Any exploitable program you run as another user will still need a local escilation exploit in order to do anything harmful.
That's fine, but he has a point. How much actual real-world good does that do? It does plenty of theoretical good, but so does making the speed limit 10 MPH. By far the better solution is to make sure that the system is safe from remote attacks.
rm -Rf / as nonroot will make you give a sigh of relief.
That sounds like a workaround to make up for a design flaw in the command-line interface to me.
ActiveX and a lot of spyware is contained in windows when running as non-administrator.
I don't know the first thing about spyware or Active X or Windows, so I certainly don't care. But since this isn't Windows we're talking about here, I fail to see how this is applicable.
Honestly, I feel users SHOULD learn a little bit about privileges before being handed the machine
Well, fortunately you're not making the decisions. The "users should have to learn" mentality is what keeps computers complicated and difficult to use.
The best way is to take the best of what windows has to offer, and augment it with the best of what Linux has to offer.
I think you'd have a hard time convincing anybody that things like "rm -Rf/" and "users SHOULD learn" and "limit the login / password for my MySQL account to only allow row INSERTs and SELECTs" and "home directory chmodded to 700" is the best of anything.
We don't accept input from minors because minors are not legally able to enter into binding agreements.
And auto-response is not on the list of features we're planning to add to iChat. iChat is a presence program. It's not supposed to be running if you're not sitting in front of the computer.
In case you're wondering, it was at this point that I decided you were making a clumsy attempt at satire:
Photoshop : proprietary graphics design softwarenot really directly relevant to the WWW although it does, I believe produce proprietary image formats which might be used on the WWW
Neither funny nor true, I'm afraid. You should have tried for at least one or the other, if not both.
The reason why everything looks the same on a Mac is that developers use the system frameworks to draw their on-screen controls. If a program has a control that looks wrong, as Firefox does, that's because the program actually is wrong. If it were using the correct frameworks to draw its controls, the controls would look right.
This is a case where the fact that it looks wrong is a sign that it really is wrong.
Now, as for Safari, it's not perfect. But then again, neither is Firefox. Our internal guys assure us that Safari is just as compatible as Firefox with well-formed Web pages, and degrades gracefully with badly-formed pages. And unlike Firefox, Safari is an actual Mac application, with support for Bonjour and Spotlight and (most importantly) the Keychain built right in.
Firefox isn't a Mac application. It's a third-party application that was ported badly to the Mac.
It's the liberal media again. Let's disregard this opinion because it fails to coincide perfectly with our own. After all, we're right and everybody else is wrong, and that's just all there is to it.
I suggest we launch a Power Line-style fatwa against the author of this article. If we all look really hard, I bet we can find evidence that he's gay or something.
You want a ACL change? Ask me. I'll change it if the reason is good enough.
Nothing personal, but I'm so glad I work for a company whose overriding business plan is to make overbearing, self-important jerks like yourself obsolete.
IT guys are the ultimate middle-men. They stand between people who can do things and the resources (computers, tools and data) they need to do them. Even at their best, they're just glorified elevator operators.
And with that attitude, you, my good chum, are not at your best.
We're talking about highly advanced stuff here. It exists only in labs. So it's way too early to talk about specifics.
I don't want to blow anything out of proportion, but think of Spotlight as being kind of like the first bitmapped graphics. What we're doing with it right now is cool. But what's really important is what it enables us to do in the future.
GPS-based locational metadata is just one example. Automatic speech-to-text transcription for audio recordings is another. (You wouldn't believe what vector processing can do for speech-to-text. I saw a demo where a high-quality, noiseless audio recording of an unaccented speaker was transcribed at 20x real-time on a single 2.0 GHz G5.)
Example: You're doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type "meeting in San Jose" into Spotlight, and it'll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week's meeting in San Jose.
Think about more detailed logging. Right now your computer logs only the most rudimentary events, stuff that is of no interest to human beings. What if it could log everything? Right now you can say "Show me that file I worked on yesterday at two o'clock." But what if you could turn that around and say, "When and for how long did I work on this file?" That's vitally important to anybody who does billable work. Imagine if, through metadata and logging, your computer could automatically produce your time sheet for you?
