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The trusted computing group is a group of the big and heavy hitters in the industry, they have collaborated on this technology, and have made it quite robust in functionality.

A primary function of the tpm is the setup of a transitive trust mechanism, whereby in an enterprise a central policy mechanism can be setup and enforced, signing all computer operations and file system objects. This functionality also provides for remote auditing and administration.

Please see my unaccepted post

It's true that the era of trusted platforms is quickly coming upon us. After much controversy the Trusted Computing Group has posted its specifications for the whole world to review. Many of our industry's analysts, artists, and commentators have both supported and denounced the technology in equal measure.

After a complete review of the literature, it is my understanding that many excellent uses are proposed for the technology. As a network integrator and consulting system administrator I'm particularly excited about the remote management capabilities that the specification calls for, and the ability to lock the hardware, software and ensure that documents created in a business stay in the business without the appropriate trust level. The transitive trust nature of the TPM will allow me to set up group policies and enforce them in ways I've never experienced. Truly industrial grade tech.

As a slashdot reader, concerned with my privacy, I was pleased to note that the specification repeatedly called for privacy protection settings, including allowing the owner full control of the module. This is particularly good for home users who may not need these features enabled, particularly the remote auditing and administration functionality. In truth, the specification is quite balanced.

My question to slashdot readers is in light of this very balanced specification, which protects all stakeholders. Is it okay that Apple is currently implementing TPM in their new iMacs and Macbooks, and not documenting it in their system specifications ? Furthermore, is it also okay that they've failed to provide home users with the appropriate tools to monitor the trust mechanism and disable the module if it's not necessary?

Okay, that's two questions, but 'the third time's the charm' Is it okay that the specification describes remote auditing and administration capabilities, and I can't even see if that's enabled?

As some have pointed out the main issue with the intel transition for Adobe and Microsoft (and others I would imagine) is that both companies use CodeWarrior which can't produce Universal binaries. So it isn't just a Power/Intel transition, but a CodeWarrior/XCode transition as well. Both companies have huge and complex programs, and it takes time to get it right. Better they take the time to get it right the first time than to risk the ire of their users by producing a hurried and buggy piece of crap that you can't rely on for making a living. Not to mention Apple probably knows this and has planned on it, which is why I think they will be selling PowerPC along side Intel computers until Microsoft and Adobe release their apps as Universal binaries.

I think the following site sums up my opinion of iTunes mini store "issue"....

iTunes MiniStore Is Now Opt-In

Proof of concept exploit:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5189335.html?ta g=zdfd.newsfeed
Feh. It has the .app file extension. I am not amazed.

http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/crying_wolf

Yep, Mac OS X can be hit with a Trojan not a big suprise there. Symantec has some info on this 'MP3Concept Trojan Horse', which is benign. It does use a neat trick to imbed the code in an MP3, but other than that it isn't that special. Tricking someone to run your program isn't really something that we will ever make impossible under every circumstances, but I will admidt that using filename extensions to identify file types is one very stupid thing that Mac OS X copied from Windows, and then hiding them by default only compounds the stupidity.

Exploit, infections from not known: http://www.macintouch.com/opener.html

But "opener" requires a previously comprimized system. A "rootkit" without a viable delivery mechinism isn't really a "virus" or "worm" or even a "trojan". Acording to McAfee: "This threat does not make use of an exploit, so to have the script run successfully on a system and make changes, the user account from which the script is run must have sufficient rights. If no superuser/root/admin access is available many of the subroutines will fail and generate errors." I don't know why McAfee classifies it as a virus/worm since it doesn't seem to have any propagation abilities.

In Wild exploit, known infections: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,390203 75,39155837,00.htm

True, the exploit mentioned is a tricky thing (potentially allowing code that was downloaded to be run as trusted), however I don't know if any was ever found in the wild - and even then it would still require an administrator's password to do system damage. The "hole" was supposedly patched by Apple's Security Update 2004-06-07 according to Unsanity who had released a little application to guard against the exploit.

