Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs, February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011 — R. I. P.

“Half the Mac OS X boxes in the world (confirmed on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard) can be rooted through AppleScript:

osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"';

Works for normal users and admins, provided the normal user wasn’t switched to via fast user switching. Secure? I think not.” On the other hand, since this exploit seems to require physical access to the machine to be rooted, you might have some other security concerns to deal with at that point, like keeping the intruder from raiding your fridge on his way out.

In the comment section it has been confirmed that

1. It only works if the user is logged into the Mac, but not via fast user switching.
2. Disable Apple Remote Desktop does not work.
3. It works over ssh if the same user also happens to be logged in.

Saying “physical access is required” is simply irresponsible. People might click on strange attachments or weird files downloaded from the net, which might run commands to get root privilege. Or maybe there are other exploits in Mac OS X that can get remote hackers local user privilege, and then use this to gain root.

Actually it is not hard to get physical access either. Sydney Apple Store opens tonight. Watch out for those pimple-faced teens typing vigorously in from the Terminal.app tonight!

MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But you don’t lose inches and pounds overnight. It’s the result of rethinking conventions. Of multiple wireless innovations. And of breakthrough design. With MacBook Air, mobile computng suddenly has a new standard.

Thanks for reminding me that I can’t lose inches and pounds overnight — gotta get back to my exercise plan. However, being “ultraportable” is exactly what Apple is trying to sell MacBook Air at. On the scale it weights 1.36kg, which is almost a whole kilo lighter than its fat brethren MacBook the unportable (2.27kg). At 0.4-1.94cm thin, you will have to buy those notebook bags with 5cm of padding so you won’t accidentally snap it in half when you throw it around.

Its CPU is a tad slower than MacBook at 1.6/1.8GHz. There is no optical drive included, i.e. at cost extra. The hard disk is either a small’ish 1.8″ 80GB or 64GB solid state drive (as an AUD$1,409 upgrade!), battery is not self-serviceable, and RAM is soldered on… It is the price you have to pay when it is designed for the niche market of ultraportable, where rivals like Sony Vaio and Toshiba Portege were used to charge their customers at a premium.

Will I buy one? No way. Starting at AUD$2,499 it is almost a whole big one more expensive than equally equipped MacBook. I know I am getting old but 1 extra kilogram is not a biggie to me. Apple knows how to design a beautiful package, preaching a message not why people will need one, but why you would want one. Being a cold hearted pragmatic, unfortunately Stevie’s distortion field has pretty weak effect on me. That’s probably why I still have not had an iPod.

But let me tell you what other ultraportable notebook has taken my fancy — Asus Eee PC. It is small. It is light. It sold like a hotcake — because it is cheap. You can buy a brand new one from OfficeWorks for $488, or less if you shop hard on eBay. It weights only 0.92kg so you probably won’t even feel it when you throw one into your bag.

Obviously there are some issues, and the Asus’ $488 Eee PC is probably not a good comparison with Apple’s $2,499 MacBook Air.

• 900MHz Celeron underclocked to 667MHz. Don’t expect a speed demon here.
• 4GB SSD is probably not even enough for your photo collection.
• 7″ LCD at an awkward resolution of 800×480 is not good even watching DVDs.
• 21-35mm thickness. Yes it is thick.

• It runs Linux.
• You need to be a midget to type on it.

But at less than $500, it has everything a person need to get work done, i.e. press Ctrl-Alt-T to bring up an Xterm — what else do you need to get work done? :) It has Wifi to access Internet, has a ethernet adapter (which MacBook Air lacks), has a card reader, runs OpenOffice.org, runs Firefox, etc. With the current climate, maybe an Eee PC would be a more prudent decision for ultraportable?

Which ultraportable would you get? Air or Eee?

Now the iPod family consists of:

iPod Touch

8GB/16GB solid state with iPhone-like touch-screen interface, 3.5″ widescreen display, Safari web browser and Wi-Fi. $419/$549.

iPod Classic

80GB/160GB 1.8″ hard disk with an all metal design, 2.5″ widescreen LCD, weight at 140g/162g, $349/$479.

iPod Nano

4GB/8GB solid state, 2″ widescreen LCD at 320×240, weight at 49.2g, $199/$279.

iPod Shuffle

1GB solid state, weight at 15.6g, $99.

iPod Touch looks good, and us Aussies can finally experience iPhone’s interface through the official channel. Not cheap at $419 though, and Wi-Fi hotspot is not that easy to find even in Sydney CBD. It would be much better to also include Bluetooth and then you would be able to hook it up with your Three or NextGen phone to access the Internet.

iPod Classic seems to be a pretty good upgrade. Capacity is now more than doubled at the same price. Nano looks “fat” and not “nano” anymore, although being able to watch H264-encoded movie at 320×240 2″ LCD will be a big selling point.

Again, I planned to buy none of these. Mr. Job — try harder next time and give me something more desirable :)

Other standard features including:

• Double-layer SuperDrive
• ATI Radeon HD 2400/2600 graphics
• iSight camera built in
• Apple Remote
• Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger + iLife 08

Available for shipping in 3-5 business days. Gee that is fast — I am still around 2 weeks away from having Vivian’s new Dell notebook delivered.

Now, my only problem is with the new thin aluminum anodised Apple keyboard. The key arrangement looks very much like the current Macbook, which is not exactly the best thing to type on. I wonder whether they have sacrified usability with style.

Keyboard is arguably one of the most important but most overlooked component, especially if you type a lot. Maybe I should go down to the Apple Centre to give it a test run.

• Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.
• Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

Well, as I am reading large amount of text every single day on computers, Microsoft’s Clear Type seems to be easier on my eyes.

A few observations so far:

• It is quick and slim. It uses around 18MB after bootstrapping to a blank page, which is a tiny bit smaller than Opera 9. I won’t mention how much Firefox uses.

• Everything looks like it is on a Mac. Every widgets, default fonts and UI elements have Mac’s look and feel. Good thing is that it is how Safari developers would like it to look like. Bad thing is it is inconsistent with the rest of desktop.

• It is not registered as a regular window, so my virtual desktop manager of choice does not work with it. D’oh.

• I managed to hang it, i.e. not responding to any input and refuses to redraw itself, after 20 minutes playing with it. I guess they can excuse themselves with that “Beta” tag. Firefox is only a tad better in this department as well.

• Functionality is pretty limited in comparison to Firefox and Opera. Worse, Safari for Windows does not yet have many plugins like Safari for Mac. Good thing is it is less likely to catch bad-ware this way, but I doubt many developers will want to use Safari as the main development platform though.

• Key binding is not always inline with Firefox or Internet Explorer. That is annoy.

I am still keeping it on my system so I don’t need to fire up my old Mac to check whether some HTML pages I made is working properly for the Safari users. Webkit is certainly an impressive rendering engine, and I am hoping a better packaged Drosera and Web Inspector will be available on Windows soon — that will definitely makes Safari a more welcomed browser amongst the web developer community.