Another type of automatically generated metadata we're experimenting with is relational metadata. Let's say you've got a picture of your dog on your computer. You e-mail it to your sister Jan. Your computer notes this as metadata on the photo so later you can ask your computer to show you what pictures you've sent to Jan.
Address Book is one area where relational metadata is pretty important. In Address Book, you put Jan and your brother Harry into a group called "Family." Both Jan and Harry, in their contact records, get metadata describing them as being members of the "Family" group. So later you can ask your computer to show you what pictures you've e-mailed to members of your family. Or received from members of your family. Or what pictures you've e-mailed to SOME members of your family but not ALL.
Let's say you take that picture of your dog and drop it in a Pages document, then export the document as a PDF and mail it to your sister Jan. The computer records, as metadata, the fact that that picture of your dog is related to Jan. It knows that put associated the picture with that Pages document, that the Pages document was associated with the PDF file, and that the PDF file was associated with an e-mail to Jan.
Now combine it with a gestural interface. Take two files, any two files. Say it's a PDF representing an invoice and a Photoshop file representing a poster you designed. You drag the invoice over the Photoshop file and a marking menu appears, giving you the option of establishing a relationship between the two files. If you want you can annotate the relationship. If you don't, you don't have to. The computer will simply note that a relationship exists.
Now extend that idea. Instead of it being two files, it can be two ANYTHING. Drag a contact from Address Book to a Pages document; up pops a marking menu asking you if you want to establish a relationship. Or an song from iTunes to a picture of your girlfriend. Or your daughter's birth certificate to her birthday in iCal.
The possibilities that Spotlight opens up are pretty inspiring. It's not just a desktop search tool. Yes, it makes that possible, but bleah. That's 20th-century thinking. That's you working in the way the computer wants. What's more important about Spotlight is the fact that it's an enabling technology that lets the computer work in the way you want.
There's some pretty exciting stuff coming in the next few years.
Absolutely it does. Pictures taken with a given camera on the same day are naturally grouped together, making it trivially easy to batch-annotate them in iPhoto. Hell, iPhoto can even discriminate between pictures taken indoors and those taken outdoors by the white balance preset.
Automatic metadata certainly does make annotation easier. Very much so.
Why do all you naysayers sound like you haven't got the foggiest idea how this stuff actually works?
Okay, so you get to the point where there's one group for every file on the system. Every file is owned by its own group, and you determine who has access to that file by who belongs to that group.
Which is just strikingly similar to ACLs.
Also, if you can't trust your developers to not make writes to the files, then who can you trust?
Clearly you don't understand the idea here. It's not about trust. It's about safeguards against accidental changes. You may prefer to work without a net. We don't.
Put the file in a PDF or a password protected PDF or even a web page.
Let me say it again because it clearly didn't sink in the first time: Proposing silly workarounds while denying that the shortcoming of the system even exists is, in a word, dumb.
Not true. Every photo taken with a digital camera has EXIF metadata, and every photo distributed by a wire service has IPTC metadata.
If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless
The old "if it's not perfect, it's useless" lie. You should be ashamed of yourself.
A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions.
Actually Spotlight scales spectacularly well across the enterprise because clients have read access to server metadata databases. However, this is just an incidental benefit. Spotlight isn't designed to do what you're criticizing it for not doing.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that you obviously have a fundamental lack of understanding about the problem you're trying to discuss. This is nothing to be ashamed of. But you should first try to wrap your head around the problem before telling everybody what's wrong with the solutions.
Besides, your objections are trumped by the most obvious rebuttal of all: Spotlight works. Spectacularly.
Add the manager to only to group A as well as keeping his primary, group C.
That would give him access to all of group A's files, not just the one he needs. That solution would not work.
If your security model is so complex you have to do something like what you discribe here, then you don't need ACL's, you need to rethink your model.