If those are the only ones you've found, you haven't really shown any "exploit[s] for a Mac OS X vulnerability", although the MP3Concept Trojan I guess uses some "social hacking" types of tricks that would also work in Windows by hiding that it is an application rather than an mp3 file. Even if we accept a count of 3 (or ten or twenty), Mac OS X would still be comparitively malware-free.

I'm not sure if the submitter is insinuating that Yahoo "Dashboard" looks suspiciously familiar to Apple's Dashboard on Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger), but we should be reminded that Yahoo Go/Yahoo Dashboard is in fact Yahoo! Widget Engine, which is in fact Konfabulator renamed.

And Konfabulator, by Arlo Rose (of Kaleidoscope fame) and Perry Clarke, was around on the Mac OS X platform first, until a Windows version was also released with the help of Ed Voas before Yahoo!'s purchase. In fact, if it weren't for the Windows version, Yahoo! may never have come knocking.

And it's easy to say that Apple ripped off Konfabulator to make Dashboard, but if we go back a step further...say, a couple of decades, we find that the idea of Konfabulator - little modeless applets that do useful things, like an address book or a notepad or a calculator or a little game - actually hearkens back to Apple's original idea of Desk Accessories.

It all comes full circle!

No, wait. That's not full circle. It all leads back to Apple. ;-)

Desk Accessories were available on the Mac OS 1 back in 1984. If there was any "idea taken by Apple", it was from their own prior art.

It sounds like constructive criticism to me. He uses Mac only. So obviously it doesn't suck too badly. He doesn't point out any specifics about what sucks, but he lingers on UI design, which has become much less consistent with OS X. First aqua, then brushed metal, then Garageband pops up with some wood grain thing. Now there's a whole new 'Pro' look going into things like Aperture. It's like the Themes from OS 8.5, but now they are app specific. It's a common gripe.

Do you mean "bright", or do you mean "glossy"? I don't think Mac screens are less bright (I hardly ever turn my all the way up), but they're definitely less glossy than some PC laptops' screens. Gruber at fireball.net wrote about this recently:

And speaking of Wintel laptop displays, what is deal with the growing trend of laptop displays being treated with some sort of super-high-gloss finish? This isn't something where some laptop displays are a bit shinier than others; it's a dramatic, instantly discernible difference. During a recent trip to Fry's, the majority of the laptops they had on display had screens which were treated with this hyper-glossy finish.

What is behind this trend? Are these screens significantly cheaper? If not, what is the appeal? Why would anyone want a screen so glossy that it's reflective? These screens quite obviously are more prone to glare from light sources, and the glossy finish would seemingly bring even more attention to smudges left behind by the ignorant mouth-breathing sort of people who touch computer displays with their fingers.

Needless to say, the new PowerBook displays use no such coating.

Apple as far as I can see has a bit of a disconnect with "reality". They're not customer-oriented [e.g. shitty dead pixel policies, really costly vendor-locked in gear, etc]. It was always "oh that's apple gear only because the quality is higher" yet all the folk I talk to say "just get a wintel laptop and be done with". And it isn't like the PPC isn't a nice processor [the G4 actually looks fairly sweet]. It's just they're a bunch of pricks.

Maybe Apple's computer "just work" and look cool to boot (and not the "hey let's put some more shinies, neons and LEDs in this I'm not sure 3.5MW worth of them is enough" cool) ?

They are pricks indeed, and suckers, but they computers work and OSX is a quite good piece of software.

In fact, quite a few people are currently shifting from Wintel to Apple 'puters...

Apple went with Intel for appearance sake only. A Turion-based laptop would have done them just fine [or hell just invest and extend the PPC line]. I mean the G5 was a bit extreme, no need for that in a laptop [though it is cool]. A 32-bit laptop is mighty fine given that you don't normally run multi-GB database engines or whatever on it.

Flash news: Current AMD Turions are, in fact, 64 bits (which *may* be why their name really is AMD Turion(TM) 64)

I wouldn't call it FUD. Considering all the "independent" OS studies MS puts out, not to mention the outright lies their marketing department (or marketing firms hired by them) passes off, I think MS has very little credibility when it comes to announcements that aren't backed by much substantial. I don't doubt they have very good people doing very good research, but the company as a whole has no credible marketing capital.

