[AlanAudio]

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This should be easy to set up with a Mac mini, and for more whole-house backup storage you can add one or more of those huge FireWire hard drives that stacks seamlessly with the mini. It could of course be headless, taking up almost no space. I could see, from your idea, Apple coming out with a cool, simple version of OS X Server for the home. iServe?

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The Mac mini is certainly more than powerful enough to handle the task. The problem with a Mac mini is that the inbuilt drive is a 2.5" drive and the most cost-effective big and fast drives are 3.5". An external drive is an obvious workaround, but I reckon that Apple would see the potential and do something much more elegant.
If they also incorporated a certain amount of flash memory, it should be possible to design a system that consumed exceedingly low amounts of power when in standby, but could spring into life in a heartbeat as soon as any demand were detected. I would hope that the standby power consumption could be determined more by the power consumption of the AirPort transceiver than by the CPU. That way it could be eco-friendly and able to be mounted anywhere without worrying about cooling or noise.
I previously mentioned the way that Leopard is further extending the ways that a Mac might want to deal with a central server. Consider the passing references to Teams and the Wiki server in OS X server. Teams is probably a bit too powerful for most home users, but the concept of using shared data, shared calendars and shared resources amongst multiple users would scale down perfectly well for home or small office use.
The in-built Wiki server is designed to be the basis of a company Intranet site for the sharing of information and resources, but again it could very easily scale down to be invaluable in the home or small office to provide a fully integrated solution for storing and sharing information and content.
The point being that if you design a system that can cope with sophisticated tasks, it's relatively easy to shrink it down to a smaller scale, but doing things the opposite way is asking for trouble.
There are so many things in Apple's existing and forthcoming products that are pointing to the desirability of small-scale servers that it can only be a matter of time before Apple redefines that concept and transforms what was formerly a boring box in the corner of an office into the centrepiece of a sophisticated home information and entertainment solution.

[mretondo]

The answer is simple. At other dev conferences the new OS was about four months away, so you could talk about everything. This time it's different; the OS is 8 or 9 months away. This allows them Jobs to demo the other features at MWSF.

[pkeene]

Andy, you've ruined my day. I won't be able to sleep tonight. Each time the lids close I'll start chortling at the image of a PC user trying to beat Clippy to death on their screen with a stapler.
Classic.
Peter

[goron]

The return of a British English localisation!
It's about time we got the Wastebasket back and colour spelled properly.
:-)

[HiRez]

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Most people will blow it off like you are, since its only backup. Kudos to Apple for taking something that, until Time Machine ships, is ugly, cumbersome and not well understood and making it drop-dead simple.

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You didn't read my post well. In it I stated I would of course still do backups myself on my own terms. I understand perfectly well that it makes a poor backup solution on a single drive, but I'd My point is I like everything about Time Machine except the separate drive requirement, but because of that restriction I won't use it on a daily basis. I'd still like to use Time Machine to manage file revisions (on my single internal laptop drive), hopefully Apple will add the ability to do that on a single drive.
On a related note, Apple needs to start putting a second FireWire port on every laptop it makes, on a separate controller and bus (or more USB2 ports with a separate USB bus). There are a lot of applications that cannot be done reliably with a hard drive daisychained to other FireWire devices, such as video record and playback and audio sample playback. I've had problems on my G5 even using separate FireWire ports simultaneously, since they share a single bus.

[ghmetcalfe]

I found the announcement of the To-do system-level services to be VERY interesting. As a Newton user, I think this is the closest so far to creating a system-level service that allows apps to interact like apps on the Newton. Could this be another step towards the iPad? I'm keeping my fingers crossed! /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Jason Snell]

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I hope it is more granular than a day, and we just haven't been able to discern that from the available demo's.

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You misunderstand me. This is information I gleaned from asking questions of an Apple employee during a briefing in Cupertino. Not speculation....

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That would be suicide. Differential compression is mature technology, and Mac users tend to have large, media oriented files.

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As far as I can tell, this is using file-based technology. Files on a drive. And if that's the case, then that's what you're going to get.

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And what do you mean "the file would appear twice".

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The file would be on the drive twice, in two different snapshots.

[Jason Snell]

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Thanks for the information on Time Machine granularity. Do you know if the granularity of Time Machine will be able to be adjusted by the user once Leopard ships? Do you know if this will be the case when Leopard finally ships?

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Generally Apple tries to discuss these features as they will be when they ship. They're not really interested in communicating development progress, but end results. However, they also do listen to feedback. The Time Machine interface seems to be destined to be day-based, but you never know.
Backups do happen more often than once a day in Time Machine. They happen all the time. But at the end of the day they're conflated into a single day, and it seems like that's part of the whole metaphor Apple's going for.