Sorry, but what I described is the simplest possible case. I deal with it every day. An editor needs to have write access to the documentation file to which he's assigned, but can't have write access to all the documentation files. Additionally, the developers need read access to the documentation but can't have write access.
Saying "rethink your whole company's way of doing business to work around a flaw in the technology" is a dumb answer, I think.
In this case, I would make a D and put the file this manager in C needs to write to and make A and C members of D or add anyone who needs to write to this file to D.
A file can only belong to one group. It can either belong to A or to D, not both. So that solution would not work either.
There are MANY ways of think yourself out of crap like this.
In fact, there are zero ways. Because "redesign your organizational structure to accommodate obsolete technology" is not a way.
Explain, please, how to make a file readable by the members of groups A and B, writable by only group A, and also writable by the manager who is a member of group C (but not the other members of group C) by using the UNIX permissions model.
Okay, I'm on a disinformation-squashing crusade today.
Google indexes content. This is important. Hugely, massively important. But we've had content indexing for a long time now. It only takes us so far.
What's more important than content indexing is metadata indexing.
Metadata literally means "data about data." It's information about your files that isn't actually stored in your files. For example, let's say you take a photograph and store it in your Pictures folder. Spotlight can automatically extract some metadata from the picture all by itself. It can tell that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it's in Nikon RAW format and that you took it on December 24, 2003. The computer knows this stuff already.
Other metadata was inserted automatically when the picture taken. For example, the camera inserted metadata identifying it as being taken with a Nikon D1 using a 1/250 exposure and a 2.8 f-stop.
Spotlight indexes all that stuff.
But there's a third type of metadata. In addition to intrinsic metadata and automatically inserted metadata, there's descriptive metadata. Your computer knows that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it was taken with a Nikon D1, but it can't know that it's a picture of your niece Katie. That's where iPhoto comes in. You use iPhoto to write a descriptive caption -- "Lawrence's daughter Katie on Christmas Eve" -- and that caption gets stored in the photo as metadata. Spotlight indexes it.
So if you come along later and search for "Christmas pictures," Spotlight will find that photo. Because it knows it's a picture, and because you described it as being related to Christmas.
Now, that's today. (Well, in two weeks.) What's next? We're going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata. Here's one we've been talking about a lot: Your laptop has a GPS receiver in it. Tiny thing, about the size of a pencil eraser. At all times, your laptop knows where it is on the face of the Earth, accurate to about thirty feet.
Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That's on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.
Say you go on a business trip to Seattle. A year later, you can search your laptop for that e-mail you sent to your coworker Tom while you were in Seattle.
More: Using a very simple user interface, you can define locations. Sitting at your desk, you tell your laptop to refer to that location as "work." Any file created within a 100-yard radius of that location will be returned in a search for "work." On your couch you define a location called "home." Sitting at the coffee shop you define a location called "Starbucks." And so on.
Now your computer knows not only when you modified that file, it knows where you were when you did it. That's all metadata you can use for searching.
This is pretty advanced stuff. It's going to be a while before we start shipping GPS-enabled Powerbooks. But it's on the drawing board.
Spotlight opens up a whole new way of storing information. It's not a new idea; we've been trying to make it work for ten years now. But the actual working implementation of it is simply revolutionary. It's a quantum leap beyond anything that anybody has to offer right now.
No, it really isn't. I'm unsurprised by your ignorance about this. I guess we've just done a lousy job of explaining it.
Spotlight is a full-fledged system service, not just a user interface. Application developers can very easily add Spotlight to their own applications. For example, look at Mail. The additions to Mail to support Spotlight searching were trivial. In fact, the total code size of an early Spotlight build of Mail was significantly smaller, because we off-loaded all of the indexing and searching to the Spotlight service, removing it from Mail.
Comparing Mail to a third-party bolt-on search product is, well, dumb.
Safari RSS = Why the name change?
There has been no name change. The name of the browser is Safari. The version is 2.0. "Safari RSS" is just a marketing name for Safari's RSS support.