Seriously, every time someone bashes on "blogs" it sounds to me like people bashing on television. Fine. Don't watch television. Or watch only the three or four shows you want to watch. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. The same thing is true of blogs. Don't want to see all of that trite bullshit that bothers you so much? Then don't read it!

That's good. I'm sick of pretentious web pages with tiny fonts, like oh so many blogs. What ass decided that low-contrast 7-point Verdana was good enough to write a whole web site in?

IE for the Mac was a steaming pile

Really? I thought it was widely regarded as better than IE5 on Windows. Hence:

When it debuted, Mac IE 5 was the best web browser in the world, primarily because of the Tasman rendering engine that provided unprecedented levels of standards compliance.

Eric Meyer said, "I don't think people realize just how much of a groundbreaker IE5/Mac really was, and how good it remains even today."

The BART Widget for Dashboard went through the same problem.

Actually, they don't bundle it with OSX anymore...

You're missing a critical point, which is that not all blogs are worthless, and that worth depends entirely on what you're searching for.

For instance, someone looking for information about red pandas is going to have trouble if they search for "firefox." Not blog related at all, but for that person, all this junk about some web browser is worthless crap clogging their search results.

Sure, there are a bunch of blogs that probably aren't going to help you much... but what about the guy who spends 8 hours trying to research a tech problem, finally figures it out, and posts a detailed summary on his blog? If the information you want is buried in one cryptic mailing list post from three years ago that doesn't use many of the phrases people are likely to search for, you might actually be better off if that blog entry is included in your search results.

Daring Fireball has a term for this: Writing for Google.

What you *really* want to do is filter the crap from your search results, not filter the blogs. And you know what, that's what the search engines want to do, too. A "blog" meta tag isn't going to help.

TV is a vast wasteland of crap, with a few great exceptions like Galactica and Six Feet Under.

The blogosphere is full of nonsense, self-referential mental masturbation, and useless blogrolls. Then there are blogs like Daring Fireball, The Long Tail, and WWDNK which are each compelling in their own way.

Spam, though, is 100% crap. In that 10% lies the difference.

http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/ditty

put a nice spin on it.

My favorite quote:

"...Begin to suspect that even Dell is not very proud of this device."

I liked this article on the marketing campaign.

Also, Dell is really starting to suck. I have a feeling that to buy this is to buy pain.

And finally, Shuffle's got a secret.

The main difference between the ipod and this player is that this player looks like a 50c lighter.

Disclaimer: I don't know how to put that link in as some text atm, but whatever.

of making sure that the UI for their #1 application never ever matches that of the OS. I can't understand how anybody can think this is a good idea. But seeing how Apple do the same thing, I guess somebody thinks it is a good idea. Though I don't hear anybody scream at Apple for plagiarising Microsofts ideas.

Tim Bray, who created he XML specification
Michael Gartenberg, an extremely influential industry analyst
John Gruber, who writes the great Daring Fireball blog
Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh dev team, and the list goes on!

I had heard there was one group trying to develop an OS X virus, but the first attempt got them flamed so hard for deviating from the user interface guidelines that they retreated to caves in the Himilayas and vowed never to touch a computer again.

So possibly if the virus writers avoid Brushed Metal, they might have a chance.

In that case, they're only safe if they did a clean-install...

The poster is insightful by simply pointing out that for an individual user, a desktop search feature is useful it if finds things he's looking for. The "critical mass" aspect of the ability to search for and index, say, Word documents is the mass of Word documents, not the number of people using the search technology.

Microsoft's real threat is google.

This gets said a lot, but I'm not convinced it's true, and the fact that Microsoft is paranoid about it doesn't change my skepticism -- Microsoft is paranoid about everyone. Google does not have a desktop platform, they have an advertising service.

As John Gruber put it recently, "What makes something a platform is that you can't take it away without the stuff that's built on it falling down." You can port programs from Windows, but you can't just move them onto another platform. They need Windows. What has Google produced that meets that litmus test? Changing your web site from using Google Search or Google Maps to Yahoo's equivalents is changing a few lines of code somewhere; Google Mail and Google Talk rely on the fact that moving to/from them is trivial; Google's few actual software products are for Windows.

