Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

MacNN notes Apple’s CEO in Decade of Mac OS upgrades likely (it’s easier to link to MacNN than the original NYT article), commenting that Mac OS X Leopard will form the basis for the next ten years of operating systems upgrade. I remember Mac OS X being announced — not sure if this was at a WWDC or Macworld keynote — as “the next twenty years” of Apple operating systems. We’re basically ten years out from the NeXT acquisition of Apple acquisition of NeXT.

He says “I’m quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future,” wherein we see again that Apple considers the Intel version of Mac OS X to be a major release of Mac OS X. That’s fine, I’m sure it took a lot of effort and it has definitely had an impact. Otherwise, accounting for the 910 days between the debuts of Leopard and Tiger would mean that Apple isn’t sticking to a 12- to 18-month release schedule.

I think, by this logic, it’s entirely reasonable for Microsoft to consider Windows XP SP2, XP 64-bit, XP Tablet Edition, XP Media Center Edition, and all of Windows Vista to be major releases. It’s only fair. Sure, it took them a long time to release an upgrade to the original Windows XP, but it’s not like they’ve sat idle without releasing anything new at all between 2002 and 2007.

If you don’t get enough Microsoft Entourage information from the usual sources, I count that as a personal failing on my part. Just kidding. But still … you’ll probably want to check out Amir's Exchange Clients Blog. There, Amir “is focussed [sic] on Entourage only in the role of being a client to Exchange Server and Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP) Feature.”

[Via Richard.]

In listening to MacBreak Weekly 25, it hit me that the new 802.11n AirPort Extreme base station could very well be the first Apple home server. In some sense, it could compete against Windows Home Server (see a preview here), which was announced at CES.

Let’s think about backup, which is one of the neat features announced with WHS. We know that Mac OS X Leopard is supposed to include Time Machine. Time Machine is going to eat drive space; to keep your current data plus historical data—so you can go back and forth in time—you’ll need more storage than you have internal in most single-drive Macs. You can do this with a local drive or a network drive, although I’ve seen no public information on the requirements for network access. (Apple coyly says only, “Or back up to a Mac OS X server computer,” on the Leopard preview pages.) It could be a shared AFP volume or it could be a disk image on a network share—that information simply isn’t public yet so let’s not speculate.

We know that the AirPort Extreme base station has a USB 2.0 port for attaching a drive. The attached drive can be shared for Mac and Windows, according to Apple, which implies AFP and SMB/CIFS support. You can set up accounts and access controls. (Oh, by the way, it still offers printer sharing.)

It’s in providing the share points that AirPort Extreme could enable over-the-network Time Machine backups for one or more computers. That would compete with WHS.

There is suspicion that the base station could be running a similar embedded “OS X” to the iPhone. This could account for the file sharing, print sharing, accounts, and access controls features; these are already part of Mac OS X today.

Now, I’m going to extrapolate. Let’s assume one could hook up a USB 2.0 hub to the base station. That implies that you could connect several devices, possibly even multiple drives—whereas right now, Apple advertises only a single “USB 2.0 port for connecting a USB printer or USB external hard drive.” [My emphasis.] This might not be ideal if you don’t have a good, consumer-friendly way to manage that storage.

Enter a new volume format. What if ZFS ever comes to the “OS X” platform, as many hope it will in Leopard? Wouldn’t it make sense to connect multiple drives, bundle them into a ZFS storage pool to provide scaling and redundancy, and then share them out?

It’s at that completely hypothetical wishful-thinking point that the AirPort Extreme base station competes more capably as a home server against WHS and my new Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. The others both have on-the-fly expansion capabilities that are not advertised for the AirPort Extreme. Assuming you just need AFP or the ability to store a disk image—a big but reasonable “if” at this point—then a multi-drive ZFS-based AirPort Extreme network storage solution would be a grow-with you home server.

Note that Microsoft itself mentions WHS as being a good host for Time Machine backups in the preview I linked to above.

It’s too bad the LAN Ethernet ports on the AirPort Extreme are only 100 Mbit.

Hm, only time will tell how this will play out.