In a post today titled "Spreading malware on the Mac," Ankur Kothari ponders the potential for malware on the Mac. A whole lot has been said about Mac OS X's supposed invulnerability to viruses, spyware, and their ilk. I really want to believe that it's true, but the reality is that the Mac has no major technical advantage in the area of security over recent releases of Windows and Linux. So what is the main cause for computer insecurity?

If you have a Mac with no display, keyboard or mouse attached you will find that you may have trouble ejecting the optical drive tray so you can insert a CD or DVD disc. This is a common problem for many OS X Server installs on PowerMacs and Mac Pros that don't have an eject button on the drive. drutil is the command line tool you are looking for...

Based on the response I got for my hint about looking up EMI tracks in your iTunes library, there are two things that are clear. First, not everyone shares my love for the command line. And second, EMI and Apple are about to hit a home run with the new DRM-free, higher quality downloads from the iTunes Store. I was very surprised by the number of people anxious to figure out how many of their songs they can upgrade. But the one response that most caught my eye was the e-mail I got from Syd Schwartz, Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy at Capitol Music Group.

Well folks, the good news is that the iPhone is apparently still on schedule for release in June. The bad news is that Leopard has slipped to October. Apparently some of Apple's OS X developers have been pulled off of the Leopard project to get the iPhone ready in time. After all, the iPhone is way higher profile. Now, I know that a lot of folks are going to jump all over Apple for letting Leopard slip, but this is still one of the few areas where Apple has a whole lot of catching up to do with Microsoft. And I distinctly recall people complaining about the "Apple tax" that "forced" them to buy a new OS X release every year. I'm not going to bother pointing out how many ways that is wrong because that has been done before, but suffice it to say that some haters are not happy unless they are hating.

Oh my! This new 8 core Mac Pro has me daydreaming again. Ah... think of the things I could do with eight CPU cores running at a smooth 3 GHz each. Oh, and a very ample 16 GBs of memory. I could really use those dual 30" displays. Oh, what the heck, make it four.