Dashboard = Avedesk/Samaurise
Um. No. Dashboard widgets are little Web Views. They're essentially Web applications running in little floating windows. I'd suggest you check it out before just arbitrarily declaring it to be the same as something else.
"AIM Profiles in iChat AV" isn't exactly a huge innovation
No, it's not. But we got 17,438 requests for that feature from users. It doesn't have to be big to be important to our customers.
it's quite easy to obtain as many free fonts as you please
We're not including free fonts. We're including professionally designed and licensed fonts --fully Unicode-savvy, of course -- that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought after the fact.
"Improved RAID Support" is what we call a "fix" not a new feature
You don't understand the feature. This doesn't really surprise me at this point, because it's clear that your goal here is just to post criticisms without a whole lot of concern about truth.
We already had striping support, which is sometimes erroneous called "RAID 0." We already had mirroring support. Now we've added concatenation. See? New feature.
I have absolutely no problem with people who want to be critical. Critical is where we live. But is it really too much to ask that the people who levy criticisms have the tiniest idea what they're talking about first? It would save so much time.
Actually, TSV and CSV import into Address Book was one of the most requested features on the list. Previously we only imported vCard files, which while great are not that compatible with third-party databases and such.
Re:Oh it's all going to hell... (Score:2)
by As Seen On TV (857673) on Sunday April 17, @01:15AM (#12259957)
"Of about 100%?" I'm way too sleepy. Obviously I meant of about 50%.
Why did you post your snide comment instead of reading what I wrote myself an hour and thirty-five minutes before, which was sitting right in front of you?
We're giving away the source to launchd as part of Darwin 8. Based on past experience, Linux will probably try to reinvent the wheel instead of just taking what we're giving, but it's worth a try.
Slashdot Mirror
Computers are complicated and difficult to use properly
They used to say the same thing about elevators. When's the last time you met an elevator operator?
Any exploitable program you run as another user will still need a local escilation exploit in order to do anything harmful.
/" and "users SHOULD learn" and "limit the login / password for my MySQL account to only allow row INSERTs and SELECTs" and "home directory chmodded to 700" is the best of anything.
That's fine, but he has a point. How much actual real-world good does that do? It does plenty of theoretical good, but so does making the speed limit 10 MPH. By far the better solution is to make sure that the system is safe from remote attacks.
rm -Rf / as nonroot will make you give a sigh of relief.
That sounds like a workaround to make up for a design flaw in the command-line interface to me.
ActiveX and a lot of spyware is contained in windows when running as non-administrator.
I don't know the first thing about spyware or Active X or Windows, so I certainly don't care. But since this isn't Windows we're talking about here, I fail to see how this is applicable.
Honestly, I feel users SHOULD learn a little bit about privileges before being handed the machine
Well, fortunately you're not making the decisions. The "users should have to learn" mentality is what keeps computers complicated and difficult to use.
The best way is to take the best of what windows has to offer, and augment it with the best of what Linux has to offer.
I think you'd have a hard time convincing anybody that things like "rm -Rf
We don't accept input from minors because minors are not legally able to enter into binding agreements.
And auto-response is not on the list of features we're planning to add to iChat. iChat is a presence program. It's not supposed to be running if you're not sitting in front of the computer.
It's "copyrighted," not "copywritten." We're talking about rights, not writings.
You'll be pleased to learn, then, that Safari 2 has a PDF reader built right in. No muss, no fuss.
In case you're wondering, it was at this point that I decided you were making a clumsy attempt at satire:
Photoshop : proprietary graphics design softwarenot really directly relevant to the WWW although it does, I believe produce proprietary image formats which might be used on the WWW
Neither funny nor true, I'm afraid. You should have tried for at least one or the other, if not both.
Boy, do you have that backwards.
The reason why everything looks the same on a Mac is that developers use the system frameworks to draw their on-screen controls. If a program has a control that looks wrong, as Firefox does, that's because the program actually is wrong. If it were using the correct frameworks to draw its controls, the controls would look right.