Google makes virtually all of their money from advertising, either by driving you to their web site or by getting their ads in front of you on other web sites. They're really good at what they do, they've got a bunch of best-in-class web applications, but for the foreseeable future, they're competing with Yahoo! and other portal/search providers. They may be competing with Microsoft's MSN and Hotmail divisions, but not on the desktop.

Use Emacs or XEmacs in outline mode. If you want fancier output, use consistent markup (either homebrew or something like markdown) and write a script to convert it to your preferred fancy format (e.g. LaTeX or HTML).

If you're writing down math lectures, learn LaTeX and use it to jot down equations.

Easy!

(Well, to say, anyway--I've never tried it. But you can't go wrong with a text file and a scripting language.)

Some time ago,for a similar job, I did pretty much as you suggest.

Then I'd use the SaveAsHTML from word and hack the html with a perl script. In those days the HTML was really bad and took a lot of fixing. These days it's not as bad.

Still, I've found it easier to save as text, and now use a script that makes some standard insertions, calls Markdown from DaringFireball) to create basic html and includes a css file reference .

Then I have another perl script that lets me put Perl Regular expressions (generally substitutions) in another file and applies those changes for me. -- That way I don' t have to edit the perl script, just the file of regexes

I generally have to iterate a few times, but because the files I'm working on are reports from a fixed group of people, the changes are relatively small, and I can often reuse many of the files from the previous round of these files.

I can often get a set of reports (< 10) up in a couple of hours -- in nasty cases it may be easier to edit by hand.

Good points, but none of them countered my argument. Most things are possible given the right browser plugins or built-in browser support (as XMLHTTPRequest and Javascript themselves are examples of) - I never debated that. I just think that it's insanely stupid to build certain kinds of apps as web applications because their implementation could be better off being built as a desktop application.

There's another side of this, too. If you have Photoshop or The GIMP or Paint Shop Pro installed, you can, with very few exceptions, snag an image from anywhere, get it into your program, edit it in a familiar environment (including usage of your own filters, shortcuts and what have you), and get it out of there. That's the whole point of desktop applications.

Web applications work just fine with text and to a lesser degree with file attachments, but making it work gracefully with other kinds of media, including rich text (yes, I know about contentEditable HTML and so on), video, sound and pictures (vector- and pixel-based) *built in* would require a major reworking of the way web developers work with HTML and Javascript. And what are we left with? A sub-optimal clone of desktop applications.

You say that I could have my drawing app as a web application. I don't *want* my drawing app as a web application. Making everything into a web application is a text book example of having a hammer and everything looking like nails.

Web applications are neat. (I would recommend everyone and anyone to read http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/location_field.) Desktop applications are neat. Moving certain desktop applications to web applications (or vice versa) to gain certain benefits is very neat. I never once contested this. But to *cram* all of one class into the other class for no particular reason, that's just not neat, beneficial or useful.

It seems as though someone agrees with me.

Bullshit.

Here it is.

I don't think you understand what FUD means.

The funny thing about that quote is to look farther down the page and find it was inspired by Dvorak's claim in April of 2003 that Apple was planning to move to Intel hardware.

"John C. Dvorak's modus operandi is to instigate. He is a button-pusher, seldom if ever trying to inform, preferring instead to inflame. And he's pretty good at that. A decade ago, he was the back-page columnist for the now-defunct MacUser magazine; almost every month, the MacUser letters-to-the-editor page contained at least one angry message asking "Why do you publish this guy's column?" The answer, of course, was because it was the sort of column that inspired people to write letters-to-the-editor.

"Dvorak is a pundit, not a reporter. When he makes a prediction, it is usually based on nothing more than his own conjecture, not actual sources. And looking at his track record, his conjecture usually has more to do with what he thinks will be controversial, rather than what might actually happen. (E.g. he's often predicted that Apple was about to go out of business, a prediction which never ceases to get a rise out of the easily incensed.) There's nothing wrong or dishonest about that, but it's something you need to keep in mind with everything he writes. To the best of my knowledge, he's never had a serious scoop regarding Apple -- a significant prediction that turned out to be right -- and he's been on the job for at least two decades."

