read more | digg story

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Most people willingly give away more information to sweepstakes, magazine subscriptions, contests, market surveys, free website subscriptions all of whom immediately turn around and sell your mailing list information. And they usually do it for something less tangible than a song for which they are willing to pay a whole dollar.

The information embedded in the music is their to protect the artists and the content publishers. Right or wrong, music is a business and they believe they have to take steps to protect their revenue. These steps are not always well considered but the intent is clear. In return, with the removal of DRM, we get the music with none of the restrictions. I can now use my iTunes music on any player or any computer with no restrictions. I no longer have to worry about losing my licenses and thereby access to my music. Is it worth it? Sure it is…its convenient!

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This turns out to be one of those times where we had it backwards. The XP and Vista machines were correct…sort of. Since Bush decided to change the Daylight Savings Time date, the information stored in the OS for when DST started was incorrect. Patches were released for XP and 2003 machines and I assume that Vista had the correct information built in already and therefore didn’t need patching. What didn’t happen, was Microsoft didn’t patch W2K, which is what our domain controllers happen to be running.

Our network admin, not knowing this fact, came in and updated the time on these machines assuming correctly that the rest of the office would follow suit and we would all be running on the same times. What actually happened, is that when we updated the time on the domain controllers, which currently think they are not running under DST rules, the time was broadcast via NTP to all the domain members and each machine updated their clocks accordingly. However, when the newer machines updated their clocks, they assumed correctly that they were running on DST and added an hour to the time broadcast by the domain controllers which was actually correct but hand’t factored in DST. So all the newer machines were now an hour ahead.

The following article has links to KB articles that walk you through making the necessary changes to the registry for Win2k machines. As soon as we have finished this process i’ll post the results here.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/95357/95357.html

First, it assumes that you only have a single partition on your hard-drive with Mac OS X. When you first run Boot Camp, you must have a single HFS partition on your hard-drive that takes up all available space. When I first tried to install Boot Camp, I decided to pre-partition my hard-drive with an HFS partition, an NTFS partition and an ext3 partition along with a linux swap partition. Turns out, I wasted my time. Boot Camp simply didn’t want to operate in that environment.

What I also didn’t realize at the time was that the partition table was a dummy partition table. The Intel Macs use EFI instead of a traditional BIOS and uses a GPT (GUID Partition Table) which is quite an improvement over the old-style partition tables but to maintain backward compatibility the EFI standard includes a dummy partition table at the beginning of the drive just before the new GUID partition table. When I rebooted after parititioning the drive, OS X didn’t recognize the new parititions which was simply due to the fact that while I had created entries in the old parition table, the GPT had no record of the new partitions. Boot Camp, however, recognized that something was different and wouldn’t allow me to continue…considering that the GPT wasn’t setup properly, it was probably for my own good.

 So, I started from scratch and reinstalled OS X cleanly so that the partition used the entire drive. By this time, I’m so engrossed in the process that I almost forgot that I was trying to install Windows on my Mac. Once I finished the OS X reinstall, I ran Software Update and reinstalled Boot Camp. This time, Boot Camp was willing to cooperate.

The first step was burn a driver CD. This was simple enough. I placed a CD-R into the drive and pressed the “Continue” button.

Once this step was complete, I could start the installation process. This was also push-button simple. Boot Camp imformed me that it was creating the Windows partition and gave me some size options. I was given an option to create up to a 32gb partition. I chose the full 32gb. After that, I was prompted to insert my Windows XP Pro w/SP 2 install disk to start the install. The remainder of this process became a normal windows installation with the caveat that I had to select the correct partition in which to install Windows.

After the Windows installation was complete, the system rebooted into Windows automatically and other than a few complaints about unrecognized hardware, it looked good. Then I inserted the driver disk and saw an executeable titled “Install Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP.exe”. This seemed like the thing to do, so I ran it and playing the role of install-monkey and clicking “Next” a couple of times, the installation was complete. Pretty much everything worked great right off the bat. The iSight camera worked, the video driver was working and the wide screen looked great. The sound worked. I was off an running, except…I couldn’t right-click on anything since my MacBook didn’t have a right mouse-button and the keyboard driver didn’t seem to support Ctrl-click. After a little research, I finally gave up and connected a standard USB mouse with a right mouse-button and all was right with the world.