This is a case where the fact that it looks wrong is a sign that it really is wrong.
Now, as for Safari, it's not perfect. But then again, neither is Firefox. Our internal guys assure us that Safari is just as compatible as Firefox with well-formed Web pages, and degrades gracefully with badly-formed pages. And unlike Firefox, Safari is an actual Mac application, with support for Bonjour and Spotlight and (most importantly) the Keychain built right in.
Firefox isn't a Mac application. It's a third-party application that was ported badly to the Mac.
It's the liberal media again. Let's disregard this opinion because it fails to coincide perfectly with our own. After all, we're right and everybody else is wrong, and that's just all there is to it.
I suggest we launch a Power Line-style fatwa against the author of this article. If we all look really hard, I bet we can find evidence that he's gay or something.
You want a ACL change? Ask me. I'll change it if the reason is good enough.
Nothing personal, but I'm so glad I work for a company whose overriding business plan is to make overbearing, self-important jerks like yourself obsolete.
IT guys are the ultimate middle-men. They stand between people who can do things and the resources (computers, tools and data) they need to do them. Even at their best, they're just glorified elevator operators.
And with that attitude, you, my good chum, are not at your best.
We're talking about highly advanced stuff here. It exists only in labs. So it's way too early to talk about specifics.
I don't want to blow anything out of proportion, but think of Spotlight as being kind of like the first bitmapped graphics. What we're doing with it right now is cool. But what's really important is what it enables us to do in the future.
GPS-based locational metadata is just one example. Automatic speech-to-text transcription for audio recordings is another. (You wouldn't believe what vector processing can do for speech-to-text. I saw a demo where a high-quality, noiseless audio recording of an unaccented speaker was transcribed at 20x real-time on a single 2.0 GHz G5.)
Example: You're doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type "meeting in San Jose" into Spotlight, and it'll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week's meeting in San Jose.
Think about more detailed logging. Right now your computer logs only the most rudimentary events, stuff that is of no interest to human beings. What if it could log everything? Right now you can say "Show me that file I worked on yesterday at two o'clock." But what if you could turn that around and say, "When and for how long did I work on this file?" That's vitally important to anybody who does billable work. Imagine if, through metadata and logging, your computer could automatically produce your time sheet for you?
Another type of automatically generated metadata we're experimenting with is relational metadata. Let's say you've got a picture of your dog on your computer. You e-mail it to your sister Jan. Your computer notes this as metadata on the photo so later you can ask your computer to show you what pictures you've sent to Jan.
Address Book is one area where relational metadata is pretty important. In Address Book, you put Jan and your brother Harry into a group called "Family." Both Jan and Harry, in their contact records, get metadata describing them as being members of the "Family" group. So later you can ask your computer to show you what pictures you've e-mailed to members of your family. Or received from members of your family. Or what pictures you've e-mailed to SOME members of your family but not ALL.
Let's say you take that picture of your dog and drop it in a Pages document, then export the document as a PDF and mail it to your sister Jan. The computer records, as metadata, the fact that that picture of your dog is related to Jan. It knows that put associated the picture with that Pages document, that the Pages document was associated with the PDF file, and that the PDF file was associated with an e-mail to Jan.
Now combine it with a gestural interface. Take two files, any two files. Say it's a PDF representing an invoice and a Photoshop file representing a poster you designed. You drag the invoice over the Photoshop file and a marking menu appears, giving you the option of establishing a relationship between the two files. If you want you can annotate the relationship. If you don't, you don't have to. The computer will simply note that a relationship exists.
Now extend that idea. Instead of it being two files, it can be two ANYTHING. Drag a contact from Address Book to a Pages document; up pops a marking menu asking you if you want to establish a relationship. Or an song from iTunes to a picture of your girlfriend. Or your daughter's birth certificate to her birthday in iCal.
The possibilities that Spotlight opens up are pretty inspiring. It's not just a desktop search tool. Yes, it makes that possible, but bleah. That's 20th-century thinking. That's you working in the way the computer wants. What's more important about Spotlight is the fact that it's an enabling technology that lets the computer work in the way you want.
