By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: January 22, 2008
Tuesday, 22 January 2008
- ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’ Lead Oscar Nominations ★
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I’ve only seen three films in the theater this year, and all three were nominated for Best Picture: Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. Clayton was good, but the other two are truly great pictures. Sometimes the Academy gets it right.
- Apple Q1 2008: Best Quarter Ever ★
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Best quarter in Apple history, including a $1 billion in profit. And so, of course, Wall Street’s reaction to this best-ever quarter is for Apple’s share price to tank, dropping over 10 percent in after-hours trading.
Late Update: I moved my commentary to a separate article here.
- Apple Adds Pink to the iPod Nano Lineup ★
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Looks pretty good.
- VectorDesigner ★
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$70 vector illustration app, and Best of Show award-winner from last week’s Expo. Sort of a modern-day MacDraw.
- Macworld Expo Best of Show Award Winners ★
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Great job by the editors at Macworld Expo picking the best products from this year’s show. The show was huge this year — far bigger than in at least a decade, it seemed — making it harder than ever to choose a handful of winners.
- Office 2008 Installer Assigns Most Files to User ID 502 ★
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Joel Bruner on a bizarre bug in Office 2008’s installer:
First things first: They’ve moved to Apple’s Package Maker (.pkg) installer files, good news for the enterprise rollouts? Well, unfortunately they’ve created all the packages to install most all of the files with the owner set to 502.
This will grant a non-admin user — if that user is the second one created on the machine — ownership of some top-level folders in /Library/ and /Applications/.
- Genius ★
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Shorter Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: If Microsoft greatly improves every single aspect of Windows — including performance, the UI, the driver model — and also adds some cool new features, then Windows 7 will be the best version of Windows ever.
- Talking About AT&T’s Internet Filtering on AT&T’s ‘The Hugh Thompson Show’ ★
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Boing Boing Gadget’s Joel Johnson:
Yesterday, I was invited to talk about gadgets on The Hugh Thompson Show, a television-style talk show sponsored exclusively by AT&T for distribution on the online AT&T Tech Channel. I eventually did talk about gadgets, but in light of AT&T’s shocking and baffling announcement of their plans to filter the internet, I thought that a much more interesting and important topic.
So that’s what I talked about.
Outstanding.
So let’s play “Who’s the Better Independent Tech Journalist?” In one corner, Johnson, who confronted AT&T on their own turf to draw attention to their odious net-snooping plans. In the other corner, Brian Lam and Gizmodo, whose “homage to the notion of independence and independent reporting” was to sabotage promotional presentations and humiliate innocent spokespeople by turning off their TV sets at CES.
- Heavier than Air ★
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Charles Miller on the MacBook Air:
The tech press, it seems, has a bad record on judging products on criteria you can’t fit on a feature matrix.
Which is a problem, because feature matrices suck. A feature matrix says: “Here is what everyone else is doing. To be competitive you must do the same.” Where’s the differentiation? Where’s the innovation in doing exactly what everyone else does, ticking the boxes, shaving off one or two points in each row so you get the green tick?
I think his comparison to the iPod Mini is spot-on.
- Depends What the Meaning of the Word ‘Expected’ Is ★
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MacNN, on this afternoon’s upcoming quarterly finance conference call from Apple (emphasis added):
Apple is expected to post better-than-expected earnings based on strong Mac sales, newly-introduced iPods, and favorable commodity pricing during the quarter.