December 18, 2006 - SVMUG Meeting

Agenda

7:00 - Introduction (and stragglers come in) 7:05 - News - Charles 7:30 - Presentation: Granite Digital 8:15 - Pot Luck 9:15 - Finish up and raffle 9:30 Post-meeting at BJ’s

Introduction

Charles Gousha welcomes the group. Tonight is our end of the year potluck! Thank everyone for bringing the food.

New people: a visitor from SMUG.

There will be no Q&A tonight — we will help you with the new Christmas toys in January!

January 15th is the next meeting — one week after MacWorld Expo San Francisco.

Your Mac Life has a (still valid) discount code, “PC0602”, for a Exhibits Pass to the Expo. Other World Computing is also offering a free pass. “PC0619”

News

MS Vista has been released. David Pogue has reviewed it for the NY Times. He notes there are resemblances. He “proves” that Vista is not a rip off, with tongue firmly in cheek.

Vista works under Boot Camp or Parallels.

Microsoft offers a business upgrade to Vista, from current Mac OS X users.

Motorola has brought Netopia (formerly Farrallon — remember PhoneNet?).

Numerous parties at the Expo — check out the Hess Events List.

Take Caltrain to the show. Stop in the User Groups Lounge, on the Mezzine level. Look for the Users Group section in the North Hall. Both halls are filled this year with vendors. The smaller vendors are in the North Hall, and the big corporations are in the South Hall.

Circus Ponies Notebook — current owners can buy a copy as a gift for a friend, and get a 20% rebate.

MacInstruct — looking for unpaid volunteers to write tutorials.

The first MySpace virus has appeared. This is the first virus to attack an online community, via an infected Quicktime movie. It redirects an user’s links to various phishing sites.

Photoshop CS3 beta is available, for current CS2 users. This is the Universal compilation.

Presentation

Granite Digital — making storage since the Macintosh Plus introduction. http://www.granitedigital.com/

Emergency Copy Adapter $25.00 — connects IDE/SATA one or two drives to USB for data recovery. Suppose your computer has a failure. You can pull the drives, and use the adapter to mount the drive, so that you can copy the data.

SATA drives run faster than IDE bus drives, or IDE over Firewire. These drives are also affordable. Granite Digital offers a dual unit enclosure for SATA. Host adapters (PCI cards) are available for G5 computers and later.

eSATA is a shielded SATA cable, for 300 MB/sec transfer.

Pot Luck

Raffle

Books, books, and Granite Digital Emergency Copy Adapter.