Next!

Macs are not immune to viruses, we just haven't seen a virus or spyware author take the time to exploit it, yet. Why? Because it isn't profitable RIGHT NOW.

True, Macs aren't immune, but you're missing a few points. It's harder to make a good virus/spyware/trojan for Macs than it is for Windows. Here are a few reasons why that is:

• On a Mac, most (all?) services are turned off by default. Ports are closed.
• Macs ship with an easy-to-use built-in firewall.
• You don't run your Mac as root. Viruses have less access on a Mac than on other OSs.
• Mac users use different E-Mail-apps and different Browsers. Mail.app and Safari have pretty good market share, but they're nowere near where Outlook/IE are. Even if Macs were to reach a significant market share, you could only reach a quite small part of them by using, say, an exploit for Mail.app (of two dozen Mac users I know, only about four use Mail.app, about five use Outlook, one uses PowerMail, one uses Mailsmith, some use Mozilla and some use Eudora).
• Mac users are less tolerant of bad software. If there's something that even smells like malware or spyware, there's a huge outcry in the community, with news sites posting the info and tons of people analyzing traffic from apps and publishing the news.
• There's more open source software in Macs than in Windows. That means less exploits and quicker fixes if there is a problem.

...No.

I'm just curious - exactly _what_ would include, if not for blogs? Certainly, I can understand not including those parked domain search sites: they're gaming the system, completely unhelpful, and filled with bogus content.

But blogs? Sure, much of the content is poorly written, or not applicable to what most people - or, well, rather, 90% of a given population - are interested in. But in searches especially, doesn't it make sense to list results that include those normal people so interested in a particular topic that they blog about them?

For example, blogs can be very helpful when facing computer troubles, provided you're dealing with bloggers who know how to write for Google. This is a good example. I mean, this surely has to be more worthy of inclusion in Google than the lion's share of those web-based bulletin boards that get indexed - you know the ones, with the "Next in thread" and the replies that are typically out of date, or altogether unrelated to your original query.

Everyone's quick to dismiss things lately. Don't dismiss blogs, just because sometimes their content seems insular and not applicable to what you've searched for. That's a problem with the search engines, not the sites they index.

I find that outline Mode in GNU Emacs works great. If you are wedded to the HTML output, consider Markdown: the syntax is easy to learn, you can write raw text and get decently formatted output on the other side. And, if you decide to move to a wiki later, some (like WordPress) can support Markdown syntax, so no reformatting is needed.

Let me guess, the next Apple interface won't even have text

Apple are way ahead of you...

John Gruber wrote a great essay on this called "The Location Field is the New Command Line". As he put it, "Web apps are just so damned easy to use ... It's all about the fact that you just type the URL and there's your email."

Apple loved to pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how much faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium equivalents. Was that so much BS?

So is Intel going to do a cheaper Itanium for Apple or is Apple going to pretend that 64-bit never existed? Yes to both is my guess, which explains why the word "Pentium" was hardly used in the Jobs presentation. Certainly, he never said WHICH Intel chip they'd be using

just mentioning an unnamed 3.6-Ghz development system -- a system which apparently doesn't benchmark very well, either (it's in the links)

If Apple is willing to embrace the Intel architecture because of its performance and low power consumption, then why not go with AMD, which equals Intel's power specs, EXCEEDS Intel's performance specs AND does so at a lower price point across the board? Apple and AMD makes far more sense than Apple and Intel any day.

So why would Steve Jobs --snip-- pre-announce this chip change that undercuts not only his present product line but most of the machines he'll be introducing in the next 12 to 18 months?

The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap, and nothing that IBM couldn't have matched. If Apple was willing to consider a processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD, so I simply have to conclude that technology has nothing at all to do with this decision.

