A remarkable article in BusinessWeek about Mac developers and Apple. A constant theme in the early days of this weblog and my column. And, it's even worse than it appears. Sometimes Apple says it has matched a developer and taken over its market, when it's not even true. Everyone loses, the platform, the developer, and the platform vendor. [Scripting News]

This article keeps going around in the Blogsphere. Unfortunately, the article does not support the conclusions of the bloggers. It makes them look as if they didn't read past the title...

11:21:43 AM  What do you think? ( Thoughts) Who linked? []   

This picture arrived in my mailbox courtesy of the Klez virus... Ah! the dangers and pleasures of Windows.

11:12:31 AM  What do you think? ( Thoughts) Who linked? []   

Passwords: The weakest link. Fortune 100 corporations, small firms and even Internet service providers with strong security have an Achilles heel: users who pick easily guessable passwords. [CNET News.com]

I always laugh when administrators try to block clear text passwords, because of fear that somebody will sniff them. Most passwords are easy, why bother sniffing them? In a large company 30% of password are susceptible to a dictionary attack another 20% or so can be deduced from public personal information (birth dates, dog names, etc). Passwords are the weakest link in the security chain and it is impossible to stop. If you assign passwords, then people will either write them out (the infamous stickies in the monitor) or forget them, so somebody else will have to know their password...

Of course my password is my dog's name... I change the name of ^a8h67%yu6a$ every three months.

8:26:21 AM  What do you think? ( Thoughts) Who linked? []   

Business Week.  Apple snubs third party developers.

>>>I raise the question now because some small developers are crying foul. They're accusing Apple of freely copying third-party programmers' innovations into its own software. "Apple should work with independent developers, rather than taking everything in the house," Rob McNair-Huff, publisher of the popular Mac Net Journal Web site, wrote recently.<<<  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

[From the article]

Still, I don't think developers' complaints about Apple have much bite. Apple may dominate its turf, but it's not a particularly big one in the vast playground of the PC market.

Here's the real test of harm: Has Apple's borrowing stymied innovation? I see no sign of it. In fact, despite Apple's growing number of knockoffs, Mac software development appears to be entering a second golden age. New software for OS X has been exploding recently, especially during the past couple of months. Apple says more than 3,000 OS X programs are now available, a figure that doesn't include shareware and freeware. Best of all, OS X has inspired new developers, especially from the Unix community, to publish for the Mac.

The author, and everyone with some sense, has to conclude that this is an overblown subject. What exactly are you supposed to do if you see great features in some piece of software? Stay away from redoing those features? Code has copyright protection, ideas do not... So, unless you have a patent (in which case you can sue), you should just shut up and get to work making your software better.

8:18:16 AM  What do you think? ( Thoughts) Who linked? []