A new survey conducted by Yankee Group Research Inc. of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives revealed that nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house. This number is up from the last survey in 2006 which indicated that 47% of businesses had in-house Macs.
Two interesting details of this survey are:
- 21% of the firms surveyed reported having delpoyed more than 50 Macs (some ranged into the thousands)
- 28% of the firms reported running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs
Clearly, virtualization software has helped catalyze this trend towards Mac delpoyment. The two leaders in virtualization software are VMware Inc. (their product is Fusion) and Parallels.
In business and in education, there is an increasing trend towards making the Mac the platform of choice. The one unfortunate side-effect from this trend may be the increased (although minimal) exposure of the Mac OS to hackers’ efforts.
I usually refrain from posting “theoretical” OS X exploits since they rarely pose any real threat to Mac users. However, several sources are now reporting multiple Mac Trojan horses in the wild. These Trojans exploit a root vulnerability in Apple Remote Desktop Agent in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.
This exploit has been rated as “critical”, but it does require that a user download and open the Trojan file.
Pay attention, folks. We knew that Macs would come more and more into hackers focus as market-share grew.
See more information at the SecureMac site.
Apple announced OS X 10.6 named Snow Leopard as more of a performance release rather than a feature release.
Some of the announced changes include a smaller footprint (giving back some hard drive space), Microsoft Exchange support, extended 64-bit support to allow a theoretical 16TB of RAM, faster clock speeds with the multicore “Grand Central” technology, and QuickTime X which includes optimized support for the latest codecs.
It’s not known yet whether Snow Leopard is the beginning of dropped support for PowerPC by Apple. Several developers are reporting that their developer preview copy runs only on Intel machines.
The rumors are that this will be a free upgrade, but that hasn’t been announced yet.
The cover story on last week’s Business Week was about the Mac’s growing presence in the corporate world.
While this trend is not particularly surprising to most seasoned Mac users, it’s notable for the fact that Apple has spent very little resources directly targeting this market. And yet, March, 2008 sales for Macs exceeded all forecasts, climbing 51% over the previous year. The article points out that combined Mac, iPhone and iPod sales grew from $5.2 billion in fiscal 2002 to $24 billion in 2007. Apple’s share price has risen 2,300% over the past 5 years.
It appears that a number of factors are at work here, including cross over from iPod and iPhone sales. However, one major factor may be the troubled Vista operating system, which seems to have been a dog from the start. Microsoft’s own Steve Ballmer calls Vista a “work in progress.”
Note: Please see a more recent post on Apple TV hacks.
ATVFiles is an application (or plugin) that lets you browse part of the ATV file system using the Apple Remote. This allows you to navigate to files that do not normally sync to the ATV. ATVFiles allows you to play any of your media (with the proper codecs installed) right from the Apple TV interface.
Note: These steps assume that you’ve already enabled SSH on your Apple TV using the procedures in this post: Hacking The Apple TV to Enable SSH.
The first step is to download the ATVFiles package. Unpack this file to the ATVFiles-1.1.0 folder. In this folder you’ll find another folder called ATVFiles.frappliance. Copy this folder (see this post for using Fugu) to the following folder on your Apple TV:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns
Now restart your Apple TV (hold down the ‘-’ and ‘menu’ buttons on the Apple Remote for 6 seconds).
You should now see the addition of a Files menu item on your Apple TV. This will allow you to navigate to any files placed in your /mnt/media directory.
