As you may or may not know, sadly MAC doesn’t support writing on an NTFS external hard disk. So if you want to share an external drive between a Windows machine and a Mac, it should be FAT32 partitioned. However FAT32 can’t let you run huge file sizes and therefore has a limit for the size of the files on the disk. With NTFS, file size limit is not anymore a problem. But unfortunately OS X doesn’t support writing on NTFS, it can only read.

But it’s not over… everything has a solution. Thankfully there is an NTFS Fuse driver which you can use with the MacFUSE userspace filesystem driver. It supports full reading and writing capability for NTFS. Using an external hard disk partitioned NTFS between Mac and Windows machines is no longer a problem.

Installation doesn’t look that easy… but it really is easy.

1.     Download and install MacFUSE - Link

2.     Just get the DMG file and run the contained installer.

3.     Download and install Fink. You need this for obtaining and building the NTFS Fuse driver.

·       Fink (Intel) - Link

·       Fink (PowerPC) - Link

4.     Run the installer within the DMG file.

5.     Drag the FinkCommander application to your Applications folder.

6.     Get NTFS Fuse driver.

7.     Open a terminal and run the following commands:

8.     /sw/bin/fink configure

9.     You will be asked many questions, just hit enter for every question and then YES to use the unstable tree.

10. /sw/bin/fink selfupdate

11. /sw/bin/fink index

12. /sw/bin/fink scanpackages

13. /sw/bin/fink install ntfs-3g (you might get an error that ntfs-3g is not found, if yes then do the next steps.

14. download ntfs-3g manually

·       NTFS-3G 2009.1.1 Update 1 [ublio] – Link – (High performance build using internal caching)

·       NTFS-3G 2009.1.1 Update 1 [stable] – Link – (Slower, but minimizes corruption in the event of a system crash)

15. Install ntfs-3g

16. Restart required

After going through all these steps, go to Apllications/Utilities/Disk Utility then check your drive connected to your system. In the info of your external hard drive it should show. 

Owners Enabled :Yes

Hope this works for everyone, and if you have an easier way of doing it just post it in the comment box.

The growth of Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s Gmail service is accelerating and, if current trends continue, it could surpass Windows Live Hotmail by the end of this year.

Between December 2007 and December 2008, Gmail’s number of unique monthly visitors in the United States grew 43%, from 20.8 million to 29.6 million, according to ComScore. Windows Live Hotmail lost 5% of its unique monthly visitors during this period, falling from 45.7 million to 43.5 million.

Between September 2007 and September 2008, Gmail’s visitor total grew 39%, from 18.8 million to 26 million, ComScore figures indicate. Windows Live Hotmail during this period saw its visitor share decline 4%, from 46.2 million to 44.6 million.

If Google’s Gmail growth rate rises to, say, 46% over 2009, it could reach approximately 43 million unique U.S. visitors by the end of the year. And if Windows Live Hotmail continues to bleed visitors at a rate of, say, 3%, it will finish the year with around 42 million unique visitors per month.

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), with 91.9 million unique monthly visitors in December 2008 and about 11% growth last year, has reason to worry, too. If Gmail continues growing as it has been, it could become the leading free e-mail provider by the end of 2011 or there about.

Measuring service usage by unique monthly visitors in the United States doesn’t tell the whole story, but the statistical trends suggest that Google is doing something right, something that Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) isn’t doing and that Yahoo needs to do more of.

Part of Gmail’s success may be because of Google’s policy of rapid-fire innovation, a practice formalized last June with the opening of Gmail Labs, a showcase and playground for Gmail engineers. Gmail Labs takes the form of a tab in the Gmail Settings menu that allows users to try out a variety of new features, some of which are useful and some of which are just fun.

On Thursday, Google said that Gmail users now have access to multiple in-box views through a new Gmail Labs experiment called Multiple Inboxes.

Read more @ InformationWeek.com