It's not debunking. Gruber has been going back and forth on this - not because he doesn't know which side to stand on but because as it stands now, more than in any other previous rumor round like this, this could really go either way. The "Odds and Ends" are really just odds and ends, interesting anecdotes. He's written more about this - just go read the current front page which has them all: http://daringfireball.net/

I think it's dumb to take an absolutist stand for or against "Intel and Apple". It depends on what chip they'll use, where they'll use it, when they'll use it and if it even happens at all. Then there's - among other things - the bigger company politics (OS X in ordinary PCs, partnering with other PC makers, etc) and what transition the developers and existing apps will have to go through. The questions about the chip is not at all where it ends, it's where it *starts*.

Here's my bet: Intel is going to produce PowerPC chips for Apple. But I'm only betting one dollar.

Now, you can argue about which is best all you like, but the important thing is: Windows does it one way, Mac OS does it the other, and users on both platforms are used to that.

This argument only goes so far. If something is *really bad*, then even if people are used to it, that doesn't mean they want it. To take the most extreme case, Windows 95 tends to crash a lot. When I had to use Windows 95, I got used to it crashing a lot. This does not mean that if I had to use Quicktime for Windows 95 (or any other app) that I would *want* it to crash a lot. Better is often better, even if it's not what you're used to.

As an interaction designer, I've seen this in all sorts of things (user interfaces, not crashing). If you design something that's truly better, then people will use it, and like it. One person famously put it "In order to improve it, we have to change it".

And if you don't want something that's *at all* different from what you're using now, then don't switch to iTunes or whatever. That's the easiest solution.

But whenever you have some idea like click-through which is both better, and foreign to your target audience, you have to choose which you think is more important. Apple, for their entire history, has chosen what they think is right, even if it's completely foreign to everybody. Remember when Macs were new? They had to literally teach everybody what a mouse was and how to use it. I'm very glad they stuck to their convictions.

Shaw said "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Apple is being unreasonable here, but in a good way. When they've been unreasonable in the past (I'm sure everybody here can name a dozen things that Apple did first), many (if not most) of the things they did became ubiquitous.

I, for one, applaud them for trying to move the world in the right direction. I've used Macs, Unix, and Windows about equally during the past 10 years, and click-through has always been one of those things that makes the Macs (prior to OS X) nicer.

(Though I'm not going to try to defend Aqua scrollbars on Windows...)

If you turn on the Finder's "Show all file extensions" preference, this now includes the ".app" extension on application bundles. [...] can't stand seeing these insipid ".app" extensions everywhere, but I don't want to turn off the "Show all file extensions" preferences because I do want to see the rest of them. What I want is the old behavior, "Show all file extensions, except for the insipid '.app' ones that completely booger up the names of every single application".

If "what it looks like" was all that counted, a guy with Photoshop could clone Mac OS X over a weekend.

As John Gruber pointed out, Dashboard is fundamentally different, because it (quite brilliantly, might I add) uses simply HTML+CSS+JS. Anybody who can build a webpage can (with the addition of one manifest file) build a Dashboard widget. Any tool for building or viewing webpages is now a tool for Dashboard development.

This is not a subtle difference. SuperKaramba and Konfabulator are for people who are willing to learn new languages for writing programs. Dashboard turns everybody who can put together a webpage into a Mac developer.

I suspect this is why there are already several sites for Dashboard widgets, the day it's released, and I can't find any independent SuperKaramba or Konfabulator widget sites.

The problem is that it was a crap implementation.

You do realize that it spawned a whole new javascript runtime for each widget, correct?

I just don't know how they could be expected to purchase a "widget" software vendor when the only thing worth buying was the community's goodwill; the architecture itself was crap.

Not only that, but Apple has had legal tangles with Arlo Rose in the past (A straight rip of the Aqua interface for his Kaleidoscope product). Most intelligent companies generally do not hop into bed with legal opponents (counter-examples exist).

Read this for a much more cogent elucidation: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_kon fabulator

I think it's lame that the 2 hit new features are shameless ripoffs of existing shareware apps. Dashboard is to Konfabulator as Spotlight is to Launchbar. They may have some improvement over the original, but who could say with a straight face that they didn't get the idea from these shareware developers?