There's some pretty exciting stuff coming in the next few years.
You do realize that there's no need to submit the feature request because the feature has already been added, right?
For actual feature requests, use https://bugreport.apple.com/
Insuring against accidental changes is not what ACL's are for! That's what backups are for.
Every once in a while, I get to the point where I think I've heard it all. Then something like this comes along.
Thank you for making my day a little more surreal.
What is your point, exactly?
You sound like you've never seen iPhoto before.
Absolutely it does. Pictures taken with a given camera on the same day are naturally grouped together, making it trivially easy to batch-annotate them in iPhoto. Hell, iPhoto can even discriminate between pictures taken indoors and those taken outdoors by the white balance preset.
Automatic metadata certainly does make annotation easier. Very much so.
Why do all you naysayers sound like you haven't got the foggiest idea how this stuff actually works?
Okay, so you get to the point where there's one group for every file on the system. Every file is owned by its own group, and you determine who has access to that file by who belongs to that group.
Which is just strikingly similar to ACLs.
Also, if you can't trust your developers to not make writes to the files, then who can you trust?
Clearly you don't understand the idea here. It's not about trust. It's about safeguards against accidental changes. You may prefer to work without a net. We don't.
Put the file in a PDF or a password protected PDF or even a web page.
Let me say it again because it clearly didn't sink in the first time: Proposing silly workarounds while denying that the shortcoming of the system even exists is, in a word, dumb.
Currently Metadata is common in Music only.
Not true. Every photo taken with a digital camera has EXIF metadata, and every photo distributed by a wire service has IPTC metadata.
If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless
The old "if it's not perfect, it's useless" lie. You should be ashamed of yourself.
A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions.
Actually Spotlight scales spectacularly well across the enterprise because clients have read access to server metadata databases. However, this is just an incidental benefit. Spotlight isn't designed to do what you're criticizing it for not doing.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that you obviously have a fundamental lack of understanding about the problem you're trying to discuss. This is nothing to be ashamed of. But you should first try to wrap your head around the problem before telling everybody what's wrong with the solutions.
Besides, your objections are trumped by the most obvious rebuttal of all: Spotlight works. Spectacularly.
Add the manager to only to group A as well as keeping his primary, group C.
That would give him access to all of group A's files, not just the one he needs. That solution would not work.
If your security model is so complex you have to do something like what you discribe here, then you don't need ACL's, you need to rethink your model.
Sorry, but what I described is the simplest possible case. I deal with it every day. An editor needs to have write access to the documentation file to which he's assigned, but can't have write access to all the documentation files. Additionally, the developers need read access to the documentation but can't have write access.
Saying "rethink your whole company's way of doing business to work around a flaw in the technology" is a dumb answer, I think.
In this case, I would make a D and put the file this manager in C needs to write to and make A and C members of D or add anyone who needs to write to this file to D.
A file can only belong to one group. It can either belong to A or to D, not both. So that solution would not work either.
There are MANY ways of think yourself out of crap like this.
In fact, there are zero ways. Because "redesign your organizational structure to accommodate obsolete technology" is not a way.
Explain, please, how to make a file readable by the members of groups A and B, writable by only group A, and also writable by the manager who is a member of group C (but not the other members of group C) by using the UNIX permissions model.
Okay, I'm on a disinformation-squashing crusade today.
Google indexes content. This is important. Hugely, massively important. But we've had content indexing for a long time now. It only takes us so far.
What's more important than content indexing is metadata indexing.
Metadata literally means "data about data." It's information about your files that isn't actually stored in your files. For example, let's say you take a photograph and store it in your Pictures folder. Spotlight can automatically extract some metadata from the picture all by itself. It can tell that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it's in Nikon RAW format and that you took it on December 24, 2003. The computer knows this stuff already.
Other metadata was inserted automatically when the picture taken. For example, the camera inserted metadata identifying it as being taken with a Nikon D1 using a 1/250 exposure and a 2.8 f-stop.