Upon reboot, I discovered (after reading the manual) that holding down the option key allows you to select between booting OS X and Windows. I also noticed that the “Startup Disk” option under “System Preferences” showed both OS X and the Windows partitions allowing me to select my default boot OS. Good stuff!

Since OS X (at least the later versions) have read-only support for NTFS, I was able to access my Windows partition from within OS X which makes sharing files between the two possible in a limited manner. After the fact, I now think that I should have used a FAT filesystem for my Windows installation which would have allowed two-way filesharing between OS X and Windows since OS X has read-write support for a FAT filesystem. Oh, and a search for an HFS driver for Windows did not turn up very much of interest.

Ok, so both OS’es were running perfectly and I had worked out the quirks but, I wanted more. First, I wanted to install Windows Vista RC1 to see if I could get away with it. Then I was hoping to install a copy of Linux and triple-boot my MacBook. I’ve read on the that others had succeeded but I obviously had a little ways to go before I got to that point.

I’m planning this as a three part article. Part 1 (this article) is the original installation of Boot Camp. Part 2 is the installation of Windows Vista (see Windows Vista “Borrows” Features from Mac OS X) which i’ve already done and simply have to write the article. Part 3 will be the installation of a Linux distro. I’ve read that others have had success with both Ubuntu and Gentoo. I expect that the Linux installation will involve reinstalling just about everything. It will also probably break Boot Camp since it assumes that it controls the partitioning scheme on the hard-drive and will only allow an HFS and a Windows partition. But, we’ll see.

Enter Windows Vista…the fact is, looks do matter and Windows Vista looks gorgeous! Vista seems to be all about eye-candy from its transparent windows and title bars to the new alternative Alt-Tab interface.

A notable new feature called Microsoft Gadgets has been been introduced with Vista. Gadgets can be displayed on your desktop or in a sidebar that attaches to the side of your screen. I have attempted to use Widgets on my Windows PC in the past and simply wasn’t happy with the performance. The Mac OS X implementation uses a “Dashboard” concept that overlays the entire screen requiring you to “activate” the dashboard before you can use your widgets. Windows allows you to display your widgets in the sidebar or on the desktop making them available at a glance. Microsoft’s gadgets remove the performance issues and adds some new twists that makes this feature something that may well become one of those “can’t live without” items.

The second item that reminds me of my Mac OS X system is a little less obvious but probably much more important is the new security system in Vista. Microsoft has built the OS with security as a primary consideration which makes this probably the most secure version of Windows yet. A new feature called User Account Control (UAC) prompts the user for permission before actions such as installing new software.

Wandering thought: I have two children, a son and a daughter. Spyware and viruses became such a large problem on their computers that I finally took the extreme step of creating a separate network and running Windows NT on their computers and giving them user accounts. This turned out to be more of a hassle for me since their computers continued to be infected with spyware even on the reduced privilege accounts but I still needed to install and update any applications they wanted on their computers. Hmmm. Finally I gave up and let them run XP Home with antispyware and antivirus. They were still infected most of the time since the infections came from software they downloaded and installed themselves but my computers were safe since they were on a separate network. I wonder if the new security features of Windows Vista will be up to the task of keeping their computers clean? I’ll definitely let you know after Vista is released.

I realize that Microsoft probably didn’t borrow this feature from OS X but it does feel very much the same. My first experience with Vista had security popups that felt very much like OS X as a I was installing applications and configuring the system for use.

In my opinion, operating systems will never be completely safe since their will always be a human factor and a lot of the spyware and viruses are using built-in social engineering tactics to get themselves installed on user’s computers. But the new security features in Vista are definitely a step in the right direction.

Finally, the directory structure that Vista uses is becoming more Mac-like. Again, this is how it feels to me so don’t start in with all the differences and reasons why the two are not the same. User accounts have been pulled from their original location at documents and settings are are now located in a directory called “Users”. Sound familiar? The directories under each user account use simpler names with no spaces (with the sole exception of “Saved Games”) and are named things like “Pictures” and “Music”. Again…sound familiar? One might point out that this is obvious and is not a structure that can be claimed solely by OS X but again, I was struck by the familiarity with my OS X system.

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Ironically, this copy of Vista is running on my MacBook Pro using Apple’s Boot Camp software to dual-boot Vista with OS X…more on that later.

For those of you who like pictures, here are a few more.