By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: August 11, 2006
Friday, 11 August 2006
- Jackass of the Week: Leander Kahney ★
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Leander “Cult of Mac” Kahney, complaining that he was bored by the WWDC keynote address:
Granted, the system as a whole looks slick, and Jobs said he was keeping some new features “top secret” to stop Microsoft from copying them. But the sneak peek just confirmed what we already know: OS X is so mature and polished, major system upgrades are more about tweaks than big new functions. (Yeah, I know there’s a lot of technical wizardry under the hood, but that’s for the geeks).
[…]
This week’s developer’s conference is a big show for Mac nerds. More than 4,000 of them paid a pretty penny to be here this week, and Jobs’ talk is the highlight of the show. For many of them, this is the only chance they get to see their hero in the flesh.
Kahney seems to have completely missed that this was Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, not the World Wide Jackass Non-Technical I-Treat-the-Mac-as-a-Cult-Rather-Than-a-Computing-Platform Hack Conference.
WWDC attendees didn’t spend “a pretty penny” to see the fucking keynote; they spent their money so they could get the technical low-down on what’s new in 10.5, and so they could get face time with Apple engineers. Apple announced a lot of cool new stuff: garbage collection for Objective-C, Xcode 3.0, Core Animation, 64-bit support for the entire OS, the first new interface for Interface Builder since way back in the Next era — the list of “cool new shit” that was announced is really pretty long.
Complaining that the announcements at WWDC only appealed to “the geeks” is like going to a rock concert and complaining that all they did was play loud music.
- Also Sprach Miyamoto ★
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Genius fusion of Kubrick and Nintendo nerdery. (Via Dan Benjamin via email.)
- Law.com Article on Apple Stock Options Backdating Probe Law.com - Apple Execs, Former GC Seek Counsel in Face of Backdating Probe ★
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I was not previously aware of this particular connotation of the word “irregularities”. This is starting to sound Not Good.
As for Apple, deeper trouble could be signified by its use of the term “irregularities” to describe what initial inquiries into grant practices had found. That term was used again in the announcement earlier this month indicating that options problems were bad enough to require a restatement of past earnings.
Several Silicon Valley defense lawyers — all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they have ties either to Apple or to other backdating cases — said that in accounting parlance, “irregularities” generally indicates a problem that’s not accidental.
- Saying Goodbye to Visual Basic ★
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Eric Schwiebert from the Mac BU on Microsoft’s decision to drop support for Visual Basic in the upcoming release of Office for Mac. This is an extraordinarily comprehensive and technical overview of the reasons behind their decision — before the era of weblogs, we’d never have gotten anything other than a message filtered through Microsoft’s marketing department.
- AFP-Over-SSH in Mac OS X ★
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Chris Pepper:
Apple provides a neat feature for automatically tunneling AFP through ssh, but unfortunately it’s broken in half a dozen ways…