new idea, and even a bit of new content to spice up the blog and give me something that might even be sustainable over the long-haul. That’s right, I’m starting over and this time I think that leaving myself room for posting my opinions on technology and what’s going on in the world will make is possible for me to regularly contribute and continually add value for my readers. Wouldn’t that be nice…?

So here we go, post one for a new era – welcome to thegeekchannel.com!

~geek

Everywhere you look retails are starting to prep for the make-it or break-it Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, that, for many, will be the deciding factor of their profitability this year.

Today is that day that many of you have been waiting for.  The official release of Apple’s iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and the added announcement that Apple is very serious about getting into the corporate world.  Nothing terribly new, but some bonus because now you’ll be able to integrate with Exchange, including push email, push calendar, and push contacts.  The iPhone will support global address books, Cisco VPN, certificates and identities.  Perhaps the most entertaining is that Apple will now offer remote wipe, so you can lose all your stuff at the IT department’s whim.

~Geek

 P.S.  Apple still says Flash sucks and they’re too good for Adobe.  Sorry.

For those of you that haven’t heard the news, or braved the beta program, Microsoft’s Live OneCare beta 2 program is about done.  After a variety of different frustrations – even when wanting Microsoft to have the single solution of OS and security – I have removed OneCare and resolved to go back to a combination of security tools that are less integrated and, in my opinion, work better.  Whether they protect my system better or not is almost irrelevant – it’s making sure that my system feel buggy that is most important to me.  OneCare didn’t offer that; with all the alerts I felt as though it was doing too little and I was doing too much.

One of the problems that I encountered during the removal had to do with the OneCare backup files.  I couldn’t, by default in Windows Vista, remove them.  I tried a variety of different things before stumbling on Laurent Duveau’s very elegant fix.  Needless to say, it worked first time for me.

Problem: You reinstalled Live OneCare, or you start using v2 beta, and want to delete your old backup folder, but you can’t.

This is a permission problem, that maybe you can solve with cacls with command line:

cacls “<drive letter>:\<path>” /t /g administrators:F 

Sample:
cacls “F:\Windows OneCare Backup\YourComputerName” /t /g administrators:F
Do NOT put a \ at the end of the path.

You’ll get a message “Are you sure(Y/N)?”

This will strip the permissions from the folder and you should be able to delete it.

Is AppleTV the worst product of 2007?  My opinion – yes and no.  Yes, I think that the implementation is very un-Apple, because it’s not unique enough to compel Apple devotees to purchase one.  After all, most of these users already have a TiVo (or equivalent) and aren’t going to buy something just to watch iTunes content.  MTV, for the most part, already covers much of that market.

On the other hand, I think that there is promise here if Apple can get past where they are today and add content for television with the same success that they’ve managed to get musical content.  Imagine, if you will, you could go to AppleTV and buy first-run movies electronically instead of on DVD.  Perhaps, because you’re purchasing digital content you can even burn that out to a DVD and have the best of both worlds?  I believe that people are going this way and that some company will win the battle.  Perhaps it’s not too late for Apple, but they need to get moving and promoting with the same passion that they do their other products.

~geek