I’ve said a lot of negative things about the Macbook Air, so I’ll say something positive about it.
It doesn’t have a Firewire port.
When the Firewire specifications were drawn up by Sony and Apple, they got a bit too smart and tried to make Firewire able to replace most of the other ports on the computer. Heck, they tried to make Firewire able to do debugging of other computers - and that’s where the problem lies.
It’s no surprise that Apple didn’t exactly have security at mind - it’s behaviour you still expect from Apple today - but to be fair there wasn’t a climate of security threats like there is these days. As a result, crackers can gain full access over a computer system by writing maliciously-crafted data to Firewire, creating a virtual device, and then using that virtual device to read and write directly to the system memory of the host computer.
Whoops. Linux combats this problem by providing two devices: /dev/dv1394 and /dev/raw1394. The dv1394 device can only recieve video, and can be accessed by any user on the system. The raw1394 device can do everything that the Firewire specification allows for (including the memory access trick) and as such as limited to root.
The difficulty is, DV capture programs generally require write access to Firewire, to remotely control the camera. /dev/dv1394 does not allow that. This is a current problem with the kernel device interface, and there are a couple of hackish workarounds. The most hackish was the one I just did - allowed read/write access to all users for /dev/raw1394! But I hadn’t learnt the better ways, and I believe that Mac OS X and Windows allow all users read/write access to Firewire anyway.
So, the good thing about the Macbook Air is that it doesn’t have the security flaws involved with having a Firewire port 
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Oh, and in case you hadn’t guessed, I bought a Samsung Mini-DV camera today! They finally came in at work, so I grabbed one.
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