Spotlight indexes all that stuff.
But there's a third type of metadata. In addition to intrinsic metadata and automatically inserted metadata, there's descriptive metadata. Your computer knows that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it was taken with a Nikon D1, but it can't know that it's a picture of your niece Katie. That's where iPhoto comes in. You use iPhoto to write a descriptive caption -- "Lawrence's daughter Katie on Christmas Eve" -- and that caption gets stored in the photo as metadata. Spotlight indexes it.
So if you come along later and search for "Christmas pictures," Spotlight will find that photo. Because it knows it's a picture, and because you described it as being related to Christmas.
Now, that's today. (Well, in two weeks.) What's next? We're going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata. Here's one we've been talking about a lot: Your laptop has a GPS receiver in it. Tiny thing, about the size of a pencil eraser. At all times, your laptop knows where it is on the face of the Earth, accurate to about thirty feet.
Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That's on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.
Say you go on a business trip to Seattle. A year later, you can search your laptop for that e-mail you sent to your coworker Tom while you were in Seattle.
More: Using a very simple user interface, you can define locations. Sitting at your desk, you tell your laptop to refer to that location as "work." Any file created within a 100-yard radius of that location will be returned in a search for "work." On your couch you define a location called "home." Sitting at the coffee shop you define a location called "Starbucks." And so on.
Now your computer knows not only when you modified that file, it knows where you were when you did it. That's all metadata you can use for searching.
This is pretty advanced stuff. It's going to be a while before we start shipping GPS-enabled Powerbooks. But it's on the drawing board.
Spotlight opens up a whole new way of storing information. It's not a new idea; we've been trying to make it work for ten years now. But the actual working implementation of it is simply revolutionary. It's a quantum leap beyond anything that anybody has to offer right now.
Spotlight = Copernic/Google Toolbar/MSN Toolbar
No, it really isn't. I'm unsurprised by your ignorance about this. I guess we've just done a lousy job of explaining it.
Spotlight is a full-fledged system service, not just a user interface. Application developers can very easily add Spotlight to their own applications. For example, look at Mail. The additions to Mail to support Spotlight searching were trivial. In fact, the total code size of an early Spotlight build of Mail was significantly smaller, because we off-loaded all of the indexing and searching to the Spotlight service, removing it from Mail.
Comparing Mail to a third-party bolt-on search product is, well, dumb.
Safari RSS = Why the name change?
There has been no name change. The name of the browser is Safari. The version is 2.0. "Safari RSS" is just a marketing name for Safari's RSS support.
Dashboard = Avedesk/Samaurise
Um. No. Dashboard widgets are little Web Views. They're essentially Web applications running in little floating windows. I'd suggest you check it out before just arbitrarily declaring it to be the same as something else.
"AIM Profiles in iChat AV" isn't exactly a huge innovation
No, it's not. But we got 17,438 requests for that feature from users. It doesn't have to be big to be important to our customers.
it's quite easy to obtain as many free fonts as you please
We're not including free fonts. We're including professionally designed and licensed fonts --fully Unicode-savvy, of course -- that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought after the fact.
"Improved RAID Support" is what we call a "fix" not a new feature
You don't understand the feature. This doesn't really surprise me at this point, because it's clear that your goal here is just to post criticisms without a whole lot of concern about truth.
We already had striping support, which is sometimes erroneous called "RAID 0." We already had mirroring support. Now we've added concatenation. See? New feature.
I have absolutely no problem with people who want to be critical. Critical is where we live. But is it really too much to ask that the people who levy criticisms have the tiniest idea what they're talking about first? It would save so much time.
Actually, TSV and CSV import into Address Book was one of the most requested features on the list. Previously we only imported vCard files, which while great are not that compatible with third-party databases and such.
We're giving away the source to launchd as part of Darwin 8. Based on past experience, Linux will probably try to reinvent the wheel instead of just taking what we're giving, but it's worth a try.
"Of about 100%?" I'm way too sleepy. Obviously I meant of about 50%.